Adventure Archives - Page 14 of 40

The Lone Ranger (2013)

July 1, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Superhero, Theatrical, Western

***/****
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.

Superman: Unbound (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

June 24, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Superhero

Supermanunbound3

***/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras C+
screenplay by Bob Goodman, based on the graphic novel Superman: Brainiac by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank
directed by James Tucker

by Jefferson Robbins With Superman: Unbound, DC Universe’s appropriation of anime elements for its superhero cartoons reaches its logical endpoint: tentacle rape. Our first glimpse of longstanding Superman nemesis Brainiac, a semi-organic humanoid computer, features his natural eye getting plucked out by a pincered appendage to be replaced with an upgraded model. Later, a bound and helpless Superman will have terabytes of deadly information pumped straight into his cortex by other such squidlike injectors. The last five years of direct-to-video DC Comics adaptations, many engineered by Korean production house MOI Animation, have all gone East for key sequences–the lonely drift of a Gotham cityscape, robot foes ripped from the comics to be redesigned as mechas. So I guess it was only a matter of time before weird snaky appendages tried to skull-fuck the Man of Steel.

World War Z (2013)

June 20, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Zombie

**/****
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.

Man of Steel (2013)

June 13, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Russell Crowe
screenplay by David S. Goyer
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is 44 beautifully constructed trailers strung together in the world’s most expensive promo reel; at this point in his career, it’s fair to wonder who it is Snyder’s still trying to impress. Shapeless, structure-less, the movie aspires towards nostalgic, grandiloquent, patriotic pastiche but succeeds only in being disjointed, muted, and frustrating. Take the casting of Kevin Costner as Superman’s terrestrial dad, Jonathan Kent. Perfect, right? But he’s reduced to a fantastic scene where he reveals his adopted son’s alien origin that is fantastic solely because Costner is not only magnificent when he’s allowed to be in his wheelhouse (baseball player, cowboy, farmer), but also because there’s a certain weight in the wrinkles on Costner’s face and the grey at his temples. He’s the embodiment of a specific brand of nostalgia all by himself, and the potential for him to be the spiritual centre of a soulless film isn’t merely squandered, it’s aggressively squandered. The Superman mythos at its best is about fathers and sons–the hero (Henry Cavill, playing Supes as Wolverine) has, after all, lost two fathers, orphaned twice in a strange land and compared visually and thematically to Christ in every incarnation. (“The last son of Krypton,” n’est-ce pas?) It’s a powerful theme, one that explains the enduring popularity of the character when wags have correctly identified that there are no real, viable external threats to someone who’s essentially all-powerful. The Jesus story is meaningless if Jesus never thought of Himself as merely a man carrying a terrible burden. Consider the elevation of Watchmen‘s Dr. Manhattan to inscrutable WMD, or The Incredibles‘ Mr. Incredible’s near-ruin in the role of family man. No, Superman’s weakness is existential. I fear that Snyder–a director who seems to abhor difference and adore surfaces in his pictures–is exactly the wrong person to explore the irony of an immaculate conception tortured in the role of outsider.

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 10, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Sam Raimi, Disney, Fantasy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams
screenplay by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Based on L. Frank Baum’s little-known Pussyhound of Oz, Sam Raimi’s career nadir Oz the Great and Powerful (hereafter O-Gap) answers the question of who you would ask to anchor your $300M+ tentpole extravaganza: yes, James Franco, who’s now claimed the mantle of the worst actor in the United States from the quiescent Paul Walker. Franco is an avatar of the picture’s bad decisions, from the Zach Braff-voiced CGI monkey sidekick to the sassy CGI Hummel figurine to the tragic miscasting of Mila Kunis as Theodora, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West. Yes indeedy, fans of the MGM original, of Baum’s wondrous series of books, and of the shit-show “Wicked” will all hate it equally–almost as much as neophytes to the whole damned mess who will come for what Raimi’s proudly proclaimed “the ultimate Disney movie” and leave with a mouthful of exactly as promised. It’s blindingly obnoxious, tasteless in a meaningless way, and occasionally makes reference to Army of Darkness just because, I suspect, Raimi’s last-resort defensive posture is to fall back on what he knows. But it’s not nearly enough to save him here. The argument with weight is that the more expensive a movie becomes, the less likely it’s going to be good; the first clue that Raimi is creatively bankrupt is that while his buddy Bruce Campbell appears in this film, Campbell isn’t the star.

