Boston Underground Film Festival 2012.02 (30 March): "Look at this ... Shorts Program", Excision, Smuggler

Hey, that Horrible Photography isn't so bad:


BUFF's Nicole McControversy and Excision director Richard Bates Jr.

Nice guy, who seemed genuinely disappointed to tell someone asking a question that a character died. I must admit that I didn't like his movie that much, even though there were plenty of things about it that I thought were well-done.

It was kind of strange to see studio logos before two movies at an underground film festival. Excision was purchased by Starz/Anchor Bay at an earlier festival, and will likely be out on video later this year, while Smuggler was produced by Warner Brothers's Japan division. Of course, it's likely that if it does reach US shores, it will probably come out via Viz or Kino or one of the other smaller distributors that put out Katsuhito Ishii's other movies. It's a weird thing - major Hollywood studios will produce movies overseas, but apparently don't have a business unit set up to distribute them in the US, so it makes more sense for them to allow smaller companies to buy the rights.

Look at This Fucking Shorts Program

Seen 30 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

This is an entire shorts program dedicated to making fun of hipsters. Which, considering some of the folks in attendance at the festival, could be considered biting the hands that feed them.

It says something that by the time the program was over, I still was not siding with the targets of satire, even though this sort of relentless hammering often changes my sympathies.

Fortunately, most of the bits were pretty funny, even if the longer ones did tend to seem very stretched out.

Excision

* * (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

Richard Bates Jr.'s Excision is a feature version of his short film, and it's sort of got that feel: More observation than story, strong visuals that exist for their own sake, and one central character that dominates an ensemble. It's occasionally as unsettling as it wants to be, but the slow burn may not be as effective as the concentrated jolt.

Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) is a high-school student who wants to be a doctor when she grows up. She's not short of motivation - her younger sister Grace (Ariel Winter) has cystic fibrosis, and they're close despite Grace being much more popular, pretty, and well-adjusted - but she's less the buckling-down-and-studying type than the medically-themed-erotic-dreams sort. She's an outsider at school and clashes with her mother (Traci Lords) at home, and counseling sessions with their priest (John Waters) only lead to more hostility. Everyone is certain there's something off about her, but nobody realizes the full extent.

Bates's intention here, perhaps, is to do a slow burn, but where something burning is changing state and composition, Excision spends most of its time smoldering - storing energy and ready to change state with the proper stimulus. The latter is ominous, to be sure, but often less interesting to watch. Pauline is creepy when the movie starts, creepy when it's about to hit its climax, and really doesn't change enough even in degree to make the movie feel like it's moving in some direction or other. There's not even really a progression to her acting out; rank the other things she does how you wish, but skipping school to go to the library seems like it should be toward the beginning of the movie, rather than the end For another example, it feels like there are a half-dozen family dinners in the movie, and they don't feel that different; it's the same attitude from the same people at roughly the same intensity.


Full review at EFC.

Sumagurâ: Omae no mirai o hakobe (Smuggler)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

Plenty of movies on both sides of the Pacific are based on comics, but while it's easy enough to take the characters or plot, but capturing the feel of the medium can be a different matter. Katsuhio Ishii's Smuggler can't quite manage that - the two are fundamentally different things, after all - but it comes a lot closer than many other movies.

Ryosuke Kinuta (Satoshi Tsumabuki), an out-of-work young actor, thinks he's found a way to beat the pachinko parlors, only to get caught and saddled with a bunch of debt, although a visit to the yakuza's "banker" Yamaoka (Yasuko Matsuyuki) offers him an opportunity to pay it off by working as part of a transport crew headed up by "smuggler" Joe (Masatoshi Nagase). Meanwhile, two assassins, Vertebrae (Masanobu Ando) and Viscera (Ryushin Tei) slaughter a local gangster and his bodyguards, and when his widow Chiharu (Hikari Mitsushima) not only hires Joe for an unusual transport job but insists on accompanying the crew in the aftermath... Well, one of Kinuta's first jobs could very easily be his last.

Smuggler is based on a manga, and while that's true of a number of Japanese movies across all genres (those comics are not just mainstream but central to pop-culture), it's got a couple of notable advantages that many manga adaptations don't: First, its source material is relatively short as far as popular Japanese comics go - just a single, 200-page-or-so volume - and as a result the movie is not overstuffed with characters, storylines, or memorable scenes, even if relatively little was lost in translation. Second, it's got Katsuhito Ishii at the helm, and with his experience in both animation and conventional movie-making, he's well-positioned to translate hand-drawn style to live action.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 2 April 2012 - 8 April 2012

Aaaand let's slow it down from last week:



The Red Sox have started playing! This cuts into my movie-watching a little, but theoretically increases writing time (it's great background). They're going to win eventually.

I'm sure of it. (written at 8pm)

EDIT: Yaaayyyy!!!! (written at 10:30pm)

An Evening with Don Hertzfeldt featuring "It's Such a Beautiful Day"

Seen 2 April 2012 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Special Presentation, 35mm!)

Yes, I managed to get a ticket to this, which made me very happy and simplifies my planning for IFFBoston a little bit. The new Hertzfeldt makes me pencil a shorts program in, which I don't mind at all, but getting to see Hertzfeldt's stuff on 35mm film is a great treat. Sure, Hertzfeldt's style of animation isn't usually the sort of thing that most people would think digital hurts, but when you think of how he makes his movies (old-style, with an animation bed) and how susceptible his style is to jaggies, it actually makes a huge difference.

This program had the new short, "It's Such a Beautiful Day", and the two other films in the trilogy that led to it "Everything Will Be OK" and "I Am So Proud of You", along with "Wisdom Teeth", "Billy's Ballon", and "Intermission in the Third Dimension". It's kind of amazing how the man's more recent shorts have expanded in both size and ambition over the past decade, to the point where he can present a fair-sized program without either "Rejected" or "The Meaning of Life" and it doesn't feel as though there are gaping holes in the presentation.

"It's Such a Beautiful Day" is pretty amazing. Hertzfeldt expands his toolbox here - there's a little more live action footage that seems purpose-made rather than found and used for background, and some elements where computers have to be involved. It's pretty stunning visually and emotionally - the trilogy has really done an amazing job of getting the audience into the head of someone whose brain is no longer reliable. It's genuinely unsettling, and the finale is tragic and fantastic and almost sarcastic at times while still being grandiose.

Serbuanmaut (The Raid: Redemption)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 April 2012 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, 35mm)

Yes, what pretty much everyone else has said - this is an amazingly well-executed action movie, the sort that doesn't so much have amazing action scenes as it has scattered moments where people are not beating each other to a pulp. It's a pretty amazing job of keeping the action coming without wearing the audience out, and Gareth Evans,along with fight choreographers Yayan Ruhian and Iko Uwais (who are also two of the stars) make the fights well-choreographed and clear.

At times, the plot does seem a little too perfunctory and coincidence-laden, and I've got to admit, I couldn't wait for the cops to run out of ammunition so that the hand-to-hand combat could start (it's awfully polite of the gangsters to run out at roughly the same time). As much as Evans and Uwais have raised their game in some ways after Merantau, The Raid isn't quite as much sheer fun. Still, if you feel like an evening of all-out action, you're not going to find better right now.

Losing Control

Let's start with the standard Horrible Q&A Photography before getting to the fun stuff:



Okay, not much to see here - writer/director answering questions, house lights don't go up enough, white screen and black outfit probably mess with my camera phone as much as anything. Pretty standard stuff. Sure, she answered questions like a great sport, but the really important image to remember is this one:



That's Ms. Dr. Weiss standing by the line to buy a ticket on Sunday night, asking if folks were there to see Losing Control, and saying, hey, they should, it's funny and the other movie that they might have been coming to see will still be there tomorrow, but this was the last time she was going to be there to do a questions & answers session afterward, and you wouldn't want to miss that opportunity, would you?

