Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Posted in2015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

Avengers2

*/****
starring Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Joss Whedon

by Walter Chaw It’s pointless to recap this edition of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s endless cycling through decades of storylines, melodramas, loves and blood feuds, deaths and resurrections–this Möbius strip of punching and quipping and punching and quipping and punching and… It’s an ouroborosian worm devouring itself into eternity, if you let it, and the sanction that a few billion dollars confers suggests it’ll keep devouring itself for a while longer. Still, it’s a cripplingly expensive endeavour, meaning that surprise and individuality are crushed in its logarithmic march towards solvency–and the human collateral caught in its gears is the tragedy that the place we get to see Mark Ruffalo and Scarlett Johansson (the two best, most interesting actors in the United States right now) share an emotionally complex scene is in this vacuous light show-cum-cash register, Avengers: Age of Ultron (hereafter Avengers II). You could say that at least it happened–you could also say that you wish it had happened in a vehicle that actually cared about them, and it wouldn’t be too much to ask.

Escape from New York (1981) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc|Escape from New York [Special Edition – DVD Collector’s Set] – DVD

Posted in1980s, 2015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, DVD, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory

Escape2

John Carpenter’s Escape from New York
***½/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence
screenplay by John Carpenter & Nick Castle
directed by John Carpenter

The below was written a dozen years ago, definitely in a crunch (I remember being among the first to receive a review copy of that DVD and wanting to scoop other sites) and, consequently, probably in a crabby mood. New reviews of John Carpenter movies, particularly the early ones, tend to read like fetishism as opposed to criticism. Indeed, over the years, Carpenter’s aesthetics have become a shorthand for cool, such that some modern horror filmmakers seem to believe that by co-opting them they’ll gain instant credibility. Still, I think I resisted the pleasures of Escape from New York a little too vehemently–this must be the most negative 3.5-star review I’ve ever written. Yes, that rape scene, or would-be rape scene, is troublesome, but for Snake to intervene would’ve been even more offensive, because it would mean the situation was cynically contrived to give him a moment of glory. Snake’s heroism isn’t pandering, and while his laconic machismo fits a certain Eastwood mold, he finally emerges as more of a countercultural badass who uses his carte blanche audience with the President to ask him the kind of impertinent rhetorical question one wants to say to every bureaucrat valued more than the soldiers doing his bidding: “We did get you out. A lot of people died in the process. I just wondered how you felt about it.” The President’s ineffectual condolences, phrased as boilerplate and expressed with squirm-inducing hesitation as he mentally scans for a lifeline (then and there, Donald Pleasence exonerates his miscasting), justify Snake’s final act in a way that makes me regret ascribing the “moral evasion” of The Thing–say what?–to this picture as well. Carpenter isn’t ducking anything here: Snake sees that this world is rotten from the head down and so he lights the proverbial fuse. God bless him, he’s an asshole. (But not a dick.)

Game of Thrones: The Complete Fourth Season (2014) – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

Posted in2014, 2015, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, Television

Gameofthroness41

Image A Sound A Extras A-
“Two Swords,” “The Lion and the Rose,” “Breaker of Chains,” “Oathkeeper,” “First of His Name,” “The Laws of Gods and Men,” “Mockingbird,” “The Mountain and the Viper,” “The Watchers on the Wall,” “The Children”

by Jefferson Robbins I suspect “Game of Thrones” has started to find its high-fantasy elements as tedious as I have. In the show’s fourth season, the trio of dragons reared by Danaerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke)–the only thing that makes her a ruler, aside from her family name–is far more felt than seen, and momentarily more a curse than an asset. Brandon Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) and his young cronies have to fight off a frozen-lake’s worth of Ray Harryhausen skeletons, a homage so derivative it adds up to me snorting my beer out of my nose. An epic assault on the epic-sized Wall includes an epic total of two giants. The fantasy convention of magic swords with hoity-toity names comes in for ridicule, too, when brutal asshole King Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) demands a title for his new enchanted blade and some wags in the audience yell back, “Stormbringer!” and “Terminus!” Woman warrior Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie), the most gullible when it comes to matters of knightly virtue, gets a nifty pigsticker, names it “Oathkeeper,” then spends her only battle of the season beating her adversary’s face in with a rock. Magic, in this adaptation of contemporary fantasy’s most successful novel series, is bogged down in human muck and mire.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2014, 2015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, New Zealand