After Earth (2013)

May 30, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Will Smith, Jaden Smith, Sophie Okenedo, Zoë Kravitz
screenplay by Gary Whitia and M. Night Shyamalan
directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Angelo Muredda Give M. Night Shyamalan this much: he is not a timid filmmaker. Where some might have responded to the critical drubbing of The Village with a shrug, Shyamalan turned his follow-up, ostensibly a children’s story, into a vicious riposte. Lady in the Water isn’t just an off-kilter fairytale about an endangered waif who falls out of the sky and into Paul Giamatti’s swimming pool: it’s also a deranged manifesto for protecting the imaginative freedom of artists like Shyamalan–playing a writer who will one day be martyred for his ideas, collected in a volume modestly titled “The Cookbook”–against critics and nonbelievers, who meet deservedly bad ends. That would be a gutsy move if the artist had something to die for himself, yet the best you could say for Lady in the Water is that at least Bob Balaban’s beast-ravaged movie reviewer is spared the finale with a saviour eagle that Shyamalan has the gall to christen “Eaglet.” Though nominally a star vehicle for Will Smith and his son Jaden, After Earth covers much the same ground, down to its repetition of both the aquila ex machina trope and half-assed nomenclature. (A double-sided spear is a “cutlass” in the future, while walking stealthily is now “ghosting.” No word on what we call spoons or actual cutlasses.) Lady in the Water‘s world-building by crayon doodles can be explained away easily enough by its bedtime-story mechanics, but there’s no excuse for After Earth, a thinly-sketched, unbearably haughty survival story that cites Moby-Dick as it steals from Suzanne Collins.

Woochi: The Demon Slayer (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

May 26, 20132000s, 2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory, South Korea

Woochi3

Woochi
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Kang Dong-won, Kim Yoon-seok, Im Soo-jung, Yoo Hae-jin
written and directed by Choi Dong-hoon

by Bryant Frazer With directors like Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, and Bong Joon-ho doing their level best to reinvent genres like the revenge thriller, the lurid melodrama, and even the monster movie, recent Korean cinema has been a wellspring of intrigue for movie buffs. You won’t get that kind of ambition from Woochi, a middle-of-the-road adventure yarn constructed out of bits of Korean mythology, formulaic action beats, and Hollywood-style VFX work. It’s featherweight through and through, adventurous only inasmuch as it switches gears partway in, moving from the generic conventions of a period martial-arts film to those of an urban fantasy opus set in modern South Korea, where centuries-old wizards are vying to retrieve an ancient relic. If you listen carefully enough during the quiet bits, you can almost hear the popcorn being chewed.

Iron Man 3 (2013)

May 2, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Revenge, Superhero, Theatrical

Iron Man Three
*½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Drew Pearce & Shane Black
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw I laughed once during Shane Black’s Iron Man 3–an unfortunate milestone for me and Black’s films, which I have found, without exception, pretty amusing. That one moment is a reference serial post-modernist and industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) makes to Michael Crichton’s 1973 cult fantasia Westworld. The Tony Stark character is not just the cocksure pop-cultural embodiment of Roland Barthes’s work on semiotics and myth: he’d be Barthes’s greatest subject for analysis–the object that presumes a pop-cultural universal constant. The place where Black works, in other words, is that place where everyone’s seen and read and heard everything they “should have” seen and read and heard. When Stark drops the Westworld bomb, then, we understand the implication that Stark is observing an evil henchman to not only appear to be robotic and indestructible but maybe sexy and Yul Brynner-esque as well–maybe a female fantasy, maybe a “stupid sexy Flanders” homosexual fantasy. Certainly, there’s a recognition that dropping a reference like this is pleasurable in a way that structuralism would appreciate, but only for the nerd bourgeoisie. It’s a moment meant to create a sense of exclusionary cloister in the midst of one of the most widely-dissembled entertainments in human history, and I liked that.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)

March 28, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Espionage, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring D.J. Cotrona, Byung-hun Lee, Adrianne Palicki, Dwayne Johnson
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
directed by Jon M. Chu

by Angelo Muredda While it’s easy to snicker at a title sequence that boasts of “Characters by Hasbro,” G.I. Joe: Retaliation (hereafter Retaliation) is the kind of movie you root for. After the banality of predecessor Stephen Sommers, John M. Chu is an inspired choice of director. This is a guy who’s made his name by bringing elegance and agility to his two attempts at the surprisingly bullet-proof Step Up franchise. There was reason enough, then, to hope his preference for long takes and earnest interest in bodies in motion would translate to a franchise inspired by a line of action figures. After all, such baubles are nothing if not fetish objects, their biceps studied by the faithful with a mad love usually reserved for dancers, matinee idols, and wrestlers. What better meeting of the three than a project steered by the director of dance films and anchored by Channing Tatum and Dwayne Johnson, née The Rock?

