2012 Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Like Someone in Love (2012) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

June 2, 20142012, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Japan, The Criterion Collection

click any image to enlarge

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Rio Kase, Denden
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

by Angelo Muredda Few filmmakers know how to put you on your guard from the first frame as effectively as Abbas Kiarostami. It's clear enough that Like Someone in Love opens in a bar in Tokyo, but it's harder to say at first what we're looking at and why. The closest voice we hear belongs to the off-camera Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young woman who's a little too preoccupied with lying her way out of a hostile phone conversation to process the flat image of well-dressed young revellers in front of her. Whether she's our lead takes a couple of false tries to figure out. Our first candidate is a redhead around her age, sitting at a table off to the side until she suddenly relocates to an empty seat in the foreground, coaching Akiko through the rest of her call until she relinquishes her spot moments later to a fortysomething man who speaks to both women with first the familiarity of a parent, then the condescension of a high-end pimp directing his employees. Somewhere in-between these encounters, we briefly lose track of who's even doing the looking. Akiko waltzes into our field of vision on the way to the bathroom, the camera fixed at where her eyeline used to be after she's vacated her seat, as if holding her place until she gets back.

Ernest & Celestine (2012) + Jodorowsky’s Dune (2014)

April 10, 20142012, 2014, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Family, France, Luxembourg, Theatrical

Ernest et Célestine
**½/****
screenplay by Daniel Pennac, based on books by Gabrielle Vincent
directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner

JODOROWSKY’S DUNE
**½/****
directed by Frank Pavich

by Walter Chaw Broad, earnest, unassuming animation from France, Ernest & Celestine is the tale of a little girl mouse, Celestine (voice of Pauline Brunner), and gruff bear Ernest (Lambert Wilson), who overcome their cultural prejudices to become fast friends. Celestine is outcast because she’d like to be an artist instead of a dentist; Ernest is outcast because he’s a busker struggling to eke out a subsistence living. Over a series of misadventures, the two end up doing the Badlands in Ernest’s ramshackle hideaway, awaiting their fate and trying to enjoy their borrowed time. It’s all leading to a grim ending, but it’s not that kind of movie.

Arrow: The Complete First Season (2012-2013) + Supernatural: The Complete Eighth Season (2012-2013) – Blu-ray Discs

February 12, 20142012, 2013, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Television, Werewolf

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ARROW: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image A Sound B Extras B-
"Pilot," "Honor Thy Father," "Lone Gunmen," "An Innocent Man," "Damaged," "Legacies," "Muse of Fire," "Vendetta," "Year's End," "Burned," "Trust but Verify," "Vertigo," "Betrayal," "The Odyssey," "Dodger," "Dead to Rights," "The Huntress Returns," "Salvation," "Unfinished Business," "Home Invasion," "The Undertaking," "Darkness on the Edge of Town," "Sacrifice"

SUPERNATURAL: THE COMPLETE EIGHTH SEASON
Image A Sound B+ Extras B
"We Need to Talk About Kevin," "What's Up, Tiger Mommy?," "Heartache," "Bitten," "Blood Brother," "Southern Comfort," "A Little Slice of Kevin," "Hunteri Heroici," "Citizen Fang," "Torn and Frayed," "LARP and the Real Girl," "As Time Goes By," "Everybody Hates Hitler," "Trial and Error," "Man's Best Friend with Benefits," "Remember the Titans," "Goodbye Stranger," "Freaks and Geeks," "Taxi Driver," "Pac-Man Fever," "The Great Escapist," "Clip Show," "Sacrifice"

by Jefferson Robbins Kindred shows in more ways than just their sharing a network, a Vancouver, B.C. shooting base, and a David Nutter-helmed pilot, The CW's "Arrow" and "Supernatural" also share a gestalt. Post-"The X Files", post-"Buffy", they grapple with family legacies, duty versus desire, and bonds (specifically male) threatened by the intrusion of a) monsters and b) lovers. Watching the debut season of the former alongside the eighth season of the latter, it becomes clear that "Arrow"'s showrunners, headed by Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and Andrew Kreisberg, are just as steeped in the modes and methods of this youth-oriented action programming as "Supernatural" creator Eric Kripke. Both series find young, handsome protagonists consumed with the bloody twilight work left undone by their dead fathers; and both–despite "Arrow"'s roots as a second-tier DC Comics property straining for multimedia relevance–are better, and bloodier, and in some ways more relevant, than one has any right to expect.

