It's weird - I feel like I'm watching less and less TV, but the DVR still fills up pretty darn quickly. Some of it's because a fair chunk of stuff on cable is pretty good - BBC America and FX, especially. Some of it's just because everything I watch is in HD now and takes up more space. Whatever the reason, I'm watching enough attentively to give some thought to how I want it organized. And so, even though I'm a couple years from doing this on Home Theater Forum (memo to self: modernize links on sidebar), I still like doing overviews.
As per usual, the information comes from The Futon Critic. The bolded selections are the things I plan on watching, the italicized ones I'm considering sampling, and comments follow.
SUNDAY
07:00 - ABC - American's Funniest Home Videos
07:00 - CBS - 60 Minutes
07:00 - Fox - NFL Overrun
07:00 - NBC - Football Night in America
07:30 - Fox - The OT
08:00 - ABC - Once Upon a Time
08:00 - CBS - The Amazing Race
08:00 - Fox - The Simpsons
08:00 - NBC - Sunday Night Football
08:30 - Fox - Bob's Burgers
09:00 - ABC - Revenge
09:00 - CBS - The Good Wife
09:00 - Fox - Family Guy
09:30 - Fox - American Dad
10:00 - ABC - Betrayal
10:00 - CBS - The Mentalist
* I'm kind of surprised that ABC's not putting SHIELD here, although if Once Upon a Time is doing well enough to rate a spin-off, they might as well not mess with the night. It is kind of strange to see so much stability on one night, especially one so important. Although, with it being the most-watched night of the week, maybe there's just enough audience to go around.
MONDAY
08:00 - ABC - Dancing with the Stars
08:00 - CBS - How I Met Your Mother
08:00 - CW - Hart of Dixie
08:00 - Fox - Bones
08:00 - NBC - The Voice
08:30 - CBS - We Are Men
09:00 - CBS - 2 Broke Girls
09:00 - CW - Beauty and the Beast
09:00 - Fox - Sleepy Hollow
09:30 - CBS - Mom
10:00 - ABC - Castle
10:00 - CBS - Hostages
10:00 - NBC - The Blacklist
* Man, does Sleepy Hollow look dumb. And yet, Fox is apparently giving it a big push.
* Nice cast on We Are Men (Jerry O'Connell, Kal Penn, Tony Shalhoub). A bit worrying that they're all in supporting roles.
* Hostages looks to be the first of a trend of self-contained series popping up this year, set to run 15 episodes, presumably with the idea of turning a lot of the cast over next year, 24-style.
* The Blacklist is described as an "action thriller" starring James Spader as a most-wanted criminal who turns state's evidence. The pilot is directed by Joe Carnahan, so that's got potential.
TUESDAY
08:00 - ABC - Marvel's Agents of SHIELD
08:00 - CBS - NCIS
08:00 - CW - The Originals
08:00 - Fox - Dads
08:00 - NBC - The Biggest Loser
08:30 - Fox - Brooklyn Nine-Nine
09:00 - ABC - The Goldbergs
09:00 - CBS - NCIS: Los Angeles
09:00 - CW - Supernatural
09:00 - Fox - New Girl
09:00 - NBC - The Voice results
09:30 - ABC - Trophy Wife
09:30 - Fox - The Mindy Project
10:00 - ABC - Lucky 7
10:00 - CBS - Person of Interest
10:00 - NBC - Chicago Fire
* The very idea that there's something like SHIELD out there seems crazy to me - an in-continuity tie-in to an ongoing movie series? Honestly, the fact that Marvel's cranking out two interconnected superhero movies per year is strange enough. And now this. Go figure.
* I liked Michael Shur's "Fire Joe Morgan" (under the name Ken Tremendous) blog when it was a thing, and enjoy him talking sports, but never got interested in any of his TV work. Brooklyn Nine-Nine might change that; it's got some folks I like, especially Andre Braugher. Trophy Wife has a nice cast too, with Malin Ackerman in the title role and support from Bradley Whitford and Natalie Morales, and since I miss The Middlemen and The Good Guys...
* Hands up, folks who saw Supernatural running nine years, especially considering the showrunner stepped back after they finished the first storyline after five years. ... Hands down, liars.
WEDNESDAY
08:00 - ABC - The Middle
08:00 - CBS - Survivor
08:00 - CW - Arrow
08:00 - Fox - The X Factor
08:00 - NBC - Revolution
08:30 - ABC - Back in the Game
09:00 - ABC - Modern Family
09:00 - CBS - Criminal Minds
09:00 - CW - The Tomorrow People
09:00 - NBC - Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
09:30 - ABC - Super Fun Night
10:00 - ABC - Nashville
10:00 - CBS - CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
10:00 - NBC - Ironside
* I managed two episodes of Revolution before I couldn't handle the bad science.
* The Tomorrow People could be interesting, although it doesn't appear to have anything to do with the two previous shows with that name. Ironside is obviously a new version of the Raymond Burr series. I'm not a big fan of Blair Underwood, but a new mystery series interests me.
THURSDAY
08:00 - ABC - Once Upon a Time in Wonderland
08:00 - CBS - The Big Bang Theory
08:00 - CW - The Vampire Diaries
08:00 - Fox - The X Factor Results
08:00 - NBC - Parks & Recreation
08:30 - CBS - The Millers
08:30 - NBC - Welcome to the Family
09:00 - ABC - Grey's Anatomy
09:00 - CBS - The Crazy Ones
09:00 - CW - Reign
09:00 - Fox - Glee
09:00 - NBC - Sean Saves the World
08:30 - CBS - Two and a Half Men
09:30 - NBC - The Michael J. Fox Show
10:00 - ABC - Scandal
10:00 - CBS - Elementary
10:00 - NBC - Parenthood
* Hey, Elementary has been pretty good! They did a pretty nice job of establishing their version of Holmes & Watson and then bringing in stuff from the canon as the series went on. I'm pleased.
* Aw, I was kind of hoping that Super Clyde, the show with Rupert Grint as a would-be superhero and Stephen Fry as his butler/sidekick, would be paired with The Big Bang Theory. Instead, CBS and NBC split a night of sitcoms with nifty casts: The Crazy Ones has Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar; The Michael J. Fox show is self-explanatory; and The Millers has Will Arnett, Beau Bridges, and Margo Martindale. Selfishly, I kind of hope The Millers and Michael J. Fox are cancelled so that The Americans can have Martindale back and The Good Wife can reclaim Fox.
FRIDAY
08:00 - ABC - Last Man Standing
08:00 - CBS - Undercover Boss
08:00 - CW - The Carrie Diaries
08:00 - Fox - Junior Masterchef
08:00 - NBC - Dateline NBC
08:30 - ABC - The Neighbors
09:00 - ABC - Shark Tank
09:00 - CBS - Hawaii Five-0
09:00 - CW - American's Next Top Model
09:00 - Fox - Sleepy Hollow reruns
09:00 - NBC - Grimm
10:00 - ABC - 20/20
10:00 - CBS - Blue Bloods
10:00 -NBC - Dracula
* Junior Masterchef creeps me the heck out. Who the heck wants to expose kids to Gordon Ramsey?
SATURDAY
08:00 - ABC - Saturday Night College Football
08:00 - CBS - Repeats (Comedy)
08:00 - Fox - Sports Saturday
08:00 - NBC - Repeats
08:00 - CBS - Repeats (Comedy)
09:00 - CBS - Repeats (Crime)
09:00 - NBC - Repeats
10:00 - CBS - 48 Hours Mystery
10:00 - NBC - Repeats
11:00 - Fox - Animation Domination High-Def
* Animation Domination includes an Axe Cop series. In.
THE BENCH - ABC
Killer Women
Mind Games
Mixology
The Quest
Resurrection
* Steve Zahn and Christian Slater is a nice cast in Mind Games; of the rest, Resurrection looks kind of interesting, but it's an ongoing-mystery that will be stretched out forever.
THE BENCH - CBS
Friends with Better Lives
Intelligence (tentatively Monday 10pm)
Mike & Molly
Reckless
* CBS isn't cool, but you don't have to be when people just keep watching.
THE BENCH - CW
Famous in 12
Nikita
The 100
Star-Crossed
* Apparently, Nikita is coming back because the head of the CW figures it's worth giving a show that lasted a few years a short season to wrap things up as long as they're still programming Fridays. I guess that can help build some brand loyalty.
* Two youth-oriented sci-fi series in The 100 and Star-Crossed, which is interesting, as the thing they're most likely to replace is The Tomorrow People. If at first you don't succeed...
THE BENCH - FOX
Almost Human (tentatively Monday 8pm)
American Idol (tentatively Wednesday & Thursday 8pm)
Enlisted (tentatively Friday 9:30pm)
The Following (tentatively Monday 9pm)
Gang Related
Murder Police
Raising Hope (tentatively Friday 9pm)
Rake (tentatively Thursday 9pm)
Surviving Jack
24
Us & Them
Wayward Pines
* Fox has some of the moves planned as "late fall" - Almost Human bumping Bones to Friday, where it will be joined by Raising Hope and Enlisted. So, no blaming baseball when the expensive sci-fi series with a nice pedigree (the Fringe crew, director Brad Anderson) doesn't happen.
* They're also apparently considering the full-year season again (something they did a lot of in their early years) - Gang Related, Wayward Pines, and the return of 24 are all being planned to start in early May and run into the summer. Interested in all of them - 24 will apparently be real-time but skipping hours, Gang Related is directed by Allen Hughes with a neat cast, and Wayward Pines is coming from M. Night Shamalayn, who still interests me.
* Us & Them is Jason Ritter and Alexis Bledel, and this sounds like a nifty pairing.
THE BENCH - NBC
About a Boy (tentatively Tuesday 9pm)
American Dream Builders (tentatively Sunday 8pm)
Believe (tentatively Sunday 9pm)
Celebrity Apprentice (?)
Chicago PD
Crisis (tentatively Sunday 10pm)
Crossbones (tentatively Friday 10pm)
The Family Guide (tentatively Tuesday 9:30pm)
Food Fighters
Hannibal (?)
The Million Second Quiz
The Night Shift
Saturday Night Live repeats (tentatively Saturday 10pm)
The Sing-Off
Undateable
* Good lord, but is NBC a mess - they haven't decided whether to bring a couple shows back, they've got a bunch of unscripted shows coming, and almost as many interesting pilots with interesting people. Still, it looks like an almost-complete relaunch after football and the Olympics.
* Believe comes from J.J. Abrams and Alfonso Cuaron, with Cuaron actually writing and directing the pilot, so... Yeah, I'll take a look at a show from the guy behind Children of Men and Gravity. A super-powered 10-year-old girl in the lead is at least an unusual hook, too.
* Crisis is going to be self-contained, right? Anyway, it's got a very nice cast and Phillip Noyce on the pilot.
* Crossbones is John Malkovich as Blackbeard. Sounds insane, but I will take it.
So, it looks like I'll still have a fair amount of time to see movies, although there are enough interesting things coming to keep one's eye out for.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Black Rock
Another week, another independent horror/thriller playing in theater #5 at Fresh Pond Apple Cinemas, just like last week. Not that I'm complaining; I like that someone is getting these movies out there, and now that Apple seems to be pretty much independent, maybe it's something the new owners like doing and they'll stick with it so enough for it to get some traction. There were only four of us in the 7:45pm show Friday night, so I don't know how how quickly it's building. It's the kind of thing that could use a little bootstrapping, I think - make sure there's a preview for Black Rock in front of Aftershock and one for American Mary in front of Black Rock, and maybe this starts building to something.
Of course, the issue might be finding 35mm previews to attach; I've got no idea how many of those studios send out these days, or whether multiplexes just have to settle for what they get attached to prints. Heck, for that matter, I'm mildly curious about getting previews for digital projection is like - do studios ship them on hard drives, or do they each have an exhibitors-only server where previews are available for download? Do links to previews clutter a theater manager's email like so much spam? Or is it mostly stuff that's "attached" to the DCPs, or at least stored on the same hard drive.
However it works, I figure it couldn't hurt to make indie/foreign genre stuff part of Apple Cinemas' identity and really build it as something you're not getting at any of the fancier multiplexes. After all, with the FEI places nearby and other screens just a little way down the Red Line, it couldn't hurt to have an identity beyond the place that plays Bollywood movies.
Black Rock
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 May 2013 in Apple Cinemas #5 (first-run, 35mm)
When building a survival-in-the-wild thriller, most writers start with something like Black Rock and then add stuff - elaborate kills, extra plot twists, maybe some sort of weird backdrop. That's the usual path, but the makers of this movie come from an indie/minimalist background, so what they come up with is simple but quirky and kind of messy like their comedies and dramas. It's an odd combination of pro-grade talent and do-it-yourself technique.
Things start with friends Sarah (Kate Bosworth) and Louise (Lake Bell) heading to the small Maine town where they grew up for a weekend on an island where they used to camp as kids. Lou is surprised to see Abby (Katie Aselton) waiting for them; though the three used to be tight, there's a reason Abby and Lou haven't spoken in years. Sarah convinces them to stick around, and while seeing a group of hunters on the island is a bit of a surprise, Derek (Jay Paulson) is the kid brother of one of their old classmates and his buddies Henry (Will Bouvier) and Alex (Anslem Richardson) seem okay, if standoffish. That won't last.
Aselton directs and also supplied the story that husband Mark Duplass fleshed out into a screenplay, and that story is not complicated at all: What the audience can suss out about Sarah, Louise, and Abby in their first scene together is pretty much all they need to know, and the dynamic with the guys is even simpler. It's just enough to get things rolling and give the cast some room to work, but there's a difference between simple and oversimplified that Aselton and company generally stay on the right side of.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Of course, the issue might be finding 35mm previews to attach; I've got no idea how many of those studios send out these days, or whether multiplexes just have to settle for what they get attached to prints. Heck, for that matter, I'm mildly curious about getting previews for digital projection is like - do studios ship them on hard drives, or do they each have an exhibitors-only server where previews are available for download? Do links to previews clutter a theater manager's email like so much spam? Or is it mostly stuff that's "attached" to the DCPs, or at least stored on the same hard drive.
However it works, I figure it couldn't hurt to make indie/foreign genre stuff part of Apple Cinemas' identity and really build it as something you're not getting at any of the fancier multiplexes. After all, with the FEI places nearby and other screens just a little way down the Red Line, it couldn't hurt to have an identity beyond the place that plays Bollywood movies.
Black Rock
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 May 2013 in Apple Cinemas #5 (first-run, 35mm)
When building a survival-in-the-wild thriller, most writers start with something like Black Rock and then add stuff - elaborate kills, extra plot twists, maybe some sort of weird backdrop. That's the usual path, but the makers of this movie come from an indie/minimalist background, so what they come up with is simple but quirky and kind of messy like their comedies and dramas. It's an odd combination of pro-grade talent and do-it-yourself technique.
Things start with friends Sarah (Kate Bosworth) and Louise (Lake Bell) heading to the small Maine town where they grew up for a weekend on an island where they used to camp as kids. Lou is surprised to see Abby (Katie Aselton) waiting for them; though the three used to be tight, there's a reason Abby and Lou haven't spoken in years. Sarah convinces them to stick around, and while seeing a group of hunters on the island is a bit of a surprise, Derek (Jay Paulson) is the kid brother of one of their old classmates and his buddies Henry (Will Bouvier) and Alex (Anslem Richardson) seem okay, if standoffish. That won't last.
Aselton directs and also supplied the story that husband Mark Duplass fleshed out into a screenplay, and that story is not complicated at all: What the audience can suss out about Sarah, Louise, and Abby in their first scene together is pretty much all they need to know, and the dynamic with the guys is even simpler. It's just enough to get things rolling and give the cast some room to work, but there's a difference between simple and oversimplified that Aselton and company generally stay on the right side of.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 17 May - 23 May 2013
It's midnight as I start writing this, but I've got a burger's worth of energy in me and want to have the next week's movies sorted out by the time I go to bed in time to get up tomorrow morning. Can the relatively limited slate help me out there?
My plans? Star Trek, Black Rock, What Maisie Knew, probably Kiss of the Damned and/or Stories We Tell.
- Having just one thing really open wide makes it a bit easier; for the most part, if something is leaving a multiplex, it's to make room for Star Trek Into Darkness. That would be the follow-up to the pretty darn great Trek refresh from 2009, with added Benedict Cumberbatch as the villain and Alice Eve as Carol Marcus. It grabs 2D and 3D screens at Somerville, Boston Common (including Imax), Fenway (including RPX), and Apple Cinemas (which I guess is what we call Fresh Pond now, even if there's no signage yet); it appears to be 3D-only at Jordan's Furniture. That's a bit of a bummer, since pieces of the movie were shot with the big IMAX cameras, but it's not native 3D; here's hoping that the Aquarium will pick it up on genuine horizontally-fed 70mm film sometime later this summer.
