Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2009, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, War

****/****
starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Mélanie Laurent
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw There are two stars in Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino and Christoph Waltz), the one to be expected, the other a shoo-in for Oscar consideration in what’s easily the most mesmerizing, commanding performance I’ve seen in any film this year. The opening sequence, in which Waltz’s SS Col. Hans Landa interrogates a French dairy farmer as to the whereabouts of a Jewish family that’s gone missing, is, how to say this, perfect, but unlike the other perfect sequences of 2009 (the prologue of Up, the main titles of Watchmen), Inglourious Basterds matches this exceptional moment with another as Landa has a little confection with a rare survivor of his attentions, Shosanna (a stunning Mélanie Laurent); then another as German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) does her best to cover for her three suspicious pals in an underground speakeasy; then another with Landa again as he asks von Hammersmark to put her foot in his lap. At first glance two separate films that only fit together roughly, if at all, it becomes clear during Inglourious Basterds‘ final chapter, as the ghostly image of a beautiful woman cackles in the smoke above a burning auditorium (“This is the face of Jewish vengeance!”), that this is Tarantino no longer making something new and strange out of his obsessive movie-love, but something dangerous and risky about the ethics of vengeance and the shifting ground beneath moral quagmires we thought we’d put to bed. What better conflict than the last popular war to stage a conversation about whether or not the only reason the winners weren’t held accountable for their atrocities is that they were the winners.

Sunshine Cleaning (2009); The Last House on the Left (2009); Race to Witch Mountain (2009)|Race to Witch Mountain – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Sunshine Cleaning (2009); The Last House on the Left (2009); Race to Witch Mountain (2009)|Race to Witch Mountain – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2000s, 2009, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Wes Craven

SUNSHINE CLEANING
**½/****
starring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Alan Arkin, Jason Spevack
screenplay by Megan Holley
directed by Christine Jeffs

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT
**½/****
starring Garret Dillahunt, Sara Paxton, Monica Potter, Tony Goldwyn
screenplay by Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth, based on the motion picture written and directed by Wes Craven
directed by Dennis Iliadis

RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Dwayne Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, Carla Gugino, Ciarán Hinds
screenplay by Matt Lopez and Mark Bomback, based on the book Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander Key
directed by Andy Fickman

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Norah (Emily Blunt) is a sort of overripe Juno MacGuff: older but no wiser, quick-witted but shiftless. As she sticks her hand underneath a railroad track, pulling it out just before a train passes, the question is clear: why is she here, doing something so unbelievably stupid, when she should be out trying to get a life? Turns out this game of chicken reminds her of the day she and her sister Rose (Amy Adams) discovered that their mother committed suicide. Christine Jeffs’s Sunshine Cleaning feels like a response to a recent spate of smarmy little indie films in the sense that it bothers to explore the self-aware idiosyncrasies typically taken for granted, and it comes to the startling conclusion that perhaps these “personality quirks” aren’t the building blocks of individualism, but rather signposts for unresolved trauma and budding mental illness. (Given how contradictory this film is to the Little Miss Sunshine mentality (and Alan Arkin’s presence makes the comparison inevitable), can we assume that its title is a double entendre?) You may laugh when Rose’s son Oscar (Jason Spevack) is kicked out of school for licking his teacher’s leg, or when her father Joe (Arkin) hustles unsuspecting business owners with one get-rich-quick scheme after another, yet the lingering question is whether or not they’d engage in “funny” behaviour if not for their inherited anguish. “It’s tough raising a kid by yourself, huh?” Joe tells Rose after she asks him to babysit at an inconvenient time. “Try two.” The attempt to mine humour from these tragic aftermaths doesn’t make Sunshine Cleaning a morbid film, exactly–but it definitely makes for a haunted one.

G-Force (2009)

