Adventure Archives - Page 16 of 41

Brave (2012)

June 20, 20122012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
screenplay by Mark Andrews and Steve Purcell and Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi
directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman

by Walter Chaw Brave…isn’t. Not very. It’s by far the most conventional Pixar film, and while it’s better than either Cars, that’s only because the Cars movies are simply awful. Brave has a plucky girl heroine who disobeys her mother, makes a hash of things, then solves everything at the end through the murder of the antagonist. It has an adorable animal sidekick (three of them, actually), treats an entire culture like a broad ethnic joke, and misses every single opportunity to be about something. Huzzah! When we say as a culture that something’s for children, we mean that it’s better–unless we’re talking about media culture. Brave is for children, and its only connection to things like WALL·E, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, or Ratatouille is its company’s pedigree, fading fast until Brad Bird or Andrew Stanton decides to strap ’em on and jump back in the ol’ computer-animated saddle, riding to the rescue as the company founded on their beautiful complexities descends into absolute, uncontroversial, shallow mendacity.

Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (2012)

June 7, 20122012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical

***/****
screenplay by Eric Darnell and Noah Baumbach
directed by Eric Darnell, Conrad Vernon, Tom McGrath

by Walter Chaw Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (hereafter Madagascar 3) is easily the best one yet and the product, I’ll bet, of co-directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath’s foray into the rigors of gag-writing for an animated TV series (“The Penguins of Madagascar”)–though I wouldn’t discount the influence of credited screenwriter Noah Baumbach, either. Madagascar 3 is deeply involved in surrealism, rivalling Disney’s pink elephants on parade in a circus sequence that, if not as good as Dumbo‘s, is not as good because it’s scored by a genuinely dreadful Katy Perry song. The picture’s so cheerfully, indefatigably strange, in fact, that at times it approaches the Golden Age of Looney Tunes. It’s an effervescent little artifact housing a psychotic, bestial gendarme named Capt. Chantel DuBois (voiced maniacally by Frances McDormand), who, in a moment of extreme cultural insensitivity, rouses her comatose henchmen with a rendition of Edith Piaf’s “Non, He Ne Regrette Rien,” right there in an Italian ICU. The picture is lawless in this way: Chris Rock’s Marty the Zebra has never been blacker (his signature song this time around has something to do with a circus afro), David Schwimmer’s Melman the Giraffe was never more of a kvetch, Bryan Cranston’s Russian tiger Vitaly is depressed and bellicose, and Martin Short’s brilliantly-conceived sea lion Stefano is enthusiastically, effervescently, Roberto Benigni-stupidly Italian.

Prometheus (2012)

June 6, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, UK

*/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Charlize Theron
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw It’s time, probably long past time, to admit that Ridley Scott is nothing more or less than Tim Burton: a visual stylist at the mercy of others to offer his hatful of pretty pictures something like depth. If either one of them ever made a great film (and I’d argue that both have), thank the accident of the right source material and/or editor, not these directors, whose allegiance is to their own visual auteurism rather than any desire for a unified product. For Scott, the conversation essentially begins and ends for me with Alien, Blade Runner, and Black Hawk Down (for most, it’s just the first two, with a political nod to Thelma & Louise)–genre films, all, and each about the complications of mendacity given over to lush, stylish excess: the gothic, biomechanical haunted house of Alien‘s Nostromo mining vehicle and its hapless band of blue-collar meatbags; the meticulously detailed Angelino diaspora of Blade Runner and its Raymond Chandler refugee; and Mark Bowden’s Mogadishu, transformed in Black Hawk Down into a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Again, there’s that utility. Without it, Scott’s films are impenetrable monuments to style, as smooth and affectless as a perfume advertisement–and the more you watch them, the less memorable that style becomes.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 3, 20122011, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Mystery, UK

*½/**** Image C+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Noomi Rapace, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Michele Mulroney & Kieran Mulroney
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Angelo Muredda On my way out of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, I overheard a woman telling her friend that it was “the sort of thing you have to see a second time.” Presumably she meant the intricate scheme by which “Napoleon of Crime” Moriarty (Jared Harris, suitably menacing) seeks to deliver Europe into an early Great War, a mystery so trite that its solution hinges on whether Holmes (Robert Downey Jr., inching dangerously towards Johnny Depp levels of hackdom) can get a hold of his nemesis’s pocketbook. But showing us everything for a second time is very much Ritchie’s M.O. There are about twenty minutes of movie in A Game of Shadows, all told: the rest is instant replay, a shameless parade of alternate angles and slow-motion recaps of bullets firing out of barrels or getting jammed in the process. It’s as if in lieu of the finished product, Ritchie submitted home footage of his own work in the editing suite, dazzled by Final Cut Pro’s array of grey filters and motion blurs.