It's not quite the only thing opening at the multiplexes; Boston Common gives a screen to The Iceman, which played IFFBoston a couple of weeks ago but was sort of out of the way because it was the only thing at the Revere Hotel. It tells the story of a killer-for-hire (Michael Shannon) who kept his actual job secret from his wife (Winona Ryder) and family. One screen there and one at Kendall Square. Apple Cinemas has some indie horror for the second week in a row, with Black Rock grabbing a screen. Katie Aselton directs and stars alongside Lake Bell and Kate Bosworth as three old friends who go to an island off the coast of Maine only to wind up hunted. Could be interesting; Aselton's The Freebie was much better than it had any reason to be and indie favorite Mark Duplass worked on the script. It's not clear how trustworthy Apple's website is, but it looks like they're planning on making tweeners like this (too small for the downtown multiplexes, not tony enough for the boutique houses) a regular thing, with American Mary on the schedule for the end of the month. Worth encouraging! - Kendall Square, as mentioned, is opening The Iceman; they're also getting another couple of IFFBoston selections. Stories We Tell (which also opens at the Coolidge) is an intriguing-looking documentary from Sarah Polley, which focuses on her digging into her own family history upon learning certain things about her mother. Polley's done a lot of interesting things in a career that started young, and I've heard great things about this one. I can vouch for Sightseers personally; I saw it while on vacation last December and Ben Wheatley's latest black comedy is as hilarious as it is dark. It's listed as having a one-week booking, so get there.
They're also getting a movie that didn't play IFFBoston; Love Is All You Need features Pierce Brosnan as a widower living in Denmark who falls in with the mother of his son's wife-to-be (Trine Dyrholm) as they head to the wedding in Italy. It should look nice, at the very least. Speaking of pretty, there are screenings of the fully-restored Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra on Wednesday the 22nd. As it's about four hours long, there will only be two screenings (1pm and 7pm), displacing The Reluctant Fundamentalist for the day. - Following a sort of chain, The Coolidge Corner Theatre also gets Stories We Tell, with Tuesday's 7pm showing an "Off the Couch" screening introduced by members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society who will discuss it afterward. They also open another documentary, Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's, that looks inside the Bergdorf Goodman clothing store. It bounces between all four screens over the course of the week, so check where it's playing before you go so you know whether there are 500 seats available or 14 (The Source Family stays in small rooms, Stories We Tell in big ones, with Mud bouncing around too).
One of the midnight screenings changes depending on the day as well - Kiss of the Damned plays in the screening room Friday night and in moviehouse 2 on Sunday. That one's a new release with beautiful vampiresses whose world is turned upside down when one falls for a mortal man. It's on a smaller screen Friday because that's when the monthly screening of The Room plays on a larger one (I get the impression that the theater is pretty sick of it, but people keep coming). The main midnight is Tank Girl, which I remember as being pretty awesome, and nobody even knew who Jet Girl Naomi Watts was yet. Also: Lori Petty as the title character and Ice-T as a kangaroo-man. 35mm.
In less-insane (but still fantatical) special engagements, the Goethe-Institut German film on Sunday morning is Summer Love, with Nina Hoss (from Barbara) as a woman who, having just moved in with the man she loves, wakes up several years in the past with a second chance at her first love. Monday night's Science On Screen program is Terminator 2: Judgment Day in genuine 35mm. Bonus: Thad Starner will be around to introduce it and talk wearable technology afterward; he coined the term "augmented reality" and is one of the guys working on Google Glass. - the Brattle Theatre will only be open during the weekend; they'll be spending Monday through Thursday installing that gear we helped them buy with their Kickstarter (DCP projection, new HVAC system). Writer Neil Gaiman & musician Amanda Palmer were involved in that, so the theater is there's for the weekend. There will be double features of movies based on Gaiman's Coraline and Stardust Friday night and Saturday/Sunday afternoon, and double features of movies they'd like to share with each other and us. Saturday, Neil introduces Peter Greenaway's Drowning by Numbers (archival 35mm) and Amanda introduces Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre (also archive 35mm). On Sunday, Neil's movie is Lindsay Anderson's If... (digital) while Amanda chooses Philippe de Broca's King of Hearts. Weekend passes are available, too.
- All Things Horror's monthly screening is on Saturday the 18th, and while it could be lost in the shuffle of their recent charity screening, Dr. Franeknstein's Wax Museum of the Hungry Dead looks like fun; it's shot locally and looks to have plenty of sex, gore, and comedy.
- The MFA's film program is still rocking the Samurai Cinema, with Rashomon on Friday, Three Outlaw Samurai and Taboo on Saturday, Yojimbo at various times on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and Seven Samurai on Thursday the 23rd. They've also got three screenings as part of Together Boston: "Sneaker Museum Presents Style Wars Friday afternoon, Wrong Saturday afternoon, and We Are Modeselektor on Sunday afternoon.
- The Harvard Film Archive has the second week of Revelations of a Fallen World - The Cinema of Arturo Pirpstein this weekend. Ripstein and frequent collaborator Paz Alicia Garciadiego will be present for the Saturday, Sunday, and Monday evening shows, and some of the programs will be unsubtitled; follow the link for more information.
- The Regent Theatre has been hosting a play for the past few weeks, but starts mixing their shows up again this weekend, including some film. They've got two traveling short-film festivals coming this week, with the 4th Annual Ciclismo Classico Bike Travel Film Festival on Monday and the "LOL Laugh Out Loud" Short Film Festival on Thursday. In between - though it's not listed on their website - Gathr will be have the first screening in a weekly preview series there onTuesday the 21st. The first screening is What Maisie Knew, with Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan as a couple whose divorce is shown from the perspective of their seven-year-old daughter.
- The Arlington Capitol isn't opening any new movies on Friday, but they will be picking up The Place Beyond the Pines as it leaves Somerville and The Company You Keep as it leaves Kendall Square. They're also one of a whole bunch of theaters opening The Hangover Part III on Wednesday; here's hoping the screenwriters' original plans of killing the characters off goes through!
My plans? Star Trek, Black Rock, What Maisie Knew, probably Kiss of the Damned and/or Stories We Tell.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Closing Night: In a World... plus! Twenty Feet from Stardom
Aaaand, done, sixteen days after the festival. It probably could have been a couple days earlier, but Talk Cinema's last program screening before summer break was one that had played during IFFBoston (good thing I made other choices on Sunday!), and it's kind of a sensible thing to pair with the festival's closing night program, so I'll act like it was a festival screening that just got delayed.
Of the two movies about female voices, Twenty Feet from Stardom was the better one. It's got the advantage of being able to tell several stories rather than just one, and really has its mind set on what it wants to talk about. It also doesn't hurt that the ladies in Twenty Feet are by and large creating things that the audience loves - a lot of classic songs get mentioned over the course of the film - while the voiceover folks are fighting to do something people at best tolerate.
One other thing about Twenty Feet that's not in the review, but it did help me develop a bit more of a respect/fondness for Bruce Springsteen. I've got friends who are absolutely nuts about him - when a new tour is announced, they'll spend a couple of weeks plotting out who's going to but how many tickets for which shows, and do they want to see some of the ones outside the immediate Boston area, and do they have signs ready to request "The Fever" (and that's nothing compared to when a new album drops) - but to me he's just been sort of pretty good. Still, it's neat to see him discussing these singers' history and just what a good set up backing vocals does for a song enthusiastically but knowledgeably. So often, rock & roll, like comedy, is treated as something that's basically instinctive, and it is to a point, but the guys who do it really well and who last the way Springsteen has know what they're doing, and have probably put a lot more thought into what works, artistically and commercially, than you might assume.
Well, anyway, back to the festival proper. I showed up for this closing night show pretty late, nearly 7:45pm for an 8:00pm scheduled start. Normally, that's pretty good, but it's also about when they assume the passholders who haven't yet shown aren't coming and start selling tickets to whoever was in the rush line; I wound up getting in just before that happened. Working in Burlington can stink. Sometime, I'm going to spend a couple of weeks even when I don't plan on seeing anything at the Coolidge figuring out which is the best route: Get off the Red Line at Harvard Square and take the 66 bus, or continue on to Park Street and take the Green Line's C train. Now, the 66 is such a frustrating part of the MBTA as to have inspired a belligerant parody twitter account that most people say captures the experience perfectly, but the C line is really underrated as a pain in the ass - you can easily wait twenty minutes for one at Park Street while a half-dozen B line trains go by, and while the Cleveland Circle stop-at-every-intersection-and-go nature isn't as pronounced as it is for the Boston College trolley, it's no fun. I need to solve this with science.
Sorry for the T-angent. Anyway, I did get there, was able to find a single seat front and center (where I like to be, anyway), and catch a few potato chips that were tossed into the audience to slake my "not eating until 11pm at least" hunger. I was pleased to see Bobcat Goldthwait and friends grab some seats in the front left-hand section of the theater; it seems relatively rare to me to see higher-profile film festival guests actually attending movies other than their own, but I like to make a note of the guys who wait in line and sit in the audience with us civilians; they're genuine fans. I just kind of hope that the guy directly behind me who was planning a "bad movie night" with his friends and suggested Goldthwait's movies didn't see he was there, because otherwise... Well, not cool.
As it was the last night, the traditional thanking of the sponsors and was followed by the introduction of the staff and special guest (a la opening night) and, shall we say, random distribution of prizes:
Charming lady, Lake Bell, but she really doesn't have the arm Casey Affleck does. I also must admit, I miss the days of Harmonix being a sponsor and Nancy faking that she was going to throw a deluxe Rock Band set into the audience and cause serious injury. A lot of the big-name sponsors were gone, for that matter, and as much as not seeing the same Ford and Jet Blue ads twenty times was a fair trade for not having door prizes, it's a bummer that the festival was a day shorter than it was last year. I don't think the quality of the films shown suffered - even if I gave out fewer four-star reviews this year, that's more personal taste than feeling like they were having to settle for second-tier stuff.
So, Lake Bell introduced her movie, we watched, she came back and answered questions. Having a Q&A follow a movie does odd things to the experience, as it's hard to not conflate them. If you really like the filmmaker who answers questions in a witty, informative way, it can skew what you think of the movie, and what they say about the plot that wasn't shown in the movie can get stored in your brain like it was. If, as was the case with In a World..., the judgments and reactions to the film's strengths and weaknesses can color how you think of the filmmaker as a person, which is kin of uncomfortable and, really, downright unfair.
So, as much as I'm sure Ms. Bell's a great person, the answers she gave to some questions rubbed me the wrong way a bit more than they should have. Consider: The previous night, I more or less let the discussion of music choices in Some Girl(s) go in one ear and out the other; this night, the way she explained that some songs were favorites that she associated with the themes sounded random. Unfair of me. She also talked about trying to avoid Los Angeles landmarks and not showing people using smartphones to keep the movie from being tied to a specific time and place, and I think that was kind of silly - it's a movie about people who narrate movie trailers that specifically mentions Don LaFontaine having died a few years ago - where and when else is it going to be set?
Still, I liked her; she was cheerful and enthusiastic, and had as good a laugh as anyone when the obvious question of what the heck the trailer for this movie would look like came up. It was fun hearing that she did a lot of phone voices herself - sometimes with the engineers adjusting things, sometimes with her just using different tones and accents. I kind of wish she'd done that more in the movie - heck, in more movies she does - because it's something both she and the character are good at, and that's what you want to see.
And with that, it's time to put IFFBoston to bed for another year... And start looking for apartments in Montreal for Fantasia!
In a World...
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Funny thing; even when trailers starting with "in a world..." supposedly happened all the time, I don't ever recall hearing it enough to snicker when it did show up. Still, the very fact that people act like it was ubiquitous makes it a good title for a comedy set in the competitive world of voice-over narration - the audience knows exactly what it's about when they hear the name. It's a shame, then, that the movie itself doesn't always seem quite so clear on what it's trying to accomplish.
While the voice most of us identify with movie previews belonged to Don LaFontaine, In a World... gives us Sam Sotto (Fred Melamed) as the clear #2 and heir to LaFontaine's throne. His daughter Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) lives in his house is sort of in the same business, working as a dialect coach since she has a fantastic ear for accents. With Sam's much-younger girlfriend Jamie (Alexandra Holden) moving in, Carol winds up crashing with her sister Dani (Michaela Watkins) and her husband Moe (Rob Corddry). She also winds up getting a couple of voice-over jobs, and may be in a position to get the most coveted job of all - a trailer for an adaptation of a hot series of young-adult novels, previously expected to go to Sam's protégé Gustav Warner (Ken Marino), where those three words will be used for the first time since LaFontaine's death.
That may seem like a small and silly thing to fixate on, but that's what makes it potentially such great material for a comedy: It practically guarantees eccentricity from its characters, puts them in odd situations, and the very fact that what they're gunning for is so seemingly trivial makes the lengths that people will go to achieve it even funnier. Writer/director/star Bell seems to get that most of the time, especially as she loads up the film with truly oddball characters. Carol "collects" accents and practically has her hair stand up on end whenever she hears a grown woman talking like a teen valley girl (especially Jamie), Gustav is bizarrely self-centered, and everyone at the recording studio where she works is full of people who would be misfits anywhere else - including and especially sweetly awkward sound engineer Louis (Demetri Martin). It's an ensemble with a lot of potential.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Twenty Feet from Stardom
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 May 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (Talk Cinema, digital)
I kind of wish Twenty Feet from Stardom hadn't just come out and said that the story of backup singers is the evolution of popular music over the last fifty years, from gospel-trained black voices pushing stiff WASPs out of the spotlight to hyper-layered multitrack recording creating technical perfection at the cost of spontaneity. Oh, it tracks, right down to Phil Spector being a great producer but a human turd, but I was feeling so good about having figured that out myself a few minutes earlier. And while someone who actually knows something about music may disagree with this thesis, they'd be hard-pressed not to enjoy the stories of the talented ladies (mostly) used to illustrate it.
They include Darlene Love, who as part of The Blossoms was one of the first groups of black background singers in the studios, and who has gone through seemingly every possible up and down since then. There's Dr. Mable John, now a minister, and Claudia Lennear, a sex symbol back when she performed behind Ike & Tina Turner and the Rolling Stones. Lisa Fischer and Tata Vega are tremendously talented vocalists who flirted with solo careers but may have found their niche in harmonizing. And then there's Judith Hill, who was to have her big break on Michael Jackson's "This Is It" tour and is now weighing the benefits of steady work as a back-up singer and how it could keep people from thinking of her as a solo artist.
The business of music, after all, is a capricious thing, and the movie is filled with stories of people either missing their windows for a solo career - which, especially if you're an African-American woman from a working-class background like most of the film's subjects, can be vanishingly small - or having their ambitions be, by all appearances, actively thwarted. Director Morgan Neville does well to track that with the evolution of the music business, but he also doesn't make it so specific to that one industry; the subjects frequently talk about it in pragmatic enough terms that anybody who has ever felt stuck in a dead-end job or seen what they do automated is going to understand where they're coming from.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Of the two movies about female voices, Twenty Feet from Stardom was the better one. It's got the advantage of being able to tell several stories rather than just one, and really has its mind set on what it wants to talk about. It also doesn't hurt that the ladies in Twenty Feet are by and large creating things that the audience loves - a lot of classic songs get mentioned over the course of the film - while the voiceover folks are fighting to do something people at best tolerate.
One other thing about Twenty Feet that's not in the review, but it did help me develop a bit more of a respect/fondness for Bruce Springsteen. I've got friends who are absolutely nuts about him - when a new tour is announced, they'll spend a couple of weeks plotting out who's going to but how many tickets for which shows, and do they want to see some of the ones outside the immediate Boston area, and do they have signs ready to request "The Fever" (and that's nothing compared to when a new album drops) - but to me he's just been sort of pretty good. Still, it's neat to see him discussing these singers' history and just what a good set up backing vocals does for a song enthusiastically but knowledgeably. So often, rock & roll, like comedy, is treated as something that's basically instinctive, and it is to a point, but the guys who do it really well and who last the way Springsteen has know what they're doing, and have probably put a lot more thought into what works, artistically and commercially, than you might assume.
