Appropriate Behavior

As much as I know that a gallery space is the natural home of independent film presentations like this - way too off the beaten path to get anything like a run, but not obviously the work of a respected-enough artiste to play a bigger venue - it feels like a weird place for me to be, even if I would have liked to move some of the stuff on their walls to my own and a twitter-friend works at and/or exhibits at Uforge, where the Chlotrudis Society is showing a few of the "buried treasure" nominees this winter. I'll be missing the next one, but take a look at what's under "events" to see if you've got a moment.

I probably won't see enough to be able to vote in this category, which is a bummer, but I get really busy with other movie stuff when the rest of the group sees a wide-open period for catching up. I do kind of hope the next one is a bit brighter - this looked really dark, with some scenes seeming like complete blackness.

If I do get to another one, I'm going to have to remember to give myself more time to get out to Jamaica Plain. The Orange Line isn't bad, but I didn't take Google Maps seriously when it said the half a mile from the station would take fifteen minutes to walk, but JP has some twisty roads.

Appropriate Behavior

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 February 2016 in Uforge Gallery (Chlotrudis, projected DVD)

Movies like Appropriate Behavior are good checks for figuring out just to what degree you are becoming a grumpy old person. Do you find the main character whiny and irritating from the start? Do you get over it? Certainly, the filmmakers have a fair amount of say in this, especially in terms of overcoming those issues and becoming reasonably entertaining, as this one manages.

It follows Shirin (Desiree Akhavan), who is just breaking up with girlfriend Maxine (Rebecca Henderson) as things get started, although a fair amount of time will be spent looking at that relationship from start to finish. Shirin has not told her parents (Anh Duong & Hooman Majd) that she's bisexual, and she's not exactly putting her M.A. in journalism to good use, either. Her friend Crystal (Halley Feiffer) does get her a line on a job, though, although teaching an after-school movie-making class to five-year-olds is probably not her dream career.

Desiree Akhavan writes and directs in addition to playing Shirin, and it often seems like one of those cases where the filmmaker has taken "write what you know" to heart even though they don't have the age or experience of doing anything but studying film and making film/TV/web videos. So there's a lot of chatting, bonding over what people dislike, and general obliviousness that takes a while to come across as self-aware; self-centered characters in a relationship (or just out of it) that doesn't have enough warmth or scope to matter to an audience.

Full review on EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 5 February 2016 - 11 February 2016

So, between the sci-fi festival, Chinese New Year, and a new Coen Brothers movie, I figure to enter movie theaters late Friday afternoon and not leave until President's Day, with brief trips to work to break it up.

• Most of that time will be in the lower floor of The Somerville Theatre, seeing films selected as part of the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival. It is a long warm-up to next weekend's main event, and I've had some issues with it before, but let's try to be optimistic before being cynical. Warner Archive night on Wednesday looks particularly fun.
• That location is also one of the theaters opening Hail, Caesar!, the star-studded new screwball comedy from Joel & Ethan Coen. It gets the big room at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, and also plays at Apple Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
  
  The Coolidge will also have two programs worth of Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts in the Screening Room. Separate admissions. They also start a "highways to hell" program for the midnights with a 35mm print of The Hitcher on Friday and Saturday night. The original, with C. Thomas Howell and Rutger Hauer. There's also Open Screen on Tuesday and Mortified's Doomed Valentine's Day.
• It's Chinese New Year come Monday, which means this is one of the biggest film release weekends in the Chinas, which means we get a couple new ones at Boston Common. Amusingly, they're both sequels to movies which haven't had any sort of official release in the United States, although we should be able to jump in pretty clean. The Monkey King 2 recasts the main character with the actor who played the villain in the first one (Aaron Kwok), and features him meeting the monk with whom he would make the Journey to the West, as well as Gong Li and Feng Shaofeng. From Vegas to Macau 3 brings back Chow Yun-fat and Nicholas Tse as master gamblers in a slapstick comedy (at least, if the first is anything to go on). Amusingly, Monkey King 2 is in 3D and Vegas to Macau 3 in 2D. Ip Man 3 also sticks around Boston Common and Revere.
• Aside from Hail,Casesar!, the multiplexes also get a couple other things. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is pretty much what it sounds like, with Lily James as Elizabeth in a version of the Jane Austen story with the undead added. It's at Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere. Those locations also get The Choice, the most recent adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel, this one apparently involving euthanasia.
  
  Boston Common also re-opens Creed, upconverted to 3D for some reason, and has a GlobeDocs preview screening of Where to Invade Next on Wednesday evening. Speaking of the Globe, Assembly Row brings back Spotlight (which has been hanging around other theatersas well).
• Originally slated to play at the sci-fi festival, Dreams Rewired plays The Brattle Theatre from Friday to Sunday. Narrated by Tilda Swinton and pieced together from footage from silent films and early talkies, it describes the history of communication and media. That also lets them segue into a brief all-35mm Surveillance Cinema series, with a double feature of 1984 & Brazil on Tuesday, Caché & Red Road together on Wednesday, and single features of The Lives of Others and Enemy of the State on Thursday. In between, there's a DocYard showing of Kingdom of Shadows, an up-close look at the US/Mexico drug war, on Monday, with director Bernardo Ruiz on-hand for a Q&A.
• Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond has a few Indian movies opening this weekend and mostly sharing one screen: Bangalore Naatkal is a subtitled Tamil comedy, Speedunnodu a Telugu romantic comedy, Visaranai a Tamil thriller, and Irudhi Suttru is a subtitled boxing drama. They will also be opening the American coming-out comedy 4th Man Out, although just for a couple shows a day.
• The Harvard Film Archive moves the weekend's "Innocence Abroad" screening up to Friday night this week, with the film in question being David Lean's Summertime, an intimate picture featuring Katharine Hepburn as an American spinster taking a Venice vacation in the 1950s. They continue their Jean Epstein retrospective later that evening with a collection of shorter works, and then re-show Jean Rivette's Out 1 Saturday and Sunday (warning: it's a lot of movie). Then on Monday, VES professor Giuliana Bruno introduces No Home Movie, the final film by Chantal Akerman, which focuses on the relationship between the filmmaker and her mother.
• The Museum of Fine Arts offers a few more chances to see Matthew Barney's three-act beast River of Fundament, with the complete trilogy showing this Friday and Sunday while there are separate shows of Act 1 on Wednesday, Act 2 on Thursday, and Act 3 next Friday. In between, they are also doing Stanley Kubrick: A Retrospective with Fear and Desire (Sunday/Wednesday), Killer's Kiss (Wednesday/Thursday), and The Killing (Thursday).
• The Institute of Contemporary Art will be screening the Oscar-Nominated Live Action Shorts Sunday afternoon. Screenings will continue through the month and both this and the Animated program continues at Kendall Square (which otherwise leaves its schedule as-is).
• This week's Bright Lights teams up with the UMass Boston Film Series for Tuesday's free screening of The Wolfpack; several members of the Angulo family will be on-hand to chat afterward. Producer Anne Carey will visit on Thursday for a screening of Diary of a Teenage Girl

So, yeah, I'll be living at the Somerville Theatre for the sci-fi fest with weekend-morning jaunts downtown for Chinese. I kind of wish the Blu-rays of the earlier installments of those had arrived by now, but when was I doing to watch them?

