Action Archives - Page 11 of 49 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Dead-End Drive-In (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

October 2, 20161980s, 2016, Action, Arrow Video, Australia, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Prison, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Ned Manning, Natalie McCurry, Peter Whitford
screenplay by Peter Smalley, from a story by Peter Carey
directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith

by Bryant Frazer Australia’s signature entry in the cinematic encyclopedia of dystopian hellscapes will always be the Mad Max series, and rightly so. But if you dig just a little deeper into the corpus of down-and-dirty genre movies from Down Under, you’ll discover this B-grade entry from Aussie action impresario Brian Trenchard-Smith, which daydreams about confining rebellious youth culture to a dusty prison camp way out on the edge of town. Trenchard-Smith is best known abroad for 1983’s BMX Bandits, an early Nicole Kidman feature widely available for home viewing in the U.S., and his corpus comes with the Quentin Tarantino seal of approval. Dead-End Drive-In isn’t great cinema, but it has some well-executed stuntwork that bolsters a speculative premise just goofy enough to catch the imagination.

The Magnificent 7 (2016)

September 24, 20162016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Western

**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Vincent D'Onofrio, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris Pratt
screenplay by Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw That there isn't more of a conversation around Antoine Fuqua's The Magnificent 7 beyond the usual wag-talk about the relative merits of sequels and remakes speaks to something like cultural progress, for what it's worth. The popular criticism of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is that it's derivative and took "no chances." My response is that the heroes of the film are a young woman, a young black man, and a Guatemalan–all in a franchise that set back the racial conversation by about thirty years with its astonishingly tone-deaf prequel trilogy. The Force Awakens, in other words, took a hell of a lot of chances, particularly in consideration of the vile blowback Paul Feig's Ghostbusters suffered for having the temerity to recast a well-remembered bro-fave with women. The Magnificent 7 takes a few chances as well by recasting John Sturges's well-remembered bro-fave Kurosawa remake with Denzel Washington (in the Yul Brynner lead), Byung-hun Lee (possibly the biggest star in Asia), Tlingit/Koyukon-Athabascan actor Martin Sensmeir, and Mexican actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. The press junket made a lot of this multi-culturalism and there's a passing reference to it in most reviews of the picture, but like The Force Awakens, the prevailing attitude is that The Magnificent 7 is derivative and that's that. It is that, but that's not all it is.

The Jungle Book (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

September 4, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, Scarlett Johansson

**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Neel Sethi
screenplay by Justin Marks
directed by Jon Favreau

by Bill Chambers Confession: As a child, I used to fantasize about live-action versions of the Disney animated features–especially Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty, because of the design extremes in those films. Thinking back on this, I was at a loss to explain why my kid brain–which had a bottomless capacity to suspend disbelief–wanted to see a “real” purple-and-black dragon spit green flames at a “real” prince, or a “real” wooden boy sprout donkey ears, until earlier this week, when a piece of clickbait unveiling the “real” Lumière and Cogsworth from the upcoming Beauty and the Beast jogged my memory: ghoulish curiosity. “Ghoulish curiosity” is, I believe, the unspoken draw of this recent spate of live-action Disney remakes, starting with 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, which doubled down by promising the Tim Burton rendition of that world. The reason Alice Through the Looking Glass tanked, Johnny Depp’s recent toxicity notwithstanding, is that we’ve seen all the freaks in that tent; true fascination lies the way of Dumbo, another Tim Burton joint. (I have a pretty good idea of what the circus stuff will look like, but I’m dying to see that elephant fly.) Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book got us there via the truly perverse notion to remake one of Disney’s animal-driven musicals in live-action. Of course it opened big ($103M, in friggin’ April!), just like of course the RNC scored higher ratings than the DNC. But if the latter rewarded our cynical rubbernecking, Favreau transcended it.

