****/**** Archives - Page 13 of 27

Seconds (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 1, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Sci-Fi, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Rock Hudson, John Randolph, Salome Jens, Frances Reid
screenplay by Lewis John Carlino, based on the novel by David Ely
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the longest time I wanted to write a book about John Frankenheimer, the crux of which would be a closer look at the relationship, if there was one, between the declining quality of his work and the assassination of his buddy Bobby Kennedy. It would be a cultural study, see, this way to tie the death of the Sixties with a director who for me definitively speaks to the rises and valleys of that decade, and who paved the way for the despairing paranoia flicks of the 1970s. In the end, I was defeated by the prospect of dealing with Frankenheimer’s later films–not because they were all as bad as Prophecy (or that any of the others are near as bad as Prophecy, or that anything could be), but because many of them are really, really good in really, really difficult ways to quantify. Closer to the truth of his output post-RFK assassination is not that it’s terrible, but that it’s all Seconds again in some form or another: diaries of personal apocalypses and the constant threat of the dissolution of identity. Besides, I think there might be an entire book in 52 Pick-Up alone.

Day of the Dead (1985) [Divimax] – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

September 25, 2013****/****, 1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Zombie

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Richard Liberty
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Far from the weak sister that critics and fanboys have branded George Romero’s conclusion to his zombie trilogy, Day of the Dead is at once the most hopeful and the most melancholy of the trio while falling short of the stark satirical perfection of the first (Night of the Living Dead) and the bloated satirical imperfections of the perhaps over-celebrated second (Dawn of the Dead). In fact, I find Day to be the equal of Dawn in almost every way and to exceed it in terms of its alacrity–its relative tightness in the development of its ideas about the nature of man unfolding against the backdrop of a rise of a new society. The obvious precursor to the zombie mythos is the Christian faith, with its saviour a zombie installing a new order (covenant) and its key ritual dedicated to a celebration of the eating of the saviour’s flesh and blood: a literal consumption of the Host that incorporates into its rite terms of infection and contagion. In fact, Day of the Dead, of the three, seems the most serious in exploring that spiritual/thaumaturgical connection with the introduction of what is essentially a demigod–an offspring of thought and body in the same way that Christ was meant to be God made flesh in all its weakness–in the form of the much-reviled Bub (Howard Sherman).

TIFF ’13: The Strange Little Cat

September 14, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Esoterica, Family, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF

Das merkwürdige Kätzchen
****/****
directed by Ramon Zürcher

by Angelo Muredda In his essay on the origins of the uncanny, Freud looks into German etymology to find that heimlich is one of those words that means a given thing as well as its opposite–that which is, on the one hand, familiar, and also that which is kept out of sight. The unheimlich, or uncanny, is by that token always latent within the ordinary–it’s the thing that should have stayed hidden away but has instead come to light. People in Ramon Zürcher’s marvellous debut are always calling the familiar things around them uncanny, and no wonder, given the alien eye with which Zürcher observes them. Set in a bustling Berlin apartment that houses a reserved matriarch, her visiting twentysomething children, her adolescent daughter, her ailing mother, and a pair of pets (including the ever-roving orange tabby that supplies the title), The Strange Little Cat has the ingredients of a multi-generational melodrama about a family coming together and splitting apart in an uneasily-shared space–an August: Osage County for the arthouse set. But Zürcher happily forgoes such narrative dead ends in pursuit of something more playful and unsettled, working with the weird formal properties of the objects that fill this domestic space, from a child’s misspelled grocery list to a glass bottle that spins around a bowl in the sink as if propelled by its own volition.

Telluride ’13: Under the Skin

September 7, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2013

****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Krystof Hádek, Jessica Mance
screenplay by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Michel Faber
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw Trouble Every Day and The Man Who Fell to Earth as directed by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing Under the Skin marks his return to feature filmmaking after a nine-year hiatus. The loosest of adaptations, cherry-picking from Michel Faber’s strong novel of the same name, Under the Skin is home to a trio (at least) of indelible images and a style and presentation that function as shunts into a thicket of thorny existential questions; it’s the best film I’ve seen this year and among the best films I’ve ever seen. Stripped to the bone, as capable of viciousness as it is tenderness, it achieves what seems impossible by creating a sense of the mysterium tremens in the body of a human-looking alien. When it works, it’s a stunner worthy of mention in the same breath as Blade Runner, but more significant than its immediate impact is its lingering afterimage. I liked it initially. In the six days since I saw it, scarcely an hour’s gone by that I haven’t thought about it. Under the Skin, not to be flip, burrows exactly there, and nests.

