Wow, I really should have saved that commentary for how the conventional romance - whether comedic or dramatic - was dead in Hollywood, at least compared to China, for this weekend, because I half-suspect that Chinese movies popped back up in Boston Common versus just Fenway this week was because there really was nothing else like this to play for Valentine's Day. That's kind of crazy, if you ask me, but I'm sure Universal will do pretty well by everyone else basically ceding the weekend to Fifty Shades. Just not sure what the other studios were thinking.
At least me and the other folks who were there for a 10:15pm show seemed to be having a good time. Kind of a long wait, but the live show I was at ran earlier than expected, and it was cold out. There was also one guy in the theater who got quite upset about some talking going on, yelling "quiet!" toward the end. Honestly, I couldn't recall noticing any talkers, but it made things weirdly tense afterward.
There were four trailers for Chinese-language movies before the feature, and I am curious to see how many will play Boston Common. I don't know if there is enough of an audience for these movies to get two screens outside of this particular circumstance, and I'd hate the two theaters splitting the audience make either think it's not worth doing.
You yi ge di fang zhi you wo men zhi dao (Somewhere Only We Know)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 February 2015 at the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)
The movie listings this Valentine's Day are weird: The big studio release is Fifty Shades of Grey and in that spirit, my local theaters are pulling out prints of Secretary, bringing The Duke of Burgundy back for a few more shows, and even booking R100 in one particularly odd case. Nothing but kink, with the near-sole exception of Somewhere Only We Know, making its way across the Pacific just days after opening in China. It's a thoroughly sweet love story that wears its old-fashioned sappiness on its sleeve, and that, somehow, serves as the alternative to what's playing next door.
As it starts out, Jin Tian (Wang Likun) has been in Prague for about a month. She came after the grandmother who raised her died and her boyfriend broke up with her, and still feels out of sorts. Through friends Luo Ji (Juck Zhang) and Shan Shan (Re Yizha), she meets cellist Peng Ze-yang (Kris Wu Yifan), who has lived in Europe for years. They hit it off, and he helps her follow the clues in a letter sent to her grandmother back in 1979. After all, she's in Prague because grandmother Chen Lanxin (Xu Jinglei) spent time there after World War II, where she apparently became quite friendly with on Dr. Josef Novak (Gordon Alexander).
Prague is often used as a shooting location for films that take place in previous eras, and it's kind of interesting that, aside from one shot, director Xu Jinglei and cinematographer Mark Ping Bin-lee don't visually differentiate present-day Prague much from the post-war city. It marks the location as timeless, and in some cases Xu allows the two love stories to bump against each other, letting Tian and Lanxin be two young women finding love halfway around the world rather than emphasizing the generational aspect. Of course, it's also a beautiful, exotic location that Xu and Ping seem to get a great kick out of filming, even if the there is something just a bit odd about having nearly every major character in a movie set in central Europe be Chinese.
Full review at EFC.
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Friday, February 13, 2015
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 13 February 2015 - 19 February 2015
I posted a few weeks ago that the romantic comedy is ridiculously dormant in Hollywood right now, but, seriously, Valentine's Day and your best bet for romance at the multiplex is the Chinese movie?
Of course it'll probably be snowed out anyway.
We'll see what the upcoming fourth big storm in a row does to my plans, but I figure to be at the sci-fi festival Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning; maybe catch Somewhere Only We Know after seeing Isabella Rossellini in Green Porno Friday, and maybe fit Jupiter Ascending in somewhere. I had been kicking around the idea of heading out to Salem to see R100 on Monday, but the storm will probably kill that idea even more thoroughly than likely needing a lot of sleep after the 'thon.
Of course it'll probably be snowed out anyway.
- That could also pose an issue for The Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, which has two more days of "festival" at the Somerville Theatre on Friday and Saturday. Friday night includes the very cool Wyrmwood (Australian zombies with Mad Max DNA), while special effects legend Douglas Trumbull visiting Saturday evening to show short films and discuss his storied career. He'll stick around for the start of the twenty-four-hour marathon that begins at noon on Sunday, introducing and likely doing some Q&A after they show 2001: A Space Odyssey on the theater's spiffy new 70mm system.
After "SF/40" finishes up, they fill the rest of the schedule with the Banff Mountain Film Festival running from Tuesday to Thursday. There are two programs of outdoor films on the schedule, with Wednesday's being different from Tuesday's and Thursday's. - Getting to regular events, the biggest release is Fifty Shades of Grey, an adaptation of the best-selling novel about a woman who meets a corporate mogul into BDSM. The reports of it being a disaster are amazing, from the leads disliking each other to the movie basically not having an ending, so... Good luck with that. It's at the Capitol, West Newton, Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common (including Imax), Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux, on a whole bunch of screens.
Also opening is Kingsman: The Secret Service, an adaptation of the Mark Millar/Dave Gibbons comic about recruits into a spy service which looks like it has Colin Firth sort-of-kind-of playing Harry Palmer, with Michael Caine playing his boss and Samuel L. Jackson as the villain. It's at the Somerville, Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.
As it's the week before the Oscars, AMC Boston Common will be running their two-day Best Picture showcase, with four films each on Saturday and Sunday. - Hey, first weekend in a while that the new Chinese movie opens next to Chinatown, at AMC Boston Common. The movie in question, Somewhere Only We Know, also opens at Fenway; it's a romance about a young Chinese woman who goes to Prague to study and discovers that her grandmother did so as well. Its day-before-Valentine's opening is just days after it played Beijing.
Neither of the Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/iMovieCafe movies are subtitled this week - Anegan is Tamil and Temper is Telugu. - The Brattle also does romance right, though, with the traditional Casablanca screenings on Friday (tickets still available) and Saturday (sold out). They also have a little fun tweaking Fifty Shades by finishing up the "Reel Weird Brattle: Mad Romance" series at midnight Saturday with James Spader & Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary.
After Valentine's Day, it's school vacation week, so the Bugs Bunny Film Festival returns, with the "All Bugs Review" playing Saturday matinees, Monday, and Wednesday and "Daffy Duck & Friends" on Sunday, Tuesday matinees, and Thursday. All of those shows are on 35mm, while Tuesday's "Trash Night" - Laser Mission with Brandon Lee and Ernest Borgnine - is probably on VHS or something. - Another relatively quiet week at Kendall Square, with Human Capital getting a one-week booking there; it follows two Italian families whose paths cross after a hit-and run.
- The Coolidge is mostly picking up films that have played elsewhere this week: Whiplash will pop up at 7:15 nightly in the main thetater (mostly), while Two Days, One Night plays the Goldscreen. There's also The Duke of Burgundy playing midnight on Friday & Saturday, which I guess is their very much off-kilter Valentine's Day presentation. The other midnight this weekend is the David Cronenberg Mad Science feature, The Fly, which is a romance of sorts itself.
- The Harvard Film Archive starts a new series, Grand Illusions - The Cinema of World War I, in conjuction with a two-day conference on he hundredth anniversary of the Great War. This weekend's selections are All Quiet on the Western Front (Friday 7pm), King and Country (Friday 9:30pm), A Fairwell to Arms (Saturday 7pm), Jules and Jim (Saturday 9pm), and The Big Parade (Sunday 4pm, with live music by Robert Humphreville). All are 35mm.
Sunday evening, they return to Robert Flaherty's films, with a screening of his previously-thought-lost short "A Night of Storytelling", followed by Man of Aran. The short is 16mm; the feature 35mm; there will also be a symposium on "A Night of Storytelling" on Thursday afternoon. Monday features a visit by Jodie Mack with over an hour of 16mm films. Wednesday's "Furious Cinema" presentation is Milos Forman's Taking Off,on 35mm. - If you don't want to do the whole sci-fi festival to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Museum of Fine Arts will be screening it Friday, Saturday, and Wednesday. More of The Films of Stanley Kubrick screen during the week - Spartacus (Sunday), Jan Harlan's Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (Sunday), Fear and Desire (Wednesday), and Lolita (Wednesday), and Dr. Strangelove (Thursday).
- The Bright Lights series in the Paramount Theater's Bright Screening Room features The Year We Thought About Love on Tuesday, with filmmaker Ellen Brodsky and the featured "True Colors" troupe - a group of youn LGBTQ actors of color telling their stories on stage.
- the ICA is screening the Oscar-nominated short films over the weekend - animated on Friday evening and afternoon shows of both animated and live action from Saturday to Monday.
- Silent film accompanist Jeff Rapsis will be at Somerville's Aeronaut Brewery at 9pm on Valentine's Day, when the craft beer house will be screening Buster Keaton's Seven Chances.
- It's a school vacation week, so The Regent Theatre in Arlington has Sing-along Shows from Monday the 16th to Friday the 20th, with each day featuring a screening of the 1982 Annie and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
We'll see what the upcoming fourth big storm in a row does to my plans, but I figure to be at the sci-fi festival Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning; maybe catch Somewhere Only We Know after seeing Isabella Rossellini in Green Porno Friday, and maybe fit Jupiter Ascending in somewhere. I had been kicking around the idea of heading out to Salem to see R100 on Monday, but the storm will probably kill that idea even more thoroughly than likely needing a lot of sleep after the 'thon.
Monday, February 09, 2015
Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2015 Day #01: Robot Overlords & Alien Outpost
As I said in the week's preview, this festival is the one where I hope for the best but tend not to have a lot of optimism; for whatever reason, the films booked are often not very good. The frustrating thing is that standards often seem to be needlessly low, with something like Robot Overlords getting praise for not being a complete screw-up of a movie. Folks just don't know that there's good material out there - they missed Predestination in theaters/VOD, and so much of the good stuff I saw at festivals last year (or lamented not being able to see) just never gets on he radar.
That defeatest mindset is often reinforced early - after festival director Garen Daly started by introducing Robot Overlords as a World Premiere (it's not; it played the London Film Festival last October, and he could have looked this up pretty quickly), he basically said that it was just okay, ran it down a bit for being a "YA" type movie, and generally just didn't sound enthusiastic. And, honestly, why book things at a festival if you're not enthusiastic about them? Sure, you'll maybe sell some tickets to a movie with Gillian Anderson and Ben Kingsley, at least if you can get it advertised, but as I posed the question to the other attendees - would you rather see a premiere of Robot Overlords or be the dozenth group to see The Reconstruction of William Zero, which is great? Boston just doesn't book these movies when and if they open, and being held when it is, it's never going to be a festival people travel too, so you might as well make it a showcase for the best stuff on the festival circuit rather than try and get ahead of things.
Robot Overlords
* * (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, DCP)
I don't miss the days when science fiction films tended to be obviously cheap productions with second-class actors and effects, but it was a lot easier to spot a disposable B-movie then. Now decent effects are maybe not cheap but they're not out of reach, and people who have had some success will sign up rather than see it as beneath them. Thus you get things like Robot Overlords, more capable than its ancestors but still not much more than filler at best.
This one takes place three years after alien robots have invaded Earth, with resistance not lasting much longer than a week. Their conditions were simple: Just stay inside, or else. Things pick up with a man not doing that and thus being disintegrated, leaving his son Connor (Milo Parker) orphaned, to be taken in by former schoolteacher Kate Flynn (Gillian Anderson), who has also taken in siblings Alexandra (Ella Hunt) and Nathan (James Tarpey) along with her own son Sean (Callan McAuliffe). With Sean's father missing, Kate is attracting the attention of "Volunteer Co-ordinator" Robin Smythe (Ben Kingsley). Sean thinks his father is still alive, though, and after an accident with the car battery they're using for power shorts out their monitoring implants, the kids venture outside to look for him.
Now, you'd think that a group of robots that can not only cross the stars and lay waste to entire planets but who have great big cube-shaped ships hovering near every city might have monitoring software sophisticated enough to notice when four implants in one location go offline at once and maybe send a bot or a collaborator to check it out - there could be a fire or something, and they clearly want humans mostly alive for some reason. Instead, they have their collaborators use paper files, which may be for the best, because it's quite clear that their network security is terrible. This may sound like silly complaints for a movie mostly aimed at a family audience, but kids aren't stupid, and having grown up with this sort of technology, they're probably even more likely to ask why the GPS and notifications systems on their smartphones would be better than the ones used by a global network of giant robots, and that's before they even get to wondering how everybody seems to be pretty well-fed and clothed for global agriculture and industry having presumably been shut down for three-plus years. Just where is Sean getting the new tennis balls he is cutting open to fill with notes and throw down the street, anyway?
Full review at EFC.
Alien Outpost (aka Outpost 37)
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, DCP)
This was the second alien-invasion movie the festival served up in a row after a draining day at work, which is perhaps not the ideal situation in which to see it. On the other hand, it wasn't just fatigue making it hard for me to stay awake and alert, but boredom, and does a movie about the front lines of an alien invasion with a fair amount of action really have any business being boring?
It starts with three new American soldiers - Frankie Fiorello (Sven Ryugrok), Ryan Andros (Reiley McClendon), and Alex "Omo" Omohundro (Joe Reegan) - arriving at Outpost 37 on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, near where a cluster of "Heavies" from the repulsed alien invasion of a few years back still remains. They're followed by a documentary crew, which records their daily routine from being hazed by the folks who have been on-station longer. The mostly-forgotten base is commanded by Captain Spears (Rick Ravanello), with Lt. North (Matthew Holmes) serving as his right-hand man. Despite the best efforts of their liaison Saleem (Khalil Kathrada), they're facing as much opposition from locals as Heavies these days, and the relative calm is about to come to an end.
