2013 Archives - Page 11 of 12 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Neighbouring Sounds (2013)

March 7, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Brazil

O som ao redor
***½/****
starring Gustavo Jahn, Maeve Jinkings, W.J. Solha, Irma Brown
written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho

by Angelo Muredda In his 1975 survey of trends in Canadian literature, Northrop Frye famously diagnosed the national character as paranoiac, fraught with nightmares about being invaded by the outside world. That so-called garrison mentality, Frye offered, meant early white Canadian settlers bonded together against both the malevolent nature past their forts and the more generalized outside threats it represented–shutting their doors to anyone who seemed the slightest bit unneighbourly. Although Frye had a very specific community in mind, it’s hard not to see it reflected in the gated neighbourhood of critic-turned-filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds, a conclave of middle-class northern Brazilian condo-dwellers who define themselves by the riffraff they discard, whether car-stereo thieves or sleeping doormen. Part-Hanekian surveillance thriller and part-Altmanesque ensemble of overlapping voices, it’s one of the most assured debut features to land in years, the sort of fully-formed high-concept work you expect after a couple of interesting misfires.

Driving Miss Daisy (1989) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

March 3, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy, Dan Aykroyd, Patti Lupone
screenplay by Alfred Uhry, based on his play
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw The heart-warming story of how a bitter old Jewess learns to not be such a bitch to a patient Negro driver in an idyllic pre-integration South, Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy, released the same year as other such landmark films about race as Ferris Bueller’s Black Civil War Regiment and Do the Right Thing, discusses how forty-one years of forced companionship can overcome even the deepest-seated prejudices and resentments. Or, at least, dementia can. We meet Ms. Daisy (Jessica Tandy) as she crashes her car, and we meet Hoke (Morgan Freeman) when he begs Miss Daisy’s son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) for a job as her chauffeur–meaning they’re both prisoners of circumstance, see? Meaning this is an unlikely but no less racially naïve remake of Stanley Kramer’s embarrassing melodrama The Defiant Ones, scored by Hans Zimmer with outtakes from his synth-heavy, bullshit-rich Rain Man score, all teddy bears humping and building music boxes and shit. Meaning, essentially, that we are to believe there is no substantive difference between a wealthy white woman needing to hire a driver and a destitute black man looking for work in 1948 Atlanta. My favourite scene is either the one where Hoke asks Miss Daisy’s permission to make water, or the one where Hoke says something and Miss Daisy tells him to “be still.”

Holy Motors (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

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

Holymotors1

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

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 Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 20, 20131930s, 2013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Espionage, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre, Nova Pilbeam
screenplay by Charles Bennett, D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, Edwin Greenwood and A.R. Rawlinson
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw The first fascination of Alfred Hitchcock’s original The Man Who Knew Too Much is that when a dashing foreign agent (Pierre Fresnay) is shot just minutes into the film, it’s Jill (Edna Best), the wife in the heroic central couple, who’s privy to his last words. They’re dancing together in the middle of a ballroom that feels like a glass cage (naturally) when the dastardly deed is done, a married English woman on holiday with husband Bob (Leslie Banks) and daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam), who look on approvingly. When Hitchcock remakes this movie 22 years later with Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart, he has Ugly American Jimmy (the one privy to the dying man’s last words) drug his hysterical wife in the first of many instances of Hitchcock undermining Stewart’s status as everyone’s favourite Yank. 1934’s The Man Who Knew too Much, like so much of Hitchcock’s British output (this is the first of his six films for Gaumont), remains current for scholars looking for tropes, images, sequences that prefigure his later work. The premature demise of what would have traditionally been the star of the picture (poor, dead Louis, also a champion ski-jumper) prefigures Psycho, of course, while the glass cages recur everywhere from Young and Innocent (which likewise features the musical plot point of this film) to Notorious to Hitch’s collaborations with Tippi Hedren. A gaze at the 34-minute mark through wrought-iron gates predicts the moment of discovery in Strangers on a Train, followed fast by a deliciously uncomfortable dentist sequence I’m surprised Hitch never came back to. Leave that, I suppose, to William Goldman and Marathon Man.

