Bored to Death: The Complete First Season (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

November 22, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image B Sound B Extras C+
"Stockholm Syndrome," "The Alanon Case," "The Case of the Missing Screenplay," "The Case of the Stolen Skateboard," The Case of the Lonely White Dove," "The Case of the Beautiful Blackmailer," "The Case of the Stolen Sperm," "Take a Dive"

by Jefferson Robbins With its accomplished but psychologically malformed boy-men, the first season of novelist-screenwriter Jonathan Ames's "Bored To Death" feels like a Judd Apatow joint transplanted to Tom Wolfe's outer boroughs. Its characters all want to be Masters of their particular Universes, but they're either hamstrung by their own neuroses or carting them along like luggage in spite of success. We know we're watching an HBO comedy, though it's often hard to discern where the comedy is supposed to be located. In Woody Allen nebbishism? In misdirection and error? In slapstick? In satirizing the hip, self-satisfied artistes of millennial New York's most fashionable burg? Barring a few episodes that succeed on the other points, the latter feels most likely.

Red Riding (2009) [Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 15, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller, UK

RED RIDING
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1974
**½/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Sean Bean, Warren Clarke, Rebecca Hall
screenplay by Tony Grisoni, based on the novel Red Riding: Nineteen Seventy-Four David Peace
directed by Julian Jarrold

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1980
***/****
starring Paddy Considine, Jim Carter, Warren Clarke, Sean Harris
screenplay by Tony Grisoni, based on the novel Red Riding: Nineteen Eighty David Peace
directed by James Marsh

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1983
**/****
starring Mark Addy, David Morrissey, Jim Carter, Warren Clarke
screenplay by Tony Grisoni, based on the novel Red Riding: Nineteen Eighty-Three David Peace
directed by Anand Tucker

by Bryant Frazer Red Riding, adapted by screenwriter Tony Grisoni into three movies from four novels by David Peace, is an awfully downbeat thing that's difficult to classify. It's not really a mystery, because the central crimes are barely the point (at least in the first two films), and the question isn't whodunit, but who among all those involved is not yet corrupt. It's not a police procedural, because the only effective police work we see is of the thuggish, back-room variety. In its specificity of time and place–nine years in Yorkshire, a county in northern England–it recalls James Ellroy's novels about Los Angeles cops in the 1940s and '50s. But Ellroy's stories were bracing because their point of view came from inside a department dominated by bigotry and machismo and tormented by its own failings. Each of the Red Riding stories comes at the situation mostly from an outsider's perspective, elevating a principled crusader to the high ground, then having the corrupt institution take potshots at him, decimating his footing.

Dead Cert (2010) – DVD

November 10, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, UK, Vampire

*/**** Image B+ Sound D+ Extras C
starring Craig Fairbass, Dexter Fletcher, Lisa McAllister, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Ben Shillito
directed by Steve Lawson

by Jefferson Robbins That single star is for the concept–London gangsters vs. vampires–which, apart from some very fine lensing and decent actors, is probably the only thing that got Dead Cert any kind of release. In a genre thickly dotted with piles of shit, this thing is shit stacked high but glazed with modest visual sugar and a great high-concept. It barely merits a single viewing, yet you keep hoping something will switch on and provide a reason to persevere.

Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009) [Blu-ray + DVD] + The Fourth Kind (2009)

November 9, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

DISNEY'S A CHRISTMAS CAROL
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
directed by Robert Zemeckis

THE FOURTH KIND
ZERO STARS/****
starring Milla Jovovich, Will Patton, Corey Johnson, Elias Koteas
written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi

by Ian Pugh If Robert Zemeckis hasn't quite left the Uncanny Valley behind, at the very least, the heart missing from his latest effort–what seems like the trillionth retelling of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and the billionth animated one–correlates directly to its absence of personality, rather than to an absence of humanity. A backhanded compliment, to be sure, but the character designs finally resemble something closer to artistic interpretation than to a failed attempt at replicating human beings exactly as they are, with Marley (Gary Oldman) and Scrooge (Jim Carrey), for example, rendered almost expressionistically to evoke rotten apples and hunched skeletons. From that standpoint, the actors' sudden bursts of acrobatic grace, no longer so incongruous, capture some of computer-animated cinema's wonder, the kind at which Zemeckis has grasped since The Polar Express–a true example of bringing the impossible to life. The only problem is that Zemeckis's own script isn't worth more than a shrug, and the film relies too much on its visuals to carry the extra weight.