For being set twenty-odd years in the future, Outpost 37 (or Alien Outpost, its more alphabetical-menu-friendly name) can seem awfully retrograde at times. Take its all-male cast, for instance; it's commented upon as a source of stress among the soldiers, but it's 2035 - why has the army apparently regressed in that area? There's another scene where a soldier is being a local casualty and one of the documentarians asks how he knows how to give the man an Islamic burial, getting "know your enemy" in response. There's some potentially interesting places you could go with that, playing with how quickly old animosity returns even after a conflict where the whole world would have to pull together, but filmmaker Jabbar Raisani seems content to just fall into familiar war-movie patterns rather than give these things some thought.
Full review at EFC.
That defeatest mindset is often reinforced early - after festival director Garen Daly started by introducing Robot Overlords as a World Premiere (it's not; it played the London Film Festival last October, and he could have looked this up pretty quickly), he basically said that it was just okay, ran it down a bit for being a "YA" type movie, and generally just didn't sound enthusiastic. And, honestly, why book things at a festival if you're not enthusiastic about them? Sure, you'll maybe sell some tickets to a movie with Gillian Anderson and Ben Kingsley, at least if you can get it advertised, but as I posed the question to the other attendees - would you rather see a premiere of Robot Overlords or be the dozenth group to see The Reconstruction of William Zero, which is great? Boston just doesn't book these movies when and if they open, and being held when it is, it's never going to be a festival people travel too, so you might as well make it a showcase for the best stuff on the festival circuit rather than try and get ahead of things.
Robot Overlords
* * (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, DCP)
I don't miss the days when science fiction films tended to be obviously cheap productions with second-class actors and effects, but it was a lot easier to spot a disposable B-movie then. Now decent effects are maybe not cheap but they're not out of reach, and people who have had some success will sign up rather than see it as beneath them. Thus you get things like Robot Overlords, more capable than its ancestors but still not much more than filler at best.
This one takes place three years after alien robots have invaded Earth, with resistance not lasting much longer than a week. Their conditions were simple: Just stay inside, or else. Things pick up with a man not doing that and thus being disintegrated, leaving his son Connor (Milo Parker) orphaned, to be taken in by former schoolteacher Kate Flynn (Gillian Anderson), who has also taken in siblings Alexandra (Ella Hunt) and Nathan (James Tarpey) along with her own son Sean (Callan McAuliffe). With Sean's father missing, Kate is attracting the attention of "Volunteer Co-ordinator" Robin Smythe (Ben Kingsley). Sean thinks his father is still alive, though, and after an accident with the car battery they're using for power shorts out their monitoring implants, the kids venture outside to look for him.
Now, you'd think that a group of robots that can not only cross the stars and lay waste to entire planets but who have great big cube-shaped ships hovering near every city might have monitoring software sophisticated enough to notice when four implants in one location go offline at once and maybe send a bot or a collaborator to check it out - there could be a fire or something, and they clearly want humans mostly alive for some reason. Instead, they have their collaborators use paper files, which may be for the best, because it's quite clear that their network security is terrible. This may sound like silly complaints for a movie mostly aimed at a family audience, but kids aren't stupid, and having grown up with this sort of technology, they're probably even more likely to ask why the GPS and notifications systems on their smartphones would be better than the ones used by a global network of giant robots, and that's before they even get to wondering how everybody seems to be pretty well-fed and clothed for global agriculture and industry having presumably been shut down for three-plus years. Just where is Sean getting the new tennis balls he is cutting open to fill with notes and throw down the street, anyway?
Full review at EFC.
Alien Outpost (aka Outpost 37)
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, DCP)
This was the second alien-invasion movie the festival served up in a row after a draining day at work, which is perhaps not the ideal situation in which to see it. On the other hand, it wasn't just fatigue making it hard for me to stay awake and alert, but boredom, and does a movie about the front lines of an alien invasion with a fair amount of action really have any business being boring?
It starts with three new American soldiers - Frankie Fiorello (Sven Ryugrok), Ryan Andros (Reiley McClendon), and Alex "Omo" Omohundro (Joe Reegan) - arriving at Outpost 37 on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, near where a cluster of "Heavies" from the repulsed alien invasion of a few years back still remains. They're followed by a documentary crew, which records their daily routine from being hazed by the folks who have been on-station longer. The mostly-forgotten base is commanded by Captain Spears (Rick Ravanello), with Lt. North (Matthew Holmes) serving as his right-hand man. Despite the best efforts of their liaison Saleem (Khalil Kathrada), they're facing as much opposition from locals as Heavies these days, and the relative calm is about to come to an end.
For being set twenty-odd years in the future, Outpost 37 (or Alien Outpost, its more alphabetical-menu-friendly name) can seem awfully retrograde at times. Take its all-male cast, for instance; it's commented upon as a source of stress among the soldiers, but it's 2035 - why has the army apparently regressed in that area? There's another scene where a soldier is being a local casualty and one of the documentarians asks how he knows how to give the man an Islamic burial, getting "know your enemy" in response. There's some potentially interesting places you could go with that, playing with how quickly old animosity returns even after a conflict where the whole world would have to pull together, but filmmaker Jabbar Raisani seems content to just fall into familiar war-movie patterns rather than give these things some thought.
Full review at EFC.
Sunday, February 08, 2015
A Most Violent Year
Folks, it was cold and snowy out Monday. I was just about the only one at the office and wound up staying a bit later than I might have so that things could clear up a little and I might be a little more visible at the bus stop. A movie that night was maybe not the wisest choice, but the sci-fi festival on Friday was forming a bit of a deadline.
Well worth it, though - I really do think that this movie got a bit hosed by A24 going for a slow release schedule. It wasn't in New York/LA until New Year's Eve, and then rolled out fairly slowly, hitting Boston in three stages, which looks indecisive to me but may just mean the film is doing well enough to get more screens.
A Most Violent Year
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #3 (first-run, DCP)
A Most Violent Year was shot from an original screenplay by director J.C. Chandor, but it feels like a highly successful adaptation of a great novel: Painted on a broad canvas, giving a feeling for the characters and their world, but pared down to a story that feels complete and focused on one viewing session. It hits its target almost without fail without becoming too simple or ponderous.
The year in question is 1981, winter, when crime in New York was at its worst. Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) owns a small heating oil company, but he's looking to expand both via aggressive salesmanship and by purchasing a property that will give his business a great deal more capacity. Trouble is coming on two fronts, though - his trucks are being robbed, and a friendly but methodical detective (David Oyelowo) is investigating his entire industry. Abel is an honest and ethical man, mostly, but that may be a luxury given him courtesy of his lawyer Andrew Walsh (Albert Brooks) and wife Anna (Jessica Chastain), herself a gangster's daughter and the one who keeps the books.
It's an elegant arrangement as a story; the general shape of things is clear very quickly but there is also room to explore. There's a mystery for characters to go through the motions of solving, but it never becomes the actual focal point of the film so that it feels neglected when Chandor spends time on something else. Though events revolve around Abel, other characters feel more intersecting than supporting, far from defined by how they intersect with him. Chandor also does a very nice job of keeping Abel actively involved, actually present and doing things at the moments where the story turns rather than just reacting after the fact; many stories along these lines will isolate the boss.
Full review at EFC.
Well worth it, though - I really do think that this movie got a bit hosed by A24 going for a slow release schedule. It wasn't in New York/LA until New Year's Eve, and then rolled out fairly slowly, hitting Boston in three stages, which looks indecisive to me but may just mean the film is doing well enough to get more screens.
A Most Violent Year
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #3 (first-run, DCP)
A Most Violent Year was shot from an original screenplay by director J.C. Chandor, but it feels like a highly successful adaptation of a great novel: Painted on a broad canvas, giving a feeling for the characters and their world, but pared down to a story that feels complete and focused on one viewing session. It hits its target almost without fail without becoming too simple or ponderous.
The year in question is 1981, winter, when crime in New York was at its worst. Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) owns a small heating oil company, but he's looking to expand both via aggressive salesmanship and by purchasing a property that will give his business a great deal more capacity. Trouble is coming on two fronts, though - his trucks are being robbed, and a friendly but methodical detective (David Oyelowo) is investigating his entire industry. Abel is an honest and ethical man, mostly, but that may be a luxury given him courtesy of his lawyer Andrew Walsh (Albert Brooks) and wife Anna (Jessica Chastain), herself a gangster's daughter and the one who keeps the books.
It's an elegant arrangement as a story; the general shape of things is clear very quickly but there is also room to explore. There's a mystery for characters to go through the motions of solving, but it never becomes the actual focal point of the film so that it feels neglected when Chandor spends time on something else. Though events revolve around Abel, other characters feel more intersecting than supporting, far from defined by how they intersect with him. Chandor also does a very nice job of keeping Abel actively involved, actually present and doing things at the moments where the story turns rather than just reacting after the fact; many stories along these lines will isolate the boss.
Full review at EFC.
Friday, February 06, 2015
Running Man
I wasn't going to see this. There was too much else I wanted to see in theaters as it was, and it seemed like the night before the sci-fi festival started might be better used on catching an early show of Jupiter Ascending than watching an extra-long episode of a Chinese reality show which I've never seen. And then China Lion tweets out that this was the highest-grossing film in the world last weekend and the part of my brain that really cares about global pop culture started getting an itch.
Obviously, sometimes those itches should be left unscratched; this just isn't a good movie, and probably not even a good episode of the TV program it was spun off from. Even more galling was that my phone was being difficult in terms of checking into MoviePass - you have to be within 100 feet of the lobby and my phone's GPS had me in the middle of the Charles River even when I was standing in the building - so that was my own money for a full-price ticket unless I can get it reimbursed.
The really surprising thing, though, is that there were a lot of previews for Chinese movies coming out within the next week or so - at least three in the next four weeks, way up from the one every month or two, if Boston was lucky, that was the standard less than six months ago. It's becoming almost as common as Indian movies, and I hope that the studios in South Korea and Japan start going with the same day-and-date system, even if we probably don't have enough screens to support it here in the Hub.
Although, man, seeing all those movies lined up, I'm even more frustrated by Well Go not being able to get The Taking of Tiger Mountain a booking here. Does the local audience for Chinese movies just not go for action like they do romance, or was it bad timing w with the students who form Fenway's core audience all home for winter break?
Running Man (2015)
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 February 2015 in Regal Fenway #2 (first-run, DCP)
This thing was the highest-grossing movie in the world last weekend, and I'm hoping like heck that China turning out for it in large numbers doesn't give Hollywood any ideas. It's vaguely worrisome enough that this sort of (mostly) unscripted television show is making the jump to the big screen, even if it wasn't done so poorly.
What is Running Man, besides an obvious invitation for legal action by whoever owns the similarly-named Arnold Schwarzenegger movie? Honestly, even after seeing the film version, I'm not entirely sure. It seems to involve celebrity teams racing around urban areas in some sort of Survivor/The Amazing Race hybrid, with players eliminated when the large name tags on their backs are ripped off. For the film, the ten stars brought to a beach resort are divided into two teams. Li Chen, Zhang Kei, Lynn Hung, Wang Baoqiang, and Guo Jingfei are in red; Kim Jong-kook, Angelababy, Sie Yi-lin, Michael Chen, and Wong Cho-lam are in red; Yi Yi serves as "tour guide" and referee. The main challenge involves searching the resort grounds for puzzle pieces tied to the jungle legend described at the beginning, at least until a new twist is added.
If you have been keeping up with the Chinese films that have been getting near-simultaneous releases in North America and Australia with increasing frequency over the past few months, there are some familiar faces in that line-up, and a few skits and obviously staged bits toward the start help those of us not well-versed in Chinese and Korean celebrities get some idea of what they or their on-screen personae are like: The guys drool over glamour gal Angelababy, Wong Cho-lam and Hsieh Yi-lin have the snarky senses of humor, that sort of thing.
Full review at EFC.
Obviously, sometimes those itches should be left unscratched; this just isn't a good movie, and probably not even a good episode of the TV program it was spun off from. Even more galling was that my phone was being difficult in terms of checking into MoviePass - you have to be within 100 feet of the lobby and my phone's GPS had me in the middle of the Charles River even when I was standing in the building - so that was my own money for a full-price ticket unless I can get it reimbursed.
The really surprising thing, though, is that there were a lot of previews for Chinese movies coming out within the next week or so - at least three in the next four weeks, way up from the one every month or two, if Boston was lucky, that was the standard less than six months ago. It's becoming almost as common as Indian movies, and I hope that the studios in South Korea and Japan start going with the same day-and-date system, even if we probably don't have enough screens to support it here in the Hub.
Although, man, seeing all those movies lined up, I'm even more frustrated by Well Go not being able to get The Taking of Tiger Mountain a booking here. Does the local audience for Chinese movies just not go for action like they do romance, or was it bad timing w with the students who form Fenway's core audience all home for winter break?
Running Man (2015)
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 February 2015 in Regal Fenway #2 (first-run, DCP)
This thing was the highest-grossing movie in the world last weekend, and I'm hoping like heck that China turning out for it in large numbers doesn't give Hollywood any ideas. It's vaguely worrisome enough that this sort of (mostly) unscripted television show is making the jump to the big screen, even if it wasn't done so poorly.