Ivan’s Childhood (1962) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 19, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Russia, The Criterion Collection, War

Ivanovo detstvo
****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Nikolay Burlyaev, Valentin Zubkov, Yevgeni Zharikov, Stepan Krylov
screenplay by Vladimir Bogomolov and Mikhail Papava (uncredited: Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky)
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

by Bryant Frazer Ivan’s Childhood opens, unexpectedly enough, inside a dream. The film is impatient. Its dreaming actually begins before the Mosfilm logo has faded from the screen, as the call of a cuckoo echoes softly on the soundtrack. Young Ivan appears, surrounded by trees (their pine needles dripping with what must be cool morning dew), our view of his face criss-crossed by the lines of a spider’s web strung up between the branches. The shot is perfectly composed, with the tree’s slender trunk and one of its branches creating a secondary, off-centre frame around the boy’s face. Ivan pauses there for only a moment–he must be looking for the cuckoo–before turning abruptly out of frame, a move that sends the camera skyward, moving vertically up the body of the pine and revealing more of the landscape. When the camera finishes its ascent, Ivan is again visible, in the midground of the image. His scrawny body, now seen in apparent miniature, turns again towards the camera. Nature is large and beautiful; he is small and, while lovely in a way, still awkward in his skin.

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (2013)

February 14, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Esoterica, Theatrical

**/****
starring Charlie Sheen, Jason Schwartzman, Katheryn Winnick, Bill Murray
written and directed by Roman Coppola

by Angelo Muredda Bill Murray's sad-clown deadpan is so ubiquitous now
that it's hard to remember a time before he was the face of hipster melancholy.
Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola had a lot to work with in Murray's cracked mug,
so you have to feel for Coppola's brother Roman, whose own project of redeeming
an iconic face hits a snag right from the casting sheet. If A
Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III really is a tour through the psyche of star and
one-man band Charlie Sheen, then the major takeaway is that there isn't much to see unless you're into incorrigible man-children on their best
behaviour. It isn't that post-meltdown Sheen lacks the charisma to anchor a
picture, but that Coppola, on rockier ground with his second feature after the
much more aesthetically bold and thematically rich CQ, is serving two
masters: his own whimsy; and his obvious desire to stage a career intervention
for his friend, recasting the actor's overexposed mania as hangdog sadness–probably
the last thing anyone wants to see Sheen embody.

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

February 13, 20132013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
screenplay by Skip Woods
directed by John Moore

by Walter Chaw A Good Day to Die Hard (hereafter Die Hard 5), or whatever the fuck it's called, teaches that the only thing anyone seems to know about what's left of the
Soviet Union is that something happened at someplace called
"Chernobyl," and whatever that something was, it had to do
with radioactivity. (Or Transformers.) It's a film that believes there's a magic
spray that neutralizes radiation; that bringing up father issues is the same
thing as depth; and that commissioning a screenplay from Skip Woods (the
asshole behind Hitman, Swordfish, X-Men Origins: Wolverine,
and The A-Team) is, hey, a great idea! Dreadful doesn't begin to
describe it–and consider that I've liked, really liked, three of the previous
four movies in this franchise, to the extent that the direction the last film
took in suggesting the John McClane character is a Terminator felt to me
pleasantly self-knowing, even brilliant. I wanted, desperately, to like this thing, but by the tenth or eleventh time McClane shook his grizzled head and
muttered "Jesus" gravely under his breath (that is, around thirty minutes in), I checked out for good. Die Hard 5 is also the kind of
movie that has its foreign bad guys speak English to one another even when
they're alone; it features an extended, much-hyped car chase to nowhere with no
sense of space or innovation before finally just settling on a series of
explosions as lazy and disinterested as the way Bruce Willis fires off a
million rounds nowadays. Apathetic isn't the same thing as cool, and Willis,
let's face it, ain't trying anymore.

Boardwalk Empire: The Complete First Season (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

February 12, 20132000s, 2010, 2013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Gangster, Television

Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
"Boardwalk Empire," "The Ivory Tower," "Broadway Limited," "Anastasia," "Nights in Ballygran," "Family Limitation," "Home," "Hold Me in Paradise," "Belle Femme," "The Emerald City," "Paris Green," "A Return to Normalcy"

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Two things right off the bat about HBO's "Boardwalk Empire". First, the Martin Scorsese who directed the pilot would eat the tedious old guy who made Hugo for lunch. Second, for as good as the first season turns out to be, it's based almost entirely on the strength of a cast minimizing the disappointment of opportunities lost. Even the actors, though, can be something of a liability, in that the mere presence of Michael Shannon cues us that straitlaced, proto-Untouchable Agent Nelson Van Alden is on his way to becoming a full-blown nutter. The premise is tired, too, as almost a century's remove from the 1920s American gangster cycle has made the whole genre exhausted. There are no new delights in a midnight Tommy-gun execution in the woods, or an unhinged Guido unloading on a hapless shopkeeper. There's not much joy, either, in trainspotting the parade of gangsters, the Lucky Lucianos (Vincent Piazza) and Al Capones (Stephen Graham, late of Public Enemies) and Meyer Lanskys (Anatol Yusef), partly because if you're a student of gangland history, you're immediately cued to their fates. Implanted spoilers, if you will. The real revelations of "Boardwalk Empire" are Jack Huston as a mutilated WWI doughboy and Gretchen Mol, who spent the first half of her career as Cameron Diaz's haircut (see also: Malin Akerman) but emerges in this venue as an actress of complexity and intelligence. It's enough to wonder what the series might have been were the casting not so otherwise on the nose–a strange liability, I know.

