The Bodyguard (1992) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

The Bodyguard (1992) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music, Romance, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras C
BLU-RAY – Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Kevin Costner, Whitney Houston, Gary Kemp, Bill Cobbs
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Mick Jackson

by Walter Chaw Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston have a conversation about Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (whose title means “The Bodyguard”) in the middle of Mick Jackson’s hilarious camp artifact The Bodyguard, the one where Costner plays a barely-vocal lunk and Houston plays a singer-turned-actress with severe personality flaws. And that little chat, occupying a minute-and-a-half or so of screentime, encapsulates everything that’s priceless about this flick: It’s stupid, embarrassing, and watered-down, but it’s also surreal, queer, and hermetically sealed in a rhinestone-studded mason jar. Have no fear, though, as that revelatory discussion of one of the great films in world cinema segues in record time into a heartfelt rumination on the lyrics of a Dolly Parton song and then into a courtship ritual involving a big samurai sword and a piece of silk. Is Kevin going to sheathe his blue steel in Whitney’s purple scarf? Ah, the decadent ribaldry! What could it all mean?

Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1950s, 2012, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama

**½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Victor Mature, Susan Hayward, Michael Rennie, Debra Paget
screenplay by Philip Dunne, based on characters from the novel The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas
directed by Delmer Daves

by Bryant Frazer Add Demetrius and the Gladiators to that shortlist of Hollywood sequels that are actually better than their predecessor. This is a continuation of the story of The Robe–that most turgid of Biblical epics, known to film students the world over (and for this reason only) as the first Cinemascope release. The title of the earlier film refers to a red garment worn by Jesus as he was taken to his crucifixion. The discarded robe catalyzes the conversion to Christianity of Roman soldier Marcellus Gallio (played in the earlier film by Richard Burton), who was last seen being frog-marched to martyrdom on the orders of nutty Roman emperor Caligula (Jay Robinson). The sequel picks up the story of Marcellus’s former slave, Demetrius, again played by Victor Mature, as he becomes the robe’s caretaker.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012) + Lockout (2012)

Posted in2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS
*/****
starring Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz
screenplay by Joss Whedon & Drew Goddard
directed by Drew Goddard

LOCKOUT
**/****
starring Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace, Vincent Regan, Peter Stormare
screenplay by Stephen Saint Leger, James Mather & Luc Besson
directed by Saint & Mather

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Drew Goddard’s (and Joss Whedon’s, you won’t be able to forget) unfortunate giant middle finger The Cabin in the Woods takes a shit-eating high-concept only to do nothing interesting with it for about 80 of its 100 minutes. Because the high concept is the crux of the film and the elbow of the argument, as they say, stop right here if you want to stay a spoiler virgin. For me, I went in not knowing anything about the movie–didn’t even see the trailer–on the back of assurances from many respected friends and colleagues that this was, in fact, a must-see for the genre fan. What I should have asked was, “What genre?” The Cabin in the Woods is Scream for what Joe Bob Briggs used to call “Spam in a cabin” flicks, in which a group of nubile youngsters piles into an unreliable junker to spend a fateful weekend in some backwoods hick oasis where they’re picked off, one by one, by some combination of demons and Ted Nugent. The difference being that Scream was cold, nihilistic, scary as hell, and a lovely example of the thing it was simultaneously deconstructing. The reason The Cabin in the Woods is neither revolutionary nor “ground-breaking” is that everything it does has already been done, repeatedly and better, and that rather than serving as a sterling example of that which it is trying to pinion (thus establishing its credibility as satire, see?), it’s really just another instalment in the live-action Scooby-Doo franchise.

The Hunger Games (2012)

Posted in2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Gary Ross and Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray, based on the novel by Collins
directed by Gary Ross