Telluride ’13: The Unknown Known

September 2, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

****/**** directed by Errol Morris by Walter Chaw Errol Morris returns to The Fog of War form in what could be seen as a complementary piece: a feature-length conversation with Donald Rumsfeld called, appropriately, The Unknown Known. It's a phrase that repeats throughout a picture that's scored in a Philip Glass-ian way by Danny Elfman (who at one point channels Michael Small's music for The Parallax View) and ends with a rimshot that would be funnier if it weren't terrifying. Different from The Fog of War and an apparently repentant Robert McNamara, The Unknown Known's Rumsfeld comes off as not…

Medium Cool (1969) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 31, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound B- Extras B+
starring Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill
written and directed by Haskell Wexler

by Walter Chaw No one has ever been cooler in a movie than Robert Forster is in Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool. The title comes from Marshall McLuhan’s assignation in his Understanding Media of television as a “cool” medium, i.e., one that requires a more active participation to benefit from meaning–in opposition to something like film, which he identifies as a “hot” medium. It could just as soon refer to Forster’s John Cassellis, however, the avatar for a new generation of existential detachment. The multifoliate rose of this contraption reveals its first complication in being a film about Cassellis, a television cameraman active at the very end of a decade of immense internal tumult in the United States, where television gradually emerged as primary witness–if not also prosecution, defense, jury, and judge–of the death of the counterculture. It’s telling, too, that one of the best studies of American ’60s cinema is by Ethan Mordden and titled Medium Cool–acknowledgment, along with Wexler’s film, that the movies can provide “hot” context for their “cool” counterpart.

Computer Chess (2013)

July 18, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Patrick Riester, Myles Page, James Curry, Robin Schwartz
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

by Walter Chaw Sneakily, the best science-fiction film of the summer is Andrew “Godfather of Mumblecore” Bujalski’s decidedly lo-fi Computer Chess, shot with a late-’60s, made-for-home-video Sony AVC-3260 analog tube video camera that approximates the very look and feel of something you’d find in a box in someone’s garage. It endeavours to tell the story of a weekend tech convention where proto-hackers engage in mortal combat over who will be the first to create a computer chess program that can defeat a human master (Gerald Peary (!)) and, incidentally, collect a $75k booty. The money, though, is incidental to the glory of scientific discovery, of being the first to push the limits of artificial intelligence to the point of…what? Aggression? Sentience, perhaps? It’s telling that Bujalski, at the forefront of a specific DIY subgenre of independent cinema reliant on largely improvised performances with no budget nor, theoretically, affectation (it’s like the American version of the Dogme95 movement), has produced the most affectless, genuine artifact of the dogme philosophy through his greatest feat of affectation: he’s created a time capsule of an era in a film about the eternity of the human instinct to create simulacra first and deal with issues of functional equivalence later. In its way, Computer Chess works like a sprung, found-footage diary of the birth of Skynet. It’s Mary Shelley, and Blade Runner, and it gets to being about what it’s about without being an asshole about it.

To Have and Have Not (1944) + The Big Sleep (1945/6) – DVDs

July 8, 2013****/****, 1940s, 2013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
****/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Dolores Moran
screenplay by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Howard Hawks

