Thursday, April 07, 2011

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 8 April 2011 - 14 April 2011

I'll finish the BUFF stuff within a week. I hope. Eight features to go.

In the meantime, some of the new stuff looks decent. Looks like it beats watching the Red Sox, in that pain is not guaranteed.

  • Hanna is an action movie starring Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett, and Eric Bana, which I suspect very few people knew they wanted. But the thing to remember is that Saoirse Ronan and Cate Blanchett are always, always, always fantastic, and director Joe Wright is the one who first made us noticed Ronan in Atonement a few years back. Throw in what looks to be a nifty soundtrack by The Chemical Brothers, and this looks pretty nifty.

    For those who didn't get enough Russell Brand last week with him doing a voice in Hop, he's got a new movie out this week with Arthur. I want to be cautiously optimistic about this one, as I like almost everybody in it - Martin, Helen Mirren, Greta Gerwig, Jennifer Garner, and Luis Guzman - but it doesn't look good. Your Highness also has an unusually nice cast supporting a lead who can be an acquired taste (Danny McBride) - James Franco, Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel. I'm hoping that the previews don't do it justice, which is possible; the name implies a lot of dope humor which just isn't making it into green-band trailers.

    And for those who might want something more family-friendly, there's Soul Surfer, featuring AnnaSophia Robb as a teenager who loses her arm in a shark attack and doesn't let that derail her love of surfing. Very PG-rated, characters maybe a little bit more religious than the norm.


  • At Kendall Square, Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu star in the new one by François Ozon, Potiche. "Potiche" is apparently French for trophy wife, with Deneuve as the widow whom nobody thought much of that must now run her husband's factory, with Gerard Depardieu as the working-class man who loved her back in the day. Is anybody else surprised to see that Ozon is only 44? I always got the vibe of the older auteur from him.

    The one-week warning is for Bill Cunningham New York, a documentary on a guy who appears to be a guerrilla fashion photographer of some sort. It had a recent preview at the MFA, and I gather Cunningham is fairly well-known among people who are up on fashion, photography, and Manhattan personalities.


  • Over at the Coolidge, the new film opening in the screening room is My Perestroika, a documentary about five Russians who grew up against the backdrop of of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It looks to be a nifty one, and on Sunday the 10th, director Robin Hessman will be there in person.

    Friday the 8th and Saturday the 9th, 80s movie midnights continue with The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, which is a bunch of fun, in part because, while it's campy in some places, in others it looks pretty darn good. I'm kind of surprised that, with all the other pillaging of vaguely recognizable names that has gone on lately, nobody has announced Buckaroo Banzai and the World Crime League. If you want to go further back and see a movie that generally doesn't have "cult" added to the word "classic" when people talk about it, they will be showing Luchino Visconti's The Leopard on their main screen on Monday the 11th. It's a new restoration and should look beautiful.


  • Another very quiet week for movies at the Brattle - Friday and Saturday evening, and Sunday afternoon, the theater will be used for a live performance of Godspell. In a sort of cool move, Sunday's performance will feature ASL interpretation. On Saturday afternoon, for those who want a film musical, you can catch The Wizard of Oz (presumably on film). Oz also runs Sunday night, but it's "The Dark Side of Oz", with the film dubbed with the songs from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

    The theater will be closed during the week, except on Tuesday, when the DocYard presents The Order of Myths, a documentary on Mobile, Alabama's Mardi Gras celebration, the longest-running one in America and one which, as of filming in 2007, was still racially segregated.


  • It's an in-person weekend at Harvard Film Archive. Friday and Saturday night, experimental filmmaker Morgan Fisher is there for "Morgan Fisher Presents", a collection of his various films. Sunday afternoon, he introduces Under Capricorn, a Hitchock movie that is a formal experiment as well as a thriller. Sunday night, Maple Razsa and Pacho Velez are there to introduce two of their short documentaries, "Occupation" and "Bastards of Utopia" - the first, amusingly, being about a protest leading to Harvard University paying its staff a living wage. And on Monday night, Linda Hoaglund is there to introduce her new documentary, ANPO: Art X War, which investigates how the American military presence in 1950s Japan sparked protest and profoundly influenced the era's artists.


  • I got an email from ArtsEmerson mentioning Hadewijch, the new film by French filmmaker Bruno Dumont about a woman whose religious passion is evidently too strong for the convents and eventually steers her to a surprising place. It plays twice each on Friday and Saturday night at the Paramount Center.

    The rest of the weekend's program includes Old Yeller, one of Disney's first live-action successes (so ingrained in American culture that even those of us who have never seen it know the ending), as the family film on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday evening Vapor Trail (Clark) runs with director John Gianvito in person. It's a mammoth (4+ hours) documentary on an environmental disaster in the Philippines, traced to a release of toxic chemicals at the Clark USAF base.


  • At the MFA, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives has its last shows Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. Much of the rest of the weekend is filled with the last days of The Boston Turkish Film Festival. On Saturday afternoon, the museum will run the full two-hour version of Phil Grabsky's In Search of Mozart, and Grabsky himself will be there on Sunday for "An Afternoon with Great Composers", featuring parts of In Search of Mozart, In Search of Beethoven, and his upcoming In Search of Haydn.

    On Wednesday and Thursday, the museum will show Mercedes Alvarez's The Sky Turns, a documentary about her disappearing hometown in northern Spain. Thursday is also the first day of the museum's first annual Hollywood Scriptures program, which this year focuses on portrayals of war and soldiers. All four nights will feature a film followed by a one-hour panel discussion; Thursday's is Waltz with Bashir. Both programs will continue into the next weekend.


  • The Regent Theater will also have Phil Grabsky on Sunday, for "An Evening with the Great Composers". Their program for this looks slightly different, with the one-hour version of In Search of Mozart, plus footage of the upcoming In Search of Haydn and In Search of Chopin. The documentary showing on Wednesday the 13th and Thursday the 14th is also musical, but in a completely different genre; The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee "Scratch" Perry, which covers the story not of a classical composer, but a trailblazing reggae/dub musician.


  • The Hindi movie opening at Fresh Pond this weekend is Thank You, in which a private detective with a reputation for getting philandering husbands to see the error of their ways is set upon three best friends - only to find himself attracted to the woman who hired him. Akshay Kumar is the big name in this one, with Sonam Kapoor the female lead and the ubiquitous Irrfan Khan also having a role.


  • The New England Aquarium sees its first real scheduling shake-up in a while as Born to Be Wild opens up for three shows a day. It's a 3-D IMAX documentary about returning orphaned elephants and orangutans to the wild. It gets these shows at the expense of "Hubble" and Tron Legacy - the former has ended its run and the latter is now only showing Saturday night (and looks to be gone completely in a couple of weeks). Morgan Freeman narrates.


  • The second-run shuffle has The King's Speech finally ending its run at the Kendall and opening up at the Capitol in Arlington; it's apparently the PG-13 version, and I'm not saying I encourage disrupting the theater by yelling profanities at the appropriate times, especially during the baby-friendly matinee on Monday... just that I think it would be really funny. They also pick up matinees of Gnomeo & Juliet, though not in 3D.

    Stuart Street actually picks up an interesting slate. From Friday to Wednesday, they will have Poetry at 4pm, The Elephant in the Living Room at 6:40 pm (if I recall correctly, this documentary on exotic pet ownership played IFFBoston last spring but never had a regular Boston run), and The Fighter at 8:40pm. This is the second Thursday in a row with no screenings; I'm not sure what they do then.


  • And, just as an early heads up, there are two festivals starting up next Friday: The Boston International Film Festival at AMC (warning: terrible website), and the Boston International Kids' Film Festival at the Arlington Capitol.



My plans? Hanna. Maybe Born to Be Wild and Your Highness, but probably more catching up than anything else.

Boston Underground Film Festival 2011 Day 3: Frankie in Blunderland, The Corridor, Luster, Cold Fish & Helldriver

It's a little bit fitting that it seems to have taken me roughly forever to get this write-up of BUFF finished. I've had a lousy luck finding time to write - between the end of last week and the beginning of this week, I wound up taking the train to Alewife, just missing the bus, and taking the train back to work from home four days out of five, and since most of my writing gets done on the bus ride... Well, there you go. Things just kept going wrong.

Which was sort of a theme for the day - I don't think I've ever been to a festival that had so many projction problems in a single day. If I had been in more of a note-taking mood that day, I would have marked down every time it happened (I would also have made notes about names for Helldriver and Cold Fish, too). It's annoying enough that the start of almost every movie involved seeing the controls for the projector pop up, with big ol' messages about zooming and aspect ratio right in the middle of the screen, but you know that thing where a DVD freezes up, and you have to restart it, jump to the right chapter, and then try to fast forward over the moment where your lousy piece-of-crap player chokes every damn time? That happened all day. It was especially bad with the shorts, but even the features weren't immune. Heck, we missed the last bit of Luster entirely, because the player just would not go any further.

