The Losers (2010) + The Back-up Plan (2010)

April 22, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

THE LOSERS
*½/****
starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoë Saldana, Chris Evans, Jason Patric
screenplay by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt, based on the comic book series by Andy Diggle and Jock
directed by Sylvain White

THE BACK-UP PLAN
½*/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Alex O’Loughlin, Eric Christian Olsen, Linda Lavin
screenplay by Kate Angelo
directed by Alan Poul

by Ian Pugh We’ve got a long summer ahead of us, full of remakes and spoofs straight out of the ’80s, and The Losers celebrates its imminent arrival by taking a dump on the action flicks of the era. Blinkered hostility is as much a mood-killer as uncritical nostalgia, and The Losers never misses an opportunity to remind you that its characters have one-note personalities defined by terse nicknames. The film begins, as it must, in the Bolivian jungle, where the titular team of U.S. soldiers (led by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is forced to go underground after an errant missile–intended for them–kills twenty-five Bolivian children they’d just saved from an evil drug lord. At first glance, that opening raid points to a toned-down Predator reference, but it’s really just a paint-by-numbers scenario meant to demonstrate how pretty much everything from that decade is stilted, corny, and hopelessly dated. So it goes for the rest of the film–how else to explain a brief chase sequence set to “Don’t Stop Believin'”? It’s not merely junk; it’s self-conscious, wilfully misinterpretive junk.

An Education (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

April 21, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Carey Mulligan
screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber
directed by Lone Scherfig

by Walter Chaw Director Lone Scherfig is perhaps notoriously the first woman to direct a Dogme95 picture (Italian for Beginners) and preserves her effortlessness with actors and light romantic imbroglios with An Education. Yet it shows little maturation, particularly after her scabrous, delicately balanced, Hal Ashby-esque Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, instead regressing into the ghetto of only-adequate BBC coming-of-age story. If An Education is remembered at all, it will be for raising the profile of the immensely appealing Carey Mulligan. She's Jenny, a sharp, sensitive sixteen-year-old schoolgirl with a promising future in letters and eyes on Oxford until she's distracted by the allure of a bohemian lifestyle with pretentious friends, who pretend at the civilization she would rightfully earn in time. Leader of said bohemians is creepy/suave David (Peter Sarsgaard), whose courtship of Jenny is a laudable contrast to Twilight in showing a worldly older man using all the benefits of his experience to impress, and eventually deflower, an easily-exploited high-schooler with stars in her eyes.

The Age of Unintended Consequences: FFC Interviews David Russo

April 20, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Interviews, Theatrical

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THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF LITTLE DIZZLE
*** (out of four)
starring Marshall Allman, Vince Vieluf, Natasha Lyonne, Tygh Runyan
written and directed by David Russo
The scion of a constipated generation, Seattle tech worker Dory (Marshall Allman) is sampling religions like grab-bag candy when a sealed bottle floats past during his lunch-hour Bible study. The message within could be either from God or from the famously polluted Puget Sound itself, but it sets Dory on a career-destroying spiral that ends with a new job on an office cleaning crew, scrubbing johns alongside renegade "artist" OC (Vince Vieluf). One of their clients is product lab Corsica Research, where a young exec (Natasha Lyonne, long missed but giving the least authentic performance here) decides the trash-scavenging janitors are perfect test subjects for an awful but addictive new cookie. The active ingredient impregnates men first with an altered consciousness (whole concepts break loose from language and float free in the air, in electrically beautiful F/X sequences), and finally with what can only be described as an incandescent blue lungfish. But it's not so much an Alien-esque affliction as an epiphany, with each man finding peace and even enlightenment in this scatological process of "childbirth." No longer adrift, they're vessels for a new life–the only kind that can survive, it's implied, in a world where Zoloft flows from the kitchen tap and breakfast just isn't a meal without Yellow Dye No. 5. Allman and Vieluf play perfectly off each other under Seattle writer-director David Russo, whose jitter-editing and hallucination segments recall Darren Aronofsky and whose screenplay references Philip K. Dick. Russo's deployment of soundtrack music skillfully twists the knife where it counts–witness the lo-fi but enchanting version of the Carpenters' "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" (by The Langley Schools Music Project, fascinating in itself) that closes the film, as Dory deposits a new message in the water and contemplates, as all new fathers must, a future for his children.–JR

