Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. (2015) – VOD

February 16, 2017Posted in2015, 2017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Horror, Netherlands, Thriller, UK, VOD

Deadlyvirtues

*½/****
starring Megan Maczko, Edward Akrout, Matt Barber, Sadie Frost
screenplay by Mark Rogers
directed by Ate de Jong

by Alice Stoehr “You cannot fight,” explains the villain to his rope-bound prisoner. “Your only chance of survival comes from compliance.” This lecture is the starting point for Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. [sic], an erotic cat-and-mouse thriller that takes place over a long weekend in a suburban English home. Said villain is Aaron, an intruder played by handsome French actor Edward Akrout. He has a sparse moustache and a head of unkempt hair, locks of which fall dashingly across his forehead. The camera adores him. Megan Maczko, playing Aaron’s prisoner Alison, receives far less flattering treatment. She spends much of her screentime tied up and in some degree of undress, her face contorted with faint disgust, eyes averting her captor’s gaze. Like Akrout, she has to look hot, but hers must be a hotness coloured by mixed emotions and performed under duress. As her co-star murmurs the lion’s share of the dialogue, Maczko needs to indicate reluctant arousal blossoming into full-on emotional liberation. She fails, but so would any actress, because the film’s greasy sexual politics set her up to fail. Meanwhile, the third member of the cast–Matt Barber, as Alison’s husband Tom–has to squirm in a bathtub and howl as Aaron mutilates Tom. He acquits himself adequately, especially given paltry lines like, “Did you touch my wife?” and, “I can’t have anyone else inside you.”

Point Break (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 26, 2016Posted in2015, 2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Sports, Thriller, ZERO STARS

Pointbreak1

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras F
starring Édgar Ramírez, Luke Bracey, Teresa Palmer, Ray Winstone
screenplay by Kurt Wimmer
directed by Ericson Core

by Walter Chaw Not enough can be said about Kathryn Bigelow’s action sense. The honkytonk slaughter sequence in Near Dark, from the first moment (when the vampires crest the hill) to the last (when the lone survivor defenestrates), is a triumph of design, of score–including the high lonesome tones of a George Strait classic on the jukebox–and editing and execution. It’s that perfect economy of ideas-into-motion that indicates her cult classic Point Break, too–that, paired with absolutely perfect casting, from Keanu Reeves’s Everybody’s All-American football hero-turned-FBI dude Johnny Utah and Patrick Swayze’s blissed-out charismatic leader all the way down to Gary Busey and Lori Petty, the best supporting staff a film about a surf-zen cult-cum-bank-robbing crew could ask for. It’s a lovely marriage between ludicrous high-concept and the period immediately following the 1980s, which found the country in a reflective mood, perched there on the verge of upsetting the primacy of film for the coming digital age. Bigelow’s Point Break was a showcase for practical stuntwork and, philosophically, a nice metaphor for the excess of the “greed is good”/City on the Hill period drawing to a close. The bad guys rob banks to pay their way to enlightenment. Of course it all ends in tears.

Anomalisa (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 6, 2016Posted in****/****, 2015, 2016, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance

Anomalisa1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
written by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson

by Walter Chaw Writing about a Charlie Kaufman film, if you do it honestly, is writing about yourself. I’ve said before and it helps me to repeat it that I don’t really understand Kaufman’s films but that they do understand me. Kaufman is the most important, innovative voice in American cinema since Orson Welles, and though he has enjoyed more autonomy in expressing that voice than Welles, I would argue that the seven years separating his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, and this follow-up, a stop-motion collaboration with Duke Johnson called Anomalisa, suggest that it’s not as easy as it should be. Certainly the journey that Anomalisa has taken is far from conventional, from Kaufman play written under the pseudonym “Francis Fregosi,” through a Kickstarter campaign, through the general challenge of making an adult-themed animation in a country that sees animation as a genre not a medium, to now this tour of festivals, looking for distribution. The play was introduced as part of a Carter Burwell project titled “Theater of the New Ear”. It was a late replacement on a Kaufman/Coen Bros. double-bill when the Coens “dropped out” at the eleventh hour, and this unknown Fregosi’s piece took its place.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + DigitalHD