Posted in2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Disney, Family, Nicolas Cage, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**/****
starring Bill Nighy, Will Arnett, Zach Galifianakis, Kelli Garner
screenplay by The Wibberleys and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio and Tim Firth
directed by Hoyt Yeatman

by Ian Pugh It’s no small wonder, I suppose, that Disney’s 3-D contraption G-Force isn’t nearly as bad as it could–and by all rights should–be. Certainly, there are people at the Mouse House still convinced that an overload of genre clichés (here the conventions of the spy movie) are made instantly clever when applied to talking, farting animals (here guinea pigs), and that the company’s morality factory hasn’t already exhausted the virtues of makeshift families and believing in yourself. But encoded in the formula this time around is an odd, unspoken thesis about facing the hitherto-ignored consequences of cruelty towards those who can’t defend themselves. Most intriguing to that end, the big-name actors roped into lending their voices to this mess are appropriately cast, their live-action personae transferred to a sticky CGI concoction of animal nature and human spite. Steve Buscemi cuts loose as an insane, sadistic hamster (his paranoid tendencies–he jealously guards his territory while mumbling to himself–born of “the psych ward at UCLA”), for instance, while Nicolas Cage, as an orphaned, star-nosed mole named “Speckles,” improbably gives his best performance in years. Utilizing his weirdo inflections from Peggy Sue Got Married, Cage manages to channel his familiar space-case into an unlikely outlet and pump it with quiet desperation–dare I say pathos–without even the smallest hint of the self-parody that’s plagued him of late. More than what the film deserves? Most definitely, although the high points of G-Force suggest that, at some stage of production, in some alternate universe, it may have actually deserved it.

The Ruins (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

The Ruins (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore, Laura Ramsey
screenplay by Scott Smith, based on his novel
directed by Carter Smith

by Walter Chaw Based on a novel by the guy who wrote A Simple Plan and directed by first-timer Carter Smith, The Ruins was lost in the shuffle of a seeming barrage of beautiful-tourists-getting-slaughtered splatter flicks, which may prove to be one of the many genre legacies of the ugly-American, difference-abhorrent Bush Jr. administration. (Not to mention that the flick could easily be read as an eco-horror picture. Lots of legacies, that W., all of them fertile for the horror genre.) What distinguishes it from the Hostels and the Turistas‘ and Club Dreads is a seriousness in its execution and a feeling that there’s nothing happening in the film that is a result of stupidity or even caprice–that the gauntlet our gorgeous heroes go through is only the best example of the futility of our evolution since The Blair Witch Project. It’s a fable of that Sophoclean idea that knowledge brings no profit to the wise, and though it might be a reach, it feels in this time and place like a story about how knowing that we’re going to get blown up by an angry young man over a large body of water doesn’t do a thing to prevent it from occurring. It’s a film that talks about hopelessness and, like in a powerful moment from Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the youth of its cast suddenly bespeaks a squeezing-off of potential rather than just tits-and-ass exploitation. Closer to the point, the titillation you feel during the prologue of our cast bathing on a Mexican beach before embarking on their bloody, intimate deaths is brutally punished. The destruction of beauty in The Ruins (the title finally makes sense) becomes allegory for a collective fear of suffering: just as porn works on some level as a fantasy of “if she’ll do that, she’ll do me,” The Ruins works on the level of, If it could happen to these kids, smart and beautiful, then it sure as shit is going to happen to me.

Chick Flick Politick – DVDs + Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2009, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, ZERO STARS

BRIDE WARS (2009)
ZERO STARS/**** Image N/A Sound C Extras F
starring Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway, Kristen Johnston, Candice Bergen
screenplay by Greg DePaul and Casey Wilson & June Diane Raphael
directed by Gary Winick

CATCH AND RELEASE (2007)
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jennifer Garner, Timothy Olyphant, Kevin Smith, Juliette Lewis
written and directed by Susannah Grant

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS (2008)
[JACKPOT EDITION]
***/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras B+
starring Cameron Diaz, Ashton Kutcher, Rob Corddry, Dennis Miller
screenplay by Dana Fox
directed by Tom Vaughan

27 DRESSES (2008)
[WIDESCREEN EDITION]
**/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras B+
starring Katherine Heigl, James Marsden, Malin Akerman, Edward Burns
screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna
directed by Anne Fletcher

ENCHANTED (2007)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, Susan Sarandon
screenplay by Bill Kelly
directed by Kevin Lima