Argento’s Dracula 3-D (2012) – Blu-ray 3D & Blu-ray

February 5, 20142012, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy, Romance, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS

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Dario Argento's Dracula
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Thomas Kretschmann, Maria Gastini, Asia Argento, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Dario Argento, Antonio Tentori, Stefano Piani, based on the novel by Bram Stoker
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw I used to love Dario Argento. Heck, who didn't? But at a certain point, it became clear that the quality of Argento's work is directly proportional (or it was for a while) to the quality of work he's riffing on. A shame that lately he appears to be mostly riffing on himself–the elderly version of a vital artist doing his best to recapture something he's lost. It was Hitchcock as muse, of course, initially, joining Argento at the hip for a while with Brian DePalma, who was doing kind of the same thing at the same time with about the same audacity in the United States. There was genius there in the Deep Reds and Suspirias, certainly in the logic-bumfuddling submerged ballroom the heroine must enter to retrieve a key in Inferno. Argento didn't really start to make bad movies until after Tenebre. Since, with notable half-exceptions like Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome, he's made almost nothing but. It all comes to a head–or a tail, as it were–with Dario Argento's Dracula: the worst entry in a filmography that includes stuff like Sleepless and Giallo, and frankly belonging somewhere in the conversation of the worst films of all-time. Until you've endured it, I can't quantify it. Coming from someone once revered for his innovative camera, for his groundbreaking work with music and production design–coming from the guy involved at some level with the conception/production of Once Upon a Time in the West and Dawn of the Dead, fer chrissakes (who, indeed, counted Leone and Bertolucci and George A. Romero as friends and collaborators), it's a fucking tragedy.

The Collection (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

September 30, 20132012, 2013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Thriller

*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Josh Stewart, Emma Fitzpatrick, Lee Tergesen, Christopher McDonald
screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
directed by Marcus Dunstan

by Walter Chaw A cheap, loose remake of Aliens that substitutes rampaging hordes of xenomorphs with a gimp-masked kung-fu master, Marcus Dunstan’s stupid sequel to his stupid The Collector at least, this time around, doesn’t function as a lame, who-cares-if-it’s-intentional echo of Home Alone. No, this one vaguely recalls turn-of-the-century serial ghoul (and hotel owner) H.H. Holmes, who built a giant hotel for the express purpose of culling his guests for, among other things, medical skeletons and simple shits and giggles. Oh, who’m I kidding–the only thing The Collection reminds me of is that I have other things I should probably be doing…oh, and that Steve Beck’s Ghost Ship opens with a bunch of people getting bisected by a runaway cable. The Collection, incidentally, opens with everyone getting chewed up by a combine attached to a runaway cable at a nightclub. This leaves Elena (Emma Fitzpatrick, of interest for the short For Your Consideration, in which she absolutely nails Anne Hathaway’s Les Misérables performance) to be packed into a steamer trunk, because for all the things our bogey The Collector (Randall Archer) is, he’s also a Jazz-era ocean-liner passenger. The Collector promptly spirits her away to his horror hotel, the one he’s set up with boobytraps and galleries of pickled people parts (and tarantulas, of course, in case he needs to set them free to gross out girls and stuff), making it a terrible place to stay but still better than most Motel 6s. BAM! Take that, Motel 6.