The Nice Guys (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

August 22, 20162016, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Matt Bomer, Kim Basinger
written by Shane Black & Anthony Bagarozzi
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw Shane Black’s The Nice Guys is a delightful fusion of John D. MacDonald and Gregory McDonald; if it had a cover, it’d be painted by Robert McGinnis. It’s California noir, no doubt, the love child of The Long Goodbye and Inherent Vice, but with the flip social commentary and occasional bouts of ultra-violence found in Carl Hiaasen’s Florida noirs. Sufficed to say that Black, who’s often spoken of his love for crime fiction, has distilled pulp here and with his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang into breezy, post-modern concoctions. The Nice Guys is as smart as it is inconsequential, as brutal and exploitive as it is a commentary on brutality and exploitation. More than anything else, it’s a very fine critical pastiche of the kinds of books you read in an afternoon because they’re thrilling, socially irresponsible, and afire with misogyny, nihilism, and Byronic macho bullshit Romanticism. But cool, baby, and stylish.

War Dogs (2016)

August 20, 20162016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, War

**/****
starring Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana De Armas, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by Stephen Chin and Todd Phillips & Jason Smilovic, based on the ROLLING STONE article “Arms and the Dudes” by Guy Lawson
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw Like The Big Short before it, Todd Phillips’s War Dogs is a breezy, loose, “for dummies” gloss on recent history that says for all the things you thought were going to hell in the world, you don’t know the fucking half of it, buddy. It details how W.’s administration, after being accused of cronyism in making Dick Cheney’s Haliburton wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of wealth with the gift of bid-free defense contracts, opened the floodgates by essentially giving every unscrupulous asshole on the planet the opportunity to bid on defense contracts. In that pursuit, our government set up an “eBay” list where major arms dealers could pick off the larger contracts, and dilettantes and arms “day-traders” could, from the comfort of their basements, sell the United States military a few thousand handguns. War Dogs adapts a magazine article about two assholes in particular, David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who made a fortune, then made a terrible mistake when they decided to traffic a hundred million rounds of defective Chinese AK-47 ammo by disguising it as Albanian stock. Actually, their mistake is that Efraim is a psychotic loser so pathological in his incompetence that even the U.S. government had no choice but to do something about it. It’s a level of obviousness matched by the film in moments like one in the middle of the game where Efraim screams, “Fuck the American taxpayer!” OK, yes, we get it.

Suicide Squad (2016)

August 3, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller, Will Smith

½*/****
starring Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie, Joel Kinnaman
written and directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw Ugly garbage that will make a lot of money, David Ayer’s Suicide Squad begins where Batman v Superman left off by positing that in a world without its big, mopey, solipsistic, Byronic Boy Scout, there will come a time when the good guys (i.e., us) will need to enlist the help of a bunch of psychopathic mutants and contract killers to protect our way of life. It’s a little bit like Escape from New York but not cool and not fun; and it’s a little bit like a satire, except that it’s more of a documentary. Marvel films are aspirational and DC films in this new cycle are diseased and beaten. Both are bloated beyond repair and slavish to a core fandom they daren’t betray, making them essentially unwatchable along their tentpole storylines–though you want less to kill yourself after the Marvel films. The bright light lately has been one-offs and side projects: Marvel’s television universe, for instance, has blossomed on Netflix and DC’s own TV series “The Flash” and “Supergirl” seem to hear the music. Then, of course, there’s Guardians of the Galaxy. The only thing worse than the kernel of an idea at the centre of Suicide Squad is its unlikely choice of writer-director to bring it to life, Ayer, perhaps the most vile, pessimistic filmmaker in the United States, whom Warner Bros. has given the task of appealing broadly somehow with this material: a little softening here, an extra scene/hero moment there after gauging the breakout star from the reaction to early teaser trailers. If you’re going to hire Ayer to do this, make it a hard-R and take out the yuk-yuk comedy. He’s not funny. He’s not for kids. The strain of pleasing dozens of masters shows. It shows in the select mix of fondly-remembered oldies à la Guardians of the Galaxy, and it shows in the flop-sweat of an entire production so badly compromised by its too-big star and its too-threatened masculinity.

