Adventure Archives - Page 13 of 41

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

April 9, 20142013, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, New Zealand

Smaug2

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extra B
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 Hidden Fortress (1958) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

April 7, 20141950s, 2014, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Japan, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Toshiro Mifune, Minoru Chiaki, Kamatari Fujiwara, Susumu Fujita
screenplay by Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto and Akira Kurosawa
directed by Akira Kurosawa

by Walter Chaw It is many things, but Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress is rare for its ability to evoke a feeling ineffable of finding yourself in the company of betters and wanting desperately/doing your best to fit in. It’s a weightless feeling. There’s euphoria in it. Fear, too–the understanding that being a cool kid is a temporary state, at least for you. And then there’s the nagging embarrassment for the friend along for the ride, what that friend says about your unworthiness, and how sick it makes you that you could feel this way about your only real ally in this whole mess. It’s two movies, then: the stylized slapstick of opportunistic peasants Tahei (Minoru Chiaki) and Matashichi (Kamatari Fujiwara); and a more standard jidaigeki involving a princess in exile (Misa Uehara) and her bodyguard/retainer General Makabe (Toshiro Mifune) trying to transport a fortune in gold to re-establish their fallen kingdom. The Hidden Fortress would work without the peasants, but it would be a different movie. It would be about heroes like The Seven Samurai, or royalty like Throne of Blood. With the peasants, The Hidden Fortress is about being ordinary in a world inhabited by heroes and royalty and the existential suffering attendant to that state. The best of Kurosawa is eternally skating along that divide; Kurosawa’s own suicide attempt, I think, had more than a little to do with a Kierkegaardian fear and self-loathing. His best–films like Ikiru, Throne of Blood, High and Low–are distinctly revealing. It’s a measure of an artist that his reflection in his art is helpless to intention or style. Hitchcock’s films lay Hitchcock bare, as Mann’s, Vidor’s, Lang’s, and Welles’s do them. Kurosawa feared his worthiness; he feared being judged and found wanting.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

April 3, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw A fine companion piece to last summer’s The Lone Ranger, with another hero whose essential goodness has become anachronistic in a world defined by its ugliness and venality, the Russo Brothers’ Captain America: The Winter Soldier (hereafter Cap 2), for all its boom-boom, is surprisingly thoughtful–and surprisingly doom-laden. It’s dark as hell. Gone are the pulp machinations of Joe Johnston–this one is more The Empire Strikes Back than The Rocketeer, where the victories are Pyrrhic and the bad guys are smarter and better equipped. By the end, this most optimistic of superheroes resolves to rescue a friend while his closest comrade-in-arms advises him to look for love again. They’re small goals, the kind of goals that mere mortals happen to share with this demigod. As such, they provide the film with an unexpected payload of pathos and nostalgia for lost selves that used to believe the world would be better if only we had a friend upon which we could always depend and love that would remain evergreen. Cap 2 is about our better natures, and it’s about the realization as you grow older that you may have allowed your better nature to be subsumed by misdirected senses of duty. It’s about what it means to compromise your values on the altar of “maturity” and “sophistication”–even “progress” and “modernity.” And when it works best, it’s about what it means when you don’t.

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

Justiceleaguewar2

**/**** 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.

Game of Thrones: The Complete Third Season (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

March 16, 20142013, 2014, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Television

Gameofthrones1

Image A Sound A Extras A+
“Valar Dohaeris,” “Dark Wings, Dark Words,” “Walk of Punishment,” “And Now His Watch Is Ended,” “Kissed by Fire,” “The Climb,” “The Bear and the Maiden Fair,” “Second Sons,” “The Rains of Castamere,” “Mhysa”

by Jefferson Robbins Kings and counsellors, indeed. George R.R. Martin’s fantasy cycle A Song of Ice and Fire–five very large novels deep now–is concerned with impassioned monarchs and their desperate ministers, as well as the deformations wrought by their egotistical wars. HBO’s series adaptation “Game of Thrones” maintains that fascination, the source of much of its continuing suspense and appeal: Anyone in the fragmenting kingdom of Westeros could die at any time, by sword or sorcery or simple dysentery, and the wounds of war upon the body politic are reflected on the characters.

Saturn 3 (1980) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

March 12, 20141980s, 2014, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett, Harvey Keitel
screenplay by Martin Amis
directed by Stanley Donen

by Bryant Frazer There are bad movies and there are tantalizingly bad movies, and Saturn 3 is the latter–the type of bad movie that tickles the imagination and demands an explanation. On first blush, there’s nothing unusual about it. Released in 1980, it was clearly trading on the post-Star Wars mania for sci-fi movies. The casting of Farrah Fawcett, at the time a big star, was a reasonable commercial gambit. And the release of Alien a year earlier certainly explained the idea of a monster movie set in space. If you look at the credits, you simply get a sense of older Hollywood types–director Stanley Donen, actor Kirk Douglas–striving to keep up with the prevailing trends.

But then you watch the movie, and you wonder: what the hell happened here?