A Hijacking (2012)

August 16, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Kapringen ***/****
starring Søren Malling, Pilou Asbæk, Dar Salim, Roland Møller
written and directed by Tobias Lindholm

by Angelo Muredda Finely-tuned but incurious about most of what falls outside its blinkered gaze, A Hijacking is about as good as this sort of stripped-down procedural filmmaking gets–Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low reconfigured for a telephonic showdown between Somali pirates and Danish shareholders. Only the second feature from Tobias Lindholm (who proves much more capable as a director than as the author of The Hunt‘s lazy allegorical punts about the concern-trolling parents of small-town Denmark), the film feels like the work of a yeoman who’s in no hurry to be recognized as a visual stylist unless the material should merit such flourishes. Annoying as that no-frills approach can be in countless austere imitations of the Dardennes and Michael Haneke, it’s more than welcome here in a film whose title might otherwise have ended with a gaudy exclamation mark.

On the Road (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

August 12, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Drama, Road Movie

*½/****
Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring
Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen
screenplay
by Jose Rivera, based on the novel by Jack Kerouac
directed
by Walter Salles

click
any image to enlarge

by
Angelo Muredda "You goin'
some place, or just goin'?" a fellow traveller asks Sam Riley's Sal
Paradise in the long-gestating, still-undigested On
the Road, Walter Salles's
handsomely-mounted but stiff adaptation of Jack Kerouac's hipster
Bible. While that's
a dangerous line to adapt in such an aimless movie, it isn't even the
most
unfortunate moment of meta-commentary within the first ten minutes.
Consider
Sal's panicked voiceover about the text he's spinning out, ostensibly
the same
one we're trudging through: "And what is there to talk about exactly?
The
book I'm not writing? The inspiration I don't feel? Even the beer's
flat."
What, indeed? What's left to say about a project that insists
on reviewing
itself at regular checkpoints and keeps finding its inspiration
wanting?

6 Souls (2013) + Dead Souls (2012) – Blu-ray Discs

July 25, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Television, Thriller, Zombie

6
SOULS (a.k.a. Shelter)
**/****
Image A
Sound A
starring
Julianne Moore, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Jeffreey DeMunn, Brooklyn Proulx
screenplay
by Michael Cooney
directed
by Marlind & Stein

DEAD
SOULS
½*/**** Image
C Sound B Extras C
starring
Jesse James, Magda Apanowicz, Bill Moseley, Geraldine Hughes
screenplay
by John Doolan
directed
by Colin Theys

by
Walter Chaw The best scene in the surprisingly-not-awful 6 Souls happens in a toothless hinterland, up yonder in them thar hills, ’round
campfires and lean-tos and a wilderness of patchy facial hair, where
forensic
psychologist Cara (Julianne Moore) meets a Granny Holler Witch (Joyce
Feurring), who is just indescribably awesome. She’s like a refugee from
The
Dark Crystal–the very incarnation of Aughra, blind but
seeing through an
albino familiar (Katiana Davis) as she performs psychic surgery, sucking up
souls
with her mouth and depositing them in a jar she calls “shelter.” Indeed, it’s
such an awesome scene that it shows up how
perfunctory the
rest of Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein’s 6 Souls
is; how the idea of a
demon jumping bodies (like The Evil Dead, yes,
but more like Fallen)
can look very much like an early-’90s mid-prestige thriller and
therefore not
anything interesting or special. A shame, as the talent
assembled for
the piece is exceptional–Moore, certainly, along with the
always-fabulous Jeffrey DeMunn as Cara’s dad Dr. Harding. It’s his
fault that
Cara gets involved with psych-patient Adam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who, in the
process of manifesting multiple bad-accent theatre personalities, also
seems to
be manifesting their physical traits (like paralysis, say, and bad
acting,
too). Turns out it ain’t science afflicting our man Adam, but you
knew
that already.

The Act of Killing (2012)

July 18, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Denmark, Documentary, Norway, UK

***½/****
directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

by Angelo Muredda Like Claude Lanzmann’s otherwise incomparable Shoah, Joshua Oppenheimer’s bracing documentary The Act of Killing reanimates a historical catastrophe without leaning on archival footage. In relying primarily on testimonials grounded at the site of violence, both films argue for a more radical than usual method of bearing witness to unspeakable genocides–in this case, the murder of nearly a million communists, intellectuals, and ethnic Chinese in mid-1960s Indonesia by a cadre of paramilitaries and gangsters who were backed by an American-funded military and subsequently never brought to trial. Yet as much as each project seeks to drag a monstrous past into the light by shooting at the present scene of the crime, Oppenheimer’s work is given an even more surreal kick by virtue of the incredible status still afforded to members of the killing squads, politically-connected goons who openly boast of their murders to anyone within earshot, including the film crew.