Hobbitarmies1

*/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo Del Toro, based on the book by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

by Walter Chaw During the first ten minutes of the first day of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (hereafter Hobbit 3), Smaug dies. I don’t intend this to be a spoiler, because, you know, the book’s been around for almost as long as this movie runs, and Rankin & Bass already adapted it (somehow squeezing Tolkien’s slim volume into one 77-minute animated flick)–but if you don’t read and live under a rock: the dragon dies. This acts as prologue. A better prologue would recap what the hell happened in the first two Hobbits; I appear to have scrubbed them completely from the ol’ memory bank in a heroic act of self-defense. This prologue, by the way, is the key moment in the book, meaning that although the CGI fireworks never let up, the rest of Hobbit 3 is the decline in action to the conclusion.

Cinderella (2015)

Posted in2015, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

Cinderella15

**½/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Lily James, Richard Madden, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Chris Weitz
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw Notable in however these things are notable for not being an Ever After revisionist Cinderella but rather a fairly straightforward adaptation of the Disney animated version, Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella would be interesting to look at next to Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, if only to see how Helena Bonham Carter morphs from immortal beloved to Fairy Godmother. (Answer? Awkwardly.) It’s not a bad conversation to have, actually, in a film that finds a great deal of depth in Cate Blanchett’s Barbara Stanwyck take on Lady Tremaine, the evil stepmother. In a nicely-played scene, she stops just short of confessing that the reason she resents Cinderella (Lily James) is because, for women, society abhors the aged and venerates the youthful. It’s not deep (and maybe it’s not meant to be), but it does add a little bitter undertaste to its “happily ever after.”

Watership Down (1978) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

Watership1

Richard Adams’s Watership Down
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Martin Rosen, based on the novel by Richard Adams
directed by Martin Rosen

by Walter Chaw Unsentimental and terrifying and set against lovely, John Constable-esque watercolour backgrounds, Martin Rosen’s adaptation of the Richard Adams novel Watership Down arose in that extended lull between Disney’s heyday and its late-Eighties resurrection. (This period also saw, in addition to Rosen’s film of Adams’s The Plague Dogs, Rankin & Bass’s The Last Unicorn and Ralph Bakshi’s most productive period, which included 1978’s The Lord of the Rings.) Watership Down points to the dwindled potential for American animation to evolve into what anime has become: a mature medium for artistic expression of serious issues. A shame that this flawed piece is possibly the pinnacle of animation’s ambition on these shores, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life notwithstanding.

101 Dalmatians (1961) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in1960s, 2015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family

101dal1

One Hundred and One Dalmatians
***½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A
story by Bill Peet, based on the book The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith
directed by Wolfgang Reitherman, Hamilton S. Luske, Clyde Geronimi

by Bill Chambers 1959’s Sleeping Beauty and 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians (hereafter 101 Dalmatians) make for an illuminating double-bill; the latter could even be construed as a Godardian rejoinder to the former. An anti-auteur of these movies, Walt Disney determined their outcome by divesting resources from their development–including his own expertise–and pouring them into his personal Taj Mahal, Disneyland. This deprived the expensive Sleeping Beauty of the talent that may have been able to crack its deceptively simple fairytale formula and transcend the limitations of a graphical style inspired by medieval tapestries. When the film barely broke even, Disney decided his next animated feature would adapt a property with some grounding in contemporary prose and cost a lot less, leading to the shuttering of the ink-and-paint department and a vigorous embrace of Xerography, whereby the animators’ pencil drawings were photocopied directly onto acetate rather than delicately retraced and refined by hand.