THE BIG SLEEP
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone
screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett & Jules Furthman, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler
directed by Howard Hawks

by Walter Chaw While biographer Todd McCarthy refers to the two versions of Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep as marking the delineation point separating linear (early) Hawks from non-linear (later) Hawks, I feel like you can mark the director’s affection for bonzo non-sequiturs throughout his sultry To Have and Have Not. The picture tells its tale of immigrants marooned off the islets of war and sexual sophistication–an island bell jar and pressure cooker envisioned as a sequel of sorts to Casablanca. But where Casablanca‘s sex was mature and companionate (the sizzle replaced by simmer) and tinged with regret, To Have and Have Not has a slick of bestial sweat to it that promises that the explosion of really naughty stuff is looming rather than in the rear-view. (There’s no sexier film in all the Forties.) The story of the corrupt Vichy government and the brave French underground unfolding behind the red-hot flirtation between diplomatically non-affiliated fishing boat captain Harry “Steve” Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) and lost American teen “Slim” (Lauren Bacall) is punctuated helter-skelter by husky lounge numbers courtesy Slim and Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael) and riff sessions with Steve and Slim that have the cadence and unpredictability of jazz improvisation. It’s not so much a narrative as a medley in a bouncy key, and Hawks is not so much a director as a bandleader. Much has been made of Hawks’s skill in casting (and it’s hard to argue otherwise when he sniffs out the alchemical enchantment between old man Bogie and new thing Bacall (and Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell; and Dean Martin and a bottle)), but looking at To Have and Have Not–the first of Bogie/Bacall’s four collaborations–is to glimpse something more than a good casting eye: it’s to witness the evolution of a true musical genius. The rhythms are subterranean, the verses in between the words; to watch this and The Big Sleep (Hawks’s other collaboration with Bogie/Bacall) back-to-back is as close to rapture as this experience gets.

Swimming to Cambodia (1987) – DVD

July 7, 2013****/****, 1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Concert Doc, Directors: Jonathan Demme, DVD, Esoterica, Scream/Shout! Factory

****/**** Image C Sound C Extras B
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw I learned about memoir as art watching Spalding Gray in Jonathan Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia. Although I was a freshman in college when I first saw it, I’m not sure that I ever really knew what “memoir” was before, and, since, I’ve been hard pressed to find any examples that measure up to the bar it sets. Swimming to Cambodia also provides an impossible standard for direction, as Demme takes Gray’s “monolog” format (essentially him, alone, on a stage) and turns it into something like an expressionistic piece, something that is at once inside Gray’s mind and inside yours using thoughtful editing choices and clever sound and lighting design. In a year that saw the release of Predator, Full Metal Jacket, The Untouchables, Empire of the Sun, Raising Arizona, Near Dark, A Better Tomorrow II, Angel Heart, Evil Dead II, and RoboCop, it’s a little astonishing to realize the best-directed film is this one with a guy sitting at a table. For what it’s worth, as I was writing my own memoir of a very particular moment in my life, the only readership I really imagined for it consisted of my father and Gray–Gray, who killed himself over water in 2004, and my father, who died a year before that. If the one was the reason, the other was the way.

Byzantium (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Ireland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire

****/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley, Caleb Landry Jones
screenplay by Moira Buffini, based on her play
directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw What is it about the Irish character, that particular quality of melancholy fatalism, that seems to inform the great works of native sons Beckett, Joyce, and maybe Yeats in particular? I like G.K. Chesterton’s description of Ireland as a place of “men that God made mad,/For all their wars are merry,/And all their songs are sad.” It infects the folklore, the story of the crags and the heather, the looming, low skies pregnant with what Michael Almereyda’s criminally underestimated (and long forgotten) The Eternal fashioned into a creation story involving unimaginable losses and the sweet, bitter tears they inspire. To that film, add John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish, Neal Jordan’s Ondine, and now Jordan’s rapturous Byzantium: a quartet of supernaturally-tinged pictures that together form a lush polyptych that captures the very sensation of walking through Dublin in the rain, or along the shores of Galway, or through the pages of Ulysses in the company of Leo and Nora. As for Byzantium, it’s beautiful, and sad, and has an eternity to it that’s reflected in its tale of a “soucriant,” a succubus of sorts with a Dominican history and favoured by Jean Rhys in novels that were themselves attempts to come to terms with the tragedies of her life as an outsider. Jordan, well-read and never shy about expressing that literariness in his pictures, is producing in his later work the very evocation of a city from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (a book he once told me he admires): Ersilia, an abandoned city built not of walls, but of strings the lost inhabitants used to mark connections with one another. Jordan weaves an intricate web with Byzantium, a film that, before even attacking the tensions within, provides tensions without in its title, most likely taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which is itself about tensions between the “artifice of eternity” and the temporariness of youth. Turns out, the film is about that, too.