The Newsroom: The Complete First Season (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

July 18, 20132011, 2012, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image
A Sound B+ Extras B
"We
Just Decided To," "News Night 2.0," "The 112^th
Congress," "I'll Try To Fix You," "Amen,"
"Bullies," "5/1," "The Blackout, Part 1: Tragedy
Porn," "The Blackout, Part 2: Mock Debate," "The Greater
Fool"

by
Jefferson Robbins The more
I think about Aaron Sorkin's chimerical HBO beast "The Newsroom", the more I think it would work far, far better as a Broadway musical.
That may
be because Sorkin loads the ranks of his ensemble drama with
accomplished
theatre vets, or it may be because of the endless dialogue references to stage
classics,
beginning and ending with Man of La Mancha.
But it's also
a matter of timing: The show offers strange eruptions of relationship
palaver,
set in the midst of world-altering sociopolitical changes and the daily
churn
of building a TV newshour around them. They arrive oddly, maddeningly,
and
frequently, just when the storylines involving real-world events are
beginning to
compel, and they feel almost uniformly dishonest and manufactured. What
I'm
saying is, they'd go down easier if they were sung.

Not Fade Away (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

June 18, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring John Magaro, Jack Huston, Bella Heathcote, James Gandolfini
written and directed by David Chase

by Bryant Frazer Not Fade Away doesn’t have an opening scene–it has an overture. You could almost call it a mash-up. After a brief snippet of TV footage showing New Jersey boys Joey Dee and the Starliters performing their 1962 hit “Peppermint Twist,” the image is replaced by an old RCA “Indian Head” test pattern superimposed with the words “Please Stand By” as a voice announces a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. After the familiar emergency-alert tone starts buzzing away for a couple of bars, it’s co-opted as part of the beat behind the guitar riff that opens “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The sense of time and place thus conjured is strong: it’s 1965, and America is on the verge of a rock-and-roll emergency.

True Blood: The Complete Fifth Season (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 17, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Romance, Television, Vampire

Image
A- Sound
A Extras
B
"Turn!
Turn! Turn!," "Authority Always Wins," "Whatever I Am, You Made Me,"
"We'll Meet Again," "Let's Boot and Rally," "Hopeless," "In the
Beginning," "Somebody That I Used to Know," "Everybody Wants to Rule
the World," "Gone, Gone, Gone," "Sunset," "Save Yourself"

click any image to
enlarge

by
Bill Chambers In general, TV series aren't built to last beyond
four seasons. I think it has something to do with how the educational
system
teaches us that four-year cycles end in graduation. Showrunners
consequently
feel an obligation to symbolically reboot in season five–to send the
high-schoolers off to college ("Dawson's Creek"), to recast the leads
("The Dukes of Hazzard"), to have Fonzie waterski over Jaws
("Happy Days"). To be fair, redefining the status quo doesn't always
mean jumping the shark: for every Cousin Oliver, after all, there's a
Dawn
Summers. Unfortunately, "True Blood" is not one of the exceptions to
the rule, as it goes off the rails in its fifth season in a way that is
different from those countless other times it seemed to be flying
a
kamikaze mission towards ratings oblivion. (This is a show that has
elevated
jumping the shark to an artform.) A good chunk of the season is devoted
to
vampires–creatures who can, in the "True Blood"-verse, run like The
Flash, fly, and fuck like pornstars–sitting around a conference table
debating
politics and religion, and the other "super" groups don't exactly
pick up the slack, what with the werewolves holding auditions for a new pack
leader
and the faes throwing slumber parties with their new BFF, Sookie.