Thir13en Ghosts (2001)/House of Wax (2005) [Horror Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

November 4, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Horror, Thriller

THIR13EN GHOSTS
**/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras B
starring Tony Shalhoub, Embeth Davidtz, Matthew Lillard, Shannon Elizabeth
screenplay by Neal Stevens and Richard D'Ovidio, based on the screenplay by Robb White
directed by Steve Beck

by Walter Chaw A loving family man, Arthur (Tony Shalhoub) has lost his wife and home to a fire. We learn of his backstory in a remarkably cheesy though cinematically satisfying slow 360º pan that needs to be seen to be believed. His children, Kathy (a not-scantily-clad Shannon Elizabeth) and Bobby (Alec Roberts, easily the most irritating kid in a horror movie since Bob from House by the Cemetery), aren't really around for much longer than a moment of peril each before vanishing, and evil lawyer Ben Moss (JR Bourne), so pivotal in William Castle's 13 Ghosts, is now basically in town for a cup of coffee.

Breaking Bad: The Complete First Season (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

November 3, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Television, Thriller

Image B Sound B Extras B
"Pilot," "Cat's in the Bag…," "…And the Bag's in the River," "Cancer Man," "Gray Matter," "Crazy Handful of Nothin'," "A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal"

Breakingbads1cap

by Bryant Frazer Describing the ideal temperature for pan-roasting, Tom Colicchio advises budding chefs that the oil in the pan should sizzle, not sputter. That's an apt description of what Bryan Cranston does, with amazing physical control, through the entirety of the first season of "Breaking Bad". He resists going over the top, but still turns in a performance that could cook a steak.

Toy Story 3 (2010) [2-Disc] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 2, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, Pixar

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
screenplay by Michael Arndt
directed by Lee Unkrich

by Walter Chaw Woody (Tom Hanks) refuses to shake Buzz's (Tim Allen) hand in farewell at around the middle point of Pixar's Toy Story 3, marking a dark return of sorts to the petulant Woody of the first film and a harbinger of things to come as the picture closes with sights and sounds that are easily darker than anything dreamed of in its predecessors. Maybe it's the comfort that comes with being part of an established franchise–with the knowledge that the only watermark to exceed is that left by its own thorny, complex second chapter. Whatever the case, Toy Story 3 is more ambitious than Toy Story 2 yet less successful as well, mainly because the first half of it seems uncharacteristically uncertain of itself. It's a feeling of awkwardness that in retrospect coalesces into this idea that maybe it's dread that colours our reintroduction to these characters. Half of their number is gone without explanation, after all, including Woody's love interest, Bo. He grieves for her. We'll come back to this. Their owner, Andy, prepares to go to college, leaving the toys to limbo in his attic until some hoped-for, equivocal day when maybe Andy could have children of his own and thus reconnect in some pat, schmaltzy epilogue, we fear, through a closed circle of eternity via progeny. The picture resorts to nothing so simple as that, thankfully, wrapping up instead with a worthy extended post-script that returns the series to its origins, though not without irreplaceable losses and an absolute clarity of purpose that binds this trilogy into something like a definitive, modern existentialist philosophy. While it's not Dostoevsky, it's not that far off, either.

Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD

October 27, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy

**/**** ImageA- Sound B- Extras C
screenplay by Joe Ansolabehere, Paul Germain, Bob Hilgenberg, Rob Muir
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Jefferson Robbins There's this thing in children's fiction I call the Curious George Effect. A character transgresses, and in the context of that character's world it's a big hairy deal, potentially life-threatening. But the repercussions are so nifty-neato that the initial sin is shrugged off, perhaps never mentioned again, perhaps not explicitly identified as an error in the first place. The consequences for the guilty character are as follows: anxiety, cool adventure, reset to status quo.

Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD

October 26, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy

**/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras C
screenplay by Joe Ansolabehere, Paul Germain, Bob Hilgenberg, Rob Muir
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Jefferson Robbins There's this thing in children's fiction I call the Curious George effect. A character transgresses, and in the context of that character's world it's a big hairy deal, potentially life-threatening. But the repercussions are so nifty-neato that the initial sin is shrugged off, perhaps never mentioned again, perhaps not explicitly identified as an error in the first place. The consequences for the guilty character are as follows: anxiety, cool adventure, reset to status quo.

THX 1138: The George Lucas Director’s Cut (1971/2004) – Blu-ray Disc

October 20, 2010Posted in1970s, 2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Don Pedro Colley, Maggie McOmie
screenplay by George Lucas and Walter Murch
directed by George Lucas

Thx1138dvdcapby Walter Chaw THX 1138 is the only film George Lucas ever wrote and directed that will and should be remembered as a mostly artistic triumph rather than a largely financial one (recalling that the best of his Star Wars films, The Empire Strikes Back, was neither written nor directed by Lucas). The fact that he's now tampered with it in much the same manner as he's tampered with his original Star Wars trilogy seems, then, an almost bigger crime against posterity, even if it makes a kind of ironic sense within the thematic framework of the film. THX 1138's preoccupations with dehumanization, an abhorrence of imperfection and humanity in favour of machine-tooled precision, and the corruption of human perception and emotions with mass-produced opiates find sympathy with this new stage of its own existence as a film that hasn't been just restored, but enhanced, too, by CGI that serves the same basic function for the audience as the drugged milk does for the protagonists of A Clockwork Orange. When Lucas made THX 1138, he was the prole toiling (stealing from Aldous Huxley and N.I. Kostomorov is toil, yes?) in obscurity; when he retooled the thing and went to Telluride with a streaming digital feed of it thirty-three years later, he completed his transformation into the faceless machine-priest of the film, sanctifying his zombified acolytes as good pods and ladling upon them the questionable bounty of blessings by the state.

Greenberg (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

October 5, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Noah Baumbach 

Mustownby Walter Chaw The ideal follow-up to his Dorothy Parker-cum-Rohmer shrine Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach's Greenberg is a deepening of the filmmaker's examinations of the peculiar voids over which we stretch the niceties of interaction betwixt the miserable intellectual elite. It's the Algonquin Roundtable reconstituted as wits without an audience: all outrage without an outlet, there's even this sense of panic attached to Greenberg's little whorls of nervous intellectualism, as if Jonathan Edwards's penitents were literati at risk of being cast into the hell of everyone else. Just as ignorance is bliss, the opposite is most assuredly also true, and it's the product of that deep, consuming contemplation of the navel that is the foundation for Baumbach's films, from his post-grad Kicking and Screaming through to his portraits of agonizing relational disintegrations The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding. The anxiety that drives his work is the fear that the armour equipped to defend against the perception of ordinariness doesn't fit well, and that the discovery of the idiot driving the sage is not merely likely but inevitable. His are films, then, of a certain deep discomfort with the projection of the self–and Greenberg, ironically, is an examination of all of Baumbach's issues carried off with what seems like absolute confidence. If Baumbach suffers from the same self-doubt as his characters, he's no longer showing it in his films.

Sex and the City 2 (2010) + Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

October 3, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

SEX AND THE CITY 2
ZERO STARS/****
starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, Kim Cattrall
written and directed by Michael Patrick King

PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ben Kingsley, Gemma Arterton, Alfred Molina
screenplay by Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard
directed by Mike Newell

Sexandpersiaby Walter Chaw One may be a misguided liberal screed and the other a misguided conservative screed, but Sex and the City 2 and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (hereafter Prince of Persia) are very much alike in that they're what a Tea Party meeting would look like with a budget. They're politically-confused hodgepodges of bad ideas and misplaced, incoherent outrage–most of it gleaned from the one or two times some idiot accidentally read the A-section of a newspaper, the rest gathered from Dummies primers on how to be cursorily informed in the Information Age. They're similarly infused with healthy doses of arrogance and cultural empiricism that speak directly to the reasons the United States is the target of fundamentalist whackos convinced we're all just like the randy quartet of aging bitches on a hedonism bender in the Middle East in Sex and the City 2. Hateful, vile, both films are also indicated by a distinct lack of artistry, representing a world post-Michael Bay in which a goodly portion of movies are dependent on not only other cultural touchstones (a TV series, a videogame) for the entirety of their alleged appeal, but on some of the most vapid cultural touchstones in the brief history of our popular culture, period.

