Adventure Archives - Page 19 of 41

Predators (2010)

July 13, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Laurence Fishburne
screenplay by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch
directed by Nimród Antal

by Walter Chaw It opens with a grab-bag of heavily-armed genre clichés–the world-weary man of action (Adrien Brody), the tough-talking Latina (Alice Braga), the mad-dog orange jump-suited killer (Walton Goggins), the Yakuza enforcer (Louis Ozawa Changchien), the Soviet (Oleg Taktarov), the savage (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), the nebbish (Topher Grace), and the wrong Mexican (Danny Trejo)–free-falling through a jungle canopy into bush that doesn’t make Cambodia look like Kansas so much as it makes Predators look like Avatar. They’re the game, see–the most dangerous game! And they’ve been dropped on an alien wildlife preserve for the express purpose of being hunted by a trio of the titular Predators. As if that weren’t enough, the film’s weak-ass script takes pains to establish that our “heroes” are also, vocationally, “predators.” Get it? It’s what passes for clever in a film that takes too long to get where we want it to go, diverting itself with one of those dumb nick-of-time animal-shooting sequences that didn’t thrill in Dances with Wolves and doesn’t thrill here (so they do it twice, why not), as well as an extended monologue delivered by a fish-eyed, paunchy Laurence Fishburne that, for all its kitsch pleasure, grinds the movie to a standstill. If it’s not going to be smart, it could at least have the decency to not also be boring.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 XVII – DVD

July 12, 20101980s, 1990s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Television

Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B-
2.1 “The Crawling Eye” (1989), 5.15 “The Beatniks” (1992), 10.10 “The Final Sacrifice” (1998), 11.5 “Blood Waters of Dr. Z” (1999)

by Alex Jackson I know it’s loony, but I watched “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (or “MST3K”) mostly for the movies. Oh, I liked the jokes. There were some episodes I laughed so hard at I had to turn off the television because I couldn’t breathe. But I saw the riffing as a bonus, a way to make a good thing better. I didn’t really watch the show just because it was funny, and its ironic appreciation of “bad movies” didn’t strike me as all that different from the sincere appreciation I had for the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space as a child. In fact, I don’t think it’s all that different from the deeper appreciation I have for those movies today. Mocking them doesn’t necessarily detract from them. Their sensually visceral aspect always shines through. You can easily tell if something is any good, regardless of who is talking over it. Besides, there’s something amiably homey and relaxed about the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” approach. If you like a film, you should be able to enjoy it on your sofa. You should be able to converse about it in the moment. And you should even be able to laugh at it. If you can only love something with reverence, I’m not sure that’s love.

Despicable Me (2010)

July 8, 20102000s, 2010, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Family, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul
directed by Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud

by Ian Pugh It only takes a cursory glance at its cast of characters and the people embodying them to see the kind of trendy thinking that sank Despicable Me. The movie presents us with the headmistress of an orphanage clearly modeled after Edie McClurg–but rather than hire McClurg herself to voice the role, they got Kristen Wiig, who hits her one, monotonous note over and over again. The antagonist proper is a bespectacled, bowl-cut pervert in an orange jumpsuit–but rather than have Eddie Deezen play him in full-blown Mandark mode, they got Jason Segel to shout a couple of dick jokes to the rafters. Finally, in the centre ring is Steve Carell, performing with a bizarre accent lodged somewhere between Boris Badenov and Ivan Drago. While Carell does an admirable job for what he’s given, he’s a little too dry to be a successful voice actor–you can’t help but think that someone like Billy West or Tom Kenny would have done something truly great with the role.

Predator (1987) [Ultimate Hunter Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

July 5, 2010****/****, 1980s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mexico, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image C Sound A Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Bill Duke
screenplay by Jim Thomas & John Thomas
directed by John McTiernan

by Walter Chaw Appearing the same year as Stanley Kubrick’s great, enigmatic, dangerous Full Metal Jacket, the brilliant neo-noir of Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, John Hughes’s devastating Planes, Trains & Automobiles, and what many feel is the quintessential film of the 1980s, Wall Street, John McTiernan’s Predator is, in plain truth, one of the two real quintessential films of the decade, a distinction it shares with Back to the Future–pictures, both, that initially appear to toe the Reagan era’s line of worship at the altar of Eisenhower’s mythological Americana only to reveal that lost wars cannot, in fact, be re-fought and that the Good Old Days were always a little violent and randy. It’s a film, this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle all of oiled musculature and technological fetishism, of unusual kinetic power and intelligence, one that sets out to sate the popular audience’s hunger for such entertainments in the age of the modern blockbuster before leaving its hero battered, broken, frightened, alone. Its kinship is to movies from the period like Aliens and, yes, Rambo: First Blood Part II–films that understand that when Shane rode away at the end, he was probably just looking for a place to die.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