by Walter Chaw Now that the United States has remade Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, it’s fair to wonder when it’ll tackle Ichi the Killer or Tetsuo, the Iron Man. It’s all part of a greater conversation around what it is that made the U.S. more sympathetic to Japan after 9/11, whereas before, films like Fukasaku’s grim little sociological masterpiece were seen as contraband in America. Marinating in social superiority only gets you so far, I guess, until the detonation of a WMD over a civilian population suddenly redraws the lines and changes your worldview. It’s no accident that Suzanne Collins’s series of tween dystopia books is wildly popular in this post-millennial zeitgeist–no accident, either, come to think of it, that the “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” books, featuring brutal rape and unforgivable fantasy vigilantism (and a fetching girl-hero, it bears mentioning), were the rage of blueblood, blue-haired reading circles: grandma in the Times Square grindhouse circa 1974. What’s genuinely frightening about the wide, middlebrow acceptance of such traditionally deviant fare is that it’s a glimpse into what happens when a country founded by Puritans suddenly has its apocalyptic paranoia and hardwired xenophobia briefly confirmed. If you’re a Republican with a moral barometer in these, our United States of America in 2012, take a good, hard look at what’s happened to your party and tell me that I’m wrong. It takes a hell of a lot of crazy to make Margaret Atwood seem prophetic–to make Mel Gibson trend towards the middle.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Czech Republic, DVD, Espionage, India, Russia, Thriller, Tom Cruise, United Arab Emirates

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton
screenplay by Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec
directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Even though Brad Bird directed The Iron Giant (arguably the best film in a year, 1999, rife with great films), even though he’s responsible for the best Fantastic Four flick there ever will be (The Incredibles) as well as the best overall Pixar release (Ratatouille), I still had the chutzpah to be skeptical when I heard that his live-action debut would be the fourth entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise. I am contrite. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (hereafter Ghost Protocol) is the model of the modern action picture. It has exactly two quiet moments (I counted)–the rest is audacious, ostentatious, glorious action set against not only the expected fisticuffs but also a ferocious sandstorm in Dubai and the bombing and partial collapse of the Kremlin. It’s an honorary Bond movie better than any of them (only the Casino Royale redux enters the same conversation–well, maybe On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, too), filled to stuffed with clever gadgets (and their logical application), exotic locales, beautiful women, and fast cars. It’s sexy, sleek, knows better than to take its foot off the pedal, flirts with relevance without ever attempting depth it’s not equipped to deal with, and establishes J.J. Abrams as better than idol Spielberg in the producing-good-action-movies sweepstakes. Not content to scale just any building, it has returning hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) climb the Burj Khalifa; not content to stage a brawl in a parking garage, it finds one of those robotic ones to provide a third dimension to the scrambling in vintage, brilliant, 1980s Hong Kong style. In a series that boasts John Woo as director of its first sequel, Ghost Protocol has the big, giant, clanking ones to outdo Woo.

The Rocketeer (1991) [20th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

The Rocketeer (1991) [20th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Brazil, Canada, Disney, Espionage, Family, Sci-Fi, Superhero

***½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Bill Campbell, Alan Arkin, Jennifer Connelly, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Danny Bilson & Paul De Meo, based on the graphic novel by Dave Stevens
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw Joe Johnston’s rousing Art Deco audition for Captain America, The Rocketeer is, twenty years on, as crisp and clean as laundry-line linen. It has a beautiful hero, his beautiful girl, and Alan Arkin as the crotchety old Q/Whistler/Lucius Fox to guarantee that no matter what our hero does to his gadgets, there’ll always be more and better ones to take their place. The villain is modelled on Errol Flynn and works for the Nazis, and you don’t have to squint very hard to figure out that a good portion of the picture’s stickiness and cult accretion has to do with the idea that its 1938 setting allows for a measure of movie-history geekery. A sequence on a film set as bad guy Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton, chewing scenery like a champ) shoots a period swashbuckler is subversive not only for the way that it reflects the vehicle in which it finds itself but also for suggesting that the Golden Age of Hollywood was, as we suspected all along, rife with miscreants and foreign agents. It allows for a greater connection to our working-class heroes, as well as the comparison the movie makes now again of The Rocketeer to Chuck Yeager. And at its best, it allows The Rocketeer to feel exactly like the best kind of aw-shucks patriotism: spic-and-span and “you got a stick of Beeman’s?” and based on a love of our ideals instead of a hatred of an Other.

Justice League: Doom (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Justice League: Doom (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2012, Action, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
screenplay by Dwayne McDuffie, based on “Justice League: Tower of Babel” by Mark Waid
directed by Lauren Montgomery

by Jefferson Robbins I’ve figured out what Warner Premiere’s DC Universe features need: music-only audio tracks. At least, as long as Christopher Drake stays on as in-house composer. His scores, from All-Star Superman to Batman: Year One to the new Justice League: Doom, are varied, adventurous, and attuned to character in a way that puts, say, Michael Giacchino to shame. His music has the same evocative power as the fables from which it springs, and at times it outclasses the direct-to-video animation it adorns. I’m not sure Drake could do “sprightly and happy,” but as long as he’s scoring the DCU projects, he won’t get the chance. The non-sequential movies, overseen by long-time producer Bruce Timm, take their cues from DC Comics’ big-screen live-action entries like Superman Returns and The Dark Knight. Punch, mope, punch some more, mope, punch really hard… Both the aforementioned theatrical fare and the DCU cartoons are firmly in PG to PG-13 territory, because why would any little kid want to watch a Batman movie, right? Right, guys…?