I think that just amounted to a few seconds, but it made me unsure whether I should write a review of that one. After all, I didn't see the whole movie, and considering that I get a little snippy (in my head at least) when I see film-critic friends of mine on Twitter mention that they were going to watch the rest of a screener later (how can you judge a movie's pacing, really, if you don't see it in one sitting?), I do feel like a bit of a hypocrite. And, actually, the first three movies of the day were all described as being in line for a little touch-up, so perhaps all three should be taken with a grain of salt. I did review them, though, and don't feel that bad about it - the folks from The Corridor at least seemed to appreciate it - though, granted, they got the positive review. And I did have to laugh/shake my head at the predictable comments Frankie in Blunderland and my review got on eFilmCritic - the people who love it for its rough edges, and the people certain that I didn't get it. Guys - I got it just fine. I just didn't like it.

The projection issues were a genuine problem, though. I tend to forgive BUFF because it's generally run well by great people - and hey, it's "underground", so this sort of thing helps the atmosphere - whereas the exact same incidents at, say, the Boston Film Festival in September would lead to sheer hate. Of course, the BUFF folks were very good about communicating with us and solving problems quickly, giving actual reasons. As a viewer, I don't really care that the filmmakers just recompressed their file the day before and didn't have time to test it, but just knowing there is a reason is helpful.

I must admit, I'm kind of surprised that these sort of screw-ups don't happen more often with digital projection. I suspect that the systems in the multiplexes are a lot more standardized - low (if any) compression, a path from the hard drive to the deck's memory, well-tested codecs, much more processing power than necessary, and I suspect they only have to test on one model of machine running one version of software. At festivals - well, it's whatever computer running a software DVD player or video playback software is available. Who knows what can happen.

Frankie in Blunderland

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

It's not uncommon for critics to rate films they see at a festival a little higher than those they see elsewhere, in part because the discussions with the filmmakers afterward help forge a personal connection and often cast the film's shortcomings as things that just couldn't be avoided. In the case of Frankie in Blunderland, however, I found the opposite happening - director Caleb Emerson said "I don't know" so much that the bits that did work started to seem like random accidents.

Frankie (Aramis Sartorio) seems like an inoffensive enough sort of guy, if a bit quick to tears and slow on the uptake. His wife Katie (Thea Martin) does nothing but sit on the couch watching Spanish-language soap operas while hurling insults at him, and his "friend" Spioch (Brett Hundley) has overstayed his intentions to crash on their couch for a couple days by a couple years. One particularly angry morning, Frankie snaps, clouting Spioch but good; dude looks dead. Later, though, Katie and Spioch are gone, a note left implying they've run off together when in fact Spioch has kidnapped Katie. So Frankie heads out to win her back, or rescue her, or, well, something. The characters frequently state that "today is stupid", and they aren't wrong.

There's all manner of other strangeness in the movie - an android girl, a Mormon with the odd tendency to use the phrase "Earth wife", a butterfly with a human body - with writer Marta Estirado basing the cast on her old friends from high school. They enter and exit almost completely randomly, and while some of these characters could be interesting if dropped into an actual story, they're just in a mess here. Nobody does anything for an actual reason, and while to a certain extent that's commentary on the arbitrary and disappointing nature of life (with cruelty to others being the only way to release that aggravation), it makes for a disjointed, nonsensical story.

Full review at EFC.

The Corridor

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

In most horror movies, insanity encroaches slowly, chipping away at the seemingly normal world that the filmmakers had built up at the start. To say that director Evan Kelly and writer Josh MacDonald go the opposite route with The Corridor would not be entirely true, but they do invert expectations enough at the beginning to keep us guessing at the end.

The opening, after all, shows Tyler Crawley (Stephen Chambers) brandishing a knife, his mother Pauline (Mary-Colin Chisholm) on the floor, and his friends Everett (James Gilbert) and Chris (David Flemming) scarred when they try to subdue him. It's a nightmare, but months pass. It's determined that Tyler inherited the same sort of mental illness his mother had, and seeing her overdose caused him to snap, but he's on medication now, well enough to leave the hospital. He, Everett, and Chris head out to Pauline's cabin to reminisce, with a couple other friends joining them - "Bobcat" (Matthew Amyotte), Chris's blading ex-jock cousin, and Jim (Glen Matthews), who's been living in another province with his wife. And when Tyler goes to scatter Pauline's ashes, he sees a strange corridor of light, where the snow and wind stop but voices start whispering to him.

It's a basic "cabin in the woods" set-up, but the main twist of knowing that one of the characters is mentally unstable going in - and how experience may make him better-equipped to deal with what's coming up, one way or another - is a good one. MacDonald stocks the cabin with plenty of tensions, both from Tyler's episode and going back to when the men were younger (Bob tended to bully Jim in high school), while Kelly and the cast manage to bring out the characters' long friendship. It's a good combination of new and old tensions for this corridor to exacerbate.

Full review at EFC.

Luster

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

I'm not saying that it should be an ironclad rule that a movie by the name of "Luster", with a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde theme, should go a little more heavy on the sex, but that would have given it a little something. Instead, it just sort of sits there, not awful but not particularly impressive.

Thomas Luster (Andrew Howard) is tired all the time, although he's got plenty of reasons. He's running a small landscaping business that is fairly stressful, considering that his current client Halo Kennedy (Pollyanna Rose) is dragging her feet on approval and payment. His unemployed actor neighbor Travis (Ian Duncan) seems to be flirting with his wife Jennifer (Tess Panzer) a little too much. The closest friend he's got is Les (Tommy Flanagan), a homeless vet who has parked his car behind Tom's shop. One day, Les offers him some sleeping pills, and though he gets a full night's sleep, he soon finds notes telling him to stop taking the pills. Thinking that someone is breaking in, he buys a security system, only to find on examining the recordings that things are stranger than that.

Director Adam Mason (working with regular co-writer Simon Boyes) sets things up well enough, although at some early points it's hard to tell whether the sleeping pills are creating Tom's other side or doing enough to suppress it that "Luster" feels the need to reveal himself and fight back. The second is more logical, although it raises a question of how Luster had gone more or less undetected for so long. Still, this sort of movie is often more about atmosphere than logic, and Mason does a nice job in terms of seeding little things that take on more significance, and by presenting the movie mostly from Tom's perspective, he gives us a good look at just how unnerving this sort of missing time can be, especially when it's clear that one's alter ego is doing some very bad things.

Full review at EFC.

Tsumetai nettaigyo (Cold Fish)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

Clearly, Sion Sono is a guy I'm going to have to pay more attention to going forward. So far, I've seen three of his movies and really liked all three, even though they're frequently the very definition of an acquired taste. Cold Fish, for instance, only seems conventional when compared to Love Exposure, Sono's four-hour epic of teen romance, religion, and kung fu panty photography - it's a mere two and a half hours of tropical fish salesmen, unhappy daughters, and bloody murder.

It starts with the Shamoto family. The father (Mitsuru Fukikoshi) runs a small tropical fish store in a small town off the highway. He has a beautiful young second wife, Taeko (Megumi Kagurazaka), which has not gone over well with his teenage daughter Mitsuko (Hikari Kajiwara). One night, Mitsuko gets caught shoplifting at a department store, but Mr. Murata (Denden), who caught her, talks the manager into letting her go, if she'll work at his tropical fish store. He and his wife Aiko (Asuka Kurosawa) do this for a lot of troubled girls - their "Amazon Gold" fish store even has a dormitory attached - but this doesn't seem to be an attack on Shamoto's store. Murata even proposes a business partnership with Shamoto, acknowledging his greater expertise. However, it's not just breeding rare fish that Murata is involving Shamoto with, but cold-blooded murder.

That's just the start, of course - once things get rolling, Sono and co-writer Yoshiki Takahashi do a great job of keeping the story chugging along, not so much with plot twists but by tightening the screws, bringing the walls in a little tighter on Shamoto. Though Sono is often best known for his twisted characters, bizarre turns of events, and shocking visuals - and there's plenty of both on-hand here, especially once the Muratas drag Shamoto into the bloody process of making murdered people disappear utterly - what's really impressive is just how well he's able to pace a movie. Cold Fish runs 144 minutes, but never feels like an unusually long movie. And though it's a screwy story, it's not until the very end that a character's actions seem strange in context.

Full review at EFC.

Nihon bundan: Heru doraibâ (Helldriver)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

Yoshihiro Nishimura's Helldriver is a Yoshihiro Nishimura film, and he doesn't do things halfway. So how a person reacts to the opening scene (and, I presume, any preview they make for the movie) will likely serve as a pretty good barometer for how they'll feel about the movie as a whole: You're either down for a movie about a schoolgirl who fights horned zombies using a sword with a chainsaw blade powered by the engine that's been grafted to her chest in place of the heart that her mother (who was a cannibal serial killer even before joining the ranks of the undead) ripped out and took for her own, or you're not.