What is Running Man, besides an obvious invitation for legal action by whoever owns the similarly-named Arnold Schwarzenegger movie? Honestly, even after seeing the film version, I'm not entirely sure. It seems to involve celebrity teams racing around urban areas in some sort of Survivor/The Amazing Race hybrid, with players eliminated when the large name tags on their backs are ripped off. For the film, the ten stars brought to a beach resort are divided into two teams. Li Chen, Zhang Kei, Lynn Hung, Wang Baoqiang, and Guo Jingfei are in red; Kim Jong-kook, Angelababy, Sie Yi-lin, Michael Chen, and Wong Cho-lam are in red; Yi Yi serves as "tour guide" and referee. The main challenge involves searching the resort grounds for puzzle pieces tied to the jungle legend described at the beginning, at least until a new twist is added.
If you have been keeping up with the Chinese films that have been getting near-simultaneous releases in North America and Australia with increasing frequency over the past few months, there are some familiar faces in that line-up, and a few skits and obviously staged bits toward the start help those of us not well-versed in Chinese and Korean celebrities get some idea of what they or their on-screen personae are like: The guys drool over glamour gal Angelababy, Wong Cho-lam and Hsieh Yi-lin have the snarky senses of humor, that sort of thing.
Full review at EFC.
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 6 February 2015 - 12 February 2015
Hey, it's my most ambivalent moviegoing week of the year - the one I want to be the best, which seldom lives up to it. But I'm still optimistic!
I will basically be living in the Somerville Theatre this week, although I hope to use some empty slots to catch Jupiter Ascending and maybe Housebound.
- That's because it's the week of The Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, which will be taking up residence at the Somerville Theatre starting on Friday. Noteworthy presentations include Robot Overlords from the director of Grabbers on Friday, Boy 7 from the Netherlands on Monday, a double feature of Dr. Who and the Daleks & Daleks Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. on Wednesday, and a rare screening of the only 35mm print left of The Noah with director Daniel Bourla on-hand on Thursday.
In the main room, the theater will be re-starting their monthly "Silents, Please!" series of 35mm prints of silent films shown with Jeff Rapsis at the organ at 2pm on Sunday. Once again, they'll be going for deep cuts, with February's selection being a double feature of two Rin Tin Tin features, Clash of the Wolves & The Night Cry. - In a weird convergence, all three movies being released in the multiplexes are in 3D, which doesn't strike me as the best way to go about it, but go figure. The most intriguing looks to be Jupiter Ascending, a space opera from the Wachowskis featuring Mila Kunis as Jupiter Jones, a Chicago girl who happens to have the same DNA as a long-dead empress of a galactic empire, with Channing Tatum as the soldier with dog genes sent to protect her. It's at the Somerville, Fresh Pond (2D only), Jordan's Furniture (3D Imax only), the Embassy, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common (including Imax 3D), Assembly Row (including Imax 3D), and Revere.
Weirdly, Seventh Son is also getting an Imax release this week, and I almost wonder if Legendary is looking to spite Warner Brothers for sitting on it for a couple of years until they got a new deal with Universal. It's playing the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond (2D only), Jordan's Furniture (3D Imax only), Fenway, Boston Common (including 3D Imax), Assembly Row (including 3D Imax), and Revere. Since those two are sharing screens, check showtimes if the big screen is a priority for you.
Finally, there's The Spongebob Squarepants Movie: Sponge Out of Water, with the residents of Bikini Bottom traveling in digitally-rendered form to the live-action surface world to retrieve their crab-cake recipe that has been stolen by a pirate played by Antonio Banderas. I love funny Antonio Banderas, so this might be worth checking out. It's at the Capitol (2D only), Fresh Pond (2D only), Fenway, Boson Common, Assembly Row, and Revere. - Only one new movie opening in Kendall Square this week, but it's one that a lot of folks I know have been looking forward to, with Mommy being the latest from Quebecois wunderkind Xavier Dolan; it stars Anne Dorval as an immature single mother who is probably not doing the greatest job raising her ADHD teenager, and is probably only hanging around for a week.
- The Brattle has another week of one movie taking up most screening times in store, with this week's selection being Actress, a documentary by Robert Greene that follows Brandy Burre, who left the screen to start a family and whose attempts to return to the profession throw her home life into upheaval and reveal how difficult it can be for women over thirty. Greene will be on-hand Friday night, and will be joined by Burre for a spectal 7pm DocYard Screening on Monday, with screenings continuing through Wednesday.
There is some repatory fun going on as well, with "Recent Graves screenings at 9:30pm over the weekends: ABCs of Death 2 on Friday, V/H/S: Viral on Saturday, and Housebound on Sunday. See Housebound, folks; it's great. On Saturday night, the 11:30pm "Reel Weird Brattle: Mad Romance" screening is Perdita Durango, in Alex de la Iglesia's director's cut no less. Then on Thursday night, there's a special premiere screening of David Cross's directorial debut Hits. - It's a pretty big weekend for Indian film at Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/iMovieCafe, with three playing at various times. The big one appears to be Shamitabh, a portmanteau of the names of stars Danush & Amitabh Bachchan, and the trailer I saw indicated it was some sort of weird, meta-fictional thing. It's in Hindi with English subtitles, and also plays at Fenway.
They will also be playing Yennai Arindhaal, a crime & revenge thriller starring Ajith Kumar, Anushka Shetty, and Arun Vijay. That one's in Tamil with English subtitles. It looks like you'll need to speak Telugu to catch what's going on in Malli Malli Idi Rani Roju, a romance of some sort. - The Coolidge mostly keeps the same line-up as last week, swapping the Oscar-Nominated Live Action & Animated Shorts in for the departing Sundance shorts, running them alongside the two programs of Documentary shorts.
The special events are an interesting group. The Cronenberg Mad Science series of weekend midnights continues on Friday & Saturday with a 35mm print of Rabid, while Monday's "Science on Screen" presentation is Evil Dead II (also 35mm), with Dr. Steven Schlozman talking about how neurobiology makes us wired to enjoy horror movies beforehand. In between, the Sunday morning Talk Cinema presentation is Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, a courtroom drama about a woman attempting to obtain a divorce is Israel, where the husband must consent. There's also Open Screen on Tuesday and Mortified's annual "Doomed Valentine's Day" show on Thursday, with people sharing their teen love poetry on stage. - Mati Diop is the Geneviève McMillan - Reba Stewart Fellow at Harvard this year, so Harvard Film Archive will welcome and pay tribute to her this weekend, with the Senegalese filmaker on-hand for three programs - recent featurette "A Thousand Suns" on Friday, a short program including "Atlantiques", "Big in Vietnam", and "Snow Canon" on Saturday, and her debut film Touki Bouki on Monday. "Snow Canon" and Touki Bouki are 35mm; the others are DCP.
Entries from two ongoing retrospectives fill the gap on Sunday, with Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story in the afternoon and Orson Welles's F for Fake in the evening, both on 35mm. Wednesday's "Furious Cinema" screening is Werner Herzog's Even Dwarfs Started Small, which appears to be odd even for him - an all-little-person cast in a movie about revolution on an island where everything is built for big people. - The Museum of Fine Arts is all The Films of Stanley Kubrick, all the time in February. This week's selections are The Killing (Friday & Sunday), Paths of Glory (Friday), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Saturday & Thursday), Jan Harlan's Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (Sunday), Spartacus (Wednesday), Fear and Desire (Wednesday), and Lolita (Thursday).
- The Bright Lights series in the Paramount Theater's Bright Screening Room also has Stanley Kubrick on the brain; they'll be screening Room 237, a film about those who hold bizarre theories about Kubrick's The Shining, on Tuesday night. On Thursday, they will screen five 16mm films by Emerson professor Robert Todd. The irregular ArtsEmerson film program will be using the room for a screening of Ousmane Sembene's Black Girl, with Drs. Smba Gadjigo & Claire Andrade-Watkins introducing that first film made by a director from Sub-Saharan Africa.
- The Regent Theatre will celebrate Black History month on Tuesday with a special screening of King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis, an Oscar-nominated documentary on Martin Luther King originally produced in 1970 which has recently been restored.
I will basically be living in the Somerville Theatre this week, although I hope to use some empty slots to catch Jupiter Ascending and maybe Housebound.
Thursday, February 05, 2015
This Week In Tickets: 25 January 2015 - 31 January 2015
Blizzard week means a lot of white.
Kind of sad that the first movie of the week was just me at Strange Magic - it's not a terrible movie, and there's a good chance it's the last one George Lucas will have any sort of direct involvement in, although the Lucasfilm logo and perhaps a "based upon Star Wars created by George Lucas" will likely be gracing movies for years to come. Speaking of, I'll bet that even if I wasn't the only one in the theater, I would have been the only one to laugh at Marianne blindfolded and swatting at even smaller faeries (like, faery-sized for faeries) with her sword because it was Luke Skywaker practicing with his lightsaber in the Millennnium Falcon and this is a movie made for eight-year-old girls like my niece.
After that, it was a pretty quiet week, because on Monday night we got hit with a snowstorm that kept up a steady pace through Tuesday and wound up dumping two feet of the white stuff on the ground when all was said and done. Everything was closed Monday night and Tuesday, and only a few of us were in the office on Wednesday. This is the point where I'd usually mock the folks who didn't come in because when I was younger we expected a lot of snow in New England and blah blah blah, but let's face it - I closed my door Monday night, turned on the heat, and then didn't even venture outside until Wednesday morning, where my commute was walking to the subway, transferring to a bus, and just burying my head in comics until it was time for me to get off and walk up a street where the sidewalks weren't cleared but there was no traffic, either.
It kept me out of theaters until Thursday, when Song One was having its last day at Fresh Pond. Normally, I'd feel bad about not getting a review up in time for people to see it - I just finished writing it up almost a week later - but it's available on the various On-Demand/Amazon-type services, so you can just watch it that way.
Friday night... Well, it's becoming clear that my phone is on its last legs, because I had a heck of a time trying to use MoviePass, eventually giving up and seeing Black Sea on Saturday. The movie was pretty good, although it has a few things that kind of gnaw at me. Gonna miss the unlimited data plan if I have to upgrade that phone, too.
Later that evening, I headed out to the Brattle Theatre for their 35mm Late Show presentation of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Terrible hot chocolate - although it did do the job of keeping my hands warm after I came in from the cold - but a pretty fun movie.
The Abominable Dr. Phibes
* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (Reel Weird Brattle: Mad Love, 35mm)
Confession, of sorts: Without having seen more than a few minutes of any of them, I used to get Vincent Price's Dr. Phibes and Dr. Goldfoot movies mixed up. That's a mistake I'm unlikely to make again; while the makers of The Abonimable Dr. Phibes to tend to move their tongue cheekward on occasion, they tend to play it just straight enough and fancy enough to make for a nifty little horror movie.
Who is Dr. Phibes (Vincent Price)? A musician, an engineer, and a scholar who, with the help of his lovely assistant Vulnavia (Virginia North), is committing a series of bizarre murders in 1920s London. Even with all of them being physicians, it seems as though he may get away with it, except that Scotland Yard Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey) begins to piece together a pattern, and with the help of potential target Dr. Vesalius (Joseph Cotton), begins to track Phibes down. The only trouble with this theory and course of action is that Phibes has been dead for four years.
At its heart, The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a simple revenge story; Anton Phibes believes that these nine men are responsible for killing his wife, and will thus pay them back in kind, the sort that one would often see in a grindhouse movie with little to make it noteworthy but its level of gore and viciousness. This one certainly does well on those counts, but stands out because everything about it is knowingly grandiose: We first see Phibes maniacally playing an organ in a mansion filled with things that have little practical purpose beyond looking fantastic, and even if the rationale for his murders to be based upon the nine Biblical plagues of Egypt is thin, but it makes nasty little murders a little bigger. On top of that, the world created by art director Bernard Reeves is equal parts 1920s art deco and 1970s garishness, the sort of situations where all of the insanity feels almost reasonable.
Full review on EFC.
Kind of sad that the first movie of the week was just me at Strange Magic - it's not a terrible movie, and there's a good chance it's the last one George Lucas will have any sort of direct involvement in, although the Lucasfilm logo and perhaps a "based upon Star Wars created by George Lucas" will likely be gracing movies for years to come. Speaking of, I'll bet that even if I wasn't the only one in the theater, I would have been the only one to laugh at Marianne blindfolded and swatting at even smaller faeries (like, faery-sized for faeries) with her sword because it was Luke Skywaker practicing with his lightsaber in the Millennnium Falcon and this is a movie made for eight-year-old girls like my niece.
After that, it was a pretty quiet week, because on Monday night we got hit with a snowstorm that kept up a steady pace through Tuesday and wound up dumping two feet of the white stuff on the ground when all was said and done. Everything was closed Monday night and Tuesday, and only a few of us were in the office on Wednesday. This is the point where I'd usually mock the folks who didn't come in because when I was younger we expected a lot of snow in New England and blah blah blah, but let's face it - I closed my door Monday night, turned on the heat, and then didn't even venture outside until Wednesday morning, where my commute was walking to the subway, transferring to a bus, and just burying my head in comics until it was time for me to get off and walk up a street where the sidewalks weren't cleared but there was no traffic, either.