A Scanner Darkly (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

October 3, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder
screenplay by Richard Linklater, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick
directed by Richard Linklater

Mustownby Walter Chaw Our reality has almost outstripped Philip K. Dick's paranoid fantasies, and Richard Linklater's grim A Scanner Darkly is the slipperiest take yet on the war between perception vs. reality in a year that knows United 93. Keanu Reeves, so often woefully miscast, is wonderfully imagined here as a guy in a "scramble suit": his appearance constantly shifting in a kaleidoscope of mismatched parts–the uniform of future-narcs (seven years from now, announce the opening titles) sent undercover to ferret out the dopers and dealers of Substance D. It's a hallucinogen that eventually causes a rift in the individual consciousness (the left hemisphere atrophies and the right tries to compensate) and Reeves' Agent Fred is sent to find out where dealer Donna (Winona Ryder) is getting her shit. But the scramble suits seem mainly used to keep the vice squad's identities from one another instead of their quarry, meaning that Fred goes underground as himself, Robert Arctor, in full grunge, inhabiting his once-cozy suburban nook with tweaked conspiracy theorists Ernie (Woody Harrelson) and Barris (Robert Downey Jr.). Meaning, too, that Fred is asked to spy on Arctor, and that Barris, in a pair of hilarious scenes, informs on Arctor to Arctor. It's not the labyrinthine audacity of Dick's delusions that so enthrals, but rather the mendacity of them. What's complicated about A Scanner Darkly isn't the compression of identity or the various plots to which its characters imagine themselves hero and victim, but the idea that reality conforms itself to belief–that because life has stopped making sense to you, life has stopped making sense, period.

Let Me In (2010)

October 1, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire

**/****
starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chloë Grace Moretz, Richard Jenkins, Elias Koteas
screenplay by Matt Reeves, based on the novel Låt den rätte komma in by John Ajvide Lindqvist
directed by Matt Reeves

Letmeinby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Matt Reeves’s redux of Swede Tomas Alfredson’s lovely, understated, doom-laden Let the Right One In finds magnification in the wrong places while betraying what seems to be its better nature in order to present something more “palatable” to a popular audience. Wrong to call it a “dumbing down”–better to say that elements left unspoken or at arm’s length in the original film are presented in Let Me In in as confrontational, uncontroversial a way as possible. More’s the pity, as the movie begins with Ronald Reagan quoting Alexis de Tocqueville in his “Evil Empire” speech (delivered to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983) on a television in a snowed-in New Mexico E.R.: “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America… America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” It’s a thread of Christian fervour that weaves through much of the first twenty minutes of the picture, through the introduction of our hero, Owen (a tremendous Kodi Smit-McPhee), suffering an extended Grace delivered by a faceless mother (Cara Buono) and, later, an admonition by an also-faceless father over the telephone that Owen’s mother is unbalanced and should stow her Christian shit a bit more tightly. The lack of the father as a physical presence in the film becomes a poignant elision in this respect: in a film about good and evil, the divorce between Father and Son, as it were, is a pithy one.

The Karate Kid (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

September 26, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Family, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Sports, Will Smith

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jaden Smith, Jackie Chan, Taraji P. Henson, Wenwen Han
screenplay by Christopher Murphey
directed by Harald Zwart