April 21, 2010|The films of David Russo have a distinctly handmade feel, and often the hand becomes visible. A largely self-taught filmmaker and animator, he makes no pretense that he's not manipulating the action. When he sets his models into neon time-lapse against backdrops that strobe from sky to sea to blackness, he almost always winds up in the shot. In Russo's short creations and in his first feature film, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, bespoke art objects–or even just words–make long, looping journeys in search of some answer. But like most philosophical quests, the journey is more important than its endpoint.

While he developed his craft Russo carried on an eleven-year career as a janitor, a vocation that sharpened his sense of the things society values: what we keep, what we cast away, what we flush. His short art films Populi (2002) and Pan With Us (2003) (viewable here, along with most of the artist's other work) gave him his first wider exposure, competing at the Sundance Film Festival in consecutive years. More recently, his hand-wrought animation lent texture to the video for Thom Yorke's "Harrowdown Hill" (2006).

Dizzle's path from script to screen was fraught with financing issues and a slender production window. It wasn't bought for distribution after its Sundance debut in early 2009, and by the time it reached Russo's hometown Seattle International Film Festival the same year, its hopes for release were no better. Finally, Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film picked up Dizzle for a brief 2010 New York theatrical engagement and a video-on-demand run that starts today. Russo's renegade janitors, chemically enlightened and midwifing the birth of a new species, might manage to swim free of the sewers after all.

Minority Report (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

April 19, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller, Tom Cruise

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, based on the short story by Philip K. Dick
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Despite a remarkable first hour, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report washes out as an overlong retread of tired thriller/mystery elements capped by the director's trademark propensity for moralizing epilogues. It suffers from mainstream cinema's squeamishness in regards to true ambiguity of character and character motivation, and for all its claims to a faithful reproduction of Philip K. Dick's dark dystopian future, the picture is ultimately about Spielberg's itch for restoration of order rather than Dick's entropic dissolution of it. Distracting and unforgivable plot holes yaw beneath the narrative, making it clear that Minority Report is just another failed attempt by Spielberg to tell an adult tale. Here is an attractively packaged summer bonbon with an essentially hollow, nutritionally empty centre.

The Wolfman (2010)

April 17, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, Werewolf

***/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving
screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self
directed by Joe Johnston

Wolfmanby Walter Chaw Gloriously, exuberantly awful, Joe Johnston's tone-perfect, imperfect-perfect update of Universal's horror legacy begs at any moment for grieving Gwen (Emily Blunt) to cry out, "He. Vas. My. BOYfriend!" It's easily the funniest movie I've seen in what seems forever–a comedy of imitation that clarifies, if anything, the extent to which our condescension to films from the '40s allows us to enjoy the Universal monster movies without irony. Not so lucky is this product of the post-modern era in which absolutely the only way to enjoy the film in any defensible way is to profess a deep knowledge and affection for the works of James Whale, Lon Chaney, and all the boys at the old studio who found themselves, not long into their run, making movie-mashups and Abbott & Costello vehicles. At the least, this redux demonstrates some respect for its source material, from its retro effects (credited to ace werewolf guy Rick Baker) to its joyful inability to assemble anything like a coherent narrative from the various bits and pieces Johnston and company have thrown into a bucket and then onto the screen. Consider the transition from a bloody, fountain-side flashback of dead mommy to prodigal son Lawrence (Benicio Del Toro) descending a few steps into a mysterious torture chamber beneath some kind of estate-bound cemetery, where his dad (Anthony Hopkins), eyes glowing mysteriously, advises that the beast "will out." It's really just a collection of non-sequiturs, of scenes that don't fit together in a landscape with no scale (Lawrence takes a full month to walk sixteen miles from London to his house and still manages to beat his carriage-riding pursuers there), strung together willy-nilly by Oedipal suggestions the film is clearly incapable, and uninterested, in exploring. The Wolfman is a big, giant, dumb movie made with such breathtaking stupidity that it actually ends with a "wolf-out" battle royale like the one in Mike Nichols's Wolf–the difference being that The Wolfman doesn't appear to take itself the tiniest bit seriously.

