Action Archives - Page 16 of 49 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Thief (1981) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

April 1, 20141980s, 2014, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Robert Prosky, Willie Nelson
screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the novel The Home Invaders by Frank Hohimer
directed by Michael Mann

“Look, I have run out of time. I have lost it all. So l cannot work fast enough to catch up, and l cannot run fast enough to catch up. And the only thing that catches me up is doin’ my magic act. But it ends, you know? It will end. When l got this, right there, it ends, it is over. So I am just asking you…to be with me.”
-Frank (James Caan), Thief (1981)

“I’m catching up. On life. Meeting someone like you.”
-John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), Public Enemies (2008)

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Like the historical Dillinger, the fictional Frank was just a punk kid overzealously punished for a petty crime by a judge looking to make an example of him. Instead, he created the man Frank is as Thief begins: a master safecracker, taught his trade in the joint by fellow convict Okla (Willie Nelson, heartbreaking). As Frank recounts in a mesmerizing monologue that Caan, for what it’s worth, has counted as his finest piece of screen acting, the other thing he learned in Joliet is how to create a forcefield around himself by disengaging from fear. It’s not Zen detachment that he’s mastered; a man of flashy tastes, he’s too much the materialist to live like Heat‘s ascetic Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), whose Modernist house in the hills is all windows and no furniture. They are cut from the same cloth, though, in that they’re acutely aware of the temporariness of their stolen lifestyles and have no qualms about jumping ship to stay ahead of the enemy.

Noah (2014)

March 27, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins
screenplay by Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw Unapologetic, curious, atavistic in its single-mindedness and simplicity, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is more impactful in the rearview than in the moment. It’s got a hell of a wake. The film is beautiful to look at, it almost goes without saying–as grand and ambitious as its ideas, with one sequence depicting what appears to be the case for intelligent design. It’s truly audacious. In many ways the movie The Fountain wanted to be in terms of scale (and featuring another Clint Mansell score that sounds every bit like a continuation of themes), Noah is a deeply insane interpretation of one of the Bible’s briefest (essentially Genesis 5:32-10:1), most contentious, most instantly-relatable and hence most-beloved of all Old Testament stories. I can only speculate what the Christian response will be (somewhere between mine and Glenn Beck’s assignation of it as the “Babylonian Chainsaw Massacre” is my guess), but for an atheist who counts many strong Christians among his friends, this interpretation is full of the menace and wonder that scripture must hold for the devout. It’s a stirring creation mythology in that it makes no bones about the interference in the affairs of men by a vengeful God. Likewise, it makes no apologies for the atrocities it represents in its visions of suffering and sin. (I can only imagine what Aronofsky’s Sodom would look like.) Noah even finds time for a dialogue about religious fundamentalism and what happens when absolute faith becomes rationale for atrocity. It’s a story about the annihilation of 99.9% of human life on the planet that’s ultimately about the value of compassion, and it’s a critical read of divine texts that skew in that direction. After a series of films attempting to explain the ways of the divine to the mundane, here’s hoping for an Aronofsky adaptation at last of “Paradise Lost”: a most comfortable marriage of material and artist.

Justice League: War (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 25, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

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**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
screenplay by Heath Corson, based on the graphic novel Justice League: Origins by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee
directed by Jay Oliva

by Jefferson Robbins The red underwear is gone, and with it, all humility. Justice League: War marks the first true animated appearance of Superman and the rest of the DC Universe heroes since the comics publisher's New 52 gambit launched in 2011, resetting at least twenty-five years of pulp history.¹ What that means for viewers is a militaristically-clothed Superman (vocal chameleon Alan Tudyk) who threatens to choke people to death and a dangerously naive Wonder Woman (Michelle Monaghan) who's definitely going to have sex with him after the credits. This, effectively, is the characters' debut. Set aside all those past versions you know, toss out even the previous direct-to-video titles you may have collected (including four "Justice League" movies) since the DCU animated line officially launched in 2007. This is where the Justice League meets–and where we meet them–for the first time. And, boy, are they a bunch of pricks.