Well, anyway, back to the festival proper. I showed up for this closing night show pretty late, nearly 7:45pm for an 8:00pm scheduled start. Normally, that's pretty good, but it's also about when they assume the passholders who haven't yet shown aren't coming and start selling tickets to whoever was in the rush line; I wound up getting in just before that happened. Working in Burlington can stink. Sometime, I'm going to spend a couple of weeks even when I don't plan on seeing anything at the Coolidge figuring out which is the best route: Get off the Red Line at Harvard Square and take the 66 bus, or continue on to Park Street and take the Green Line's C train. Now, the 66 is such a frustrating part of the MBTA as to have inspired a belligerant parody twitter account that most people say captures the experience perfectly, but the C line is really underrated as a pain in the ass - you can easily wait twenty minutes for one at Park Street while a half-dozen B line trains go by, and while the Cleveland Circle stop-at-every-intersection-and-go nature isn't as pronounced as it is for the Boston College trolley, it's no fun. I need to solve this with science.
Sorry for the T-angent. Anyway, I did get there, was able to find a single seat front and center (where I like to be, anyway), and catch a few potato chips that were tossed into the audience to slake my "not eating until 11pm at least" hunger. I was pleased to see Bobcat Goldthwait and friends grab some seats in the front left-hand section of the theater; it seems relatively rare to me to see higher-profile film festival guests actually attending movies other than their own, but I like to make a note of the guys who wait in line and sit in the audience with us civilians; they're genuine fans. I just kind of hope that the guy directly behind me who was planning a "bad movie night" with his friends and suggested Goldthwait's movies didn't see he was there, because otherwise... Well, not cool.
As it was the last night, the traditional thanking of the sponsors and was followed by the introduction of the staff and special guest (a la opening night) and, shall we say, random distribution of prizes:
Charming lady, Lake Bell, but she really doesn't have the arm Casey Affleck does. I also must admit, I miss the days of Harmonix being a sponsor and Nancy faking that she was going to throw a deluxe Rock Band set into the audience and cause serious injury. A lot of the big-name sponsors were gone, for that matter, and as much as not seeing the same Ford and Jet Blue ads twenty times was a fair trade for not having door prizes, it's a bummer that the festival was a day shorter than it was last year. I don't think the quality of the films shown suffered - even if I gave out fewer four-star reviews this year, that's more personal taste than feeling like they were having to settle for second-tier stuff.
So, Lake Bell introduced her movie, we watched, she came back and answered questions. Having a Q&A follow a movie does odd things to the experience, as it's hard to not conflate them. If you really like the filmmaker who answers questions in a witty, informative way, it can skew what you think of the movie, and what they say about the plot that wasn't shown in the movie can get stored in your brain like it was. If, as was the case with In a World..., the judgments and reactions to the film's strengths and weaknesses can color how you think of the filmmaker as a person, which is kin of uncomfortable and, really, downright unfair.
So, as much as I'm sure Ms. Bell's a great person, the answers she gave to some questions rubbed me the wrong way a bit more than they should have. Consider: The previous night, I more or less let the discussion of music choices in Some Girl(s) go in one ear and out the other; this night, the way she explained that some songs were favorites that she associated with the themes sounded random. Unfair of me. She also talked about trying to avoid Los Angeles landmarks and not showing people using smartphones to keep the movie from being tied to a specific time and place, and I think that was kind of silly - it's a movie about people who narrate movie trailers that specifically mentions Don LaFontaine having died a few years ago - where and when else is it going to be set?
Still, I liked her; she was cheerful and enthusiastic, and had as good a laugh as anyone when the obvious question of what the heck the trailer for this movie would look like came up. It was fun hearing that she did a lot of phone voices herself - sometimes with the engineers adjusting things, sometimes with her just using different tones and accents. I kind of wish she'd done that more in the movie - heck, in more movies she does - because it's something both she and the character are good at, and that's what you want to see.
And with that, it's time to put IFFBoston to bed for another year... And start looking for apartments in Montreal for Fantasia!
In a World...
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Funny thing; even when trailers starting with "in a world..." supposedly happened all the time, I don't ever recall hearing it enough to snicker when it did show up. Still, the very fact that people act like it was ubiquitous makes it a good title for a comedy set in the competitive world of voice-over narration - the audience knows exactly what it's about when they hear the name. It's a shame, then, that the movie itself doesn't always seem quite so clear on what it's trying to accomplish.
While the voice most of us identify with movie previews belonged to Don LaFontaine, In a World... gives us Sam Sotto (Fred Melamed) as the clear #2 and heir to LaFontaine's throne. His daughter Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) lives in his house is sort of in the same business, working as a dialect coach since she has a fantastic ear for accents. With Sam's much-younger girlfriend Jamie (Alexandra Holden) moving in, Carol winds up crashing with her sister Dani (Michaela Watkins) and her husband Moe (Rob Corddry). She also winds up getting a couple of voice-over jobs, and may be in a position to get the most coveted job of all - a trailer for an adaptation of a hot series of young-adult novels, previously expected to go to Sam's protégé Gustav Warner (Ken Marino), where those three words will be used for the first time since LaFontaine's death.
That may seem like a small and silly thing to fixate on, but that's what makes it potentially such great material for a comedy: It practically guarantees eccentricity from its characters, puts them in odd situations, and the very fact that what they're gunning for is so seemingly trivial makes the lengths that people will go to achieve it even funnier. Writer/director/star Bell seems to get that most of the time, especially as she loads up the film with truly oddball characters. Carol "collects" accents and practically has her hair stand up on end whenever she hears a grown woman talking like a teen valley girl (especially Jamie), Gustav is bizarrely self-centered, and everyone at the recording studio where she works is full of people who would be misfits anywhere else - including and especially sweetly awkward sound engineer Louis (Demetri Martin). It's an ensemble with a lot of potential.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Twenty Feet from Stardom
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 May 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (Talk Cinema, digital)
I kind of wish Twenty Feet from Stardom hadn't just come out and said that the story of backup singers is the evolution of popular music over the last fifty years, from gospel-trained black voices pushing stiff WASPs out of the spotlight to hyper-layered multitrack recording creating technical perfection at the cost of spontaneity. Oh, it tracks, right down to Phil Spector being a great producer but a human turd, but I was feeling so good about having figured that out myself a few minutes earlier. And while someone who actually knows something about music may disagree with this thesis, they'd be hard-pressed not to enjoy the stories of the talented ladies (mostly) used to illustrate it.
They include Darlene Love, who as part of The Blossoms was one of the first groups of black background singers in the studios, and who has gone through seemingly every possible up and down since then. There's Dr. Mable John, now a minister, and Claudia Lennear, a sex symbol back when she performed behind Ike & Tina Turner and the Rolling Stones. Lisa Fischer and Tata Vega are tremendously talented vocalists who flirted with solo careers but may have found their niche in harmonizing. And then there's Judith Hill, who was to have her big break on Michael Jackson's "This Is It" tour and is now weighing the benefits of steady work as a back-up singer and how it could keep people from thinking of her as a solo artist.
The business of music, after all, is a capricious thing, and the movie is filled with stories of people either missing their windows for a solo career - which, especially if you're an African-American woman from a working-class background like most of the film's subjects, can be vanishingly small - or having their ambitions be, by all appearances, actively thwarted. Director Morgan Neville does well to track that with the evolution of the music business, but he also doesn't make it so specific to that one industry; the subjects frequently talk about it in pragmatic enough terms that anybody who has ever felt stuck in a dead-end job or seen what they do automated is going to understand where they're coming from.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Day 06: Some Girl(s) and Willow Creek
15 days behind, for those keeping track.
It took me a bit of time to get to the theater on Monday, for reasons I don't quite remember. The festival folks announced fairly early on that Willow Creek would be moving to the Somerville Theatre's main auditorium to accommodate the demand, but something odd was going on with the line for the 7pm-hour shows too. I was sort of up in the air on which one to see then anyway - I made Blackfish and Touchy Feely lower priorities because they already had distribution, and then sort of found myself choosing between Some Girl(s) and The Beautiful Game pretty much on-the-spot, figuring the one that started earlier would be less likely to bump up against the Willow Creek at 9:30. They also did the lines a bit differently than usual, and I think were letting things in in an unusual order.
So, of course, Some Girl(s) started late and had a Q&A I hadn't been expecting afterward:
It was executive producer Nick Horbaczewski, and producer Q&As are kind of weird. They're seldom the people you really want to talk to; and even though there are often a number of things where they may have better knowledge of the process - casting, locations - it always feels like you're getting second-hand information even when they answer a question on their area of expertise. Still, he did seem to be the right guy to talk about how they were able to get a lot of name actors for a tiny production because of how much they wanted to be in a movie based on one of Neil LaBute's plays.
I was getting a bit antsy by the end; I didn't particularly like the movie but the auditorium was full of theater people who knew a great deal about the play or had acted in it and were thus full of specific questions and observations. Apparently the sequence with Zoe Kazan's character is often cut when it's performed; partly for length and partly for ick. Other fun trivia was that LaBute was involved but hands-off; apparently director Daisy von Scherler cut a lot out of the text because it's a long play, but the only thing LaBute asked to be re-instated was one character saying "yes." No, I don't know where. There was also a fair amount of discussion about music, which sort of left me in "yeah, whatever, if you say so" territory. I don't know a lot about music.
And then I was able to get out and duck into screen #1 which was already seating for Willow Creek. It meant I was sitting up front by necessity as much as choice, but that was good for getting pictures.
Bobcat Goldthwait is kind of awesome, and he seems to be pretty fond of this festival, giving Boston the World Premiere even though he probably could have done Tribeca if he wanted to. It's his third time here, after World's Greatest Dad and God Bless America, and he mentioned being really pleased with how supportive IFFBoston is to people who work outside the system. And despite being a fairly recognizable name, that's what Godthwait is - he's made a movie with a crew he found on Craigslist, and this one flew so far under the radar that it didn't have an IMDB entry until just a week or so before the festival.
And you can't say he's not committed; his introduction to the movie was kind of odd; he had apparently had spinal surgery the previous Friday and was still taking some painkillers ("Is the mike cutting in and out, or is that me?").
After the film, he brought up stars Alexie Gilmore and Bryce Johnson, who were pretty much the entire cast aside from the real-life locals. Both had worked with Goldthwait before, and that familiarity is probably huge for a project like this, which is mostly improvised and shot way out in the middle of the woods, where you might not have to deal with Bigfoot, but there's bears, mountain lions, the other sort of bobcat, and "river people".
As anyone who's seen the film will probably imagine, they spent a fair amount of time talking about the big centerpiece scene, which rather than being an elaborate set-piece was one 19-minute take of Gilmore & Johnson inside a tent as strange noises, shadows, and pokes at the fabric go on in the background. He said they shot it three times, using the second (the other two might make killer DVD extras, IMHO), while he was actually outside, running around the tent and making noises for his cast to react to. I'm trying to remember if I've ever heard of another movie being filmed that way, with the director just trusting letting the cast run for what's an important scene not just in terms of being scary but in terms of character. He had pretty tremendous praise for his cast in that scene, and I can't say I blame him; that thing is really impressive.
(Here's a video of at least some of the Q&A)
Bobcat stuck around for the closing night screening on Tuesday, which was pretty cool, as it's always fun to see a festival's guests enjoying the event rather than just treating it as promotion. The guys right behind me were talking about having a bad movie night with the Bobcat Goldthwait Collection, and I wanted to turn around and say "dude, he's right over there and can probably hear you!". He makes weird and oftentimes-uncomfortable movies, but I've certainly liked what I've seen from him.
Some Girl(s)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Based upon Daisy von Scherler Mayer's film version, Some Girl(s) is a play with a rather tortured premise, and I suspect that actors who like a challenge are drawn to it for that. Sure, Neil LaBute gives them all the words they could want, but it's ultimately on them to make it work. It's a fairly daunting challenge, and one that may work better on stage than screen.
The premise involves a writer (Adam Brody) who is about to get married flying across the country to visit a number of old girlfriends before the big day. They include high-school sweetheart Sam (Jennifer Morrison), no-strings-attached lover Tyler (Mia Maestro), one-time teacher Lindsay (Emily Watson), best friend's kid sister Reggie (Zoe Kazan), and Bobbi (Kristen Bell), who may be the one who got away. He means to make some apologies, but these things may be better off not revisited.
This is an obviously stupid idea. Well, in real life it is; for a play, it's a potentially nifty device to set up five of the sort of extended one-on-one scenes that are what that medium does best. The trouble is, once the meeting with Sam is an awkward disaster, most reasonably intelligent people would recognize it was a bad idea and give up on it; doing the same thing five times without offering any sort of explanation until the end is the sort of thing that can try an audience's patience if the individual scenes aren't riveting enough to overpower the basically silly premise. And while the explanation that does come has been foreshadowed, it's the kind of thing that feels more like a writerly quirk than something particularly telling.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Willow Creek
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston After Dark, digital)
Ever since The Blair Witch Project kickstarted the boom in found-footage horror a decade and a half ago, there's been a tendency to make the form ever more elaborate, until the likes of Cloverfield and Trollhunter are basically special effects blockbusters in disguise. Every once in a while, though, someone strips the form back down to its roots, and Bobcat Goldthwait does a damn good job of it with Willow Creek.
Willow Creek, as those who know their cryptozoology will tell you, is the town closest to Bluff Creek, where the famed Patterson-Gimlin film of Bigfoot was shot in 1967. Jim (Bryce Johnson) is a firm believer that there are Sasquatches in the woods; his girlfriend Kelly (Alexie Gilmore) is not. She's a good sport, though, so when Jim wants to spend a weekend camping in those woods, the city girl goes along, helping him shoot video of both the town and the wilderness.
Goldthwait appears to be a genuine Bigfoot enthusiast, which may explain why the people of Willow Creek (where Bigfoot is a cottage industry much like UFOs are in Roswell, New Mexico) were generally willing to play along, with Gilmore and Johnson the only actors playing roles as Kelly and Jim wander around town, meeting up with local "experts" and eccentrics. It gets the audience that doesn't know anything about the legend up to speed in a manner that is respectful and irreverent - the believers are given their due, with Kelly's willingness to crack a joke a fun complement to Jim's unbridled enthusiasm.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
It took me a bit of time to get to the theater on Monday, for reasons I don't quite remember. The festival folks announced fairly early on that Willow Creek would be moving to the Somerville Theatre's main auditorium to accommodate the demand, but something odd was going on with the line for the 7pm-hour shows too. I was sort of up in the air on which one to see then anyway - I made Blackfish and Touchy Feely lower priorities because they already had distribution, and then sort of found myself choosing between Some Girl(s) and The Beautiful Game pretty much on-the-spot, figuring the one that started earlier would be less likely to bump up against the Willow Creek at 9:30. They also did the lines a bit differently than usual, and I think were letting things in in an unusual order.
So, of course, Some Girl(s) started late and had a Q&A I hadn't been expecting afterward:
It was executive producer Nick Horbaczewski, and producer Q&As are kind of weird. They're seldom the people you really want to talk to; and even though there are often a number of things where they may have better knowledge of the process - casting, locations - it always feels like you're getting second-hand information even when they answer a question on their area of expertise. Still, he did seem to be the right guy to talk about how they were able to get a lot of name actors for a tiny production because of how much they wanted to be in a movie based on one of Neil LaBute's plays.
I was getting a bit antsy by the end; I didn't particularly like the movie but the auditorium was full of theater people who knew a great deal about the play or had acted in it and were thus full of specific questions and observations. Apparently the sequence with Zoe Kazan's character is often cut when it's performed; partly for length and partly for ick. Other fun trivia was that LaBute was involved but hands-off; apparently director Daisy von Scherler cut a lot out of the text because it's a long play, but the only thing LaBute asked to be re-instated was one character saying "yes." No, I don't know where. There was also a fair amount of discussion about music, which sort of left me in "yeah, whatever, if you say so" territory. I don't know a lot about music.
And then I was able to get out and duck into screen #1 which was already seating for Willow Creek. It meant I was sitting up front by necessity as much as choice, but that was good for getting pictures.
Bobcat Goldthwait is kind of awesome, and he seems to be pretty fond of this festival, giving Boston the World Premiere even though he probably could have done Tribeca if he wanted to. It's his third time here, after World's Greatest Dad and God Bless America, and he mentioned being really pleased with how supportive IFFBoston is to people who work outside the system. And despite being a fairly recognizable name, that's what Godthwait is - he's made a movie with a crew he found on Craigslist, and this one flew so far under the radar that it didn't have an IMDB entry until just a week or so before the festival.
And you can't say he's not committed; his introduction to the movie was kind of odd; he had apparently had spinal surgery the previous Friday and was still taking some painkillers ("Is the mike cutting in and out, or is that me?").
After the film, he brought up stars Alexie Gilmore and Bryce Johnson, who were pretty much the entire cast aside from the real-life locals. Both had worked with Goldthwait before, and that familiarity is probably huge for a project like this, which is mostly improvised and shot way out in the middle of the woods, where you might not have to deal with Bigfoot, but there's bears, mountain lions, the other sort of bobcat, and "river people".