Jason Bourne (2016)

July 30, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel
written by Paul Greengrass & Christopher Rouse
directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw There are two modes in Paul Greengrass’s Jason Bourne, his and star Matt Damon’s return to the franchise after almost a decade away from it: thudding tedium, and incomprehensible chaos. By this fifth instalment (which follows the Jeremy Renner-starring spin-off attempt, The Bourne Legacy), it all plays a little too much like self-parody. Every time there’s a conversation about THE TRUTH now, it feels like a bad SNL skit. I still love The Bourne Identity. Watching it in comparison with the Greengrass films (and with most any modern action movie) underscores exactly how superior is Doug Liman as an action director. Liman shoots an action scene like the dance sequences in Saturday Night Fever: with respect for geography and the skill and physicality of his stunt performers and cast. The car chase through Paris in the original begins with a careful consultation of a map, a few questions about the state of the car, and some light but crucial character development, then proceeds into a nice, clean set-piece that establishes stakes, spatial geometry, and destination in a way that is Friedkin-esque. It’s a textbook, as good as the L-train underpass pursuit in The French Connection and the wrong-way freeway chase in To Live and Die in LA.. The Bourne Identity is defiantly classical action filmmaking and that’s why it still seems fresh, even though it will be fifteen years old next year.

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

July 26, 20162015, 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.

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

July 21, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Idris Elba
screenplay by Simon Pegg & Doug Jung
directed by Justin Lin

by Walter Chaw The cultural watershed isn’t when it’s revealed that Sulu (John Cho) is gay, but rather a moment just before that, when an interracial couple–an Asian man and a white woman–are used as an example of a “good” relationship. I’m Chinese, my wife is a tall redhead. When my kids watch Star Trek Beyond, it’ll be the first time they see their parents reflected in a major American tentpole. There are a lot of things wrong with Star Trek Beyond, which at its best is great in the same way that David Twohy’s The Chronicles of Riddick is great–and at its worst is bad in the same way the last film in this reboot series is bad (that is, self-conscious and fan-pleasing, torturously so). But when Sulu is given the one, true, rousing hero moment in the piece, it speaks not just to the vision of a multicultural United States that Lin’s The Fast and the Furious movies proposed, but also, perhaps, to the real impact of an Asian-American director behind the camera. It makes sense that a Lin-directed Star Trek would make Sulu the hero; I just wasn’t expecting to be so affected by it.

Ghostbusters (2016)

July 13, 20162016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones
written by Kate Dippold & Paul Feig
directed by Paul Feig

by Walter Chaw Sort of the George Cukor to Melissa McCarthy’s Katharine Hepburn, director Paul Feig has shown over multiple collaborations that he knows how to make a Melissa McCarthy vehicle pretty well, perhaps explaining why none of the other funny people in his Ghostbusters reboot are funny in the slightest. “Melissa McCarthy vehicle” is a low bar besides, if a reasonably lucrative one–a low bar matched by the low bar of Ivan Reitman’s terrible but revered original film. Reitman’s Ghost Busters (’84 spelling, to be anal and to differentiate the two titles) shares a cultural space with other terrible movies like The Goonies and Purple Rain and pretty much everything starring Bill Murray before Quick Change. It’s an aggressive movie, painfully unfunny, and for a few months when I was 11, it was the best thing I’d ever seen. 11-year-olds are very smart at being 11 and very stupid in almost every other respect. I didn’t know a ghost was giving Dan Aykroyd a blowjob until years later, after I’d had one. Oh yeah, I said, that ghost gave Dan Aykroyd a blowjob. Was it to save herself from getting “busted”? That’s a pretty sexually violent pill in the middle of all that arrogant improvisation. Think of it as a slave narrative where a slave woman gives a slave master a blowjob in the middle of a montage. Right, I get it, it’s a comedy, lighten up; but Mel Brooks it ain’t. What I wouldn’t have given for a scene in the new film where one of the women receives cunnilingus from a member of the tormented undead. That would’ve been pointed, taboo, and smart. Looking at it again years later, the best part of Ghost Busters is Rick Moranis, because Rick Moranis is the best part of every movie he’s in. He always plays a real character. He’s never too good for the material.