Bridewars

by Walter Chaw I’m not kidding: Bride Wars is reptilian, hateful stuff, biologically engineered to disrespect–with maximum efficiency–the precise demographic to which it targets itself. It’s like an antibody to the middle-class, medium-attractive girl by virtue of encouraging her to associate herself with upper-middle-class, gorgeous avatars and, through that agency, act in ways completely hostile towards common sense and decency. It’s an epidemic of bad taste: there’s no other way to read the suggestion that size-zero Kate Hudson is a fat, disgusting swine for gaining five pounds pounding chocolate and cookies for a couple of weeks, is there? What’s harder to explain is a scene in the middle where rivals/best friends Liv (Hudson) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) do a slutty dance-off in a strip-club for the crown of “sexiest bride.” Here’s the weird part: one of them actually cares when the other one wins. In the middle of a movie that can only hope to attract women as its audience, here’s a scenario that physically exploits women as opposed to just emotionally or situationally (as is more to be expected). It’s like a soul kiss and a reach-around between Vin Diesel and Paul Walker to cap off a nice street race. But does it have the same chilling effect on its would-be audience, or does it instead feed into the electric lesbian tension that serves as the motor for all these “Sex and the City” knock-offs? Never mind, it’s not important. What is somewhat important is that Gary Winick, the heir-apparent to Garry Marshall’s chick-flick throne, be discouraged from ever directing another movie.

The Deep (1977) – Blu-ray Disc

The Deep (1977) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2009, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring Robert Shaw, Jacqueline Bisset, Nick Nolte, Eli Wallach
screenplay by Peter Benchley and Tracy Keenan Wynn, based on Benchley’s novel
directed by Peter Yates

by Bryant Frazer English cinematographer Christopher Challis got his start working on newsreels and travelogues before getting a gig with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s production company, The Archers. There, he worked on a team with the great Jack Cardiff before serving as the DP on The Tales of Hoffmann, a lush Technicolor envisioning of the Jacques Offenbach opera. While Challis isn’t among the best-known directors of photography, his technical facility kept him in demand for the next 40 years. He shot films for Stanley Donen, Carol Reed, and Blake Edwards, but there may have been no movie where his sense of colour and light was more critical than on The Deep. Rushed into production at Columbia Pictures to capitalize on the success of Jaws, another seafaring adventure based on a Peter Benchley novel, The Deep has a humdrum story, generally uncommitted performances, and a phoney Moray eel (nicknamed “Percy” on set) that gives the much-maligned mechanical shark “Bruce” from Jaws a run for its money in the department of unconvincing animal attacks. Yet the quality of the imagery is something else.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009)

Posted in2000s, 2009, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, UK

*/****
screenplay by Michael Berg, Peter Ackerman, Yoni Brenner
directed by Carlos Saldanha

by Walter Chaw It’s not entirely accurate to say that I’ve hated the Ice Age movies. They’re not, after all, the Land Before Time series, the post-classic Disney output just prior to the Pixar revolution, or, heaven forefend, the Shrek trilogy. No, better to say that the Ice Age franchise is at worst merely the quintessence of inconsequence: they’re films so bereft of wit and vigour that their biggest crime isn’t the constant shit and hit routines, nor the predictable parade of unearned sentimentality, but rather that they’re as inert as the right side of the Periodic Table. The message in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (hereafter Ice Age 3)–that no matter what our heroes look like on the outside (two mammoths, two opossums, a giant sloth, a sabre-toothed tiger), on the inside, they’re members of one tribe–is the same as in the first two instalments, and by this time, its constant mantric recitation begins to take on the air of unaware self-parody. Of course, despite its incessant championing of a non-traditional family unit, like Shrek, it still has a mammoth (Manny (voiced by Ray Romano)) marry a mammoth (Ellie (Queen Latifah)), leaving cross-species miscegenation, unlike the otherwise execrable Madagascar sequel, to the actors voicing them. What I wouldn’t give for the same premise in live-action with Romano married to Latifah, the latter morbidly knocked-up and royally pissed-off.

Spaceballs (1987) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Spaceballs (1987) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2009, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Satire, Sci-Fi

**/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Mel Brooks, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Bill Pullman
screenplay by Mel Brooks & Thomas Meehan & Ronny Graham
directed by Mel Brooks

