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Posted Reel Hub Recommends: The Hurt Locker at Stuart Street Playhouse; The Fugitive at HFA to Bostonist
Ty Burr, not yet killed by Ebert, brings tidings (how else can you refer to a post ending 'get thee hence'?) that the Stuart Street Playhouse will be showing The Hurt Locker from March 12 to 18 and possibly longer if the movie proves popular enough. This is good news. Even if you're of the opinion that The Hurt Locker is only marginally better than Point Break (as one area movie blogger recently argued),...
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Posted The Art of the Steal Review: Barnes Collection Movie Comes to Boston to Bostonist
It's fitting that a movie whose ethos are so thoroughly grounded in the muckraking tendencies of the Age of Dewey (not-decimal) should be even somewhat connected to progressive education. Sure, the majority of the new film The Art of the Steal, which examines attempts to move an art collection to Philadelphia, is spent agitating for individual property rights. However, the reason we come to care deeply about the fate of the Barnes collection is...
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Posted Did Roger Ebert Kill Film Criticism? Globe Says Thumbs Up, We Say Thumbs Down to Bostonist
Chris Jones' new profile of Roger Ebert in Esquire is excellent and often touching. And very few film websites are better than Ebert's blog, home to some of the most impressive and incisive reviews on the web. So we don't understand why the Globe's "MovieNation" is using the profile as a reason to sound a death knell for film criticism, especially since they actually employ some of the best critics out there (including Ty...
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Posted Hank Paulson’s <em>On the Brink</em>: A Call Log of Crisis to Bostonist
We were pretty big fans of The Price of Loyalty, Ron Suskind's book about George W. Bush's first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neil, and the first media source to really question the run-up to the Iraq War. So we were extremely excited to see that Bush's last treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, had written a memoir. Not because we were expecting a tell-all account of the real origins of the Bear Stearns sale, TARP, TARF, and...
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Posted Boston Jewish Film Festival Wrap-Up to Bostonist
Exurberant French itinerant photographer Jean-Baptiste (Patrick Dell’Isola) visits Argentina in Camera Obscura. (National Center for Jewish Film. Used with permission) This year's Boston Jewish Film Festival closed yesterday, showing Camera Obscura in the afternoon and wrapping up with a showing of Within the Whirlwind in the evening. We had the pleasure of watching the former movie, adding to the list of films we enjoyed in this iteration of the festival. There are lots of...
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Posted Boston Jewish Film Festival: Hello Goodbye to Bostonist
There's a scene in Daniel Burman's Empty Nest--a film we reviewed earlier this year for a screening sponsored by the Boston Jewish Film Festival--where the two main characters, a husband and wife, arrive at Ben Gurion International Airport and are summarily subjected to a search of their possessions, the passport authorities doubting their intentions. Suddenly the wife puts a stop to it. "We're Jewish," she says, "I know the dances," and just as quickly she and the agents break into a rendition of an Israeli folk dance. It's a punctuated moment of glee in what had been a mostly tempered affair.
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Posted Boston Jewish Film Festival: Opening Night with Eli and Ben to Bostonist
Eli and Ben, the opening film for this year's Boston Jewish Film Festival, is a far more muted affair than last year's The Deal. In this post-Madoff world, the showy tale of a Hollywood flim-flam man whose defining strength is his ability to talk story, the ability to effortlessly pile layers of lies on top of each other, is somehow out of step and no longer palatable. There's been too much artifice already. Times call for quieter, more restrained movies such as this one, a coming-of-age story that looks not so much at the loss of an innocence as a genealogy of morality. Bonus: Eli and Ben also happens to be a pretty good movie.
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Posted IFFBoston Preview: The Brothers Bloom to Bostonist
2005 was a great year for Meta Film Noir (if such a genre exists). Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang injected new vitality into the detective story with its use of humor and not-so-subtle breakdowns of the sexual roles found in the classic films of the thirties and forties. Noir always had rich parts for women, be they femme fatales or expanded damsels in distress, but the sexual potency of the protagonist was rarely questioned.
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Posted Reel Hub: Mickey, Sean, and Ty at the BSFC to Bostonist
Last night at the Brattle theater, the Boston Society of Film Critics gathered to hand-out their annual awards. It was the second time the organization held an actual ceremony, and the group wisely decided to use the opportunity to single out the people that make the Boston film world what it is, the curators, theater managers, authors, and projectionists whose unqualified love of film make going to the movies here a singular experience. We...
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Posted Bring 'Sex' to the Hub to Bostonist
Sex and Justice Michael DiBiasio is a writer/director from Cranston, RI. His new movie, "Sex and Justice," premiered at the Columbia Theater in Providence and screened this weekend at the Tribeca Cinemas in New York. "Sex and Justice" is a stylish crime feature, with a taut, often surprising story, and rich dialogue that captures the genre's pithiness. Rebecca De Ornelas, who also played the roles of producer and director's fiancee, inhabits the seductive bette...