Homefront (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 10, 20142013, 2014, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Stallone, Thriller

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**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Jason Statham, James Franco, Winona Ryder, Izabela Vidovic
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel by Chuck Logan
directed by Gary Fleder

by Bill Chambers After a drug bust goes farcically awry, undercover DEA agent–and ex-soldier, natch–Phil Broker (Jason Statham) retreats to rural Louisiana with his little girl, Maddy (Izabela Vidovic), hoping to give her a peaceful life raising horses while he makes ends meet as a carpenter. But like father, like daughter: When the school bully pushes Maddy too far on the playground one day, she fights back with a few Bourne-worthy movies, setting off a chain reaction that leads the boy’s humiliated, meth-head mother (Kate Bosworth) to sic her swamp kingpin brother Gator (James Franco) on Broker, who proves so invincible against all comers that it piques Gator’s curiosity. Some (too) light snooping on his part uncovers Broker’s former identity, and he enlists his girlfriend (Winona Ryder–the film has an eclectic cast, to say the least) to rat Broker out to the biker gang that’s looking for him. All because of an altercation on a schoolyard.

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

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

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

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

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

RoboCop (2014)

February 11, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Joshua Zetumer, based on the screenplay by Edward Neumeier & Michael Miner
directed by José Padilha

by Walter Chaw There's a scene at the end of José Padilha's RoboCop reboot where nearly-widowed Clara Murphy (Abbie Cornish), nervous about being reunited with her nearly-murdered husband, Det. Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), takes care to put on makeup and something nice. (For me, Cornish trying to get prettier is like a tree trying to get tree-ier.) Padilha lingering here tells me a lot about both him and a film that doesn't touch the Verhoeven original, of course (few movies could, just in terms of sheer force of personality), but does care about developing its relationships, if not necessarily its characters. It reminded me of the kind of helpless love I feel when my wife tries to dress it up for me–I mean, honey, you don't have to do that. It's human, in other words, and if the franchise–a subgenre of machine/man existentialism–is about anything, it's about the difference between the little moments that make us human and all the other ones that align us more closely with machines. You could go deeper and describe it as an Apollonian/Dionysian thing–a mind/body dichotomy, the marriage of Heaven and Hell and on and on; or you could simply look at RoboCop as a pretty good action flick with lots of PG-13 fatalities that features more than its share of good actors in supporting roles as familiar action-movie staples. It's clear after the half-way point that that's what it's really aspiring to be. Either way, it manages a few times to make a case for this mythos to be, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, one of those things each generation should consider adapting to their particular dysfunctions. It's no satirical masterpiece, no Grand Guignol exercise, but as slight entertainment, there's some meat on the bone.

The Monuments Men (2014)

February 6, 20142014, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, War

*½/****
starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett
screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov, based on the book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter
directed by George Clooney

by Angelo Muredda There have been far worse prestige films than George Clooney's delayed Oscar season also-ran The Monuments Men, but there's rarely been a more misguided one. Hinging on a conceit that even the filmmaker appears to realize is weak sauce and based on a true story that's probably worth its weight in magazine articles that really make you think, the film follows the exploits of a team of ragtag art dealers and curators turned Allied troops, sent into Europe in the closing days of WWII to save the Western world's finest paintings, sculptures, and, yes, monuments, before Hitler could destroy them. It's perhaps a mild credit to Clooney the humanitarian that the overwhelming gaucheness of the premise–that European art is the thing most worth preserving amidst a war that saw the systematic genocide of 6 million Jews–rates not just a mention but a guilty structural response, too, in the form of a framing story that sees Clooney the actor, as team leader Stokes, lecturing his overseers on the ambiguous value of the mission. It's also to his shame as a screenwriter (alongside usual partner Grant Heslov) that the response is so ill-considered–the same canned "Art is all of us" spiel politicians who couldn't give a damn about art give in the promotional material for government-funded cultural events.

John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

February 2, 20141990s, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, Sci-Fi, Thriller