The Finest Hours

I haven't been to the "MX4D" screen at the Showcase Cinema in Revere yet, and they don't even have The Finest Hours playinig on it this week. Pretty clearly a waste, because as much as it's a decent movie and machines which jerk the audience around are probably an even greater affront to the director's vision and the idea of cinema as an art form than a hasty 3D post-conversion job, but sitting in theater #2 of the Somerville Theatre, the screen not quite filling my field of vision, I couldn't help but think that would be a lot of fun.

One thing that I did like about it was that the ship itself seemed right. I love walking around on old ships when I travel, loving the cramped spaces and taking a bunch of pictures that probably don't do much for anybody I show them to. Because of my hobbies, I do notice that shooting a movie on them would be night-impossible - there is just no room, so it's impressive how well this movie makes it feel right while still giving everybody room to move.

The Finest Hours

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2016 in Somerville Theatre #2 (first-run, DCP)

Movies like The Finest Hours win people Oscars. Not folks like Chris Pine and Carry Affleck, but the guys listed as doing research and development for the visual effects companies at the other end of the closing credits, who spend months researching the motion of large bodies of water and figuring out how to replicate it on-screen while other engineers build state of the art machinery to both safely twist a set in any conceivable direction and precisely record this movement (while being buffeted by wind and rain machines) so that a third set of people can digitally stitch it together. These accomplishments alone aren't enough to rate a ticket purchase today, but they're a big part of why a movie like this can be dismissed as enjoyable but not extraordinary, and they'll be making movies better well after we move on to the next thing at the multiplex.

All of this technology is in service of a story about people pulling off some impressive feats of their own when a storm and the captain's recklessness tears the tanker Pendleton in half off the coast of Massachusetts in 1952. With the ship's control and communication systems down, engineer Ray Sybert (Affleck) hatches a desperate plan to riff up a manual rudder and run what's left of the ship aground, hoping for rescue before the rising water levels flood the engines and render the pumps inoperable. That rescue will have to come from Bernie Webber (Pine), helming a boat small enough that just getting out of the harbor through the waves the storm is kicking up alive is unlikely.

There are, of course, plenty of other things going on around this - it's about a year since Bernie was unable to rescue the crew of another boat in a similar storm; things are getting serious with Miriam (Holliday Grainger), who is modern and assertive in most ways but skittish about the water; some in the Pendleton crew want to take their chances in the lifeboats; and many of them aren't too fond of Sybert - as there must be to create a little bit of space between the dangerous bits and give the audience reason to remember these guys' names. It's basic stuff that shows up in most movies of this type but the screenwriters seem to do better than most in not piling on with events that oversell the story and director Craig Gillespie doesn't emphasize personal drama in a way that implies that this is what's really challenging very often.

Full review on EFC.

Kung Fu Panda 3

Some recommended reading that I was thinking of during the early going here: A recent "Kaiju Shakedown" column by Grady Hendrix, in which he uses the recent release of Ip Man 3 to discuss the see-saw history of kung fu and wuxia in Chinese entertainment. It's not quite the way is always thought of it - I'd always had the impression of wuxia as swordplay versus kung fu's fists and feet - but the way Hendrix divides it up is interesting and gives me a little hope that maybe the more realistic martial arts will ascend again, because it's cyclical.

It came to mind, obviously, because of the opening sequence which takes in the spirit realm which is a grander sort of fantasy than the film has traded in, which feels like graduation for the characters, although it makes Po and the other characters so powerful that it's hard to imagine what sort of foe they could fight next time. But, like I mention in the review, it seems like a good place to stop. Ironically, that's where Madagascar 3 ended up when they added Bryan Cranston to the cast - more obviously done, sure, but threatening to overflow anyway.

Not that the Kung Fu Panda series is likely to end here - it actually opened bigger in China than the U.S., and there's no way a studio is going to drop something with that sort of pan-Pacific appeal right now. Heck, DreamWorks even worked things so that they could get it considered a Chinese production - it is technically a co-production with "Oriental DreamWorks" which is technically a separate company - so it isn't considered part of the quota of 34 foreign films per year which can only play 30 days each. Po and company are probably the company's best beachhead into that territory, so I don't see them being retired.

Kung Fu Panda 3

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2016 in Regal Fenway #7 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

Kung Fu Panda 2 ended with a tease of a hidden panda village, which makes it surprising to me that DreamWorks let four and a half years pass before following that up. Sure, that's partly just how it goes with animation - this stuff takes time - but it's a heck of a long gap considering that the kids who loved the first back in 2008 are teenagers by now, probably feeling like they've outgrown this sort of thing. And while these movies are still plenty of fun, they haven't exactly grown up with their audience.

Before reuniting title character Po (voice of Jack Black) with his long-lost biological father Li Shan (voice of Bryan Cranston), the film introduces its villain: Kai (voice of JK Simmons), a former friend of Master Oogway (voice of Randall Duk Kim) dispatched to the spirit realm 500 years ago when he tried to use the pandas' chi techniques to conquer the world and since forgotten. As Kai escapes to the mortal realm, Master Shifu (voice of Dustin Hoffman) announces his plans to retire and put Po in charge of training, although both Li's arrival and Kai's approach will have the adopted Po seeking to reconnect with his panda roots, especially if that's how he can learn how to harness chi and defeat Kai.

In the same way that the first Kung Fu Panda seemed like a stroke of obvious genius for making characters to match animal-inspired fighting styles, the opening scenes of this movie are a delight: It's every trippy "higher plane" scene from a fantasy wuxia film realized in a way that even the best wire-fu and digital backlot techniques can't quite manage, and that it involves an ox and a turtle doesn't really matter. Heck, that helps keep the audience from getting jolted out of the picture because the characters are doing things that they shouldn't be able to. As expected, this sort of scene demonstrates just how well DreamWorks animators use 3D, as in addition to how great their rendering engine is throughout. Aside from the tech, the filmmakers do a great job of filling the screen with good-looking stuff without it becoming too much for the adults in the audience, even during a big action scene where Po and half a dozen other kung fu matters have enough to keep them busy. They get a lot of good jokes out of their menagerie of characters as well.

Full review on EFC.

Jane Got a Gun

In addition to the Weinstein Brothers shenanigans that have kept Jane Got a Gun on the shelf for two years or so, there was a Relativity banner at the front of the movie, although I don't recall seeing them credited in the titles at all, so I'm curious as to whether that was also part of the film's sporty history. That production company with Sudo ambitions seems to be reaching the end of its bankruptcy reorganization, so I can see that being a hold-up.