Side Effects (2013)

February 7, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Channing Tatum
screenplay by Scott Z. Burns
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Whatever you may think of the distinctive yellow patina that creeps across his filmography, Steven Soderbergh is something of a chameleon artist, prone to the compulsive shape-shifting that’s led some to mischaracterize commercial work like the Ocean’s series as mere Hollywood capital to be cashed in on ambitious curios like Bubble. If anything, it’s the Ocean’s movies that most bear his signature in their attention to complex systems run amok and their indulgence of postmodern genre pastiche, which recur in projects as disparate as Haywire and Magic Mike. Both tendencies are in full force in psycho-thriller Side Effects, ostensibly the last of Soderbergh’s theatrical releases and in many ways the most quintessentially Soderberghian despite its impersonal subject. It’s an unusual swan song, but perhaps the ideal one for a director who’s always revealed himself in his formalist rigour, the conspicuous act of emptying out his idiosyncrasies into preexisting generic containers–in this case, half a dozen of them.

The Vampire Diaries: The Complete First Season (2009-2010) – Blu-ray Disc

February 7, 20132000s, 2010, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Romance, Teen, Television, Vampire

Image C+ Sound B- Extras C-
“Pilot,”
“The Night of
the Comet,” “Friday Night Bites,””Family Ties,”
“You’re Undead to Me,” “Lost Girls,” “Haunted,” “162
Candles,” “History Repeating,” “The Turning Point,” “Bloodlines,”
“Unpleasantville,” “Children of the Damned,” “Fool Me Once,” “A Few
Good Men,” “There Goes the Neighborhood,” “Let the Right One In,”
“Under Control,” “Miss Mystic Falls,” “Blood Brothers,” “Isobel,”
“Founder’s Day”

by Walter
Chaw You can
diagnose things like Kevin Williamson’s tween opera “The Vampire
Diaries” by
how much of the dialogue consists of peoples’ names. “Hey, Ben
is
with Carrie down in the tomb with Josie and Halley. Chris said he and
Caroline
would meet us there, but then Damon said that Stefan was going instead,
but
Stefan still has feelings for Elena…” OMFG, amiright?
Add
to
that a liberal use of music by the likes of Matt Kearney, The
Fray, and
Bat for Lashes, mix sloppily with
flavour-of-the-month genre fetish,
and, voilà!, the kind of thing everyone describes as a “guilty
pleasure”–which basically means they’re not telling you they
also enjoy “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo”. The
remainder of the dialogue is interested in secret parentage, secret
siblings, and this and that about lore to establish credibility
while simultaneously demonstrating that everyone involved in
this one has read more books
than Stephenie Meyer (a low bar) and is aware of Stephenie Meyer…and
Heath
Ledger…and Emily Brontë. Never mind, you wouldn’t understand.
Similarly
difficult
to understand are magic rings that allow vampires to walk around in
daylight,
ancient tombs sealed by Creole witches led by that bitch from “A
Different
World”, and a complex series of events that need to happen before one
of
this show’s vampires is able to turn one of this show’s hot little
nymphos into
a vampire. It’s a metaphor–not for abstinence, per se, but maybe for
embarrassing tumescence. That’s right, “The Vampire Diaries” is a
boner joke.

Peter Pan (1953) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 4, 20131950s, 2013, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Revenge

**/**** Image
B+ Sound
A Extras
B+
directed
by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson

click any image to enlarge

by
Bill Chambers Since the 1950s, mainstream audiences have
grown up
knowing Walt Disney’s Peter Pan as the definitive
adaptation of J.M.
Barrie’s play and its subsequent novelization (Peter and Wendy),
and
that’s a mixed blessing. For every thing the Disney does well, like the
swashbuckling, it does
something
horribly wrong, like compounding Barrie’s 19^th-century
notions with
retrograde
values all the movie’s own. For instance, the English Barrie may have
regarded
Native Americans as exotic creatures by locating them in Never Land, but
it’s
Disney who immortalized them in literal red skin, then gave them a song
celebrating
their mono-syllabic cretinism:

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) + The Rains of Ranchipur (1955) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Discs

February 1, 20131940s, 1950s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Romance, Thriller