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**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kurt Russell, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Cliff Robertson
screenplay by John Carpenter & Debra Hill & Kurt Russell
directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer The 1990s were unkind to John Carpenter: The stock market was booming, there was a Democrat in the White House, and the American horror film was at a low ebb. That was the decade when Carpenter–arguably the best B-movie auteur in the world during the 1980s and certainly the most audacious–lost his mojo. Exhausted from the experience of making two genre classics (They Live and Prince of Darkness) back to back, Carpenter took a couple of years off from filmmaking. When he was ready to work again, he considered making The Exorcist III but eventually settled on an ill-fated Chevy Chase vehicle, the $40 million sci-fi adaptation Memoirs of an Invisible Man, that torpedoed his attempted return to big-budget filmmaking. Carpenter tore through three more projects in the next three years–the Showtime horror anthology Body Bags, the Lovecraft riff In the Mouth of Madness, and a Village of the Damned remake–before deciding to pillage his own back catalogue with a sequel to the dystopian Escape from New York.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 21, 20141970s, 2014, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: John Carpenter, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer, Nancy Loomis
written and directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer Written and directed by USC film-school grad John Carpenter, Assault on Precinct 13 is the work of a man with something to prove. Carpenter had finished one film, the shot-on-16mm SF parody Dark Star, co-written with Dan O’Bannon, but he found that nobody in Hollywood took it (or him) seriously. After winning a for-hire writing gig for Columbia Pictures (Carpenter wrote the screenplay that became The Eyes of Laura Mars), he got his hands on a hundred thousand dollars and wrangled some of his friends from USC to help him make the first “real” John Carpenter film. The project, which borrowed its story from Rio Bravo and its mood from Night of the Living Dead, was a siege movie set in an abandoned police station in the fictional Anderson, CA, identified on screen as “a Los Angeles ghetto.”

Message from Space (1978) – DVD

January 15, 20141970s, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory

***/**** Image C+ Sound C- Extras C Madness A
starring Vic Morrow, Sonny Chiba, Philip Casnoff, Peggy Lee Brennan
screenplay by Hiroo Matsuda
directed by Kinji Fukasaku

by Walter Chaw Essentially a big-budget, feature-film version of Calvinball if Bill Watterson were a manga artist undergoing a psychotic break, Kinji Fukasaku's balls-insane Message from Space is a very special brand of genius. It honours no structural logic that I can discern, though it does have a kinetic kid-logic, the kind honed from endless summer afternoons tromping around with your buddies, making shit up and being happier than you'll ever be again in your life. Message from Space captures that headiness, that heedlessness, the sort of reckless creativity that charts the course between memorable films by someone like Ed Wood and forgettable films by every other hack with the same level of talent but not the same joyful dedication. I'm not saying Message from Space is a good movie–I can't even say that the reasons for its existence are particularly honourable (it's an obvious Star Wars cash-grab). But I can say that Message from Space is crazy-energetic and has more delightful moments packed into it than a dozen "normal" movies. I also wouldn't underestimate its influence on a generation of kids Star Wars-hungry during that three-year gap between the first film and The Empire Strikes Back. Herein, find the source of Will Ferrell's Ron Burgundy at least, and, incidentally, the better version of Mel Brooks's Spaceballs (and Stewart Raffill's The Ice Pirates).

Lone Survivor (2013)

January 7, 20142013, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, War

***/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Eric Bana
screenplay by Peter Berg, based on the book by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw Peter Berg is a great action director. He does it with verve, a good sense of space (which is increasingly rare these days), and a sense of both weight and humour. He has excellent timing, as well as an understanding of what's meaningful visual information in there among the dross of motion and impact. Moreover, he seems obsessed with working through issues surrounding what it means to be a man–how too often, it means your social interactions are limited to violence, threats to your sexuality, and hazing rituals dangerous and bestial. I'm a huge fan of his debut feature, Very Bad Things; visually, I think it's wrong to underestimate how influential is his romantic rack-focus gimmick from Friday Night Lights. I love Berg's Hancock, the movie that Man of Steel aspired to be (and if we're talking secondary influences, Zack Snyder owes much of his cinematic vocabulary to Berg). I love The Rundown, and while Battleship is inarguably a misfire, it's also less of a misfire than it could have been. With Lone Survivor, based on the memoir of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, the titular lone survivor of a botched four-man special forces mission in Afghanistan, Berg's examinations of the masculine take their logical turn from bachelor parties to football to superheroes to military action. And for long moments, Lone Survivor is fantastic.