Conquest (1983); Contraband (1980); Zombie (1979) – DVDs + Zombie (1979) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 1980s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Spain, Zombie

CONQUEST
½*/**** Image D+ Sound C
starring Fabio Testi, Marcel Bozzuffi, Ivana Monti, Guido Alberti
screenplay by Ettore Sanzo and Gianni de Chiara
directed by Lucio Fulci

Luca il contrabbandiere
**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Fabio Testi, Marcel Bozzuffi, Ivana Monti, Guido Alberti
screenplay by Ettore Sanzo and Gianni de Chiara
directed by Lucio Fulci

by Walter Chaw There’s something decidedly uncinematic about the films of Lucio Fulci (excepting Don’t Torture a Duckling and Four of the Apocalypse, which actually sort of rock). If not for his fascination with gore effects and his propensity for casting irritating children in irritating children parts, it’d be hard to find anything to separate his work from the grindhouse ghetto of, say, Jess Franco. As it is, the stilted claims at auteurism (he’s known as the master of eye violence, mainly for a few juicy bits from The Beyond and Zombie) do more, perhaps, to relegate his work to a sort of camp gulag: the Siberia of legitimate cinema, where adolescent tools congregate for midnight showings armed with irony and a crippling baggage of disdain and contempt. I liked “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and believed that I liked it because I was sophisticated; in time, you realize that you like it because you’re an officious prick who sort of gets off on mocking movies. I think a lot of people would argue that this is the role of the film critic, but I’d offer that a critic–a good one–loves film so much that he or she is offended when a movie is terrible. There’s no real joy in defiling altars, particularly when they’re your own.

Batman: Year One (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, 2012, Action, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Superhero

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Tab Murphy, from the comics story by Frank Miller
directed by Sam Liu and Lauren Montgomery

by Jefferson Robbins Before he was a grouchy and politically nearsighted old man with enough clout to cast Scarlett Johansson in a $60M fetish video, Frank Miller truly did change the face of mainstream superhero comics. Doing so brought him fame as a visionary, a label that implies prophetic or pioneering concepts but–at least in comics art–is most commonly applied to artists fusing pre-existing styles into a successful hybrid, or distilling an old story to its barest elements. Miller did both. In fact, between 1986’s “The Dark Knight Returns” and the 1987 “Batman: Year One” arc, his reengineering of the Batman mythos wasn’t so much a thrusting of the character forward into the 1980s as a slingshotting back to the 1970s. The core fact of Batman, viewed in the light of Taxi Driver, is that he’s Travis Bickle with a cape and lots of money. What is Travis’s mohawk if not a costume to strike fear into the hearts of criminals? What is his trick pistol sling, fashioned from a typewriter carriage, but a blue-collar utility belt? And what is the hardboiled dialogue Miller puts in Bruce Wayne’s mouth–better read than spoken–but Bicklean self-justification? No coincidence that Batman’s first, badly-botched outing as a crimefighter in “Year One” involves the violent rescue of an underaged prostitute.

The Expendables (2010) [Extended Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

Posted in2000s, 2010, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain, Thriller

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke
written and directed by Sylvester Stallone

by Walter Chaw After the remarkably tough and uncompromising Rambo and the almost-unbearably poignant and transparent Rocky Balboa, it’d be fair to nurse a healthy anticipation for Sylvester Stallone’s paean to the ’80s blockbuster, The Expendables. Alas, what’s on display owes more to Stallone’s Rhinestone than to his venerable Rocky series. A redux of Wild Hogs as embarrassing, boring, and ineptly- shot and edited as the original, The Expendables even ends the same way, with geezers riding off into the sunset on the backs of their four-fifths-life-crisis choppers. Tattoos and plunging v-neck Ts the rule of the day, it’s more Rogaine commercial than action movie, making fun of itself in the way that old guys who are genuinely insecure about their age make fun of themselves. It’s awkward. It’s also, in addition to being almost entirely free of excitement or a single line of dialogue that isn’t some syncopated mix of grunting and tough-guy cliché, maybe a no-shit adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano”. That’s the only way to explain how it is that a film tits-deep in dialogue could have not one exchange that makes any sense whatsoever. The way the movie’s put together, too, is a model of the Theatre of the Absurd’s occasional dabbling in non-sequiturs–something The Expendables seems to address at one point when the horsey-looking, freshly-waterboarded damsel (Giselle Itié) wonders how Stallone’s Barney has magically appeared as her saviour in a Caribbean (?) dictator’s dungeon. “I just am!” mumbles Barney. Who am I to argue with that?