THE
POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
***/****
Image B+
Sound A
Extras A
starring Lana Turner, John
Garfield, Cecil Kellaway, Hume Cronyn
screenplay by Harry Ruskin
and Niven Busch, based on the novel by James M. Cain
directed by Tay Garnett

THE
RAINS OF RANCHIPUR
**½/****
Image A
Sound A
Extras B
starring Lana Turner,
Richard Burton, Fred MacMurray, Michael Rennie
screenplay by Merle Miller,
based on the novel by Louis Bromfield
directed by Jean Negulesco

click
any image to enlarge

by
Jefferson Robbins There's a series
of doublings in The
Postman Always Rings Twice, Lana Turner's best-known
vehicle, that
illuminate its obscure title. Disillusioned young wife Cora Smith
(Turner) and
drift-through handyman Frank Chambers (John Garfield) try twice to make
way for
their illicit love by eliminating her diner-impresario husband, Nick
(Cecil
Kellaway). There are two court cases steered by suspicious chief
prosecutor
Sackett (Leon Ames) and defended by wonderfully shifty lawyer Arthur
"I'm
Handling It" Keats (Hume Cronyn). There are two moonlight swims, each a
turning
point in the criminal couple's courtship. Twice the action bends when
ailing
female relatives, never seen, summon a main character to their
sickbeds. There
are even two roadside-diner femmes fatale: Cora,
and her
double Madge (Audrey Totter), who diverts Frank while he's on the outs
with the
woman he killed to obtain. Finally, the murder itself creates a literal
echo.
These aren't anvils falling from the heavens, but instead
the patterns
life presents only in retrospect: This moment, that
day, that was
when God was trying to get my attention. Like Frank, we're too
preoccupied to
ever hear the first ring.

The Client (1994) – Blu-ray Disc

January 29, 20131990s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
starring Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones, Mary-Louise Parker, Brad Renfro
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by John Grisham
directed by Joel Schumacher

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Joel Schumacher's The Client starts out like a sequel to Schumacher's own The Lost Boys, as two little boys (one
of them Brad Renfro) try out cigarettes and John Grisham's awful dialogue
(augmented by awful screenwriter Akiva Goldsman) in a
verdant backwoods Eden before witnessing the suicide of mob lawyer Jerome
Clifford (Walter Olkewicz). "Romey" is despondent, see, because he
knows where mobster Muldano (Anthony LaPaglia) has buried a body. Because
little Mark (Renfro) spent quality time with the goombah before his voyage to
the great Italian restaurant in the sky, Mark is now Little Italy's
most-wanted. Cut to Muldano polishing off a Shirley Temple–judging by
the way Schumacher makes love to the maraschino cherry between LaPaglia's teeth–at
a sleazy New Orleans nightclub to complete the impression that all
schlockmeister Schumacher ever wanted to make was variations on
arrested-vampire movies. At least it sports Will Patton in a supporting role
back when he was a well-kept secret. And JT Walsh, and William H. Macy, and
Mary-Louise Parker. Plus, Anthony Edwards, Bradley Whitford, Ossie Davis, Dan
Castellaneta, William Sanderson…

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.

Tha Makioka Sisters (1983)

January 25, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Japan, Theatrical

***/****
starring Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yuko Kotegawa
screenplay by Kon Ichikawa, based on the novel by Junichiro Tanizaki
directed by Kon Ichikawa

by Angelo Muredda “So many things have happened in this house,” middle child Sachiko (Yoshiko Sakuma) tells her older sister Tsuruko (Keiko Kishi) near the end of The Makioka Sisters, an expansive period piece in miniature that could be churlishly described as a film about the sorts of mundane things that happen in houses. In settling down to adapt Junichiro Tanizaki’s 500-page tome about prewar Japan in a state of profound social and economic transition, glimpsed only through the intersecting marital and financial crises of the titular siblings, writer-director Kon Ichikawa inherited a difficult task, best appreciated by pausing to consider that there’s no English equivalent of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (though Sam Mendes keeps trying). If historical epics are hard to translate to a medium that doesn’t allow for marginal notes and flow charts to keep track of the minor players, the cloistered setting of domestic ones is doubly tricky. Consider that Joe Wright’s recent and thoroughly rotten stab at Anna Karenina adapts the first part of the novel as a self-reflexive essay about how difficult it is to dramatize tragedies that take place in drawing rooms, and the rest as an utterly banal dramatization of a tragedy set in drawing rooms. Ichikawa’s solution, after his own flirtation with hyper-theatricality in the first reel (which unveils the ensemble in a series of spatially disconcerting close-ups, then medium shots establishing the siblings’ relatives ages), is largely to mine the charismatic reserves of his all-star cast.