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

May 30, 20122012, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, Sam Claflin
screenplay by Evan Daugherty and John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw A handful of arresting images aside (and even those owe more than a passing debt to artist Bev Doolittle, or Terry Gilliam minus the tchotchkes–and here’s Lily Cole again, post-Parnassus), Rupert Sanders’s dreary Snow White and the Huntsman plods along without much sense on its way to producing not much with little impact and no purpose. Though beaten to it by Gary Oldman’s legendary turn in the inexplicable Tiptoes, it has a gaggle of hale British actors playing dwarves, including a humiliated Bob Hoskins, tasked with being blind-guy exposition for little miss Joan of Arc. And it has a gorgeous Charlize Theron, demonstrating in full fetish-wear that she has no idea she’s in a Twilight ripper by turning in a pretty good character performance as an evil step-witch who’s spent way too much time reading The Beauty Myth. Indeed, the Big Bad Wolf in this fairytale is Naomi Wolf.

John Carter (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD

May 27, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon, based on A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by Andrew Stanton

by Walter Chaw Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote grand, incendiary pulp. He in fact defined pulp for me as a kid, not so much with his Tarzan, but with his Barsoom. I remember the Gino D’Achille covers for the Ballantine run of the books, all eleven of them, and I remember how excited I felt once I finally completed my collection of them at a mildew-smelling (delicious) used bookstore that didn’t know what it had. It’s easy to forget the thrill of those discoveries in the pre-Internet bazaar. When I was on the fence about buying a Kindle last Christmas, I saw that Burroughs’s complete run of Barsoom (i.e., John Carter of Mars) novels was available for free; now I own a Kindle. Rereading the series this past year in preparation for Andrew Stanton’s John Carter, I was reminded of the scope of Burroughs’s work–its sociology, its uncompromising stance on religion, its unabashed chivalry and romance; when I read Sir Walter Scott years later, it couldn’t hold a candle to Burroughs. Barsoom was my gateway to works by Burroughs contemporaries H.P. Lovecraft (compare what Carter finds at the gate of the River Iss with the arctic nightmare of At the Mountains of Madness and tell me they didn’t influence one another) and Robert E. Howard, but at the end of it all was always, for me, Barsoom. I’ve been waiting for a big-budget, prestige presentation of this property for almost as long as I waited for the Star Wars prequels–and if I’m not as disappointed, it’s only because Episode I killed much of what was disappointable in me. John Carter is garbage.

Men in Black 3 (2012)

May 23, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, United Arab Emirates, Will Smith

**/****
starring Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Emma Thompson
screenplay by Etan Cohen, based on the Malibu comic by Lowell Cunningham
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

by Angelo Muredda That Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black 3 isn’t garbage comes as a surprise ten years after the first terrible sequel, and amidst reports of a troubled shoot that got underway before there was even a screenplay. As detailed in a NEWSWEEK piece on the production, Will Smith’s enormous trailer guzzled fuel and idled for months while the script was hashed out on dirty napkins, looking like a readymade symbol for a lead balloon in the making. Still, that it isn’t the bust it could have been shouldn’t make us too generous towards what’s essentially a bloated and very expensive nostalgia trip not to its setting of 1969 but to the first film’s release year of 1997, a time that’s probably too near to really miss.