Kick-Ass (2010)

April 16, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Nicolas Cage, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Mark Strong, Nicolas Cage
screenplay by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, based on the comic book by Mark Millar & John Romita Jr.
directed by Matthew Vaughn

Kickassby Walter Chaw A wonderfully unlikely amalgam of Hong Kong-era John Woo and Shaolin Soccer/Kung Fu Hustle–era Stephen Chow, Matthew Vaughn's ebullient, often-unconscionable Kick-Ass reimagines Woo's iconic Tequila as an 11-year-old girl with a purple bob, an incredible potty mouth (she uses the "C" word correctly in a sentence, cunts), and absolutely no remorse in crushing a defenseless douchebag in a car cuber. Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) is destined to be an icon, a more popular tattoo-parlour fave than Calvin in evoking the cheerful, insouciant lawlessness of misdirected youth. Far from truly groundbreaking, though, sober minds could only identify her as a continuation of that quintessentially American, Huck Finn tradition of children as collective, societal Id and trickster gods. She's even employed in the picture as a punitive, apolitical, unapologetic champion of order who limits her victims to drug-dealers and gangsters, those disturbers of civilization. As her father (Nicolas Cage) clarifies in response to her unconventional upbringing, it's not his blame to shoulder, but arch-baddie Frank D'Amico's.

Big Love: The Complete Second Season (2007) – DVD

April 7, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A Extras C+
"Damage Control," "The Writing on the Wall," "Reunion," "Rock and a Hard Place," "Vision Thing," "Dating Game," "Good Guys and Bad Guys," "Kingdom Come," "Circle the Wagons," "The Happiest Girl," "Take Me As I Am," "Oh, Pioneers"

by Alex Jackson There's definitely something cheeky and slyly subversive at the core of HBO's "Big Love". The show is the brainchild of Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, an openly-gay couple who've been together since the early-'90s. That single fact opens up some interesting connections when it comes to polygamy. The standard argument religious groups have against homosexuality is that it's unnatural: Two men or two women cannot naturally procreate and therefore it's deviant, godless behaviour. By contrast, polygamy is possibly more natural than monogamy–you could argue that males are hardwired to spread their seed with as many females as possible and it is not cost efficient, evolutionarily speaking, to restrict yourself to one woman. And if the ability to procreate is what makes heterosexuality more moral than homosexuality, then we have to admit that polygamists are able to procreate "better" than monogamists and so polygamy should be embraced as the morally superior lifestyle.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

April 5, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Max Records, Catherine Keener, Lauren Ambrose, Mark Ruffalo
screenplay by Spike Jonze & Dave Eggers, based on the book by Maurice Sendak
directed by Spike Jonze 

Mustownby Walter Chaw Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are is the product of an artist who may only be able to assimilate art and the creation of it through the filter of celluloid and the music that animates its flickers. More, there’s the suggestion in its depth of emotion that this may be the only way Jonze knows to communicate at all, and so he tasks it to capture the breadth of human experience. If the “film brats” of the New American Cinema were the first reared on a diet of the French New Wave and critical theory, this new post-modernism to which Jonze belongs consists of artists reared on the entire panoply of popular culture…and maybe nothing else. What other explanation is there for the elasticity and strangeness of films by people like Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino? They create works that strive towards the ineffable, seemingly unaware of film’s limitations and therefore undaunted by ideas of what’s possible.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

April 1, 2010Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Norway, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller

Män som hatar kvinnor
*/****
starring Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Peter Haber
screenplay by Nikolaj Arcel, Rasmus Heisterberg, based on a novel by Stieg Larsson
directed by Niels Arden Oplev