Krivina (2013)

January 24, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical

***/****
starring Goran Slavković, Jasmin Geljo
written and directed by Igor Drljaca

by Angelo Muredda 2012 was an unusually rich year for Canadian cinema, from the strangely fruitful pairing of David Cronenberg and Don DeLillo in Cosmopolis–though it comes from DeLillo, is there a more Cronenbergian line about deformity than the doctor’s insistence that Robert Pattinson let his mole “express itself”?–to the near perfect genre vehicle of Michael Dowse’s Goon. Both films are legibly Canadian in terms of content, despite Cosmopolis‘s faux-Manhattan setting, but one of the most heartening developments in last year’s crop was a turn to formalism that might confound expectations about what our movies are supposed to look and sound like. Weird Sex and Snowshoes, both Katherine Monk’s book and Jill Sharpe’s documentary adaptation of it, sketched a history of Canadian cinema through its dourness of tone and harsh thematic machinations–necrophilia, the malevolent north, and so on–so successfully as to canonize that image. Yet films like Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond the Black Rainbow and now Igor Drljaca’s Krivina (which debuted at last year’s TIFF) are a nice reminder that there’s also a sharp formalist strain, à la Michael Snow, for which such thematic surveys can’t quite account.

The Qatsi Trilogy [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 24, 20131980s, 2000s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary, The Criterion Collection

Koy1

KOYAANISQATSI (1983)
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
directed by Godfrey Reggio

POWAQQATSI (1988)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
directed by Godfrey Reggio

NAQOYQATSI (2002)
½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
written and directed by Godfrey Reggio

by Bryant Frazer There’s nothing quite like Koyaanisqatsi. Some six or seven years in the making, the mid-1980s arthouse favourite was a genuine screen spectacle that gave audiences a taste of the avant-garde and elevated Philip Glass to the status of popular musician. It’s the 1970s brainchild of Godfrey Reggio, a progressive activist and community organizer who lived in New Mexico and took a dim view of industrialization in general and the information revolution in particular. Accordingly, it exalts the natural landscape, recoils from the computer-chip gridwork of the modern city, and wallows piteously in the human condition.

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?

A Man and a Woman: Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva – TIFF Cinematheque Retrospective

January 15, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blog, Film Festivals, France

by Angelo Muredda When Michael Haneke’s Amour met its first wave
of hosannas at Cannes, the press seemed eerily unanimous with respect to all
but the film’s place within the German-Austrian taskmaster’s oeuvre. Although
some were quick to call it the warmest of his many portraits of couples in
crisis (it would be hard not to be), others saw it as of a piece with his
austere horror films about complacent bourgeois hoarders reduced to ashes by
external invaders–in this case, not the home intruders of Funny Games or Time
of the Wolf (though there is a break-in, for those keeping
score), but the more insidious threat of age-related illnesses. The truth is
probably somewhere between those poles. It’s no surprise that the key
players in this two-hander are named, as they always seem to be in Haneke’s
pictures, Anne and Georges Laurent–sturdy middle-class monikers for tasteful
piano teachers. But it’s difficult to wholly ascribe the universal quality we often
associate with Haneke’s Laurents to the familiar, if weathered, faces of
Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, who–far more than the chameleonic
Juliette Binoche or Isabelle Huppert, other Haneke collaborators–recall a
bygone era of French cinema.

Gangster Squad (2013)

January 10, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Gangster, Theatrical

*/****
starring Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn
screenplay by Will Beall
directed by Ruben Fleischer

by Angelo Muredda In his recent chat with David Poland, Ruben Fleischer bristled at the suggestion that Gangster Squad shares any DNA with Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy. That’s the sort of aesthetic family resemblance a lightweight like Fleischer ought to milk for all it’s worth, but hear him out: Sean Penn’s enterprising mob boss Mickey Cohen, he insists, isn’t a cartoon bruiser in the tradition of Al Pacino’s Big Boy Caprice, but a real guy whose face only looks a little off because it’s been molded by other men’s fists. He isn’t a comic-strip grotesque, then, but a seasoned boxer-turned-kingpin reanimated by a grand old actor and his team of historically-faithful makeup artists. What more could one ask of a Warner Bros. crime movie than such attention to detail? A lot, apparently–especially if the finished product looks more like Elmer Fudd than any retired amateur boxer. Verisimilitude is a nice goal, but it doesn’t suit Gangster Squad, at once a lumbering history lesson and a squib of a gangster picture–a zit on the ass of Mulholland Falls, Lee Tamahori’s somehow more accomplished stab at L.A. noir.