That comes pretty close to covering the movie - an asteroid landed in northern Japan and zombified much of the population, which is only separated from the rest by a wall built across the middle of Honshu. Zombie horns are used to make a new addictive drug, despite the fact that they are really explosive. Kika (Yumiko Hara) and some other criminals are given an opportunity to head north on a Dirty Dozen road trip, where Kika's mother Rikka (Eihi Shiina) awaits.

Believe it or not, when Nishimura was in Montreal last summer promoting another movie he was involved with (Mutant Girls Squad), the Tokyo Gore Police director said that he was aiming to make a more serious movie than some of his other productions with Helldriver. One certainly wouldn't think so to read that description. And yet, credit where credit is due: Nishimura and co-writer Daichi Nagisa do spend a fair amount of time playing with their world beyond finding the shortest distance between gonzo set pieces; a chunk of the plot is driven by a difference of opinion among government ministers about whether or not the zombified have civil rights. And maybe Nishimura didn't intend to talk about poaching horns or equate drugs to an unstable material that will blow up in one's brain, but it certainly feels right. He also does much better than these movies often do in building up suspense (even if, as occasionally happens in this sort of movie, it's not clear exactly where where the opening action scene fits into the story).

Full review at EFC.

Monday, April 04, 2011

The Music Never Stopped

Roadside Attractions opened two new movies in Boston this weekend (The Music Never Stopped and The Last Godfather), which seems pretty unusual for a small distributor, and they have been popping up on the radar a lot more often of late. It's a potentially interesting division of the indie-film distribution line-up: IFC and Magnolia seldom get movies into multiplexes the way Roadside does, and it's probably got something to do with the movies they pick. Roadside's tend to have some sort of name that can be put on the poster, even if, as in this case, it's the soundtrack rather than the star or director (although, hey, I came to a movie because it starred J.K. Simmons). Roadside also seems to be a pure theatrical distributor - their films tend to get distributed by others on home video.

What's all this mean? Not much, other than that my unhealthy interest in distribution is still in force.

The Music Never Stopped

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 April 2011 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run)

As near as I can tell, J.K. Simmons has never had a starring role in the movies or on television. He's been part of ensembles, and stolen scenes in supporting parts, but being the first guy listed in the credits here seems to be a first for him. As might be expected, he's up to the job, although there are times when the rest of the movie isn't quite up to his standard.

Simmons plays Henry Sawyer, who when the film opens in 1986 receives a surprising phone call - his son, Gabriel (Lou Taylor Pucci) is in the hospital. It looks like he's been living on the street - neither Henry nor his wife Helen (Cara Seymour) has seen him in nearly twenty years - and the diagnosis is not good: A tumor has spread throughout Gabriel's brain, and even once it's removed, his memory is severely damaged. When Gabriel seems to respond to music, Henry looks for someone who can build on that, coming up with Dianne Daley (Julia Ormond). Of course, Gabriel regaining his memory is a double-edged sword, as it forces to Sawyers to confront just why Gabriel left home to begin with.

The connection between music and memory is made early, in flashback scenes featuring Gabriel as a five-year-old played by Max Anitsell. It's an obvious but canny move, in that it works to establish this sort of musical therapy as not a miracle cure, but something that Gabriel (and, for that matter, Henry) might respond to particularly well. It also demonstrates what a changeable and context-dependent thing memory itself can be. In many ways, it's a much more effective way of getting the point across than when music actually jolts Gabriel out of his fugue and he starts going on about why certain Grateful Dead songs are so brilliant - after all, musical know-it-alls can be annoying even when they are miraculous.

Full review at EFC.

Sunday, April 03, 2011

Cold Weather

I hate not getting a review up until the last day of something's run on general principle, especially in the case of a good movie like Cold Weather, but this one is extra-special annoying because I expected to be able to write something about it a couple months ago. One of the perks of the eFilmCritic gig is that I'm on some publicists' mailing lists, and while 99% of it is stuff I can easily ignore, the one for Cold Weather sounded interesting, because I had liked Quiet City and love Sherlock Holmes. I said I would like to do an interview, but after seeing the movie, but I couldn't make it to NYC for the screening. That's okay, the email came back, I'll send you a screener, what's your address?

I sent it, but nothing came back. And then the filmmaker came for a two-night retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive, but I couldn't go because it was the start of BUFF - the end of which bumped into the Brattle's run of it.

It's not the first screener that never showed, and I can't blame folks for not sending them - I am terrible about actually watching and reviewing the things. It just seems strange to go back and forth a couple times in email and then have nothing happen.

Anyway, the movie is on it's last night at the Brattle today. The 5:30pm show is a double feature with the 3pm Rear Window, which is reason enough to go on its own.

Cold Weather

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 April 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run)

Cold Weather looks like a detective story, but to an extent that's just camouflage. Though it's got more of a definite plot than many of the movies that rightly or wrongly are placed under the "mumblecore" umbrella, the mystery winds up serving as structure for another look at twentysomethings lacking direction. A good one, but if you go in looking for Sherlock Holmes, you may be disappointed.

Doug (Cris Lankenau) majored in criminology and forensic science in college, but never finished. Now he's back home in Portland, Oregon, moving in with his sister Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn). He finds a job at an ice factory, where he meets Carlos (Raul Castillo), who also does gigs as a DJ and hits it off with Doug's visiting ex-girlfriend Rachel (Robyn Rikoon). So when Rachel doesn't make it to one of Carlos's gigs, he gets worried and calls on Doug to figure out what's going on. Which appears to be nothing - at least, not until Doug spots someone watching them as they search Rachel's room.

Looking at the plot in retrospect, it really doesn't make a lot of sense - not in terms of being unfair (like how the Sherlock Holmes stories referenced tend to rely on information not given to the reader), but for how none of the actions of the criminal element seem to come together in a way that seems logical on their own - they all seem like set-up for Doug and company to jump through specific detective-story hoops. It's fun to watch them try and go through those hoops; the whole group is amateurs sort of imitating what they've seen in movies or read in books, having to improvise. Fortunately, it doesn't become a spoof, and even dropping references is kept to a minimum.

Full review at EFC.

Friday, April 01, 2011

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 1 April 2011 - 7 April 2011

Next Week in Tickets is officially an April Fools-free zone this year, no matter how much fun that might be. This includes The Last Godfather. I'm crazy behind this week, have stuff needed for work, and I'm even giving "This Week" an off-week [at least, until the double-sized BUFF extravaganza (note: may not actually be an extravaganza) next week]. But, since there's stuff to be excited about here, let's get right to it!

  • Source Code opens! All my friends who saw it either at SXSW or critics' screenings came out very excited, which is impressive, because most of them (like me) are big fans of Duncan Jones's first feature, Moon, and thus had heightened expectations. It's also got a great cast (Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright) and a nifty sci-fi storyline. The only thing holding back my enthusiasm is that it seems to be almost-exclusively in DLP cinemas, getting neither 35mm prints (except at Fresh Pond) nor the premium rooms (I'd have paid the RPX prices on this one, Regal). Oh well, you only really notice that during the credits, most of the time.

    For those who lean more to the horror side of genre films, there's Insidious, a haunted house story by the makers of Saw. And while Lionsgate beat that franchise into the ground, the first one was darn good and these guys left fairly early in the process. Of course, their other work hasn't set the world on fire, but the same folks I know who liked Source Code had good things to say about Insidious.

    For the kids, there's Hop, with Russell Brand as the voice of the son of the Easter Bunny who finds his way to Los Angeles with the goal of becoming a drummer in a band. It looks mostly harmless. The movie at least looks like a nice blend of live action and CGI, and it's not in 3D, which should make the matinee with the kids a little less costly.


  • Also playing at the multiplexes is The Last Godfather, and it kind of boggles my mind that it's not just playing at Boston Common, but Fenway and Revere as well. It's the latest from Korean writer/director Shim Hyung-rae, last seen making the pretty darn bad Dragon Wars. Here, he steps back in front of the camera (before trying to conquer the American film business, he was best known as one of South Korea's most popular comedians) as the apparently developmentally disabled son of mobster Harvey Keitel, who has been brought back to 1950s New York to be his heir apparent. I suspect that like "D-War", this was a big hit in South Korea, but will get eaten alive here.

    In more encouraging "boutique movies at the multiplex news", Boston Common adds two screens' worth of Win Win (knocking Jane Eyre down to one) and also opens The Music Never Stopped, about a father trying to reconnect with his estranged son, who has a Memento-like inability to form new memories and thus really can't get past their previous animosity. It's a rare starring role for J.K. Simmons, a reliable and familiar supporting actor (I say he's got "That Guy" status).


  • For boutique movies in something closer to their natural environment, Kendall Square offers an almost completely revamped slate, with roughly half of the screens taken up by new releases. Likely the most multiplex-friendly is Super, in which a just-dumped nebbish (Rainn Wilson) decides to change his luck by dressing up as a superhero and fighting crime. It's from James Gunn, who made the pretty-fantastic Slither, and has a fun supporting cast - Keivn Bacon, Ellen Page, Nathan Fillion, Liv Tyler, Michael Rooker, and more.