April 3, 2016Posted in2015, 2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Star Wars

Starwars2

Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Max Von Sydow
written by Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw I was four when I saw Star Wars. It was the first time I’d seen a film in a theatre; it was the first film I’d seen, period. I didn’t speak a word of English. It was overwhelming, and I’m discovering, after watching J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens (hereafter Star Wars 7), that it imprinted itself on my DNA. Thirty-eight years later, I collect the toys my parents couldn’t afford to buy me when I was a kid–the ones I played with at friends’ houses, when I pretended to be Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) as a child of immigrants doing his best to fit into a society that promised blond and blue-eyed messiahs. My office is full of these toys. They are fetishized relics for me. I hold them and they possess a totemic value. The curve of a molded plastic stormtrooper’s helmet reminds me of the department store where I looked at it through the packaging–and of my delight at my mom one day buying me one, which I opened on the way home in the backseat of the family car.

The Hateful Eight (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 28, 2016Posted in2015, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, Western

Hateful81

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film, The Hateful Eight, features eight hateful people trapped in a small space during a blizzard. The hullabaloo surrounding its release has to do with the production shooting in an extinct widescreen format (70mm anamorphic) and putting up a lot of money so that it can be screened accordingly in select theatres. A few critics have misidentified its vistas as belonging to Wyoming (it was filmed in Telluride, Colorado), which is understandable given that only about five minutes of the 187-minute running-time is spent outside. There hasn’t been a Tarantino feature until this one that I haven’t loved; I believe he is our finest working film critic. He understands things about the movies he pulls from–that certain traditions of Japanese and exploitation filmmaking are strongly feminist, that blaxploitation was initially empowerment before it was instantly gentrified, that the best slave narratives involve legacies of violence, which is why Lalee’s Kin and Django Unchained have a biological connective bridge. I’ve learned more about movies from watching Tarantino than I have from watching Godard, who’s actually trying to teach me something. I think the Kill Bill saga is a remarkable statement about motherhood. I find his dialogue to be distinctive and sometimes exhilarating. I struggled with disliking The Hateful Eight for each of its 187 minutes. It’s the first time I’ve ever understood the popular criticism of Tarantino as self-indulgent, nihilistic, misogynistic, even racist. I don’t agree with every charge, but I do get it now. It’s the first time, too, that I was troubled by a plot point in his film: there’s someone in the piece who hates Mexicans, see, but when we get a flashback to this person engaging with a Mexican, we see that this is a fallacy. I can’t figure out if this was intentional; I fear that it wasn’t. I fear, more, that this is evidence that for the first time Tarantino has lost control of his screenplay. I also finally felt the loss of Sally Menke, who was his Marcia Lucas. I hope it’s not a harbinger of things to come.

In the Heart of the Sea (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 14, 2016Posted in2015, 2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disaster Movie, Drama, DVD

Intheheartofthesea1

*/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Charles Leavitt, based on the book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
directed by Ron Howard

by Bill Chambers In the Heart of the Sea is Ron Howard’s water movie, just like Backdraft is his fire movie, Far and Away is his earth movie, and Apollo 13 is his air movie. It’s also his first fish movie since Splash, suggesting that Howard is retracing his steps in a career reboot that began with Rush, his first car movie since his directorial debut, Grand Theft Auto. But one waits for history to repeat itself with some sign of accrued wisdom beyond obvious markers like technical proficiency. In fact, in its show-offiness and ersatz emotionalism, In the Heart of the Sea seems the less mature film next to Splash, which has a formal self-control and hints of real pathos despite a fantastical premise that sees a landlubber falling in love with a woman who’s secretly a mermaid. (It’s the first film to seize on Tom Hanks’s Jimmy Stewart quality, as well as the rare one to tap into his anger.) There’s hardly a genuine moment in In the Heart of the Sea, and a framing device only exacerbates the problem by adding another layer of dramatization to something that already plays like a big-budget History Channel re-enactment.