June 30, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire

**/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by David Slade

by Walter Chaw The first and greatest surprise of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (hereafter Eclipse) is that it’s not awful; it’s actually almost good for its first forty-five minutes or so, until the burden of Stephenie Meyer’s genuinely, legendarily poor source material catches up to it. Until such time, there’s some interest blossoming despite itself in the love triangle between mopey Bella (Kristen Stewart), fruity Edward (Robert Pattinson), and swarthy Jacob (Taylor Lautner): a hint of racial discomfort, a soupçon of class struggle, a glimmer of insight given over to the difficulties of teen relationships at a moment in life when Nancy Drew plays like Richard Wagner. Never mind that of the three leads, only Pattinson delivers a (surprisingly, too) good performance–and then only fitfully; never mind that Meyer has taken a giant, steaming dump on centuries of folklore and tradition to construct thin cardboard monsters that serve as bad metaphors for Mormon libido (as told by Judy Blume’s less talented soul sister); never mind that the picture’s entire last two-thirds devolves into constant repetition of the will she/won’t she theme punctuated by its stupid mythology. Really, the way that new director David Slade’s flat-to-the-point-of-garish camera brings out the faintest suggestion of corruption beneath the pancake makeup and baggy eyes of the film’s immortal underwear models–who are, literally, ancient beasts–lends the series the dread that was buried in the first two films under volumes of camp and dreary incompetence. Not to say that Eclipse doesn’t ultimately end as the same old bullshit, but for the first time, if only briefly, the clouds part for a brief, tantalizing twinkle of what it was that all this could have been.

Golden Age Romance on DVD

June 28, 2010****/****, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Billy Wilder, Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953)
[CENTENNIAL COLLECTION]
***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert, Hartley Power
screenplay by Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton
directed by William Wyler

SABRINA (1954)
[CENTENNIAL COLLECTION]
**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, William Holden, Walter Hampden
screenplay by Billy Wilder, Samuel Taylor and Ernest Lehman, based on Taylor’s play
directed by Billy Wilder

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1957)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
½*/**** Image C Sound B
starring Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, Maurice Chevalier, John McGiver
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, based on a novel by Claude Anet
directed by Billy Wilder

NOW, VOYAGER (1942)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D
starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper
screenplay by Casey Robinson, based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty
directed by Irving Rapper

MOGAMBO (1953)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
*/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Clark Gable, Ava Gardiner, Grace Kelly, Donald Sinden
screenplay by John Lee Mahin, based on a play by Wilson Collison
directed by John Ford

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Natalie Wood, Pat Hingle, Audrey Christie, Warren Beatty
screenplay by William Inge
directed by Elia Kazan

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s one of those seminal moments that movies provide the culture with now and again, like the swoop up a little rise to an impossibly fresh John Wayne in Stagecoach, or the intervention of a fortuitous steam vent in The Seven Year Itch, this introduction we have to Audrey Hepburn as she’s whirled around in a barber chair in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday to reveal the pixie-cut heard ’round the world. That she’s adorable is a given–the real issue is whether she’s an actress or just a bundle of inexplicable charisma, a ganglion of celluloid starlight that evaporates under the slightest critical scrutiny. I love Roman Holiday, but I vacillate between indifference and actual dislike of the rest of Hepburn’s films. I don’t find her winsome in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, am irritated by her in Charade, think she’s appallingly twee in Love in the Afternoon. She doesn’t hold her own against Sean Connery in Robin and Marian and gets blown off the screen by Albert Finney, Alan Arkin, and Rex Harrison in Two for the Road, Wait Until Dark, and My Fair Lady, respectively. If you ask me, Audrey isn’t an actress so much as someone you would like to have known and maybe had the opportunity to cuddle, which makes her mega-stardom in the Fifties and Sixties all the more testament to her ineffable appeal. Happening right when Method was rendering personalities like Hepburn déclassé, she was making a career of being terminally anachronistic. It’s Ozzie’s Harriet, sashaying while Rome burns. Instant nostalgia; even when she was introduced for the first time, it must have seemed like ages ago.