Girlwithdragontattooby Walter Chaw Slick and overproduced and poised for a David Fincher-helmed American redux, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor), Niels Arden Oplev’s adaptation of the first of the late Steig Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy,” falls off the exploitation tightrope. The titular flicka may be insane in the mainframe, but when she gets naked and straddles, cowgirl-style, an old guy while resisting even the notion of a committed relationship, it is only what it is. It doesn’t matter what her issues are, in other words, because she’s a hot twentysomething Goth-chick fantasy into computers and casual sex–and when I’m watching a representation of same, I’m not growing a conscience, I’m getting a hard-on. Imagine Elisha Cuthbert playing this role in the United States: on the one hand, it’s theoretically harrowing to see her tied up and raped; on the other hand, I’m not complaining about seeing a hot twentysomething actress tied to a bed, completely prone and naked, pretending to be raped. It’s the kind of playacting porn is discouraged from engaging in because it’s actually too illicit for porn–but it’s not too illicit for an arthouse import that’s allegedly trying to have a conversation about what happens to little girls who are sexually abused.

Clash of the Titans (2010)

April 1, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

½*/****
starring Sam Worthington, Gemma Arterton, Mads Mikkelsen, Liam Neeson
screenplay by Travis Beacham and Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi, based on the screenplay by Beverley Cross
directed by Louis Leterrier

Clashofthetitans2010by Walter Chaw Absolutely awful in absolutely the most boring way possible, Louis Leterrier's update of Ray Harryhausen's swan song is made several degrees worse by the decision to blur and dim everything via the exhaustively-touted wonder of 3-D. Why anyone would pay 15 cents much less 15 bucks for the privilege of watching this turgid mess is beyond me, but if you go you'll find exhaustively-touted wonder Sam Worthington mashing together his last two roles as Terminator and blue cat to embody Greek demigod Perseus, who's on an incomprehensible quest to, um, get into the pants of immortal slut Io (Gemma Arterton), I think. Familiarity with the source mythology actually a terrible impediment, better to take this Clash of the Titans at face value as Perseus sees his adopted family murdered by Hades (Ralph Fiennes) and petulantly rejects his newly-discovered status as the Son of Zeus (Liam Neeson). Hades, meanwhile, hatches a half-assed plan to freak out the good people of Argos in order to steal followers away from Zeus, making one pine in the process for not only the better-than-you-remember original, but also a couple of hours in front of any "God of War". All of which results in Perseus traveling a long way to somewhere ill-defined so as to encounter giant, domesticated scorpions, people covered in bad wood makeup who remind a lot of the Cyclops from zero-budgeted craptavaganza Krull (which also featured Liam Neeson in a bit part), and a CGI Medusa that makes Uma Thurman's recent snake-haired turn in The Lightning Thief seem, erm, deep. For my part, I kept waiting for the moment Perseus shoves his black Pegasus's tail up his ass before he can ride it. Fear not, the Kraken is released and revealed to be an aquatic Cloverfield that spends a lot of time sort of flailing around waiting for Perseus to kill him. Spoiler alert: he does.

Lost: The Complete Third Season (2006-2007) – Blu-ray Disc

March 30, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
"A Tale of Two Cities," "The Glass Ballerina," "Further Instructions," "Every Man for Himself," "The Cost of Living," "I Do," "Not in Portland," "Flashes Before Your Eyes," "Stranger in a Strange Land," "Tricia Tanaka is Dead," "Enter 77," "Par Avion," "The Man from Tallahassee," "Exposé," "Left Behind," "One of Us," "Catch-22," "D.O.C.," "The Brig," "The Man Behind the Curtain," "Greatest Hits," "Through the Looking Glass"