I've gone to more than the occasional screening with a Q&A, and by and large, they're only for selected shows and the filmmaker is sort of kept off to the side until it's time for the introduction. From what I could see of the signage outside the theater and what was posted on the movie's Twitter account, she did this all weekend, from the 11am show to the 9:40pm one, and then went across the way to Tommy Doyle's (which had Losing Control-themed drinks on the menu) to hang out with the audience some more.

And she was still full of energy and enthusiasm as I made my way in to the movie, telling folks at the concession stand that she'd try to stall a little so they'd have time to get in for the start, because the start is really good. By my count, that's like a dozen shows in three days' time. You just don't see that very often - by the time an independent film like this hits theaters, the director is a couple years away from making it and her mind is halfway to the next thing - and it really left no doubt that this movie was her personality coming out on screen.

From the Q&A, it seemed to work for them - I gather only Jiro Dreams of Sushi did better at the theater since Friday - and the movie will likely get to hang around another week, maybe get some good word-of-mouth, and open in more cities as a result. Here's hoping, it's a fun little movie, the folks involved seem pretty nice, and I kind of love that it's a "women doing science" movie without making that a plot point.

I'd also be kind of curious how some of the Boston stuff plays elsewhere. There's only a few really local bits (especially since most of the movie was filmed in L.A.), but the duckboats and the hat that may only help you in Brookline made me laugh.

Losing Control

* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 April 2012 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, digital?)

I try not to get too worked up about science in movies, but given that Losing Control is about a scientist trying to apply the scientific method to her personal life and the title is a pun that you kind of need to know a little bit of science to appreciate... Well, shouldn't inconsistent results in the control group of her experiment have been a bigger issue? Sure, a chunk of the audience won't care, and probably shouldn't. They will likely just find this an entertainingly off-beat movie, and it's pretty successful on that count.

The young scientist whose experiments are having the wonky results, preventing her from finishing her Ph.D, is Samantha (Miranda Kent); for some reason, whenever it's time to present her spermicide that only targets sperm carrying a Y-chromosome, the control group is unusable, and the ability to reproduce is making her question everything. This includes her five-year relationship with boyfriend Ben (Reid Scott), so while he is on a fellowship in China, she sets out to prove that he's the one empirically - by testing a larger sample, so to speak.

Good plan? Not really, and when you get right down to it, the fact that the control sample is unreliable is only one of many parts of the script that doesn't quite make sense. Other parts are telegraphed pretty early or otherwise built out of pretty broad stereotypes; it's a screwball comedy with the emphasis on the screwy. That said, writer/director Valerie Weiss never makes any pretenses about it being something else; and the somewhat heightened environment works for it more often than not. By my usual crude litmus test for such things - how many characters exist only to advance the plot without actually being funny? - the movie is as focused on making the audience laugh as one could hope for.

Full review at EFC.

Love in the Buff

For all the talk of how it's hard for anything but gigantic blockbusters to get onto American screens these days, consider this: Love in a Puff came out in Hong Kong just about exactly two years ago, played a few film festivals, and has not, as of yet, officially reached the USA either theatrically or on legitimate home video. This sequel, on the other hand, arrives in North America just a day after its release in HK, making me wonder if someone will be on-the-ball enough to do a region 1/A release of the first alongside this one. It's hardly a trend, but it does indicate that there's some slow movement toward foreign films getting a little more traction in the US.

This one drew a pretty good crowd on Saturday at 7:20, though I've got no idea how many people had seen Love in a Puff beforehand, as there are only a couple of obvious callbacks to the first movie and they're not really jokes, where you can tell how many people got it by the amount of laughter. Ultimately, I suppose it doesn't matter, but I am curious, and I suppose that getting a good crowd for a movie that is a pretty direct sequel to something that most of America hasn't had a chance to see shows how much China Lion's target audience is expatriates rather than folks like me who don't mind reading subtitles.

(Although, speaking for us American guys without multi-region DVD/BD players, could someone get on releasing Pang's The Exodus here? I wanted to see it at NYAFF a few years ago and it hasn't shown up here since!)

I also found myself feeling strangely defensive about Hong Kong as the movie went on. The new, prosperous Beijing is a fixture in Mainland Chinese movies these days, and filters into Hong Kong films as they both try to make inroads into Chinese theaters and get Chinese co-production money. This was more than just "The People's Republic is Awesome!", though - there's a bunch of lines of dialogue implying that Hong Kong is yesterday's news, worth abandoning, etc. Weird, considering that this is technically a Hong Kong movie.

One final weird thing: China Lion's title card before the picture is on a white background, and I notice very few (if any) other companies do that. It really seems to scream "digital projection" compared to the companies that use a more muted background.

Chun giu yu chi ming (Love in the Buff)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 April 2012 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, DLP)

The vagaries of North American release patterns of foreign films have resulted in Love in the Buff reaching theaters here before Love in a Puff, the movie to which it is a sequel, has been available on anything but import DVD and a few film festivals. It should play well enough as an audience's first encounter with the characters, although it's a lot easier to be invested if one has seen the original movie.

Cherie (Miriam Yeung Chin-wah) and Jimmy (Shawn Yue) have been dating for about five months, and it's starting to come apart. It's not so much the ten years Cherie has on her twenty-something boyfriend as the things that go with it - she's a bit jealous, he's prioritizing work and telling little lies, that sort of thing. When they break up, that makes Jimmy accepting a job in Beijing easier. As fate would have it, Cherie winds up transferred there a few months later, where she finds Jimmy has already started dating You-you (Mini Yang), the attendant on his flight from Hong Kong. It's not too long before she meets Sam (Zheng Xu), who is everything that Jimmy isn't. And as much as both seem better off with their new partners, it's almost inevitable that they will be drawn back toward each other.

Sequels to romantic comedies are tricky things; in most other genres, it's not hard to create a new challenge or raise the stakes, while the act of resetting to zero can sour the audience on the very notion of the couple reuniting. In some ways, Love in the Buff may actually work better in some ways for audiences who haven't seen the first; they're not burdened with any attachment to how the pair met during smoke breaks and quit nicotine but not each other and are more free to wonder whether Cherie's and Jimmy's relationship was the real thing or just a learning experience. Director Pang Ho-cheung and co-writer Luk Yee-sum do an impressive job of making the story something that could go either way even for returning audiences; it's well-enough built that the audience can't take things for granted.

Full review at EFC.

Boston Underground Film Festival 2012.01 (29 March): John Dies at the End

Ugh, nothing like getting the first review from a film festival out nearly a week after the festival ends. And things are only going to get slower!

Opening night was fun, and would have been even more fun if it hadn't been ridiculously cold. Believe it or not, there was beautiful spring-like weather in Boston a couple of weeks ago, but it was not like that as we wound up waiting outside for a sold-out 8pm show for quite a while. Also mildly amusing was the chicken-and-egg situation we found ourselves in at first: No entry into the theater without a ticket, no tickets without passes, and the passes are in the theater. It got resolved easily enough, but, hey, that's what runs through my mind as I'm waiting in line.

I was waiting for a pass from having contributed on Kickstarter, which cost the same as getting it elsewhere, but does sort of make one feel a bit more like part of a community. On the one hand, it's kind of unfortunate that a festival with BUFF's history and reputation has to go looking for donations, but I think that that sense of ownership is good for a festival. If only there were a way to get it without it feeling imperiled.

Still, the movie's the really important part, and John was a fun opener. I've got no idea how well it will play to a general audience, or if the fans of the book will wind up embracing it. I'd kind of like to see Magnet pick it up and book it as midnights and get it on VOD as they are wont to do, although director Don Coscarelli used to be able to get something like this into regular theaters.

Speaking of...


(A producer whose name I forget a week later, writer/director/producer/editor Don Coscarelli, and BUFF's Kevin Monahan)

Coscarelli was a friendly, likable guy, talking about the challenges of adapting the book and the parts he would have liked to included. He mentioned that the dog's name was changed because "Bark Lee" was the name of the dog they had playing the part, and this made it much easier. He also said they got very lucky there - about a week after filming, Bark Lee had a skin problem which caused hair to fall out, and while a studio will often have doubles for animal roles, they were awful close to being in big trouble.