As anyone who's seen the film will probably imagine, they spent a fair amount of time talking about the big centerpiece scene, which rather than being an elaborate set-piece was one 19-minute take of Gilmore & Johnson inside a tent as strange noises, shadows, and pokes at the fabric go on in the background. He said they shot it three times, using the second (the other two might make killer DVD extras, IMHO), while he was actually outside, running around the tent and making noises for his cast to react to. I'm trying to remember if I've ever heard of another movie being filmed that way, with the director just trusting letting the cast run for what's an important scene not just in terms of being scary but in terms of character. He had pretty tremendous praise for his cast in that scene, and I can't say I blame him; that thing is really impressive.
(Here's a video of at least some of the Q&A)
Bobcat stuck around for the closing night screening on Tuesday, which was pretty cool, as it's always fun to see a festival's guests enjoying the event rather than just treating it as promotion. The guys right behind me were talking about having a bad movie night with the Bobcat Goldthwait Collection, and I wanted to turn around and say "dude, he's right over there and can probably hear you!". He makes weird and oftentimes-uncomfortable movies, but I've certainly liked what I've seen from him.
Some Girl(s)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Based upon Daisy von Scherler Mayer's film version, Some Girl(s) is a play with a rather tortured premise, and I suspect that actors who like a challenge are drawn to it for that. Sure, Neil LaBute gives them all the words they could want, but it's ultimately on them to make it work. It's a fairly daunting challenge, and one that may work better on stage than screen.
The premise involves a writer (Adam Brody) who is about to get married flying across the country to visit a number of old girlfriends before the big day. They include high-school sweetheart Sam (Jennifer Morrison), no-strings-attached lover Tyler (Mia Maestro), one-time teacher Lindsay (Emily Watson), best friend's kid sister Reggie (Zoe Kazan), and Bobbi (Kristen Bell), who may be the one who got away. He means to make some apologies, but these things may be better off not revisited.
This is an obviously stupid idea. Well, in real life it is; for a play, it's a potentially nifty device to set up five of the sort of extended one-on-one scenes that are what that medium does best. The trouble is, once the meeting with Sam is an awkward disaster, most reasonably intelligent people would recognize it was a bad idea and give up on it; doing the same thing five times without offering any sort of explanation until the end is the sort of thing that can try an audience's patience if the individual scenes aren't riveting enough to overpower the basically silly premise. And while the explanation that does come has been foreshadowed, it's the kind of thing that feels more like a writerly quirk than something particularly telling.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Willow Creek
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston After Dark, digital)
Ever since The Blair Witch Project kickstarted the boom in found-footage horror a decade and a half ago, there's been a tendency to make the form ever more elaborate, until the likes of Cloverfield and Trollhunter are basically special effects blockbusters in disguise. Every once in a while, though, someone strips the form back down to its roots, and Bobcat Goldthwait does a damn good job of it with Willow Creek.
Willow Creek, as those who know their cryptozoology will tell you, is the town closest to Bluff Creek, where the famed Patterson-Gimlin film of Bigfoot was shot in 1967. Jim (Bryce Johnson) is a firm believer that there are Sasquatches in the woods; his girlfriend Kelly (Alexie Gilmore) is not. She's a good sport, though, so when Jim wants to spend a weekend camping in those woods, the city girl goes along, helping him shoot video of both the town and the wilderness.
Goldthwait appears to be a genuine Bigfoot enthusiast, which may explain why the people of Willow Creek (where Bigfoot is a cottage industry much like UFOs are in Roswell, New Mexico) were generally willing to play along, with Gilmore and Johnson the only actors playing roles as Kelly and Jim wander around town, meeting up with local "experts" and eccentrics. It gets the audience that doesn't know anything about the legend up to speed in a manner that is respectful and irreverent - the believers are given their due, with Kelly's willingness to crack a joke a fun complement to Jim's unbridled enthusiasm.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Monday, May 13, 2013
Peeples
I wasn't originally going to be the guy to review Peeples for eFilmCritic, but then, I wasn't originally going to see it opening weekend; I was figuring to get out to Revere, see No One Lives, and head back to Boston, maybe check something at the boutique houses out in the evening, and catch this under the "mediocre movies are basically free with MoviePass" plan. But, as I mentioned yesterday, things got a little hairy on the bus ride out, and I arrived fifteen minutes after No One Lives was scheduled to start. Not knowing whether this theater tended more toward the AMC extreme of "20 minutes of previews" or the Somerville "just get to the movie" model, I figured Peeples was the one I could squeeze in. I mean, I was out in the part of the suburbs that's just all shopping centers; what the heck else was I going to do?
It was an... interesting screening. First, as I noticed yesterday, some of the previews didn't just say "approved for ALL AUDIENCES" or "approved for APPROPRIATE AUDIENCES", but that they were "approved to ACCOMPANY THIS FEATURE". Which... Kind of weird. I mean, as much as I sort of accept that the MPAA is a necessary evil, that just seems like a weird step to take, like they don't trust theaters to determine what "appropriate audiences" are (although that's sort of a vague term itself). Also noteworthy: The two that had that tag were both movies featuring all-mostly African-American casts, which seemed vaguely limiting, like there was some sort of cinematic apartheid going on. That sadly seems to go on anyway, but that seemed to make it official.
(Also - you can apparently get a hell of a cast when making a movie for that audience. The cast list for the sequel to The Best Man was ridiculous!)
Second, I think I sort of wandered into a special-needs screening. Not official, but that's who the other half-dozen folks in the room were, so there were some odd noises coming from behind me. It wasn't particularly disruptive or anything - though it may have been in a more crowded room with someone who really gets uptight and angry at any distractions - but it was kind of odd, especially when I didn't know what might be part of the soundtrack.
Anyway, saw Peeples, more or less enjoyed it, and figured I'd write it up if nobody else did. As you can see, no-one else did. Sometime I'll have to go back through the last few months to see just how often movies with primarily minority casts get written up. I feel like it's something we could do better on, but we're a pretty white group. Which doesn't preclude us reviewing the likes of Peeples, but when you consider that we're pretty much all-volunteer and how these things often seem to be marketed to such completely separate audiences, I think a lot of time they slip through the cracks because something's not on our personal to-see list. I'd like to say I'm going to try and be a little better about this, but I get busy, and sometimes it seems like Tyler Perry is the only guy who can get a predominately-African-American film opened wide... And from what I gather, his movies are really not going to be my thing. It would be pretty cool if we could find some different voices.
I will try and see/write up more when I can, though. It's kind of ridiculous that I'll see a ton of movies from China just because they're from China but can remain relatively unfamiliar with things being produced in my own back yard.
Peeples
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 May 2013 in Showcase Cinema de Lux Revere #2 (first-run, DLP)
Comedy is hard, folks. It must be, because look at Peeples - it's got a cast full of funny and talented people, a premise that's been proven fertile enough, and one would be fairly hard-pressed to find many places where it really missteps. And with all that going for it, it winds up average. Not bad, not great, just pleasant enough to be one part of an enjoyable date night.
It stars Craig Robinson as Wade Walker, a children's entertainer more interested in helping kids than making records; he's been seeing Manhattan lawyer Grace Peeples (Kerry Washington) for about a year, and he's ready to propose. He was planning to do it this weekend, but Grace has a family thing that she assures Wade would bore him. He goes anyway, though, only to find that her parents Virgil (David Alan Grier) and Daphne (S. Epatha Merkerson) haven't been told a thing about him, and the demanding Virgil, a federal judge, doesn't think much of Wade, although the family may tend to be blind to their own imperfections.
The "meet the parents" plot is obviously familiar - from, among other things, Meet the Parents - but it keeps getting trotted out because it works. Writer/director Tina Gordon Chism has a handle on why it works, too; there's natural tension to the situation but never so much that it becomes a melodrama rather than a comedy. Most importantly, all three of the people involved in this triangle of sorts have enough eccentricities that there's always a joke ready at hand, even before going to the high-quality supporting cast.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
It was an... interesting screening. First, as I noticed yesterday, some of the previews didn't just say "approved for ALL AUDIENCES" or "approved for APPROPRIATE AUDIENCES", but that they were "approved to ACCOMPANY THIS FEATURE". Which... Kind of weird. I mean, as much as I sort of accept that the MPAA is a necessary evil, that just seems like a weird step to take, like they don't trust theaters to determine what "appropriate audiences" are (although that's sort of a vague term itself). Also noteworthy: The two that had that tag were both movies featuring all-mostly African-American casts, which seemed vaguely limiting, like there was some sort of cinematic apartheid going on. That sadly seems to go on anyway, but that seemed to make it official.
(Also - you can apparently get a hell of a cast when making a movie for that audience. The cast list for the sequel to The Best Man was ridiculous!)
Second, I think I sort of wandered into a special-needs screening. Not official, but that's who the other half-dozen folks in the room were, so there were some odd noises coming from behind me. It wasn't particularly disruptive or anything - though it may have been in a more crowded room with someone who really gets uptight and angry at any distractions - but it was kind of odd, especially when I didn't know what might be part of the soundtrack.
Anyway, saw Peeples, more or less enjoyed it, and figured I'd write it up if nobody else did. As you can see, no-one else did. Sometime I'll have to go back through the last few months to see just how often movies with primarily minority casts get written up. I feel like it's something we could do better on, but we're a pretty white group. Which doesn't preclude us reviewing the likes of Peeples, but when you consider that we're pretty much all-volunteer and how these things often seem to be marketed to such completely separate audiences, I think a lot of time they slip through the cracks because something's not on our personal to-see list. I'd like to say I'm going to try and be a little better about this, but I get busy, and sometimes it seems like Tyler Perry is the only guy who can get a predominately-African-American film opened wide... And from what I gather, his movies are really not going to be my thing. It would be pretty cool if we could find some different voices.
I will try and see/write up more when I can, though. It's kind of ridiculous that I'll see a ton of movies from China just because they're from China but can remain relatively unfamiliar with things being produced in my own back yard.
Peeples
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 May 2013 in Showcase Cinema de Lux Revere #2 (first-run, DLP)
Comedy is hard, folks. It must be, because look at Peeples - it's got a cast full of funny and talented people, a premise that's been proven fertile enough, and one would be fairly hard-pressed to find many places where it really missteps. And with all that going for it, it winds up average. Not bad, not great, just pleasant enough to be one part of an enjoyable date night.
It stars Craig Robinson as Wade Walker, a children's entertainer more interested in helping kids than making records; he's been seeing Manhattan lawyer Grace Peeples (Kerry Washington) for about a year, and he's ready to propose. He was planning to do it this weekend, but Grace has a family thing that she assures Wade would bore him. He goes anyway, though, only to find that her parents Virgil (David Alan Grier) and Daphne (S. Epatha Merkerson) haven't been told a thing about him, and the demanding Virgil, a federal judge, doesn't think much of Wade, although the family may tend to be blind to their own imperfections.
The "meet the parents" plot is obviously familiar - from, among other things, Meet the Parents - but it keeps getting trotted out because it works. Writer/director Tina Gordon Chism has a handle on why it works, too; there's natural tension to the situation but never so much that it becomes a melodrama rather than a comedy. Most importantly, all three of the people involved in this triangle of sorts have enough eccentricities that there's always a joke ready at hand, even before going to the high-quality supporting cast.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Blood & Guts in Theaters I Haven't Visited in a While: Go Goa Gone, Aftershock, and No One Lives
It seems like it's been a while since I've been to either Fresh Pond or the Showcase Cinemas in Revere. That's because Fresh Pond has historically not been very good and Revere is far away, and, well, I don't know how much that's changed since then. But, sometimes they get movies that don't show up downtown. This seems kind of backwards to me - aren't you going to get more people going to a niche film where there's a large concentration of people rather than further away? - but, hey, if I book theaters Boston would have had a chance to see Tai Chi Hero.
Anyway, the two places haven't really changed. Fresh Pond still reminds me of the theaters of my youth, in that it's a great big cinder block in an ocean of parking spaces, with center aisles in most (if not all screens). The prices actually aren't bad - a $9.75 evening show ($12 for Indian movies) is pretty good compared to what you'll find at Boston Common and Fenway, and roughly on par with what FEI charges in Somerville and Arlington. I actually used to go there a lot, as neither Fenway nor Boston Common had been built when I first moved to Cambridge, and the same movie seldom played both Harvard Square and Fresh Pond, Copley was small and expensive, and Somerville & the Capitol were mostly second-run.
Go Goa Gone played in one of the upstairs theaters, which are generally the good ones. It's not a great movie, but it's kind of fun, and seeing Indian movies just tends to be a kick in general. One thing that kind of amused me was just how hard a push there seems to be against smoking in Bollywood; for all that folks raised a bit of a ruckus in America when the MPAA started including tobacco use in the ratings system, this movie was not only preceded by a long anti-smoking PSA, but whenever someone was smoking on-screen, there would be a warning in the corner that "smoking is injurious to health". This was made even funnier by the fact that most of the time, the characters were smoking marijuana rather than tobacco. Other fun bits of Indian prudishness: The subtitles would often say something like "f___ers", punctuation and all, even though the characters were often swearing in English.
Things took a bit of a step downhill for Aftershock, though - it was (sadly) just me and one other guy there, and there still was not much in the way of good seats. Not just the center aisle thing, either - a large chunk of seats was removed from the middle of the auditorium, either to provide disabled seating or for damage. The pre-show slides were two years old and what were described as "fun facts" on them were actually just banal data. The sound quality of the music being piped in was terrible. And the two trailers before the movie included Dark Skies, mid-February release data and all. I guess that was the only horror-movie trailer they still had on 35mm.
And, to be fair, the presentation of the movie was actually fine. It's kind of sad that seeing it on 35mm turned out to be a pretty pleasant surprise; these days I just assume it's going to be digital, and part of me wonders if Aftershock was just what they could book in 35mm because they haven't upgraded all the screens to DCP yet. Whatever the reason, I'll take it, and recommend that folks go see it - it's a pretty good movie, will likely only last a week, and, hey, there's $4.75 shows on Tuesday. I think that's new to the place's "Apple Cinemas" incarnation (while it still says "Entertainment Cinemas" on the marquee, the tickets show them as under new management). I'm kind of curious as to how many smaller releases shown as coming soon on their new website actually show up; I could wind up spending more time there than expected if they are looking to draw people in with stuff that doesn't play elsewhere.
That was Friday night; Saturday I took a trip out to Revere to see the 2:20pm show of No One Lives. Again, only place showing it on the T, and I do like director Ryuhei Kitamura. I got too late a start, so I was too late for the bus connection I wanted to make at Malden station, and the one which looked like it could be a useful backup wound up being ten minutes late. That meant I got there too late to even do the "buy ticket, run inside without any snacks" thing, and since it was a shopping center area in Revere, there was nothing to do but see another movie in the meantime. I'll get to Peeples in another post.
I used to work in Showcase Cinemas in Worcester while in college, and the "Cinema de Lux" in Revere has basically the same layout I remember from the "new" Worcester North cinema - concession area in the center, two wings with about ten theaters each. It must be a pain in the neck to staff, as the concession area is like a food court in how it's set up, right down to a weird little steakhouse set up inside the lobby. There were no kiosks to buy tickets, either, as I've grown to expect in multiplexes, and they don't take Discover, so MoviePass was out of the question. It was kind of a weird combination between tricked out and lacking basic amenities.
To be fair: The pizza they had on offer was pretty good, and even the screen No One Lives played on was big and comfortable. One odd thing I noticed was that several of the previews (mostly before Peeples) didn't just say they had been approved by the MPAA for "Appropriate Audiences", but to "Accompany This Movie". Since when has that been a thing?
It was interesting to get out of my usual routine, I suppose, but I don't see myself revisiting either one of these cinemas soon unless they've got something I can't see elsewhere - so, guys, when Well Go is releasing an Asian action movie, pounce! Otherwise, convenience and cost put other places ahead of them.
Go Goa Gone
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 May 2013 in Apple Cinemas #1 (first-run, DCP)
Go Goa Gone isn't going to be of a whole lot of interest to serious horror movie fans unless they're trying to fill a zombie passport of some sort and were missing a comedy from India. Otherwise, it's pretty familiar stuff, far from the leading edge where intensity is concerned, the jokes either aren't that funny or don't really translate, and the opportunities for just going weird get passed by.
For heroes, it gives us Hardik (Kunal Khemu) and Luv (Vir Das), two stoners who only have jobs because of their more responsible roommate Bunny (Anand tiwari). Luv decides to clean up for his girlfriend, gets dumped... Look, they wind up on a trip to Goa, Luv meets a new girl, Luna (Pooja Gupta), and the drugs at a rave turn everyone into zombies. The ferry back to the mainland won't be back for a couple of days, so they and Russian gangster Boris (Saif Ali Khan) have to stay alive until then.