Knight and Day (2010) + Grown Ups (2010)

June 23, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Theatrical, Tom Cruise

KNIGHT AND DAY
**/****
starring Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Paul Dano, Peter Sarsgaard
screenplay by Patrick O’Neill
directed by James Mangold

GROWN UPS
½*/****
starring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider
screenplay by Adam Sandler & Fred Wolf
directed by Dennis Dugan

by Ian Pugh Knight and Day isn’t really a movie so much as an amateur screenwriting exercise: the cardinal rule is maintaining momentum, and if that momentum should come at the ironic price of interest or excitement then so be it. It’s true that lots of things happen in this movie–lots of car chases and stunts and rapid-fire dialogue and whiplash changes in scenery–and director James Mangold even has the decency to sometimes hold a shot for more than five seconds. But despite this flurry of activity, you never actually watch or experience the picture–you observe it, like an ant farm or a goldfish bowl, looking for some magical insight that simply isn’t there. Knight and Day is cute, fluffy, feather-light, and utterly, instantly forgettable. Let’s just cut to the chase and say that, should Tom Cruise ever propel himself back into the public consciousness, this ain’t gonna be the way he does it.

Futuramarama

June 21, 20102000s, 2010, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Television

FUTURAMA: BENDER'S BIG SCORE (2007)
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
screenplay by Ken Keeler
directed by Dwayne Carey-Hill

FUTURAMA: THE BEAST WITH A BILLION BACKS (2008)
**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
screenplay by Eric Kaplan
directed by Peter Avanzino

FUTURAMA: BENDER'S GAME (2008)
*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
screenplay by Eric Horsted (parts one and two), Michael Rowe & Eric Kaplan (part three), David X. Cohen & Patric M. Verrone (part four)
directed by Dwayne Carey-Hill

FUTURAMA: INTO THE WILD GREEN YONDER (2009)
*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
screenplay by Ken Keeler
directed by Peter Avanzino

by Ian Pugh While Matt Groening with "The Simpsons" had an incalculable effect on how I perceived movies, television, and just about everything else in life, truth be told I probably love his "Futurama" more. What can I say other than that it came at the right time in my life–it was my "Star Trek", my "Buffy", my "Doctor Who": the first sci-fi property to capture my heart, and the avatar into which I poured all my nerdy obsessions. I appreciated its ability to strike a perfect balance of comedy and characterization that legitimized its silliest scenarios. Who would have guessed that the search for a long-lost seven-leaf clover could turn into a touching tribute to brotherly love? Subplots often wore thin and jokes fell flat, but looking back, there isn't a single half-hour in its initial 72-episode run that can be considered an outright failure. Unfortunately, the show never got a chance to shine, placed at a ridiculous timeslot on Fox–Sunday at 7PM, where it was certain to be either pre-empted or overshadowed by Sunday Night Football (jocks vs. nerds!)–and thus doomed to an inevitably short life. The final episode of the fourth season promised that "Futurama" would "see you on some other channel," but the initial salvation came from Fox's home-entertainment division: The producers were offered the chance to do a direct-to-video movie, which was eventually negotiated up to four movies, made and released over a span of three years. Of course, the success of these paved the way for a sixth season due to air on Comedy Central beginning this week, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Easy Rider (1969) [40th Anniversary] – Blu-ray Disc

June 15, 2010****/****, 1960s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Jack Nicholson, Road Movie

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Luke Askew
screenplay by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern
directed by Dennis Hopper

FFC Must-Own by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s not easy to mark the beginning of the Sixties as an idea. Me, personally, as it’s the way I’m wired, I like to use as the starting gun the trilogy of dysfunctional pictures–Psycho, Eyes Without a Face, Peeping Tom–that literally inaugurate the decade, but I’d also accept that 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis was enough for many of the nearly-disaffected to become completely what-the-fuck disaffected. And if you go with that, then what happens at the end of 1963 with the assassination of JFK is that Zapruder places film as the end-all of Truth. A lot changed with those 26.6 seconds of film–or, should we say, a lot changed back, to a period where the newsreel, no matter how doctored or fabricated, was the primary mass means of information-gathering before television began to encroach on it. A lot of ink’s been spilled about the extent to which movies in the mid-to-late-Fifties tried to outdo the boob-tube with grand Technicolor visions; comparatively little has been written about Zapruder’s 486 colour frames, which stole the thunder of television’s hold on vérité–remember, in 1960, Hitch wanted to shoot Psycho in a televisual style for its implicit realism–as elegantly as a shell fired from a mail-order Carcano. TV achieves a stalemate by broadcasting Vietnam during the dinner hour, yet it doesn’t win outright until the ’90s when it embraces shakycam and film unveils itself once and for all as a magician’s medium: smoke, mirrors, Forrest telling LBJ he needs to piss, and the Titanic going down again to the tune of a tween tearjerker.