by Walter Chaw So here's the thing: there's something really powerful about the archetype of a child losing his father and finding a mentor and, on the flipside, of a father losing a son and finding an apprentice. Easy to scoff, it's also the worn-through, threadbare foundation for stuff like the Dardennes' arthouse favourite The Son, Beat Takeshi's Kikujuro, and Pixar's Up–so why not another go-round with a remake of The Karate Kid? The only places it truly fails are in its deviations from formula: a little too much faithless razzle-dazzle here, a bit too much equivocal bullshit there, and a whole lot of nepotism as overmatched Jaden Smith (spawn of producers Will and Jada Pinkett) grimaces his way through a cipher of a character. It's high-concept fat that clogs the arteries of a lean, John G. Avildsen-sculpted framework, this inner-city-to-Forbidden-city crap that sees li'l Dre (Smith) jetting off to Beijing when mommy (Taraji P. Henson) gets a job at an auto plant. Should there be an undercurrent of irony here about moving from Detroit to Beijing to work on cars? Doesn't matter, as in the place of subtext, The Karate Kid quickly introduces a deeply uncomfortable love story between 12-year-old Dre and little Mei (Han Wenwen) that culminates in a stolen kiss and a sexy dance set to Lady Gaga that has blank Dre slacking his jaw in the very approximation of Forrest Gump finally fucking Jen-nay. Is there a racial element when bully Cheng (Wang Zhenwei) warns Dre to "stay away from all of us"? Doesn't matter, as in the place of all that stuff about internment camps that so beautifully complicated the 1984 flick is the drama of Mr. Han née Miyagi (Jackie Chan) losing control of his car on a dark and stormy night (because just as every chink knows kung fu, none of them can drive–Han totals a car in the film while it's parked in his living room), thus opening the door for a ragamuffin to come calling like some funked-up changeling.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) + Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (2009)

September 24, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, Family, Fantasy

WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS
**/****
starring Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Josh Brolin, Frank Langella
screenplay by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff
directed by Oliver Stone

LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE
*½/****
screenplay by John Orloff and Emil Stern, based on the novel Guardians of Ga'Hoole by Kathryn Lasky
directed by Zack Snyder

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Oliver Stone has a penchant for writing himself into living history, and normally, it's quite fascinating. By making movies about historical events whose ramifications have not yet fully materialized, he engages in a battle of wits with the unfamiliar. He tries to understand what's unfolding at this very moment, constantly on the lookout for something resembling closure. From that perspective, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (hereafter Wall Street 2) suffers from Stone's familiarity with the subject. Having already made a movie about the chaos of the free market, he knows exactly what he wants to say from the outset. Our boy Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) spent the Clinton years behind bars, leaving his personal life in shambles. Beloved son Rudy has died of a drug overdose, and hitherto-unmentioned daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan) is–irony of ironies!–a lefty blogger who won't have anything to do with him. Enter her fiancé, Jake Moore (professional protégé Shia LaBeouf, who's convincing enough; and the character's name is More, get it?), an ambitious green-energy investor who wants to learn a few moves from a living legend. As fate would have it, the two men share a mutual enemy in Bretton James (Josh Brolin), the slimy businessman who sent Gekko to the slammer and spread a few market rumours that prompted Jake's mentor/father figure (Frank Langella) to commit suicide. Gekko sees the chance to rekindle his relationship with Winnie, while Jake wants to make a mint founded on revenge. Alliances are forged, tricks are played, trust is abused, and, above all, greed continues to rule the day. When the bottom falls out, you'd best be prepared for a lot of hand-wringing in the executive boardroom–but hell, you know there are more important things floating around here, right? Winnie announces her pregnancy on the very same day that the 2008 economy does its final nosedive. Where do you think Wall Street 2 is going to end up?

I’m Still Here (2010)

September 22, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Esoterica, Jack Nicholson, Music, Satire, Theatrical

****/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Antony Langdon, Casey Affleck, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs
screenplay by Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix
directed by Casey Affleck 

by Ian Pugh It’s far too easy to believe that Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here hinges on whether or not its subject has perpetrated a hoax. Joaquin Phoenix grows a lunatic’s beard, declares he’s quitting acting, and starts planning a hip-hop career? Surely, he can’t be serious. But here’s how it ends, kids: yes, I guess you could call it a “put-on” in the strictest sense of the word–yet at the same time, he is deadly serious. What needs to be understood about Phoenix, and this film, is that there was a kernel of truth to everything the man mumbled through that maniacal persona. I do believe that Phoenix is tired of acting (or, at least, tired of stardom), and, for his farewell performance, he’s blurred the line between actor and role so completely as to obliterate all our preconceived notions of who he is and what he is supposed to represent. The false Phoenix–the bedraggled, abusive prophet spouting non-sequiturs–is, for all intents and purposes, the “real” Phoenix, the iconic artist who pulls a disappearing act by forcing the art and the iconography to consume his entire being. You can’t call I’m Still Here a mockumentary, exactly, because, inside and outside of the “act,” that is precisely what happened. And what came out of it is a harrowing thought exercise about artistic failure and the baggage of celebrity.