    Also opening is Certified Copy, which features an interesting combination of talent: Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and French actress Juliette Binoche, as a bookseller who meets and English writer in Italy. It appears to be a star vehicle for Binoche, and there's nothing wrong with that. Another director in an unexpected place is Tom Shadyac, a guy who is best known for comedies that don't exactly tax the mind, but who after a nasty injury changed his life completely, stripping it of excess and making I Am, a documentary about how to make the world a better place.

    Elsewhere, director Julian Schnabel returns with Miral, about a Palestinian girl being drawn into the Arab-Israeli conflict. It's in English and stars Frieda Pinto along with a few other familiar faces (Vanessa Redgrave, Willem Dafoe, Alexander Siddig, and Hiam Abbass, who seems to appear in every single movie made in that part of the world). And the one-week warning is attached to Die Fremde, a German film about a Turkish family in Berlin that still finds itself attached to old traditions with potentially deadly results. Note that there are no 9pm showtimes for this one, for some reason.


  • Strangely, Happythankyoumoreplease is not playing in any of the usual spots in metro Boston; to see it, you'll have to head out to the Embassy Cinema in Waltham (which is actually a fairly nice place, but not usually the only spot to see a movie. It's got a nice enough cast, but looks like a fairly weak interconnected-stories picture.


  • If you're into Bollywood, Game opens at Fresh Pond today. It's apparently neither a musical version of the David Fincher film nor a take on The Most Dangerous Game, more's the pity, but an action-oriented mystery taking place on a private island in Greece.


  • Extremely quiet week for the Brattle - they finish up their run of Cold Weather on Sunday, but if you see it this weekend, there's a chance to see it as part of a double feature - there's a 9pm screening of The Big Lebowski tonight, and a 3pm one on Satruday (replacing Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye on the schedule). The 3pm show on Sunday is Rear Window, which makes the 5:30pm Cold Weather a bonus.

    If you haven't gotten enough out-of-the-mainstream material from the Underground Film Festival, they've got you covered - Cinemental and Truth Serum has the latest installment of Bike Porn at midnight on Friday and Saturday, which is what it sounds like. On Wednesday evening (at a time still to be announced), they kick off the 10th anniversary of the 48 Hour Film Project with a screening of Be Kind, Rewind and previous entries in the short-film contest. They're closed the rest of the week, I'm guessing because the live theater playing there next weekend takes some set-up.


  • The Coolidge doesn't have any new openers, but they have a whole bunch of special events: Friday and Saturday they kick off their 1980s adventure midnight movie series with The Goonies, which I have somehow never seen. I am amused by them including one of my favorite actors in their credits as "Joey Pants". The Sunday morning "Talk Cinema" screening is Incendies, in which the reading of their mother's will leads a pair of twins to seek out the family they never knew they had. Also playing this week (in the screening room) are three films from Whole Foods's "Do Something Real" Film Festival: Vanishing of the Bees (Sunday the 3rd), Lunch Line (Monday the 4th) and On Coal River (Wednesday the 6th).

    Oh, and the stage performance of Frankenstein directed by Danny Boyle on Monday night, this time with Jonny Lee Miller playing the monster and Benedict Cumberbatch playing victor. Sold out right now, although they may release tickets that afternoon. I've got mine and I'm excited.


  • F. Murray Abraham is appearing in The Merchant of Venice on the Paramount's main stage, but he will take a moment before that starts to introduce Amadeus in the screening room upstairs on Friday night; the movie also runs Saturday afternoon. Saturday and Sunday evenings, they have a double feature of A Letter to Mother, a classic Yiddish film from 1939, and Mamadrama, a documentary on portrayals of Jewish mothers in Yiddish, Hollywood, and Israeli cinema.


  • At the MFA, the Boston Turkish Film Festival continues this weekend with four different films. On Wednesday (the 6th), the MFA starts something that's almost like a regular booking, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. It's the new one by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in which a man near death returns to the forest and tells the story of not just his current life, but his past lives. It won last year's Palme d'Or at Cannes and its omission from the Oscar nominations caused a fair amount of confusion in some circles.


  • Race to Nowhere pops up again, this time Thursday (the 7th) night at the Arlington Regent. Down the street at the Arlington Capitol, a couple of other movies that played elsewhere open up for second runs: Kill the Irishman in the smaller screening room and The Fighter. Downtown, Stuart Street picks up Even the Rain, but only Friday through Sunday and only at 8:50pm (Black Swan plays at 4:25 and Inside Job at 6:35 all week).


  • And, finally... Baseball! I'm writing this while watching Sox-Rangers, and, man, this could cut into my movie watching just a bit (but help the reviewing, because it's great background material).



My plans? Since it looks like the game won't be done in time to see Cold Weather tonight, that's probably on deck for tomorrow. Maybe I'll head downtown for Source Code tonight. Sunday morning will probably be my last chance to catch Hubble 3-D for a second time, as the Aquarium shuffles their line-up next weekend. That'll put me downtown for a cheap show at Boston Common, with maybe something at the Coolidge later.

Or I can just sit, watch baseball, and actually make some headway on all these BUFF reviews.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Boston Underground Film Festival 2011 Day 2: Machete Maidens Unleashed! and The Twilight People

Friday night turned out to be my wimp-out night: I think I nodded off a bit during The Twilight People, and then when it finished, I looked at the half-hour plus until Wound started and had a hard time mustering enthusiasm. After all, I didn't watch it at Fantasia, didn't have any idea whether the title was referring to an injury or emotional state, and, hey, I may have missed an important plot point in the last movie (inasmuch as The Twilight People had important plot points) by being asleep.

Nothing to do with it looking a bit past the amount of nastiness I was looking for. Nope, no sir.

Machete Maidens Unleashed!

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

I wonder where Mark Hartley's next stop will be. Hong Kong? Thailand? Indonesia? After spotlighting the exploitation cinema of Australia in Not Quite Hollywood and the Philippine Islands in Machete Maidens Unleashed!, there must be other spots on the Pacific rim that he can give a look-in. Machete Maidens Unleashed! is maybe a little less informative than Not Quite Hollywood, but it's certainly one of the more energetic movie-history docs you'll see.

As the opening narrative crawl tells us, the Philippines had a thriving film industry throughout much of the twentieth century. Starting in the 1960s, and especially the 1970s, it became a popular place for American exploitation filmmakers for its combination of skilled professionals, cheap labor, and varied environments. Roger Corman's New World Pictures, in particular, shot many of their most famous pictures there, sometimes with American directors like Jack Hill, other times with local talent like Eddie Romero.

Many viewers may come away wishing that the film focused more on Romero. His interview segments are fun to watch - he's one of the directors that looks back on his time working with Corman without shame and laughs nostalgically as he recalls making blood & guts pictures. When others talk about him and his work, though, it's with unusual respect; Corman and others describe how his shots would be beautifully framed and lit, and how he would put more effort into things like story and character development than Corman thought necessary (or even really desirable). His career extends many years in either direction away from his American exploitation pictures, and as the movie points out, he is a grandmaster of Filipino cinema.

Full review at EFC.

The Twilight People

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

The Twilight People is one of the movies featured in Machete Maidens Unleashed!, and it's a good example of how well Hartley cut his picture together - the clips of this film in the documentary make it look fast-paced, fun, and perhaps surprisingly good, especially with all the positive words said about director Eddy Romero. And... It's not good. To be fair, it's got potential. Romero shoots the jungle quite well, and there's both some actual tension to the last act and some well-shot action.

The animal people, in particular, are an entirely watchable combination of cheese and restraint; there is a nice blend of bestial and human to them. Nobody but Pam Grier (who has a more or less silent part) would really go on to bigger and better things, but they're mostly adequate. If the first half of the movie were a little better, it might fit solidly into guilty pleasure territory, but it's not quite there.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Boston Underground Film Festival Opening Night: Hobo With A Shotgun

Last year's BUFF opening night film was a bit sparsely attended, which is likely to be expected from a four-hour Japanese movie. That absolutely was not the case this year, where the opener was something that had a bit of a higher profile and would not be such a test for people who had to be at work the next day (such as myself). It also meant that it was possible to get to the opening night party close to the start if one was so inclined.

Not that I was so inclined; work the next day, can't pick out voices in large rooms, don't drink, etc. It was still a good time, though - the movie is a pretty good example of the genre/style it's homaging, and the director and producer who did a Q&A afterward were great and enthusiastic.

Strangely, the movie doesn't seem to be getting much of a release in the USA - it's got booking starting in May, but they're scattered, and the only New England location I saw was in Salem, and that will probably just be for midnights. Meanwhile, in its native Canada, it opened semi-wide (50 screens) yesterday. Those up in the Great White North could probably do much worse this weekend.