Alice in Wonderland (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 14, 20102000s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Italy, Japan, Mystery, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Mia Wasikowska
screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw A diary of missed opportunities but not the disaster it could have been, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland reminds a great deal of Walter Murch’s Return to Oz in that both are closer in spirit to the respective dark of their inspirations while still falling tantalizingly shy of the beguiling murk of their headwaters. (In terms of adaptations, No Country for Old Men holds the gold standard for cinema that understands its source well enough to use it in its own sentence.) It’ll be compared of course to the Disney animated classic that mistook Lewis Carroll’s misanthropy-soaked surrealism for whimsy–a comparison Burton tries to sidestep by incorporating more elements (the Bandersnatch, the Jabberwocky, the Jub-Jub Bird, snickersnack) from the largely-ignored second book, Alice Through the Looking Glass, but one that’ll hound a film featuring plucked-out eyeballs and a castle moat traversed by skipping across severed heads.

The A-Team (2010)

June 10, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson
screenplay by Joe Carnahan & Brian Bloom and Skip Woods
directed by Joe Carnahan

by Walter Chaw Not the full-on prison rape its preview promises, Joe Carnahan’s is-what-it-is The A-Team is a sometimes-affable acceptance that the best this film will possibly be, given that it has not one spark of inspiration in its creation, is an expensive knock-off of a kitschy cultural artifact. It doesn’t quite go the route of surreal post-modernism like the The Brady Bunch movies, but neither does it try to play it Leave it to Beaver straight, instead walking a middle road through occasional flashes of self-awareness amid much stupid action. Credit where credit’s due that, prior to its bombastic finale, disgraced Col. Hannibal Smith (a miscast Liam Neeson) mutters, “Overkill is greatly underrated,” despite that overkill in bad movies like this is neither overrated nor unexpected. I guess I just appreciate the opportunity to chortle smugly. Rather, The A-Team is a Michael Bay joint without the overt racism and dangerous misogyny–a picture for nostalgic and/or stupid people that doesn’t also make them bellicose and agitated. At the least, it holds the honoured distinction of being the first movie I’ve ever seen that uses a quote from Gandhi to shake a career assassin out of his newly acquired distaste for violence. That, my friend, takes a certain level of genius and chutzpah.

War of the Worlds (2005) – Blu-ray Disc

May 31, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Tom Cruise

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. A lot like Minority Report, the first 90% of War of the Worlds is among the best movies of the year, and the last 10% is among the worst. Spielberg is the only one who can ruin his films and he does it over and over again because he’s Peter Pan in a Captain Hook world. There has never been a more gifted visual storyteller than Steven Spielberg; in the five minutes of shorthand that opens his War of the Worlds, he creates three characters we care about, a world that we recognize, and a real hope that this time, this one time, he’ll be courageous enough to follow a narrative through to its logical end instead of the one he thinks will least disturb his audience. His audience being one that he underestimates with such stunning regularity that it can be said with confidence at this point that he’s not really underestimating anybody–that he knows for whom he’s making movies, posterity be damned. War of the Worlds is a work of obvious genius that is about nothing, which is an amazing and disheartening thing to say because so much of the picture is composed of jaw-dropping–I mean it, it’s astonishing–Holocaust tableaux mixed with 9/11 imagery.

Shrek Forever After (2010)

May 20, 20102000s, 2010, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
screenplay by Josh Klausner & Darren Lemke
directed by Mike Mitchell

by Ian Pugh Because Shrek the Third tied things up pretty conclusively, what they’re probably going to tell you is that Shrek Forever After (hereafter Shrek 4) is more of an epilogue than a sequel. What they won’t tell you is that this “epilogue,” co-written by the screenwriter of Date Night, is more of a toy than a feature film. But your money’s just as green as it ever was. Now settled into a monotonous family life, Shrek (voice of Mike Myers) strikes a deal with Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn) for the chance to live one more day as a bachelor/terrifying ogre. Unfortunately, said deal transports Shrek into an alternate reality in which he never rescued Fiona (Cameron Diaz) from the dragon’s lair, freeing Rumpelstiltskin to conquer the kingdom of Far Far Away. And despite much talk of being grateful for what you have, that’s all there is to it, really. Sure, it’s better than Shrek the Third, but lots of things are better than Shrek the Third–and even then, Shrek 4 is only an improvement in the sense that it isn’t obsessed with scatological humour…and that it doesn’t leave an especially terrible aftertaste. It doesn’t leave the slightest impression at all, in fact. It’s not merely a product, it wants you to see it as a product: It’s a Wonderful Life as told by Mr. Potter. Oh, and it’s in 3-D. I mean, of course it is.