by Bill Chambers Neither the audacity of Mel Brooks’s perpetually relevant Blazing Saddles nor the movie-love that manifested itself in his uncanny genre parodies Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety inhabit Brooks’s Spaceballs, a spoof tailored to the undiscriminating palate of preteens and people who can’t resist a joke at the expense of Star Wars hobbyists. It is, in other words, Brooks’s very own Return of the Jedi, and although it’s being reissued in a Collector’s Edition DVD to capitalize on the release of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, it’s not really in a position to take the piss out of the new Star Wars trilogy. In fact, the most interesting thing about Spaceballs circa 2005 is that what was once spectacularly stale–by the time it came out, the first wave of Star Wars mania had passed–now elicits nostalgia for a Star Wars saga that was so classical and (visually / narratively / allegorically) uncluttered as to lend itself to burlesque. Because nothing in the current “episodes” has a prayer of becoming an institution, a contemporary Spaceballs would just be a succession of insults–you can’t mock Jar Jar Binks with any affection.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Posted in2000s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Michael Bay, Jordan, Revenge, Spielberg, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro
screenplay by Ehren Kruger & Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw The worst summer in recent memory continues as Michael Bay brings his slow push-ins and Lazy Susan dolly shots back to the cineplex with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (hereafter Transformers 2), the ugliest, most hateful, most simple-minded and incomprehensible assault on art and decency since the last Michael Bay movie. It’s bad (that goes without saying), and it’s possible that even its fans will have the brute sense to recognize that it’s bad–but it’s bad in such a way that defies easy description. It’s so bad, it’s exasperating. The action, as you’d expect, is impossible to follow, with long stretches cascading in on one another without the slightest notion of who’s winning, where, and to what end. But that’s not why it’s bad. It suggests that the evil robots have perfected Terminator technology in the manufacture of a gorgeous slut-bot (Isabel Lucas), who, before trying to kill the returning Sam (Shia LaBeouf) with her go-go-gadget tongue, is humiliated by having heroic Autobot Bumblebee money-shot robot semen all over her face. But that’s not why it’s bad, either. Ridiculously poor filmmaking and Bay’s wearying misogyny aren’t “bad,” per se, so much as they’re the tools of his auteur canon, of his absolute gold-standard grasp of what it is that prepubescent boys are into and his desire to, as fast as he can, create undercover hardcore porn to gratify those desires. What else to make of the weird girl issues–the entire co-ed Michael Bay U campus populated with hot bimbo chattel, Bay’s camera leering obligingly? It’s tough to make someone feel sorry for Megan Fox, yet the extent to which she’s objectified in this flick has you looking for track marks, smeared mascara, and other evidence of bus-stop porn-star exploitation.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) [2-Disc DVD Collector’s Set – Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1960s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, DVD, Italy, Spain, West Germany, Western

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (Extended English-language Version)
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach, Aldo Giuffrè
screenplay by Age & Scarpelli & Luciano Vincenzoni & Sergio Leone
directed by Sergio Leone

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Perhaps it had been too long between screenings, or perhaps my mind had been playing tricks on me, but my most recent viewing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly wasn’t as good as the others. There was still much to admire: the wild structure, which doesn’t properly introduce its MacGuffin until about half an hour in; the hilariously cavalier attitude towards human decency; the raw-meat attitude towards bodies and faces; and, of course, the idea of Eli Wallach playing a Mexican, which is always appealing. But all of this seems somehow only fitfully successful now, the film’s conceptual high points surrounded by the same arid desert that nearly finishes off two out of three of the protagonists. Perhaps I should chalk it up to the distance of memory–even downgraded, the experience has something bizarre for just about everybody, whether their memories will be kind to it or not.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) [Extended Version] – Blu-ray Disc + Waterworld (1995) [2-Disc Extended Edition] – DVD

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) [Extended Version] – Blu-ray Disc + Waterworld (1995) [2-Disc Extended Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES
½*/**** Image C Sound B Extras B
starring Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
screenplay by Pen Densham & John Watson
directed by Kevin Reynolds

WATERWORLD
***/**** Image B Sound B
starring Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tina Majorino
screenplay by Peter Rader and David Twohy
directed by Kevin Reynolds

by Walter Chaw In the “careful what you wish for” sweepstakes, here’s Kevin Costner, fresh off an Oscar victory for his naïve idyll Dances with Wolves, spending his hard-won Hollywood currency indulging best buddy Kevin Reynolds in a trilogy of pictures (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Rapa Nui, Waterworld) he produced for the express purpose of giving Reynolds more than enough rope. If you’re in the sport of charting the positively Greek decline of the late-’80s box-office king, mark 1991 as Exhibit A, as his sad attempt at an English accent for Robin of Loxley was notoriously overdubbed in post-production after being deemed the stuff of legend in initial cuts. Aside from providing schadenfreudians endless fodder, it was the first real evidence that the Golden Boy’s tragic flaw was the belief that his charm was based on something other than Gary Cooper’s mantle of Everybody’s All-American Doofus.