Hobo with a Shotgun

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #1 (Boston Underground Film Festival 2011)

Hobo with a Shotgun arrives with one of the most straightforward, descriptive titles for an action movie since Snakes on a Plane. That simplicity serves it fairly well; it's exactly the sort of 1980s exploitation pastiche the name implies, as good as a movie about a shotgun-wielding hobo can be.

Why the hobo (Rutger Hauer) gets off the train near Hopetown doesn't matter, although one might wonder why he doesn't hop the next train out when he sees that the town's name is far from accurate is unclear. As soon as he arrives, he sees local crime boss Drake (Brian Downey) and his sons Slick (Gregory Smith) and Ivan (Nick Bateman) executing Drake's brother as an example to the populace. When one of the boys tries to rape a hooker (Molly Dunsworth), he steps in to make a citizen's arrest. The whole police force is on the take, though, so he's beaten and mauled, the word "scum" carved into his chest. Soon, he snaps, and instead of getting that lawn mower he's always wanted, he gets himself a scattergun and starts rampaging.

From the opening titles on, the filmmakers create a fairly dead-on recreation of bloody action flicks from the old school. They never specifically place things in the eighties with gratuitous pop-culture references or nostalgic musical cues, but the Miami Vice fashions that the villains favor and the eight-bit games in the arcade place us in that time period, or at least its frame of mind. Many pieces will seem immediately familiar - the crowds overlooking a vacant arena, the gratuitous blood and nudity, and the goons that are one step away from being supervillains (or at least their henchmen). Blood and gore are all over the place, with main characters bleeding a lot but soldiering on while the body parts of of minor characters more or less explode when struck.

Full review at EFC.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 24 March 2011 - 31 March 2011

It's festival time! Two noteworthy festivals begin in Boston tonight (well, one in Boston and the other in Cambridge, and the one in Boston soon moves to Somerville, but you get the general idea), and unfortunately it's hard to make both of them, let alone the other worthwhile things playing this weekend.

  • The bigger festival is The Boston Underground Film Festival, in its lucky thirteenth year. The annual orgy of strange and transgressive cinema will be occupying to screens at Kendall Square, and it's actually possible to see every feature there with a little effort - the only things not having repeat showings are today's opening night screening of Hobo with a Shotgun and Lucky McKee's The Woman on Friday (the 25th). Other notable features (to me, at least) are Indonesian exploitation documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed (paired with an example of the genre, Twilight People); Chop, from the writer of Deadgirl; two bits of madness from Japanese cult directors in the shape of Sion Sono's Cold Fish and Yoshihiro Nishimura's Helldriver; recent Chlotrudis honoree Larry Fessenden presenting (and appearing in) James McKenney's Satan Hates You; and Argentinian post-apocalyptic dark comedy Phase7.

    Some of these may not seem totally underground - Phase7, for instance, comes pretty directly from SXSW - but few are likely to show theatrically elsewhere, and the environment can be raucous. For a festival of its size, it's extremely well-run, with a well-thought-out schedule and a great option for those who would like to see a lot of movies for not a lot of money (the $35 "recession special" pass, which gets you into all the encores from Monday the 28th to Thursday the 31st). The films themselves may not be for everyone, but many are surprisingly good.


  • The other festival this weekend is Irish FIlm Festival Boston, which opens tonight (Thursday the 24th) with Parked at the Stuart Street Playhouse before moving to the Somerville Theatre for Friday through Sunday. If you're going, be careful with your schedule; its shows sometimes have about ten minutes of turnaround time in between, which means one starting late can mess up the rest of the day.


  • Just to potentially confuse matters, Kendall Square adds White Irish Drinkers to Kill the Irishman on its marquee. Writer/director John Gray will be introducing/QA-ing the Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon shows, but remember - the festival at Kendall is the Underground. Irish is in Boston and Somerville.


  • Also opening at Kendall Square and the Coolidge Corner Theatre is Win Win, a Sundance comedy starring Paul Giamatti about a part-time high school wrestling coach who thinks he has found a way to parlay that into a payday. It's got a nice supporting cast, too, including Amy Ryan, Melanie Lynskey, Jeffrey Tambor, and Bobby Cannavale.

    The Coolidge also opens Orgasm Inc., a documentary about shady goings-on at a pharmaceutical company searching for a Viagra for women. A "classic" intersection of horror and blaxploitation plays midnights Friday and Saturday with Blacula. The Goethe-Institut Sunday morning movie is Mahler on the Couch, a comedy about the composer driven to consult Sigmund Freud over his wife's infidelities. And Monday night, there is a special presentation of Gen Silent, a locally-produced documentary about homosexual elders facing a return to the closet in order to get by in the assisted living system.


  • It's a relatively quiet week in the mainstream theaters, with just two new releases. Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch gets a whole bunch of screens, including most of the premiums. It's certainly spiffy-looking, with every frame looking like it was taken out of an exceptionally cool comic; whether there's steak to the sizzle - or just cheesecake - seems to be a different question. For the kids, the adaptation of Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules appears pretty close to exactly one year after the movie of the first, but what can you do - there's five books in the series and kids grow up so quick. Boston Common also picks up Jane Eyre on a pair of screens, and reduces The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman to one show a day (at an awkward 5:10pm at that).


  • The Brattle, Harvard Film Archive, and ArtsEmerson seem to be handing things off between each other during the coming week. First, the Archive will have Aaron Katz in town on Friday and Saturday; he'll introduce his new film, Cold Weather on Friday and a double feature of his two previous films, Dance Party, USA and Quiet City; the Brattle opens Cold Weather on Wednesday for a five-day run that stretches to Sunday April 3rd. I'm looking forward to this one; Quiet City was pretty good and Cold Weather is described as having a big Sherlock Holmes influence.

    With Katz at the Archive, the Claude Chabrol series moves to the Paramount Theater on Friday and Saturday, with 2004's The Bridesmaid and 1970's La Rupture playing both nights (but not, I don't think, as a double feature). The series concludes Sunday evening back at the Archive, with 1975's Pleasure Party.

    Before it gets Cold Weather, the Brattle has a set of interesting screenings. Friday through Sunday, they will alternate a new print of Sally Potter's gender-bending fantasy Orland with early and late screenings of Black Swan. On Monday, Independent Film Festival Boston hosts a special (and free!) preview of Super, James Gunn's comedy about a loser who becomes a superhero to impress his girlfriend; Gunn will be there for your edification and interrogation. And on Tuesday, the DocYard has director Darius Marder on-hand with Loot, a documentary about World War II vets who stole and hid treasures during their service and the amateur treasure hunter helping them to recover them.

    ArtsEmerson sticks to the classics for their family-friendly Saturday afternoon show, with a pairing of Albert Lamorisse's "The Red Baloon" and "White Mane". On Sunday night, they present their regular Avant-Garde Showcase; "Images of Nature, or The Nature of the Image: Canadian Artists at Work", eighty minutes of experimental short films culled from forty years of Canadian explorations of film and the environment.

    Which just leaves the Archive, who on Monday will have visiting lecturer Dominique Cabrera in person for Folle Embellie, in which a French asylum is evacuated as German troops approach during World War II. Their schedule also lists Ross McElwee present during a VES screening of Bright Leaves on Tuesday the 29th; no guests are expected for Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Page of Madness on Wednesday, which is to be expected, as it is a Japanese silent film from 1927.


  • The MFA wraps up their Francophone Film Festival Friday night (the 25th), but starts the Boston Turkish Film Festival tonight. Twelve different features an a collection of short films will screen intermittently between now and 10 April. There will also be screenings of Mahler on the Couch on Saturday, rescheduled from two weeks previously (the tickets from 11 March screening will be honored), and Bill Cunningham New York, a preview screening of a documentary on the 80-year-old fashion photographer.


  • It's a bit out of the way for car-less people like me, but the Monogamy opens at the West Newton Cinema. It's about a wedding photographer who starts a service in which people hire him to stalk them. Odd. It's only playing two shows a day out there in the suburbs, so it's really being buried. Also out in the burbs, Oxy-Morons continues its unlike run, down to one show a day at 10pm (and weekend midnights) at the Showcase Cinema in Revere.


  • Stuart Street hasn't put their schedule for tomorrow out yet, so the second-run shuffle looks pretty small - Biutiful opens at the Arlington Capitol.



My schedule is pretty simple - I'm at BUFF all week. Say hi if you see me, though I likely won't recognize you. I may try and catch one of the early shows at Boston Common on Saturday or Sunday, or use the open day in my schedule on Wednesday for something else, but I suspect sleep will be a more attractive option.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

This Week In Tickets: 14 March 2011 to 20 March 2011

I would just like to say, to all those reading who may have attended the Chlotrudis awards or found the musical number on YouTube, that I did not attempt to nominate The Human Centipede: First Sequence for "Best Ensemble Cast". I haven't even seen the thing!