Avatar (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD

May 17, 20102000s, 2009, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Sam Worthington, Zoë Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver
written and directed by James Cameron

by Walter Chaw A morally, historically, socially, and politically childish amalgam of Pocahontas and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, Avatar finds James Cameron–still the Cameron of Titanic (or the uncomfortably simpering T2, if we’re honest with ourselves) rather than the Cameron of Aliens and The Terminator–trying his hand at being Kevin Costner: powerful, dim, and only relevant for a tiny window of time he doesn’t realize has already closed. The more simple-minded liberal proselytizing he perpetrates like Avatar, the farther away he gets from the B-movie muscularity that indicated his early career. It’s a bad thing, believe me, that the first set of movies people think to compare your latest to is first George Lucas’s ridiculous prequel trilogy–then Dances with Wolves.

Lost: The Complete Fourth Season (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

May 17, 20102000s, 2008, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
"The Beginning of the End," "Confirmed Dead," "The Economist," "Eggtown," "The Constant," "The Other Woman," "Ji Yeon," "Meet Kevin Johnson," "The Shape of Things to Come," "Something Nice Back Home," "Cabin Fever," "There's No Place Like Home: Part 1," "There's No Place Like Home: Part 2"

by Walter Chaw Four years into its run, "Lost" appears to have hit something of a stride–at least it does until it falls completely off the rails, maybe for good. Blame the most recent Writer's Strike, which happened in the middle of this truncated season, or better yet, blame the fact that the series can't seem to leave well enough alone. It has a chance to be transcendent, see, and resigns itself to being ordinary. The best episode of the run so far happens early in the season with episode 4.5, "The Constant." A clear homage to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, it replaces Billy Pilgrim with our Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), who becomes "unstuck" in time and struggles during the course of things to find a "constant" with which to anchor his consciousness in one fixed timeline. Ingeniously executed and manufacturing the first real suspense "Lost" has managed since possibly the first episode of the first season (or since the first hatch was opened), "The Constant" suggests that there are separate Oceanic Flight 815s, that reality is slippery, and that there might be a struggle somewhere, between some things, for control over a dominant reality. "The Constant" marks the moment I became a "Lost" fan. And then, in the very next episode, "The Other Woman," everything goes to shit: "Lost" scrambles to demystify all these philosophies in favour of a vast conspiracy masterminded by an evil billionaire who, apparently, has filled a fake plane with exhumed corpses and planted it in the ocean so as to prevent his daughter Penelope–named for Odysseus's wife, right?–from reuniting with a boy of whom he doesn't approve. The problem is mainly that after three-and-a-half years of this garbage, anything the creators could come up with in terms of an Answer would not be equal to the investment the show's loyal viewers have already made in it.

Robin Hood (2010)

May 14, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, William Hurt, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Brian Helgeland
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw Predictably, achingly, perfectly okay, Ridley Scott into his dotage has produced a string of absolutely unsurprising, overlong, uninspiring-if-occasionally-visually-striking films, of which Robin Hood is only the latest. An attempt to “reboot” the Robin Hood legend with a “prequel” that shows how a middle-aged Robin (Russell Crowe) meets his Merry Mystery, Alaska Men, woos freshly-widowed “maid” Marion (Cate Blanchett), sort of composes the “Declaration of Independence,” directly influences–it’s implied–the signing of the Magna Carta (in the completion of which the film’s real hero, William Marshal (William Hurt), was instrumental) not long after the events of the movie, and enters into a life of sylvan banditry at the prodding injustice of ineffectual King John (Oscar Isaac, doing his best Russell Brand). It also suggests that Marion is a Maid of Orléans figure who rides into battle alongside the menfolk to repulse an inexplicable French invasion shot in such a way as to suggest a Gallic D-Day landing (or an attack on Northern England by the New Orleans Saints)^*–marking the second time Blanchett’s done this exact scene after the admittedly-worse Elizabeth: The Golden Age. All of which is portrayed in so exacting and expository a way in that inimitably stately Ridley Scott style that the picture’s bumfuddling 140-minute runtime feels like a couple of torturous days spent at a Renaissance Fair. Maybe it’s the complete lack of stakes that hamstrings the production–the surety that no compelling issues will be broached, despite all the posturing about Robin Hood being Thoreau over six centuries before Thoreau (or Thomas Jefferson five centuries before Jefferson) in a deeply stupid town-centre meeting that more closely resembles the Endor council in Return of the Jedi than it does the requisite stirring centrepiece monologue in this prestige epic lost without an awards season.