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) – Combo Pack: Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

March 18, 20132012, 2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, New Zealand

Hobbit1

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Andy Serkis
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 Walter Chaw Shot at a vaunted 48 frames-per-second to better approximate the television soap opera its mammoth length suggests, Peter Jackson’s vainglorious trainwreck The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (hereafter “Hobbit 1“) looks for all intents and purposes like its own porn knock-off. A technological “advancement” that is to the naked eye identical to any episode of reality television or live sporting event you’ve been watching in your living room for years, the 48fps “breakthrough” was for Jackson a way of making the increasingly unpopular new-gen 3-D a little bit less crappy. It’s like putting a dress on a pig. Understand, complaints about “HFR” are not akin to the bellyaching about colour film or CinemaScope, since those innovations didn’t actively cheapen the moviegoing experience. The irony of all that being, of course, that while the image indeed doesn’t stutter or blur as much in 3-D, what we’re forced to look at is overlit, obviously artificial, and reminded me more than once of the jarringly amateurish “Star Wars Holiday Special”.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 20, 20131930s, 2013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Espionage, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

Manwhoknewtoomuch34

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre, Nova Pilbeam
screenplay by Charles Bennett, D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, Edwin Greenwood and A.R. Rawlinson
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw The first fascination of Alfred Hitchcock’s original The Man Who Knew Too Much is that when a dashing foreign agent (Pierre Fresnay) is shot just minutes into the film, it’s Jill (Edna Best), the wife in the heroic central couple, who’s privy to his last words. They’re dancing together in the middle of a ballroom that feels like a glass cage (naturally) when the dastardly deed is done, a married English woman on holiday with husband Bob (Leslie Banks) and daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam), who look on approvingly. When Hitchcock remakes this movie 22 years later with Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart, he has Ugly American Jimmy (the one privy to the dying man’s last words) drug his hysterical wife in the first of many instances of Hitchcock undermining Stewart’s status as everyone’s favourite Yank. 1934’s The Man Who Knew too Much, like so much of Hitchcock’s British output (this is the first of his six films for Gaumont), remains current for scholars looking for tropes, images, sequences that prefigure his later work. The premature demise of what would have traditionally been the star of the picture (poor, dead Louis, also a champion ski-jumper) prefigures Psycho, of course, while the glass cages recur everywhere from Young and Innocent (which likewise features the musical plot point of this film) to Notorious to Hitch’s collaborations with Tippi Hedren. A gaze at the 34-minute mark through wrought-iron gates predicts the moment of discovery in Strangers on a Train, followed fast by a deliciously uncomfortable dentist sequence I’m surprised Hitch never came back to. Leave that, I suppose, to William Goldman and Marathon Man.

Peter Pan (1953) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 4, 20131950s, 2013, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Revenge

Peterpan1

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
directed by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson

by Bill Chambers Since the 1950s, mainstream audiences have grown up knowing Walt Disney’s Peter Pan as the definitive adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s play and its subsequent novelization (Peter and Wendy), and that’s a mixed blessing. For everything the Disney movie does well, like the swashbuckling, it does something horribly wrong, like compounding Barrie’s 19^th-century notions with retrograde values all the movie’s own. For instance, the English Barrie may have regarded Native Americans as exotic creatures by locating them in Never Land, but it’s Disney who immortalized them in literal red skin, then gave them a song celebrating their mono-syllabic cretinism:

The Bourne Legacy (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + Ultraviolet

December 11, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Espionage, Japan, Thriller