That's fairly basic material, and the filmmakers manage to stick reasonably close to the template; the biggest twist is that the "heroes" are screw-ups, but that's hardly enough of a variation to be worth noting these days (heck, a zombie dressed as the title character from Shaun of the Dead shows up at one point). It's a bit bloated for something so basic by western standards - though the 110-minute running time is arguably short for an Indian movie, it could easily be tightened down to an hour and a half. Directors Krishna DK and Raj Nidimoru (who co-write with Sita Menon) spend a lot of time establishing Luv and Hardik in the opening act for very little payoff later, and what's the point of do a freeze frame with the characters' names in big letters if you're just going to stop the movie to have everyone introduce themselves to each other three times? There's also pauses to explain in dialog how zombies work compared to vampires/ghosts/evil-deads, though that may be necessary for the Indian audience; I gather there have only been a few Hindi-language zombie pictures before this.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Aftershock (2013)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 May 2013 in Apple Cinemas #5 (first-run, 35mm)
Aftershock is an impressively vicious combination of disaster and horror movies, and I mean about 75% of that as a compliment. The purpose of these movies is to draw forth sharp, primal emotions, and director Nicolas Lopez manages that even in the face of repeated, numbing exposure to the genre. He does that job so well that by the end, fatigue may set in, making one wonder if there's a point to it beyond the wringer.
Things start with an amiable gringo (Eli Roth) visiting Chile, hanging with his friend Ariel (Ariel Levy) and Ariel's friend Pollo (Nicolas Martinez). Pollo may not look like much, but his father is rich, which is how they're getting into exclusive clubs and making time with Eastern European model Irina (Natasha Yarovenko), heiress Kylie (Lorenza Izzo), and Monica (Andrea Osvart), the half-sister along to keep Kylie out of trouble. They're in a Valparaiso nightclub when a massive earthquake hits, and as they climb out of the rubble and carnage, at least one member of the sextet is in urgent need of medical attention. With a tsunami warning sounded and reports of escaped prisoners, it's everyone for themselves, and only a local firefighter (Marcial Tagle) offers much assistance.
It was by coincidence more than plan that I saw Aftershock back-to-back with another movie that spends a fair amount of time introducing the audience to the cast before hitting them with a disaster, but instructive in terms of showing how to do it well rather than run in circles. Even when Lopez and company are setting up locations and such that will be important later on, they're also letting the viewer see the good and bad sides of the characters' personalities and how they relate to each other. The traits assigned may be familiar ones, but they're expressed well; even the moments that seem far from smooth where the viewer may want him to just get to the earthquake already are not smooth in a way that fits the characters. There's enough detail given to throwaway characters that it's actually shocking when they're thrown away.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
No One Lives
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 May 2013 in Showcase Cinema de Lux Revere #14 (first-run, DLP)
No One Lives is a nasty piece of work, the sort of "thriller" that mostly seems to be designed to string an increasingly grotesque set of violent deaths together while taking a perverse sort of pride in how there's nothing really close to a conventional hero for the audience to cheer for. It should just be easily dismissed junk, but somehow cult favorite director Ryuhei Kitamura makes all the pieces that don't really make any sense together into a movie that holds the audience's attention.
At the top level, the three basic pieces have potential: First, there's Emma Ward (Adelaide Clemens), a girl attempting to escape her kidnappers as the movie opens. After that, we meet a couple (Luke Evans & Laura Ramsey) moving cross-country stopping at the Highwayman Motel after a long day of driving. Finally, there's Hoag (Lee Tergesen) and his bad of robbers, which include his girlfriend Tamara (America Olivo), the hulking Ethan (Brodus Clay), hot-headed Flynn (Derek Magyar), and Denny (Beau Knapp), who's really only there because he's dating Hoag's daughter Amber (Lindsey Shaw). After a job goes wrong, Flynn decides to make up the shortfall by going after the guy just passing through - which turns out to be a very bad idea.
That's the basic "dangerous people who run afoul of someone who is on a whole different level" set-up, with an interesting wild card thrown in, as it becomes clear that Emma is not the typical helpless heiress she might have been once upon a time. You can do a fair amount with that beyond just assuaging the audience's guilt at enjoying inventive murder because the victims kind of have it coming too; and the script by David Cohen plays with a number of ideas. The thing is, it doesn't exactly commit to any of them. There's an theme running through the movie about which people are capable of being killers under which circumstances, but it doesn't quite connect. That connects to what's going on with Emma's kidnapping, but the way that plays out is disappointing, too.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Anyway, the two places haven't really changed. Fresh Pond still reminds me of the theaters of my youth, in that it's a great big cinder block in an ocean of parking spaces, with center aisles in most (if not all screens). The prices actually aren't bad - a $9.75 evening show ($12 for Indian movies) is pretty good compared to what you'll find at Boston Common and Fenway, and roughly on par with what FEI charges in Somerville and Arlington. I actually used to go there a lot, as neither Fenway nor Boston Common had been built when I first moved to Cambridge, and the same movie seldom played both Harvard Square and Fresh Pond, Copley was small and expensive, and Somerville & the Capitol were mostly second-run.
Go Goa Gone played in one of the upstairs theaters, which are generally the good ones. It's not a great movie, but it's kind of fun, and seeing Indian movies just tends to be a kick in general. One thing that kind of amused me was just how hard a push there seems to be against smoking in Bollywood; for all that folks raised a bit of a ruckus in America when the MPAA started including tobacco use in the ratings system, this movie was not only preceded by a long anti-smoking PSA, but whenever someone was smoking on-screen, there would be a warning in the corner that "smoking is injurious to health". This was made even funnier by the fact that most of the time, the characters were smoking marijuana rather than tobacco. Other fun bits of Indian prudishness: The subtitles would often say something like "f___ers", punctuation and all, even though the characters were often swearing in English.
Things took a bit of a step downhill for Aftershock, though - it was (sadly) just me and one other guy there, and there still was not much in the way of good seats. Not just the center aisle thing, either - a large chunk of seats was removed from the middle of the auditorium, either to provide disabled seating or for damage. The pre-show slides were two years old and what were described as "fun facts" on them were actually just banal data. The sound quality of the music being piped in was terrible. And the two trailers before the movie included Dark Skies, mid-February release data and all. I guess that was the only horror-movie trailer they still had on 35mm.
And, to be fair, the presentation of the movie was actually fine. It's kind of sad that seeing it on 35mm turned out to be a pretty pleasant surprise; these days I just assume it's going to be digital, and part of me wonders if Aftershock was just what they could book in 35mm because they haven't upgraded all the screens to DCP yet. Whatever the reason, I'll take it, and recommend that folks go see it - it's a pretty good movie, will likely only last a week, and, hey, there's $4.75 shows on Tuesday. I think that's new to the place's "Apple Cinemas" incarnation (while it still says "Entertainment Cinemas" on the marquee, the tickets show them as under new management). I'm kind of curious as to how many smaller releases shown as coming soon on their new website actually show up; I could wind up spending more time there than expected if they are looking to draw people in with stuff that doesn't play elsewhere.
That was Friday night; Saturday I took a trip out to Revere to see the 2:20pm show of No One Lives. Again, only place showing it on the T, and I do like director Ryuhei Kitamura. I got too late a start, so I was too late for the bus connection I wanted to make at Malden station, and the one which looked like it could be a useful backup wound up being ten minutes late. That meant I got there too late to even do the "buy ticket, run inside without any snacks" thing, and since it was a shopping center area in Revere, there was nothing to do but see another movie in the meantime. I'll get to Peeples in another post.
I used to work in Showcase Cinemas in Worcester while in college, and the "Cinema de Lux" in Revere has basically the same layout I remember from the "new" Worcester North cinema - concession area in the center, two wings with about ten theaters each. It must be a pain in the neck to staff, as the concession area is like a food court in how it's set up, right down to a weird little steakhouse set up inside the lobby. There were no kiosks to buy tickets, either, as I've grown to expect in multiplexes, and they don't take Discover, so MoviePass was out of the question. It was kind of a weird combination between tricked out and lacking basic amenities.
To be fair: The pizza they had on offer was pretty good, and even the screen No One Lives played on was big and comfortable. One odd thing I noticed was that several of the previews (mostly before Peeples) didn't just say they had been approved by the MPAA for "Appropriate Audiences", but to "Accompany This Movie". Since when has that been a thing?
It was interesting to get out of my usual routine, I suppose, but I don't see myself revisiting either one of these cinemas soon unless they've got something I can't see elsewhere - so, guys, when Well Go is releasing an Asian action movie, pounce! Otherwise, convenience and cost put other places ahead of them.
Go Goa Gone
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 May 2013 in Apple Cinemas #1 (first-run, DCP)
Go Goa Gone isn't going to be of a whole lot of interest to serious horror movie fans unless they're trying to fill a zombie passport of some sort and were missing a comedy from India. Otherwise, it's pretty familiar stuff, far from the leading edge where intensity is concerned, the jokes either aren't that funny or don't really translate, and the opportunities for just going weird get passed by.
For heroes, it gives us Hardik (Kunal Khemu) and Luv (Vir Das), two stoners who only have jobs because of their more responsible roommate Bunny (Anand tiwari). Luv decides to clean up for his girlfriend, gets dumped... Look, they wind up on a trip to Goa, Luv meets a new girl, Luna (Pooja Gupta), and the drugs at a rave turn everyone into zombies. The ferry back to the mainland won't be back for a couple of days, so they and Russian gangster Boris (Saif Ali Khan) have to stay alive until then.
That's fairly basic material, and the filmmakers manage to stick reasonably close to the template; the biggest twist is that the "heroes" are screw-ups, but that's hardly enough of a variation to be worth noting these days (heck, a zombie dressed as the title character from Shaun of the Dead shows up at one point). It's a bit bloated for something so basic by western standards - though the 110-minute running time is arguably short for an Indian movie, it could easily be tightened down to an hour and a half. Directors Krishna DK and Raj Nidimoru (who co-write with Sita Menon) spend a lot of time establishing Luv and Hardik in the opening act for very little payoff later, and what's the point of do a freeze frame with the characters' names in big letters if you're just going to stop the movie to have everyone introduce themselves to each other three times? There's also pauses to explain in dialog how zombies work compared to vampires/ghosts/evil-deads, though that may be necessary for the Indian audience; I gather there have only been a few Hindi-language zombie pictures before this.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Aftershock (2013)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 May 2013 in Apple Cinemas #5 (first-run, 35mm)
Aftershock is an impressively vicious combination of disaster and horror movies, and I mean about 75% of that as a compliment. The purpose of these movies is to draw forth sharp, primal emotions, and director Nicolas Lopez manages that even in the face of repeated, numbing exposure to the genre. He does that job so well that by the end, fatigue may set in, making one wonder if there's a point to it beyond the wringer.
Things start with an amiable gringo (Eli Roth) visiting Chile, hanging with his friend Ariel (Ariel Levy) and Ariel's friend Pollo (Nicolas Martinez). Pollo may not look like much, but his father is rich, which is how they're getting into exclusive clubs and making time with Eastern European model Irina (Natasha Yarovenko), heiress Kylie (Lorenza Izzo), and Monica (Andrea Osvart), the half-sister along to keep Kylie out of trouble. They're in a Valparaiso nightclub when a massive earthquake hits, and as they climb out of the rubble and carnage, at least one member of the sextet is in urgent need of medical attention. With a tsunami warning sounded and reports of escaped prisoners, it's everyone for themselves, and only a local firefighter (Marcial Tagle) offers much assistance.
It was by coincidence more than plan that I saw Aftershock back-to-back with another movie that spends a fair amount of time introducing the audience to the cast before hitting them with a disaster, but instructive in terms of showing how to do it well rather than run in circles. Even when Lopez and company are setting up locations and such that will be important later on, they're also letting the viewer see the good and bad sides of the characters' personalities and how they relate to each other. The traits assigned may be familiar ones, but they're expressed well; even the moments that seem far from smooth where the viewer may want him to just get to the earthquake already are not smooth in a way that fits the characters. There's enough detail given to throwaway characters that it's actually shocking when they're thrown away.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
No One Lives
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 May 2013 in Showcase Cinema de Lux Revere #14 (first-run, DLP)
No One Lives is a nasty piece of work, the sort of "thriller" that mostly seems to be designed to string an increasingly grotesque set of violent deaths together while taking a perverse sort of pride in how there's nothing really close to a conventional hero for the audience to cheer for. It should just be easily dismissed junk, but somehow cult favorite director Ryuhei Kitamura makes all the pieces that don't really make any sense together into a movie that holds the audience's attention.
At the top level, the three basic pieces have potential: First, there's Emma Ward (Adelaide Clemens), a girl attempting to escape her kidnappers as the movie opens. After that, we meet a couple (Luke Evans & Laura Ramsey) moving cross-country stopping at the Highwayman Motel after a long day of driving. Finally, there's Hoag (Lee Tergesen) and his bad of robbers, which include his girlfriend Tamara (America Olivo), the hulking Ethan (Brodus Clay), hot-headed Flynn (Derek Magyar), and Denny (Beau Knapp), who's really only there because he's dating Hoag's daughter Amber (Lindsey Shaw). After a job goes wrong, Flynn decides to make up the shortfall by going after the guy just passing through - which turns out to be a very bad idea.
That's the basic "dangerous people who run afoul of someone who is on a whole different level" set-up, with an interesting wild card thrown in, as it becomes clear that Emma is not the typical helpless heiress she might have been once upon a time. You can do a fair amount with that beyond just assuaging the audience's guilt at enjoying inventive murder because the victims kind of have it coming too; and the script by David Cohen plays with a number of ideas. The thing is, it doesn't exactly commit to any of them. There's an theme running through the movie about which people are capable of being killers under which circumstances, but it doesn't quite connect. That connects to what's going on with Emma's kidnapping, but the way that plays out is disappointing, too.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Day 05: The Defector: Escape from North Korea, Remote Area Medical, The Act of Killing, and Berberian Sound Studio
10 days behind!
I suppose I should kick myself on buying tickets for the Red Sox game that I knew would conflict with the festival, but I don't remember if IFFBoston's exact dates were announced back when the Sox four-packs went on sale, and anyway, the Sunday game package is when it's easiest for my folks to come. So, I wound up missing my brother and his girls on the 28th, although that family is big enough now that they need the whole four. From the pictures, it looked like they had fun.
I had fun, too, although that's a funny thing to say about this line-up of movies, which involved human trafficking, large groups of Americans being unable to pay for health care, Indonesian death squads, and, in the one that was actually supposed to be entertaining rather than informative, a man going slowly mad from isolation. Really could have used a movie about cute puppies being adopted by the end there, but at least the movies about ugly things were interesting.
Unlike Saturday, I had plenty of time to get something to eat at Boston Burger Company between shows, in part because only one of the four had a Q&A that would tighten up the gap between shows.
That's Farihah Zaman and Jeff Reichert, the team behind Remote Area Medical. Like all of the day's films, it was pretty good, although somewhat like Oxyana, it wasn't too hard to get the feeling during the Q&A afterward that they sort of went soft in a few areas to make it palatable to an audience with somewhat broader political beliefs. For instance, you won't hear anybody mention "Obamacare" anywhere in the movie, although it was something that naturally came up while interviewing the subjects. Given the part of the country they were in (Tennessee), there was a lot of objection to it, although a lot of people they interviewed apparently said that they wanted a system like in Canada or the UK, having a hard time accepting that it's impossible to get there all at once. Or, arguably, at all; some parts of the country have a really deep, ingrained distrust of government.
(It also struck me that, not having been ill or just having had a check-up lately, I really have no idea what health care costs me as a consumer. Some of the numbers people floated as to what it "should" cast seemed ridiculously low to me for involving highly-trained professionals, but I just have no context.)
Anyway, they seemed like nice folks; doing this movie came from having worked with RAM before, so they were able to start with a fair amount of trust from everyone on that side, and I suspect that a lot of the patients would want their voices heard in this situation. It certainly felt like a doc with unusually good access for a subject that could have been uncomfortable.
Okay, three more to go. Four, kind of. Might not get to them until Sunday or Monday, but the chance of getting these movies written up before they fall out the back of my brain looks pretty good.
(To be fair: The end of Berberian Sound Studio is kind of hazy. Is it weird that I tend to forget the ends of movies pretty fast, especially in genres where the denouement is so important?)
The Defector: Escape from North Korea
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
The Defector is a documentary adventure of sorts - it embeds the filmmakers and audience in a situation that has very real danger as things happen, rather than having the filmmakers dig up what they can later. Sure, it's not a big action-movie sort of adventure, but there's plenty of very real tension as a group of North Korean defectors make a 3,000-mile trip to escape to the South.