One other thing from the Q&A: Folks appear to really dig Phantasm; a lot of questions/statements from the audience were preceded by some reference to it.

John Dies at the End

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

According to the post-film Q&A (and others I've talked to), John Dies at the End is a cult novel that barely had time to gain a reputation as unfilmable before going before the cameras. Director and screenwriter Don Coscarelli dealt with this by (mostly) sticking to the (relatively) linear first third of the book, but make no mistake - this is still quite the odd story, and the telling is nearly as peculiar.

David Wong (Chase Williamson) and his friend John (Rob Mayes) may seem like nothing more than slackers, but they're actually the go-to guys for handling the frequent incursions of the paranormal on their small Illinois town. How did they get started? Well, as as Dave tells reporter Arnie (Paul Giamatti), there was this guy (Tai Bennett) handing out this drug called "the soy sauce", which fundamentally alters ones perception of space and time in a way that others only claim to. The morning after, everybody who took it is either missing or dead, and Dave has to figure out what's going on while avoiding a detective (Glynn Turman) and fielding weird telephone calls from John, when all he really wants to do is get together with Amy (Fabianne therese), the cute girl looking for the dog that turned up next to his car..

That description makes John sound almost sane, like an action movie with a vaguely science-fictional premise. It's not. It starts out weird and piles new types of strangeness on at points when other movies might be trying to simplify things, leaving large chunks unexplained and papering over the rest with something akin to "hey, the soy sauce, man". Somehow, though, it holds together - Coscarelli has extracted a plot that follows something akin to internal logic without often getting bogged down. He does occasionally drop a little too much of the book in verbatim, although it's hard to blame him - the narration sounds like the sort of text that would be great fun to read.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 6 April 2012 - 12 April 2012

Guess I should have done this a day or two ago, as potentially the biggest opening of the weekend had a Wednesday opening. but, hey, you probably know if you want to see it or not.

• That movie is Titanic, which is was re-released in 3-D on Wednesday. I've got to admit, the preview that's been running made me remember it more fondly than I expected, and for a 3-D conversion, it appears pretty good. No 2-D showtimes in the Boston area, so if you just want to see the movie again without it being modified, you're out of luck. It plays the Arlington Capitol, Fresh Pond, Harvard Square, Boston Common, and Fenway.
  
  Another blast from the past, potentially, is American Reunion, in which the characters from American Pie get back together for their 13-year reunion. Most of the cast has returned. It plays Somerville, Fresh Pond, Harvard Square, Fenway, and Boston Common.
  
  Boston Common will augment that line-up with an import from Hong Kong, Love in the Buff. It's Pang Ho-cheung's follow-up to Love in a Puff, a charming little comedy that it can hopefully stand apart from, as the first movie hasn't received a North American release. Word seems to be that the new one is just as good, though, so it might be worth a look.



• Kendall Square's main opening comes more by way of Japan, as Jiro Dreams of Sushi follows Jiro Ono, a master sushi chef who still works in his tiny subway sushi bar at the age of 85 and feels he still has more to learn - which puts his son and designated heir in a bit of an awkward position.
  
  Also opening is Losing Control, a locally-made romantic comedy about a research scientist (Miranda Kent) a bit gun-shy of committing to her boyfriend (Reid Scott). Could be fun, and seems to invert the gender roles in an interesting way. Writer/director Valerie Weiss will be on-hand over the weekend, doing a Q&A after the 7pm shows on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and introducing the 9:40 ones. Pretty much zero chance of that happening with Thin Ice, which was taken from its director, re-edited, and re-scored, and the end result winds up being not very good.



• Over at Coolidge Corner, The Raid and Footnote continue to own the large screens (though there will be no 7:20pm show of The Raid on Wednesday as the theater is used for MassMouth's Story Slam Finals), but The Pruitt-Igoe Myth opens up in the screening room; it's a documentary about a housing project in St. Louis that was hailed as revolutionary when it opened but was demolished twenty years later as the city and the concepts of what urban housing should be rapidly changed.
  
  The midnight shows this weekend are larger-than-usual presentations: On Friday scream-queen Linnea Quigley is on-hand to introduce her 1984 exploitation flick Savage Streets, but the price of a ticket also gets short films, music videos, and a live performance by one of the bands, Sexcrement (whose video stars Ms. Quigley, bringing us full-circle). Saturday's midnight, meanwhile, is all four hours of Kill Bill I & II.



• The Brattle will also have plenty of special guests in the upcoming week, most notably during the Ghett'Out Film Festival, which runs Friday to Sunday (before moving to New York City on Monday) and features movies by outsiders relative to the rest of the French film industry. Tuesday, meanwhile, has a Balagan "Projection Performance" by Bruce McClure, and Wednesday has writer/producer Michael Cuscuna there to introduce Blue Note: A Story of Modern Jazz, part of the Office for the Arts at Harvard's year-long celebration of the jazz label.
  
  There are no guests at the other shows, but they've got Scott Pilgrim vs The World at midnight on Friday and Saturday. Thursday evening has another Blue Note screening, a double feature of 'Round Midnight (featuring Dexter Gordon and Herbie Hancock) and Roger Vadim's Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which features a score by Thelonious Monk.



• Yet more guests at Harvard Film Archive, as Ed Pincus, Lost and Found has Pincus introducing and discussing every screening, along with various other guests - David Neuman for Black Natchez & One Step Away on Friday and The Way We See It on Sunday, Rob Moss and Ross McElwee for Diaries on Saturday, Steve Ascher and Scott MacDonald on Sunday; and Lucia Small for The Axe in the Attic on Monday.



• One last guest appearance - screenwriter Diane Lake will introduce Friday evening's screening of Frida at the Paramount theater's screening room as part of "ArtsEmerson Presents". After that, they have the first of two movies by Peter Greenaway, on Rembrandt: Rembrandt's J'accuse plays Friday and Saturday nights and Nightwatching plays Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. And on Saturday afternoon, they present their next Gotta Dance screening - a 16mm print of Busby Berkeley's Babes in Arms with Mickey Runy and Judy Garland.



• Over at the MFA, Senna and The Boston Turkish Film Festival continue, wrapping up their runs on Sunday. They start their next cycle on Wednesday the 11th with the first screenings of Gerhard Richter Painting, a profile of the German artist that contains apparently rare footage of Gerard Richter in the studio... painting. The second annual "Hollywood Scriptures" film series begins on Thursday with The Squid and the Whale, running through Sunday.



• The Regent Theatre in Arlington has two movies this week. Legend of Aahhh's: A True Story is a ski film from Greg Stump, who made The Blizzard of Aahhh's a quarter-century ago, which not only covers skiing and Stump's life, but the history of the ski film itself. They've also got a second screening of All In, a documentary about the recent boom in poker.



• Housefull 2: The Dirty Dozen opens at Fresh Pond, a sequel to a popular but apparently not well-regarded Bollywood romantic comedy that likely ups the ante on the number and zaniness of romantic entanglements and misunderstandings.



• The second-run shuffle moves a couple of movies from Kendall Square to the suburbs. Somerville picks up Friends with Kids, while Footnote plays at the Arlington Capitol.

My plans? Love in the Buff, Losing Control, Jiro, and maybe Kill Bill if I'm feeling super-wide-awake on Saturday night.

Also, let's take a minute to acknowledge the formal end of the Stuart Street Playhouse; they stopped showing movies on any regular basis roughly a year ago, but the website seems to indicate that any lingering association with the West Newton Cinemas and Belmont Studio is gone; "Theater 1" is now a branded function space operated by the hotel. A shame; it was a nice little spot that never figured out a way to exist in the shadow of the nearby multiplex.

Traumatized Children: Monsieur Lazhar and Intruders

A day mostly spent at the Boston Underground Film Festival didn't figure to be a day when I saw good work from a bunch of young actors. But, go figure, I liked the kids in both of these movies, and the little girl in Some Guy Who Kills People, and the boy in Klovn. It wound up becoming the theme for the day, albeit not exactly a pleasant one. (No kids in Gandu, which is probably for the best)

I liked both of the non-BUFF movies quite a bit, and I hope that both do well - though if you want to see Intruders, you'd better do it tonight (Thursday); it's apparently one week and done on one screen in Boston. Monsieur Lazhar is at least a couple of weeks off, or so it seems. And while both are mainly focused on the adults, I don't think either would be nearly as good if the child actors weren't so strong.