Even if that's the case, there seems to be little doubt that Lynn Ramsey walking away days before production started is the defining event for this movie, no matter how much has happened since then. The "trivia" part of this thing's IMDB page is a dizzying merry-go-round of recasting, people quitting in solidarity, and others coming in last-minute. At the time, I wondered why the film went ahead at all and couldn't come up with any answer other than Natalie Portman still being attached and really wanting to do it, especially since she was a producer as well as the star. I suppose it's also possible enough work had been done (and enough people were being paid regardless) that the producers figured they ought to spend a bit more money to have a movie that might sell some tickets, discs, and streams to eventually make up the difference.

As much as I tried to review just what was on screen without making any suppositions, I can't help but be really curious about how the switch off directors and subsequent recasting changed the movie. Portman and Joel Edgerton were Ramsey hires (though Edgerton for a different role), and they give pretty low-key performances, with Ram McGregor a bit more boisterous, and I wonder how much of that was the holdover carrying Ramsay's vision of the movie (presumably very naturalistic with the director working to pull something sharp from her cast) over despite O'Connor's more meat-and-paps style. You kind of see it in the general look of the movie, too - everything is built to be weathered, worn-down, and busy in the present, and I suspect Ramsey and her cinematographer might have gone for tighter, darker shots than the brightly-lit movie (with one notable exception) that got made. Even if that's not the case, it must be pretty strange to take over a wild west town built to another filmmaker's specifications.

SPOILERS!

The end, for what it's worth, feels like it must have been changed at some point, like some sort of gut-punch has been removed and an improbable reunion inserted in its stead. It makes the movie feel like it's about it always being possible to return to how things should be despite everything up until then being about how things have changed the characters irrevocably.

!SRELIOPS

And for one last observation - digital is no way to see a Western, no matter who did what. Sitting in the front section for what is presumably 2K projection probably doesn't help, but seeing it that way just looked wrong.

Jane Got a Gun

* * (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2016 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, DCP)

I wonder, idly, if The Weinstein Company sat on Jane Got a Gun so long in the hopes that it would become "that sort of disappointing western" rather than "that movie that self-destructed in spectacular fashion and was put back together without many of the things that made it interesting". I don't know that it becomes a great movie with Lynn Ramsey directing the original cast, but it seems like one where just a little more investment could have made a big difference.

It opens with Jane Hammond (Natalie Portman) playing with her daughter at their homestead in 1871 New Mexico, just as husband Bill (Noah Emmerich) arrives. It's not a happy reunion, as he falls off his horse with three bullets in his back. Old enemies the Bishop Boys have caught up with him, and with "Ham" to injured to move, Jane drops their daughter off with a friend and loads up on weapons, recruiting gunslinger Dan Frost (Joel Edgerton) to defend them. Billy Bishop (Ewan McGregor) has about a dozen men, and there's also the issue of what Jane's and Dan's history adds to the situation.

Putting these three in a house together should make things plenty tense regardless of how close the Bishop Boys are, and yet it often seems surprisingly businesslike, with the idea of these three being an uneasy alliance far more involving than what actually happens on screen. There are flashbacks enough to go around, and the occasional conversation discussing what those scenes miss, but this serves more to point out that there's tension and history between these people, and maybe explain it, but seldom to bring it into sharp relief. The best moments along those lines are probably the least articulated verbally, as Ham lies in the bed, every part of his body rapidly failing him, watching his wife's former lover take his place. It's a hellish scenario and director Gavin O'Connor makes the most of it, blurring the picture in point-of-view shots and being very careful with when Ham is in frame.

Full review on EFC.

Mojave

Barely getting this up before the film finishes it's Brattle run, but that's OK; it's available on demand, which itself probably explains why its theatrical presence is so tiny. I like it, though, and it looks nice enough on screen to be worth a trip to the theater.

One thing that does kind of interest me:

SPOILERS!

In the review, I imply that writer/director William Monahan likely identified more with the bookish hitman than the film director, which is obviously complete supposition. But if it is the case, I'm curious what the end means. Maybe nothing, maybe just that even when you think you've got something figured out, it can turn around and bite you in the ass.

!SRELIOPS

Mojave

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 January 2016 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run/Special Presentation, DCP)

William Monahan's new film is right on the line between the crime movies where the filmmakers are aware of the genre's tropes and can therefore share a wink as it uses or avoids them and the movies which spend so much time examining their own archetypes that they neglect their own stories. It would probably take only the smallest of pushes for Mojave to end up on the wrong side of that line, and it may wind up that way for some; for the rest, it should work nicely as a compact bit of Hollywood crime.

Thomas (Garrett Hedlund) is a creature of Hollywood, both as a motion picture director and as a guy famous and powerful enough to be frustratingly erratic. He takes a drive out into the desert and wrecks his car, although he's resourceful enough to make his way back out. On the way, he bumps into Jack (Oscar Isaac), an apparent drifter with a rifle who likes his Shakespeare and is probably just as dangerous as he seems. Thomas gets away, and is soon back to business as usual with his producer (Mark Wahlberg), agent (Walton Goggins), and star/mistress (Louise Bourgoin), but he's become a loose end for Jack, who is just as intelligent as he is crazy.

Monahan pursued scholarly and satirical writing before winding up in the movie business, and as such has probably placed more of himself in Jack, the nominal antagonist, than any other character. Jack's a smart guy, well-read in the classics and philosophy, and as such both an odd fit for the movie world but also capable of moving through it like a hungry shark when he gets acclimated. There's a sense throughout of there being riches there for the taken unless things are derailed by the odd, amoral people who live there, so wrapped up in their own highly-specific struggles that they don't think much about actual physical danger when it appears. Monahan uses Jack to present what is likely his own point of view, someone able to navigate Hollywood despite not still being of it, not blind to the decay around him.

Full review on EFC.

The Final Girls

So, after noting them in Next Week In Tickets for a long time, being interested in it just because programmer Anna Feder always seemed genuinely enthusiastic about what she was doing when working with the Boston Underground Film Festival, and liking both free movies and the space they occupy, I finally made my first trip out to the Bright Lights series for The Final Girls.

Since it's an Emerson College presentation, there's a very real possibility that I was twice the meidan age of the folks attending. That's sobering.



Give this to director Todd Strauss-Schulson - he was down for a good Q&A, sticking around for about an hour or so, seeming genuinely enthusiastic that the audience at his alma mater showed up for and dug his movie, and speaking pretty frankly about being disappointed by how the sales and distribution end worked: A prime spot at SXSW didn't really translate into any offers from places that would do more than Stage 6 (Sony's VOD-focused label) would despite the fact that this is a movie that works pretty well with an audience.

It was kind of interesting to hear him talk about how they were kind of hands-on, in that he seemed to resent it as is natural and probably healthy but most of what came out of it was pretty good ideas: They insisted what was a fairly gory screenplay become a PG-13 movie, but audiences getting into the kills might have undercut what the movie was going for; there were reshoots after a test screening indicated that the obligatory romance wasn't enough for the ending to rest on, and it really was obligatory; and so on. I kind of wonder where the line is between filmmakers feeling it was helpful and not.