No Way Out (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

July 4, 20161980s, 2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Espionage, Mystery, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

***/**** Image B- Sound B Commentary C
starring Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Sean Young, Howard Duff
screenplay by Robert Garland, based on the book The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw I was lucky enough to be 14 in 1987, right at that age where my buddies and I were dropped off at the theatre by our parents for whatever we wanted to see. Because we were generally not well-supervised in such matters, we talked them into buying us tickets for stuff like Hellraiser, RoboCop, Lethal Weapon, Full Metal Jacket, and The Untouchables. My first R-rated theatrical experiences were, in other words, magical. They were gleefully violent, extravagantly so, and the sex… Jesus. The sex in mainstream movies in 1987 was combustible–enough so that it formed the backbone of my onanism for the next several years. I saw Angel Heart this way, and Fatal Attraction of course. Key in there is Roger Donaldson’s largely-forgotten but durable political-paranoia thriller No Way Out. Starring Kevin Costner, cementing a legendary winning streak that began a month or two earlier with his star-making turn in The Untouchables and continued with the dead sexy Bull Durham the following year and the legendarily-chaste Field of Dreams a year after that. Lost in conversations about Costner’s stardom during this period is his preternatural ability to be an Everyman sex symbol. Girls loved him, and guys didn’t mind because Costner isn’t really all that threatening. He sure is likable, though. When he introduced a note of menace into his nice-guy archetype in A Perfect World, he, in fact, discovered his perfect role. The problems came when he tried to be something more than that. Cowboy, baseball player, fish-man, all-around all-American? No problem. Attorney, doctor–now we got issues.

The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

July 3, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical

***/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer, based on the “Tarzan” stories created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw David Yates’s The Legend of Tarzan is at once a long-overdue, if massively fictionalized, biopic of George Washington Williams’s time in the Congo observing colonial Belgium’s abuses of the rubber, ivory, and diamond trades; and it’s an adaptation, nay, updating of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first five Tarzan books, with heavy creative license taken but the spirit kept largely intact. Although it’s more successful as the latter than as the former, both endeavours are carried through with seriousness and intelligence. It’s not a perfect film: the editing is terrible, particularly during the action sequences, suggesting this was probably a longer movie truncated out of fear of diluting the “good” bits. I also don’t love the washed-out colour palette that paints everything in a blue gloom–at least not as much as Yates seems to, between this and the last four Harry Potter films. And it bears mentioning that Samuel L. Jackson isn’t really an actor anymore and that Margot Robbie arguably never has been. Yeah, The Legend of Tarzan is hard to defend objectively. It does, however, understand the appeal of the Tarzan mythos, answering in grand moments why it is that he’s found his way into over 200 motion pictures and dozens more serials and television series (live-action and animated). I should disclaim, too, that I read (re-read, in some cases) all 24 original Burroughs Tarzan novels in the weeks leading up to the picture’s release. In other words, I’m a big, giant pulp nerd.

Knightriders (1981); Monkey Shines (1988); The Dark Half (1993) – Blu-ray Discs

June 27, 20161980s, 1990s, 2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: George A. Romero, Disability, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Stephen King, Thriller

George A. Romero’s Knightriders
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Ed Harris, Gary Lahti, Tom Savini, Amy Ingersol
written and directed by George A. Romero

MONKEY SHINES
*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Jason Beghe, John Pankow, Kate McNeil, Joyce Van Patten
based on the novel by Michael Stewart
written for the screen and directed by George A. Romero

THE DARK HALF
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Timothy Hutton, Amy Madigan, Julie Harris, Michael Rooker
based on the book by Stephen King
written for the screen and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw Knightriders, George A. Romero’s very own Fast Company, is another of the earnestly socially-conscious filmmaker’s earnestly socially-conscious films, though one without the benefit of a metaphor that holds any kind of water. It doesn’t even have an argument that makes sense. It feels like Romero over-identifying with the topic and losing the thread somewhere along the way–and padding the runtime with far too many pedestrian bike stunts. There’s something to be said for personal projects (Romero’s work seems like it’s all personal, frankly), but with that intimacy comes real peril. I will say Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is a no-kidding masterpiece. It’s one of the best films ever made and perhaps the single most important Civil Rights picture, too. I’m partial to his Day of the Dead as well, for the cleanness of its execution and for the interesting things it has to say about identity and the military-industrial complex. It’s fair to wonder, then, if Romero is tied so inextricably to the zombie genre not because (or not just because) of timeliness (and that he essentially invented an entire subgenre with a legion of imitators), but also because without zombies, his stuff is only leaden and clumsy. Without zombies functioning as they do, as both grand bogey and versatile metaphor, Romero’s weighed down by a lethal payload of well-meant proselytizing, and just like that the flat artlessness of his films feels less “spartan” on purpose than “affectless” by accident.