Bournelegacy1

½*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Tony Gilroy & Dan Gilroy
directed by Tony Gilroy

by Walter Chaw By the end of Tony Gilroy’s unbearably long and talky The Bourne Legacy, one is left feeling as though the film hasn’t even started yet. Nothing happens in it, and the only thing it inspires is anticipation: it’s all first act; all supplementary material; all self-importance and hot air. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) sits this one out while another similar soldier, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), occupies a space parallel to the first three films, climbing mountains, Grey-ing wolves, and saving hot virologist Dr. Marta (Rachel Weisz) from the clutches of our evil government so that she can infect him with a virus that makes him smart. This leads to a moment, inevitable, where Cross suggests that losing 12 points off his artificially inflated IQ would result in some personal “Flowers for Algernon” apocalypse where 12 points would probably result in him forgetting his phone number at worst. It also leads to a series of incoherent flashbacks that fit in perfectly with Gilroy’s impossible-to-follow action sequences; if you’re just going to turn a camera on and throw it out a window, why bother trying to set it up? For those keeping score, there are more spinning Lazy Susan shots here than in Transformers: Asshole. You’ve been warned.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

December 3, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Disaster Movie, Drama, Superhero, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw For all its overreaching (and what's perilously close to a training montage), Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises is fascinating, engaging, and aggressively present. It's a wonderfully-performed melodrama about the sad, intractable state of our sorry state, painted in broad strokes in a muted palette. It's what many would think impossible despite the evidence of its predecessor: a comic book for grown-ups. And it accomplishes what it sets out to do without much in the way of action sequences or hero moments–the irony being, of course, that The Dark Knight Rises is fated to become the best-reviewed and most-lucrative release of 2012 for having the very same qualities for which the deeply-underappreciated Superman Returns was lambasted. I would argue that a wide swath of the people who will adore it will have difficulty articulating exactly why.

ParaNorman (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 30, 20122012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Horror, Zombie

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Chris Butler & Sam Fell
directed by Chris Butler

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) can see and speak with ghosts, which, if you squint a little, is only a metaphor for the kind of sensitivity that, in a boy, will invariably lead to about a decade of being brutalized by his disconnected male peer group. (Everything will change once he invents Microsoft or Pixar.) Norman's chief tormentor is barely-verbal Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, already past his sell-by date); his shallow and image-obsessed teenaged sister with a heart of gold™ is Courtney (the awesome Anna Kendrick), who has the hots for the captain of the football team, pre-verbal Mitch (Casey Affleck); and Norman's best friend, whether he likes it or not, is Mitch's weird, fat little brother, Neil (Tucker Albrizzi). The first problem of ParaNorman is that, in its rush to be sensitive to intelligent outcasts like Norman and Neil, it dehumanizes and mocks its tormentors, robbing them of the depth and complexity that would have resulted in a better film than this beautifully-wrought, entirely predictable package. (It's like a jack-in-the-box made by Faberge.) The only moment in which one of these "inside" characters is given any kind of depth (it's Mitch) is used as a sort of sitcom punchline that doesn't lend the moment gravity so much as it continues the road of taking sloppy aim at an easy target.

Skyfall (2012)

November 7, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Espionage, James Bond, Theatrical, Thriller, Turkey, UK

**/****
starring Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Judi Dench
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and John Logan
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw For me, the James Bond films are the literalization of a very particular Conservative fantasy in which a suave, quippy, emotionally-arrested sociopath battles Cold War foes, beds beautiful women without consequence, always has the latest technology, and engages in the endless murder of foreigners. Just suggesting a "license to kill" reveals a certain level of arrogance; and it's their confrontation of the noisome wake left by those attitudes that makes On Her Majesty's Secret Service and the more recent Casino Royale the powerhouses that they are. Skyfall, the latest in the decades-spanning series, tries but fails to do the same. A good part of the problem can be traced back to non-action director Sam Mendes (superseding Marc Forster, non-action director of the disastrous Quantum of Solace), who, in trying to honour the visceral requirements of the genre, finds himself unable to produce either a meaty melodrama or a capable action vehicle.