The Social Network (2010)

September 22, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Theatrical

****/*****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer
screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich
directed by David Fincher

Socialnetworkby Walter Chaw An asshole movie about an asshole, David Fincher’s The Social Network is an exacting, brutal celluloid treatise on the theory that the only reason anything ever gets made in this world is because some smart guys don’t get laid enough. It’s the misandrous analogue to Camille Paglia’s once-inflammatory assertion in her Sexual Personae that if women were in charge of civilization, we’d still be living in grass huts. Freud at its mud-wallow base, The Social Network isn’t thoughtful–it’s not a conversation unto itself, not much more than pocket philosophizing easily turned into a weapon for either side. In the end, it’s just a series of loose, out-of-sequence vignettes chronicling the creation of a 25-billion dollar enterprise on the back of a painful break-up and a best friend getting into an exclusive campus club that said 25-billion dollar enterprise’s creator could not. But it’s good. Good because Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin have tapped into a vein of male anxiety in a way that feels like mainlining a particularly hot, particularly angry fix. It’s Fight Club again, but with an ending that’s more about the toothed pit at the middle of male loneliness and obsession–drawing that line between genius and psychosis instead of, as in Fight Club, pandering to some notion of a romantic solution capable of soothing eons of atavistic penis crises. It’s Fight Club without Marla.

Machete (2010)

September 2, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Danny Trejo, Jeff Fahey, Michelle Rodriguez, Steven Seagal
screenplay by Robert Rodriguez & Alvaro Rodríguez
directed by Ethan Maniquis & Robert Rodriguez

Macheteby Walter Chaw The only kind of movie Robert Rodriguez should be making as well as the kind of movie The Expendables should have been, the knowing, balls-out Machete is unforgivable, reprehensible, sleazy, disgusting fun, and somehow not entirely stupid. It gives props to the eternally quickly-dead character actor Danny Trejo as the titular ex-Federale, a grab-bag of Mexican stereotypes who in the course of his bloody rampage (for justice, of course) uses a weed-whacker and a pick-axe, among other day-labourer tools. Meanwhile, when he's picked up as a patsy in a senator's ploy, he more fears that he's being tapped for a "septic job." It's unabashed in its politics, taking on the illegal immigration debate in the United States with a naïve brio and outrage. But it's all the more winning, I think, for its complete lack of embarrassment about itself. The thought even occurs that the reason it works is the exact reason a few of the better drive-in/grindhouse/exploitation films of the Seventies worked: Born of low pretensions, it frees itself to explore its outrage with a simple-mindedness that rings with the earnest "geez!" of a Kevin Costner joint.

Soul Power (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

August 31, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Concert Doc, Documentary, Music

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte

by Jefferson Robbins There's a double filter of nostalgia on Soul Power, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's assemblage of decades-old footage from the Zaire '74 music festival. The Kinshasa-based event opened the fabled Muhammad Ali-George Foreman bout "The Rumble in the Jungle," where Ali reclaimed the world heavyweight championship–back when the thought that music and sport could change the world seemed less far-fetched. But while the concert showcase captures stirring performances from some of soul music's greatest figures, it still winds up being only half a documentary. The miles of film accumulated in Kinshasa–shot by Albert Maysles, among other notables–sat in storage until it got aired out for Leon Gast's rousing sports doc When We Were Kings in 1996. That piece is a valuable curation, recording exactly how Ali-Foreman (mostly Ali, by seizing the narrative early) energized a nation oppressed first by Belgian colonialism, then by Mobutu Sese Seko's dictatorship. That's not to mention how the fight (again, via Ali) reasserted ties between African-Americans and their ancestral continent, and was billed (by Don King) as a triumph for American black pride.