by Walter Chaw By now, "Lost" is resolving as an interminable adaptation of that old PC puzzle game "Myst": lush environments, episodic brain teasers of medium intensity, and a mystery revolving around the failed construction of a society that suffers from a paucity of real forward momentum. The rate at which new characters are introduced accelerates rapidly in Season Three as Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are taken by the Ben-led Others to a neighbouring island on which the Others have built a quiet little bedroom community complete with outdoor cages, a surgical theatre, and a book-club. (This month's selection? Of all things, Stephen King's Carrie.) It's all very "Days of Our Lives"–particularly that show's supernatural stint from a decade or so ago which saw purportedly massacred citizens of Salem actually spirited away to the secluded island of Melaswen. Is "Lost" the further adventures of our Melaswen castaways? Why not. It's ultimately not more preposterous than this framework set for returns from the dead, alternate timelines, and suggestions that that glimpse of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in the hatch in the middle of Season Two will finally bear middle-school fruit in the show's dedication to slack foreshadowing and Gen-X/pomo 101 pop-culture references piling up thicker than desiccated corpses on the main island. If it bugs you that the characters periodically take breaks from worrying about their continued, casual existence amid polar bears and carnosaurs to do shtick on "Skeletor" and Thundercats while hot-wiring a VW bus to play Three Dog Night in an episode that blows the dust off Cheech Marin for a cameo as Hurley's no-account daddy (why not have him light up a spliff and shove his arm elbow-deep up a horse, too?), phew, then you're not the right audience for "Lost", a series that now averages one slo-mo musical interlude per episode to match its pace of introducing new people and storylines.

Sherlock Holmes (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

March 28, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Germany, Mystery, UK

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong
screenplay by Michael Robert Johnson and Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw On page 31 of the first book of Frank Miller's seminal The Dark Knight Returns, there's a sequence in which Batman takes a few seconds to assess the seven options he has to either kill, disarm, or cripple his quarry whilst crouched in a darkened stairwell. That last option, Miller informs his reader, hurts, and I thought of this–the moment as a kid I gave myself over to the hard noir of The Dark Knight Returns–during the opening of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes as the exact analog for our Holmes (a mesmerizing Robert Downey Jr.) calculating the damage he's about to do to an antagonist. The film that follows is akin to Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, with the same weaknesses (pacing in a saggy middle) but the same considerable strengths as well as it rescues Holmes from the lovely yet stuffy Rathbone/Bruce serials and reintroduces the detective as the man capable of bending an iron poker with his bare hands ("The Adventure of the Speckled Band")–the man with a cocaine (the familiar "seven percent solution" is a solution of Bolivian marching powder, of course) and intravenous morphine habit ("The Sign of the Four"*) he indulges to fend off bouts of depression, having suffered one ("The Adventure of the Reigate Squire"), possibly two ("The Adventure of the Devil's Foot") nervous breakdowns. Holmes, in other words, is a fucking mess and a bit of a badass, and this doesn't scratch the surface of his faithful sidekick Dr. Watson (Jude Law), a veteran of a brutal Afghan campaign that's left him with shrapnel in his shoulder.

Armored (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

March 15, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Matt Dillon, Jean Reno, Laurence Fishburne, Columbus Short
screenplay by James V. Simpson
directed by Nimród Antal

Armoredcap

by Bryant Frazer Watch enough movies, you get some insights into criminal activity and human behaviour. For example, the more conspirators you involve in your can't-miss heist scheme, the more likely it is that things will go south. Some people are capable of great ruthlessness. Others have a surprising and troubling capacity for cruelty. That lone cop snooping around is about to get in trouble. And that guy who made you promise that nobody would get hurt? He's going to be very, very disappointed.

Green Zone (2010)

March 12, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, France, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

**/****
starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, Jason Isaacs
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the book by Rajit Chandrasekaran
directed by Paul Greengrass

by Ian Pugh Sucks for Green Zone that it’s being released the weekend after The Hurt Locker won the Oscar for Best Picture, which only makes the former look that much more antiquated. Paul Greengrass can still stick a couple of actors in front of a computer and perform those “shaky-cam” action sequences with the technical proficiency we’ve come to expect from him, but as proficiency is the only thing he has going for him this time around, it appears the director has finally run out of new tricks. Green Zone feels like a self-conscious relic of the previous decade and there’s nothing to convince us of otherwise, particularly because it applies tired aesthetics to an impotent tirade about the American invasion of Iraq. At its best, the picture suggests an extraneous coda to the Greengrass-completed Bourne trilogy, without the benefit of its mystery, its forward momentum, or its looming implications. It immediately, unwisely lays everything out on the table for you–The Bourne Ultimatum without any damned ultimatum. The film Green Zone reminds of most, however, is former Greengrass collaborator Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton: it’s so consumed with stating the obvious about corruption in the system that it fails to recognize this is hardly a newsflash. While Greengrass and Gilroy are smart guys, I’m starting to wonder if they can only work miracles together.