It would be hard to imagine two reactions to a movie more opposite than the ones seen here - the audience at the Coolidge loved Monsieur Lazhar, and both they and Boston Globe critic Ty Burr (leading the conversation) seemed genuinely enthused. The audience was, at best, indifferent to Intruders, with one guy walking out about halfway through, quickly followed by a couple of others once they apparently realized this was an option (and yelling "this movie sucks!" as they left). Happily, the movie got pretty good almost right away, but it didn't really seem to draw the audience in; it was kind of willing to let the audience examine it rather than get sucked in.

Both, though, have interesting takes on (SPOILERS!) kids dealing with something traumatic. In Monsieur Lazhar, the horror is completely human and plainly shown - a teacher hanging herself in the classroom, to be found by her students - and Lazhar and his students must deal with it as-is, with him eloquently stating why it's so terrible toward the end. Intruders, in a nifty final-act flashback, turns out to have become a horror movie because Juan could not confront the thing that scared him directly; the monster literally grows from his own fear, and he winds up spreading it to his own daughter before acknowledging it for what it is. (!SRELIOPS)

It's an interesting comparison, I think. Monsieur Lazhar and Intruders are both fairly low-key unusual examples of their respective genres - teacher movies usually have a bit more bombast and inspirational rallying, while few horror movies are quite so willing to unambiguously deconstruct their monsters without being self-referential. I suspect Lazhar will be justly praised for this while Intruders will likely be unjustly forgotten, which is too bad - while Monsieur Lazhar is something special and Intruders is mostly just pretty good, both treat their audience with a very pleasant respect.

Monsieur Lazhar

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 April 2012 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (Talk Cinema, digital)

Monsieur Lazhar, Canada/Quebec's nominee for best foreign language feature at the recent Oscars, is a quite remarkable piece of work, and all the more so for how quietly and efficiently it goes about its business. It is amazingly low-key for a movie that opens on a moment of genuine horror and could easily become schmaltzy and simple, but no less powerful for it.

At an average-looking primary school in Montreal, a popular teacher has just died in the worst possible way, and Mme. Vaillancourt (Danielle Proulx), the principal, is having some difficulty finding a long-term replacement when Bachir Lazhar walks into her office and volunteers his services. The middle-aged Algerian immigrant soon finds that the classroom is different in Quebec than back home, and finds himself especially concerned with two students who are most directly affected by their teacher's death than others: Alice (Sophie Nélisse), a bright girl whose airline-pilot mother (Evelyne de la Chenelière) is frequently absent, and her best friend Simon (Émilien Néron) - or, at least, the 11-year-olds were best friends before. And even as he becomes closer with his colleagues, they don't realize that his immigration status is not quite as settled as he let on.

One amazing thing about Monsieur Lazhar is how instantly we know the title character. The camera pans from Proulx to Fellag and the audience likes him immediately; even before he says a word, his body language is striking the right balance of relaxed self-confidence and old-world formality. When he speaks, it is with the propriety of a man who understands what sort of responsibility he has taken on but with the humanity of a person with great capacity for cheer and joy. There are several related themes to this movie, but the one most embodied in Fellag's performance is how there are, amid the terrible things that happen in the world, new things to delight in, and you survive the former by making room for the latter. Bachir is so good at it that it should almost be surprising when something like real despair comes, but Fellag has shown just enough hints of what the character has been through that the audience finds itself admiring his quiet strength.


Full review at EFC.

Intruders

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 April 2012 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, DLP)

It's hard too believe that Intruders is just Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's third feature film; the past decade-plus has been pretty good for Spanish genre filmmakers whether working in their native tongue or English, and Fresnadillo's 2001 film Intacto was creative and atmospheric. And yet, since then he's only directed 28 Weeks Later before this Spanish/English hybrid. It's puzzling, because he makes good, creepy movies, even if his latest takes a while to get going.

Although their parents dutifully inform them that there are no such things as monsters, two children - Juan (Izán Corchero) in Madrid and Mia (Ella Purnell) in the London suburbs - are about to learn different. A wandering cat leads each of them to encounters with "Hollowface", a formless creature that attempts to steal the faces of children. While Juan's mother Luisa (Pilar López de Ayala) turns to handsome young priest Father Antonio (Daniel Brühl) for help, Mia's working-class father John (Clive Owen) tries to take matters into his own hands, even as her mother Susanna (Carice van Houten) finds herself terrified.

Fresnadillo doesn't mind taking his time to set a movie up; even a sequel like 28 Weeks Later gives the audience a little time to let its concept sink in. That's a double-edged sword here; while the deliberate opening gives the film plenty of time to build atmosphere, introduce storytelling as an important factor in how Hollowface takes shape and becomes a threat, and establish strong parent-child relationships, the split between England and Spain means that everything is, to a certain extent, being done twice, and that does tend to make things seem slower than they actually are. Fresnadillo and screenwriters Nicolás Casariego & Jaime Marquesl also introduce a (literal) mystery box very early on but seem to ignore it for far too long, perhaps because there just aren't enough layers of mystery to it to peel them away slowly.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 26 March 2012 - 1 April 2012

Look at all these tickets:



Yep, festival time, so the weekend was spent on ever-increasing numbers of movies and even a shorts program. Sunday was especially nuts, with five movies in three venues in as many different cities.

It was also a weird day for walkouts. Nothing from Monsieur Lazhar, but a couple of people left Intruders - not totally surprising, as it's a very slow starter - making sure to yell "this movie sucks!" as they did. Can't say I get the point of that; what are they trying to do, convince us all to do a walk-out, demanding our money back from the box office. Geez, you don't like it, fine, but don't mess with anyone else's enjoyment.

Funny part: It got pretty darn good as soon as they left. This is why you stick these things out!

One quick T ride later, I'm back in Cambridge for Gandu at BUFF. It's not a proper Underground Film Festival if something doesn't have people leaving, and this one was a prime instigator of that sort of thing - weird, sexually explicit, and otherwise in-your-face. I arrived a couple minutes late, so I plopped myself down int he back row rather than get in front of anybody, which meant I had a good view of the older gentleman who stood, walked to the front of the theater, and was just about out the door when the sex scene started. At that point, he just stood there and watched, leaving as soon as it was done.

Kind of awkward, honestly. This must be what adult theaters were like - not just watching a sex act on screen, but being acutely aware that there are other people in there with you.

Anyway, since I want to review every one of the twelve shows up there in one way or another, this is going to be a quick lightning-round style recap until I can get back to them in more detail.

EDIT: Here's a quick index of the individual recaps, complete with Horrible Photography:

Day 1 (Thursday, 29 March): John Dies at the End.
Day 2 (Friday, 30 March): "Look at this Fucking Shorts Program", Excision, and Smuggler.
Day 3 (Saturday, 30 March): Manborg and Inside Lara Roxx.
Day 4 (Sunday, 1 April): Gandu, Some Guy Who Kills People, and Klovn.

John Dies at the End

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

The best way I can describe John Dies at the End - a movie adapted from a novel often described as unfilmable - is that it's like an American version of the movies Sushi Typhoon cranks out - a simple but half-incoherent plot, copious gore, and special effects that do what they can to plow through limited resources with pure enthusiasm. It's fun and occasionally frustrating in many of the same ways as those movies, to the point where I half-expect Nikkatsu to release it in Japan under a "Hamburger Tornado" label.

Like a lot of ambitious-but-low budget movies, it's a bit of a mixed bag: Crazy fun and enthusiasm on the one hand, likable enough performances (including and especially an extended cameo by executive producer Paul Giamatti), but an occasionally frustrating tendency to drop large chunks of narration directly from the book into the movie.

But, hey, the dog is awesome.