Final Destination 5 (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller

Finaldestination5caprev

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Nicholas D’Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher, David Koechner
screenplay by Eric Heisserer
directed by Steven Quale

by Angelo Muredda “Five! Five different systems had to fail for this to happen.” So shouts a slumming Courtney B. Vance as a suspicious cop on the scene of only the second or third most elaborate death in the cynically titled Final Destination 5. Who can blame him? Five, after all, is an improbably large number. Here we are, though–as many entries into a series that’s sure to rival even Final Fantasy‘s swollen ranks once the last lighter fluid-doused fan blade hits the last neck.

Elite Squad – The Enemy Within (2010)

Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Brazil, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Tropa de Elite 2 – O Inimigo Agora É Outro
***/****
starring Wagner Moura, Irandhir Santos, Andre Ramiro, Milhelm Cortaz
screenplay by Bráulio Mantovani & José Padilha
directed by José Padilha

by Angelo Muredda Early in Elite Squad – The Enemy Within (hereafter The Enemy Within) José Padilha’s blustery follow-up to his 2007 hit Elite Squad, deluxe cop Lt. Colonel Nascimento (Wagner Moura, Brazil’s answer to Mark Ruffalo) promises to give us a history of Rio that happens to coincide with his life story. It’s a tall order, but Padilha and co-screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani are ambitious and foolish enough to undertake it, returning to the favelas they brought to boot-stomping life in the first Elite Squad while shifting focus this time from drug lords to corrupt cops. No one would call their work subtle, but they strike a surprisingly watchable balance between Goodfellas-type insider confessional and incendiary political exposé, ditching the tight timeframe and local scope of the original and going for a more sprawling survey of Rio as Hell on Earth. Yet as much as The Enemy Within deserves solemn back-pats for its anaesthetized, everybody’s-guilty project, it really takes off in brutally violent set-pieces that forgo neutrality. Cut loose from his earnest ambitions to tell an ambivalent political fable that clucks its tongue equally at anti-poverty activists and conservative law-and-order types, Padilha shows his directorial hand in testosterone-charged gunfights where either all the right people get shot or all the good ones go down as martyrs, and it’s the hand of a vigilante sympathizer drawn to the romance of man-to-man violence. Fascist? No doubt. But as ideologically suspect apologies for rogue justice go, this one’s pretty well-executed, and at times just plain more fun than the hemming and hawing of The Dark Knight.

Ben-Hur (1959) [Fiftieth Anniversary Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc|[Fiftieth Anniversary] Blu-ray Disc

Ben-Hur (1959) [Fiftieth Anniversary Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc|[Fiftieth Anniversary] Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1950s, 2011, 2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, Haya Harareet, Stephen Boyd
screenplay by Karl Tunberg, based on the novel by Lew Wallace
directed by William Wyler

Editor’s Note: Warner has just reissued Ben-Hur on Blu-ray minus the third disc and material bonuses of the box set, although this release does include the commentary and isolated music score. Technical specs remain unchanged.