Anyway, they talked about how it was apparently developing a cult following, noting that there was a midnight screening lined up at the Cooldige in April and that there's been a good response online, including fanfic and mashups. I kind of wonder if that will be used as a measuring stick eventually.

It's not bad, and I'm glad I got to see it with a crowd.

(Pointless aside: Co-star Alexander Ludwig apparently also appeared in a movie named "Final Girl" last year. That's not confusing at all!)

The Final Girls

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 January 2016 in the Bright Screening Room (Bright Lights, digital)

You can tell from the title that this movie is going to be playing on horror movie tropes - the "final girl" being the last survivor of a massacre who takes down the killer - but that's often the last interesting thing in play with it. On the other hand, it's got a very nice cast and a hook that invites the audience to actually care from the start rather than just snickering at how silly the whole thing is.

The setup introduces the audience to Max Cartwright (Taissa Farmiga), a high-school senior whose actress mother Amanda (Malin Akerman) died in a car accident three years ago; her best friend Gertie (Allia Shawkat); Gertie's step-brother Duncan (Thomas Middleditch); Chris (Alexander Ludwig), the tutor Max has a crush on; and Vicki (Nina Dobrev), Chris's envious ex. The cinema where Duncan works is screening one of Amanda's old movies, Camp Bloodbath, and because of a bunch of jerks who don't know how to act in a movie theater, they wind up trying to escape a fire via the emergency exit behind the screen. Instead, they wind up inside the movie, where Amanda's girl-next-door Nancy is just one of several characters slated to be dismembered.

They quickly figure that the only way out of the movie is to be among the survivors at the end, but this part of the story really makes no sense whatsoever, from the theory being formulated to how it plays out to how inconsistent and hole-filled it is in between. The whole "sex equals death in horror movies" trope feels like warmed-over Scream, good for some broad comedy as campers Kurt (Adam DeVine) and Tina (Angela Trimbur) bounce about in a way that is basically asking for it given that set-up but not exactly fresh material satirically. When this material is actually driving decision-making, it can get sort of frustrating, as director Todd Strauss-Schulson and writers M.A. Fortin & Joshua John Miller seem to have the characters adopt "movie logic" that can't quite be pinned down a bit too readily, struggling with how it conflicts with actual logic.

It's mostly forgivable, though, because it gets the audience to the right place, with Max and Nancy at the center of the movie and the way the hole at the middle of Max's life is hurting her and holding her back. Tessa Farmiga is especially good, always showing how Max is smart and strong but also carrying more than she sould at that age without having to articulate it. Malin Akerman shines as well, quickly establishing Amanda Cartwright as imperfect but justifiably adored by her daughter in the beginning and doing a fine job of pushing Nancy from a parody of a horror-movie stereotype to someone more complete, selling the idea that even the roles that an actress doesn't think much of have some part of her in them.

The rest of the cast does good work, too - Alia Shawkat and Nina Dobrev play types that are as familiar to modern slasher fans as the others, but they naturally have more personality, and are funny to boot. Alexander Ludwig is sneakily funny and charming as Chris - he seems like a sort of blandly handsome and nice guy, but there's an understated earnest dorkiness and oddity to him that's often just as amusing as how Thomas Middleditch puts that sort of thing front and center. The Camp Bloodbath characters are a lot of fun as well - Adam DeVine and Angela Trimbur dive into what they're given with abandon, but it's also pretty easy to develop a soft spot for Tory N. Thompson's laid-back take on a guy who was created to have one personality trait but grows nicely when given the chance.

They work with Strauss-Schulson to make sure the movie always hits the right tone at the right moment, and he actually proves pretty nimble - the fire in the theater starts out as Rube Goldberg silliness but gains some actual tension, as does the central "booby trap" set piece. The film is full of big, goofy jokes that earn their laughs without undercutting empathy for the characters, and the action is fairly well-executed as well.

There's a fair amount of places where "The Final Girls" could have been better, although it hits its main target and strings a more good moments together than most other films like it. If nothing else, it's got more ambitions than most horror spoofs of its ilk, and does a fair job of achieving them.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 29 January 2016 - 4 February 2016

Man, all those previews for Lazer Team and it doesn't show up. Not that I wanted it to, but that's something like a half hour of my life a lot of aggregate screen-time given an ad that amounted to nothing.

(Hopefully it won't be a case where the local theater guys don't realize that it's been bypassed and keep putting the trailer on things well after its release; that's happened too).

Anyway, on to what actually is playing!

DreamWorks gets a jumpstart on Chinese New Year with Kung Fu Panda 3, the newest installment of the series with Jack Black voicing a roly-poly fanboy who becomes a kung fu master, picking up on the tease from, yikes, four and a half years ago that promises more pandas. In 2D and 3D at the Arlington Capitol (2D only), Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere (including MX4D & XPlus). Boston Common cleans its Chinese offerings up a bit, but keeps Ip Man 3, which also expands to Revere. Revere is also keeping Brazilian comedy Vai que Cola around, as well.

The Finest Hours is also playing in 2D/3D, although it seems like more an after-the-fact conversion than something doing 3D natively. That one, about a seemingly doomed rescue of a fishing vessel during a mammoth storm, plays at the Somerville Theatre (2D only), Apple Fresh Pond (2D only), Fenway (RPX screen only), , Boston Common (including Imax 3D), Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.

Slightly smaller openings are on tap for a couple more: Fifty Shades of Black stars Marlon Wayans and spoofs... Well, you can guess. It's at Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere. And believe it or not, Jane Got a Gun - a western starring Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor that had crazy behind-the-scenes issues and has basically sat on the shelf for nearly two years - finally comes out. It's at Boston Common, Assembly Row, Fenway, and Revere.

Kendall Square gets a bit crowded with most of the award-nominated stuff sticking around while other stuff opens. That includes the Academy Nominated Short Films, at least in the animated and live action categories. They're sharing a theater, so it's a natural double feature. They and West Newton also pick up Lady in the Van, starring Maggies Smith as a homeless woman who parks her van in playwright Alan Bennett's driveway and sticks around for years.

The Brattle Theatre gets a new release this weekend with Mojave, the latest from William Monahan, which has a Hollywood type (Garrett Hedlund) meeting a drifter in the Mojave Desert, onlyl to have the guy follow him home. Nice cast which also includes Mark Wahlberg and Walton Goggins. It plays Friday to Monday.

The theater is closed Tuesday, but has a David Bowie tribute on Wednesday with Labyrinth; the 7pm show has already sold out but there are likely still tickets for the 9:30pm. Then, on Thursday, they have a special screening of Forks Over Knives, with the documentary preceded by a meet & greet and book signing with Rip Esselstyn.