This Week In Tickets!

(As always, click on the tickets to jump to that film's write-up)

As always, the Chlotrudis awards were good fun, although it's always amusing how the guests never seem to know what they're getting into. Here's the list of winners; it's not a bad group.

Barney's Version

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2011 in Arlington Capitol #6 (second-run)

Looking at the IMDB page for Barney's Version, I find myself much more interested in the little, trivial bits than the movie itself. For instance, ubiquitous Canadian actor Maury Chaykin shows up in a tiny role, presumably just to keep busy for a couple of days. Barney works on the set of a Canadian TV show which stars Paul Gross as an RCMP constable, amusing for those who will always remember him from Due South, and the on-screen directors are played by Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg. The director of the film itself, Richard J. Lewis (no, not the self-pitying stand-up comic), shows up in a late scene as a pathologist, there to figure out the circumstances of the title character's life.

Clever bits all, and Barney's Version is, by and large, a movie made up of clever bits and pieces that doesn't quite add up to a whole. Part of that's by design; one of the main threads in the present day is how the title character (Paul Giamatti) is losing his memory, which means that there's a very real possibility that the mystery that occasionally pops up is one that can never be solved (only Barney knew, and now that's going). Nifty idea, almost no execution. And then there's the set-up in the past, which interestingly does interesting things with Barney's first two wives - a wonderfully acted of betrayal and guilt in Rome, and a perfectly stifling picture of Barney retreating into conformity in Montreal - which gets us to the meet-cute with Rosamund Pike's Miriam and the possible murder. That's a nifty way to get the movie to a very conventional place.

The conventional place is where the movie spends most of its time - Barney becomes a blandly jealous and inattentive husband, Miriam is better than he deserves, and neither their courtship nor the eventual collapse of their marriage is nearly as interesting as what got the movie there.

Paul

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2011 in AMC Boston Common #13 (second-run)

One thing Paul has going for it: It's back-loaded. The end of the movie features a bunch of snappy gags leavened with a little bit of earned sentiment, pop culture gags that actually work, and generally snappy back-and-forth that almost feels like the movie was shot in sequence and the cast and crew have finally clicked. That more likely means that I as an audience member have just gotten used to director Greg Mottola's and co-writers/co-stars Nick Frost's and Simon Pegg's rhythms. Well, that and the start of the movie being a bunch of tired "look at the nerds" bits.

The end winds up being impressive enough to more than make up for the start, and it's a pretty slickly-produced movie to boot. The gray alien of the title looks pretty good for a mid-tier comedy, and Mottola and company come up witha good look for the movie that gives an idea of the grandeur of the American west but also feels like a movie as opposed to the real thing, a nice compromise for a film that is in many ways a love letter to genre flicks.

Barney's VersionPaulThe Butcher, the Chef, and the SwordsmanI Saw the DevilI Will FollowChlotrudis Awards

Monday, March 21, 2011

I Will Follow

I made a bit of an effort to get through the entire review of I Will Follow without mentioning the characters' skin color. I'm not really proud of that; in the twenty-first century, that should be more or less irrelevant information, but we're sadly not quite there yet. Still, it really wasn't that hard to do; the only real temptation I had to mention it was when describing Beverly Todd's character; she reflects an archetype of elderly women, sure, but she makes me think of older black women in movies specifically. It did seem a bit unusual to have this old black lady talking about U2 as opposed to some 1970s soul group, and the character of her daughter did make a bit of a point about it, but soon after that, the point dropped. That the bulk of this film's characters are African-American became a part of the backdrop, not a point of contention.

I mention that here both because I like that sort of approach to race and because, for all that I Will Follow should be a thoroughly accessible movie to anybody who cares to watch it, that the cast is predominately African-American (as, I presume, are the filmmakers) does play into how it gets seen. I don't think it's quite so bad as it used to be - the other day, a friend was telling me about how movies with black stars and filmmakers always got shown in Boston's worst theaters (I wasn't here then, but in Worcester, they always wound up at the Main South Showcase Cinema, and opened on a Wednesday, with the reason given being that it spread the gang presence out). Part of that may just be unfortunate demographics - if a city's black population is centered around crappy neighborhoods, well, crappy neighborhoods tend to have crappy theaters. Of course, if it's because the bookers presume that correlation, that's a different thing.

I wouldn't be too surprised if some of that still goes on; my gut feeling is that a small, independent film with the themes of I Will Follow is more likely to play boutique theaters if it's in Japanese than if it has a black cast. My gut feeling, of course, is almost certainly wrong; I'm pretty sure that if I went over what opened at Landmark Square over the past year, I wouldn't find a whole lot of movies like I Will Follow anywhere, no matter what the demographics; that particular sort of indie just don't play much, period. And while movies with predominately African-American casts do show up, they don't seem to be

Still, I do find myself glad that the group involved in the release of this movie - the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement is around and appears to be one of many that has struck a deal with AMC. It's not as ambitious as some other film series - the website has them releasing a modest two films a year - but it's a useful one, I think. I don't personally have any sort of obvious stake in seeing more African-Americans represented on screen, but if I'm going to say I want more good movies of any stripe or origin to get seen on the big screen, that absolutely includes things like I Will Follow - and if a good movie like this needs some sort of push to get in front of audiences, I'm glad for any help it receives even as I regret any need for it.

I Will Follow

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 March 2011 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run)

Ava DuVernay's I Will Follow is a fairly traditional independent film of a certain type: A close, quiet examination of family ties and other relationships, the sort made with a small budget, a single location, and the desire to do something real. That can be a recipe for tedium or self-indulgence, but that's seldom the case here, in large part because there's just as much warmth as turmoil.

Maye Fisher (Salli Richardson-Whitfield) has been putting this day off - it's time to pack up her house and move. Only it's not really her house - she's spent the last year caring for her aunt Amanda (Beverly Todd), who has finally succumbed. Some of Amanda's things have been donated to a music museum in Seattle (she was a session musician), but Maye hasn't touched her room yet - she's waiting for Amanda's daughter Fran (Michole White), who arrives with teenage son Raven (Dijon Talton) and two other kids in tow. They clash, as usual, and Maye is also playing phone tag with her ex-boyfriend Brad (Blair Underwood).

Although she doesn't make a formal, stylistic point about it, DuVernay builds this picture as a series of people ostensibly playing against Salli Richardson-Whitfield's Maye. Richardson-Whitfield is in nearly every scene, although no matter whether she's alone or talking with someone else, Amanda is usually there too, invisible but always in the back of the characters' minds. It's an impressive shadow to cast, as DuVernay doesn't show us much of the larger-than-life figure that Amanda must have been in her prime; Maye's flashbacks are to a woman who, while likely being caught on a good day, is shrunken and weakened; it's through the way everybody else talks about her that we feel her loss.

Full review at EFC.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Asian exodus: The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman and I Saw the Devil

I hadn't meant to do back-to-back Asian films Saturday afternoon, but you know how I said yesterday that work would have to screw me over but good for me to miss I Saw the Devil on opening night? Maybe work didn't quite screw me over, but the afternoon was spent looking at the bus app on my phone, seeing yet another one pass, and growing more fearful that I would not catch the one I needed.

One thing I couldn't help but notice yesterday afternoon was the large number of walk-outs. The couple that left I Saw the Devil was perhaps to be expected; it establishes itself right off the bat as not being for the squeamish and considering how crowded the room was, someone was going to object to it. Announcing that they were in the wrong movie loud enough for the rest of the auditorium to hear seemed to be poor form, though.

The walk-outs for The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman were a bit more of a head-scratcher, though. Maybe not on their own - it's a weird, screwy movie that doesn't always succeed in what it sets out to do, and the folks in the audience who looked like they might have come from nearby Chinatown looked like a bit of an older crowd. I know I'm painting with several broad brushes here, but that audience can be fairly conservative, and Wuershan's style is anything but. What's interesting to me, though, is that this isn't the first time I've seen this happen at a Chinese movie - What Women Want and (to a lesser extent) If You Are the One 2 both had a fair number of people leaving as the film went on. At least, I think they did - my memory isn't perfect. Still, I sort of wonder if this may be a cultural thing; are Chinese and Chinese-American audiences less likely to stick through a movie they don't like all the way to the end than others? It's something to watch out for next time.

One interesting thing to note is that China Lion does seem to have given this movie a bit more of a promotional push than some of their previous releases. I noted back in December that If You Are the One 2 seemed to have snuck into American theaters, while this one had previews, English-friendly posters, and partnerships with comic shops. Part of this is selling an action-adventure versus a romantic comedy, I suppose (though the L.A. Times writer who lumped Boston in with the "potential fanboy audience" could perhaps have done a little more research), but the harder push is noted and I hope it eventually pays off - they may not have yet released a movie that I've loved, but when they do, it's going to be great seeing it on the big screen rather than waiting and hoping for a festival showing or English-friendly DVD release.