by Jefferson Robbins Charlton Heston’s Judah Ben-Hur is a Jew in a Roman world, but his emotional journey is all Greek. It’s 26 AD, and Judah’s bond of friendship, his philia, with Roman noble Messala (Stephen Boyd), is sorely tested. When this bond breaks and Judah’s entire family suffers under the Roman version of justice, his romantic love, eros, for his servant’s daughter, Esther (Haya Harareet), is smothered by hate and vengefulness. What is left him? Only a really bitchin’ chariot race–the paramount action-chase scene in movie history, not matched for twenty years (see below) and still never bettered–and the hope of agape, the love and yearning between Man and God. This faithful but frustrated son of the Torah must learn that path through brushing contact with the new rabbi in town: a humble carpenter’s son, bound for glory on the Hill of Skulls.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Chris Evans, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw Given the opportunity to finally do the sequel to his The Rocketeer that I’ve sort of been hoping to see for the last twenty years, Joe Johnston comes through with flying colours. The absolutely, unapologetically cornpone Captain America: The First Avenger achieves exactly the right tone of Greatest Generation wartime propaganda without any winking post-modern irony to befoul the stew. It’s an earnest, genuine underdog story about a wimpy kid, Steve (Chris Evans, digitally reduced), who’s beaten up for defending the sanctity of the movie theatre before finally, on his sixth try, being accepted into the army under the kind auspices of mad scientist Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci). Erskine sees an essential goodness in Steve, a decency born from the Great War heroism of his long-gone parents, it’s suggested (in high-Fifties style), while crusty Col. Philips (Tommy Lee Jones) is persuaded by this twerp’s willingness to dive on a grenade to save a platoon made up of the type of men who spent their childhood tormenting guys like Steve. Asked if he wants to kill Nazis, Steve replies that he doesn’t want to kill anyone–he simply hates bullies. Steve, see, is an idealist. And any film that paints America’s bedrock idealism as heroic is not just the right kind of patriotic (the kind that doesn’t demean other cultures) and the right shade of nostalgia (i.e., in love with the essential purity of the hope behind the foundation of our country)–it’s more than okay by me, too.

The Thing (2011)

Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Ulrich Thomsen
screenplay by Eric Heisserer
directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.

by Walter Chaw Just talking time, I’ve been waiting for this prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing almost twice as long as I waited for Episode I, and if the disappointment seems inversely proportional to the duration of the anticipation, chalk it up to me probably being too old to be duped like that again. (There’s also the thought that Episode I killed anticipation for my entire generation.) To be fair, this Thing prequel (hereafter The Thing-quel), which imagines the happenings at the Norwegian camp prior to the titular alien finding Wilford Brimley and Kurt Russell’s beard, isn’t nearly as boring and/or offensive as a senate debate, a naval blockade enacted by space-Japs, and a hike in the desert surrounded by evil Jews and Arabs in the company of a Jamaican Stepin Fetchit. No, the only thing Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s (son of Matthijs van Heijningen, the IMDb helpfully informs) The Thing-quel does is mill around tepidly while demonstrating that Rob Bottin’s seriously fucked-up creature effects from the original lose their soul when squeezed through the mainframe of a giant computer. What truly depressed me, though, were the sheer number of people at the public screening I attended with no awareness of the 1982 film, who were thus breathless with anticipation that the closing credits–which set up the opening of the Carpenter flick–were setting up some kind of remake-cum-sequel. As experiences go, it’s somewhere south of getting kicked square in the sack.

Real Steel (2011)

Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, India, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Sports, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo, Evangeline Lilly, Anthony Mackie
screenplay by John Gatins
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw There’s really no excuse for Real Steel, a Frankenstein contraption made up of spare parts from middle-American fairytales like Field of Dreams and underdog sports intrigues starting with Rocky, I guess, and building all the way through to junk like The Rookie and any number of films just like it that appear with what seems like annual reliability. Set a few years from now, in a world where for some reason people have decided they love to watch giant robots fight each other in place of good ol’ primate bloodsport, it has going for it the most bucolic vision of the future since “The Jetsons”. Indeed, there are so many gorgeous shots of waving wheat and bilious white clouds that it’s fair to wonder if Ridley Scott directed it. Alas, Shawn Levy, the genius behind Night at the Museum, The Pink Panther, and Cheaper by the Dozen directed this cynical piece of bathetic crap and his sticky, syrup-coated paws are all over it, from the movie’s flat, unimaginative staging to its absolute inability to be non-didactic in its presentation. (The biggest surprise? That there isn’t a flatulent dog around for cheap reaction shots.) Already legendary for how quickly its trailers revealed it to be possibly the worst idea since Buck Henry pitched “The Graduate, Part 2” at the beginning of The Player, Real Steel–the condescension starts with the quasi-inspirational dual-meaning of its title–swiftly becomes legendary in its own right for somehow being exactly as bad as you thought it was going to be.