The Grey (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD

May 14, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, James Badge Dale
screenplay by Joe Carnahan & Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, based on Jeffers’s short story “Ghost Walker”
directed by Joe Carnahan

by Angelo Muredda The teaser for Joe Carnahan’s The Grey closes with Liam Neeson MacGyver-ing a wolf-punching power glove out of mini-liquor bottles. It’s a great hook, and easily the best trailer of the year. It’s also kind of a lie. To be fair, Carnahan’s latest–after the dreadful one-two (wolfless) punch of Smokin’ Aces and The A-Team–is a career-saving return to form, although Narc was hardly epic stuff. Adapted from a short story by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, The Grey ambitiously aspires to be a Jack London-esque exploration of ruffians fighting for their lives against an unmoved wilderness; tonally, it sits somewhere between the gritty naturalism of “To Build a Fire” and the bros-only philosophical seminar of The Sea-Wolf. Carnahan brings an admirable seriousness to this task and invests his band of rogues with some nice human touches, but there’s a dopiness to this material that doesn’t always pass muster. Watching The Grey‘s arctic powwows between protagonist Ottway (Neeson) and his sad burly men, I was most reminded not of endangered-man potboilers but of The Breakfast Club, which similarly gathers a group of rejects around the high-school equivalent of a makeshift fire for some prime bonding. Slogging through these men’s tales of woe isn’t exactly detention, but eventually, it does start to feel like homework.

The Muppets (2011) [The Wocka Wocka Value Pack] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

May 6, 20122011, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Muppets, Musical

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jason Segel, Amy Adams, Chris Cooper, Rashida Jones
screenplay by Jason Segel & Nicholas Stoller
directed by James Bobin

by Bryant Frazer I stopped paying attention to new Muppet movies after creator Jim Henson’s untimely death in 1990. I just didn’t have the heart for it. But I was aware that the Henson legacy continued with The Muppet Christmas Carol, Muppet Treasure Island, and, finally, Muppets from Space. (For Gen X-ers, 1999 was a very bad year: George Lucas told you that The Force was really tiny space critters living in your bloodstream, and Team Muppet expected you to believe that Gonzo was an extraterrestrial.) Muppets from Space was the last hurrah for Frank Oz, Jim Henson’s right-hand man for so many years, although the Muppets endured on a newly humble scale, reaching in 2005 what fans generally agree was the nadir of their existence, the made-for-TV The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz.

Marvel’s The Avengers (2012)

May 3, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero

The Avengers
**½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Joss Whedon
directed by Joss Whedon

by Walter Chaw Joss Whedon delivers his definitive artistic statement with the completely inoffensive, agreeably stupid Marvel’s The Avengers. It’s a giant, loud, sloppy kiss planted right on the forehead of a fanboy contingent that will somehow find jealous dork solidarity in the largest product excreted this year by a Hollywood machinery that’s the playground now of Whedons and Apatows and Farrellys, where it used to be the domain of John Fords and Sam Peckinpahs and Von Sternbergs. Not a full-grown man among them, they’re drunk on power and nerd cred, making references to their references and amazed that someone like Scarlett Johansson returns their calls (or that they could be married to someone like Leslie Mann in a world not gone mad). The Avengers is a brilliant balance of indecipherable against crowd-pleasing, with bouncy fight scenes, one-liners as character development, and the absolute confidence that everyone in the audience has on purpose seen each of the films designed as a prequel to this one. As the pendulum swings back to pleasuring 18-year-old boys vs. 16-year-old girls (despite Titanic in 3D‘s attempts at swinging it back), take heart that if, at the end, it only reminds of the loudest, most expensive team-up episode of “Shazam!”, it at least has the sense to deliver the best Hulk moments…ever.

The Hunger Games (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

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

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

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

April 9, 20122011, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Czech Republic, DVD, Espionage, India, Russia, Thriller, Tom Cruise, United Arab Emirates

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

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

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

April 2, 20121990s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Brazil, Canada, Disney, Espionage, Family, Sci-Fi, Superhero

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

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

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

March 15, 20121970s, 1980s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Spain, Zombie

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

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

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

Lady and the Tramp (1955) – Diamond Edition Blu-ray + DVD

March 5, 20121950s, 2012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
animated; screenplay by Erdman Penner, Joe Rinaldi, Ralph Wright, Don Dagradi
directed by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson

by Bill Chambers Given that it may have the most famous scene in the Disney oeuvre, it’s odd that Lady and the Tramp doesn’t enjoy a better, or at least bigger, reputation. The first animated feature in CinemaScope, as well as the studio’s first original story¹ and its first dog movie (various Pluto-starring shorts notwithstanding), the film, despite earning the highest grosses of any Disney production since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, seems to have been eclipsed in the public consciousness from a genre standpoint by 101 Dalmatians and from a cinematographic standpoint by Sleeping Beauty, each of which followed so closely on Lady and the Tramp‘s heels as to reduce history’s perception of it to a dry run. It’s a bit better than that, but, coveted “Diamond” status to the contrary, frankly not one of the greats.