Museum Hours (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Mary Margaret O’Hara, Bobby Sommer, Ela Piplits
directed by Jem Cohen

by Angelo Muredda The closing credits of Jem Cohen’s warm and wonderful Museum Hours give equal thanks to John Berger and Patti Smith, and it’s not hard to see why. Further to being Cohen’s friend and occasional collaborator, Smith occupies a rare place at the intersection of art stardom and punk history, while Berger might be the only figurehead total newcomers to art criticism can name, his TV series “Ways of Seeing” having turned innumerable undergraduates onto ideologically-inflected readings of popular images. Whatever their personal contributions to the film may have been, Berger’s knack for providing the novice critic with the armature to see intelligently and ethically is as instructive here as Smith’s mercurial punk ethos. Museum Hours–which, like Berger’s BBC miniseries and book, is destined to have a long afterlife in college art courses–is an absorbing and richly humanist synthesis of those seemingly contradictory impulses, a puckish walking tour through an art gallery that doubles as a manifesto for seeing deeply into the rubbish beyond the walls of the museum.

Band of Outsiders (1964) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 3, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, The Criterion Collection

Bande à part
****/****
Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur, Danièle Girard
screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard (uncredited), based on the novel Fool’s Gold by Dolores Hitchens
directed by JeanLuc Cinéma Godard

by Bryant Frazer For the casual observer, Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (Bande à part) may as well be titled The Eyes of Anna Karina. The famously radical director’s follow-up to the hit film Contempt isn’t a favourite of American movie buffs for its politics or its thematic rigour. Instead, it’s a veritable spoof of film noir–at times a near-farce–involving a couple of small-time schemers who take their cues from Hollywood. Though Band of Outsiders is thought of as one of Godard’s most accessible works, it’s also one of his most dissonant. It’s a gritty crime drama wrapped around a light romance; a breezy comedy shot through with intimations of the geopolitical landscape of the 1960s; an homage to U.S. culture that incidentally imagines the decline of the American empire. In Godard’s body of work, Band of Outsiders–its story based on a novel by American mystery writer Dolores Hitchens–can be read as the connective tissue between the bones of Breathless, which is full of loving references to American cinema and pulp fiction, and the later Weekend and Tout va bien, which are explicitly critical of western culture in general and capitalism in particular.

Before Midnight (2013)

June 7, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

****/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
screenplay by Richard Linklater & Ethan Hawke & Julie Delpy
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Before Midnight opens with a bit of misdirection, a tracking shot of two pairs of shoes ambling towards the camera that we instinctively ascribe to Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) before the second pair is shown to belong instead to Jesse’s teenaged son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), about to board a flight back to the States. Somewhere in the slow pan up to the actors’ faces, and in the deferral of series MVP Celine, is a playful acknowledgement that Richard Linklater’s Before movies have grown into a franchise with a coherent visual language that’s dependable enough to riff on. Much has changed since Jesse and Celine’s inaugural philosophical walking tour through Vienna 18 years ago, and the prologue is an economical demonstration of how arbitrary our encounters with the couple to date have been, shaped by our inability to listen in after Nina Simone drowns out the end of Before Sunset. But the presence of Jesse’s son (from the unseen wife alluded to throughout the previous film) in place of Celine, who’s finally revealed in another tracking shot in the next scene, also alerts us to something new: a conflict that runs deeper than the pair’s usual anxious negotiations with a ticking clock.

Cabaret (1972) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

June 3, 2013****/****, 1970s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Music, Musical, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Marisa Berenson, Joel Grey
screenplay Jay Allen, based on the play by John Van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood
directed by Bob Fosse