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

June 25, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*/****
starring Liam Hemsworth, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Maika Monroe
screenplay by Nicolas Wright & James A. Woods and Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich and James Vanderbilt
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Walter Chaw About a third of the way through the slog of Independence Day: Resurgence (hereafter ID4.2), the hopelessly misguided and bellicose POTUS (Sela Ward), dressed smartly in a pantsuit with her hair pulled back in a severe-but-sensible bun, makes the first of a couple of really, really stupid mistakes before being executed off-screen by the alien scourge. And good riddance, for in her place rises man-of-action legacy POTUS Whitmore (Bill Pullman), suffering from some kind of alien-inflicted dementia but, you know, a man who hears voices and occasionally lapses into a coma is still better than a woman, amiright ‘murica? High five. There’s also a younger, less-demented POTUS on standby, Adams (William Fichtner), who is also obviously preferable to a woman. (High five.) There’s a heroic team of fighter pilots that reminds me a lot of the Thunderbirds or the Power Rangers (because there’s a Chinese one–the surprise is that her plane isn’t yellow), and then there’s Whitmore’s now-grown daughter Patricia (Maika Monroe), who gave up flying to care for her demented father but is back in the cockpit again, though she still needs her flyboy fiancé, roguish Jake (Liam Hemsworth), to save her in the end and she STILL almost shoots him because she’s scared and has a vagina. This is Roland Emmerich’s world. Try to keep up.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) [Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

June 20, 2016****/****, 1980s, 2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Vincent Suarez, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi, Star Trek

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, Ricardo Montalban
screenplay by Jack B. Sowards
directed by Nicholas Meyer

The film portion of this review comes from a piece originally published in July of 2000 that also critiqued the A/V quality of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan‘s very first DVD release. I opted not to repost Vincent’s comments on the DVD proper because they no longer seemed relevant, especially in this context.-BC

by Vincent Suarez Legend has it that, despite the popularity of television reruns and the stunning phenomenon of “Star Trek” conventions, Paramount green-lighted Star Trek: The Motion Picture only after the success of Star Wars, in an envious bid for a sci-fi blockbuster of its own. In the minds of many fans and critics, however, director Robert Wise delivered a film that more closely approximated Star Bores. (For the record, I love the film’s slow pace and its oft-neglected reprisal of themes from my favourite classic “Trek” episode, “The Changeling.”) While not the huge grosser the studio was hoping for, fans turned out in strong enough numbers to warrant a sequel, and a cash cow was born. There have since been eight additional films and three spun-off television series, but the most brilliant Trek effort remains that first sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Zootopia (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 13, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Disney, DVD, Family

Zootopia1

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
screenplay by Jared Bush & Phil Johnston
directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore

by Walter Chaw Early on in Disney’s Zootopia, directed somehow by a triumvirate (Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush) from a screenplay by Bush and Phil Johnston, a baby fox declares that it would like to grow up to be an elephant. It even has an elephant hoodie; the creature idolizes, it appears, elephant culture. It gets a laugh. It’s worth the conversation to wonder what about this is funny. At its essence, the idea that something could grow to be something else is funny. It’s also funny because it knowingly, gently pokes fun at our culture of “you can be anything you want to be,” the source of more sometimes-murderous disappointment than any other child-rearing strategy endemic to the West. Astronaut? No problem. And Zootopia opens on a children’s pageant where a little animal solemnly declares that where in primordial times he would have been predator or prey, in civilized times, he has the choice to maybe be an astronaut, or an accountant. The third way this is funny is harsher, in that it begins to touch on the truism that there are certain traits you’re born with, and while that’s a no-brainer when it comes to the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s a tough thing for most proud Judeo-Christians to accept. We have hardwiring, see, and accepting that means there are a lot of other things we need to accept as well, almost none of them politically correct and all of them fraught with delicate dancing around the issue. Zootopia is complicated as hell.