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

February 27, 20122011, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Family, Fantasy, France, Mystery, UK

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz
screenplay by John Logan, based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Channelling Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Robert Zemeckis to numbing effect, the once-vital Martin Scorsese follows his elderly Shutter Island with the honest-to-God borderline-demented Hugo, in which the titular French urchin helps Georges Méliès reclaim his cinematic legacy. It’s a shrine to the birth of cinema, blah blah blah, the kind of thing someone as involved as Scorsese has been in film preservation was destined to make, I guess, at least at the exact moment that the ratio of working brain cells gave over the majority. It’s heartbreaking to see someone as vital as Scorsese used to be end up in a place as sentimental and treacly as this, resorting to retelling the Pinocchio story with little Hugo (Asa Butterfield) as a clock-fixer (really) whose life’s mission is to repair an automaton his dead dad (Jude Law) found in a museum attic–and who dreams one night that…wait for it…he himself is the hollow, broken automaton. I wish I didn’t have to go on. Did I mention that it’s in 3D? And that it’s two-and-a-half hours long but feels like a slow seven or eight? Seriously, Shoah is a breezier watch.

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

January 9, 20122000s, 2010, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain, Thriller

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

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

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

November 24, 20111950s, 2011, 2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc

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

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

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

Attack the Block (2011) + Super 8 (2011)|Super 8 – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 21, 20112011, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, France, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

ATTACK THE BLOCK
***/****
starring Jodie Whittaker, John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh
written and directed by Joe Cornish

SUPER 8
***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso
written and directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw Joe Cornish’s low-budget creature-feature Attack the Block is a charmer, a delight, the kind of rare film–like Jack Sholder’s The Hidden, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, or Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile–that devotees will latch onto, and for good reason, with the fervour afforded genuine cult classics. It has energy to burn, a strange affinity with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and a super-cool monster that looks like a cross between Ira from the “Moonshadow” comic and a grizzly bear. That most of it was carried off with practical effects is a shot in the arm for practical effects and a bearer of the nostalgia banner that seems to be popular lately, what with our dreams and memories fodder again for the celluloid couch. Better still, it introduces a new star into the future pantheon in John Boyega, who has charisma to burn as gang leader-cum-saviour Moses. The movie’s tale of a group of street toughs has drawn comparisons to The Warriors, but I think the better analogy is Spielberg’s E.T., not just in that alchemy between the fantastic and the absolutely mundane (South England’s Lambeth neighbourhood), but also in the crafting of a living youth subculture alive with its own language, ritual, and custom. It’s not too much to say that, at its best, Attack the Block makes you feel the way you did when the guys took things into their own hands to deliver the flying, omniscient, omnipotent E.T. to his landing site. It taps into the irrational cool. Which doesn’t happen very often.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011)

November 18, 20112011, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Billy Burke
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Appalling by pretty much every measure, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (hereafter Twilight 4.1) is the predictable end result of a film based on a book written by an illiterate Mormon housewife mistaking her profound ignorance for profundity. It’s about a really old guy who talks a really young girl into marrying him and enduring really, really painful childbirth as her portion of God’s judgment on her kind; and then it’s about another kind of pedophilia, wherein a 19-year-old badly in need of acting lessons gets turned on by a baby and decides he’s going to marry that infant once she’s old enough to breed. Still with me? So, yes, I knew it was going to be bad and, yes, I went anyway. And you know what? For as girded as I was to the raw incompetence of this franchise, Twilight 4.1 still managed to plumb a few new depths. See, Twilight 4.1 is an apologia for spousal abuse and a clumsy pro-life screed (what about this crap isn’t clumsy?) before turning into cartoon Grand Guignol horseshit meant to freak out an audience of pre-teens and lonely housewives who think that this object of their devotion is selling them anything except loneliness and delusion. It’s sledgehammer racist in its depiction of a native housekeeper cast as Maria Ouspenskaya, and it has a moment in which a circle of wolves “think-talk” to each other in some ineffable evocation of an Optimus Prime pep talk. It’s completely inexplicable, in other words, and irritating for it.