It kept me out of theaters until Thursday, when Song One was having its last day at Fresh Pond. Normally, I'd feel bad about not getting a review up in time for people to see it - I just finished writing it up almost a week later - but it's available on the various On-Demand/Amazon-type services, so you can just watch it that way.
Friday night... Well, it's becoming clear that my phone is on its last legs, because I had a heck of a time trying to use MoviePass, eventually giving up and seeing Black Sea on Saturday. The movie was pretty good, although it has a few things that kind of gnaw at me. Gonna miss the unlimited data plan if I have to upgrade that phone, too.
Later that evening, I headed out to the Brattle Theatre for their 35mm Late Show presentation of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Terrible hot chocolate - although it did do the job of keeping my hands warm after I came in from the cold - but a pretty fun movie.
The Abominable Dr. Phibes
* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (Reel Weird Brattle: Mad Love, 35mm)
Confession, of sorts: Without having seen more than a few minutes of any of them, I used to get Vincent Price's Dr. Phibes and Dr. Goldfoot movies mixed up. That's a mistake I'm unlikely to make again; while the makers of The Abonimable Dr. Phibes to tend to move their tongue cheekward on occasion, they tend to play it just straight enough and fancy enough to make for a nifty little horror movie.
Who is Dr. Phibes (Vincent Price)? A musician, an engineer, and a scholar who, with the help of his lovely assistant Vulnavia (Virginia North), is committing a series of bizarre murders in 1920s London. Even with all of them being physicians, it seems as though he may get away with it, except that Scotland Yard Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey) begins to piece together a pattern, and with the help of potential target Dr. Vesalius (Joseph Cotton), begins to track Phibes down. The only trouble with this theory and course of action is that Phibes has been dead for four years.
At its heart, The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a simple revenge story; Anton Phibes believes that these nine men are responsible for killing his wife, and will thus pay them back in kind, the sort that one would often see in a grindhouse movie with little to make it noteworthy but its level of gore and viciousness. This one certainly does well on those counts, but stands out because everything about it is knowingly grandiose: We first see Phibes maniacally playing an organ in a mansion filled with things that have little practical purpose beyond looking fantastic, and even if the rationale for his murders to be based upon the nine Biblical plagues of Egypt is thin, but it makes nasty little murders a little bigger. On top of that, the world created by art director Bernard Reeves is equal parts 1920s art deco and 1970s garishness, the sort of situations where all of the insanity feels almost reasonable.
Full review on EFC.
Song One
When writing Next Week in Tickets a couple weeks ago, I half-jokingly speculated that the Indian-American owners of Apple Cinemas doesn't pay particularly close attention to the details of how a film is being released, so they didn't even realize that The Interview had been pulled or that things like Song One or Predestination are getting a same-day release on VOD , which is why those movies get booked there but not anywhere else in Boston. They see the names involved, mark it down, and are kind of surprised when something with Anne Hathaway barely makes a blip.
That's probably not the case; my other speculation is that their set-up and location - ten screens serving a relatively small neighborhood nestled pretty snugly between the Captiol and Somerville Theatres at the end of the Red Line means that they wind up turning movies over more quickly than anybody else in the area, and having a couple screens of Indian films will only do so much on that account.
Whatever the reason, I'm glad they do; $9.75 isn't significantly more expensive then a rental and you get to see it in a theater on a big screen with an audience. It's also important to note that I might not have noticed that it existed at all if not for seeing it pop up a list of the movies playing in the area.
Song One
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 January 2015 in Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond #4 (first-run, DCP)
There are times when Song One starts to come across as a simple enough romance that its peculiar start fades into the background, and it's odd for that to feel like a good thing. The way the two parties meet doesn't work, and it's the whole foundation of the movie, but there are enough nice moments afterward that work regardless.
After all, it starts with a 19-hear-old musician (Ben Rosenfield), headphones blocking everything out, getting struck by a car. His sister Franny (Anne Hathaway), a graduate student doing research in Morocco, is called home by their mother (Mary Steenburgen), and while she does what she can to help draw him out of his coma, she decides to use the James Forester concert ticket she finds in his notebook. She talks to the musician (Johnny Flynn) afterward, telling him her comatose brother Henry is his biggest fan; he comes by the hospital. And so on.
That whole situation is weird, right? It's weird from Henry apparently only having interest in this one other musician, to Franny hanging around after the show to drop all this on him, to the next day when she asks James to meet her at a show after he shows up to see them at the hospital. Certainly, there are details that make it less off-putting than that sounds, but we don't know Franny well enough when she hits this folk musician with her brother's coma or when she figures a hospital visit is the right time to make a date for it to seem like something natural rather than writer/director Kate Barker-Froyland trying to force her movie's concept. Of course, it's supposed to be weird, but we don't see Franny wrestling with the awkwardness of it much.
Full review at EFC.
That's probably not the case; my other speculation is that their set-up and location - ten screens serving a relatively small neighborhood nestled pretty snugly between the Captiol and Somerville Theatres at the end of the Red Line means that they wind up turning movies over more quickly than anybody else in the area, and having a couple screens of Indian films will only do so much on that account.
Whatever the reason, I'm glad they do; $9.75 isn't significantly more expensive then a rental and you get to see it in a theater on a big screen with an audience. It's also important to note that I might not have noticed that it existed at all if not for seeing it pop up a list of the movies playing in the area.
Song One
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 January 2015 in Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond #4 (first-run, DCP)
There are times when Song One starts to come across as a simple enough romance that its peculiar start fades into the background, and it's odd for that to feel like a good thing. The way the two parties meet doesn't work, and it's the whole foundation of the movie, but there are enough nice moments afterward that work regardless.
After all, it starts with a 19-hear-old musician (Ben Rosenfield), headphones blocking everything out, getting struck by a car. His sister Franny (Anne Hathaway), a graduate student doing research in Morocco, is called home by their mother (Mary Steenburgen), and while she does what she can to help draw him out of his coma, she decides to use the James Forester concert ticket she finds in his notebook. She talks to the musician (Johnny Flynn) afterward, telling him her comatose brother Henry is his biggest fan; he comes by the hospital. And so on.
That whole situation is weird, right? It's weird from Henry apparently only having interest in this one other musician, to Franny hanging around after the show to drop all this on him, to the next day when she asks James to meet her at a show after he shows up to see them at the hospital. Certainly, there are details that make it less off-putting than that sounds, but we don't know Franny well enough when she hits this folk musician with her brother's coma or when she figures a hospital visit is the right time to make a date for it to seem like something natural rather than writer/director Kate Barker-Froyland trying to force her movie's concept. Of course, it's supposed to be weird, but we don't see Franny wrestling with the awkwardness of it much.
Full review at EFC.
Sunday, February 01, 2015
Black Sea
I don't know whether MoviePass or my phone was acting up the last couple of days, but I didn't see this on Friday night because I just could not get the app to work, and the problem seemed to be repeating itself on Saturday until I finally got to the point where it said I had already checked in, which was weird. I suspect it's my phone - reception has suddenly turned to crap in the last few days - but it's frustrating.
Glad I did, even if the movie did seem to take a turn when it became more about conflict among the crew than salvage operations. I almost wonder if it started as a disaster-filled treasure hunt only to have the infighting added in order to make it more an actor's piece.
Speaking of the actors, here's a funny thing: For some reason, I've got Jude Law mostly filed away as an odd fit for action, more a softly handsome period-piece/upper-classs-snot/romantic-comedy type, and I'm not sure how that happened. I guess it's from seeing him early in Wilde, Gattaca, and The Talented Mr. Ripley - and Sky Captain wasn't exactly the gritty sort of action/adventure - but it means that practically everything I see him in now seems to be him playing against type.
Similarly, it was funny to look up a couple of the Russian actors on IMDB and see that Konstantin Khabenskiy was the star of the Night Watch movies and Grigoriy Dobrygin was the kid from Black Lightning (and had a big role in A Most Wanted Man for good measure). Felt like I should have recognized them even if I've only seen them brieflly over a period of years.
Black Sea
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2015 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)
The basic ingredients of Black Sea don't appeal to everyone, but it's got claustrophobic subs, lost Nazi gold, an underwater setting that can look like an alien landscape, and grizzled ex-Navy types who respond to an investor representative's worries that the ship will sink with "it'd be a useless f---ing submarine if it didn't". It's maybe not quite the ideal arrangement of those things, but good enough for an afternoon's thrills.
The first piece to fall in place is Robinson (Jude Law), a Scottish submarine pilot being laid off after more than ten years with an underwater salvage company. He's commiserating with fellow downsizing victims Blackie (Konstantin Khabenskiy) and Kurston (Daniel Ryan) about lousy job prospects when Kurston mentions something he spotted in the Black Sea a year ago - a WWII U-boat that sank while carrying over two tons of gold that the Soviets sent Germany as a loan before the two were at war, ripe for the taking since ownership of the area is disputed between Russia and Georgia. Soon enough, they're underway with a half-British, half-Russian crew, although the Russians want nothing to do with Tobin (Bobby Schofield), an 18-year-old kid who takes Kurston's place, and nobody cares for Daniels (Scoot McNairy), the "banker" there to represent the investors' interests.
And then there's the likes of Fraser (Ben Mendelsohn), who is the best diver for this sort of job but also a pot-stirrer, which the other twelve people in a rusty Soviet-era sub don't really need. To a certain extent, the movie doesn't need it either; there's more than enough inherent peril to the situation to make for an exciting adventure without setting the crew at each other's throat. That's especially true when you consider that Dennis Kelly's script often seems to raise, drop, and reconfigure those tensions in fairly arbitrary ways: Fraser will throw the ship into utter calamity, but then there will be remarkably little tension when the movie needs him to just be an expert diver. Daniels is an afterthought for much of the movie. The practical difficulties of the two halves of the crew not being able to understand each other because only Blackie is bilingual and he's out of action are not an issue for very long.
Full review at EFC.
Glad I did, even if the movie did seem to take a turn when it became more about conflict among the crew than salvage operations. I almost wonder if it started as a disaster-filled treasure hunt only to have the infighting added in order to make it more an actor's piece.
Speaking of the actors, here's a funny thing: For some reason, I've got Jude Law mostly filed away as an odd fit for action, more a softly handsome period-piece/upper-classs-snot/romantic-comedy type, and I'm not sure how that happened. I guess it's from seeing him early in Wilde, Gattaca, and The Talented Mr. Ripley - and Sky Captain wasn't exactly the gritty sort of action/adventure - but it means that practically everything I see him in now seems to be him playing against type.
Similarly, it was funny to look up a couple of the Russian actors on IMDB and see that Konstantin Khabenskiy was the star of the Night Watch movies and Grigoriy Dobrygin was the kid from Black Lightning (and had a big role in A Most Wanted Man for good measure). Felt like I should have recognized them even if I've only seen them brieflly over a period of years.
Black Sea
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2015 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)
The basic ingredients of Black Sea don't appeal to everyone, but it's got claustrophobic subs, lost Nazi gold, an underwater setting that can look like an alien landscape, and grizzled ex-Navy types who respond to an investor representative's worries that the ship will sink with "it'd be a useless f---ing submarine if it didn't". It's maybe not quite the ideal arrangement of those things, but good enough for an afternoon's thrills.
The first piece to fall in place is Robinson (Jude Law), a Scottish submarine pilot being laid off after more than ten years with an underwater salvage company. He's commiserating with fellow downsizing victims Blackie (Konstantin Khabenskiy) and Kurston (Daniel Ryan) about lousy job prospects when Kurston mentions something he spotted in the Black Sea a year ago - a WWII U-boat that sank while carrying over two tons of gold that the Soviets sent Germany as a loan before the two were at war, ripe for the taking since ownership of the area is disputed between Russia and Georgia. Soon enough, they're underway with a half-British, half-Russian crew, although the Russians want nothing to do with Tobin (Bobby Schofield), an 18-year-old kid who takes Kurston's place, and nobody cares for Daniels (Scoot McNairy), the "banker" there to represent the investors' interests.
And then there's the likes of Fraser (Ben Mendelsohn), who is the best diver for this sort of job but also a pot-stirrer, which the other twelve people in a rusty Soviet-era sub don't really need. To a certain extent, the movie doesn't need it either; there's more than enough inherent peril to the situation to make for an exciting adventure without setting the crew at each other's throat. That's especially true when you consider that Dennis Kelly's script often seems to raise, drop, and reconfigure those tensions in fairly arbitrary ways: Fraser will throw the ship into utter calamity, but then there will be remarkably little tension when the movie needs him to just be an expert diver. Daniels is an afterthought for much of the movie. The practical difficulties of the two halves of the crew not being able to understand each other because only Blackie is bilingual and he's out of action are not an issue for very long.
Full review at EFC.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
This Week In Tickets: 18 January 2015 - 24 January 2015
If I get this up before going to the midnight at the Brattle, it's still technically "this" rather than "that" week!
Kind of a slow-ish week, although the writing was slowed when my tablet took a tumble to the floor, and this time is was the display that was hosed even though the touchscreen still worked. Rest in Peace, Nexus 7. I wrote more reviews on you than I ever fathomed could be done without an actual keyboard.