Look at This Fucking Shorts Program

Seen 30 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

This is an entire shorts program dedicated to making fun of hipsters. Which, considering some of the folks in attendance at the festival, could be considered biting the hands that feed them.

It says something that by the time the program was over, I still was not siding with the targets of satire, even though this sort of relentless hammering often changes my sympathies.

Fortunately, most of the bits were pretty funny, even if the longer ones did tend to seem very stretched out.

Excision

* * (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

I wanted to like this one. I really did. It's got a surprisingly terrific cast - Annalynne McCord, Roger Bart, Traci Lords, John Waters, Ray Wise, and more - and does a pretty decent slow burn. It gets into the psyche of its main character very well, and despite being frequently bizarre, never feels false.

But, man, is it ever a short expanded to feature length. There's just not enough happening; there are something like a half-dozen family dinners in the picture, and while the topic of discussion may change, the relationships and dynamics of the conversation don't. A feature should do more than a short; this one feels like it does the same amount over a longer period of time.

Sumagurâ: Omae no mirai o hakobe (Smuggler)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

New Katsuhito Ishii! Rejoice! And remember to get that DVD of Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl off your shelf and actually watch the darn thing, because that's what everyone is comparing this to, as opposed to Funky Forest or The Taste of Tea (or even Redline, where he did a lot of design work) - a stylish crime movie filled with both shocking violence and whimsy.

Perhaps my favorite thing about it is the way Ishii directs action; there's a huge fight scene in the beginning that feels more like manga than anything else I've seen. Action in manga is a very unusual thing; "battle" manga, for instance, will often devote something like eight twenty-page installments to a fight that takes minutes in real-time, and yet the fighters are so good (sometimes preternaturally so) that it doesn't feel drawn-out; instead, you're getting a look at the split-second responses a master is capable of. That's the sense that Ishii evokes in the scene where Vertebrae and Viscera take out a crime boss; it's done in slow motion, but the assailants don't seem to be slowed down quite as much. Not quite superhuman, but, damn, they're good.

It's a lot of fun besides seeing how master assassins direct nunchucks for maximum damage; Ishii and company build up an entertaining cast of characters and twisty plot without obvious effort, and the dude can make a good-looking movie. It's got a catchy soundtrack, and just generally feels like good action manga come to life.

Manborg

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

For what it is, Manborg is damn impressive. Director Steve Kostanski estimates that he and his friends made the movie for about a thousand dollars, although I suspect that is the sort of estimate that severely underestimates the value of one's own time. It's cheap and looks it, embracing a 1980s VHS aesthetic even as the Kostanski and company use digital tools to pile their green-screened actors and stop-motion creations onto one other, with a droll sense of humor that never crosses the line to outright winking parody.

Still, to admit my own bias, I can't help but wonder what Kostanski and company could have made if their goal was not to replicate every positive and negative attribute of 80s schlock, but to make a movie as good as the ones his predecessors were trying to make. There's enough talent and creativity on display here that they don't need the crutch of "it's supposed to be cheesy", and this kind of tribute always strikes me as a very backhanded compliment.

Inside Lara Roxx

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

Hey, festivals, I know all I really want to know about the porn industry. Really, you can stop doing docs about it and setting films there. Well, after this one, I suppose.

Director Mia Donovan doesn't make much of a pretense of distance or objectivity where her subject - a young Quebeçoise who performed under the name "Lara Roxx", an had only been doing porn in Los Angeles for a couple of months when she was infected with HIV by another performer - is concerned. It wouldn't work otherwise; as much as she has some exhibitionist tendencies and likes performing, getting this sort of access requires a tremendous amount of trust, which just isn't going to be there if Lara suspects that Mia will sandbag her. That's not just about her talking to Donovan in the first place, but continuing for the next five years, through highs and lows.

Two things really struck me: First, these girls are young - Lara is about 22 when we first meet her, and without her makeup, she both looks used up and not terribly different of the pictures of her from high school and even middle school. Second - and not as related to the first as one might think - is the level of willful ignorance in the industry; a visit to an older man who had been supportive when Lara was first diagnosed and for whom she still has a great deal of affection pulls the rug out from under the audience when he starts rattling off that HIV isn't as easy to catch as people think, and what happened to Lara was just bad luck.

I found myself hoping Lara was doing well as the movie ended, and kind of hope she shows up when the movie inevitably plays Fantasia to accept congratulations. She's not perfect, but she let the world see her at her worst because she thought people needed to see that, and that's worth a little admiration.

Monsieur Lazhar

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 April 2012 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (Talk Cinema, digital)

Canada/Quebec's nominee for best foreign language feature at the recent Oscars is a good one. It's really amazingly low-key for a movie that opens on a moment of genuine horror and could easily become schmaltzy and simple.

One amazing thing is how instantly we know the title character. The camera pans to this Algerian immigrant and the audience likes him immediately, knowing that this guy is sincere and can be trusted with kids. North African performer Fellag is fantastic, but the entire cast is strong, especially the kids. Sophie Nélisse is especially good as Alice; there's a great scene where she grabs her mother for support that doesn't look acted the way a lot of kids' scenes do.

There's not a moment that isn't used to dual purpose, and the whole thing has at least two big themes. Most of the talk at the screening was about bureaucracy versus honesty, but what really struck me was how much it was about respecting kids. Bachir reads to his students from Balzac, and engages them directly about the death of their former teacher. Kids can be surprisingly capable, and it's amazing how well this movie portrays that.

Intruders

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 April 2012 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, DLP)

It's hard too believe that Intruders is just Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's third feature film; the past decade-plus has been pretty good for Spanish genre filmmakers whether working in their native tongue or English, and Fresnadillo's 2001 film Intacto was creative and atmospheric. And yet, since then he's only directed 28 Weeks Later before this Spanish/English hybrid. It's puzzling, because he makes good, creepy movies, even if his latest takes a while to get going.

Although their parents dutifully inform them that there are no such things as monsters, two children - Juan (Izán Corchero) in Madrid and Mia (Ella Purnell) in the London suburbs - are about to learn different. A wandering cat leads each of them to encounters with "Hollowface", a formless creature that attempts to steal the faces of children. While Juan's mother Luisa (Pilar López de Ayala) turns to handsome young priest Father Antonio (Daniel Brühl) for help, Mia's working-class father John (Clive Owen) tries to take matters into his own hands, even as her mother Susanna (Carice van Houten) finds herself terrified.

Fresnadillo doesn't mind taking his time to set a movie up; even a sequel like 28 Weeks Later gives the audience a little time to let its concept sink in. That's a double-edged sword here; while the deliberate opening gives the film plenty of time to build atmosphere, introduce storytelling as an important factor in how Hollowface takes shape and becomes a threat, and establish strong parent-child relationships, the split between England and Spain means that everything is, to a certain extent, being done twice, and that does tend to make things seem slower than they actually are. Fresnadillo and screenwriters Nicolás Casariego & Jaime Marquesl also introduce a (literal) mystery box very early on but seem to ignore it for far too long, perhaps because there just aren't enough layers of mystery to it to peel them away slowly.

Full review at EFC.

Gandu

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 April 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

Gandu is almost more interesting for what it is - an "anti-Bollywood" movie - than as a movie with characters and story and all. Shot in stark black-and-white, and musically propelled by hard-edged Tamil rap, it focuses on the everyday life of its title character (whose nickname is actually a nasty insult) rather than a strong plot or story. It's not likely to be similar to any Indian movie the audience has seen before.

And as a result, it kind of runs out of story halfway through, getting weirdly self-referential before throwing in an explicit sex scene that got little more than polite attention.and kicking up a number of other bits that seemed to have very little to do do with how the movie started. It's a weird thing, but as soon as things started happening, the movie got much less exciting.

Some Guy Who Kills People

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 April 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

I've actually had a festival screener for this movie since Fantasia in July/August, but had not found time to actually watch much in that pile in the seven months since. My loss, obviously, because this is hilarious. Ironically, given the title, it would be a pretty darn entertaining movie even without all the murder.