The Coolidge Corner Theatre re-opens Youth on Friday so that it's around as they pay tribute to co-star Jane Fonda, who will be there for a screening and Q&A at the 12pm show on Sunday. That will, in fact, be the only movie they show all day, as they make ready for An Evening with Jane Fonda at 8pm that night, where she will receive the annual Coolidge Award. Later in the week, Nine to Five screens on Wednesday.

In other special presentations, they wrap up their Tarantino midnights with From Dusk Til Dawn on Friday and Saturday, screening it on 35mm. They also celebrate Groundhog Day on Tuesday by screening the movie with screenwriter Daniel Rubin on-hand for Q&A afterward.

The Harvard Film Archive has two new programs this week, with professor Sarah Keller introducing some early films by Jean Epstein on Friday - 6½ x 11 & "His Head" at 7pm and The Faithful Heart at 9:30pm. As these are early enough to be silent, Robert Humphreville will be providing musical accompaniment; the first two are presented on 35mm and the last on video. They'll stick to French legends on Saturday and Sunday, with all eight episodes of Jacques Rivette's Out 1 screening over two days. That's nearly 13 hours' worth, and if folks need to tap out, they will be re-run next weekend. It bumps the 35mm "Innocence Abroad" screening of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone to Monday evening.

The Museum of Fine Arts finishes this year's Boston Festival of Films from Iran with 316 (Friday/Sunday), Melbourne (Friday/Saturday), Atomic Heart (Friday), and Avalanche (SaturdaySunday). They also start their February calendar with the king-sized River of Fundament, the latest from Matthew Barney which clocks in at nearly six hours in three acts ($22 for all three, $11 per) and stars Paul Giamatti, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Ellen Brunstyn. All three acts play in order on Wednesday and Thursday.

• Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond, in addition to opening a few apparently-unsubtitled Indian movies, also has the odd booking of Israeli horror movie Jeruzalem for 11am screenings Friday-Sunday, moving to 1:30pm Monday-Thursday. That is some odd booking strategy on someone's part.
• The UMass Boston Film Series starts their Spring season on Tuesday with a free screening of Field Niggas, the first documentary feature from photographer Khalik Allah, who will visit to discuss his portrait of the poorest, most beset residents of Harlem. As per usual, it is free for all at the Campus Center Ballroom.
• The Institute of Contemporary Art has a group of short films for familys on Saturday as part of their Play Date events, which also includes a stop-motion workshop.
• This week's Bright Lights screenings in the Bright Screening Room at ArtsEmerson's Paramount Theater are American Beatboxer on Tuesday, with producer Rich McKeown and beatboxer gene Shinozaki on-hand afterward, and Truth, with a post-film discussion of ethics in journalism.
• Two movies at The Regent Theatre this week: A preview of "Homeplace Under Fire", a featurette about the attempt to keep family farms going presented by Farm Aid, with director Charles Thompson and others on-hand for a post-film Q&A. Another director will be on hand with his film on Thursday, as Eric Green presents Life on the V: The Story of V66, a documentary on Boston's over-the-air music video station of the mid-1980s.

My plans: Kung Fu Panda 3, Mojave, The Finest Hours, Jane Got a Gun and whatever other catch-up I can do before the Sci-Fi Film Festival devours far more of my life than it deserves next week.

This Those Weeks In Tickets: 19 April 2015 - 2 May 2015

Ha! I knew when I was reviewing Against All Odds that I had seen Out of the Past; so this is why I couldn't find it on the blog!

So, it looks like I did a thriller double feature of sorts on the first Sunday of the IFFBoston Weeks - Child 44 & Unfriended. Checking the blog, my memmories of that seem about right - the first was not that great despite having Tom Hardy and an interesting subject, while the second was as genuinely exciting and thrilling as everyone had said it was at Fantasia the year before.

Monday night was when I saw noir classic Out of the Past, probably with the intentions of writing about it, although the upcoming IFFBoston just left me in too much of a time crunch. I recall liking it, though.

Then, it was IFFBoston 2015, and this was my line-up:

Wednesday the 22nd: The End of the Tour
Thursday the 23rd: Slow West and (T)Error
Friday the 24th: Angkor's Children and Shorts Delta (including "World of Tomorrow")
Saturday the 25th: Stray Dog, H., Lost Conquest, Call Me Lucky, and Day Release
Sunday the 26th: The Chinese Mayor, A Brilliant Young Mind, The Look of Silence, and The Keeping Room
Monday the 27th: Manglehorn and Future Shock!: The Story of 2000AD
Tuesday the 28th: I'll See You in My Dreams and The Wolfpack
Wednesday the 29th: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

All in all, a pretty good festival, although I probably crashed and crashed hard Thursday.

Friday, I had Red Sox-Yankees tickets, and it ended poorly - A-Rod getting a home run off Taz is about as much of a bummer as these games can be. I was going to just go home afterward, but I'd been looking at my phone on occasion, and even the people who weren't posting actual spoilers about Avengers: Age of Ultron were tweeting stuff like "my 32 non-spoiler thoughts on the movie", so I headed straight into the RPX theater a couple blocks away from Fenway Park. Not a terrible idea.

Saturday night, I tried to stagger things so that I could see a couple of movies without a whole lot of delay, although I don't think it quite worked that way. First up was Ex Machina, a pretty decent little sci-fi movie that I didn't quite love as much as the similar The Machine, but whose slickness I enjoyed. Then it was a ways down the C line for Roar, which is an outright curiosity that I don't quite love as much as many do, in part because I don't feel hugely comfortable about paying for something dangerous.

Out of the Past

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2015 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Big Screen Classics, 35mm)

It's been long enough since seeing this that I can't really remember the details, especially since I saw the remake since. I do remember it being pretty good, though, with an excellent performance by Robert Mitchum.

Just means I'll have to see it again sometime!

Avengers: Age of Ultron

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2015 in Regal Fenway #13 (first-run, 3D DCP RPX)

That Marvel got itself to the point where Avengers: Age of Ultron could be described as about what you'd expect is testimony to what an astonishing job they had done in building a shared universe on film despite nobody having done this sort of thing before. It's a bit more unidirectional than the first Avengers movie - where that was both the culmination of the individual films that had come before and the set-up for what came next, this one is much more about setting up Phase 3 than picking up from what happened in Phase 2, except where bonus scenes had been explicitly placed. Really, it requires setting what Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) had grown to aside.

It is still a bunch of fun, though - with even more characters to balance, Joss Whedon shows just why he was the right guy for the job of managing the franchise; it needed a TV guy even if he is mostly a workmanlike director, with the big stylistic flourish the long-shot action bit at the start. He does a nifty job of seeding something early on with a joke and letting it be a casually big deal later, while also taking a bit of casting that was almost a lark way back in the first Iron Man movie and making it something perfect.