Before that, though, there were movies. Sunday's selection was Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh's impressive biography of English painter William Turner, brought to life by Timothy Spall. Between that performance and Channing Tatum in Foxcatcher, there's been a lot of animalistic grunting in classy movies this year.
On Tuesday night, I only caught the back-end of a Brattle double feature, because I'm at the point where I don't expose myself to Catherine Breillat unless absolutely necessary. That meant just Rocks in My Pockets, and... Man, I was not in the mood. I wanted to strangle the filmmaker for her incessant narration, even if I could be impressed by what she put on-screen.
Plan A on Friday was Strange Magic, but that fell through when the show I checked in for on MoviePass was cancelled. I got them to check me into another, which wound up being Mortdecai, even though I had been dreading it since I first saw a trailer. It wasn't a wholly miserable experience, though - I rather liked Paul Bettany and Gwynneth Paltrow in it, and it meant I learned about the original books, which sound a heck of a lot better than the disastrous movie.
After that, I rested up for Saturday's Boston Horror Show, which the good folks at All Things Horror had at the Somerville Theatre. Short version: Sins of Dracula bad, The Battery OK, Dys- very good, and Spring exceptional. I really can't wait for more people to see the latter when it hits general release in March.
Kind of a slow-ish week, although the writing was slowed when my tablet took a tumble to the floor, and this time is was the display that was hosed even though the touchscreen still worked. Rest in Peace, Nexus 7. I wrote more reviews on you than I ever fathomed could be done without an actual keyboard.
Before that, though, there were movies. Sunday's selection was Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh's impressive biography of English painter William Turner, brought to life by Timothy Spall. Between that performance and Channing Tatum in Foxcatcher, there's been a lot of animalistic grunting in classy movies this year.
On Tuesday night, I only caught the back-end of a Brattle double feature, because I'm at the point where I don't expose myself to Catherine Breillat unless absolutely necessary. That meant just Rocks in My Pockets, and... Man, I was not in the mood. I wanted to strangle the filmmaker for her incessant narration, even if I could be impressed by what she put on-screen.
Plan A on Friday was Strange Magic, but that fell through when the show I checked in for on MoviePass was cancelled. I got them to check me into another, which wound up being Mortdecai, even though I had been dreading it since I first saw a trailer. It wasn't a wholly miserable experience, though - I rather liked Paul Bettany and Gwynneth Paltrow in it, and it meant I learned about the original books, which sound a heck of a lot better than the disastrous movie.
After that, I rested up for Saturday's Boston Horror Show, which the good folks at All Things Horror had at the Somerville Theatre. Short version: Sins of Dracula bad, The Battery OK, Dys- very good, and Spring exceptional. I really can't wait for more people to see the latter when it hits general release in March.
Boston Horror Show: The Sins of Dracula, Dys, The Battery, Spring, and shorts.
The late-January dead zone is a pretty good time to have this sort of event, although I noticed that the theater had signs up saying that Into the Woods wouldn't play due to a hard drive problem. Not that I'm doubting their honesty there, but who wouldn't mind their own hardware failures being so well-timed?
Anyway, here's the line-up, which wound up being more than tigher than I was expected, since I mentally assume horror movies are about 90 minutes and shorts are about ten:
Busy day. I actually bailed on another event - the Clotrudis Award nominations - in part because I couldn't find a date for them, in part because, hey, seeing independent movies trumps arguing over whether something is fifth or sixth best in a given category, and partly because I couldn't make Dys- or Spring fit into the festivals where they played last year, and I wanted to see them with a crowd.
It may not have been a huge crowd, but it was an appreciative one. It's a shame that they had to get Sins of Dracula inflicted upon them, because that is one of the less enjoyable examples of a genre movie substituting camp for originality, just seeming boringly lazy and unoriginal.
Still, it got better. I considered bailing after "Beating Hearts" to get a burger across the street, since I'd already seen The Battery, but a snack during movie #2 meant I wasn't particularly hungry during #3, so I stuck around from start to finish, capping things off with Spring.
Which, by the way, is fantastic, an early lead on my favorite movies of the year, and I wish it were out already so that I could talk about it more. Heck, let's talk about the end after the review.
"Slut"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
Chloe Okuno's "Slut" is not groundbreaking; it's a fairly straightforward bit of 1970s/1980s exploitation pastiche, from the credits to the hairstyles, but it's one that is happily played straight even if it does have a dark sense of humor. Standard stuff: Mousy girl in glasses who spends all her time looking after her grandmother envies the easy blonde down at the roller rink, but when she gets a little male attention herself, it's not necessarily so nice.
It's a pretty good short, and I like the way that Okuno is careful to make sure that nothing comes entirely out of left field, even if it does mean that there's a veritable Chekhov's Arsenal lying around. She's got a good knack for staging action clearly, and even if the acting is highly variable (star Molly McIntyre has both great and rough moments), she pulls it all together well.
The Sins of Dracula
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
Oh, man, so many angles from which to disdain The Sins of Dracula, just one opening paragraph. I mean, I've recently seen one of the Hammer Draculas that this draws inspiration - do I come at it that way? Or maybe I should consider the question of whether Richard Griffin setting a movie around a community theater company shows self-awareness or a lack thereof. Then again, you don't really need an angle beyond "bad movie that tries to use camp as an excuse".
That starts from the beginning, when a winking warning tells the audience that this movie is about what happens in a faithless world. Soon, nice church-going boy Billy (Jamie Dufault) is telling his pastor (Carmine Capobianco) that he wants to do more than just sing in the choir, getting into theater with his girlfriend Shannon (Sarah Nicklin), even if all the others in the troupe - D&D-loving Traci (Samantha Acampora), self-named NuWave (Jesse Dufault), drug fiend Bandilli (Derek Laurendeau), and gay Lance (Aaron Peaslee) all seem to be people he shouldn't be near. But, of coruse, they aren't a patch on director Lou Perdition (Steven O'Brion) and his girlfriend Kimberly (Elyssa Baldassarri).
None of these guys are particularly convincing teenagers, although I suppose that the filmmakers would say that's part of the joke - it's a straight-faced spoof of shoddy horror movies and Christian scare flicks! The trouble is, it never feels like the genuine more-enthusiasm-than-talent camp that makes such movies memorable, nor does it have the targeted gags to make for good parody. It almost seems cynical, as if Griffin and company know by now that with a few exceptions, the people who show up in they work with aren't that good, so this sort of send-up/homage is done as an excuse. Or even worse, it can feel like laziness - when going for camp, you don't have to come up with actual scares or gags; you can just imitate what they are like.
Full review at EFC.
"I Am Monster"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
Well, that was rather gross.
That's half the point, of course, and that the gross-out is almost exactly half the point (and half the running time) makes "I Am Monster" a great way to examine just how difficult it can be to be a smart person who loves horror. The first half of the short is all in-your-face provocation: Co-writer/director Shannon Lark stars as a woman dressed like a fetish model who goes into a morgue after-hours, chooses the best looking lady corpse in here, and engages in some serious necrophilia aided by what I hope must be custom implements, taking Polaroids throughout. It's all envelope-pushing and apparent objectification, with a couple of moments where Lark and filmmaking partner Lori Bowen take the basic concept to its unnatural conclusion.
Then the supernatural part kicks in - or maybe it's just Vivienne cracking - and things start getting interesting; it becomes more clearly about Vivienne being cut off from actual intimacy. The push and pull between Vivienne and Jason (Adam Cardon) is nifty, but the short doesn't quite have the room to explore her as a potentially multifaceted person with all the exploitation material, and while that's not just there to shock and titillate, that tends to blot the rest out.
It's a nifty short, but it shows the tough balance at play in a good horror story, trying to create something that shocks without totally obliterating what's underneath.
Dys-
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
Maude Michaud's Dys- looks to be on the path to dystopia as it starts, but as with many stories that start with an outbreak, that turns out to be the background for some intense dysfunction. It's the sort of movie that is going to push some a bit too far, but will be absolutely riveting for others.
It starts with some of the usual disturbing signs - news reports of a nasty strain of the flu going around, and a possibly-related murder suicide with rumors of cannibalism. A lot of people in a Montreal photography class are absent, with one heading out just as Sam (Alex Goldrich) starts to deliver his lecture. He's distracted for other reasons; his marriage to model and longtime muse Eva (Shannon Lark) is falling apart. She's finally set to start a new job at a bank when the government institutes a travel ban, and even before a tense dinner with their neighbor (and Sam's best friend) James (Dega Lazare) ends with him coughing up blood in Eva's direction, there are times when you just don't want to be stuck in a small space with certain people.
Hallucinations may be a symptom of this "flu" - or maybe not - and when Michaud combines that with her intentions to reveal these characters' complete backstory slowly, the audience is in for some serious uncertainty from moment to moment. Michaud doesn't just count on everyone being a potentially unreliable narrator, though, finding ways to make the situation incrementally worse before the time for serious rug-pulling comes. She's also quite good at presenting things just a bit larger than completely necessary so that they are remembered later, whether as an explanation or a bit of a fake-out.
Full review at EFC.
"Beating Hearts"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
It's natural to spend much of "Dead Hearts" trying to construct a backstory that explains everything - particularly an opening scene that takes the express route from sweet to horrific - in a way that shifts blame to the least-ugly place it can go, and that's still an ugly, ugly situation.
Writer/director Matthew Garrett's decision to play things somewhat ambiguous keeps things interesting - just how twisted is the relationship between the characters credited as only "The Girl" (Gianna Bruzzese) and "The Grandfather" (Peter Coriaty), what is their endgame, and just how did things get there? Garrett offers no convenient and clear delineation for who made whom a killer.
It's a fine source of unease, although when it comes time to finish the story, that uncertainty does take away from the story having a truly satisfying conclusion. That's quite possibly part of the point, though, and what makes things a bit more unnerving.
The Battery
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
The environment where you see a movie can be pretty important; I first saw The Battery on a Fantasia Festival screener back in 2013, after having already heard the All Things Horror guys rave about it, and didn't see what the big deal was. Seeing it on a big screen, with a crowd, definitely makes for a better experience.
I still don't love the movie, although I appreciate it more afer the second time through. I do sort of wonder what the deal is with that last sequence, and how long it was going on (they really shouldn't have mentioned having to eventually drink their pee, because then I start wondering what they're doing with it). It's an able and often impressive post-apocalyptic story, although it's not really one that uses that environment to get at particularly interesting ideas.
Full review at EFC.
"Dead Hearts"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
"Dead Hearts" is an entertaining little mash-up by Stephen W. Martin, and it feels something like what you'd get if you merged Tim Burton and Wes Anderson, adding in a healthy amount of kung fu. Like Burton & Anderson movies, the result is sometimes a little too precious, but the inventiveness more than balances it out.
The cuteness here involves a nine-year-old undertaker (Valin Shinyei) with a crush on the blind martial-arts master in his elementary-school class (Dalila Bela). Of course, it doesn't last - she moves away and he seldom leaves his mortuary again, until decades later when he shows just how far he will go to share his heart with her.
Context can be king, and, boy, was "Dead Hearts" a lot of fun toward the end of a day filled with grim movies. It's the sort of fantasy that takes a lot for granted, but it's cheerful and sly about it, not quite winking about how it makes sure everyone is wearing masks so that they can sub in stunt performers, or how the fairy tale trappings are played into but made modern without being subverted. It's a fun little movie, and I'm very curious about what sort of a feature Martin might end up making should he get the chance. A Burton/Anderson type who really loves genre movies would be no bad thing.
Spring
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
Every once in a while, a movie will be built in such a way to make you forget what sort of film you came in expecting to see, usually so that it can get a jolt out of genre fans who come in ready for anything. Spring does that, to a certain extent, but takes it a bit further - its switch-up seems less about softening a tough audience up than easing it into something that sounds crazy, even if it winds up being fantastic.
So we start with Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) in California; he dropped out of college to look after his dying mother, and now that she has passed, he's got no reason not to hate the loose end he's at. It leads to a fight, which leads him to leave town for Italy, where he hooks up with a couple of British tourists, winds up in Bari, a small town on the coast. That's where he meets Louise (Nadia Hilker), a grad student researching the genetic irregularities of a relatively isolated population. She's beautiful, smart, and funny - but there's something else that makes her unlike any girl Evan has ever met.
It's a while before we meet Louise, but that's okay, because a real effort is put into making sure that we get to know Evan despite his seeming like just a simple American everyman to contrast with the Italian girl with the big secret. There's obligation but also deep love on display during the one scene with his mother, and a chip on his shoulder soon after that, but the approach matters: He hits back hard when he feels the jolt but is an easygoing softie when just pushed at. Lou Taylor Pucci is seldom pushed to make Evan extraordinary in any specific facet, but he makes sure that the audience likes the guy, making him approachable in his imperfections and having it balance out into a man worth spending time with.
Full review at EFC.
SPOILERS!
I can't talk enough about how much I love the way Benson, Moorhead, and Nadia Hilker built Louise, especially since the temptation to have some kind of "regeneration" sequence (I couldn't get Doctor Who out of my head once Louise's nature was revealed) must have been almost impossible to resist, just to show us what they were talking about rather than coming at it obliquely. The fact that she becomes a different person, influenced by the genetic material of her last lover, means that it makes sense for her to be youthful in mind as well as body, even if she is thousands of years old, which Hilker does carry.