The Fall (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

The Fall (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, India, South Africa

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Lee Pace, Justine Waddell, Catinca Untaru
screenplay by Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis & Tarsem
directed by Tarsem

by Walter Chaw Beware the film that positions itself as being told from the perspective of a child, because unless you’re a child or that specific child’s parent, you’re eventually going to wish that someone would slap the kid in question. Tarsem’s labour of love The Fall, his unlikely follow-up to his serial killer movie as shot by Salvador Dali-cum-Caspar David Friedrich The Cell, is such a film, told from a child’s perspective–and rather than as an artistic decision, it plays as a plea for leniency. It’s a fairytale about a little girl’s emergence into maturity… No, it’s a fairytale about the delicacy of life… No, it’s not anything much of anything. By touching on a suicidal movie star’s convalescence after an impressively shot accident on a film set (involving a horse, Tarsem scholars take note), the picture seems to want to access some discussion concerning artificiality and its intrusion into reality–something that would make sense if The Fall positioned itself as a dyad with The Cell (which was, after all, only about film as a dream medium that acts as the brain does), but it doesn’t really do that, either. All it does, in fact, is provide Tarsem an excuse to indulge his prurience and affection for elaborate set-pieces awash in saturated colours and tableaux that often border on the grotesque. Freed of the necessity to be coherent, freed of much understanding of Bruno Bettelheim or Jung or Freud, it’s a fairytale without purpose and pretentious to boot, reminding more than a little of the also-pretty, also-empty Neil Gaiman/Dave McKean collaboration Mirrormask. It’s too bad, really, as there are images in here genuinely affecting for their visual splendour. I wonder if it’s unforgivable heresy to say The Cell is badly underestimated and due for revisionism while The Fall, despite its relative obscurity (no J-Lo anywhere in sight), is badly overestimated.

Land of the Lost (2009) + The Hangover (2009)

Posted in2000s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

LAND OF THE LOST
½*/****
starring Will Ferrell, Anna Friel, Danny McBride, Jorma Taccone
screenplay by Chris Henchy & Dennis McNicholas, based on the television series by Sid & Marty Krofft
directed by Brad Silberling

THE HANGOVER
**/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Jeffrey Tambor
screenplay by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore
directed by Todd Phillips

by Ian Pugh I’d estimate there are around a hundred reasons why Brad Silberling’s big-screen adaptation of Sid & Marty Krofft’s “Land of the Lost” is awful, but none of them are more infuriating than the fact that it panders to its core hipster audience by being a great big nostalgic turd with an ironic bow on top. Have you watched the series recently and cracked self-satisfied jokes about how drugs were its primary influence? If so, then this film is for you. Do you like movies that try as hard as possible to resemble shitty episodic television from yesteryear? Then you’ve probably seen Land of the Lost twice already and rationalized it as something that won’t win awards but at least manages to pass the time. That’s certainly the mentality driving this unfortunate theme-park ride: the film would prefer that you look to the old series’ theme song to fill in the necessary plot details, jamming the lyrics of same into its dialogue with a heavy-handed wink. Rick (Will Ferrell), Will (Danny McBride), and Holly (Anna Friel) are on “a routine expedition,” and despite much ensuing sound and fury, that’s all you need to know. But hey, dude, do you remember the Sleestaks? ‘Cause this film totally remembers them, too–and while they’ve been injected with some CGI gloss, the costumes are just crappy enough to keep your childhood memories intact! It’s worth noting that this is the second film in as many weeks to use an old-school Universal logo in its opening credits–but unlike Drag Me to Hell, Land of the Lost has nothing to distinguish it from what came before, no special insight into why the TV show that inspired it is a cultural touchstone. Frankly, it’s impossible to see how any of it could be considered an improvement on renting the original series and jerking off.

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2009, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

2010
*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras F
starring Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Helen Mirren, Bob Balaban
screenplay by Peter Hyams, based on the novel 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke
directed by Peter Hyams