Such a long trip may seem unnecessary, but the border between the two Koreas is the most guarded frontier in the world, effectively impassable. So what's more common is for people to escape to Yanji in northern China, take the highway via Xian to Kunming, where they can sneak into Laos, cross the mountains on foot, and finally make it to Chiyachi, Thailand, where they can apply for political asylum in various countries. They can't do that alone, obviously, which is why there are brokers such as "Dragon", who escaped North Korea in 2001 and has helped about 500 since. This group includes Sook-ja, who is seeking her missing sister, and Yong-hee, who was kidnapped by human traffickers eight years previous and sold as a mail-order bride.
Ann Shin's film can't quite be a narrative film with real people, for a number of reasons. What would be plot threads in a feature inevitably sputter out unresolved here, and conflict between the subjects will often result not in great cinema but significantly reduced access for the filmmaker. Safety concerns mean that Shin and her crew (presumably just cinematographer Stephen Chung) cannot accompany the defectors on the trek through Laos, which is potentially the most cinematic leg of the journey. And while she does well with recreations when they're necessary, moments when she states her emotions in voiceover because it was prudent to hide them while she was filming are somewhat flat.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Remote Area Medical
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Remote Area Medical takes great pains to separate itself from partisan politics as much as possible, but its very premise - that a service designed to bring basic medical treatment to people in areas without any sort of infrastructure like the middle of the Amazon rain forest now spends 60% of its time tending to small-town America - must at least suggest a need for action, no matter what one feels the action is. And even without having that argument, it's an intriguing look at just how this massive-but-mobile free clinic works.
In this case, the RAM team is spending a weekend in Bristol, Tennessee, not terribly far from their Knoxville headquarters. They set up shop at the racetrack, hand out tickets at 3:30am - which would seem early except that some cars have been waiting for days - and then at 7am sharp they take people in the order that they arrive. Many are there for routine checkups, mammograms, and the like, while some have more specific symptoms. A large number are there for eye exams and dental care; there are facilities on-hand to manufacture glasses and dentures. Roughly two thousand people will be examined by the volunteer physicians on-hand.
That dental and vision are so prominent may be surprising to some in the audience, but perhaps it shouldn't be. As much we often tend to think of health care in reactive terms - not necessarily emergency services, but something done after a problem has shown itself - filmmakers Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman have the patients receiving that kind of assistance explain how a degenerative gum disease that leave's one's teeth a mess can certainly make it difficult to get a job that involves dealing with people, or how not being able to see well enough to read can undermine a person's confidence. There are bits where people talk about what health care costs and what it should cost, sure, but if Remote Area Medical makes any contribution to the debate about affordable health care, it's in framing it as something that improves everyday life as opposed to just something needed in bad situations.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
The Act of Killing
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
The Act of Killing opens with a group of dancing girls emerging from a covered bridge shaped like a fish. This may not seem like a particularly apt way to start a film about the criminal and paramilitary gangs who systematically murdered dissidents during and after Indonesia's 1965 military coup, but in this case, the absurd is called for. This is one of the most self-referential, strange documentaries one can imagine, and a rare one that uses that inward gaze to find power rather than express ego.
What director Joshua Oppenheimer does is to have his subjects shoot their own movies about what happened back then, while his behind-the-scenes video captures them speaking about murder, intimidation, and other injustices in plain view. The killers take on various roles behind the camera and in front of it, sometimes portraying themselves, sometimes playing accomplices and victims, while Oppenheimer, co-director Christine Cynn, and their collaborators (many of them anonymous) fill the audience in with details about the country's recent history and present.
The men he works with.. Well, they're a transfixing group of people, if nothing else. Anwar Congo quickly emerges as the central figure; he's a rail-thin, dark-skinned, silver-haloed fellow who dresses like a pimp, cheerfully talks about having been a "movie-theater gangster" who later moved up to torturing and killing the government's enemies, and how he was inspired by a desire to top the violence of Hollywood movies. Herman Koto is like his sidekick, a tubby former paramilitary fighter who winds up cross-dressing when the picture needs a weeping mother and undertakes an ill-advised run for government in the middle of production. The less-flamboyant Adi Zulkadry flies in from where he's been living abroad for many years, and newspaper publisher Ibrahim Sinik brags about people being tortured in his office. Then there are the more conventional monsters, including a paramilitary group founded by Congo and now led by Safit Parede; gangsters like Congo and public figures like Vice President Jusuf Kalla mingle at their rallies.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Berberian Sound Studio
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston After Dark, digital)
Berberian Sound Studio brought a film called "Amer" to mind, even though the two are spectacularly different in the way they pay tribute to Italian giallo movies. What they have in common is a deep affection for the genre, a remarkable attention to detail, and an incredible ability to create atmosphere from sound and a barely suggested plot. This movie just takes those qualities into post-production.
Post-production on a film called "The Equestrian Vortex", to be specific. Gilderoy (Toby Jones), an English audio engineer, has been hired to record and mix the movie's soundtrack, but he didn't quite know what he was getting into - aside from the bloody, violent content of the script taking him by surprise, he's a quiet Englishman surrounded by brash Italians; he doesn't speak the local language; and he's having a hard time finding someone to reimburse him for his airfare. Producer Francesco (Cosimo Fusco) switches from ingratiating to domineering at the drop of a hat, and the director who specifically requested him is mostly absent and eccentric when he is around. The closest thing he finds to a friend is Silvia (Fatma Mohamed), one of the actresses dubbing the film, though some of the other men on set claim she's trouble.
If I were producing next year's Academy Awards, I'd look into using clips from this movie to illustrate just what is meant by Sound Editing and Sound Mixing; a fair amount of time is spent on showing how Gilderoy and his colleagues go about their work, whether it be smashing vegetables to approximate the sounds of the human body being abused, carefully raising and lowering sound levels to just so, and watching women scream their hearts out while standing in a booth with nothing to react to. It's great fun to watch for those who like to see how things work and how movies are made, but the way writer/director Peter Strickland uses this environment to tell the story is kind of brilliant. Certainly, it's dark and claustrophobic and kind of run-down; that's kind of a given. But it's Gilderoy that grabs the attention; Jones and Strickland let us get to know the man by how he goes about his work, usually separated from the girl he may fancy by glass. The machines he uses are analog, mechanical things, an extension of his actions in the way that digital interfaces can only approximate, and the instinctive way he is able to manipulate them stands in stark contrast to how nervous he is in his interaction with the other people.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
I suppose I should kick myself on buying tickets for the Red Sox game that I knew would conflict with the festival, but I don't remember if IFFBoston's exact dates were announced back when the Sox four-packs went on sale, and anyway, the Sunday game package is when it's easiest for my folks to come. So, I wound up missing my brother and his girls on the 28th, although that family is big enough now that they need the whole four. From the pictures, it looked like they had fun.
I had fun, too, although that's a funny thing to say about this line-up of movies, which involved human trafficking, large groups of Americans being unable to pay for health care, Indonesian death squads, and, in the one that was actually supposed to be entertaining rather than informative, a man going slowly mad from isolation. Really could have used a movie about cute puppies being adopted by the end there, but at least the movies about ugly things were interesting.
Unlike Saturday, I had plenty of time to get something to eat at Boston Burger Company between shows, in part because only one of the four had a Q&A that would tighten up the gap between shows.
That's Farihah Zaman and Jeff Reichert, the team behind Remote Area Medical. Like all of the day's films, it was pretty good, although somewhat like Oxyana, it wasn't too hard to get the feeling during the Q&A afterward that they sort of went soft in a few areas to make it palatable to an audience with somewhat broader political beliefs. For instance, you won't hear anybody mention "Obamacare" anywhere in the movie, although it was something that naturally came up while interviewing the subjects. Given the part of the country they were in (Tennessee), there was a lot of objection to it, although a lot of people they interviewed apparently said that they wanted a system like in Canada or the UK, having a hard time accepting that it's impossible to get there all at once. Or, arguably, at all; some parts of the country have a really deep, ingrained distrust of government.
(It also struck me that, not having been ill or just having had a check-up lately, I really have no idea what health care costs me as a consumer. Some of the numbers people floated as to what it "should" cast seemed ridiculously low to me for involving highly-trained professionals, but I just have no context.)
Anyway, they seemed like nice folks; doing this movie came from having worked with RAM before, so they were able to start with a fair amount of trust from everyone on that side, and I suspect that a lot of the patients would want their voices heard in this situation. It certainly felt like a doc with unusually good access for a subject that could have been uncomfortable.
Okay, three more to go. Four, kind of. Might not get to them until Sunday or Monday, but the chance of getting these movies written up before they fall out the back of my brain looks pretty good.
(To be fair: The end of Berberian Sound Studio is kind of hazy. Is it weird that I tend to forget the ends of movies pretty fast, especially in genres where the denouement is so important?)
The Defector: Escape from North Korea
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
The Defector is a documentary adventure of sorts - it embeds the filmmakers and audience in a situation that has very real danger as things happen, rather than having the filmmakers dig up what they can later. Sure, it's not a big action-movie sort of adventure, but there's plenty of very real tension as a group of North Korean defectors make a 3,000-mile trip to escape to the South.
Such a long trip may seem unnecessary, but the border between the two Koreas is the most guarded frontier in the world, effectively impassable. So what's more common is for people to escape to Yanji in northern China, take the highway via Xian to Kunming, where they can sneak into Laos, cross the mountains on foot, and finally make it to Chiyachi, Thailand, where they can apply for political asylum in various countries. They can't do that alone, obviously, which is why there are brokers such as "Dragon", who escaped North Korea in 2001 and has helped about 500 since. This group includes Sook-ja, who is seeking her missing sister, and Yong-hee, who was kidnapped by human traffickers eight years previous and sold as a mail-order bride.
Ann Shin's film can't quite be a narrative film with real people, for a number of reasons. What would be plot threads in a feature inevitably sputter out unresolved here, and conflict between the subjects will often result not in great cinema but significantly reduced access for the filmmaker. Safety concerns mean that Shin and her crew (presumably just cinematographer Stephen Chung) cannot accompany the defectors on the trek through Laos, which is potentially the most cinematic leg of the journey. And while she does well with recreations when they're necessary, moments when she states her emotions in voiceover because it was prudent to hide them while she was filming are somewhat flat.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Remote Area Medical
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Remote Area Medical takes great pains to separate itself from partisan politics as much as possible, but its very premise - that a service designed to bring basic medical treatment to people in areas without any sort of infrastructure like the middle of the Amazon rain forest now spends 60% of its time tending to small-town America - must at least suggest a need for action, no matter what one feels the action is. And even without having that argument, it's an intriguing look at just how this massive-but-mobile free clinic works.
In this case, the RAM team is spending a weekend in Bristol, Tennessee, not terribly far from their Knoxville headquarters. They set up shop at the racetrack, hand out tickets at 3:30am - which would seem early except that some cars have been waiting for days - and then at 7am sharp they take people in the order that they arrive. Many are there for routine checkups, mammograms, and the like, while some have more specific symptoms. A large number are there for eye exams and dental care; there are facilities on-hand to manufacture glasses and dentures. Roughly two thousand people will be examined by the volunteer physicians on-hand.
That dental and vision are so prominent may be surprising to some in the audience, but perhaps it shouldn't be. As much we often tend to think of health care in reactive terms - not necessarily emergency services, but something done after a problem has shown itself - filmmakers Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman have the patients receiving that kind of assistance explain how a degenerative gum disease that leave's one's teeth a mess can certainly make it difficult to get a job that involves dealing with people, or how not being able to see well enough to read can undermine a person's confidence. There are bits where people talk about what health care costs and what it should cost, sure, but if Remote Area Medical makes any contribution to the debate about affordable health care, it's in framing it as something that improves everyday life as opposed to just something needed in bad situations.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
The Act of Killing
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
The Act of Killing opens with a group of dancing girls emerging from a covered bridge shaped like a fish. This may not seem like a particularly apt way to start a film about the criminal and paramilitary gangs who systematically murdered dissidents during and after Indonesia's 1965 military coup, but in this case, the absurd is called for. This is one of the most self-referential, strange documentaries one can imagine, and a rare one that uses that inward gaze to find power rather than express ego.
What director Joshua Oppenheimer does is to have his subjects shoot their own movies about what happened back then, while his behind-the-scenes video captures them speaking about murder, intimidation, and other injustices in plain view. The killers take on various roles behind the camera and in front of it, sometimes portraying themselves, sometimes playing accomplices and victims, while Oppenheimer, co-director Christine Cynn, and their collaborators (many of them anonymous) fill the audience in with details about the country's recent history and present.
The men he works with.. Well, they're a transfixing group of people, if nothing else. Anwar Congo quickly emerges as the central figure; he's a rail-thin, dark-skinned, silver-haloed fellow who dresses like a pimp, cheerfully talks about having been a "movie-theater gangster" who later moved up to torturing and killing the government's enemies, and how he was inspired by a desire to top the violence of Hollywood movies. Herman Koto is like his sidekick, a tubby former paramilitary fighter who winds up cross-dressing when the picture needs a weeping mother and undertakes an ill-advised run for government in the middle of production. The less-flamboyant Adi Zulkadry flies in from where he's been living abroad for many years, and newspaper publisher Ibrahim Sinik brags about people being tortured in his office. Then there are the more conventional monsters, including a paramilitary group founded by Congo and now led by Safit Parede; gangsters like Congo and public figures like Vice President Jusuf Kalla mingle at their rallies.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Berberian Sound Studio
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston After Dark, digital)
Berberian Sound Studio brought a film called "Amer" to mind, even though the two are spectacularly different in the way they pay tribute to Italian giallo movies. What they have in common is a deep affection for the genre, a remarkable attention to detail, and an incredible ability to create atmosphere from sound and a barely suggested plot. This movie just takes those qualities into post-production.
Post-production on a film called "The Equestrian Vortex", to be specific. Gilderoy (Toby Jones), an English audio engineer, has been hired to record and mix the movie's soundtrack, but he didn't quite know what he was getting into - aside from the bloody, violent content of the script taking him by surprise, he's a quiet Englishman surrounded by brash Italians; he doesn't speak the local language; and he's having a hard time finding someone to reimburse him for his airfare. Producer Francesco (Cosimo Fusco) switches from ingratiating to domineering at the drop of a hat, and the director who specifically requested him is mostly absent and eccentric when he is around. The closest thing he finds to a friend is Silvia (Fatma Mohamed), one of the actresses dubbing the film, though some of the other men on set claim she's trouble.
If I were producing next year's Academy Awards, I'd look into using clips from this movie to illustrate just what is meant by Sound Editing and Sound Mixing; a fair amount of time is spent on showing how Gilderoy and his colleagues go about their work, whether it be smashing vegetables to approximate the sounds of the human body being abused, carefully raising and lowering sound levels to just so, and watching women scream their hearts out while standing in a booth with nothing to react to. It's great fun to watch for those who like to see how things work and how movies are made, but the way writer/director Peter Strickland uses this environment to tell the story is kind of brilliant. Certainly, it's dark and claustrophobic and kind of run-down; that's kind of a given. But it's Gilderoy that grabs the attention; Jones and Strickland let us get to know the man by how he goes about his work, usually separated from the girl he may fancy by glass. The machines he uses are analog, mechanical things, an extension of his actions in the way that digital interfaces can only approximate, and the instinctive way he is able to manipulate them stands in stark contrast to how nervous he is in his interaction with the other people.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Friday, May 10, 2013
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 10 May - 16 May 2013
I presume Boston is kind of weird in how movies get distributed to the various theaters, at least compared to other large cities. I mean, it would make sense that the suburbs would only get the most mainstream releases and the more niche things would only play in the city where there's more and more varied people. But, no, it's the other way around here. Weird.
My plans? Well, I hate missing The Thief of Bagdad, but I've got baseball tickets for Sunday. Still heartily recommend it. So that means I'll try to make it out to Revere for No One Lives on Saturday, and maybe do a horror double feature at Fresh Pond Friday night. That means Gatsby likely happens sometime during the week, as does any other catch-up.
- Within the city, it's not quite "you'll see The Great Gatsby and like it", but it's fairly close. Baz Luhrmann's attempt to make this story not boring involves having Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, Carey Mulligan as Daisy, Tobey Maguire as Caraway, shooting in 3D, and probably bringing the same sort of contemporary style and soundtrack to a period piece that he did to Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge. It plays 2D and 3D at Somerville, the Studio Cinema in Belmont (2D only), Kendall Square, Boston Common, and Fenway. After all, there's also the option of Peeples which is being sold under the Tyler Perry name, but is actually the work of Tina Gordon Chism. It features Craig Robinson as a man who finds girlfriend Kerry Washington's father (David Alan Grier) hostile. It plays Fenway, Boston Common, and Fresh Pond.