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)

Posted in2015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

Kingsman

*/****
starring Colin Firth, Samuel L. Jackson, Mark Strong, Michael Caine
screenplay by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, based on the comic book "The Secret Service" by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons
directed by Matthew Vaughn

by Walter Chaw Whatever surface similarities they might share, the difference between something great like John Wick and something like Kingsman: The Secret Service (hereafter Kingsman) is that Kingsman is smug and misanthropic. It's a self-knowing ape of the James Bond franchise, literally name-dropping both it and Jason Bourne with a kind of Cabin in the Woods smirk as it goes through the comic-book, Mark Millar-ugly motions of gadgets, high espionage, and a plot by lisping supervillain Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) that involves the cell-phone triggered, rage-fuelled annihilation of billions. (Yes, it's also a weird rip on third-rate Stephen King novel Cell.) Gone mostly unexamined by critics for fear of "spoiling" the film, I guess, it features a scene in which Barack Obama commits treason and is then rewarded with an explosive decapitation–which is, itself, a form of treason, I think, although I admit the modern political landscape has made the limits of treasonous disrespect of the office somewhat murky to me. It's a jaw-dropping moment in a film that has not only a foreign head of state offer anal sex as a reward to our sprightly young protagonist, but also our Bond-ish hero, Harry (Colin Firth), slaughter a few dozen unlikeable yet innocent civilians in a church. Edgy, non?

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

Posted in2015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, ZERO STARS

Jupiterascending

ZERO STARS/****
starring Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis, Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne
written and directed by The Wachowskis

by Walter Chaw “Call me Jupe!” pipes Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) in her breathy, little-girl Lauren Bacall voice, and the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending in the same moment announces itself as the siblings’ latest insufferable piece of shit about being born with a secret and embracing the real you. With mascara. Jupiter Jones is not the oldest of the Three Investigators, but she is the reincarnated Mina Murray, space queen of a clan of Atriedes/Harkonnen industrialists, and she has a special way with honeybees. That’s good, since there’s a scene where she visits a guy (Sean Bean) living in a house infested with honeybees. The guy has a daughter who is sick, which we know because she coughs a little before disappearing into the editing-bay ether with the rest of the connective tissue of a film too terrible to waste a summer slot on. Jupiter Ascending is kind of the Radio Shack of movies in that it’s too expensive to not open, though it desperately needs to close. Just the fact that this reference will be completely obsolete in six months or so says everything that could be said about this trainwreck. And yet I persist.

The Boxtrolls (2014) – Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2014, 2015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, Fantasy

Boxtrolls2

***/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Irena Brignull, Adam Pava, based on the book Here Be Monsters by Alan Snow
directed by Graham Annable & Anthony Stacchi

by Walter Chaw Stop-motion animation studio Laika (Coraline, ParaNorman) continues its winning streak with the perverse, lovingly-detailed The Boxtrolls, which nails the company’s developing penchant for inserting a sting of relevance on the trailing end of assorted Nick Park-ian silliness. It’s basically the usual kid-flick moral of not judging lovable books by their horrible, green, warty covers, but there’s also a little bit about the danger of starting wars based on black pretense for unsavoury purposes. Likewise buried in the puns and gross-out gags are a class melodrama, a deep criticism of the ruling class, and a fairly disturbing aside about anti-intellectualism and the misuse of technology. It’s Schindler’s List in the sense that even that film was Spielberg’s own remake of E.T., substituting the industrious, wizened space goblin for Ben Kingsley; The Boxtrolls isn’t as effective a Holocaust/Łódź ghetto allegory as the hotel-clearing in Babe: Pig in the City, but no question the aim of its villains is ultimately genocide.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, New Zealand, Theatrical

Hobbitarmies

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

by Walter Chaw During the first ten minutes of the first day of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (hereafter Hobbit 3), Smaug dies. I don’t intend this to be a spoiler, because, you know, the book’s been around for almost as long as this movie runs, and Rankin & Bass already adapted it (somehow squeezing Tolkien’s slim volume into one 77-minute animated flick)–but if you don’t read and live under a rock: the dragon dies. This acts as prologue. A better prologue would recap what the hell happened in the first two Hobbits; I appear to have scrubbed them completely from the ol’ memory bank in a heroic act of self-defense. This prologue, by the way, is the key moment in the book, meaning that although the CGI fireworks never let up, the rest of Hobbit 3 is the decline in action to the conclusion.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014)

Posted in2014, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Romance, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical

Mockingjay1

*½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Danny Strong and Peter Craig, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw In this episode of “Katniss Loves Peeta–No, Gale. No, Peeta! No, Gale”, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) spends a lot of time underground, delivering speeches and crying. It’s an extended entry in hormonal-teen mood-swing theatre, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (hereafter Mockingjay 1), an allegory not for political corruption and the Orwellian influence of media, but for what it’s like to be a teenage girl no one understands or ever could. It’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Moreta, Dragonlady of Pern”–a Judy Blume coming-of-age opera exuded out by Anne McCaffrey. It has all the feelings. Mostly feelings of martyrdom, but the noble kind that you choose to defend the honour of one of your boyfriends–the less handsome one, so there’s a problem, amiright ladies? It’s not about looks, though, as Mockingjay 1 takes a moment to remind when some old guy says they shouldn’t put Katniss in makeup because it makes her “look 35,” handily identifying exactly the demographic assembled for this film: tweens and everyone else pretending they didn’t glance at J-Law’s naughty selfies. Feelings of tremendous, overwhelming, Titanic-like levels of love, too, where the only way to really represent how much you love this boy (or that one–no, this one) is by standing on the corpses of your loved ones and a few thousand bystanders. It’s that much love. You couldn’t understand. Only my diary could understand.

Interstellar (2014)

Posted in2014, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Interstellar

***/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw When my wife was pregnant with my daughter, we thought she would miscarry. We’d been through several miscarriages already; the doctors weren’t optimistic. I don’t know why we agreed to risk it again, the crippling grief and unrecoverable loss. We told ourselves that if we couldn’t carry this last child to term, we’d console ourselves with a long vacation, the two of us. The appointment with the doctor the day we were to learn the timing of our misfortune, he found a heartbeat, and we held our breath for the next seven months, through a difficult pregnancy and birth, until she was here. My daughter turned 11 last week, and she’s perfect. Her brother is eight, and he’s perfect, too. I spent the first several months with my daughter as her primary caregiver; I was teaching and writing and my wife was making our living, and I have a relationship with my daughter unusual for it, I think. I look back and it’s not her birth that was miraculous–as miracles go, that one happens a few hundred thousand times a day. No, the miracle is what I suddenly understood about the world now that I was the happy accessory to someone else’s happiness and security.

Maleficent (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance

Maleficent1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Angelina Jolie, Sharlto Copley, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley
screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Robert Stromberg

by Walter Chaw A gyno-centric reimagining of Disney’s own Sleeping Beauty, visual-effects guy Robert Stromberg’s directorial debut Maleficent (from a script by never-good Disney house-overwriter Linda Woolverton) takes all the ingredients for a horrible disaster and somehow wrestles a fitfully fascinating film from them. It hates men, that much is certain. Paints them as alternately servile and monstrous. Good men follow orders and are easily intimidated; bad men are sexually dangerous and violent. Good men know their place, led about on a tether and bullied into situations by women in groups or singly; and the rest, well…sufficed to say that Sharlto Copley, the most Ellis-from-Die-Hard human, is cast as chief BigBad, the good king Stefan. The film even goes so far as to suggest that romantic, heterosexual love is a sham, a dangerous one at that–something it tries to soften with a couple of doe-eyed exchanges during the epilogue, though I’m not buying it. In fact, had Maleficent truly committed to its themes of feminine empowerment and rage, had it linked them together hand-in-hand without entire agonizing stretches of Disney-fication, it could have entered into the same conversation as Tarantino’s Kill Bills. Here’s another film with a kick-ass female protagonist who finds strength in motherhood. Alas, for as often as it’s great, it’s limited by what its masters will allow.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Time Travel, Tom Cruise

Edgeoftomorrow1

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, based on the graphic novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
directed by Doug Liman

by Angelo Muredda Whatever one thinks of his weaselly insouciance as a performer, it’s hard to argue against Tom Cruise’s record of choosing solid collaborators to bring a certain kind of high-concept amuse-bouche to life. From Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, a derivative film about derivatives, to the more or less solid auteurist permutations of the Mission: Impossible franchise, the results have varied, but Cruise’s reputation as the sort of star who can get moderately interesting pulp bankrolled and realized by moderately interesting talents has deservedly persisted. So we arrive at Edge of Tomorrow, Doug Liman’s first kick at the Cruise can–a clever, fleetly-paced sci-fi riff on Groundhog Day with all the paradoxes of Duncan Jones’s structurally similar Source Code but a more playful demeanour.