by Walter Chaw As we slide ever closer to the reality of artificial intelligence, the question of functional equivalence becomes ever more pressing to our sense of ourselves. It's because of this, I think, that Peter Hyams's 2010 seems more pertinent now than it necessarily did in 1984. I watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time just a few months before I saw 2010 (this would be the summer of '84; I was twelve years old), and to that pre-teen me, 2010 gave the impression in most ways of being the better film. It appeals to the pragmatist instead of the philosopher, to the childish belief that there is nothing without an explanation under the sun and that should we encounter an alien intelligence, it will inevitably have the same desires and motivations we do. My first viewing of 2001 left me feeling angry and bored–the moments that tickled at something greater weren't moments I was able to isolate and examine (I wouldn't learn the term mysterium tremens until at least a decade later)–and in a sense 2010 allowed me to appreciate the Kubrick picture as a linear narrative. Which is, after all, not the point, and perhaps even ultimately destructive of 2001. It's easy to understand benevolence (whether it's from an alien "creator" to us, its possible creations, or from us to our machine creations), because benevolence is within the human capacity to comprehend. It's much harder to understand an astronaut waking up in a hotel room after a trip down the rabbit hole and then coming back to Earth as a glowing fetus.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009) – Blu-ray Disc + Bedtime Stories (2008) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009) – Blu-ray Disc + Bedtime Stories (2008) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-Fi, ZERO STARS

PAUL BLART: MALL COP
*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring Kevin James, Jayma Mays, Keir O’Donnell, Shirley Knight
screenplay by Kevin James & Nick Bakay
directed by Steve Carr

BEDTIME STORIES
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Adam Sandler, Keri Russell, Guy Pearce, Russell Brand
screenplay by Matt Lopez and Tim Herlihy
directed by Adam Shankman

by Ian Pugh For Kevin James and his co-writer, the talking cat from “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”, it’s not enough that Paul Blart (James) is a fat moron prone to knocking things over with the sheer force of his girth–he must also be completely oblivious, fully convinced that he possesses more power and responsibilities as a mall cop than any reasonable person would believe. So, what to do when Paul’s newest trainee (Keir O’Donnell) turns out to be a Hans Gruber wannabe who takes over the mall with his hip young gang in a bid to clean it out? A feature-length parody of Die Hard has long stopped being an enticing prospect, given that Die Hard itself has been deconstructed to death by the fact of its enormous influence on the action genre (to the degree that the “Die Hard in an X” template actually became the dominant model for action movies in the 1990s), with the proverbial final nail driven in by a third sequel, Live Free or Die Hard, that concluded there was no point in still pretending our everyman hero was anything but invincible. As Paul Blart: Mall Cop sees it, the only way to endue the John McClane archetype with any tension is to make him fat and stupid. The first time we see Paul, he’s shovelling food into his mouth, his sweater stained with perspiration from beneath his man-boobs, shortly before his hypoglycaemia kicks in and sidelines him from joining the police academy. But he’s got a big heart or something, and that’s what counts, right?

Anaconda (1997) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Brazil, Horror, Peru, Thriller

**½/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz
screenplay by Hans Bauer and Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Luis Llosa

by Walter Chaw Almost worth it just for Jon Voight's post-regurgitation wink, Luis Llosa's B-movie creature-feature Anaconda is a deadpan riff on the nature-amuck flicks of the mid-Seventies in general and Steven Spielberg's Jaws in particular. (Cinematographer Bill Butler shot both films.) It borrows the Moby Dick conceit of a mad hunter forcing a hapless crew to take a personal vision quest against an aquatic foe and post-modernizes it with a passel of genre in-references, an unusually dry script, and a supporting cast of accomplished character actors. The only real failure of the film in respect to its modest aspirations, in fact, is the snake itself, a frankly awful CGI phantom that destroys the tension with its every appearance. It's hard to be afraid of a glorified screen-saver.

Never Say Never Again (1983) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Never Say Never Again (1983) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Bahamas, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, France, James Bond, Thriller, UK, West Germany

*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Sean Connery, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Max Von Sydow, Edward Fox
screenplay by Lorenzo Semple, Jr.
directed by Irvin Kershner

by Ian Pugh After decades of legal wrangling, producer Kevin McClory had finally won the right to make an autonomous James Bond flick out of Ian Fleming’s Thunderball, and 1983 seemed like the perfect time to capitalize on it, what with resident Bond Roger Moore’s age catching up with him and the original series running out of steam as a consequence. A household name, the character of Bond has enough cultural heft and influence that he warrants interpretations from independent sources besides, and given that Sean Connery was lured out of a twelve-year retirement from the character–hence the title, Never Say Never Again–as well as the room for improvement left by the original Thunderball, the film had the potential to be more than just a cynical cash-in.