Fresh Pond (now called Apple Cinemas), meanwhile, is apparently the only place in the Boston area playing Aftershock, a Chilean thriller by Nicolas Lopez where an American tourist (played by co-writer/producer/horror movie impresario Eli Roth) and his friends survive a major earthquake only to find humanity can be nastier than nature. Tremendously gory, by all reports. That's the same profile as No One Lives, which is noteworthy for being Ryuhei Kitamura's second English-language movie. It's about a group of modern-day highwaymen who kidnap a wealthy couple only, apparently, to find they're a match for them. It's only playing at the Showcase Cinema in Revere, which I guess is at least closer to Boston than The Midnight Meat Train got. - Speaking of potentially gross stuff at Fresh Pond, iMovieCafe gets into the act with Go Goa Gone, a horror comedy where a zombie outbreak occurs near the resort island of Goa. It's in Hindi with English subtitles, with daily shows of Greeku Veerud in Telugu.
- The Somerville Theatre has a pretty darn cool set of special screenings this week as well. Their first "Silents! Please" screening of the year is Sunday afternoon at 1pm, with Jeff Rapsis accompanying a 35mm print of The Thief of Bagdad on the big screen. On Wednesday, the big screen is also used for the monthly All Things Horror Presents screening, where instead of an under-the-radar indie, they'll be showing a 35mm print of Re-Animator. It's a fun movie, and all proceeds will go toward The 1 Fund for those injured in the Boston Marathon attacks. After that, they'll be screening 2009's Star Trek at 9:30pm before the midnight premiere of Star Trek Into Darkness (which opens Thursday on most screens and Wednesday on IMAX screens at Boston Common and Jordan's Furniture)
- Gatsby is the first 3D film to play Kendall Square, and they also have two others opening. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is the new one by Mira Nair; it stars Riz Ahmed as a young Pakistani man who embraces America only to be rejected in the aftermath of 9/11. The one-week booking also comes from a notable filmmaker, Olivier Assayas. His Something in the Air is a semi-autobiographical picture of a young filmmaker who is torn between art and revolutionary action in the early 1970s.
- While we're in the 1970s, The Coolidge Corner Theatre keeps the same films on the main screens, but they open The Source Family, a documentary on a group that apparently evolved from being hippies to a cult which imploded in spectacular fashion, in the screening rooms.
The midnight movie on Friday and Saturday is the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which isn't nearly as good as the TV series, but has its own sort of charm. On Monday night, they will welcome John Lurie to introduce and discuss three episodes of Fishing with John featuring Tom Waits, Dennis Hopper, and Willem Dafoe. - The Boston LGBT Film Festival continues through the 12th, with screening throughout the weekend at the Brattle and MFA, with shows Saturday evening at the Revere Hotel's Theater1 venue and Sunday afternoon at the ICA.
- After the festival, the Brattle Theatre has a couple special presentations. Sunday night, they celebrate Mother's Day with two screenings of Psycho, because why not? The Monday night Balagan show is "Mirror Stage", an hour of short films where the filmmakers captured and audience. They were going to be closed for the rest of the week, but they scheduled a last-minute Ray Harryhausen tribute double feature for Wednesday and Thursday, with Jason and the Argonauts and the original Clash of the titans.
- The MFA's film program has more Samurai Cinema - Sanjuro on Friday evening and Saturday morning, Taboo and Rashomon on Wednesday the 15th, and Three Outlaw Samurai on Thursday afternoon. They've also got another Japanese cinema tie-in with their samurai exhibit with a Wednesday matinee of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. And there's also "HDADD+", a cinema performance by multimedia artist Brian Kane on Thursday evening.
- The Harvard Film Archive starts a new retrospective, "Revelations of a Fallen World - The Cinema of Arturo Ripstein". A Mexican director described as a "maverick contrarian" by the program, he and his frequent screenwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego will visit in person next weekend, but this weekend is a chance to get familiar with his work ahead of time: Deep Crimson and Life Sentence on Friday, The Castle of Purity and "No One Writes to the Colonel" on Saturday, Time to Die and The Beginning and the End on Sunday, and The Holy Office on Monday.
- ArtsEmerson's "Bright Lights" series has one last presentation before closing up shop until the new academic year with a set of screenings of grad student thesis projects on Sunday evening.
My plans? Well, I hate missing The Thief of Bagdad, but I've got baseball tickets for Sunday. Still heartily recommend it. So that means I'll try to make it out to Revere for No One Lives on Saturday, and maybe do a horror double feature at Fresh Pond Friday night. That means Gatsby likely happens sometime during the week, as does any other catch-up.
Wednesday, May 08, 2013
No Place on Earth
Following businesses on Twitter or Facebook can be kind of silly - it's voluntarily requesting more advertising on a screen that can be quite cluttered with it - and Landmark Kendall Square's feeds can often contain a lot of filler like "Mondays!" or "what did you see this weekend?" whose purpose is mainly to just make sure you don't forget about them. Still, the posting on Monday or Tuesday that says which movies will be leaving on Thursday (and which screenings will be skipped for previews or other special events, because some will be) are worth rolling your eyes at the silly ones for. It's a fairly essential part of planning my moviegoing week, since there's no excuse these things will pop up elsewhere or I'll remember them when they hit disc or streaming.
Or writing, obviously, since I'd like to recommend this one before it leaves town. I don't know how completely gone it will be - the subject matter makes it fairly likely to show up in one of the Coolidge's small rooms or hang around for a screening or two daily in West Newton, as those places do know their local audiences - but room's got to be made for Gatsby this weekend.
Aside - the Kendall screening things at 7:25pm is more or less perfect for me. Just enough time to get there from Burlington without running, worrying about the T running late, or hanging around for a half-hour. If they could start more movies then, I'd be really grateful.
No Place on Earth
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 May 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run, 2K DCP)
There's enough staged footage with actors in No Place on Earth that one almost wonders why director Janet Tobias didn't just present this story of a Jewish family hiding from the Nazis in caves for the better part of two years as a conventional narrative feature, or at least figures somebody will, eventually. It's not a particularly hard question to answer, though - it is, after all, a great joy to see these survivors (in every sense of the word) telling their own story.
The Ukraine/Poland border was one of the most dangerous places to be a Jew during World War II, and that Esther Stermer saw the storm clouds coming and made arrangements to get her family on a ship made no difference when the Nazis arrived earlier than expected. Like many, the Stermers fled into the woods, and eventually into a cave. Most of the family his in there while eldest son Nissel kept watch outside, and when discovered, they eventually took refuge in another, deeper cavern, where they and four other extended families would stay from 5 May 1943 until 12 April 1944, when the Russians re-took the area.
The audience isn't introduced to the survivors right away, though - the first voice we hear comes from Chris Nicola, an investigator for the state of New York and avid spelunker who found evidence of twentieth-century habitation in the Priest's Grotto cave in 1993 while on a trip to Ukraine to learn more about his own ancestry (his family were Ukranian Orthodox Christians) and spent the next decade chasing stories. It might seem like an unnecessary distraction from the main story, but it's not: Nicola's expertise gives the audience some idea of how dangerous and unusual this achievement is while also sharing the audience's wonder and setting up how this story became something that had to be rediscovered.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Or writing, obviously, since I'd like to recommend this one before it leaves town. I don't know how completely gone it will be - the subject matter makes it fairly likely to show up in one of the Coolidge's small rooms or hang around for a screening or two daily in West Newton, as those places do know their local audiences - but room's got to be made for Gatsby this weekend.
Aside - the Kendall screening things at 7:25pm is more or less perfect for me. Just enough time to get there from Burlington without running, worrying about the T running late, or hanging around for a half-hour. If they could start more movies then, I'd be really grateful.
No Place on Earth
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 May 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run, 2K DCP)
There's enough staged footage with actors in No Place on Earth that one almost wonders why director Janet Tobias didn't just present this story of a Jewish family hiding from the Nazis in caves for the better part of two years as a conventional narrative feature, or at least figures somebody will, eventually. It's not a particularly hard question to answer, though - it is, after all, a great joy to see these survivors (in every sense of the word) telling their own story.
The Ukraine/Poland border was one of the most dangerous places to be a Jew during World War II, and that Esther Stermer saw the storm clouds coming and made arrangements to get her family on a ship made no difference when the Nazis arrived earlier than expected. Like many, the Stermers fled into the woods, and eventually into a cave. Most of the family his in there while eldest son Nissel kept watch outside, and when discovered, they eventually took refuge in another, deeper cavern, where they and four other extended families would stay from 5 May 1943 until 12 April 1944, when the Russians re-took the area.
The audience isn't introduced to the survivors right away, though - the first voice we hear comes from Chris Nicola, an investigator for the state of New York and avid spelunker who found evidence of twentieth-century habitation in the Priest's Grotto cave in 1993 while on a trip to Ukraine to learn more about his own ancestry (his family were Ukranian Orthodox Christians) and spent the next decade chasing stories. It might seem like an unnecessary distraction from the main story, but it's not: Nicola's expertise gives the audience some idea of how dangerous and unusual this achievement is while also sharing the audience's wonder and setting up how this story became something that had to be rediscovered.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Day 04: Secundaria, Night Labor, Computer Chess, Oxyana, and V/H/S/2
Only nine days behi... Oh, wait, the clock just struck midnight. Ten days behind!
Saturday was kind of a wacky day - I got my usual slow start, for a festival weekend day, and would spend some time bouncing back and forth between venues as the day went on, although there was more than enough time scheduled between "blocks" that it wasn't hard to get from one thing to another.
It was a day for busy lines, too - though it's usually easy enough to keep everyone at all five movies at the Somerville Theatre in one line during IFFBoston, they had the Much Ado About Nothing folks broken out during the afternoon, as the cult of Joss Whedon can get folks out for this sort of targeted event. The real surprise was around 9pm; while I waited for Oxyana: I sort of assumed the big crowd was for The Hunt, but apparently The Dirties brought out a big crowd; I wouldn't be surprised if they shuffled it from screen #2 to #5 to fit more people in. It was a rowdy crowd, too, for a movie that didn't really seem to leap off the page of the program for me.
Didn't have time for dinner - Boston Burger Company was packed, and I didn't want to wander much further from Davis Square (probably should have hit Tasty Burger after Computer Chess) - so I grabbed some snacks at the concession stand and Ian (the Somerville's manager) greeted me by name. That always freaks me out a bit - I don't post a lot of pictures of myself online or go introducing myself, so folks recognizing me means I've got to be pretty pretty ubiquitous. It's tough to get to the concession stand during the festival, since you'll often have everybody trying to fill a theater in a five minute period, and as I may have mentioned, with a lot of climbing over people and going back and forth in the theater, not to mention the merch cart and general loitering in the lobby. I half-jokingly suggested on Twitter that the theater ought to have a pushcart to sell some basics to folks waiting in line, but there's probably not enough sidewalk as there is.
OK, movies and guests!
There you have director Mary Jane Doherty, the composer (whose name I didn't get and can't find because the film's web and IMDB pages are shells), and producer Lyda Kuth. Ms. Doherty is a professor at BU, so there were a number of her students in the audience - meaning folks got called on by name and there were some inside jokes during the Q&A. It was a pretty friendly crowd.
SPOILERS!
The most interesting questions, naturally, revolved around the film's main subject Marya defecting to the United States at the climax - did she know what was going on? Did she assist? Did it make finishing the movie with Gabriela and Moises more difficult? No, no, and obviously. She said a couple of interesting things about the situation, though - for one, apparently defecting is almost considered an inevitable part of a ballerina's career in Cuba - every talented dancer walks away from a touring company eventually, although this was the first time a student had done so. The other was that before that happened, the movie was shaping up more as a sort of visual poem, but this is the sort of event that immediately puts everything that came before into a new context - that scene where Maryara's prize money is taken by the school goes from being about how poor Cuba is to how that sort of authoritarian system can push its talented youth away.
It turned out, I was seated in front of a Cuban ballerina. Not Maryara - she's apparently busy in Orlando as a lead dancer in that city's company - but someone who was able to leave Cuba by dint of her mother being Spanish and having dual citizenship.
!SRELIOPS
Add Cuba to the list of places I might like to visit someday, though - every movie I see shot there makes it look so lively, even where it's very poor. The Talk Cinema people do a trip to the film festival, but I think I'd rather wait until the country is more open and on its feet; I'd rather not engage in poverty tourism.
Man, is that the best picture I got of Computer Chess producer Andrew Finnigan (I think), actor Gerald Peary (better known as a local film critic and teacher), and the Brattle's Ned Hinkle? Let me check the phone...
That's better. Anyway, Gerry made a more impassioned plea than usual for folks to donate some money to IFFBoston, stating (not incorrectly) that it's kind of crazy that the festival is in its eleventh year and the folks in charge are still all volunteers, probably burning all their vacation time from their day jobs on this event (between spending a week running it and heading out to other festivals to scout potential selections).
I don't want to spend too much time on the Q&A (or this movie in general), because it kind of annoyed me, highlighting that this time it was mostly improvised (compared to Bujalski's previous films, which were actually tightly scripted but had the awkward stumbling feel of improvisation). It was the kind of discussion that served to push some of my buttons, with a lot of how they were casting people who already embodied the characters, and need a lot of nerds, so who are the nerdiest people you know - well, editors! The movie already had the sort of Big Bang Theory attitude I don't like - where the filmmakers are making the same mocking jokes about nerds as usual, but by throwing a few references in they expect to curry some favor. Combine this with a precious essay in the program and it's become pretty clear that this filmmaker's stuff is just not for me.
Oxyana director Sean Dunne, executive producer Colby Glenn, and (I think) co-producer Cass Marie Greener. No, I don't know why I get better shots from my phone than my real camera at this festival.
Anyway, they seemed like a really great group of folks, with a lot of respect for the people in their film that didn't seem insincere in the least. Like their movie, they were admirably straightforward and plain-spoken about what was going on down there, getting into why they thought towns like Oceana were mostly dealing with prescription drugs rather than meth or harder stuff (isolated enough that it's not yet worth expanding into the area) and why dealing with the problem was so problematic (a real "pray it away" attitude. As I mention in the review, I might have liked hearing some of that in the actual film, but that would have been hard to do with the people involved telling it in their own words.
So, that's Saturday at IFFBoston. Next up: A nearly-as-busy Sunday!
Secundaria
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
For someone who has never been to the ballet, I sure tend to find a lot of movies involving the combination of art and athleticism fascinating. Maybe it's the way that the intense discipline necessary to master the form naturally creates great drama as well as great beauty; maybe ballet is a tough enough sell to many Americans that what manages to make it on screen is exceptional. Either way, Secundaria is quite the strong documentary, even if some of its most interesting material isn't about the ballet itself.
Ballet is a big deal in Cuba, and vice versa, even if the island is best known for other styles. Many of the world's foremost companies have Cuban performers taking lead roles, though, with many of them trained at an internationally-renowned academy in Havana. This film follows three who entered the three-year program in 2007: Maryara, who lives in a small apartment with her mother and brother and rides a bus for an hour each way to get to the school; Gabriela, who by contrast comes from a comfortable background (her mother is a hotel accountant and her father is in the military); and Moises, a new friend of Maryara's who comes from one of Havana's poorest neighborhoods. At the start of each year, students are ranked by how they perform in a competition, and while Gabriela is one of the most heralded talents, Maryara surprises by coming in second for the whole school.
That's the story's starting point, and filmmaker Mary Jane Doherty sticks with these characters for the full three years rather than the more common path of choosing, say, a freshman, a senior, and a graduate and following them in parallel. It works out nicely; it means that the various threads don't play as disconnected while it seldom seems forced when the group interacts (although I half-suspect that the decision to make Moises one of the central characters was made later).
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Night Labor
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Documentary filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin had two features at IFFBoston last year; I saw the one about teenage Russian models in Japan rather than the one about the attempt to open a fish-processing plant in Maine. The latter would have been a natural complement to Night Labor, to the extent that I almost wonder if this film is constructed out of unused footage from the other.
The film focuses almost entirely on one man, Sherman Frank Merchant. He's the sort of fellow who looks his age and then some; there's evidence of a lot of hard living and cigarettes on his face. Now, he clams in the afternoon, eats his catch for dinner, and then works the night shift at the plant. He doesn't talk much, but he doesn't seem to have too many people to talk with.