The Lone Ranger (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 15, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Superhero

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***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Tom Wilkinson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Justin Haythe and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw What Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger has going for it, in addition to a genuinely ugly streak of nihilism and a surprisingly high body count, is that it doesn't seek to "darken" its titular boyscout hero so much as offer that his brand of do-gooderism seems naïve and ineffectual in the modern conversation. It's the same tactic taken by Arthur Penn's own picaresque western Little Big Man, the film it most resembles right down to the framing story: an aged narrator relating his sometimes fanciful tale to a modern chronicler, used to amusing effect when the plot gets out of hand, Princess Bride-style. It's like a lot of movies, I guess (including two Simon Wincer westerns, Quigley Down Under and Lightning Jack), which doesn't mean it's derivative so much as it means that it plays like any number of satires of the kind of innocence that made the Lone Ranger character a favourite of impressionable young Americans for generations. It's more the anachronism of The Brady Bunch Movie than the update of Man of Steel, in other words–and the better for it, even if its ultimate message appears to be that the crimson tide has overtaken us, once and for all, and there's no real room left in the world for the idealism represented by a hero with a list of creeds, the first of which is that to have friends one must first be a friend.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

December 12, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Fantasy, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo del Toro, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

by Angelo Muredda And so arrives Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (hereafter Hobbit 2), landing at its appointed hour a year after its predecessor’s mixed debut like a job application received after the position has already been quietly filled. While middle entries in trilogies are always awkward stepchildren, Hobbit 2 is a very special problem case: It consists of roughly the midsection of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fleet fantasy book for children, cracked open and fattened with multi-coloured Post-it notes until the spine can bear no more. Here at last, then, we have the week-old meat of the only Hobbit adaptation Jackson could deliver, having spent a decade steering comically overextended editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a 3-hour version of King Kong, and a wrongheaded interpretation of The Lovely Bones as a Nintendo-ready CG light show.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

November 20, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Philip Seymour Hoffman
screenplay by Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw Portentous, eagerly-anticipated, ending on an abrupt cliffhanger aboard a spaceship… Yes I'm talking about The Matrix Reloaded–I mean, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (hereafter Catching Fire), which for all the conceptual visual improvements inherent in moving from The Hunger Games director Gary Ross to director Francis Lawrence for this instalment, still suffers from hilarible, unspeakable dialogue and a scenario seldom honoured by the execution. Those who haven't read the books (myself included), fair warning that you'll not be able to follow a moment of this one without revisiting the first film–again like The Matrix Reloaded. From what I could glean based on the fragments of The Hunger Games I haven't blocked out is that this girl, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence, earnestly dreadful), has won a televised deathmatch sponsored by a monolithic government to keep control of twelve impoverished, racially- and class-coded districts. I get it, it's a metaphor and, um, a satire of some sort.

The Hangover Part III (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

October 6, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Road Movie

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any image to enlarge

*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
starring
Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, John Goodman
screenplay
by Todd Phillips & Craig Mazin
directed
by Todd Phillips

by
Angelo Muredda When Project X
spilled forth from its amniotic
septic tank last spring, I
read it as a prime example of a
producer-driven form of auteurism pioneered by Judd Apatow. That
found-footage
chronicle of a house party-turned-apocalypse, I suggested, was a
monument to
producer Todd Phillips's equally noxious Hangover
series, where the same Dionysian impulses and
deep-seated hatred of the different–whether female, trans, queer, or
disabled–were championed by a trio of middle-aged men. What a
difference a
year makes. If Project
X was a brand
consolidator and The
Hangover Part II
was a morbidly curious recalibration of its predecessor, displacing
Phillips's
demonic impulses and scarcely controlled misogynist rage from Bradley
Cooper's
Phil to Ed Helms's Stu, Part
III is an actors'
contract negotiation sputtered to life. Since the previous instalment,
Cooper has
become a respectable leading man and Oscar nominee and Helms has been
savaged
for the degeneration of his irritating Andy Bernard character on "The
Office", while co-star Ken Jeong's fortunes have inexplicably risen.
Consequently, gone now are the days of Phil's "Paging Doctor Faggot,"
along with Stu's loveable dude-rage and the Wolfpack's infinite jokes
about Mr.
Chow's shrunken Asian manhood. In their place is a surprisingly
neutered, if
inarguably more ethical, product with very few laughs and no reason for
being.