I also really love that, even from that early age, she was trying to explain herself scientifically, even if the concept wasn't quite there yet. The science in the movie is kind of bunk (grumble grumble conservation of matter grumble), but the outlook is refreshing, especially since the easy way out would be to treat love as magic and say that faith is more important than understanding. Instead, Louise likes understanding, and even if there's a level at which it makes her cynical - seeing love as chemicals in the brain and knowing she's never been in that sort of love can do that - it isn't a mark against her. She recognizes the value of ritual as a focus even if she doesn't take it literally, and recognizing her mutation for what it is keeps her from seeing herself as a monster.
And, wow, that last sequence, when she shows Evan her family and says that this is how she knows love is what changes things, is great - playing on her rationality without losing emotional weight. It's where the idea begins to emerge that he can win her even if what we've already learned said that not only will Louise become someone else, but maintaining a relationship with her would be kind of incestual. But there's a price, and it's kind of horrible - while this sort of story traditionally has the immortal feeling diminished by her isolation from regular humanity and lack of love, Louise doesn't want to give up eternity; there's still too much to see, and limiting herself to a mere sixty more years is horrible.
But that's what happens, and while festival-friend Kurt Halfyard's review suggests that Evan & Louise don't last, I interpret the smoldering volcano at the end a little differently; I see it as tying her back to her parents, acknowledging that while they love each other and will love their child - a traditional happy ending - we must also acknowledge that falling in love has killed Louise. She won't be able to regenerate, she may envy her daughter for the long life she will likely lead, she may even resent Evan at times. Maybe, as is traditional, she'll see it as a fair trade-off, but just like the volcano killed her family, her position is now reversed; she'll be the one who dies while someone else lives on, and that's tragic, even if they live a happy life.
!SRELIOPS
Anyway, here's the line-up, which wound up being more than tigher than I was expected, since I mentally assume horror movies are about 90 minutes and shorts are about ten:
Busy day. I actually bailed on another event - the Clotrudis Award nominations - in part because I couldn't find a date for them, in part because, hey, seeing independent movies trumps arguing over whether something is fifth or sixth best in a given category, and partly because I couldn't make Dys- or Spring fit into the festivals where they played last year, and I wanted to see them with a crowd.
It may not have been a huge crowd, but it was an appreciative one. It's a shame that they had to get Sins of Dracula inflicted upon them, because that is one of the less enjoyable examples of a genre movie substituting camp for originality, just seeming boringly lazy and unoriginal.
Still, it got better. I considered bailing after "Beating Hearts" to get a burger across the street, since I'd already seen The Battery, but a snack during movie #2 meant I wasn't particularly hungry during #3, so I stuck around from start to finish, capping things off with Spring.
Which, by the way, is fantastic, an early lead on my favorite movies of the year, and I wish it were out already so that I could talk about it more. Heck, let's talk about the end after the review.
"Slut"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
Chloe Okuno's "Slut" is not groundbreaking; it's a fairly straightforward bit of 1970s/1980s exploitation pastiche, from the credits to the hairstyles, but it's one that is happily played straight even if it does have a dark sense of humor. Standard stuff: Mousy girl in glasses who spends all her time looking after her grandmother envies the easy blonde down at the roller rink, but when she gets a little male attention herself, it's not necessarily so nice.
It's a pretty good short, and I like the way that Okuno is careful to make sure that nothing comes entirely out of left field, even if it does mean that there's a veritable Chekhov's Arsenal lying around. She's got a good knack for staging action clearly, and even if the acting is highly variable (star Molly McIntyre has both great and rough moments), she pulls it all together well.
The Sins of Dracula
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
Oh, man, so many angles from which to disdain The Sins of Dracula, just one opening paragraph. I mean, I've recently seen one of the Hammer Draculas that this draws inspiration - do I come at it that way? Or maybe I should consider the question of whether Richard Griffin setting a movie around a community theater company shows self-awareness or a lack thereof. Then again, you don't really need an angle beyond "bad movie that tries to use camp as an excuse".
That starts from the beginning, when a winking warning tells the audience that this movie is about what happens in a faithless world. Soon, nice church-going boy Billy (Jamie Dufault) is telling his pastor (Carmine Capobianco) that he wants to do more than just sing in the choir, getting into theater with his girlfriend Shannon (Sarah Nicklin), even if all the others in the troupe - D&D-loving Traci (Samantha Acampora), self-named NuWave (Jesse Dufault), drug fiend Bandilli (Derek Laurendeau), and gay Lance (Aaron Peaslee) all seem to be people he shouldn't be near. But, of coruse, they aren't a patch on director Lou Perdition (Steven O'Brion) and his girlfriend Kimberly (Elyssa Baldassarri).
None of these guys are particularly convincing teenagers, although I suppose that the filmmakers would say that's part of the joke - it's a straight-faced spoof of shoddy horror movies and Christian scare flicks! The trouble is, it never feels like the genuine more-enthusiasm-than-talent camp that makes such movies memorable, nor does it have the targeted gags to make for good parody. It almost seems cynical, as if Griffin and company know by now that with a few exceptions, the people who show up in they work with aren't that good, so this sort of send-up/homage is done as an excuse. Or even worse, it can feel like laziness - when going for camp, you don't have to come up with actual scares or gags; you can just imitate what they are like.
Full review at EFC.
"I Am Monster"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
Well, that was rather gross.
That's half the point, of course, and that the gross-out is almost exactly half the point (and half the running time) makes "I Am Monster" a great way to examine just how difficult it can be to be a smart person who loves horror. The first half of the short is all in-your-face provocation: Co-writer/director Shannon Lark stars as a woman dressed like a fetish model who goes into a morgue after-hours, chooses the best looking lady corpse in here, and engages in some serious necrophilia aided by what I hope must be custom implements, taking Polaroids throughout. It's all envelope-pushing and apparent objectification, with a couple of moments where Lark and filmmaking partner Lori Bowen take the basic concept to its unnatural conclusion.
Then the supernatural part kicks in - or maybe it's just Vivienne cracking - and things start getting interesting; it becomes more clearly about Vivienne being cut off from actual intimacy. The push and pull between Vivienne and Jason (Adam Cardon) is nifty, but the short doesn't quite have the room to explore her as a potentially multifaceted person with all the exploitation material, and while that's not just there to shock and titillate, that tends to blot the rest out.
It's a nifty short, but it shows the tough balance at play in a good horror story, trying to create something that shocks without totally obliterating what's underneath.
Dys-
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
Maude Michaud's Dys- looks to be on the path to dystopia as it starts, but as with many stories that start with an outbreak, that turns out to be the background for some intense dysfunction. It's the sort of movie that is going to push some a bit too far, but will be absolutely riveting for others.
It starts with some of the usual disturbing signs - news reports of a nasty strain of the flu going around, and a possibly-related murder suicide with rumors of cannibalism. A lot of people in a Montreal photography class are absent, with one heading out just as Sam (Alex Goldrich) starts to deliver his lecture. He's distracted for other reasons; his marriage to model and longtime muse Eva (Shannon Lark) is falling apart. She's finally set to start a new job at a bank when the government institutes a travel ban, and even before a tense dinner with their neighbor (and Sam's best friend) James (Dega Lazare) ends with him coughing up blood in Eva's direction, there are times when you just don't want to be stuck in a small space with certain people.
Hallucinations may be a symptom of this "flu" - or maybe not - and when Michaud combines that with her intentions to reveal these characters' complete backstory slowly, the audience is in for some serious uncertainty from moment to moment. Michaud doesn't just count on everyone being a potentially unreliable narrator, though, finding ways to make the situation incrementally worse before the time for serious rug-pulling comes. She's also quite good at presenting things just a bit larger than completely necessary so that they are remembered later, whether as an explanation or a bit of a fake-out.
Full review at EFC.
"Beating Hearts"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
It's natural to spend much of "Dead Hearts" trying to construct a backstory that explains everything - particularly an opening scene that takes the express route from sweet to horrific - in a way that shifts blame to the least-ugly place it can go, and that's still an ugly, ugly situation.
Writer/director Matthew Garrett's decision to play things somewhat ambiguous keeps things interesting - just how twisted is the relationship between the characters credited as only "The Girl" (Gianna Bruzzese) and "The Grandfather" (Peter Coriaty), what is their endgame, and just how did things get there? Garrett offers no convenient and clear delineation for who made whom a killer.
It's a fine source of unease, although when it comes time to finish the story, that uncertainty does take away from the story having a truly satisfying conclusion. That's quite possibly part of the point, though, and what makes things a bit more unnerving.
The Battery
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
The environment where you see a movie can be pretty important; I first saw The Battery on a Fantasia Festival screener back in 2013, after having already heard the All Things Horror guys rave about it, and didn't see what the big deal was. Seeing it on a big screen, with a crowd, definitely makes for a better experience.
I still don't love the movie, although I appreciate it more afer the second time through. I do sort of wonder what the deal is with that last sequence, and how long it was going on (they really shouldn't have mentioned having to eventually drink their pee, because then I start wondering what they're doing with it). It's an able and often impressive post-apocalyptic story, although it's not really one that uses that environment to get at particularly interesting ideas.
Full review at EFC.
"Dead Hearts"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
"Dead Hearts" is an entertaining little mash-up by Stephen W. Martin, and it feels something like what you'd get if you merged Tim Burton and Wes Anderson, adding in a healthy amount of kung fu. Like Burton & Anderson movies, the result is sometimes a little too precious, but the inventiveness more than balances it out.
The cuteness here involves a nine-year-old undertaker (Valin Shinyei) with a crush on the blind martial-arts master in his elementary-school class (Dalila Bela). Of course, it doesn't last - she moves away and he seldom leaves his mortuary again, until decades later when he shows just how far he will go to share his heart with her.
Context can be king, and, boy, was "Dead Hearts" a lot of fun toward the end of a day filled with grim movies. It's the sort of fantasy that takes a lot for granted, but it's cheerful and sly about it, not quite winking about how it makes sure everyone is wearing masks so that they can sub in stunt performers, or how the fairy tale trappings are played into but made modern without being subverted. It's a fun little movie, and I'm very curious about what sort of a feature Martin might end up making should he get the chance. A Burton/Anderson type who really loves genre movies would be no bad thing.
Spring
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Horror Show, digital)
Every once in a while, a movie will be built in such a way to make you forget what sort of film you came in expecting to see, usually so that it can get a jolt out of genre fans who come in ready for anything. Spring does that, to a certain extent, but takes it a bit further - its switch-up seems less about softening a tough audience up than easing it into something that sounds crazy, even if it winds up being fantastic.
So we start with Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) in California; he dropped out of college to look after his dying mother, and now that she has passed, he's got no reason not to hate the loose end he's at. It leads to a fight, which leads him to leave town for Italy, where he hooks up with a couple of British tourists, winds up in Bari, a small town on the coast. That's where he meets Louise (Nadia Hilker), a grad student researching the genetic irregularities of a relatively isolated population. She's beautiful, smart, and funny - but there's something else that makes her unlike any girl Evan has ever met.
It's a while before we meet Louise, but that's okay, because a real effort is put into making sure that we get to know Evan despite his seeming like just a simple American everyman to contrast with the Italian girl with the big secret. There's obligation but also deep love on display during the one scene with his mother, and a chip on his shoulder soon after that, but the approach matters: He hits back hard when he feels the jolt but is an easygoing softie when just pushed at. Lou Taylor Pucci is seldom pushed to make Evan extraordinary in any specific facet, but he makes sure that the audience likes the guy, making him approachable in his imperfections and having it balance out into a man worth spending time with.
Full review at EFC.
SPOILERS!
I can't talk enough about how much I love the way Benson, Moorhead, and Nadia Hilker built Louise, especially since the temptation to have some kind of "regeneration" sequence (I couldn't get Doctor Who out of my head once Louise's nature was revealed) must have been almost impossible to resist, just to show us what they were talking about rather than coming at it obliquely. The fact that she becomes a different person, influenced by the genetic material of her last lover, means that it makes sense for her to be youthful in mind as well as body, even if she is thousands of years old, which Hilker does carry.
I also really love that, even from that early age, she was trying to explain herself scientifically, even if the concept wasn't quite there yet. The science in the movie is kind of bunk (grumble grumble conservation of matter grumble), but the outlook is refreshing, especially since the easy way out would be to treat love as magic and say that faith is more important than understanding. Instead, Louise likes understanding, and even if there's a level at which it makes her cynical - seeing love as chemicals in the brain and knowing she's never been in that sort of love can do that - it isn't a mark against her. She recognizes the value of ritual as a focus even if she doesn't take it literally, and recognizing her mutation for what it is keeps her from seeing herself as a monster.
And, wow, that last sequence, when she shows Evan her family and says that this is how she knows love is what changes things, is great - playing on her rationality without losing emotional weight. It's where the idea begins to emerge that he can win her even if what we've already learned said that not only will Louise become someone else, but maintaining a relationship with her would be kind of incestual. But there's a price, and it's kind of horrible - while this sort of story traditionally has the immortal feeling diminished by her isolation from regular humanity and lack of love, Louise doesn't want to give up eternity; there's still too much to see, and limiting herself to a mere sixty more years is horrible.