The Wind Rises (2013) + Frozen (2013)

February 25, 2014****/****, 2013, 2014, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Japan, Musical, Romance, War

THE WIND RISES
****/****
written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki

FROZEN
**½/****
screenplay by Jennifer Lee, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”
directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee

Editor’s Note: This review pertains to the original Japanese-language version of The Wind Rises.

by Walter Chaw Hayao Miyazaki’s alleged swan song The Wind Rises is mature, romantic, grand storytelling that just happens to be something like a romanticized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer behind the design of the Mitsubishi A5M, which led, ultimately, to the Zero. Indeed, for a Western audience, watching Jiro’s dreams of squadrons of Zeros buzzing over fields of green is chilling, and advance critics seemed unable to distinguish the Japanese war machine from the film’s focus on a life lived in pursuit of dreams. In truth, separating these two aspects of the picture–the proximate and the historical–is self-defeating. (Dismissing the movie out of hand is equally blinkered.) One without the other, The Wind Rises loses anything like substance, resonance, importance. It would fall on the one side into gauzy bullshit, on the other into Triumph of the Will. As is, it’s something more akin to Studio Ghibli’s own Grave of the Fireflies in its humanizing of a man whose dreams were corrupted into something terrible. Einstein would be one of the West’s potential Horikoshi corollaries–and if Miyazaki had done Albert’s biography, I’d expect to see mushroom clouds illustrating his fantasies of relativity. For Horikoshi, Miyazaki provides upheavals and disasters as highlight to each of his life events: He first meets his wife in a train crash; in a lilting epilogue, when Jiro bids farewell to his dead wife, Miyazaki offers fields of devastation and a village in flames. Throughout, Miyazaki presents earthquakes, rainstorms, sudden bursts of wind as reminders of…what? The inevitability of change? The portents of war? The cycles of life and death? All of that; but what compels is the idea of helplessness in the face of larger forces–that although we chase our dreams, we’re never really in control of our destinies.

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, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Television, Werewolf

Supernatural1

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.

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

Escapefromla1

**/**** 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.

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).

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, Western

Loneranger1

***/**** 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 boy scout 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

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.

Monsters University (2013) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 12, 20132013, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, Pixar

Mu2

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
screenplay by Daniel Gerson & Robert L. Baird, Dan Scanlon
directed by Dan Scanlon

by Bill Chambers On a school trip to Monsters, Incorporated, young cyclops Mike Wazowski, the kind of pipsqueak who gets saddled with the teacher when his classmates choose partners, sneaks onto the scaring platform and follows an octopus-like creature through one of the closet-door terminals. Rather than reprimand him, the monster tells Mike he might have what it takes to become a scarer and gives him his cap, Mean Joe Green-style. That hat bears the logo of the Scarer’s alma mater, Monsters University (better than Fear Tech!); an undergrad is born.

Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet Combo Pack

September 23, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor
screenplay by Darren Lemke and Christopher McQuarrie and Dan Studney
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw There’s an interesting moment early on in Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer, but don’t get used to it. It’s a cross-cut sequence wherein peasant Jack (Nicholas Hoult) and princess Isabelle (absolutely adorable Eleanor Tomlinson) reveal they’re both products of neglect and the devastation of a parent lost too young. This unites them in strife and turmoil (in the way that wasn’t properly addressed by the Mako/Raleigh team-up in Pacific Rim) to (likewise) battle monsters of the theoretical Id (Oedipus is the first guess, Electra the second), here literal giants in a cloud-shrouded kingdom, accessed by a priapic growth sprouting in the dead of night. It’s the only time the film identifiably belongs to Bryan Singer, a maker of large films nonetheless invested in personal, intimate deconstructions. People in my world are neatly divided between the ones who didn’t like Singer’s Superman Returns and the ones who are right. I want to believe that movie is the reason why Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor, and Ian McShane said “yes” to Jack the Giant Slayer, and not because Tucci, McGregor, and McShane are already just filthy impulses cashing paychecks à la 1980s Michael Caine.

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.

Telluride ’13: Tracks

September 2, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

*/**** directed by John Curran by Walter Chaw Kind of like a dustier Eight Below, in which Mia Wasikowska walks four camels and a dog across the Australian Outback in a whimsical death march that I find, at my age (40), amazingly selfish and borderline sociopathic. Tracks is based on the true story of "camel lady" Robyn Davidson, who, in 1977, walked across a huge stretch of Australia because she really hated being around other people. Davidson says, by way of charming voiceover narration, that she didn't want to be a whiny bitch like the rest of her generation, but she…

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.

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013)

August 6, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Jake Abel
screenplay by Marc Guggenheim, based on the novel by Rick Riordan
directed by Thor Freudenthal

by Walter Chaw Say this about Thor Freudenthal and Marc Guggenheim’s Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (hereafter PJ2): you’re more than justified in questioning its existence, but at the end of the day it’s impossible to make something this bad by accident. No, it takes genuine inspiration to be this tone-deaf, to create something that requires intimate knowledge of the source novel or the first film in this benighted franchise yet will instantly piss off the teenies who love the Rick Riordan books and the far fewer souls who liked that first movie. For me, because I love my 9-year-old daughter with all my heart, I endured PJ2 and only thought about walking out a half-dozen times before resigning myself to the murky 3-D and even murkier execution. Yes, it’s awful, that much is to be expected, but that it’s significantly worse than a movie that was already terrible by nearly every objective standard is really some kind of accomplishment. At the end of the day, when a 9-year-old articulates that what’s wrong with the film is that they took out all the relationship stuff, cherry-picked crap from other novels to contrive a half-assed cliffhanger for a sequel that will likely never happen, and basically fumbled the promise of the title, well…at least PJ2 can claim the distinction of awakening the critical facility in a child who, before this, thought every movie was pretty good.