Django Unchained (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 14, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Revenge, Theatrical, Western

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw If Inglourious Basterds was an
ambiguous, brilliant indictment of "Jewish vengeance" wrapped in this
impossibly canny exploration of violence through screenwriting, performance,
and love of film, think of Quentin Tarantino's follow-up, Django Unchained, as a glorious continuation of what has become a singular artist's evolving
theme. It demonstrates an absolute command of the medium, of what film can do
when tasked to do more than usual, and it does it by
being some of the finest film criticism of the year. If the
Coens are our best literary critics, then Tarantino is our best film critic cum
sociologist, and his topics, again, are how we understand history through
specific prisms and how violence can be both catharsis and atrocity–often
in the same breath and almost always in the same ways. Consider that this difficult film's most difficult moment comes, as it does in Inglourious Basterds, at the very end, in an unbearably ugly act of violence perpetrated against not the expected slave-owner
antagonist, Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), but his manservant Stephen/Stepin
(Samuel L. Jackson). Consider, too, the idea that vengeance–particularly in
our post-9/11 environment–is the proverbial tiger we've caught by the tail:
our cultural legacy that we try to justify through any means, given that our
ends are so very righteous.

Like Someone in Love (2012)

April 12, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Rio Kase, Denden
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

by Angelo Muredda Few filmmakers know how to put you on your
guard from the first frame as effectively as Abbas Kiarostami. It's clear
enough that Like
Someone in Love opens in a bar in Tokyo, but it's
harder to say at first what we're looking at and why. The closest voice we hear
belongs to the off-camera Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young woman who's a little too preoccupied with lying her way out
of a hostile phone conversation to process the flat image of well-dressed young
revellers in front of her. Whether she's our lead takes a couple of false tries
to figure out. Our first candidate is a redhead around her age, sitting at a
table off to the side until she suddenly relocates to an empty seat in the
foreground, coaching Akiko through the rest of her call until she relinquishes
her spot moments later to a fortysomething man who speaks to both women with
first the familiarity of a parent, then the condescension of a high-end pimp
directing his employees. Somewhere in-between these encounters, we briefly lose track of who's even doing the looking. Akiko waltzes into our field of
vision on the way to the bathroom, the camera fixed at where her eyeline used
to be after she's vacated her seat, as if holding her place until she gets
back.

“Zero Dark Thirty”: The Ashes Of American Flags

April 9, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blog, War

by Jefferson Robbins Kathryn Bigelow's Zero
Dark Thirty is politically abhorrent, an ideologue's digest
of how torture "works" on behalf of democratic governments seeking to
defend from or avenge themselves upon terrorism. There's no debate: by
means of torture, CIA operative Maya (Jessica Chastain) digs her way
from Osama bin Laden's outer network to his inner circle, one, two,
three. As journalist Malcolm
Harris put it, "That Kathryn Bigelow used to be involved in left aesthetics
should make us shiver in fear about who we may yet become." But subtly,
in the way Bigelow presents her lead character's view of the
battlefield and the flag under which she strives, Zero Dark
Thirty betrays mixed feelings about its own ramifications.

Evil Dead (2013) + Beyond the Hills (2012)

April 4, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Romania, Theatrical

EVIL
DEAD
***½/****
starring
Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas
screenplay
by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues, based on the
screenplay by Sam Raimi
directed
by Fede Alvarez

BEYOND
THE HILLS
****/****
starring
Cosmina Stratan, Cristina Flutur, Valeriu Andriuta, Dana Tapalaga
screenplay
by Cristian Mungiu, inspired by the non-fiction novels
of Tatiana Niculescu Bran
directed
by Cristian Mungiu