The action is also top-notch, at times almost feeling like a direct rebuke to Man of Steel in how a fight is almost never just a fight, but also a rescue mission, with an emphasis on problem-solving and minimizing danger. They're great bits of action that properly emphasize heroism, to the point where the villain is dispatched in almost off-hand manner, much like it was in Avengers. It's sort of an indication on how Marvel, contrary to was previously the case, has dedicated themselves to building on their heroes rather than their villains.

Ex Machina

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 May 2015 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, DCP)

I must admit that, to a certain extent, I initially liked Ex Machina more for what it represents than what it is; hanging around as a bit of a sleeper hit and likely intriguing people more when they start looking for other things that is cast of stars on the rise did is great for the genre of science fiction even if I found myself more fascinated by The Machine, another take on the same sort of story.

That's unfair, of course, because despite what similar central trios and broad plot outlines (a decent man employed by a shark to engage an A.I. given sensual female form in a Turing Test), the themes diverge. The Machine is much more about mankind not being prepared for its descendants to both surpass them and have different values, although its secondary theme is in line with the core of Ex Machina: That the creation of conscious, self-aware artificial intelligence is implicitly the creation of slaves, and as such is immoral for reasons far more universal than the usual explanation of "playing God."

It's a fascinating step for writer/director Alex Garland to take, but a natural one; his screenplay for Never Let Me Go revolved around this sort of servitude and he has mentioned that he and Sunshine director Danny Boyle came at that film from different directions (Garland saw it as being about atheism, Boyle about faith, and that it works as both indicates what a collaborative medium film is). Here, Garland makes it clear that while Nathan (Oscar Isaac) may present Ava (Alicia Vikander) as her own autonomous being, it's fairly clear that his goals certainly include creating sexual slaves, with the idea that this will allow him to act on his worse impulses guilt-free, rather than improving himself. I initially thought that the ending was a little too harsh, but it's Garland drawing a clear moral line, saying that there is no room for equivocation: A slave's drive to escape supersedes her owner's right to life, and while Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) seems decent enough, he's part of the system, and if you aren't actively fighting it, you're complicit.

I'm actually glad to have another chance to watch it soon, to see how all this looks when I'm once again in the moment rather than looking back on it. It's at least great to look at - Garland and company do fine "futuristic things in a real-world environment" work - and there's little bad to say about the cast. They would all be in more prominent movies later in 2015, meaning this film really caught lightening in a bottle in some ways.

This Week In Tickets: 18 January 2016 - 24 January 2016

So, let's start off with some unfinished business:

By that, I obviously mean Arabian Nights: Volume 3, the Enchanted One, where I was thinking I might wind up by myself before a small handful of other people arrived. I'm kind of curious as to whether folks went with more compact scheduling or just bailed midway through that series. It was interesting, but this last one was a bit of a test.

Work and such (along with a DVR that was practically busting at the seams even before Tuesday's bounty got added) kept me busy for a couple days after that, and then I opted to do the Thursday-night early screening of Ip Man 3 rather than try my luck on the weekend, which would have snow, Red Line diversions, and the drawing power of recent Chinese movies interacting in unpredictable ways. It was a good but not packed crowd on Thursday, and we got to see a pretty entertaining movies which got better with a little reflection.

Friday night, I hit the Brattle for their too-attached-to-the-family-home double feature of 99 Homes & Crimson Peak. I was only going to do the first, but "gorgeous Guillermo del Toro movie on the big screen" is a pretty decent reason to stick around, even if it's not one I love.

The snow wasn't as big a deal as the initial forecasts, but the Longfellow bridge was (mostly) closed anyway, and from the shuttle bus it looks like they're replacing the tracks wholesale. Got me there in time to see Monster Hunt, the week's other Chinese movie. Very small audience, although I've got no idea whether it's the six-month delay or the expensive 3D tickets or the snow that kept it that way. After that, I figured I'd watch The 5th Wave, but decided to head up the Green Line to see it at Fenway rather than just hang around the Common while the snow fell; it would let me take a different route home that avoided construction, too.

Not sure what I think of the upgraded rooms at Fenway; so far they haven't hiked the prices to compensate for the decreased capacity, but they've got recliners and desks, kind of like the LuxLite seats in the SuperLux. Seating's reserved, and they won't let you leave a seat. You don't actually need to, although it's not obvious when you're looking at the seating chart for the first time, which is kind of an issue the first time around with reserved seating. Nice enough.

Then, on Sunday, a bunch of writing and then heading to the Harvard Film Archive for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, because that was pretty much the most anti-NFL thing going that afternoon. Considered sticking around for Roman Holiday, but opted not to (plus the HFA only takes cash and by the time I got to an ATM and back it would have started).

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2016 at the Harvard Film Archive (Innocence Abroad, 35mm)

On the one hand, it's hard for those of us who didn't live through the period to take references to the straight-laced, conservative 1950s seriously when it was the decade that gave us Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, and delightful sex comedies like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; on the other, one does wonder if these movies would be nearly as much fun if the implication wasn't that these characters indulging themselves was a bit defiant. If the second case were entirely the reality, this movie would likely feel more quaint than it does; instead, it holds up for being sweet and funny more than just kind of cute.

Monroe and Russell play a pair of nightclub entertainers, Lorelei Lee and Dorothy Shaw, who are not exactly inhibited on or off the stage. Lorelei, by far the more mercenary of the pair, has all but landed herself a rich husband in Augustus Esmond Jr. (Tommy Noonan), although his father's daily phone calls have thus far kept him from actually proposing. The solution is a trip to Paris where they can get engaged and married without interruption, though they don't go together - Lorelei is traveling by ship and Gus will follow by air. Dorothy comes with Lorelei as a chaperone, which seems like a sweet gig - the Olympic team is on the same boat, and there's no rule saying the chaperone can't have fun! The athletes' coach has them turning in early, leaving Dorothy spending a lot of time with Ernie Malone (Elliott Reid), a sweet guy except for how he's a private eye hired to spy on Lorelei. Not that she'd dream of cheating on Gus, even if another passenger (Charles Coburn) does have his own diamond mine.

As plots go, it's as wispy as cotton candy, kind of stumbling toward the end because it requires characters to act more nakedly selfish and unreasonable than they do before or after; whether that's the case in the original play or not, screenwriter Charles Lederer and director Howard Hawks are kind of gambling that they've built up enough goodwill to get away with it. The Good news is that it's also as sticky as cotton candy, creating plenty of room for Dorothy and Lorelei to have misadventures, musical numbers, and other entertaining moments without feeling like they're missing out on anything important. A sea voyage is often about filing time anyway, and the filmmakers use the farcical bits to keep things moving, if not forward, than side-to-side rather than backward.