Lost: The Complete Second Season (2005-2006) – Blu-ray Disc

March 10, 2010Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A Sound A+ Extras B
“Man of Science, Man of Faith,” “Adrift,” “Orientation,” “Everybody Hates Hugo,” “…And Found,” “Abandoned,” “The Other 48 Days,” “Collision,” “What Kate Did,” “The 23rdPsalm,” “The Hunting Party,” “Fire + Water,” “The Long Con,” “One of Them,” “Maternity Leave,” “The Whole Truth,” “Lockdown,” “Dave,” “S.O.S.,” “Two for the Road,” “?,” “Three Minutes,” “Live Together, Die Alone”

by Walter Chaw The problem so far, as I see it, is that the first season’s episodes–with the possible exception of the two-part pilot and the three-part closer–were too, how to phrase this, episodic. Predictable rises and falls in action ending in either a cliffhanger or poignant musical montage or some mutant hybrid of the two do not a sustainable experience make. (Perhaps it’s easier to take when you’re not watching it in six-hour chunks.) I feel almost the same way about “Lost”–and many would count this as a positive comparison, though I would not–as I do about Dickens, and concede the same: that maybe it was different reading Great Expectations in bite-sized chunks separated by days and weeks. Anything designed for parcelling out and serialization dooms itself to a certain viewer-fatigue when consumed all at once. Still, I watched the first two seasons of “Deadwood” in the space of something like three days and didn’t feel anything close to the disdain and exhaustion I felt after just one season of “Lost”. It’s not that it’s tense so much as it’s generally bereft of imagination and, therefore, repetitive early and often. Its only consistency is this steadfast observance of its staid narrative ebb and flow; its only innovation is that it sometimes begins an episode with a flashback instead of going to flashback midstream.

The Crazies (2010)

March 5, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, United Arab Emirates

***½/****
starring Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker
screenplay by Scott Kosar and Ray Wright
directed by Breck Eisner

Crazies2010by Walter Chaw A military plane transporting a biological agent designed to destabilize civilian populations is headed for incineration when it crash-lands in tiny Ogden Marsh, IA, causing a few of the local yokels to start acting on all the urges that the veneer of civilization holds in check. A father kills his wife and son, a school principal dispatches a few of his students, a coroner begins stitching up the living, and Sheriff Dutton (Timothy Olyphant, good as sheriffs) is left to consider that for as naughty as these actions are, they're not so out of character for the people he protects. (It takes a while for him to deadpan that they might be in a little bit of trouble.) The Crazies plays with the thought that there's not only not much of a line separating acceptable behaviour from homicidal, there's also not much of a line between the infected townspeople and the military choppered in to contain them. In a good film's best moment, Dutton and his deputy capture a young soldier (Joe Reegan) and allow him a few minutes to be afraid and to enact a moment of grace that, if you think about it later, facilitates the complete destruction of another, larger urban population. A lot like the mordant epilogue of the also-fantastic 28 Weeks Later (another film that deals with the problem of occupation armies and the suppression of insurgencies), the ultimate source of trouble here is the heroic, quintessentially American desire to survive no matter the cost to the greater good.

Maid in Manhattan (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

February 22, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras D
starring Jennifer Lopez, Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Bob Hoskins
screenplay by Kevin Wade
directed by Wayne Wang

by Walter Chaw Less another version of the Cinderella story than a remake of the dreadful Ever After, Wayne Wang's Maid in Manhattan (why Wang is trying to make the same kind of magical Manhattan love tripe as Nora Ephron is only the first of the film's head-scratchers) manages ill-advisedly to remind of the Ally Sheedy vehicle Maid to Order whilst degenerating into the sort of dead-eyed quasi-political femi-bullshit tailor-made for divas in decline looking for a reason for their existence other than as subject of the next blaring headline. Ironic, then, that the central issues of the picture are resolved through snapshots of fake magazine covers.