Creed (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 2, 2016Posted in2015, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Sports, Stallone

Creedblu1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad
screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Aaron Covington
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I do. It’s not perfect. The love interest is underbaked and the fight choreography of the final match is unfortunately disjointed. But I love this movie–unconditionally, I guess. The story goes that Ryan Coogler, the young director of Fruitvale Station, pitched Sylvester Stallone on the idea of rebooting Rocky with Apollo Creed’s son. (Something the Indiana Jones series needs to do with a grown-up Short Round, by the way.) The auto-critical analysis of the film is that it’s essentially a father/son intrigue, which lends some insight into the Rocky/Mickey relationship of the original Rockys, and there are enough references to same to gratify the cultists. What I liked most about Stallone’s willingness to take a shot on a fresh idea from a minority perspective–this is the first instalment of one of his two venerable franchises to not spring from a Stallone-written script–is that it feeds into the idea of Stallone as an auteur maybe, a canny cultural anthropologist definitely. Every Rocky, every Rambo, is distinctly a product of its time. I don’t feel qualified to talk about this, but to the extent that I understand the theory, I’m sold.

The Good Dinosaur (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

February 23, 2016Posted in2015, 2016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, Family, Pixar, Road Movie

Gooddino1

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He's clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him "Spot" (he's a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film's final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar's The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space–as all great westerns are–between the old ways and the encroaching new. It's far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

The Intern (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 25, 2016Posted in2015, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Robert De Niro

Intern1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Robert De Niro, Anne Hathaway, Rene Russo, Anders Holm
written and directed by Nancy Meyers

by Bill Chambers Back to back, literally, Robert De Niro made Mean Streets, The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, 1900, The Last Tycoon, New York, New York, The Deer Hunter, Raging Bull, True Confessions, The King of Comedy, and Once Upon a Time in America. Brazil, The Mission, Angel Heart, Midnight Run, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, This Boy’s Life, Casino, and Heat punctuate his next ten years as a working actor. So I’ve never really felt the urge to bash De Niro for his late-period career choices, which are mostly about maintaining a standard of living, funding entrepreneurial bids, and mellowing with age. (This is not a man who owes us anything.) And his persona–whatever it is, can we agree that his most volatile roles inform it?–has not been so debauched by decades of ham that there’s not a bit of a subversive kick to seeing him play Mary Poppins, complete with luggage though sans umbrella, in Nancy Meyers’s The Intern.

Apples vs. Oranges: On the Burt Reynolds and Frank Langella Memoirs

December 30, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Books About Movies

Burtandfrank

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME: A MEMOIR
FFC rating: 6/10
by Burt Reynolds and Jon Winokur

DROPPED NAMES: FAMOUS MEN AND WOMEN AS I KNEW THEM
FFC rating: 10/10
by Frank Langella

by Bill Chambers Burt Reynolds and Frank Langella are very different actors (Burt could not have pulled off Dracula, nor would Langella have ever looked at home behind the wheel of a Trans-Am) and, as it happens, very different writers, yet in 2015’s But Enough About Me: A Memoir and 2012’s Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them, respectively, they’ve taken a similar approach to memoir by reminiscing about, in Langella’s words, “the transient company of many remarkable people.” Langella sticks to the rich and famous while Reynolds broadens his repertoire to encompass his father, various civilian friends, and a horse, but a more significant distinction is that, with one exception, everyone Langella writes about is dead, whereas quite a few of Burt’s players are still alive. It sometimes makes But Enough About Me read like an open letter–one with decidedly Nixonian overtones in a passage listing every person who stood by Reynolds when it was rumoured he had AIDS. (If you’re not on it, fuck you is the subtext.) If Langella is by definition the more vulturous of the pair, he’s also the superior anthropologist, a keener observer, and, comparatively-speaking, a born humorist, vividly caricaturing his subjects so that even the most reviled of them (Anthony Quinn, Lee Strasberg) will seem worthy of the contempt. Here’s how Langella introduces his chapter on Strasberg:

Concussion (2015)

December 26, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical

Concussion

*/****
starring Will Smith, Alec Baldwin, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Albert Brooks
written and directed by Peter Landesman

by Walter Chaw Peter Landesman's deeply compromised Concussion so shockingly exposes and excoriates the negligence of the NFL in protecting its players that it's constantly advertised during NFL games. The whole thing feels like a redacted security document: It's choppy, skips over entire plot points, short-sells the issues, and gives equal time to celebrating the beauty and the glory of football as it does to how football turns a scary percentage of its players into confused, manic, suicidal zombies. Save for a few minutes spent with Pittsburgh Steelers centre Mike Webster (David Morse), living in a truck and gluing his teeth into his head with superglue, we don't get much of a glimpse at the symptomatology of "CTE," the repeated-trauma disease discovered by Nigerian-born Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith), who's introduced listing off his accomplishments to declare himself the "smartest person you've ever probably met or will probably ever meet." Concussion is what Spotlight would have looked like had it been made by Cardinal Law: you know, some stuff happened, but the Catholic Church is MAJESTIC. To be fair, we don't get much of a glimpse of anything–not even the romance between Omalu and his ward-cum-lover-cum-spouse (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, so astonishing in Belle and Beyond the Lights; welcome to the mainstream, Gugu!), which is treated in a curious, epileptic shorthand. She's a homeless refugee. She's very religious. Oh, now they're dancing and, um, fucking, and married and, wait, pregnant and married. Wait, now she's doing that wife-in-Bridge of Spies thing where she's protecting the family and… And Concussion is terrible.

Joy (2015)

December 25, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

Joy

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Edgar Ramirez, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by David O. Russell
directed by David O. Russell

by Walter Chaw After demonstrating with his last few movies that he’s not Martin Scorsese, David O. Russell has decided to kill two birds with one stone by demonstrating that he is neither Wes nor P.T. Anderson, either. In Joy, he proves that marrying Wes Anderson’s whimsical solipsism with P.T. Anderson’s Pynchon-esque biographical sketches is an amazingly stupid thing to do–one of those science experiments in ’50s B-movies that everyone knows is a bad idea except for the idiot doing the splicing. Yes, Joy is that bad. When it’s not being unbearably twee, it’s perving on Jennifer Lawrence like von Sternberg on Dietrich. But Joy ain’t no Blue Angel, and while I like Lawrence fine, I guess, Russell is sure as hell no von Sternberg. What I’m saying is that Russell is a terrible, glitchy director with a thing for Lawrence that he manifests by shooting her walking towards the camera with sunglasses, without sunglasses, with a wig and without a wig, in slow-motion or at normal speed, in daytime, nighttime; he lights her with the sun, with spots, with discretes, from below, and especially from behind–all in a kind of PENTHOUSE glamour. The only part of Joy that isn’t unwatchable is a sequence shot precisely like identical sequences in P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia, where an obviously tense Bradley Cooper, playing QVC programming director Neil Walker, shows the titular domestic goddess Joy (Lawrence) around the studio. I take it back, those were pretty bad, too. The only thing preventing Joy from being the worst movie of the year is that Pixels happened.

The Good Dinosaur (2015); The Revenant (2015); The Hateful Eight (2015)

December 25, 2015Posted in2015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Disney, Drama, Family, Mystery, Pixar, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

Revenant

THE GOOD DINOSAUR
***/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

THE REVENANT
***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, a bear, angry junketeers
screenplay by Mark L. Smith & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

THE HATEFUL EIGHT
**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He's clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him "Spot" (he's a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film's final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar's The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space–as all great westerns are–between the old ways and the encroaching new. It's far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

Pan (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

December 20, 2015Posted in2015, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Family, Fantasy