The two lead roles are so perfectly cast that is a surprise that the studio never actually managed to pair Russell and Monroe again. That they share the same hourglass figure puts them on equal footing for the folks who bought a ticket to spend an hour and a half looking at pretty girls, but they play off each other well: Russell wisecracks with the best of them but doesn't make Dorothy cynical in doing so; she knows what she wants but isn't mean or petty about it. Monroe's Lorelei is about the same in terms of knowing what she wants, but if she's calculating, we're taking about pretty simple math, and there's never even a hidden harshness under her breathy come-on of a voice. She also hits a very specific dumb blonde target perfectly, sounding sweet and innocent in her man-focused way, trying to imply that she'd fit in with high society with her "thanks everso" and failing, but not so badly that she looks pathetic. They play off each other well, and the moments when they play against expectations are even better. While the guys they captivate don't have quite the same charisma, Charles Coburn and Tommy Noonan are amusingly besotted while Elliott Reid stakes out a good place where he can be smooth or genuine as the need arises.

To a certain extent, sex comedies like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes avoid becoming anachronisms by not being ashamed or too clever about how open-minded they are; Dorothy and Lorelei being able to pursue their own pleasure without much complaint beyond worries that Lorelei is a gold-digger keeps the movie from being strident or open to snickers. Dorothy being Lorelei's chaperone is so obviously an anachronism exploited to bring her friend along that Malone is necessary to the plot. And, heck, you could argue that the most overly sexual number has Dorothy wearing pants amid dozens of male athletes dressed only in flesh-colored shorts, while the dialogue calls out the hypocrisy in how society views men and women coating partners for shallow reasons.

Or, at least that's what we tell ourselves to not feel guilty for ogling the girls. Not that they're the only pleasures the movie offers; aside from the fun screenplay, the songs are catchy whether just being bouncy or moving the story along. The best is obviously "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend", and is even better in the movie than on its own, a tart response to the situation Lorelei and Dorothy find themselves in but covered with enough sexy sugar to not ruin the mood by making the pair feel like victims. It's also a great-looking film, with bright colors all over, fun costumes, and direction by Howard Hawks that preserves the fun of a door-slamming farce without feeling particularly stage-bound.

It's hard to become a classic comedy; what was once considered innocent fun can seem less so or become the target of a viewer's laughter rather than the source as standards change (generally for the better). Gentlemen Prefer Blondes isn't immune, but it's still winning enough for plenty of honest laughter and other good feelings sixty years later.

(Previously at EFC)

This Those Weeks In Tickets: 15 March 2015 - 5 April 2015

Looking at this set of pages, I'm really curious just what I was doing during that first week. Not "go check Facebook/Twitter" curious, though.

Was it snowing like crazy in the middle of March, or was I just staying in, watching TV, and trying to catch up on sci-fi film festival write-ups? Or, perhaps, I lost a bunch of ticket stubs when moving? Whatever happened, it looks like I just got to one movie that week, Lost and Love from China. It's funny to be pointed back at that one this week, though, because I just saw co-star Jing Boran in Monster Hunt, and someone nominated this movie as a buried treasure at the Chlotrudis awards meeting, surprising me a bit as I often feel like the only person catching these Chinese releases. Amusingly, he described Andy Lau in terms of being an action movie star, when other movies I saw this year point out that he is thought of as a pop singer more than anything else.

And, speaking of the Chlotrudis Awards, this was apparently the week they took place last year. I remember almost nothing about that. I also, sadly, have little specific memory of seeing It Follows at the Coolidge the next evening, other than it being very cool to see a great genre film in their largest auditorium as well as feeling that the curse as punishment for having sex was perhaps a bigger part of the film than I gave it credit for before, when I reviewed the Fantastic Fest screening.

The next day, it was basically cramming in some docs I wanted to see before a festival started, so I did a double feature at Kendall Square of An Honest Liar & The Wrecking Crew. They both turned out to be pretty entertaining, not surprising given that they're about entertainers.

After that, I was basically living at the Brattle for the Boston Underground Film Festival:

Wedneday: The Editor
Thursday: "Hoping for Something Better" shorts, The World of Kanako, and Excess Flesh
Friday: "Homegrown Horror" shorts, I Am a Knife with Legs, and Bloody Knuckles
Saturday: "Two-Way Mirror" shorts, We Are Still Here, and Bag Boy Lover Boy
Sunday: Magnetic, "Laugh Track" shorts, 20 Years of Madness, Der Samurai, and Goodnight Mommy

You want a good idea of how far off-track I got with this blog last year? That last one was just posted a week ago, about nine months after seeing the movies. It's not any great loss, I suppose - a couple got bigger releases than you might expect from underground fest films, one was something I didn't like where I didn't also want to discourage the filmmakers, but film festivals tend to be where I'm trying to get the most writing done quickly without having the time, and they just stacked up on me something fierce last year.

Especially since there was no just going off movies after that, since I caught Merchants of Doubt the Monday evening that followed that Sunday marathon. It's a decent documentary, although, ironically for a film about how lobbyists obfuscate by playing into what people want to believe, I kind of wondered if my personal brand of skepticism made me more receptive than most. Irony, that.

The next day, I went for a double feature, though somewhat out of necessity - I could probably see Home in 3D at any point, but likely nowhere as cheaply as at Apple on Tuesday, but it was the movie after that, Apartment Troubles, that had me curious; I like one of the two writer/director/stars a fair amount but it was only playing at 9:30pm, and I wasn't heading back out to Fresh Pond that late. Surprisingly, I liked Home more than Apartment Troubles, but it was an interesting night, if nothing else.

I'm not sure how I wound up being able to get to a 5pm screening of Furious Seven on a Friday afternoon - I'm guessing it was raining hard enough for me to work from home with a very thin queue. Fun anyway, though I don't recall feeling like I was getting away with anything.

Then, Saturday, it was a long, unexpectedly-themed day: Taking the bus out to West Newton for Effie Gray & Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, and then heading back into Boston for Let's Get Married, which was a big public transportation loop - the 70 from the house to Watertown, the 553 from there to West Newton, movies, the 553 to Newton Corner, the 57 to Kenmore, movie, the 47 to Central Square, and then the 70 back to the house. Truth be told, I haven't tried getting out there since moving; I kind of suspect that adding the Red Line to that loop might mean it has to be a little more urgent.

Next up (aside from recent stuff): The IFFBoston weeks.

Furious Seven

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 April 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)

Is there any franchise that has had a more curious life than The Fast & the Furious? Even noting that I've managed to skip the second through fourth entries and it doesn't much matter because it evolved into something completely different during that time, the continuity is kind of screwy because the director who made four decided he wanted to keep a character he killed off in his first around, making three films essentially flashbacks, and then this one has to dance around the fact that one of its stars was killed midway through shooting, and because he was killed in an automobile accident, the most logical way to write him out would have been in terrible taste. How the heck is it even vaguely coherent?

And yet, it is. This movie is still kind of a mess - it combines a revenge storyline with a spy one and the parts really fit together all that well - but this basically gives them two hooks to build nutty action scenes around. The opening is probably one of my favorite bits of the series, though, and it's not even action; it's new director James Wan snaking a camera through a hospital, showing the carnage that Jason Statham's villain has left in his wake. It's a signal that Wan's take on the franchise is potentially going to be even nuttier than that of the folks who have come before him.