Why? Well, in large part, because of the terrific supporting cast. Barry Bostwick, for instance, has been playing puffed-up doofs for years, but his sheriff is a masterpiece of the form. Karen Black makes the mean mom character funny as opposed to just nasty, and Ariel Gade as the daughter the main character had never seen is everything that's wonderful about kids while still showing us the character hurting.

It's almost enough to overshadow Kevin Corrigan as the... well, not sane center that the craziness revolves around, but the guy whose issues are at the middle of the story. Corrigan's low-key enough to almost get swallowed up by the rest of the movie, but it's a good enough performance that when his character does talk from the heart, even plainly, it manages to tie everything together.

Klovn: The Movie

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 April 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

Speaking of Fantasia, I saw this last July and nearly busted a gut laughing.

It holds up to a second viewing, even when one is somewhat prepared for just where Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen are willing to go.

Someone, get the TV series on Region 1 DVD/Region A Blu-ray, because this is hilarious.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 30 March 2012 - 5 April 2012

Aaaagh, dang it, I could have sort-of-kind-of extended BUFF another night but I forgot to pre-order tickets for something. Son of a...

• The Boston Underground Film Festival is cut down from what it was last year - one screen instead of two, half as many movies, only running four days instead of eight. But, you can still see everything, as the second half was all repeats anyway. It's still a very strong line-up - I am tremendously excited to see Katsuhito Ishii's newest, Smuggler, on Friday night, and on Sunday, I and can recommend both Karate-Robo Zaborgar at noon on Sunday and especially Klovn: The Movie at 8:30pm that night.
  
  After the end of the festival, they have the DocYard presentation of Scenes of a Crime on Monday, a true-crime documentary that dissects an interrogation that led to a disputed confession and high-profile trial. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the Brattle is a venue for the Together Festival, with musical docs on both nights: "Take One" and The Chemical Brothers: Don't Think on Tuesday and The Electric Daisy Carnival Experience on Wednesday. They keep a similar vibe going on Thursday, with Scott Pilgrim vs The World at 6pm and a Rock Band Night at 9pm.



• You know what would fit in great with all that stuff? "An Evening with Don Hertzfeldt", with the iconoclastic animator in town to present "It's Such a Beautiful Day", the final entry in his "Bill" trilogy. Along with the rest. And some of his previous shorts. In 35mm. But it's sold out and I, like an idiot, didn't get tickets ahead of time. Well, I guess I'll have to be satisfied with some of the other special screenings, like the Oscar-nominated Monsieur Lazhar, starring Fellag as an Algerian immigrant to Quebec who takes a job as a substitute teacher and must step in as a long-term replacement for a beloved middle-school educator. It's the Sunday morning Talk Cinema offering. There are also Friday and Saturday midnight shows of Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, a famously over-the-top martial arts action movie about a super-powerful fighter cleaning up the prison where he's locked up. Action and gore-a-plenty.
  
  Also playing midnights, as well as all day, is The Raid (which has had "Redemption" added as a subtitle since it played Sundance). It features the director and star of Merantau, which was pretty darn good. Almost all reports on this are that it's excellent, taking a simple premise (drug lord at the top of an apartment building, cops entering at the bottom, and every room in between packed with killers) and building non-stop action from it. Also playing at Kendall Square, Embassy Square, and Boston Common.



• Also playing Boston Common is Intruders, a new horror movie from Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. Man, he does not work often enough - Intacto, 28 Weeks Later, and now this in just over a decade. It's a horror movie with an international cast (Clive Owen, Carice van Houten, Daniel Brühl) about a monster called "Hollow Face" who is simultaneously appearing to different families. Not getting the greatest reviews, but Intacto was so good that I'll probably give it a shot.
  
  The multiplexes are opening other fantasy fare as well; the big opener is Wrath of the Titans, with Sam Worthington returning as Perseus, heading into the underworld to rescue Zeus from Hades. Kind of a mythological stew, but early word has it better than Clash. It plays in 3D at Boston Common (including the Imax-branded screen), Fenway, Harvard Square, Fresh Pond, and the Arlington Capitol; 2D shows at Boston Common, Fenway, and Fresh Pond. Also playing is Mirror Mirror, a comedic retelling of Snow White with Julia Roberts as the evil queen, Lily Collins as the princess, and Armie Hammer as Prince Charming. Strangely (perhaps), it's directed by Tarsem Singh, who makes visually stunning movies but whose previous three films don't suggest a family-friendly story - I honestly thought he was directing the other, darker Snow White story coming out this summer. This one plays the Somerville Theatre, Fresh Pond, the Belmont Studio, Boston Common, and Fenway.



• In addition to The Raid, Kendall Square offers up three new movies this week. Writer/director Taika Waititi will be in town today (30 March) to introduce the 7pm and 9:40pm screenings of Boy, his comedy about an 11-year-old Maori kid whose fantasies about his absent father are due for some revision after the man himself returns from jail. There will be Q&A after the 7pm show. Also opening are The Deep Blue Sea, Terrence Davies's adaptation of Terrence Rattigan's play about an affair between a judge's wife (Rachel Weisz) and a RAF pilot (Tom Hiddleston) in post-war London. And then there's The Kid with a Bike, which while not Belgium's Oscar nominee (Bullhead was the surprise for that honor), is a more traditional sort of film for that honor, with filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne crafting a story about an orphaned boy.



• It's all classics at the Paramount this weekend, with a Re-Released! double feature of Laura andGilda on Friday and Saturday nights. Gene Tierney and Rita Hayworth play the respective title characters, and both are presented in new/restored 35mm prints. The Saturday and Sunday afternoon "Gotta Dance" screening is The Great Ziegfeld, MGM's 1936 musical about the legendary showman featuring The Thin Man stars William Powell and Myrna Loy.



• The Harvard Film Archive spends most of the weekend on Inutile: The Cinema of Carmelo Bene, a retrospective of the avant-garde cinema of the Italian theatrical director. Salomé and One Hamles Less play Friday, Don Giovanni and Our Lady of the Turks on Sunday, and Capricci on Monday, many of them preceded by short films. On Saturday, Jeff Daniel Silva is in town with Ivan & Ivana, a documentary about two Serbs who moved to the United States just before the recession hit. It played IFFBoston last year and also serves as a sequel to Silva's first documentary, Balkan Rhapsodies.



• The MFA continues The Boston Turkish Film Festival this weekend with screenings of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Friday), Future Lasts Forever, In Flames (both Saturday), and Somersault in a Coffin (Sunday). They also will be showing Senna, Asif Kapadia's popular recent documentary on Formula One legend Ayrton Senna, on Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday, as well into next weekend.



• The Regent Theatre in Arlington has one movie screening this week, All In - The Poker Movie, a documentary on the 21st-century boom in poker as a phenomenon. It plays Thursday the 5th at 7:30pm, with a second showing on the 12th.



• The Americana Trio is in Somerville tonight with a Not So Silent Cinema screening of three Buster Keaton shorts at The Armory. The three shorts - "The Goat", "The High Sign", and "One Week" - are funny ones, and they'll be accompanied by a new score performed live.



• The second-run shuffle brings The Artist to both the Somerville Theatre and Arlington Capitol, and while Hugo continues to play matinees at the Capitol, it will no longer be running in 3-D.

My plans: Basically living at the Brattle for BUFF through Sunday, with a brief trip to the Coolidge on Sunday for Monsieur Lazhar. I may try and cajole the folks I know there into letting me into the sold-out Hertzfeldt show on Monday, but when that fails, I figure that The Raid will be one heck of a consolation prize.

The Hunger Games and its cinematic parents: Battle Royale & Winter's Bone

The joke has been making the rounds more lately, but probably started roughly ten seconds after somebody read a description of Suzanne Collins's young adult novel: "What do they call The Hunger Games in France? Battle Royale with cheese." It's unfair, of course, especially if the implication is that Collins was inspired by Koushun Takami's novel or Kinji Fukasaku's film; adults forcing teenagers to fight to the death as a means of control is not a difficult concept to come up with.