Indiana Jones: The Complete Adventures – Blu-ray Disc

October 15, 2012****/****, 1980s, 2000s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)
****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984)
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri
screenplay by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C
starring Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Denholm Elliot, Alison Doody
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (2008)
**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C-
starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Shia LaBeouf
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Let’s talk about hats–fedoras, in particular, and how they evolved from the image of the hard-boiled detective in the American noir cycle into the chapeau-of-choice for Coppola’s gangsters in the anti-hero ’70s. How Harrison Ford’s Deckard from Blade Runner was originally conceived with one of the hats to go with his trench coat before Raiders of the Lost Ark made an American icon out of Ford’s swashbuckling archaeologist Indiana Jones, and how that didn’t stop child-killing child-molester Freddy Krueger from getting a fedora (singed and blood-stained, but so was Indy’s) in 1984–the same year, as it happens, that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas turned their American icon into the star of his own horror movie with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The relationship between Americans and the hats their heroes wear is a complicated one. A Freudian would offer that hats are tumescent–the loci of masculine power, a metaphor for the penis/head–and that losing a hat is the equivalent of castration. My favourite example of that theory in practice is Joel McCrea losing his in a field of windmills to the trilling, mocking laughter of ladylove Laraine Day in Foreign Correspondent. The Coen Brothers make it a throughline in Miller’s Crossing, too, as Tom loses and reclaims his hat in cycles of power and powerlessness. I think it means something in the fourth Indiana Jones flick that evil Russkie Spalko tips the brim of Indy’s hat in an attempt to read his mind instead of knocking it off entirely.

La Grande Illusion (1937) [StudioCanal Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 2, 2012****/****, 1930s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Jean Renoir, Drama, FFC Must-Own, War

Grand Illusion
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay, Marcel Dalio
screenplay by Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak
directed by Jean Renoir

by Bryant Frazer If you watch it cold, the opening scenes of La Grande Illusion (hereafter Grand Illusion) make for a confounding experience. The film opens in a French canteen, equipped with bar and phonograph player, where an aristocratic captain calls a working-class lieutenant to accompany him on a routine reconnaissance mission. One short dissolve later, without even the narrative pleasantry of a stock-footage flight over enemy territory, we’re in a German canteen, equipped with bar and phonograph player, where an aristocratic captain announces that he’s shot down an enemy plane. Another fade-out, and the Frenchmen are quickly welcomed at the German dinner table. The German captain even apologizes for the French lieutenant’s broken arm.

Jaws (1975) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

August 25, 2012****/****, 1970s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Spielberg

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary
screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, based on the novel by Benchley
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw What’s not mentioned in very many conversations about Jaws is the pleasure it takes in work. That it’s one of the most influential films of all time–a picture commonly identified as the one responsible for the studio summer-blockbuster mentality–is a given by now. The miracle of it, though, is that it gets better every time you see it. I have the movie memorized at this point; I can recite it like a favourite song. I still jump when Ben Gardner appears in the hole in the hull of his boat, and I still laugh when Hooper helps himself to Brody’s uneaten dinner. More than a fright flick, Jaws is a beautifully rendered character piece, establishing Spielberg as–a little like Stephen King, oddly enough–a master of the easy moment. (They’re artists I’ve conflated in my head for their popularity with and influence on a generation of people my age.) It’s a little nasty, too, Jaws is, in throwaway moments like the one on the beach where, after a giant fin appears in the water, Spielberg cuts to a group of old men picking up their binoculars. They’re there to looky-loo; they’re expecting carnage. It’s not a Hitchcockian moment of audience critique (though it functions that way), but a brilliant character beat expressed with Spielberg’s savant-like visual genius. But above all, Jaws is about function and work–not unlike Star Wars, the final nail in the New American Cinema, will be two years later.

Premium Rush (2012)

August 23, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Shannon, Dania Ramirez, Jamie Chung
screenplay by David Koepp & John Kamps
directed by David Koepp

by Angelo Muredda Those who had hoped Joseph Gordon-Levitt's presence in The Dark
Knight Rises signalled some kind of Tim Drake extravaganza only to make do
with his dour Robin surrogate John Blake ought to perk up, for Premium Rush
is here. David Koepp's unabashedly silly, good-natured courier thriller is
curiously light on thrills, its daytime climax of a bike race in the park about
as low-stakes as Harvey Keitel's hot pursuit of a pickpocket simian in Monkey
Trouble. What it lacks in dramatic heft, though, it more than makes up for
in its fleetness and tight grasp on cartoon physics, as well as its smart use
of Michael Shannon as an unstable roadblock and Gordon-Levitt as just the blunt
instrument to push past him, a chiselled boy wonder who knows his way around a
fixie, i.e., the lightweight single-gear bike to which he's practically glued.