And so, Night Labor is a documentary that is almost 100% pure observation. We watch Merchant go through what seems like a typical day, with no narration and no particular attempts to add context. Even when Merchant says something, it's not really directed to the camera as much as it's an under-his-breath muttering that brings Popeye to mind when the audience feels generous and that guy wandering the street or riding the bus who is so disgusted or enamored with something that he has to say it out loud. How much the audience enjoys the movie may be directly proportional to how much they see as interesting details and demonstrations of processes with which they weren't previously familiar versus how much seems like banal minutia.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Computer Chess
* * (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in The Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
I think I'm done with Andrew Bujalski. I've seen three of his four films, and even the one I kind of liked didn't really impress me. And while I can see some merit in the ones like Computer Chess that bore me to frustration, it's not enough. This thing is just not clever enough to go without a story.
Sure, it sort of looks like it has a story: In the late 1970s/early 1980s, there's an annual convention where the developers of various chess-playing computer programs set their creations against each other round-robin style. The winner will play host and chessmaster Pat Henderson (Gerald Peary), although at the time, the idea that a computer could defeat a human being is ludicrous. Among the competitors are a team from MIT that includes Peter Bishton (Patrick Riester) and Tom Schoesser (Gordon Kindlmann); one from Cal Tech that includes Shelly (Robin Schwarts), the only girl in the tournament; independent operator Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige), who apparently hasn't booked a room; and a privately-funded team with Martin Beuscher (Wiley Wiggins). There's also a sort of swingers' group sharing the space, and... cats.
Bujalski and his cast of what are, for the most part, non-actors (Wiggins and Paige have prior credits but have been doing other things lately) create a few memorable characters, and a great many others that run together. As is often the case, there's a certain authenticity to their performances, especially since they are by and large editors, computer programmers, and others who can easily handle the retro-technical terms. Paige gets the most memorable character, with Papageorge just cynical and snide enough for his being thwarted to be entertaining but not quite enough to really get on the audience's bad side. Riester's Peter winds up drifting toward the center of the story, and he does project a likable everynerd quality.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Oxyana
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Addiction to prescription medication is hardly limited to rural America, but it thrives there. The reasons why communities like Oceana, West Viginia have such a serious problem with painkillers like Oxycontin are far from the first concern of this movie, which concerns itself almost entirely with showing the effects, becoming a tragic study in human frailty.
Director Sean Dunne builds the film almost entirely out of interviews with local residents; some are functioning addicts, some are dealers, some are relatives who have tried to get their loved ones into rehab but to no avail. There's a man suffering from cancer and the wife who is determined to go down with him. Young men who left for a little while after graduating from high school who came back to find their friends dying at an astonishing rate, and a dentist shocked at his patients' prescription requests. There's a couple of scenes with the district attorney and other officials, but not many; this isn't a story about enforcement.
They're country folks, in general, plain-spoken and not particularly prone to seeking anyone's pity. They spell out the reasons why they think drug abuse has become so endemic in towns like Oceana both as a trend and for themselves personally, and that they can communicate this clearly is somewhat unusual for movies about addiction: There's no metaphor to it, just a simple description of how each feels on and off oxy that makes it more easy than usual for the viewer to put themselves in their positions. Though the idea of "Appalachian Fatalism" is brought up, this tendency to think it's impossible to win brought on by (among other things) decades of exploitation by the coal industry never feels like the end of their arguments; there's a sad willingness to accept responsibility.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
V/H/S/2
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston After Dark, digital)
To call last year's V/H/S uneven would be generous; while it managed "pretty good" in a couple of segments, it was awful in more. Still, the good thing about commercially successful anthology films is that sequels need not be encumbered by prior entries' failings, and V/H/S/2 is a great example of this: The new segments feel tighter, more creative, and scarier than last time, with the new filmmakers inspired to top what came before and the returnees opting to step up their game.
The opening/wraparound story - "Tape 49" by Simon Barrett - is still kind of stupid; as the premise is apparently that these VHS tapes unleash monsters and/or make their viewers homicidal just by being VHS, and for all the format's shortcomings, I think you have to be a cinematographer to have that reaction. It's more fun than last time, though - the obnoxious bros from last time out have been replaced by a co-ed team of private investigators (Lawrence Michael Levine & Kelsey Abbot), and their pulpy banter is a definite step up, with the whole deal of them recording themselves watching the tapes they find actually making a reasonable amount of sense.
The first one they watch, "Clinical Trials" by Adam Wingard, has a premise borrowed from movies such as The Eye by the Pang Brothers: Guy (Wingard) is outfitted with a prosthetic eye which records everything it sees as part of its engineers' QA process, only to discover that he's now seeing things that normal people can't. Simple premise, but fun - Hannah Hughes soon pops up as a hot, sarcastic mentor figure and Wingard works plenty of good jumps and a fairly impressive escalation into the short's runtime. My biggest complaint is that it feels less like a complete short film than half a feature, stopping rather than ending just when things are starting to get good - or, alternately, getting out before Wingard has to build a boring mythology and get predictable.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Saturday was kind of a wacky day - I got my usual slow start, for a festival weekend day, and would spend some time bouncing back and forth between venues as the day went on, although there was more than enough time scheduled between "blocks" that it wasn't hard to get from one thing to another.
It was a day for busy lines, too - though it's usually easy enough to keep everyone at all five movies at the Somerville Theatre in one line during IFFBoston, they had the Much Ado About Nothing folks broken out during the afternoon, as the cult of Joss Whedon can get folks out for this sort of targeted event. The real surprise was around 9pm; while I waited for Oxyana: I sort of assumed the big crowd was for The Hunt, but apparently The Dirties brought out a big crowd; I wouldn't be surprised if they shuffled it from screen #2 to #5 to fit more people in. It was a rowdy crowd, too, for a movie that didn't really seem to leap off the page of the program for me.
Didn't have time for dinner - Boston Burger Company was packed, and I didn't want to wander much further from Davis Square (probably should have hit Tasty Burger after Computer Chess) - so I grabbed some snacks at the concession stand and Ian (the Somerville's manager) greeted me by name. That always freaks me out a bit - I don't post a lot of pictures of myself online or go introducing myself, so folks recognizing me means I've got to be pretty pretty ubiquitous. It's tough to get to the concession stand during the festival, since you'll often have everybody trying to fill a theater in a five minute period, and as I may have mentioned, with a lot of climbing over people and going back and forth in the theater, not to mention the merch cart and general loitering in the lobby. I half-jokingly suggested on Twitter that the theater ought to have a pushcart to sell some basics to folks waiting in line, but there's probably not enough sidewalk as there is.
OK, movies and guests!
There you have director Mary Jane Doherty, the composer (whose name I didn't get and can't find because the film's web and IMDB pages are shells), and producer Lyda Kuth. Ms. Doherty is a professor at BU, so there were a number of her students in the audience - meaning folks got called on by name and there were some inside jokes during the Q&A. It was a pretty friendly crowd.
SPOILERS!
The most interesting questions, naturally, revolved around the film's main subject Marya defecting to the United States at the climax - did she know what was going on? Did she assist? Did it make finishing the movie with Gabriela and Moises more difficult? No, no, and obviously. She said a couple of interesting things about the situation, though - for one, apparently defecting is almost considered an inevitable part of a ballerina's career in Cuba - every talented dancer walks away from a touring company eventually, although this was the first time a student had done so. The other was that before that happened, the movie was shaping up more as a sort of visual poem, but this is the sort of event that immediately puts everything that came before into a new context - that scene where Maryara's prize money is taken by the school goes from being about how poor Cuba is to how that sort of authoritarian system can push its talented youth away.
It turned out, I was seated in front of a Cuban ballerina. Not Maryara - she's apparently busy in Orlando as a lead dancer in that city's company - but someone who was able to leave Cuba by dint of her mother being Spanish and having dual citizenship.
!SRELIOPS
Add Cuba to the list of places I might like to visit someday, though - every movie I see shot there makes it look so lively, even where it's very poor. The Talk Cinema people do a trip to the film festival, but I think I'd rather wait until the country is more open and on its feet; I'd rather not engage in poverty tourism.
Man, is that the best picture I got of Computer Chess producer Andrew Finnigan (I think), actor Gerald Peary (better known as a local film critic and teacher), and the Brattle's Ned Hinkle? Let me check the phone...
That's better. Anyway, Gerry made a more impassioned plea than usual for folks to donate some money to IFFBoston, stating (not incorrectly) that it's kind of crazy that the festival is in its eleventh year and the folks in charge are still all volunteers, probably burning all their vacation time from their day jobs on this event (between spending a week running it and heading out to other festivals to scout potential selections).
I don't want to spend too much time on the Q&A (or this movie in general), because it kind of annoyed me, highlighting that this time it was mostly improvised (compared to Bujalski's previous films, which were actually tightly scripted but had the awkward stumbling feel of improvisation). It was the kind of discussion that served to push some of my buttons, with a lot of how they were casting people who already embodied the characters, and need a lot of nerds, so who are the nerdiest people you know - well, editors! The movie already had the sort of Big Bang Theory attitude I don't like - where the filmmakers are making the same mocking jokes about nerds as usual, but by throwing a few references in they expect to curry some favor. Combine this with a precious essay in the program and it's become pretty clear that this filmmaker's stuff is just not for me.
Oxyana director Sean Dunne, executive producer Colby Glenn, and (I think) co-producer Cass Marie Greener. No, I don't know why I get better shots from my phone than my real camera at this festival.
Anyway, they seemed like a really great group of folks, with a lot of respect for the people in their film that didn't seem insincere in the least. Like their movie, they were admirably straightforward and plain-spoken about what was going on down there, getting into why they thought towns like Oceana were mostly dealing with prescription drugs rather than meth or harder stuff (isolated enough that it's not yet worth expanding into the area) and why dealing with the problem was so problematic (a real "pray it away" attitude. As I mention in the review, I might have liked hearing some of that in the actual film, but that would have been hard to do with the people involved telling it in their own words.
So, that's Saturday at IFFBoston. Next up: A nearly-as-busy Sunday!
Secundaria
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
For someone who has never been to the ballet, I sure tend to find a lot of movies involving the combination of art and athleticism fascinating. Maybe it's the way that the intense discipline necessary to master the form naturally creates great drama as well as great beauty; maybe ballet is a tough enough sell to many Americans that what manages to make it on screen is exceptional. Either way, Secundaria is quite the strong documentary, even if some of its most interesting material isn't about the ballet itself.
Ballet is a big deal in Cuba, and vice versa, even if the island is best known for other styles. Many of the world's foremost companies have Cuban performers taking lead roles, though, with many of them trained at an internationally-renowned academy in Havana. This film follows three who entered the three-year program in 2007: Maryara, who lives in a small apartment with her mother and brother and rides a bus for an hour each way to get to the school; Gabriela, who by contrast comes from a comfortable background (her mother is a hotel accountant and her father is in the military); and Moises, a new friend of Maryara's who comes from one of Havana's poorest neighborhoods. At the start of each year, students are ranked by how they perform in a competition, and while Gabriela is one of the most heralded talents, Maryara surprises by coming in second for the whole school.
That's the story's starting point, and filmmaker Mary Jane Doherty sticks with these characters for the full three years rather than the more common path of choosing, say, a freshman, a senior, and a graduate and following them in parallel. It works out nicely; it means that the various threads don't play as disconnected while it seldom seems forced when the group interacts (although I half-suspect that the decision to make Moises one of the central characters was made later).
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Night Labor
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Documentary filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin had two features at IFFBoston last year; I saw the one about teenage Russian models in Japan rather than the one about the attempt to open a fish-processing plant in Maine. The latter would have been a natural complement to Night Labor, to the extent that I almost wonder if this film is constructed out of unused footage from the other.
The film focuses almost entirely on one man, Sherman Frank Merchant. He's the sort of fellow who looks his age and then some; there's evidence of a lot of hard living and cigarettes on his face. Now, he clams in the afternoon, eats his catch for dinner, and then works the night shift at the plant. He doesn't talk much, but he doesn't seem to have too many people to talk with.
And so, Night Labor is a documentary that is almost 100% pure observation. We watch Merchant go through what seems like a typical day, with no narration and no particular attempts to add context. Even when Merchant says something, it's not really directed to the camera as much as it's an under-his-breath muttering that brings Popeye to mind when the audience feels generous and that guy wandering the street or riding the bus who is so disgusted or enamored with something that he has to say it out loud. How much the audience enjoys the movie may be directly proportional to how much they see as interesting details and demonstrations of processes with which they weren't previously familiar versus how much seems like banal minutia.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Computer Chess
* * (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in The Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
I think I'm done with Andrew Bujalski. I've seen three of his four films, and even the one I kind of liked didn't really impress me. And while I can see some merit in the ones like Computer Chess that bore me to frustration, it's not enough. This thing is just not clever enough to go without a story.
Sure, it sort of looks like it has a story: In the late 1970s/early 1980s, there's an annual convention where the developers of various chess-playing computer programs set their creations against each other round-robin style. The winner will play host and chessmaster Pat Henderson (Gerald Peary), although at the time, the idea that a computer could defeat a human being is ludicrous. Among the competitors are a team from MIT that includes Peter Bishton (Patrick Riester) and Tom Schoesser (Gordon Kindlmann); one from Cal Tech that includes Shelly (Robin Schwarts), the only girl in the tournament; independent operator Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige), who apparently hasn't booked a room; and a privately-funded team with Martin Beuscher (Wiley Wiggins). There's also a sort of swingers' group sharing the space, and... cats.
Bujalski and his cast of what are, for the most part, non-actors (Wiggins and Paige have prior credits but have been doing other things lately) create a few memorable characters, and a great many others that run together. As is often the case, there's a certain authenticity to their performances, especially since they are by and large editors, computer programmers, and others who can easily handle the retro-technical terms. Paige gets the most memorable character, with Papageorge just cynical and snide enough for his being thwarted to be entertaining but not quite enough to really get on the audience's bad side. Riester's Peter winds up drifting toward the center of the story, and he does project a likable everynerd quality.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Oxyana
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Addiction to prescription medication is hardly limited to rural America, but it thrives there. The reasons why communities like Oceana, West Viginia have such a serious problem with painkillers like Oxycontin are far from the first concern of this movie, which concerns itself almost entirely with showing the effects, becoming a tragic study in human frailty.
Director Sean Dunne builds the film almost entirely out of interviews with local residents; some are functioning addicts, some are dealers, some are relatives who have tried to get their loved ones into rehab but to no avail. There's a man suffering from cancer and the wife who is determined to go down with him. Young men who left for a little while after graduating from high school who came back to find their friends dying at an astonishing rate, and a dentist shocked at his patients' prescription requests. There's a couple of scenes with the district attorney and other officials, but not many; this isn't a story about enforcement.
They're country folks, in general, plain-spoken and not particularly prone to seeking anyone's pity. They spell out the reasons why they think drug abuse has become so endemic in towns like Oceana both as a trend and for themselves personally, and that they can communicate this clearly is somewhat unusual for movies about addiction: There's no metaphor to it, just a simple description of how each feels on and off oxy that makes it more easy than usual for the viewer to put themselves in their positions. Though the idea of "Appalachian Fatalism" is brought up, this tendency to think it's impossible to win brought on by (among other things) decades of exploitation by the coal industry never feels like the end of their arguments; there's a sad willingness to accept responsibility.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
V/H/S/2
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston After Dark, digital)
To call last year's V/H/S uneven would be generous; while it managed "pretty good" in a couple of segments, it was awful in more. Still, the good thing about commercially successful anthology films is that sequels need not be encumbered by prior entries' failings, and V/H/S/2 is a great example of this: The new segments feel tighter, more creative, and scarier than last time, with the new filmmakers inspired to top what came before and the returnees opting to step up their game.
The opening/wraparound story - "Tape 49" by Simon Barrett - is still kind of stupid; as the premise is apparently that these VHS tapes unleash monsters and/or make their viewers homicidal just by being VHS, and for all the format's shortcomings, I think you have to be a cinematographer to have that reaction. It's more fun than last time, though - the obnoxious bros from last time out have been replaced by a co-ed team of private investigators (Lawrence Michael Levine & Kelsey Abbot), and their pulpy banter is a definite step up, with the whole deal of them recording themselves watching the tapes they find actually making a reasonable amount of sense.
The first one they watch, "Clinical Trials" by Adam Wingard, has a premise borrowed from movies such as The Eye by the Pang Brothers: Guy (Wingard) is outfitted with a prosthetic eye which records everything it sees as part of its engineers' QA process, only to discover that he's now seeing things that normal people can't. Simple premise, but fun - Hannah Hughes soon pops up as a hot, sarcastic mentor figure and Wingard works plenty of good jumps and a fairly impressive escalation into the short's runtime. My biggest complaint is that it feels less like a complete short film than half a feature, stopping rather than ending just when things are starting to get good - or, alternately, getting out before Wingard has to build a boring mythology and get predictable.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
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