Still, Battle Royale is out there, more so now than ever as Viz's Haikasoru imprint and Anchor Bay have been happy to use this movie's coattails to promote the translated Japanese novel and film. However, especially during the opening segment, it's often another recently-filmed novel that comes to mind, Debra Granik's adaptation of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone. Having only seen the three films, I can't offer any commentary on how they digress from their source material. I can, however, say that based on the films alone, The Hunger Games is the least of them.

The Hunger Games

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2012 in the Arlington Captiol #1 (first-run, 35mm)

Of course, that's not to say The Hunger Games is a bad film; as these things go, it's pretty decent. Its future world makes a little bit of sense, it has some neat ideas that it plays with fairly well, and it gets good work out of a well-chosen cast. There's very little in it that's done badly. This may be damning with faint praise, but I'm pretty certain that there was more hilarious idiocy/incompetence in the two-minute teaser for Twilight: Breaking Dawn: Part Two that preceded it than the entire 122-minute run time of this film.

There are some red flags, even early on. Director Gary Ross and director of photography Tom Stern can't even shoot a crowd scene that doesn't need to be particularly frantic without shaking the camera; a big action scene at the finish would be a whole lot more exciting if the camera had been bolted down and the audience got to see what the fight co-ordinator (and cast and stunt cast) is capable of. He, his co-writers (Billy Ray and original novelist Suzanne Collins), and the editing team use their relatively generous running time to let things unspool slowly rather than hit the audience with a lot of detail - there are twenty-four young "tributes" expected to fight to the death, but only three of them are worth remembering names, and maybe another handful (if you're generous) worth tracking from scene to scene.

To a certain extent, that makes the concessions to the PG-13 rating more tolerable - yeah, a lot of kids are killed off-screen or without a lot of gore, but showing the kid-on-kid violence would be little more than cheap exploitation in this case, as we don't know the characters well enough for it to be more than empty violence. The filmmakers also seem to go out of their way to avoid having the sympathetic characters kill in cold blood, to the point where it's as noticeable as the arbitrary "gameplay".

Still, it works pretty well, in part because Ross does keep up a steady pace, and very seldom does the movie sacrifice pleasant enjoyment to set up a franchise. The world-building is full of interesting details, even if it is occasionally really dumb on a macro level (the city folk appear shocked that murdering a child leads to riots, and District 12 appears to have a population of maybe a few thousand at most). Even if it keeps Elizabeth Banks smothered in make-up, the design of Capital City and its people hits a near-perfect balance between seductively opulent and grotesque. That's some nice attention to detail.

And the cast is pretty great. Banks, Woody Harrelson, Lenny Kravitz, and Wes Bentley aren't really doing subtle work, but they are doing good work. Really, the person in the casting department who came up with Woody Harrelson deserves a bonus - he's the one who is funny, but with an edge, and does as much as anybody to create a sense that this is a real world with history and complexities to it. Liam Hemsworth does pretty well in a role that will likely be much larger in the sequels. Josh Hutcherson and Amanda Stenberg do well as two of the other tributes.

And, man, Jennifer Lawrence. If you're starting a youth-oriented franchise, you could do a whole lot worse than someone deservedly nominated for an Oscar for work she did at the age of 19. She's in nearly every scene as Katniss Everdeen, never giving less than her best. She's not always put in the best position to succeed - Katniss never really the underdog, and the script never opts to tip its hand as to just how well she grasps the media manipulation angle - but she is absolutely somebody who can carry the movie on her back.

The Hunger Games & Winter's Bone

Of course, anybody who has seen Winter's Bone knows what Lawrence is capable of; that's the movie where she got nominated for that Academy Award, and she spent a similar amount of time center-stage in that one. If you haven't seen it, do so. I loved it at IFFBoston in 2010 and in my opinion, it was the best of the Best Picture nominees that year.

And, amusingly, the set-up for Winter's Bone is somewhat similar to that of The Hunger Games - "District 12" could be the future of the Ozarks where Winter's Bone takes place (well, more likely the Appalachians; I don't believe there's coal in the Ozarks), and both feature Lawrence as a girl looking after a younger sister, and Katniss makes a comment to her mother that suggests she once was as catatonic as Ree's is. It's fun to make tongue-in-cheek comments about The Hunger Games being a sequel to Winter's Bone.

The comparison between the two highlights one of the main issues with The Hunger Games, though - it talks big about the dire straits the outlying districts are in, but it's hard to really feel it. All of the Tributes look pretty well-fed, although there are hints that this can be explained in-story (resource consumption seems to increase the number of times one's name is in the random drawing, so the healthier kids are statistically more likely to be selected). One of the most memorable scenes - one repeated, it's so important - has Peeta angrily throwing bread from his family's bakery away before tossing some to Katniss. It's likely meant to demonstrate how angry and frustrated with his family was; instead, it comes across as there being food enough to waste. Compare that to the scene in Winter's Bone where Ree is teaching her younger brother Sonny how to gut a squirrel, setting certain bits aside. "Do we eat those parts?" the brother asks. "Not yet," Ree replies.

That's a family and region in dire straits; the folks in District 12 don't ever seem to be quite there yet.

Another way that The Hunger Games and Winter's Bone seem to be drawing on the same material is in the music choices; traditional backwoods music shows up in both, with The Hungers Game having T-Bone Burnett as musical supervisor and credited with "additional music" (James Newton Howard is the main composer). It's a shame that it's only really noticeable as what's played over the end credits. Imagine if they had used it as much of the underscore in the first half, and really set the mood, before switching up for something more futuristic or symphonic in the city. Then, maybe have the time in the arena a sort of synthetic imitation of what we heard in the beginning.

The Hunger Games vs. Battle Royale

The arena, of course, is where the comparisons to Battle Royale become most obvious - once you've got kids killing each other, the details are where a distinction must be made.

Just in terms of execution Kinji Fukasaku (and his son Kenta, who adapted the novel into a screenplay) - do much better work. Penalties for not fighting are made abundantly clear early on in Battle Royale, but I don't think the film of The Hunger Games ever presents the audience with a compelling reason for the Tributes to do something other than sit around and talk about how the Capital City folks are screwing them over early on. Sure, later they herd Katniss back toward the others and throw CGI monsters in, but at that point it's late enough to feel like a cheat - something that has been running for 75 years shouldn't need to resort to this.

(Kukasaku Kenta also did second unit work, and directed the much-maligned sequel after his father passed away. Hopefully those that scorned him for this lightened up after seeing his delightfully frantic X-Cross!)

(And speaking of second-unit directors, Steven Soderbergh is one of three listed for The Hunger Games. Yes, that Steven Soderbergh. That's either an odd extravagance for a movie that doesn't seem to have a huge budget or a guy with some extra time on his hands!)

Digressions aside, what makes Battle Royale a much better, vital movie is that it's got teeth. Not just because it's got the kind of blood & guts that made it too hot a potato for anyone in the USA to touch ten years ago (at least at the prices Toei was demanding) while Ross and company keep much of the violence off-screen; Fukasaku's movie is at its heart a satire that, while it springs from a very specific set of circumstances, is able to have broad, long-lasting appeal because it's willing to make its characters more than just stand-ins for ideas and because it's willing to attack in all directions.

The funny thing is that, though The Hunger Games is the franchise designed and marketed specifically for teenagers - it's shelved in "Young Adult" rather than "Science Fiction" - Battle Royale is the one that more specifically speaks to youth. The villains in The Hunger Games are sort of generically privileged, a vague mishmash between one-percent-ers and an uncaring government. If there's a reason why kids are chosen to be Tributes beyond "they're the target audience", it doesn't make it into the movie. Having a young cast lets them tap into the audience's feelings of persecution directly, and does offer a moment or two of clever satire - when a blond, athletic cadre advances on Katniss and Rue, it's tough not to think of a jock-and-cheerleader crowd going after a pair of outsiders. But that's as mean as it gets.