by Walter Chaw Bob Fosse’s Cabaret is an astonishment. It’s a milestone for musical adaptations, a scabrous mission statement early on for the best period in American film (in film anywhere, really), and, taken with her turn in The Sterile Cuckoo (and arguably as Lucille 2 on “Arrested Development”), everything you need to know about Liza Minnelli as a very down, very particular American icon. Daughter of one Judy Garland, whose 1969 death from an abuse of drugs and alcohol was no longer considered spectacular in the shadow of poor, martyred Marilyn Monroe, she represents the broken legacy of Old Hollywood. Ray Bolger said at Garland’s funeral that she had just worn out. Poignant. Poignant especially because it happens the same year her daughter has a breakdown from a broken heart in The Sterile Cuckoo, and just three years before Minnelli’s Sally Bowles composes herself a split second before the curtains part and she, snap, justlikethat, puts on a happy face for a Weimar audience fiddling as the Republic burns. As endings go, it’s as horrifying as the editing error at the close of John Frankenheimer’s 1966 Seconds–the film that, for my money, is the real beginning of the New American Cinema, appearing less than a year before the “official” starting gun of Bonnie & Clyde. Cabaret is a quintessential ’70s picture, a devastating experience and an exhilarating one, too.

Sansho the Bailiff (1954) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 29, 2013****/****, 1950s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Japan, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
starring Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa, Masao Shimizu
screenplay by Fuji Yahiro, Yoshikata Yoda
directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

by Walter Chaw A little late to the party, I know, but Kenji Mizoguchi’s magisterial jidaigeki Sansho the Bailiff is the source material for Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Both are initiated by the filmmakers as fairytales, mythologies; and both are initiated within the text by a specific fatal flaw in parental figures. In Sansho, it’s hubris when the father, a principled public servant, stands up under an unjust edict and is exiled, leaving his family in peril. In Spirited Away, the parents engage in an endless banquet, indulging their gluttony until they’re transformed into literal swine despite the protests of their child. Both films are withering indictments of the cultures that produced them, and each is opened to a greater depth of interpretation by an appreciation of the other. Coming here from the Miyazaki, it’s fruitful to consider why it is the Mizoguchi is named after the villain, the cruel slave-owner who tortures the film’s heroes, while the Miyazaki is named for the innocents (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) and the loaded act/word “Kamikakushi,” which once referred to abduction by angry gods but has a contemporary implication of sex trafficking. Arguably, Mizoguchi sets up this read of the later text in his own canon, with many of his films addressing the problem of sexual exploitation among the lower class in Japanese history–a problem that persisted through the war years and, some would say, beyond. With its naming, it’s possible to infer that the source for the ills in Sansho the Bailiff is too strong a hold on the traditions of an antiquated past; in Spirited Away, it’s the frittering away of the future by a generation too solipsistic, too blinkered by its own sense of entitlement, to save itself from obsolescence. See the two films as bookends of a particularly Japanese introspection, equal parts humility and nihilism. (As one of the characters in Sansho the Bailiff sings, “Isn’t life a torture?”) And in the contemplation of the Mizoguchi, find also an undercurrent of warning–and doom–in the Miyazaki.

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

Djangounch2

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

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.

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

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.

Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 11, 2013****/****, 1930s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins, Edward Everett Horton
screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the play by Noel Coward
directed by Ernst Lubitsch

by Walter Chaw The impulse to call the work of Ernst Lubitsch “frothy” and “bubbly” and otherwise insubstantial (a practice excoriated, rightfully so, by film scholar William Paul on Criterion’s Blu-ray release of Design for Living) obscures the fact that none of Lubitsch’s romantic masterpieces would carry any kind of resonance without an essential heart of darkness and decay. The oft-invoked “Lubitsch Touch”–that well-circulated anecdote that Billy Wilder hung the words “What Would Lubitsch Do” above his office door–suggests to me the wellspring of the asshole element in Wilder’s works: the idea that Wilder was just Hitchcock undercover, with Lubitsch influencing both directors in ways obvious and not so and not in terms of a “light” touch so much as a decidedly bitter one. Take my favourite Lubitsch film, Trouble in Paradise, which begins with a trash barge in the middle of the night in a Venice we don’t see again until Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. The picture proceeds to document the love affair between two professional thieves and the innocent woman who falls victim to them. In that, there’s a direct reference to hated President Hoover’s deep-in-the-Depression platitude that “prosperity is right around the corner,” offered in piercing irony for a cash-strapped audience for whom the theatre had most likely just lowered their admission to a dime. The “Lubitsch Touch,” indeed: edged and between the ribs before you know it’s being brandished.

The Loneliest Planet (2012) – DVD

February 28, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, 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.