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Posted Reel Hub: Sometimes He Is that Into You to Bostonist
Great Romances IV Friday, Feb. 6th -- Saturday, February 14th Brattle Theater, 40 Brattle St. Cambridge more information True, there is no Saint Valentine, and the feast of saints Cyril and Methodius just doesn't have the same ring. But there will always be Paris, and in Cambridge there's always the Brattle, and in February it doesn't matter if you're in love or just love going to the movies. Tonight marks the first night of...
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Posted Reel Hub: Empty Nest at the MFA to Bostonist
Daniel Burman's Empty Nest (El Nido Vacio) is a steadily somber film punctuated by moments of extreme joy and visual expressionism. Largely a domestic story, the movie follows Leonardo (Oscar Martinez), a successful playwright, as he navigates the breakdown of his personal life. His is the subtle breakdown of children moving away and ebbed romance rather than the sudden, dramatic breakdown of marriage, and, as such, it requires a different sort of language than the high theatricality of a Revolutionary Road. There's the need for a tenderness and emotional restraint, and Burman treats his characters with detached love even as he moves them into surreal places.
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Posted A Year at the Movies to Bostonist
With December movies always released in Boston a good fortnight or more after their LA/New York premieres, it seemed only fitting to wait a few days before posting our year in review. Of course, between the MFA, the Harvard Film Archive, the Brattle Theater, and other venues, Boston had great film events almost every night of the year (You do read Happenings, right?), and we could have easily turned this look back into a representation-is-as-big-as-the-whole allegory ala Synecdoche, New York or Borges' Exact Map. But, instead, we'll stick to the conventional format and highlight a few of the recent past's more notable moments.
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Posted Whip it Good: The Roots of the Whip at the Brattle to Bostonist
The Roots of the Whip: Indiana Jones and His Influences Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981) at 4:30, 7:00, 9:30 today Introduction by Dr. Marc Zender at 7:00 The Brattle Theater [ Tickets & Info ] At their best, the Indiana Jones movies are the purest of cinematic fantasies. One man armed with little more than a whip and a knowledge of almost every single ancient language faces off against medieval superstitions and Nazis while...
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Posted The Lost Welles to Bostonist
Tonight, the HFA winds down its look at the Unknown Orson Welles with two hours of rough footage from some of Welles' never completed projects. While footage from The Deep makes up the bulk of tonight's program, the HFA is also screening scenes from Welles' version of Don Quixote, the dream project that received a new vitality when Terry Gilliam tried and failed to film is own version of the story, brilliantly documented in the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha. There's no way of knowing what to expect from tonight's program, whether the footage justifies Welles' uncompromising vision, or whether it was all folly. But it's likely tonight may be the only chance you have to find out.
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Posted Reel Hub: Holyland Hardball at the BJFF to Bostonist
The excitement of documentary filmmaking is that you never know exactly where the story will take you. The makers of startup.com probably never set out to make a morality tale about the outsize egos of internet start-ups, or "the rise and fall of the American dream" as the tagline eventually proclaimed, nor does one imagine that the filmmakers of Holyland Hardball intended to make a movie about cultural separation and the rise and fall of American dreamers. But the end result is a thoroughly entertaining documentary movie about misplaced altruism, about the desire to do something for someone else, without ever stopping to think about whether or not the "good deed" is wanted at all.
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Posted Opening Night for the 20th Boston Jewish Film Festival to Bostonist
Tonight marks the first official night of the 20th Boston Jewish Film Festival. Since it began, the BJFF has grown to be one of the premier festivals in the region, regularly screening challenging films like The Pianist and Au Revoir, Les Enfants. Part of the festival's rise is undoubtedly tied to the sudden, rapid growth of Israeli Cinema. While Israeli movies may lack the "it" status (itness?) of Romanian films, Israeli Cinema has quietly become one of the world's finest, providing the curators with a reliable stream of exceptional films. In recent years, the BJFF has screened the Academy Award nominated Beaufort, the Camera D'Or winning Jellyfish, and the brilliant Nina's Tragedies.
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Posted Reel Hub: All Tricked Out to Bostonist
The Shining, It's Alive, Halloween Somerville Theater (55 Davis Sq., Somerville) Tonight, 8pm There are those who prefer their Halloween harrowing, while others simply take the opportunity to masquerade and enjoy the beneficence of candy giving strangers. Either way, Halloween is a holiday of role reversal: a time when the undead walk the streets of Boston and chastely folk drop the pretext of virtue. It's also a time when this Bostonist gets over his fear...
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Posted The Reel Debate: The Candidate vs. W. to Bostonist
While we're sad the end of the presidential debates probably means the end of new metonyms for America (Joe Sixpack, we hardly knew ye), Bostonist is glad to see the election move back to its proper home, the big screen, for an unlikely face-off between Robert Redford as The Candidate and Josh Brolin as W.