In Battle Royale, things are heightened; various high-school cliques are at each other's throats with the members literally willing to stab each other in the back if there's something in it for them. But it's not just about high-school rivalry; at its heart the movie is about how adults are often afraid of the next generation (or the one after that, if they're old enough). They see high schools as full of delinquents and thugs who return their love and kindness with scorn and violence, and by god, it's time to put them back in their place. Japan in the 1990s seemed to feel this particularly strongly, as the conflict between a culture with a high priority on respecting elders ran into a generation that did not see security in tradition. Things seldom got as violent as the flashbacks in Battle Royale, but the tension and unwarranted disdain likely seemed that extreme to both parties.

And that's part of what makes Battle Royale fantastic - Takeshi Kitano's former teacher is a monster, but he's also a good man broken by undeserved hate and violence. Kitano is a spout of angry, vicious comedy, but he's not entirely unsympathetic. Fukasaku makes this movie just enough of an elders' revenge fantasy that it doesn't become a one-sided rant. Everybody is exaggerated, but even the kids who eventually realize that being at war does no good are at least a little complicit.

All of that working together makes Battle Royale a legitimate classic. And while The Hunger Games is good, with some very impressive work in it, it very seldom has the greatness of its "parents".

This Week In Tickets: 19 March 2012 - 25 March 2012

It was warm last week. Like, after working from home on Monday, I got a potato and some steak tips from the grocery store, fired up the grill, and had a delicious dinner. I watched (spring training) baseball on Thursday night, and it didn't feel ridiculous



So, of course, the weekend comes and it gets cold and rainy. Unfair.

21 Jump Street

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 March 2012 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run, 35mm)

This movie has no right to be this funny. After all, Jump Street the TV show. though based on an absurd premise, wasn't really known as a comedy. Channing Tatum isn't really known for his comic chops. And while Jonah Hill is, I'm not exactly sure why.

Still, this is a very funny movie; Tatum proves to be genuinely funny, and the script by Michael Bacall (with Hill teaming with him on the story) is self-referential right up to the point when it would stop being funny. There's a car chase that plays off this with absolutely impeccable comic timing - while also being a remarkably impressive car chase. It's also filled with clever blink-and-miss jokes on billboards that make me grin not just because they're funny, but because they indicate an impressive level of attention to detail.

I was also kind of amused by the gags involving people who graduated high school a mere seven years earlier not getting kids these days. There was a rumor going around (as it turns out completely unwarranted) about a remake of Back to the Future, which on a certain level I know to be a bad idea, but on second thought, doing one in 2015 where Marty travels back to 1985 might be fun. I initially didn't think it would be that different, even though Detention (opening in just a couple weeks! see it!) put the weird past era in the exact year I graduated high school, but this makes a bit of an argument that things would be different after all.

And, one last thing - I loved seeing the Stephen J. Cannell animation in the middle of the closing credits. He was credited as a producer, although given that he died in 2010, I don't know how much involvement he could have had. Still, Cannell's name just makes me feel good.

Casa de mi Padre

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2012 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DLP)

This one, meanwhile, winds up a pretty big disappointment. It's a dry spoof that does all right as such movies go, but almost never really takes off. At times, it feels like the joke is that there is no joke - there's an English-speaking comedian playing it straight in a Spanish-language movie, and the expectation of something wacky happening is comic tension - and at others it seems like there is no joke other than spoofing telenovelas' lousy production values.

Or maybe the joke is that there's a lot of genuine talent involved in this spoof thing. Diego Luna, like some of the others, is a legit Spanish-language heartthrob and movie star. Genesis Rodriguez has done her time in real telenovelas, and while she's mainly cast for being incredibly easy on the eyes, she certainly gives every indication that she could handle an actual character if one was given to her. But Gael García Bernal... Gael García Bernal walks off with every scene he's in as the villain, and he's really the only guy who seems to realize that it's okay to be actively funny on top of straight-faced or deliberately mocking the genre.

As these things go, it's OK - I'm not the biggest fan of the warts-and-all spoof/homage - but it certainly feels like something that was a lot funnier in the heads of Ferrell and the filmmakers than it wound up being.

Early Hitchcock: The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes

Well, I was kind of hoping that this Sunday night double-feature would be a Sunday afternoon one, but someone went and booked the theater for a wedding. The nerve!

As always, it's great to see these in 35mm, a reminder of how much I love Hitchcock, with The 39 Steps a particular favorite. It's always somewhat surprising to me - although it shouldn't be - just how funny Hitchcock is. Both The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes are easily categorized as comedies as well as thrillers - the former inspired a Broadway musical comedy, the latter spun two comedic characters off - and in some way they represent Hitchcock at the peak of his powers.

He would later do many great movies in America, but one thing that really pleased me with these two is how good the endings are; a lot of Hitch's finales tend to leave something to be desired (I mean, really, that's how you end The Birds?). These don't have jaw-dropping endings or anything, but a simple bit of hand-holding at the end of one feels warmer than many more passionate displays, and The Lady Vanishes, for as weak as its opening is, puts on a clinic in how to unravel a mystery without drowning the audience in exposition or hitting them with flashbacks to what they missed.

Anyway, great movies. I see Criterion is finally porting The 39 Steps to Blu-ray, which is much welcome, but even though I have one of these on the shelf and will have the other in a few months, it's always a great thrill to see them with a good crowd, and Hitchcock brings out an event better crowd at the Brattle than Bogart.

The 39 Steps

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Hitchcock Weekend, 35mm)

The 39 Steps is by no means the first "falsely accused man on the run" thriller, but it is certainly a template for many that came afterwards - the fortuitously-timed parade in The Fugitive, for instance, is lifted directly from this picture. It remains a delight, in large part because Alfred Hitchcock and company recognize and anticipate what would become drab or rote, evading cliché as their protagonists evade the law.

Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) is nobody special, but when shots ring out at a music-hall show one night, he finds himself taking a most unusual girl home. Miss Smith (Lucie Mannheim) - though she readily admits to having many names - claims to be a freelance agent being pursued by a pair of killers. It proves true, and Hannay follows the clues she left to Scotland, with the police rapidly catching up and Pamela (Madeleine Carroll), the girl he meets on the train, in no mood to help him.

At one point, the pair are famously manacled to one another, and while that sequence may be what the movie is most remembered for, it actually lasts only twenty minutes, with the filmmakers casting it aside once they feel they've done enough with it. Indeed, it's cast away almost carelessly, in perhaps the most obvious example of just how loose Hitchcock and screenwriters Charles Bennett and Ian Hay opt to play things. There's seldom a moment when the audience will that things couldn't happen that way, just that sometimes things seem a little more sloppy than playful.


Full review at EFC.

The Lady Vanishes

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2012 in the Brattle Theatre (Hitchcock Weekend, 35mm)

1941's Mr. & Mrs. Smith is generally considered Alfred Hitchcock's only pure comedy. I'd include The Trouble with Harry, myself, but The Lady Vanishes is pretty close to the romantic comedy category itself, especially during its best parts.

An avalanche has a number of vacationers taking the same train from the tiny country of Bandrika to London: Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), an heiress about to marry; Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), a governess about to retire; would-be musical historian Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), whose late-night research on Bandrikan folk dance had Iris calling the hotel management the night before; a couple who are married, but, inconveniently, not to each other (Cecil Parker & Linden Travers); and a pair of Englishmen trying to make it home before the test match finishes (Naunton Wayne & Basil Radford). Something odd happens, though - Iris awakens from a nap to find Miss Froy gone, and nobody on the train willing to say they saw her. A traveling neurologist, Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas), points out that a planter fell on Iris's head earlier, and vivid hallucinations are frequently associated with the resultant concussion. Iris is certain, though, and Gilbert decides to tag along.

The Lady Vanishes takes a relatively long time to get started; the filmmakers aim to introduce the bulk of the characters before loading them on the train. So there's a protracted meet-cute with Iris and Gilbert, and a great deal of comic relief with Wayne & Radford's hapless tourists well before the movie has any actual tension to relieve. The cast gets even bigger once they've boarded the train, large enough that even if Hitchcock and writers Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder (adapting a story by Ethel Lina White) wanted to play things as ambiguous for a while, it would be very difficult practically; the story seems to rely on things being set up just so as it is.

Full review at EFC.