by
Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The greatest irony
of Fede Alvarez's
otherwise laudably straightforward reboot of Sam Raimi's
Spam-in-a-cabin
classic The Evil Dead is that the moments where
it references its primogenitor
are actually the movie's weakest. I'm thinking, in particular, of
handsome young hero
David (Shiloh Fernandez) getting thrown around a wet cellar in high
Raimi
smash-zoom style, which only underscores how much the original films
drew their
tone from Bruce Campbell–and how much this new one misses him. The
danger of
casting a group of beautiful people and taking itself deadly seriously
(and jettisoning the "The," in a gesture that reads as hipster
insouciance) is that Evil Dead might
draw closer to the mainstream and farther from
its grindhouse roots. The small miracle of it, then, is that in both
its
absolute glee in finding the line of how much gore to show and then
crossing it
(a pair of glasses stop a hypodermic needle…but only for a moment)
and its
surprising efforts at locating a deeper thread in a frayed
brother/sister
relationship and the impact of drug addiction, Alvarez's film is a
solid, even
affecting genre piece that allows for an abundance of memorable money
shots. Compare
its intelligence and earnestness, its infernal energy, against
the
disrespectfulness and self-satisfaction of The Cabin in the
Woods to
see that Evil Dead is not just a taste of the old
religion, it's really
pretty great.

The Master (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

March 27, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image
A
Sound A
Extras A-
starring
Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern
written
and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

click any image to enlarge

by
Walter Chaw Of all the
recognizable and memorable phrases that John Keats contributed to the
English
language, this ranks high:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet
breathing.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) – Combo Pack: Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

March 18, 20132012, 2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Andy Serkis
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo Del Toro, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Shot at a vaunted 48 frames-per-second to
better approximate the television soap opera its mammoth length suggests, Peter
Jackson's vainglorious trainwreck The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
(hereafter "Hobbit 1") looks for all intents and purposes like
its own porn knock-off. A technological "advancement" that is to the
naked eye identical to any episode of reality television or live sporting event
you've been watching in your living room for years, the 48fps "breakthrough"
was for Jackson a way of making the increasingly unpopular new-gen 3-D a little
bit less crappy. It's like putting a dress on a pig. Understand, complaints
about "HFR" are not akin to the bellyaching about colour film or
CinemaScope, since those innovations didn't actively cheapen the moviegoing experience. The irony of all that being, of course, that while the
image indeed doesn't stutter or blur as much in 3-D, what we're forced to
look at is overlit, obviously artificial, and reminded me more than once of
the jarringly amateurish "Star Wars Holiday Special".

Zero Dark Thirty (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

March 17, 20132012, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Thriller, War

***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Ehle, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler
screenplay by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

click any image to enlarge

by Angelo Muredda As of this writing, the latest wannabe tastemaker to
thumb his nose at Zero Dark Thirty is novelist and
professional blowhard Bret Easton Ellis, who
tweeted that critics
lauding the film "need to admit that they're admiring a morally
indefensible movie." With that, Ellis joins an army of self-deputized film
writers who've taken issue on moral grounds with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark
Boal's treatment of the CIA's decade-spanning manhunt for Osama bin Laden. While Ellis's tasteless tweets about Bigelow's appearance a few weeks back
make his word suspect, it's harder to dismiss Glenn Greenwald, the liberal
firebrand whose initial survey of early praise for the film (then unseen by him) slammed Bigelow and Boal for glorifying torture. Incensed by the suggestion that crowd-sourcing knowledge about Zero Dark Thirty's representation of torture from the
likes of David Edelstein constituted poor form, Greenwald soon saw the picture for
himself and insisted that the viewing
only confirmed his initial impressions: "[T]o depict X as valuable in enabling the killing
of bin Laden is – by definition – to glorify X," he observed, where X
meant torture; woe to the "huge numbers of American viewers" about to
be "led" down the filmmakers' dim alleyways.

The Loneliest Planet (2012) – DVD

February 28, 2013****/****, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Hani Furstenberg, Bidzina Gujabidze
screenplay by Julia Loktev, based on the short story by Tom Bissell
directed by Julia Loktev