Pan2

***½/**** Image B Sound A Extras C
starring Hugh Jackman, Garrett Hedlund, Rooney Mara, Levi Miller
screenplay by Jason Fuchs
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw Paired with Hanna, his take on the Little Red Riding Hood story, Joe Wright's Pan suggests that the director's closest career analogue is that of J.J. Abrams. Wright's askew take on Anna Karenina hints at a sympathetic penchant for ebullient reinterpretation–no less so his adaptations of Atonement (by an author essentially making a career of taking a piss) and Pride & Prejudice, which, in its sparseness and emotional economy, could stand alongside Andrea Arnold's magnificent Wuthering Heights. Hanna, his best film, achieves at least a portion of its greatness through its bull-headed perversity. No premise is too fanciful to be presented seriously by Wright. In Pan, when we're introduced to the pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman), a Fury Road's collection of orphan miners sing-chants "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in obeisance to their monstrous overlord. It's something born of Brian Helgeland's anachronistic A Knight's Tale and of Terry Gilliam in its antic set design and costuming and of David Lynch, even, in a sequence where Blackbeard dons a mask aboard his flying ship to breathe deep something that resembles the Spice. There's another sequence in which a pirate ship, a 16th-century galleon, engages in midair with a trio of British Hawker Hurricanes (I think) defending Mother England against the German blitz before breaking through the clouds for a brief, weightless moment.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

December 16, 2015Posted in2015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

Forceawakens

***½/****
starring Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Max Von Sydow
written by Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw I was four when I saw Star Wars. It was the first time I'd seen a film in a theatre; it was the first film I'd seen, period. I didn't speak a word of English. It was overwhelming, and I'm discovering, after watching J.J. Abrams's Star Wars: The Force Awakens (hereafter Star Wars 7), that it imprinted itself on my DNA. Thirty-eight years later, I collect the toys my parents couldn't afford to buy me when I was a kid–the ones I played with at friends' houses, when I pretended to be Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) as a child of immigrants doing his best to fit into a society that promised blond and blue-eyed messiahs. My office is full of these toys. They are fetishized relics for me. I hold them and they possess a totemic value. The curve of a molded plastic stormtrooper's helmet reminds me of the department store where I looked at it through the packaging–and of my delight at my mom one day buying me one, which I opened on the way home in the backseat of the family car.

Blind Chance (1987) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 15, 2015Posted in1980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Drama, Poland, The Criterion Collection

Blindchance1

Przypadek
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Boguslaw Linda, Tadeusz Lomnicki, Marzena Trybala, Monika Goździk
written and directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

by Bryant Frazer Before Krzysztof Kieslowski became the standard-bearer for the latter-day European art film with ravishing portraits of unspeakably beautiful women living their lives under unutterably mysterious circumstances, he was a gruff but adventurous chronicler, in both documentary and narrative films, of lives lived in the rather more drab surroundings of communist Poland. Well, money changes everything. It was the arrival of funding from Western sources that bestowed the gift of abstraction: Beginning with the internationally-celebrated The Double Life of Veronique in 1991, it made Kieslowski's expressions of ennui beautiful. But in the 1980s, Kieslowski had less time for beauty.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

December 14, 2015Posted in2015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Espionage, Thriller, Tom Cruise

Roguenationblu1

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw At some point, sneakily, wonderfully, Tom Cruise became our Jackie Chan. It happened when the storyline shifted away from his essential ickiness–the Scientology thing, the Katie Holmes thing, and all the attendant nightmare gossip–and onto his fearlessness and absolute willingness to perform his own stunts wherever possible. (I realize of course that said storyline may never shift for some.) There were murmurs when he did the rock-climbing in the second Mission: Impossible flick–the one where he recruited John Woo, who was at the time the best action director on the planet. Those murmurs turned to grudging admiration once it was revealed that Cruise let himself be suspended for real outside the Burj Khalifa in Brad Bird’s superior Ghost Protocol; and now, with Christopher McQuarrie’s fleet, intelligent, immanently professional Rogue Nation, for which Cruise hung from an airplane in flight and held his breath for six minutes, Cruise’s bravado is a big part of the draw.