The Collection (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

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

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

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

World War Z (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

September 22, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disaster Movie, DVD, Horror, Zombie

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Max Brooks
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster’s World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks’s cause célèbre novel (think Stephen Ambrose on the zombie apocalypse) that had a production so troubled the real surprise is Terry Gilliam had nothing to do with it, lands as half an idea, handsomely mounted in a really expensive crater. With almost no relationship to the book beyond honouring its concept of a conflagration told in vignettes, it feels almost exactly like James L. Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything, which began life as a musical and ended up, after extensive reshoots and careening budget overages, song-free, yet whole somehow despite the trauma. That sense of a sudden change in direction, in genre, is all over World War Z–something in its almost apologetic reserve, something in its unmistakable indecision. Indeed, it serves as a fitting metaphor for a zombie as a corpse similarly brought to shambling half-life, but frankly, it could’ve been a lot worse. It works for what it is in the same way that Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion works, and with the same limitations, ambivalence, anticlimax, and handsome mounting. If, at the end, its Damon Lindelof-penned solution* (the twelfth-hour salvation of a freight train jumped its tracks) is as stupid as you would expect something Lindelof to pen, at least the journey there is interesting, even occasionally (if only very occasionally) arresting. A shame that Forster hasn’t gotten any better at directing action since Quantum of Solace.

TIFF ’13: Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

September 18, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, TIFF

***/****
written and directed by Sion Sono

by Angelo Muredda Two of the funniest films at TIFF were, of all things, elegies. Like the doppelgänger duo of The Double and Enemy and the misdirected-revenge double-bill of Bastards and Prisoners, Raya Martin and Mark Peranson’s La última película and Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play In Hell? seemed to be sharing a direct line, commiserating over the demise of celluloid while huddled together in an abandoned cinema, bracing for the digital apocalypse in mock terror. Tonal and thematic overlaps aside, however, the films diverge in their cases for the relative importance of filmmakers at this moment of crisis. La última película directs its satirical energies towards Alex Ross Perry’s self-satisfied hero, a director on a mission. Sono’s by turns delirious and sentimental film goes the other way, all but deifying its energetic schlockmeister, who prays to the Movie God as a teen that he might one day make something worthy of 35 mm and finds his prayers answered ten years later, when a pair of warring yakuza clans commission him to turn their grand battle into a cinematic time capsule, to be screened at the homecoming for one of the mobster’s jailed wives.

Riddick (2013)

September 5, 20132013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Vin Diesel, Jordi Mollà, Matt Nable, Katee Sackhoff
written and directed by David Twohy

by Walter Chaw Maybe it was the anticipation, maybe it’s because it’s too much like the first film, Pitch Black, but David Twohy’s Riddick is merely fine for what it is, lacking the kind of loopy, operatic invention of the franchise’s middle course and contenting itself with being a bug hunt in the James Cameron sense of the word instead of exploring more of this universe. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that, but I wanted to love this movie with all my heart, having declared to everyone’s exhaustion that of all the prestige movies prepping down the pike, this was the one I was waiting for. Turns out, the best science-fiction film of the last quarter of this year is Jonathan Glazer’s unbelievably good Under the Skin–not Gravity and, alas, not Riddick, either. To be fair, of the three, Glazer’s is the only one to deal with science-fiction as existentialism rather than as background and circus. More’s the pity, because Chronicles of Riddick, with its elementals and fringe religions, its funky spiritualism and its sense of fairy-tale hyperbole, is one of the genuinely great cult films of the last decade. If not for an ending to Riddick that promises Twohy’s ready for another swing at the plate if another ball is lobbed at him, I wouldn’t be in a very good mood at all.

The Wolverine (2013)

August 8, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Will Yun Lee, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tao Okamoto
screenplay by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw James Mangold's The Wolverine is lovely, unusual, novel enough that the moments it makes concessions to its genre and comic-book origins are the same moments that feel like a shame. It's not that they don't work, exactly–it's that when a brooding character study offset by a few delightful action scenes introduces an adamantium samurai mecha and a Poison Ivy manqué to bring it all home, well…it's that it works too well at being something the film is otherwise not. It's two movies, really: a unique one about women in tension; and a more common one about a grief-stricken man taking on the responsibility of protecting a surrogate. Both are complex. It's a pity that, by dint of license and expectation, The Wolverine had to be a literal superhero movie and not something more covert like The Caveman's Valentine or The Brave One. At the end, the only place to put the blame is the impossibility of funding a picture like this without the license and expectation: no one would invest, it would seem, in an anonymous story about a man's mute, impotent melancholy and the many females around him engaged in the maintenance of their separate, disintegrating orbits.