Whiteout (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

February 16, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Crime, France, Mystery, Thriller, Turkey

½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Kate Beckinsale, Gabriel Macht, Columbus Short, Tom Skerritt
screenplay by Jon Hoeber & Eric Hoeber and Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes
directed by Dominic Sena

by Walter Chaw The first thing you notice about Whiteout is that it looks like shit. Though it was shot on location in Manitoba (subbing for Antarctica), they could've saved everyone the trouble and shot it in a green warehouse for all that anything in the film resembles anywhere outside. Not unreal, merely artificial. Take the moment, for example, when unbelievably-hot U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale) and cohort Dr. John Fury (Tom Skerritt, well into the Kris Kristofferson portion of his career) discover the body that will be the centre of their stupid investigation into the film's stupid mystery. The middle of an ice canyon, it looks more like something out of a Quatermass flick, sixty years old on a shoestring, and it only gets worse when we come to sepia-toned flashbacks trying to explain why Stetko is damaged goods and, therefore, hiding from herself at the bottom of the world. Everything seems to have been manufactured in a mainframe–even the performances. It's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and, brother, that ain't good for something trying hard at edgy realism.

The Box (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

February 15, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella, James Rebhorn
screenplay by Richard Kelly, based on the short story "Button, Button" by Richard Matheson
directed by Richard Kelly

by Walter Chaw As if to dispel any whisper of a doubt after Richard Kelly's Southland Tales that whatever ephemeral magic was captured in his Donnie Darko was completely accidental, along comes Kelly's third film as writer-director, The Box. I don't know yet whether it's the worst film of the year, but I will say that next to it Alex Proyas' similar disaster Knowing seems like a goddamn masterpiece. It's excruciatingly written, for starters, with the all-timer coming when vanilla paterfamilias Arthur (James Marsden), fresh from a 2001 light tunnel, says to vanilla materfamilias Norma (Cameron Diaz) first that "it's beyond words," then, a few dozen words later, that it's "neither here, nor there…but somewhere in between" and that it's a place "where despair is not the governor of the human soul." It was around this time that I bore down like a Civil War soldier getting a limb sawed off and watched as The Box magically made its 115-minute running time feel like a day spent undergoing oral surgery. It's that bad. Badly edited, too, as the awful script (based on a pretty good Richard Matheson short story)–which already jumps around haphazardly between cheap, moronic comparisons of itself to Sartre's No Exit and egregious exposition that makes M. Night Shyamalan's leisurely verbal masturbations look like Mamet by comparison–is matched by bizarre jump-cuts and senseless, arrhythmic pacing. Despite how long it feels, it's over before it really begins.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)

February 12, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Sean Bean
screenplay by Craig Titley, based on the novel by Rick Riordan
directed by Chris Columbus

Percyjacksonby Walter Chaw You don't have to have read Ovid to enjoy Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (hereafter The Lightning Thief), because, hell, no one involved in the production appears to have read him. In fact, having a cursory knowledge of Greek mythology will mostly serve to irritate you, as the picture runs roughshod over a whole other religion whilst merging many of its images with Christian myth in an attempt to somehow justify itself to an imaginary audience of affronted, I don't know, Protestants? What other reason could there be to bastardize the Greek conception of the underworld by mixing it with Milton's? Actually, in conception, the movie's Hades (Steve Coogan) owes a lot more to Peter Jackson's Balrog than to Blake's illuminations, and suddenly director Chris Columbus's motivations come into sharper focus. Not having any familiarity with Rick Riordan's popular tween novels, the first of which is adapted for this film, I can only comment that I also didn't appreciate a Stepin Fetchit character, Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), who fulfills a threefer function as talking animal/pet (he's a satyr), token black guy comic relief, and uncomfortable throwback to the bad old days of sideshow coon. No better way to inject levity than to have a hilarious black guy crack wise, widen his eyes, and declare his everlasting fealty to massah. Maybe he exists under the same rationale as Jar Jar Binks and the Na'vi: that fictional creatures can't be racist caricatures and, besides, this venomous stereotyping is in a children's film, so we should all just relax. Regardless, The Lightning Thief could play on a double bill with The Blind Side for a cozy trip back to the '30s in American cinema.