Thor (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, Superhero

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins
screenplay by Ashley Edward Miller & Zack Stentz and Don Payne
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw An uneasy collision of the Henry V Kenneth Branagh and the Peter’s Friends Kenneth Branagh, Branagh’s foray into the long-form Avengers trailer sweepstakes Thor features a star-making turn from handsome Aussie soap actor Chris Hemsworth (whose star was actually made as James T. Kirk’s dad in the Star Trek reboot), a lot of debt to the kitsch elements of Superman II, and another waste-of-life post-credits teaser starring everyone’s favourite one-eyed motherfucker. It has the titular Norse God of Thunder deposited fish-out-of-water-style in bumfuck New Mexico (better than Arizona, I guess, where he’d be asked for his papers, denied an education, then probably shot), where he falls under the care of mousy (?) physicist Jane (Natalie Portman), her mentor Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård), and wacky alterna-intern Darcy (Kat Dennings). He’s been banished, see, by daddy Odin (Anthony Hopkins); betrayed by tricky brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston); and separated from his beloved hammer until such time as he can prove himself a true Asgardian. Gibberish? You bet. Leave it at this: the movie’s pretty decent in a Starman sort of way when Thor’s tossing down coffee mugs at a local greasy spoon and demanding more drink and pretty horrible when it’s depicting the war between the Norse and the Frost Giants on a massive CGI stage that triggers Tron: Legacy flashbacks like wet heat does Vietnam.

TIFF ’11: Countdown (d. Huh Jong-ho)

Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, South Korea, Thriller, TIFF, TIFF 11

Speaking to my new friend George after a screening of the stylish but gratuitously long South Korean export Countdown, I said, “It was a good yarn, at least. It reminded me of the kind of thing Hollywood used to do and do well.” “Yes, you can just see Bogie in it,” he replied. Then, almost in unison, we both added: “Only the Bogart version would’ve been over in 90 minutes.” Tae (Jung Jae-young) is a debt collector who receives a terminal diagnosis of liver cancer after passing out in traffic. Since his best hope is a transplant, he puts his skills to use tracking down the recipients of his dead son’s organs: knowing their blood type will match his own, he hopes to guilt one of them into a reciprocal donation. Finally, he locates Cha (Secret Sunshine‘s luminous Jeon Do-youn, surely bound to be poached by the American studios any day now), the con woman who got his son’s heart, and she agrees to give up a piece of her liver if he’ll provide in exchange the whereabouts of a criminal kingpin on whom she seeks revenge. Underestimating her slipperiness, the increasingly weary Tae spends a frantic couple of days pursuing and protecting Cha in equal measure.

Drive (2011)

Posted in****/****, 2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks
screenplay by Hossein Amini, based on the novel by James Sallis
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn 

by Walter Chaw The pink, cursive font of the opening credits immediately calls to mind ’80s classics like Smooth Talk while the obsessive interest in functionality and work (and Cliff Martinez’s awesome Tangerine Dream soundtrack) recalls Michael Mann’s Thief, but it’s that certain quality of masculine stillness that marks Drive as another Nicolas Winding Refn masterpiece. Its story is boilerplate noir: loner (Ryan Gosling) falls for young mother (Carey Mulligan) and is forced by circumstance to protect her and her son (Kaden Leos) against all the bad men. Drive is, in other words, Taxi Driver if Mann had made it in the eighties, a meticulous character study done in long, drawn-out takes and extended silences punctuated now and again by extreme violence. It’s a smart movie–a quintessentially L.A. one, too, in its self-awareness (the nameless hero is a stuntman, Richard Rush fans take note), and it has an extraordinary quality of stillness that paints in confident strokes what it feels like to be completely alone by luck you call choice. A late scene with “Driver” holding himself around the middle, then getting in his car as Refn splashes neon on him and The Chromatics play on the soundtrack is something like a perfect moment in a film indicated by them.

Executive Decision (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Kurt Russell, Halle Berry, John Leguizamo, Steven Seagal
screenplay by Jim Thomas & John Thomas
directed by Stuart Baird

by Jefferson Robbins SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Stuart Baird’s Executive Decision begins and ends as a bad, bad movie. It starts off wobbling distractedly from one fraught international locale to another, complete with bleeping, wordy chyrons telling us where we are and with whom. It ends in a pile of airliner-in-peril clichés and some flirty banter so terrible it puckers the ears, acting as though Airplane! never happened. In between, the picture gets better, tighter, and tenser than a sub-Tom Clancy military political thriller starring Steven Seagal has any right to be. It accomplishes this, in part, by throwing Seagal off the plane.