Dao Jian Xiao (The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2011 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run)

The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman certainly doesn't lack for style; it's got more styles than you can shake a stick at. At times, overwhelmingly so - though the movie is often quite funny and exciting, director Wuershan might have been served by a little more clarity and a little less flourish.

The title characters each have their own story, united by a cleaver made of black iron. The Butcher (Liu Xiaoye) is smitten with a lovely courtesan, Madame Mei (Kitty Zhang Yuqi), but even if such a lowly person were to be allowed near her, he would have to fight his way past the brutish "Big Beard". A grotesque eunuch with a reputation for killing those whose cooking displeases him is coming to sample a chef's signature eight-course meal, so the chef (Mi Dan) chooses a mute but talented kitchen servant (Masanobu Ando) to be his apprentice. And Fat Tang (You Benchang), a village blacksmith who was once the kingdom's greatest swordmaker, is approached by a swordsman (Ashton Xu) who wishes him to forge him a blade out of a lump of iron melted down from the weapons of five great warriors.

The nested telling of these stories is actually very well-done, which is not the case for many movies that tell multiple stories and jump around the timeline. Wuershan and his co-writers (working from a short story by An Changhe) make this feel like the natural way to tell the tale, and the relationship of characters and events is always fairly clear, even when we're four levels deep in flashbacks and unreliable narrators. The frantic cross-cutting, switching of film stocks, and stylization is a good match to the film's broad, zany sense of humor. It's a movie filled with broadly defined and played characters, occasional fourth-wall breaking, and the sort of mugging for the audience that can seem unsophisticated but which are a direct descendant of the Chinese opera which occasionally shows up in the movie.

Full review at EFC.

Akmareul Boatda (I Saw the Devil)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run)

A colleague of mine described Kim Ji-woon's last film, The Good, the Bad, the Weird, as an attempt to make an action movie with nothing but the Good Parts. Kim brings that same attitude to I Saw the Devil - it's like a serial killer movie that starts at the moment when others kick into high gear, and then keeps going for nearly two and a half hours. It's dark, bloody, and intense, not for the weak of heart (or stomach), but electric nearly all the way through.

We open with Jang Ju-yeon (Oh San-ha) in a car with a flat tire, on the phone to her fiance Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee Byung-hun), an officer in the Korean equivalent of the Secret Service. A tow truck is on the way, but a seemingly helpful man offers his assistance. He is Jang Kyeong-chul (Choi Min-sik), and he is a serial killer. In the aftermath, Soo-hyeon tells his boss that he only needs a couple weeks off from work, but instead of grieving, he intends to hunt Ju-yeon's killer down, but not just to kill him - Soo-yeon means to terrorize Kyeong-chul the way he terrorized his victims.

This is a bad idea, and to director Kim's and writer Park Hoon-jung's credit, it's obvious as a bad idea from the start, but it's also seductive and the sort of thing that fits Soo-hyeon's character more as we see more of him (and seeing him demonstrate his skills as the movie goes on reinforces our hopes that he can pull this off even as the situation threatens to spin out of control). Without waxing overly philosophical, the story ponders a bit about the psychology of serial killers, and even throws in a side plot that could work as its own movie to push that along. The movie is in post-plot-twist, anything-can-happen mode practically from minute one, without much time for untested righteousness, and the tale is told through action rather than hand-wringing. We don't see Soo-hyeon agonizing over his questionable actions, we just see situations where his thirst for revenge may get innocent people killed.

Full review at EFC.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 18 March 2011 - 24 March 2011

What we have here is a week in which I clearly have to stop whining about how my new commute messes with my moviegoing and start finding ways to work around it, because there's a ton of stuff that looks like it might be worth seeing and a clear reason not to put it off.

  • Of all the nifty things opening this week, I'm probably most excited for I Saw the Devil, the movie with the one-week warning at Kendall Square. It's the new thriller by Kim Ji-won, who did the excellent A Tale of Two Sisters, A Bittersweet Life, and The Good, the Bad, the Weird. Here he reunites with the star of the last two, Lee Byun-hun, as an obsessed detective who digs deep into his own dark side while chasing a serial killer (played by Oldboy's Choi Min-sik). Director Kim makes great movies, and this one is said to be dark even by Korean revenge thriller standards. It's only booked for one week, so don't miss it.

    At the end of the week, Kendall will play host to the Boston Underground Film Festival, which starts on Thursday the 24th and runs for a week thereafter. The opening night film is Hobo with a Shotgun, which started as a fake trailer made in a contest to promote Snakes on a Plane and became enough of an internet sensation to spawn this feature starring Rutger Hauer as, shall we say, an avenger who literally has nothing to lose.

    Also opening this week at the Kendall are Of Gods and Men, in which a group of French monks must decide whether or not to leave their monastery in war-torn Algeria; and Kill the Irishman, a true-crime story starring Ray Stevenson and a whole bunch of recognizable names/faces (Val Kilmer! Vinnie Jones! Vincent D'onofrio! Christopher Walken! Linda Cardellini!). And, oh, yes, two screens for Jane Eyre.


  • Jane Eyre also opens up at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Early on, its previews and advertising got some negative buzz from English lit crowds for making it look like a horror movie, but I've got to admit - it's some of the most effective advertising for a period/literary classic I've ever seen. An impressive cast (Mia Wasikowska, Jamie Bell, Sally Hawkins, Judy Dench, Michael Fassbender) and direction by Sin Nombre's Cary Fukunaga doesn't seem to hurt, either.

    The midnight show Friday and Saturday is a no-doubter horror movie - a spiffy new print of Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead. Even though the sequels are likely better known and more popular, calling this one "the ultimate experience in grueling horror" wasn't just tongue-in-cheek; it's a tense, well-executed example of the genre that is actually able to benefit from its raw young director and cast. There are also a couple of preview screenings on tap: Monday the 21st's "Science on Screen" feature of Transcendent Man with director Barry Ptolemy and subject Ray Kurzweil has already sold out of pre-sales, but there will be some on sale at the box office (free for Coolidge members) on Monday. Thursday night features a preview of Orgasm Inc., a documentary on the search for a "woman's Viagra" which played last year's Independent Film Festival Boston and opens for regular screenings on the 25th. Filmmaker Liz Canner and several others will bet here for a Q&A after the movie on the 24th.


  • Three movies get wide releases today, all of which at least look to have potential. Paul, for instance, features the team of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in the leads, and since only sad, humorless people don't like Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz, that's a good start. Now, to be fair, this one is directed by Greg Molotta rather than Edgar Wright, and by its nature is going to feature a lot of nerd comedy (two Brits on a road trip to ComicCon meet up with a real alien), so it may not be for everyone.

    The other science fiction-ish wide release is Limitless, which plays to one of the more obnoxious pseudo-science things that people keep repeating despite there being little evidence ("we only use 10% of our brains; imagine if we could unlock it all!"). Still, it's got Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro, which is also a good start, and if the filmmakers can handle superintelligence well (and creating a capable character more intelligent than oneself without giving him an obvious psychological blind spot is one of the hardest things for a writer to do), it could be something pretty impressive.

    A more conventional thriller opens as well in The Lincoln Lawyer, with Matthew McConaughey starring as a lawyer who works out of the back of his car possibly getting in over his head with his latest case. It looks like a solid mystery/crime story, it's got a pretty great supporting cast, and McConaughey can be pretty good when he's on his game.


  • Over at Boston Common, they've got a few other screens to fill out, including a day-and-date premiere for China's The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman. It is, arguably, the thing a lot of us have been waiting for since China Lion started doing these same-day releases in the USA: A big, crazy action movie, with people punching and kicking and chopping at each other with swords and knives (the thing that China does better than pretty much anybody else), and I gather this is more quirky and stylized than many period epics. 20th Century Fox and Doug Liman are "presenting" it, and if that gets people in the door, great.

    Also opening is I Will Follow, a drama about a grieving woman starring Salli Richardson-Whitfield. Ebert likes it, and the bottom of his review mentions that it's part of a series, the "African Film Festival Releasing Movement", placing these movies directly in theaters without a studio (I think it may be another AMC-supported series).

    And, finally, they've got Lord of the Dance 3D for a week, which actually opened yesterday and is also plalying one show a day at Fenway (though at 4:25pm). It's easy to joke about Lord of the Dance, but you know what? It's replacing Justin Bieber: Never Say Never 3D on most screens. Take that as you will - improvement, same thing/different demographic, whatever.


  • The Brattle and Harvard Film Archive each continue their celebrations of Famous French Film Folks. At the Brattle, it's a week of Belle Toujours: The Films of Catherine Deneuve - A Christmas Tale and The Hunger (digital) Friday, 8 Women (digital) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg for a musical double feature on Saturday, Time Regained on Monday, Dancer in the Dark on Tuesday, and a double feature of Repulsion and Belle de Jour on Wednesday. The Harvard Film Archive presents more Murderous Art of Claude Chabrol, with This Man Must Die and Betty on Friday, Le Boucher and Innocents with Dirty Hands on Saturday, and Story of Women on Sunday. Color me kind of shocked that these two series don't intersect anywhere, but the pair only worked together once.