Warcraft (2016)

June 11, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, China, Fantasy

**/****
starring Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Foster, Dominic Cooper
written by Charles Leavitt and Duncan Jones
directed by Duncan Jones

by Walter Chaw A lot of it's a mess, and I'm well and truly disinterested at this point in huge-scale battles betwixt CGI armies, but enough of Duncan Jones's Warcraft is like Apocalypto to make it at least a fascinating misfire. It shares with Alex Proyas's instantly-derided Gods of Egypt this sense that but for the grace of God these are the exact kind of Ladyhawke/Clash of the Titans/Krull movies I used to love when I was a kid home from school with a fever. They're thick with invention and the sort of risk-taking that comes with not really having much shame. Their barometer for cheese and corn is broken, too. Warcraft is a picture without a sense that it shouldn't take itself seriously and so it takes itself very seriously, and there's one moment where the heroine of the piece talks about the strength she's gained from surviving repeated, and brutal, sexual assaults that actually cuts through the bullshit to the heart of some really troubling conversations. Particularly, pointedly, as it occurs in the middle of a narrative adaptation of a videogame whose culture is infamous for its intolerance of, and ideological violence towards, women. Warcraft earns points, too, for not being sentimental about its characters–for being another 2016 blockbuster that's unafraid of dealing with the consequences of forever wars on families and other non-combatants. Also, it occurs to me that if the humans had more gryffins, the war–and the movie–would be a lot shorter.

Zoolander No. 2 (2016) [The Magnum Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 30, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

Zoolander 2
**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Penélope Cruz
written by Justin Theroux and John Hamburg & Ben Stiller and Nicholas Stoller
directed by Ben Stiller

by Bill Chambers It opens with Justin Bieber taking more bullets than Sonny Corleone. So far, so good. Bieber commemorates his death with an Instagram selfie, which makes me want to purse my lips against my fingertips and blow a kiss to the chef–mwah! News of Bieber’s assassination raises alarms at Fashion Interpol, where his death selfie is compared against those of several other musicians, all of whom died making the same pouty face as Bieber. (Madonna being among them strikes me as more of a production designer’s idea of a joke.) Struggling to decipher the meaning of the pose, Agent Valentina Valencia (Penélope Cruz) finally surrenders to the idea that there’s only one person who might have the insight she needs: Austin Powers! No, wait–Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller)!

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

May 27, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

***½/****
starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar Isaac
screenplay by Simon Kinberg
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw I know the sample size is small, but Bryan Singer’s X-Men prequel trilogy (we’ll call it his, since he produced Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class), culminating now in X-Men: Apocalypse, is the far superior prequel trilogy. If you were so inclined, you could find in them–and in all of Singer’s work (just like Victor Salva’s across the genre divide)–assimilation melodramas: tales of the struggle with being born different, complete with abilities and…urges. There’s explanation there of why Singer’s films are always about alienation, best when dealing with teens, and critical of the laws and systems that would condemn things that are natural as criminal. Matt Zoller Seitz recently wrote about the problem with believing that Woody Allen is likely a child abuser/pedophile and still watching, still sometimes enjoying, his movies. I was taken with how the stain of that knowledge on the viewer never really goes away. When I watch Singer’s work, which I tend to like a lot, never more than ten minutes go by without me wondering whether what people have said about him being a serial abuser and statutory rapist is true. If it is, it complicates this reading of his films. He’s a little like Elia Kazan in that respect; I wonder if their message is meant as apologia–if it’s repugnant in its human fascination.

The Nice Guys (2016)

May 22, 20162016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Matt Bomer, Kim Basinger
written by Shane Black & Anthony Bagarozzi
directed by Shane Black