Macbeth (2015)

December 10, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Shakespeare, Theatrical, UK, War

Macbeth2015

***½/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Paddy Considine, David Thewlis
screenplay by Todd Louiso & Jacob Kokoff and Michael Leslie
directed by Justin Kurzel

by Walter Chaw In a season awash in Terrence Malick shrines, Justin Kurzel's Macbeth has the temerity to evoke Andrei Tarkovsky instead. Maybe certain moments from Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha, married to the saturated minimalism of Tarkovsky's Stalker. It's beautiful, in other words. Stunning enough that its self-consciousness is just another approach to centuries-old material, and a comfortable part of the whole. There are two approaches left to Shakespeare, I think: to acknowledge the centuries of intense scholarship around the canon that has uncovered the archetype (mostly Jungian, sometimes Freudian) mooring the tales, or to ignore them. This Macbeth understands that the Scottish Play is splashed red–all passion and portent and looming storms flashing low on the horizon. Every incident is portent. I mumbled along with the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech that I memorized for extra credit in eighth grade and marvelled at how Kurzel rolled it into a greater thematic conversation about the lust between these two people, Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) and his Lady (Marion Cotillard). It's as interesting an interpretation as Ethan Hawke's Melancholy Dane pondering choices in the aisles of Blockbuster Video. Muting the dialogue, swallowing it as Fassbender does here (or burying it, as in the various battleground sequences–Banquo (Paddy Considine) calls out his warning choking on blood and dirt), has the effect of placing the words of the story as secondary to its indelible images. It's Macbeth as mythology, seeking to explain how eternity metastasizes in the space between a couple who have lost a child.

Krampus (2015)

December 7, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Horror, Theatrical

Krampus

**/****
starring Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner, Krista Stadler
written by Todd Casey & Michael Dougherty & Zach Shields
directed by Michael Dougherty

by Walter Chaw I used to have a collection of short stories edited by Isaac Asimov, The Twelve Frights of Christmas. Ramsey Campbell's "The Chimney" is anthologized therein, and though it's not directly a Krampus story, it's sort of a Krampus story and was, at least, the first time I'd been introduced to the concept of something like an anti-Santa. It's a great story. Michael Dougherty's Krampus is not great, but with all the lulls and jokes misfiring, it does give you plenty of time to think about other things. (I didn't like his Trick 'r Treat either.) What works about the film are its first twenty minutes or so, where Dougherty seems to be setting up an unpleasant, nasty little commentary on the commodification of Christmas. There's trouble, though, when the parts of your movie that work are the parts that compare best to Jingle All the Way. I'll say, too, that there's genuine delight in the appearance of weird snowmen on the lawn during a blizzard blackout, stranding a shitty family alone with their thoughts while a German alpine demon lurks about outside–as well as hope, however self-deluding and fleet, that Dougherty's going to pay off the early abduction of the second-most sympathetic child of six. Alas, it's ultimately as compromised as Trick 'r Treat. The last five minutes are a masterpiece of playing both sides against the middle and pandering to an intended middlebrow audience. Like its PG-13 rating, Krampus is a devil's bargain between horror film and family film. It's the kind of thing that only really worked when it was Gremlins.

Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (1995) [Collector’s Edition] + Tales from the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood (1996) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

November 30, 2015Posted in1990s, 2015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Vampire

Talesfromcrypt3

Demon Knight
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Billy Zane, William Sadler, Jada Pinkett, Brenda Bakke
written by Ethan Reiff & Cyrus Voris & Mark Bishop
directed by Ernest Dickerson