    The Archive also features Promised Lands by Susan Sontag on Monday night (the 21st), while the Brattle has a sold-out Henry Rollings show on Sunday night and the Boston Cinema Census, showcasing recent locally-produced films, on Thursday (the 24th).


  • The MFA began their Francophone Film Festival last night, and it continues through next Friday, with eight different films from France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Haiti, Tunisia, Chad, and Mali.


  • The ICA brings back the Oscar-nominated short films for animation and live action for matinees on Saturday (the 19th).


  • The Regent Theatre wll have Winston Churchill: Walking with Destiny, a documentary by Richard Trank, Monday the 21st through Thursday the 24th. After the film, historian Daniel J. Moulton will be answering questions.


  • Saturday and Sunday (the 19th-20th), the Somerville Theatre offers a double feature of Robocop and The Terminator on their big screen. It's two days only (tonight, the room is used for a concert), with Blue Valentine reclaiming a screen on Monday. AMC, meanwhile, will be digitally projecting Taxi Driver in their Harvard Square and Boston Common theaters on Saturday the 19th and Tuesday the 22nd.


  • The second-run shuffle is quiet this week, with Stuart Street adding Biutiful to its daily screenings of True Grit and Inside Job. They also host the opening night of Irish Film Festival Boston on Thursday the 24th with Parked, featuring Colm Meaney as a man living out of his car whose life turns around when a young man in a similar situation parks next to him. The Irish Fest will continue through next weekend at the Somerville Theatre.


  • And, finally, the Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film will have their annual Awards Ceremony on Sunday (the 20th). 5pm at the Brattle Theatre, with Larry Fessenden on hand to receive an award for all he's done for independent film - both highbrow (Wendy and Lucy) and horror (The Last Winter, etc.). The members vote on the awards, and I'm one, so there will be at least some small amount of sanity to the process. It's a fun, laid-back event that Boston fans of independent film should enjoy.



My plans? I Saw the Devil tonight is non-negotiable (and with the 8:10 start time, work would have to screw me over but good for me to miss it), and I will likely go for The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman, Paul, and some Chabrol tomorrow. The Lincoln Lawyer will be in there somewhere, as I got in on those $6 Fandango tickets on Groupon (sorry, it's expired), and I may wind up doing two movies a night at Kendall Square to catch up before BUFF eats next week.

And Thursday is nasty - I've already got my BUFF pass, but if I get any inkling that Hobo with a Shotgun will play Boston elsewhere, I might head to Stuart Street for Parked instead. This "two festivals in one weekend" thing wasn't funny when Boston International Film Festival decided to overlap with IFFBoston, and it's not terribly amusing now.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

This Week In Tickets: 7 March 2011 to 13 March 2011

I strongly suspect that Adrianne Palicki will never have as perfect a role as she has in Women in Trouble and Elektra Luxx, and I suspect that Sebastian Guitierrez's annual movie with Carla Gugino at SXSW this year suffered for her absence:

This Week In Tickets!

Not only was Saturday the only time I got out to the movies last week, it was also (just) warm enough throw a steak and potato on the grill outside. And I finished the book I've been reading for what seems like the last month. Sometimes, you've just got to power through 300 pages of people playing games in a casino with the author acting like the cards have some sort of spiritual component beyond chance to get to what one hopes to be the sci-fi action at the end.

And then, you go to a midnight movie, daylight savings time hits, and Sunday is gone right before it starts. But, hey, look at Saturday:

Battle: Los Angeles

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 March 2011 in AMC Harvard Square #5 (first-run)

It's a good thing for the world at large that things arranged themselves so that I wouldn't have time or inclination to write a full review of Battle: Los Angeles. Not that it's quite so bad as the reviews on EFC (especiall) and elsewhere have it; rather than the affront to God and Man some paint it as, it's just an old-fashioned war movie, with aliens substituted for terrestrial villains so that it can be set in present-day Los Angeles.

I'm not sure whether that makes it bad satire or bad science fiction. As science fiction goes, it really is head-thumpingly awful, falling apart as soon as you apply even a few seconds of thought to it: It actually pulls out "aliens are attacking Earth for its liquid water supply", which is so idiotic that even Star Trek Voyager backed away from it after the pilot. And I'm not sure where "bad science fiction" and "bad tactics" ends, but I don't get why these aliens did a ground attack first, and then went for aerial bombardment. If you're looking to crush a relatively ground-bound civilization, pulverize them from orbit, and keep your command & control center there, rather than underground. From orbit, you've got a clear line of sight to all your units, human defenses have a hard time hitting you, and you're way less vulnerable to a plucky group of marines sneaking in and wreaking havoc.

Maybe "satire" isn't quite the correct word for what this movie might have been going for, if the idea was to show gung-ho American audiences a role reversal ("hey, now you're the ones watching your homes be leveled by a technologically advanced enemy who wants your resources! Sucks, doesn't it?"). If that's where the filmmakers are going, they're being awfully subtle about it, and maybe undercutting themselves with the ending. I don't expect them to be quite so bleak or on-the-nose as, say, Brian Wood's and Riccardo Burchielli's comic DMZ, but playing this as a chance to do a war movie without getting into politics could be seen as a bit of a missed opportunity.

Not that there's anything really wrong with that; without actually glorifying war, it's a fine environment for telling stories of duty, sacrifice, et al, and the cast here is pretty good. It's just a shame that, despite it's sci-fi trappings, it winds up being so generic in execution.

Elektra Luxx

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 March 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)

Although Elektra Luxx is being released in markets where Women in Trouble didn't play theatrically, and you can probably follow along well enough without having seen the other one. And despite it picking up on threads from that movie, that may be the best way to see it - that way, the viewer won't be thinking of how much better the first one was.

We open on Bert Rodriguez (Joshua Gordon-Levitt) lamenting the retirement of Elektra Luxx (Carla Gugino) on his porn-oriented vlog. Elektra is pregnant, see, and though she's not ashamed of her old job - she even teaches a course on how to spice up one's marriage at the local community center - it's not the life she wants any more. She's about to get an odd reminder of it, though - Cora (Marley Shelton), the flight attendant who was in the middle of a tryst with the rock star father-to-be when he died (really, see the first movie) arrives and offers her the lyrics he was going to use for his next album (all of which are about Elektra) if she'll help assuage her guilt by seducing her fiance. Meanwhile, Holly Rocket (Adrianne Palicki), one of Elektra's old co-workers, is heading out on vacation with her best friend (Emmanuelle Chirqui), which has the potential to be awkward because Holly's starting to think she may want to be more than friends.

Though the title implies that this movie will focus solely (or at least primarily) on Elektra, that turns out not to be the case; both Bert's and Holly's stories go their own way without intersecting very much. That's a problem, because all three are decidedly not created equal: Bert's segments are filled with tedious, played-out jokes about bloggers who present themselves as experts but live with their parents and have nothing outside their obsessions, and neither Bert nor Holly gets nearly as much good material as Elektra. That's as it should be - she is, after all, the title character - but if their stories are going to be such slight reflections of hers, then maybe writer/director Sebastian Guitierrez shouldn't spend so much time on them.

Full review at EFC.

Gone with the Pope

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 March 2011 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (@fter midnight)

Gone with the Pope is a genuine oddity, shot in the mid-seventies in whatever time and supplies writer/director/star Duke Mitchell had available. Being shot on such a shoestring, finding money for post-production was similarly difficult, so it was still uncompleted when Mitchell died in 1981. The footage sat in his garage for nearly a decade and a half, when his son mentioned it to Sage Stallone and Bob Murawski. Murawski spent another decade and a half piecing it together between other jobs. The result is, quite honestly, terrible, but give it credit - it's memorably terrible.

It opens with one group of gangsters plotting to kill another; they hire Paul (Mitchell) to do the job. Just released from prison, he'd really like to just spend time with Jean (Jenne Hibbard), an old girlfriend who's now a rich widow. But he figures this is a way to make some money to help his friends Luke (Jim LoBianco) and Peter (Peter Milo). Eventually, he comes up with a scheme of his own, where they will sail to Italy and kidnap the Pope (Lorenzo Dardado), with an affordable enough ransom: One dollar from every Catholic in the world.

That's a reasonably clever hook, actually; or at least it seems clever enough that it's initially frustrating that the movie spins its wheels for half its running time before actually getting to Rome and getting started on it. In actual practice, though, it's not so exciting; the actual kidnapping is not a particularly memorable caper and what follows does not turn out to be a thrilling battle of wills or chase or the like. It's almost as if Mitchell had the idea for the story and jumped straight from that to shooting, eventually getting many bits that didn't add up to an actual plot.

Full review at EFC.

Battle: Los AngelesElektra LuxxGone with the Pope