by Walter Chaw Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet
is an existentially terrifying little film about life's essential loneliness,
the absolute mutability of interpersonal relationships, and the ways our
identities are formed not only by our perceptions of others, but by our
preconceptions of the roles we play and, in turn, cast others to
play, unbeknownst to them or to anyone. It gives the lie to the
possibility of an unconditional relationship, to the idea that we can ever
truly know ourselves or the people with whom we choose to share our lives. Most
uncomfortably of all, it posits that everything we believe, everything we hold
most dear about who we are and who we think we are, can change in an instant. It's
about love in that way, but love only in the context of the brutal, capricious,
arbitrary world–love in the sense that we invest everything in it in acts of
faith entirely unjustified by Nature and circumstance. There's a scene in The
Loneliest Planet where two pairs of feet play with each other on top of a
sleeping bag, followed fast, after something small but terrible happens, by the
owner of one pair of those feet watching the owner of the other walk away and
eventually disappear into the ugly, insensate terrain of Russian Georgia's
Caucasus mountains. I think it's no accident that the film takes place there,
where mythology places Titan Prometheus in his eternal torment: Prometheus the
bringer of fire, and life, and foresight (literally, in his name)–the father
of Man flayed bare and reintroduced to the carnal night.

Holy Motors (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

February 24, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue
written and directed by Leos Carax

click any image to enlarge

by Angelo Muredda It's no great shock that Holy Motors is innovative, coming from
the same headspace as The Lovers on the
Bridge and Mauvais Sang–movies
that seemed fashioned out of whole cloth despite their indebtedness to names
like David Bowie and Herman Melville. What's most surprising is that beneath
the formal variety and cheekiness, mainstays of Leos Carax's freewheeling cinema,
is a moving and altogether serious exploration of what it means to be an actor,
in both a professional and a metaphysical sense. Carax's films have been ranked
among the boldest aesthetic manifestos since the 1980s for good reason, yet the
ineffable quality that distinguishes them from the superficially similar
grandstanding of nascent stylists like Xavier Dolan is their deep sincerity and
unabashed adoration of the eccentric city-dwellers who cross paths on the
loneliest roads in urban France. If Holy
Motors is even wilder in presentation than its predecessors, then, it's
also perfectly legible within a body of work that's always found a human streak
in the avant-garde.

The Apparition (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

January 27, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror

*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras HILARIOUS
starring Ashley Greene, Sebastian Stan, Tom Felton, Julianna Guill
written and directed by Todd Lincoln

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw I think you enter into a handshake
agreement with The Apparition that it's never, not for a moment, going to be scary when in its prologue, we're introduced to Harry Potter
alum Tom "Draco" Felton as a grad student or something in a Doc Brown
helmet prattling on about "anomalistic psychology" in
that affected, pained way the Harry Potter alums (see: Emma
"Hermione" Watson in The Perks of Being a Wallflower) seem to have
adopted post-franchise. Or maybe it's the first scene between central pretties Kelly and Ben (Ashley Greene and Sebastian Stan), which, without fail,
sports extra, meaningless, unintentionally hysterical blank reaction
shots, thus announcing, in addition to hyphenate Todd Lincoln's inability to
cast, his inability to frame shots or hire an editor (or three, as the case may
be). To The Apparition's credit, though, milquetoast hero Ben is wearing the Bauhaus T-shirt I used to wear in high school when I wasn't trying to be hip, so…yay for being old enough to have a direct connection to a hipster reference. As for the
rest of it, it's kind of astonishing that this didn't land as a dtv relic
submitted for the immediate disapproval of the Netflix-streaming peanut
gallery.

Frankenweenie (2012) – Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

January 20, 20132012, 2013, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Disney, Family, Horror

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by John August, based on a screenplay by Lenny Ripps
directed by Tim Burton

click any image to enlarge

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Back in the early-Eighties, Tim Burton was part of the conveyor belt at the Walt Disney Company, cranking out artwork for films like The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron. But drawing cuddly animals proved as bad a fit for Burton as it did for R. Crumb, and the studio eventually allowed him to separate from the pack, giving him a chance to hone his voice that was kind of unprecedented. Under the Disney umbrella, Burton produced two black-and-white shorts: the animated Vincent, a sweet and Seussian ode to his idol, Vincent Price (who narrated); and the live-action Frankenweenie, about a boy who uses mad science to bring his departed canine back to life. The latter scandalized Disney (too “scary,” plus dead dogs and black-and-white have got to be roughly equivalent anathema to kiddie fare), and plans were shelved to attach the film to prints of Pinocchio in 1984. Three decades later, Disney confidently bankrolled a feature-length remake of Frankenweenie, stop-motion animated this time but still in black-and-white, and still with an undead dog at the crux of the narrative. What changed in the interim?