Bordello of Blood
*/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras A
starring Dennis Miller, Erika Eleniak, Angie Everhart, John Kassir
screenplay by A.L. Katz & Gilbert Adler
directed by Gilbert Adler

by Walter Chaw I didn’t have HBO as a kid. Didn’t even have cable. When I went over to friends’ houses, I would spend a lot of time wanting to watch MTV to try to catch up on all the popular culture I was missing. “Remote Control”, the first Jon Stewart show, “Dream On”, “The Kids in the Hall”–each of them represent gaping holes in my pop education. Lump in the Walter Hill-produced “Tales from the Crypt” anthology program with that group of things I knew about but only by title and reputation. My first exposure to the EC Comics-inspired/adapted-from show was through reprints of “Tales from the Crypt” and “Strange Tales” comics during the early-’90s industry boom. Then Ernest Dickerson’s fantastic Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (hereafter Demon Knight) satisfied every single expectation I had of something seeking to honour the ghoulish, sometimes puerile depravity of William Gaines’s seminal source material. It’s as gory as it is corny and smart as hell for recognizing that those were the only requirements. Doesn’t hurt that the practical-effects work is goopy and inventive. Oh, and the cast is exceptional.

San Andreas (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 29, 2015Posted in2015, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Disaster Movie, Drama, DVD, Thriller

Sanandreas1

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Carlton Cuse
directed by Brad Peyton

by Bryant Frazer Back in the 1970s, Hollywood thrillers broke a sweat trying to depict a single terrible event–just one burning building, overturned luxury liner, or airship disaster. These days, the imagery has gotten a lot more freewheeling. Armed with powerful computer algorithms that generate cartoonish eruptions of earth, fire, wind, and water, today's VFX supervisors have a mandate to make bad things happen on screen–all of the bad things, preferably at the same time. In San Andreas, the terrible, horrible, no-good very bad day includes a disintegrating Hoover Dam and a container ship that cartwheels end-over-end into the Golden Gate Bridge. Skyscrapers collapse in on themselves, generating 9/11 flashback clouds of dust and debris that blast through city streets. A tsunami and its attendant flooding sends murky water pulsing through the floors of submerged high-rises, trapping helpless victims inside like goldfish behind glass. It would all be a little hard to take if the visual effects were more convincing (they're cartoonish) or the action scenes at all naturalistic (ditto), but director Brad Peyton isn't especially ambitious. His operative aesthetic is purely Theme Park.

Creed (2015)

November 25, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Stallone, Theatrical

Creed

***/****
starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad
screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Aaron Covington
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I do. It's not perfect. The love interest is underbaked and the fight choreography of the final match is unfortunately disjointed. But I love this movie–unconditionally, I guess. The story goes that Ryan Coogler, the young director of Fruitvale Station, pitched Sylvester Stallone on the idea of rebooting Rocky with Apollo Creed's son. (Something the Indiana Jones series needs to do with a grown-up Short Round, by the way.) The auto-critical analysis of the film is that it's essentially a father/son intrigue, which lends some insight into the Rocky/Mickey relationship of the original Rockys, and there are enough references to same to gratify the cultists. What I liked most about Stallone's willingness to take a shot on a fresh idea from a minority perspective–this is the first instalment of one of his two venerable franchises to not spring from a Stallone-written script–is that it feeds into the idea of Stallone as an auteur maybe, a canny cultural anthropologist definitely. Every Rocky, every Rambo, is distinctly a product of its time. I don't feel qualified to talk about this, but to the extent that I understand the theory, I'm sold.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015)

November 22, 2015Posted in2015, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Mockingjay2

***/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Peter Craig and Danny Strong, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw The first four hours of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (hereafter Hunger Games 3.2) are interminable. Because I barely remember anything from any other movie in this series (I had to go back and reread my reviews, not just to refresh my memory, but to affirm that I'd even seen the previous films), everything that wraps up loose threads, the two (count 'em) times characters are forced to give Biblical genealogies to the probable delight of ardent fans, the deadening nonsense involving love triangles, all that jazz, is exactly like watching paint dry. It's bookkeeping. They could just be moving their lips and making smacking noises. I like how the late Philip Seymour Hoffman handles these scenes: chin to the chest, looking for all the world like he's counting minutes. It's not unlike that part of The Sound and the Fury (which is my favourite book, by the way, so I'm not really complaining) that most people skim. And for good reason. Moby Dick has one, too. I'm saying this in the vain hope that you lay off in the comments section. Oh, I also still hate the silly Dickensian names. They're stupid and desperate.