Eventually, though, it gets to the enjoyable vehicular mayhem, along with other action scenes of similar absurdity, like Paul Walker not being completely destroyed by Tony Jaa. They're fun action bits, and even though the series is clearly having trouble juggling all of its characters by now, there's something for everyone to enjoy in it. The other half, the emphasis on how much these characters mean to each other, actually almost benefits from Paul Walker's untimely demise; writing him out gives it a little more heft than just saying they're family.

Am I down for another? Heck, yes. As this has become a series of heist adventures rather than drag-racing stories, it's become a lot more fun, even if the big impossible stunts are kind of a lateral move away from the great vehicular action the series started out featuring

Gimpy Protagonists and Hidden Monsters: Monster Hunt & The 5th Wave

News of movies like Pacific Rim or Terminator Genisys having the sort of success at the Chinese box office that might counter their underperformance in America - or of Chinese comedies like Lost in Hong Kong having the sort of opening weekends that generally only happened in the United States - would occasionally have me joking that if China ever figured out how to make this sort of big special-effects extravaganza on its own, Hollywood would be in some trouble. At the time, I was kind of missing that this was already happening, with Monster Hunt making something like $370M in China while the first time I heard of it was when China Lion announced that its Bai Baihe picture, Go Away Mr. Tumor!, had knocked that juggernaut out of first place back home. Then, sure, I got interested, both because I really liked Ms. Bai in the other movie and I wanted to see what a homegrown Chinese blockbuster looked like.

The timing on its release is interesting; the six-month gap between its Chinese release and its American one is almost unheard of for a mainstream movie these days, although understandable in this case; as nifty as Monster Hunt looks, sticking its preview next to one for a summer blockbuster would have it looking less polished. The January "dumping ground" period is a pretty good place for it to stand out. Still, this particular week is curious - many theaters probably only have room for one Chinese movie at a time, and Ip Man 3 might be an easier sell, while Kung Fu Panda 3 comes out next week. Then again, if distributor FilmRise plans to push it to more theaters next week, primarily with English-language digital files then, it might make a fun double feature with the DreamWorks film.

One other thing that amuses me: Apparently some of the marketing to Chinese-American audiences runs along the lines of "you've seen it on your phone, now see it in 3D on the big screen as it was meant to be seen!", which strikes me as awesomely pragmatic.

That the afternoon's other movie wound up having some vague parallels amused me a bit; I suppose I recalled the (terrible) trailer for The 5th Wave mentioning alien invaders in human hosts, but truth be told, I had been ready to skip it until someone mentioned on Twitter that director J Blakeman had made The Disappearance of Alice Creed, and, dang, I hadn't even realized that he'd been quiet since then. It kind of reminded me of a friend suddenly being interested in Last Chance Harvey after hearing that it was from the same filmmaker as Jump Tomorrow, Josh Hopkins, who had disappeared and been basically forgotten in the meantime (ironically, I just fond out he had another film a couple years ago, The Love Punch; some folks just can't get noticed). It's not necessarily the best reason to see a movie, but it certainly piques the curiosity.

Zhuo yao ji (Monster Hunt)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 January 2016 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)

I've read that the English-dubbed version of Monster Hunt (releasing at about the same time the original Mandarin version hits the United States) cuts a few scenes, including one where dog meat is seen offered for sale in a street market, and while I get cutting that from a movie in large part aimed at kids, it does seem like an arbitrary line to draw, considering who is casually eating what (or trying to) at various points of this movie. This is not a complaint - considering that much of the recent influx of Chinese movies into America theaters has been terribly generic romantic comedies and nostalgic dramas, a genuinely weird family fantasy is actually a nice change of pace, whether from Chinese or Hollywood fare.

Early on, restaurateur Lord Ge (Wallace Chung Hong-leung) telling us that while humans and other creatures used to live together, their lands were separated, and the Monster Hunting Bureau was so successful in driving them out of human lands that many people in its medieval Chinese setting don't believe there is any such thing as monsters. A civil war in the monster kingdom has driven the widowed, pregnant monster queen and her bodyguards (Eric Tsang Chi-wai & Sandra Ng Kwun-yu) into the human world, where they encounter Song Tianyin (Jing Boran) - the disrespected mayor of Yongning Village and the son of a supposedly-great monster hunter - and Huo Xiaolan (Bai Baihe), a young monster hunter looking to create a reputation. Circumstances lead to the pair winding up with the newborn prince of monsters (whom they eventually name "Wuba"), and while Xiaolan is initially all about collecting the bounty, they find themselves getting kind of attached to this cute little bloodsucking beastie that looks like a radish with tentacles.

Despite not necessarily looking state-of-the-art by Hollywood standards, Monster Hunt became the highest-grossing film of all time in China last summer partly on the strength of its CGI creature effects, which are fairly strong - the opening scene of a big monster battle may have the videogame feel that often comes from trying to absolutely fill a 3D space with creatures, but as the film goes on and the presence of monsters isn't quite so overwhelming, the style meshes pretty well with the live-action. The designs are simple but emotive, and even the meaner monsters are fun to look at. The effect is kind of what a live-action Pokemon movie might look like, which isn't a bad target. The rendering isn't quite up to Hollywood standards (the lighting is a little too even), but it works well enough.

Full review on EFC.

The 5th Wave

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 January 2016 in Regal Fenway #1 (first-run, DCP)

I'm kind of curious what sort of effects budget gets you a city-destroying cataclysm these days, because The 5th Wave has a few of those at the beginning but nothing else that particularly impresses. It doesn't even give the audience a look at its alien invaders. That makes it a dreadfully boring young adult sci-fi thing, the type with franchise ambitions but little reason beyond the involvement of a few folks who have done better work for anybody to be interested in it continuing.

We initially meet narrator Cassie Sullivan (Chloe Grace Moretz) as she's already on the run, scavenging what she can after the end of the world, so we flash back to when she was an ordinary teenage girl in Ohio, before the "Others" came and, after simply hanging in the air for a while, hit the earth with waves of attacks - an EMP, massive earthquakes, super-powerful avian flu. She gets separated from her father (Ron Livingston) and little brother Sam (Zackary Arthur) when the army shows up at a refugee camp warning of a fourth wave, alien parasites within human hosts. Setting out to find Sam, she is shot by a sniper, but nursed back to health by hunky survivor Evan Walker (Alex Roe). Meanwhile, Sam and other kids are recruited by Colonel Vosch (Liev Schreiber) to fight the aliens and the upcoming fifth wave.

Looking at the themes that made it into the script, it's not hard to see why the original book might have been popular enough to spawn sequels and a movie adaptation; there's good stuff in there about kids being used and not being the shallow types adults see them as. There's a moment of potentially-interesting perspective when the aliens' motivation is laid out. And though some may roll their eyes at certain tropes, if teenagers like that served up with potential love triangles, why not? These may be familiar trappings, but there's something to them; you can see the ideas behind them.

Full review on EFC.