Telluride ’14: Wild

Posted in2014, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

Wild

**/****
starring Reese Witherspoon, Thomas Sadoski, Michiel Huisman, Laura Dern
screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the novel by Cheryl Strayed
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

by Walter Chaw Wild is exactly what you think it will be and is that for what feels like forever. It’s the inspirational true story of smack-addicted party girl Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon), who, after reading a lot of well-known volumes of collected verse, cleans out an REI store and sets out to walk the PCT up the Western coast. And she likes Snapple. Yeah, it’s a commercial about regaining white privilege after trying to give it away, complete with more rapey moments than expected. That’s not fair: Cheryl doesn’t so much give her privilege away as indulge in the perks of it to the point where a trio of hale, happy-go-lucky trail-bums dub her the “Queen of the PCT” for all the favours and special treatment she receives along the way. It also takes time for Cheryl to thank REI for being her most favouritest corporation ever for replacing her faulty boots, so that happened.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Teenagemutantninja

½*/****
starring Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, Johnny Knoxville
screenplay by Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec and Evan Daugherty
directed by Jonathan Liebesman

by Walter Chaw Jonathan Liebesman’s brutally awful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a Michael Bay co-production in conjunction with kid’s basic-cable network Nickelodeon, meaning it’s a PG-13 piece of shit aimed at preteens that packs a payload of sexual objectification, mild torture, and assorted grotesquerie. That’s really all there is to say about it. It implies bestiality in the constant come-ons aimed at Bay’s favourite target (Megan Fox) by a foul-looking monster, then makes a joke out of a human counterpart staring at her ass while she’s dangling out a car window. Best is the moment where one of the monsters declares Ms. Fox to be “so hot I can feel my shell tightening,” which comes just after she’s equated with a “sexy bird,” because birds are slim animals as opposed to fat animals like pigs and cows. Later, Whoopi Goldberg appears as that Cabbage Patch doll you didn’t get for Christmas because you’re going to a Michael Bay-produced movie advertised on a children’s cartoon channel, and one of the bad guys instructs his henchmen to “drain every last drop of blood” from our heroes, “even if it kills them.”

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] – Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2014, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mexico, Peru, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

Aguirre1

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes
****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Commentary A
BD – Image A- Sound B+ Commentaries A
starring Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Ruy Guerra
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw A work of holy madness about acts of holy madness, Aguirre, The Wrath of God is a transcendent, haunting film that defies description and captures, somehow, what it means to be human in all the venal, small, sometimes grand things that being human implies. Once seen, it’s never forgotten, and upon repeat viewings, it’s one of those pictures that makes you want to cry for no particular reason but that it is, in almost every non-quantifiable way, perfect, a film alight with invention, love, and passion–a memoir of the worm in the gut that demands blood and glory. Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) is an under-lieutenant in the bona fide Peruvian expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés) to find the lost city of gold, El Dorado, a fiction of the Peruvian Indians meant as a suicide pill for their conquistadors. Once the expedition bogs down in the mud of the rainy season, Pizarro sends nobleman Don Pedro de Ursua (Ruy Guerra) off with Aguirre on a satellite mission to scout a path ahead for the main body. Though neither party was ever heard from again, Aguirre, The Wrath of God proposes to tell the final days of Ursua’s doomed men.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

Guardiansofthegalaxy

***/****
starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Benicio Del Toro
written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman
directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw After years of looking for a Star Wars for my son (too little for Lord of the Rings; nothing to attach to in Pacific Rim), here’s James Gunn’s awesome Guardians of the Galaxy to fit the bill. It’s science-fiction in exactly the same way that Star Wars is science-fiction–essentially a serial western, with Chris Pratt as both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, green Zoe Saldana as Princess Leia, and a raccoon and a tree subbing for Wookiee and droid. It has a secret history for our hero, a scary baddie in a black cloak, and an entire universe of wonders it treats like an amusement park. It’s also fun in the same way Star Wars was fun, and fresh in the same way, too: heedlessly, carefree, even bratty, which explains the post-credits cut-scene that’s easily the best of them. Furthermore, it has a soundtrack packed with AM Gold that lends the picture camp and hipster cred simultaneously. Heavy on exposition at times, squandering a few opportunities to demonstrate a better team action dynamic, and not about anything at the end of the day, Guardians of the Galaxy‘s sword and shield is that its irreverence and self-awareness land as self-deprecating and warm. Doesn’t hurt that it’s a blast.

Noah (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, DVD

Noah1

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
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.