The Losers (2010) + The Back-up Plan (2010)

April 22, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

THE LOSERS
*½/****
starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoë Saldana, Chris Evans, Jason Patric
screenplay by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt, based on the comic book series by Andy Diggle and Jock
directed by Sylvain White

THE BACK-UP PLAN
½*/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Alex O’Loughlin, Eric Christian Olsen, Linda Lavin
screenplay by Kate Angelo
directed by Alan Poul

by Ian Pugh We’ve got a long summer ahead of us, full of remakes and spoofs straight out of the ’80s, and The Losers celebrates its imminent arrival by taking a dump on the action flicks of the era. Blinkered hostility is as much a mood-killer as uncritical nostalgia, and The Losers never misses an opportunity to remind you that its characters have one-note personalities defined by terse nicknames. The film begins, as it must, in the Bolivian jungle, where the titular team of U.S. soldiers (led by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is forced to go underground after an errant missile–intended for them–kills twenty-five Bolivian children they’d just saved from an evil drug lord. At first glance, that opening raid points to a toned-down Predator reference, but it’s really just a paint-by-numbers scenario meant to demonstrate how pretty much everything from that decade is stilted, corny, and hopelessly dated. So it goes for the rest of the film–how else to explain a brief chase sequence set to “Don’t Stop Believin'”? It’s not merely junk; it’s self-conscious, wilfully misinterpretive junk.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Sci-Fi Adventures – DVD

April 19, 20101950s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK

THEM! (1954)
***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness
screenplay by Ted Sherdeman
directed by Gordon Douglas

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, Kenneth Tobey
screenplay by Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger, suggested by the story “The Fog Horn” by Ray Bradbury
directed by Eugène Lourié

WORLD WITHOUT END (1956)
**½/**** Image A Sound B-
starring Hugh Marlowe, Nancy Gates, Rod Taylor
written and directed by Edwards Bernds

SATELLITE IN THE SKY (1956)
*/**** Image C Sound B
starring Kieron Moore, Lois Maxwell, Donald Wolfit
screenplay by John Mather, J.T. McIntosh and Edith Dell
directed by Paul Dickson

tcmscifithem-1733871 by Jefferson Robbins We’re all mutants now. Those of us who weren’t literally irradiated by the Atomic Age still carry its glowing cultural DNA. As we’ve built better ways to destroy ourselves, we’ve also spurred the creators of our science-fiction to imagine life in newer Waste Lands. Their work assumes that no matter how we survive each new apocalypse, our circumstances will be quite changed. The upshot of our atom-splitting folly would be not sloughed skin or violent cancer but marvels and wonders, which would then seek our destruction on their own terms.

Minority Report (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

April 19, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller, Tom Cruise

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, based on the short story by Philip K. Dick
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Despite a remarkable first hour, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report washes out as an overlong retread of tired thriller/mystery elements, capped by the director’s trademark propensity for moralizing epilogues. It suffers from mainstream cinema’s squeamishness in regards to true ambiguity of character and character motivation, and for all its claims to a faithful reproduction of Philip K. Dick’s dark dystopian future, the picture is ultimately about Spielberg’s itch for restoration of order rather than Dick’s entropic dissolution of it. Distracting and unforgivable plot holes yaw beneath the narrative, making it clear that Minority Report is just another failed attempt by Spielberg to tell an adult tale. Here is an attractively packaged summer bonbon with an essentially hollow, nutritionally empty centre.

The Lord of the Rings (1978) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

April 15, 20101970s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, Musical, Spain, UK

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
**½/****
DVD – Image C Sound C-
BD – Image C+ Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle, based on The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Ralph Bakshi

by Walter Chaw An adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Rings” books that began with The Fellowship of the Ring and ended when the money ran out in the middle of The Two Towers, Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated feature The Lord of the Rings is unintentionally disturbing, occasionally brilliant, and fatally uneven. The film is faithful to the main movements of Tolkien’s novels but told in the kind of narrative shorthand that favours truncation over summary. Its rotoscoping of actors combines uneasily with traditional modes of animation: they mix into an abstract soup of contradictory images that destroys our suspension of disbelief.