A Bug’s Life (1998) – [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] DVD + Blu-ray Disc

A Bug’s Life (1998) – [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] DVD + Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2009, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, Pixar

**/****
DVD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
BD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Donald McEnery & Bob Shaw
directed by John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton

by Walter Chaw The Seven Samurai by way of ¡Three Amigos!, Pixar’s A Bug’s Life stands as the company’s sole artistic disappointment, suffering from a weightlessness that is particularly troubling given that it is also the only Pixar production whose characters don’t interact with the human world. The revelation embedded in its relative failure is that the animation studio is better at satire than it is at fantasy–not a terrible thing, for sure (after all, anime legend Hayao Miyazaki has never made a film independent of the human realm), the picture still points to the damning difficulty of creating a fantasy unto itself and based on alien quirk that is more than an exercise in Flintstones-era visual punning wrapped around a familiar underdog-uplift narrative.

Star Trek (2009)

Posted in2000s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Theatrical

***½/****
starring John Cho, Ben Cross, Bruce Greenwood, Leonard Nimoy
screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw My long-held suspicion of J.J. Abrams as a no-trick pony has thawed completely now that after producing the exceptional Cloverfield, he has directed a reboot of Gene Roddenberry’s beloved “Star Trek” that walks the fine line between absolute seriousness and absolute cheese and does so in about the exact same, smart, swashbuckling way as the ’60s TV show, to which this movie serves not as a prequel, but as a delicious alternate possibility. Abrams’s Star Trek is faithful to Roddenberry’s vision in every way, including a restoration of the sexiness and spunk that’s been largely lost to decades of syndication. It’s easy to forget that the first interracial kiss on television belongs to the original series–not to mention all those ripped-shirt fights, tumbles with green girls, and “Bizarro-version” facial hair. The picture is faithful simultaneously to the spirit of this time, joining what looks to be a spate of films with apocalyptic visions of entire planets destroyed by unimaginable calamity. Spry and well-written, Star Trek plays up the idea of individual heroism for the collective good in high Trek fashion and, fascinatingly, works in the clay of deep-set parental issues to give its young characters the psychological framework for evolution in this new reality. If this James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is more of a brawler and a rake than Shatner’s rakish brawler, blame it on the premature loss of daddy; if this Spock (Zachary Quinto) has his humanity closer to the skin than the other Spock (Leonard Nimoy, who has a sizeable role), blame it on mommy (Winona Ryder). Yet for all its weighted subtext, it avoids the self-seriousness of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, finding in its material the spirit of discovery and bonhomie that made the franchise in its heyday one of the most affecting bits of popular relational drama on television.

WarGames (1983) [25th Anniversary Edition] + Saturday Night Fever (1977)/Staying Alive (1983) [Double Feature] – DVDs|Saturday Night Fever [30th Anniversary Special Collector’s Edition]- Blu-ray Disc

WarGames (1983) [25th Anniversary Edition] + Saturday Night Fever (1977)/Staying Alive (1983) [Double Feature] – DVDs|Saturday Night Fever [30th Anniversary Special Collector’s Edition]- Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Music, Sci-Fi, Stallone, Teen, Thriller, ZERO STARS

War Games
***½/**** Image B Sound C Extras A
starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy
screenplay by Lawrence Lasker & Walter F. Parkes
directed by John Badham

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
****/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+ Extras C
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring John Travolta, Karen Gorney, Barry Miller, Joseph Cali
screenplay by Norman Wexler
directed by John Badham

STAYING ALIVE
ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring John Travolta, Cynthia Rhodes, Finola Hughes, Steve Inwood
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Norman Wexler
directed by Sylvester Stallone

by Walter Chaw I hadn’t realized until I watched the 25th Anniversary Edition DVD of it how intimately WarGames is embedded in my psyche. I saw it in the theatre as a ten-year-old in 1983 and, for the rest of that decade (the prime of my excited filmgoing experience), I didn’t know that movies were ever different. The first time, in fact, that I recognized that movies were human was the first time they revealed themselves as something that could fail to inspire any kind of response at all–and I wonder if that initial moment of disappointment had more to do with the development of my cynicism than any one picture’s deficiency. Film is a progressive addiction, says one theory: the more sophisticated you get as a viewer, the harder it is to find the fix. WarGames presented me with the idea of eroticism through mild scatological exhibitionism. It had a young man in his room, alone with a young woman, excusing himself to urinate in the next room–an act unthinkable to me as a ten-year-old and holding with it the thrill of taboo. The next time they meet, the world starts to explode and, better yet, the girl traps the boy between her legs when he tries to edge by.