But that's what happens, and while festival-friend Kurt Halfyard's review suggests that Evan & Louise don't last, I interpret the smoldering volcano at the end a little differently; I see it as tying her back to her parents, acknowledging that while they love each other and will love their child - a traditional happy ending - we must also acknowledge that falling in love has killed Louise. She won't be able to regenerate, she may envy her daughter for the long life she will likely lead, she may even resent Evan at times. Maybe, as is traditional, she'll see it as a fair trade-off, but just like the volcano killed her family, her position is now reversed; she'll be the one who dies while someone else lives on, and that's tragic, even if they live a happy life.
!SRELIOPS
Friday, January 30, 2015
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 30 January 2015 - 5 February 2015
Well, it looks like some of the dry spell will finish up next week, so there's that. But for now, it's another quiet week.
I do not know how I will fit all I want to see in before the sci-fi festival, but I'm prioritizing Black Sea, as many Oscar short programs as I can get into, Nanook, Still Alice, A Most Violent Year, and Dr. Phibes. The rest of you, go see The Duke of Burgundy.
- The best-looking wide release is probably Black or White starring Kevin Costner as a grandfather who has lost both his daughter and wife, winding up battling for custody of his granddaughter with the girl's other surviving grandparent, played by Octavia Spencer. It's at Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Square, Revere, and the SuperLux. That is, unless you count A Most Violent Year, which expands to the Somerville, Embassy, Fenway, and Revere, already playing the Coolidge, Kendall Square, and Boston Common.
Less promising-looking is Project Almanac, a youth-oriented time-travel story produced by Michael Bay's company. It's at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere. And, man, The Loft has been sitting on the shelf for three years despite a pretty decent cast for this mystery about five married men who rent a loft to carry on their affairs, only to find a girl dead there one morning. That plays Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.
Black Sea will be playing on relatively few screens - the Embassy, Fenway, and Revere - but it looks pretty good, with Jude Law as a submarine captain searching for Nazi gold underwater, but apparently having to watch his back with both backers and crew. - The Brattle opens The Duke of Burgundy, which is a pretty fantastic weird romance from Peter Strickland, who did the utterly different but similarly brilliant Berberian Sound Studio, in which their mutual interest in entomology is hardly the strangest part of the relationship between a noblewoman and her servant.
They've got more "Mad Romance" as part of the Saturday late-night Reel Weird Brattle series, with this weekend's entry a 35mm print of The Abominable Dr. Phibes, featuring Vincent Price as a scientist who gets gruesome revenge on those whom he blames for killing his wife. It is visually over-the-top and should look great on actual film. - Kendall Square splits one theater between two programs of Oscar-Nominated Shorts, one animated and one live-action. The Coolidge Corner Theatre has the five nominated documentary shorts, splitting them between two programs, mostly in the GoldScreen, so get tickets early.
The Coolidge also kicks off a month of midnight screenings of David Cronenberg films with a 35mm print of eXistenZ. He'll be paying a visit at the end of the month, although that sold out in an afternoon. - Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/iMovieCafe has two subtitled Hindi movies this week. Baby stars Akshay Kumar as a counter-intelligence officer hunting down a gang of international terrorists, while Hawaizaada stars Ayushmann Khurrana as a Mumbai man working on powered flight in 1895, well before the Wright Brothers.
Over at Fenway, the week's day-and-date Chinese release is Running Man, which is apparently a spin-off of a reality show (also popular in Korea) with bigger celebrities, including Wang Boaqiang and Angelababy. Apparently, its formula is akin to The Amazing Race, although it has special movie-like episodes, so who knows what this will be like. - The Harvard Film Archive begins a month-plus-long retrospective of "The Lost Worlds of Robert Flaherty", one of the originators of documentary filmmaking, starting with perhaps his most famous work, 1922's Nanook of the North. It screens Friday at 7pm on 35mm film with Jeff Rapsis on the organ. It will be followed by the next film in their Orson Welles retrospective, Macbeth, also on 35mm. The "Furious Cinema '70 - '77" series continues on Wednesday with a 35mm screening of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
Much of the rest of the weekend will be spent welcoming a special guest, presenting The Visions of Luther Price in three programs on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday nights, with Price on hand to introduce a group of short films on various film formats each evening at 7pm. - The Museum of Fine Arts continues In Case of No Emergency: The Films of Ruben Östlund with Force Majeure on DCP Friday and then 35mm prints of Play (Friday), The Involuntary, and The Guitar Mongoloid (both Saturday). On Wednesday, the February calendar starts with The Films of Stanley Kubrick, roughly chronological with Killer's Kiss (Wednesday & Thursday), Fear and Desire (Wednesday), and Paths of Glory (Thursday).
- There's film at the ICA this weekend, with a 74-minute program of selections from the Ottawa International Animation Festival at 7pm Saturday and noon Sunday.
- The Bright Lights series has two free films this week in the Paramount Theater's Bright Screening Room. On Tuesday, they screen documentary Schooling the World (a look at the effects of modern schooling on indigenous cultures) with discussion from VMA professor Claire Andrade Watkins; Thursday they have social psychologist Dr. Lindsay Beck discussing Boyhood
I do not know how I will fit all I want to see in before the sci-fi festival, but I'm prioritizing Black Sea, as many Oscar short programs as I can get into, Nanook, Still Alice, A Most Violent Year, and Dr. Phibes. The rest of you, go see The Duke of Burgundy.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Strange Magic
Just think: If I'd been able to see this Friday night like I planned, it might have been lumped in with Rocks in My Pockets in a "two very different kinds of animation" post!
Instead, I wound up going Sunday night, and unless someone snuck in behind me after it had already started, I was the only one there for this show. Which is kind of no fun on the best of days - a bad audience can ruin a movie, but a good one enhances it - but I must admit, when I go to a kids' movie like this, I really like to hear how actual kids react to it even if I'm not going to be writing about it. I've still really got no idea whether my niece who freaked out when she opened a fairy activity book at Christmas might react to it, for instance, and I'll trade any awkwardness about being a forty-one-year-old man watching a movie for little girls for that.
(Funny aside: MoviePass had a bug tonight, which means I have to send them a picture of my ticket/receipt in order to get reimbursed. I've got to document that I went to this movie!)
Aside from that, it does make me pretty sad that, as I mention in the eFilmCritic review, this is likely to wind up George Lucas's swan song; by all accounts most of the road map he'd created for future Star Wars films has been discarded by Disney since they acquired Lucasfilm, so unless he does finally follow in Francis Ford Coppola's footsteps and spend his later years making unusual, experimental films, this could be his last credit for doing anything other than creating Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I'll probably spend more time wrestling with his legacy later in the year, when I'll likely rewatch the whole saga in preparation for The Force Awakens, but I never felt particularly angry or betrayed by him like so many others have. I'm going to miss him, and while it probably wasn't realistic to expect he would leave the stage with a creative and box-office hit - careers generally don't end well because otherwise they wouldn't end - it would have been nice.
Strange Magic
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 January 2015 in Regal Fenway #11 (first-run, DCP)
I wanted Strange Magic to be good (and dreaded it being otherwise) a bit more than most movies. It will, after all, likely be the last screen credit for George Lucas other than "based upon Star Wars created by", and no matter how much his legacy has soured for many, it would be nice to see him retire on something good. It's directed by Gary Rydstrom, who has done a lot of great sound work and directed two animated shorts for Pixar. Plus, I've got an eight-year-old niece who loves fairies. It mostly winds up a mess, but I'll take that over hating it.
It takes place on the border of the Fairy Kingdom and Dark Forest, which is where the primroses that can be used to make love potions grow. Or would, if the Bog King (voice of Alan Cumming) didn't both make sure the plants were cut down by his goblins as soon as they bloomed and keep the Sugar Plum Fairy (voice of Kristin Chenoweth) who can make such things locked up. Meanwhile, on the other side of the border, fairy princess Marianne (voice of Evan Rachel Wood) is about to marry handsome soldier Roland (voice of Sam Palladio) when she catches him cheating. She doesn't take it well, but her sister Dawn (voice of Meredith Anne Bull) is still boy-crazy, much to the chagrin of best friend Sunny the elf (voice of Elijah Kelly). Roland, still wanting to be king someday, convinces Sunny that a love potion could help them win the sisters' hearts, although those things tend to attract trouble-making imps.
The script is a bit of a mess at points, and like a lot of movies meant for girls but (mostly) written by men, it often has trouble not playing into the stereotypes even as it wants to rise above them. For example, the writers know that "love potions" are dishonest shortcuts, but they aren't going to fully confront how horrible they are, and that seems kind of weak so soon after Maleficent. The characters' personalities could be a little sharper, especially the ladies - Dawn kind of needs her own thing other than being attracted to the guy of the moment, and Marianne's shift from flighty and clumsy to sword-swinging tough girl is kind of clumsy.
Full review at EFC.
Instead, I wound up going Sunday night, and unless someone snuck in behind me after it had already started, I was the only one there for this show. Which is kind of no fun on the best of days - a bad audience can ruin a movie, but a good one enhances it - but I must admit, when I go to a kids' movie like this, I really like to hear how actual kids react to it even if I'm not going to be writing about it. I've still really got no idea whether my niece who freaked out when she opened a fairy activity book at Christmas might react to it, for instance, and I'll trade any awkwardness about being a forty-one-year-old man watching a movie for little girls for that.
(Funny aside: MoviePass had a bug tonight, which means I have to send them a picture of my ticket/receipt in order to get reimbursed. I've got to document that I went to this movie!)
Aside from that, it does make me pretty sad that, as I mention in the eFilmCritic review, this is likely to wind up George Lucas's swan song; by all accounts most of the road map he'd created for future Star Wars films has been discarded by Disney since they acquired Lucasfilm, so unless he does finally follow in Francis Ford Coppola's footsteps and spend his later years making unusual, experimental films, this could be his last credit for doing anything other than creating Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I'll probably spend more time wrestling with his legacy later in the year, when I'll likely rewatch the whole saga in preparation for The Force Awakens, but I never felt particularly angry or betrayed by him like so many others have. I'm going to miss him, and while it probably wasn't realistic to expect he would leave the stage with a creative and box-office hit - careers generally don't end well because otherwise they wouldn't end - it would have been nice.
Strange Magic
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 January 2015 in Regal Fenway #11 (first-run, DCP)
I wanted Strange Magic to be good (and dreaded it being otherwise) a bit more than most movies. It will, after all, likely be the last screen credit for George Lucas other than "based upon Star Wars created by", and no matter how much his legacy has soured for many, it would be nice to see him retire on something good. It's directed by Gary Rydstrom, who has done a lot of great sound work and directed two animated shorts for Pixar. Plus, I've got an eight-year-old niece who loves fairies. It mostly winds up a mess, but I'll take that over hating it.
It takes place on the border of the Fairy Kingdom and Dark Forest, which is where the primroses that can be used to make love potions grow. Or would, if the Bog King (voice of Alan Cumming) didn't both make sure the plants were cut down by his goblins as soon as they bloomed and keep the Sugar Plum Fairy (voice of Kristin Chenoweth) who can make such things locked up. Meanwhile, on the other side of the border, fairy princess Marianne (voice of Evan Rachel Wood) is about to marry handsome soldier Roland (voice of Sam Palladio) when she catches him cheating. She doesn't take it well, but her sister Dawn (voice of Meredith Anne Bull) is still boy-crazy, much to the chagrin of best friend Sunny the elf (voice of Elijah Kelly). Roland, still wanting to be king someday, convinces Sunny that a love potion could help them win the sisters' hearts, although those things tend to attract trouble-making imps.
The script is a bit of a mess at points, and like a lot of movies meant for girls but (mostly) written by men, it often has trouble not playing into the stereotypes even as it wants to rise above them. For example, the writers know that "love potions" are dishonest shortcuts, but they aren't going to fully confront how horrible they are, and that seems kind of weak so soon after Maleficent. The characters' personalities could be a little sharper, especially the ladies - Dawn kind of needs her own thing other than being attracted to the guy of the moment, and Marianne's shift from flighty and clumsy to sword-swinging tough girl is kind of clumsy.
Full review at EFC.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Rocks in My Pockets
I missed the Chlotrudis Society nominations meeting yesterday to go to the Boston Horror Show, which may have been a good thing where this movie was concerned, because there are some people on the mailing list who have been championing it rather strongly over recent weeks, and I can totally see this being a case where they push it for every eligible category, and I try to hold my tongue about not liking it, but...
I wanted to like it. There were plenty of moments when I was staring at the screen agape, all "holy cow look at that", and the fact that this is a extremely impressive piece of animation isn't the only reason to like it. Unfortunately, it's got the sort of narration that has me saying "shut up shut up shut up shutupshutup!" under my breath, glancing at the clock on the Brattle's wall to see how much longer until I'm actually let go. It is frustrating as can be; I can't remember the last time one element of a movie has so thoroughly wrecked my enjoyment.
Speaking of the narration in a different sense: The IMDB shows this as Latvia's submission for the Foreign-Language Film Oscar, but I recall precious little (if any) of the film being in anything but English. Given the nature of the production - there is no dialogue, just voice-over narration - I wonder if there is just a completely different soundtrack in the version submitted.