Cosmopolis (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

January 6, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: David Cronenberg, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Satire

****/****Image
B+ Sound
A Extras
A
starring
Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon, Paul Giamatti
screenplay
by David Cronenberg, based on the novel by Don DeLillo
directed
by David Cronenberg

click
any image to enlarge

by
Walter Chaw David Cronenberg's North by
Northwest, his adaptation of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis
functions as a difficult, arctic précis of the Canadian filmmaker's
career-long obsession with the insectile nature of, and indulgence in,
hunger. Cronenberg's proclivity for parasites, after all, is
essentially the admiration of creatures defined by their hunger. His
latest is Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a voracious sexual predator
who lives in the dark cocoon of his stretch limo as it inches its way
across Midtown to a barbershop that would be more at home in the
bucolic small town of A History of Violence than
in the metal canyons of Manhattan. Its existence, like a little diner
along the way, like a bookshop with paper- and leather-lined walls, is
further evidence of infestation–pockets of disease on the glistening
skin and sterile surfaces of industry. No wonder the filthy rabble
protesting in Gotham's streets have as their unifying symbol the rats
that are the true inheritors of man's work. Cronenberg recalls his
own Crash in these ideas–and not just in
his desire to adapt literary properties considered unadaptable. He
recalls his Naked Lunch in the idea that language
is a neurological contagion, and he recalls most of all both
his Videodrome (in his
identification of screens with every intercourse) and his eXistenZ (in
the erasure of any meaningful line between our interiors and
exteriors). Cosmopolis is dense and
multifarious–the absolute pinnacle of pretentious, too, in its desire
to explain not only its creator, but all of the world at this moment in
time in our age of missing information.

Notorious (1946) – Blu-ray Disc

January 6, 2013****/****, 1940s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Espionage, Romance, Thriller

****/****
Image B Sound B- Extras C+
starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern
screenplay by Ben Hecht
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Other than Psycho, the most examined, most carefully raked-through picture in Hitchcock’s filmography might be the cold, meticulous, perfect Notorious. It serves as a model for technique, offered as the pinnacle of Hitchcock’s early American period and used as proof by some that Hitch was a misogynist. The Dark Side of Genius author Donald Spoto wrote a fitfully interesting (if ultimately useless) article about how the first half of the film is a mirror image of the second–rising to a midpoint before diminishing at the end to the same composition as the first shot. (I’d argue that you could say the same for Shadow of a Doubt–particularly during the movie’s character-/setting- establishing sequences.) Stories of how the FBI began a file on Hitch because of his prescient use of uranium as his MacGuffin in Notorious are among the most beloved Hitch arcana, and critics who favour Lacan as the prism through which to analyze the Master of Suspense have found in the picture compelling demonstrations of spectatorship and gender construction. For Freudians, it has its Oedipal elements, its Madonna/Whore complexities–it’s a very fine historical relic, one of maybe only two of the director’s films (the other being Shadow of a Doubt) that’s ever entered into a noir conversation. And at the end–among those in the know, at least–it’s the better version, in every way that matters, of Casablanca. Robin Wood writes a brilliant piece on it in his second Hitchcock book, taking on previous brilliant takes by Laura Mulvey, Raymond Bellour, and Michael Renov. I probably like Raymond Durgnat’s quick-hit the best, however, for his pegging of the picture’s iciness and of Hitch at this moment as midway between idealistic and cynical (though I’d go farther and say he’s pretty much all the way cynical by now). Notorious is possibly, neck-and-neck with Vertigo, the best film Hitchcock ever made, though it’s seldom identified–unless you’re Francois Truffaut–as anyone’s favourite (leave that for the bitterest (North by Northwest), the most nihilistic (Psycho), the least sick (Rear Window)), and when the dust settles, the prospect of writing about it is almost as intimidating as pretending that there’s anything new to say about it. But here goes.