Rocks in My Pockets
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (Some of the Best of 2014, DCP)
I want to champion Rocks in My Pockets; it is a striking animated film made with adults in mind, and one that tackles a difficult but important subject head-on. The world needs movies like that. The thing is, the world also needs them to be something other than a chore to sit through. That isn't to say that a film about depression and suicide should be easy, or fun, but it needs to hook the audience, and at the risk of sounding uncaring, this one can get very tedious at points.
It starts out provocatively enough, with filmmaker and narrator Signe Baumane describing a dream about watching her grandmother Anna attempt suicide, and how she would not make the same mistakes Anna does in this dream, because she has given plenty of thought about how to do it right. It turns out that there is a history of mental illness and suicide among the women of Baumane's Latvian family, and she recounts five: Herself, Anna, and three cousins - Miranda, whom Signe was close to; the beautiful and aloof Linda; and Irbe, who casually mentions to Signe one day that she hears voices.
All five of these tales have elements in common - familial and cultural pressures to not reveal this "weakness", the looming presence of the Soviet Union, which drastically upends circumstances and has only clumsy pharmacological treatment on offer for mental illness, the stricter bonds of propriety placed upon women than men. It's to Baumane's credit that, while she gives the bulk of the movie over to Anna (she lived an eventful life even without urges to relinquish it), she finds ways to differentiate these tales and characters who are often only met briefly. Her drawing style may be simple and not given to animated wild takes, but there's a common unease to her characters that transfers readily to the audience.
Full review at EFC.
I wanted to like it. There were plenty of moments when I was staring at the screen agape, all "holy cow look at that", and the fact that this is a extremely impressive piece of animation isn't the only reason to like it. Unfortunately, it's got the sort of narration that has me saying "shut up shut up shut up shutupshutup!" under my breath, glancing at the clock on the Brattle's wall to see how much longer until I'm actually let go. It is frustrating as can be; I can't remember the last time one element of a movie has so thoroughly wrecked my enjoyment.
Speaking of the narration in a different sense: The IMDB shows this as Latvia's submission for the Foreign-Language Film Oscar, but I recall precious little (if any) of the film being in anything but English. Given the nature of the production - there is no dialogue, just voice-over narration - I wonder if there is just a completely different soundtrack in the version submitted.
Rocks in My Pockets
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (Some of the Best of 2014, DCP)
I want to champion Rocks in My Pockets; it is a striking animated film made with adults in mind, and one that tackles a difficult but important subject head-on. The world needs movies like that. The thing is, the world also needs them to be something other than a chore to sit through. That isn't to say that a film about depression and suicide should be easy, or fun, but it needs to hook the audience, and at the risk of sounding uncaring, this one can get very tedious at points.
It starts out provocatively enough, with filmmaker and narrator Signe Baumane describing a dream about watching her grandmother Anna attempt suicide, and how she would not make the same mistakes Anna does in this dream, because she has given plenty of thought about how to do it right. It turns out that there is a history of mental illness and suicide among the women of Baumane's Latvian family, and she recounts five: Herself, Anna, and three cousins - Miranda, whom Signe was close to; the beautiful and aloof Linda; and Irbe, who casually mentions to Signe one day that she hears voices.
All five of these tales have elements in common - familial and cultural pressures to not reveal this "weakness", the looming presence of the Soviet Union, which drastically upends circumstances and has only clumsy pharmacological treatment on offer for mental illness, the stricter bonds of propriety placed upon women than men. It's to Baumane's credit that, while she gives the bulk of the movie over to Anna (she lived an eventful life even without urges to relinquish it), she finds ways to differentiate these tales and characters who are often only met briefly. Her drawing style may be simple and not given to animated wild takes, but there's a common unease to her characters that transfers readily to the audience.
Full review at EFC.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
This Week In Tickets: 11 January 2015 - 17 January 2015
I'm going to call this caught up, because with the Boston Horror Show today and the Sci-Fi Festival in a couple of weeks, it may be some time before I can say that again.
It turned out to be a busy week, and the surprising thing is that I got a lot of writing done while still seeing all of these movies. It doesn't usually work that way!
The week started out with Tevar, which, well, was not auspicious. It's a pretty bad Bollywood movie, probably getting a little benefit of the doubt because it wasn't the visual incompetence of Taken 3 from the night before.
Things improved the next day with The Overnighters at the Brattle. It was part of their "Best of 2014" series and I can't argue against it belonging there. It's an interestingly tight focus on how a lot of things where our support systems fall over (the free market does not work smoothly, and the church does not always practice what it preaches), and definitely one of 2014's more interesting documentaries.
I took Tuesday off and went to see Predestination at Fresh Pond on Wednesday, which meant I supported this movie I'd seen at Fantasia last July with a little more money than I might have. I don't mind doing so; it's well deserved and I was glad to see that I wasn't alone in the theater. As at Fantasia, demand seemed to be a little better than expected, even if it was also out on VOD.
Oscar nominations came out Thursday, but that wasn't why I saw Whiplash that night - I had been meaning to catch it for months, but my timing was off, or there was something else that was leaving that night, etc. It's a pretty great little movie, though, and the nominations meant there was a packed house. Not sure why it cleared out before the credits ended, though - if you liked that movie, wouldn't you want to hear more of the drumming?
My Friday night plan got kind of messed up when the bus back into town from Burlington was almost twenty minutes late - and given that that's how long they are spaced, the next bus actually pulled ahead of us by the time we arrived in Alewife. Then the Red Line was running slow because of a disabled train. So, no getting to Fenway for a 6:55 show, and I instead wound up seeing Spare Parts at Boston Common. I don't regret it, though - it's a fun little movie that fits its template well, and was more up-front than usual in the end credits about compositing two people and casting more conventionally-attractive people that the real life students.
That meant waiting until the next afternoon to see 20 One Again, which turned out to be a remake of another movie I saw at Fantasia. Kind of nice to revisit my favorite festival roughly midway between two editions! The evening was kind of in that vein, to, with Blackhat taking place in Hong Kong and Indonesia (heck, I think I've seen another action sequence take place in a half-finished building that Mann used in Jakarta).
Predestination
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 January 2015 in Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond #4 (first-run, DCP)
Predestination was always going to be an interesting one to see a second time around - it's a twisty pretzel of a time-travel story, built in such a way to have a "second time around" in the first viewing. I'm glad to see that it holds up very well - granted, I had some vague memory of the original story going in, so it wasn't all surprise revelations for me the first time - and I think that's in part because the Spierig Brothers knew it would be seen that way, and the puzzle-box aspect thus was not enough.
Plus, Sarah Snook is still fantastic here. The filmmakers ask an awful lot out of her, and she delivers in spades. Lots of people in time-travel movies have to meet their future selves, but few have the challenges Ms. Snook does, and she kills it. Ethan Hawke is pretty good as well, as is the "alternate-1960s-the-way-Heinlein-wrote-it" world the Spierigs create.
Still one of the best recent sci-fi films, and I can't wait to see what they do next.
Full review on EFC.
Blackhat
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 January 2015 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP)
There were a couple of times while watching Blackhat where I joked to myself that it's too bad so much was set in Hong Kong, because it meant that I wanted to see the Johnnie To version of this movie. That passed, though - Michael Mann is no slouch at this sort of thing either, and he built a heck of a movie here, It kicks off with a great visualization of the inside of a computer, both giving the audience an idea of what's going on and reminding us that we don't really understand it at once, and keeps the good work up straight through a technical but still suspenseful body, right down to an impressively violent end.
Mann's approach is businesslike, which may turn off some people, but I kind of love it - the way the various cops and accomplices go about the investigation adds urgency, and the way that Tang Wei plays her Chen Lien's pairing off with Chris Hemsworth's Nick Hathaway is impressively subtle. There's an self-destructive history to her only vaguely alluded to in the dialogue, because Michael Mann and writer Morgan Davis Foehl aren't making a movie about that, even if it is a big part of who she is and why she doesn't feel like a cardboard cut-out.
It's a little harder to say the same for Hemsworth's Hathaway; I don't care that he's handsome and muscular (hey, all of us IT guys could be!), but he's a little too good at everything; he doesn't seem to have either the urgency of the other characters or a defining sort of restraint. He doesn't fit into a team story and isn't quite big enough to control the movie on his own.
Still, he's in the middle of a movie that looks as great as anything else Mann has done - contrary to what I said about wanting to see Johnnie To's version, I loved that Mann seeks Hong Kong differently - and sticks the landing in terms of the plot and villains being both monstrous and banal at the same time. Supposedly the hacking action here is more believable than is usual, and I believe it is, but there is an awful lot that just feels right about this movie, making it a heck of a thriller.
It turned out to be a busy week, and the surprising thing is that I got a lot of writing done while still seeing all of these movies. It doesn't usually work that way!
The week started out with Tevar, which, well, was not auspicious. It's a pretty bad Bollywood movie, probably getting a little benefit of the doubt because it wasn't the visual incompetence of Taken 3 from the night before.
Things improved the next day with The Overnighters at the Brattle. It was part of their "Best of 2014" series and I can't argue against it belonging there. It's an interestingly tight focus on how a lot of things where our support systems fall over (the free market does not work smoothly, and the church does not always practice what it preaches), and definitely one of 2014's more interesting documentaries.
I took Tuesday off and went to see Predestination at Fresh Pond on Wednesday, which meant I supported this movie I'd seen at Fantasia last July with a little more money than I might have. I don't mind doing so; it's well deserved and I was glad to see that I wasn't alone in the theater. As at Fantasia, demand seemed to be a little better than expected, even if it was also out on VOD.
Oscar nominations came out Thursday, but that wasn't why I saw Whiplash that night - I had been meaning to catch it for months, but my timing was off, or there was something else that was leaving that night, etc. It's a pretty great little movie, though, and the nominations meant there was a packed house. Not sure why it cleared out before the credits ended, though - if you liked that movie, wouldn't you want to hear more of the drumming?
My Friday night plan got kind of messed up when the bus back into town from Burlington was almost twenty minutes late - and given that that's how long they are spaced, the next bus actually pulled ahead of us by the time we arrived in Alewife. Then the Red Line was running slow because of a disabled train. So, no getting to Fenway for a 6:55 show, and I instead wound up seeing Spare Parts at Boston Common. I don't regret it, though - it's a fun little movie that fits its template well, and was more up-front than usual in the end credits about compositing two people and casting more conventionally-attractive people that the real life students.
That meant waiting until the next afternoon to see 20 One Again, which turned out to be a remake of another movie I saw at Fantasia. Kind of nice to revisit my favorite festival roughly midway between two editions! The evening was kind of in that vein, to, with Blackhat taking place in Hong Kong and Indonesia (heck, I think I've seen another action sequence take place in a half-finished building that Mann used in Jakarta).
Predestination
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 January 2015 in Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond #4 (first-run, DCP)
Predestination was always going to be an interesting one to see a second time around - it's a twisty pretzel of a time-travel story, built in such a way to have a "second time around" in the first viewing. I'm glad to see that it holds up very well - granted, I had some vague memory of the original story going in, so it wasn't all surprise revelations for me the first time - and I think that's in part because the Spierig Brothers knew it would be seen that way, and the puzzle-box aspect thus was not enough.
Plus, Sarah Snook is still fantastic here. The filmmakers ask an awful lot out of her, and she delivers in spades. Lots of people in time-travel movies have to meet their future selves, but few have the challenges Ms. Snook does, and she kills it. Ethan Hawke is pretty good as well, as is the "alternate-1960s-the-way-Heinlein-wrote-it" world the Spierigs create.
Still one of the best recent sci-fi films, and I can't wait to see what they do next.
Full review on EFC.
Blackhat
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 January 2015 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP)
There were a couple of times while watching Blackhat where I joked to myself that it's too bad so much was set in Hong Kong, because it meant that I wanted to see the Johnnie To version of this movie. That passed, though - Michael Mann is no slouch at this sort of thing either, and he built a heck of a movie here, It kicks off with a great visualization of the inside of a computer, both giving the audience an idea of what's going on and reminding us that we don't really understand it at once, and keeps the good work up straight through a technical but still suspenseful body, right down to an impressively violent end.
Mann's approach is businesslike, which may turn off some people, but I kind of love it - the way the various cops and accomplices go about the investigation adds urgency, and the way that Tang Wei plays her Chen Lien's pairing off with Chris Hemsworth's Nick Hathaway is impressively subtle. There's an self-destructive history to her only vaguely alluded to in the dialogue, because Michael Mann and writer Morgan Davis Foehl aren't making a movie about that, even if it is a big part of who she is and why she doesn't feel like a cardboard cut-out.
It's a little harder to say the same for Hemsworth's Hathaway; I don't care that he's handsome and muscular (hey, all of us IT guys could be!), but he's a little too good at everything; he doesn't seem to have either the urgency of the other characters or a defining sort of restraint. He doesn't fit into a team story and isn't quite big enough to control the movie on his own.
Still, he's in the middle of a movie that looks as great as anything else Mann has done - contrary to what I said about wanting to see Johnnie To's version, I loved that Mann seeks Hong Kong differently - and sticks the landing in terms of the plot and villains being both monstrous and banal at the same time. Supposedly the hacking action here is more believable than is usual, and I believe it is, but there is an awful lot that just feels right about this movie, making it a heck of a thriller.
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