Adventure Archives - Page 9 of 41

The BFG (2016) + Pete’s Dragon (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

December 8, 20162016, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Spielberg

Thebfg1

Roald Dahl’s The BFG
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Mark Rylance, Ruby Barnhill, Penelope Wilton, Jemaine Clement
screenplay by Melissa Mathison, based on the book by Roald Dahl
directed by Steven Spielberg

PETE’S DRAGON
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Oakes Fegley, Wes Bentley, Robert Redford
screenplay by David Lowery & Toby Halbrooks
directed by David Lowery

by Bill Chambers An inverse E.T. written by that film’s screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, The BFG is in some ways archetypal Spielberg. It’s another child-led picture to follow E.T., Empire of the Sun, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and The Adventures of Tintin, featuring more of Spielberg’s weird hallmark of colourful food and drink (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Hook, Jurassic Park). But Spielberg just isn’t that guy anymore, even if he always will be in the public imagination (it happens to actors…and it happens to directors, too), and The BFG has the same ‘you can’t go home again’ quality that plagued Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It would be inexplicable within the recent arc of his career if not for the precedent of Tintin, which gave him an appetite for impossible camera moves that can really only be sated when the sets are virtual, as they are for much of The BFG. I can’t help thinking of Spielberg’s story about how the alien-abduction sequence in Close Encounters of the Third Kind wasn’t working until he went back and added shots of the screws on a vent cover turning by themselves; he thrives in that margin of error, like when he let a sick Harrison Ford shoot the swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark and stumbled upon one of the most iconic moments in cinema. The amount of previsualizing necessary to make something like The BFG shrinks that margin considerably, and all foresight and no hindsight make Steve a dull boy.

Moana (2016)

November 21, 20162016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Musical, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Jared Bush
directed by Ron Clements & John Musker (co-directed by Don Hall & Chris Williams)

by Walter Chaw Arguably, the only place it really matters in terms of the diversity tango in Disney’s new animated musical Moana is in the songwriting and voice-acting, and so although there are only white people directing (four credited directors) and writing (eight credited scenarists), find Opetaia Foa’i and Lin-Manuel Miranda behind the music and Dwayne Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho behind the Pacific Islander characters. This is progress. Also progress is what seems, to this non-Polynesian, like a real effort to not appropriate a culture so much as represent its mythology, tied as it must be to a narrative about a young woman, Moana (Cravalho), a stout Disney heroine of that certain mold for whom adventure calls, declaring her independence from the patriarchy. We’ve seen her before, is what I’m saying, but she’s neither sexualized nor given an aspirational mate/therapeutic marriage. Progress. I’ll take it. There’s even a moment where demigod Maui (Johnson) makes a crack about Moana being in the Disney canon. Progress? Self-awareness, at least. I’ll take that, too. What’s unfortunate is that for everything that’s very good about the film, there’s something very familiar. The argument should probably be made that familiarity is the sugar that helps the medicine of its progressive elements go down. It worked for The Force Awakens.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)

November 19, 20162016, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical

**/****
starring Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Colin Farrell
written by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw J.K. Rowling is more plotter than writer or editor, more rambling fantasist than disciplined storyteller–explanation there as to why her Harry Potter novels aren’t classics so much as very popular stories for children. This also explains why Rowling flinched at the prospect of Harry martyring himself at the end, something the entire series leads up to. Rowling betrays, too, heroine Hermione, the logical successor to Dumbledore’s seat, not wife to Harry’s drippy buddy. She didn’t have the heart, she says, to do the things she should have done, and so produced books you’ll grow out of. And quickly. The film adaptations (like Beethoven’s Symphonies, only the odd ones are good, and you should skip the first) are uneven largely because they’re best when the folks doing the adapting take Rowling’s ideas and craft narratives and narrative subtext from/for them–and worst when they try to pack in all those volumes of blandly discursive blather to please a massive fanbase. Asking Rowling herself to write the screenplay for David Yates’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (hereafter Fantastic Beasts), then, has yielded exactly the expected result: the film is bloated, boring at times, rambling most others; and it’s rich with genuine ideas and an honest-to-goodness progressive heartbeat. It’s topical, boasts of an extremely able cast it squanders mostly, and acts as a glossy coat sheening over the “real” story, pulsing but drowned, at its centre.

Finding Dory (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 15, 20162016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Pixar

Findingdory1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Victoria Strouse
directed by Andrew Stanton (co-directed by Angus MacLane)

by Walter Chaw Credit is due Pixar and writer-director Andrew Stanton (co-directing here with Angus MacLane) for wanting to right what I don’t know anybody really perceived as a wrong. I remember thinking when I first saw Finding Nemo that Dory’s inability to retain short-term memories was a product of her species. In the new Finding Dory, it’s revealed to indeed be a mental disability, one that her parents (voiced by Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton) worry over a great deal in a series of flashbacks. They create coping mechanisms for their daughter. They devise a literal shell game so that when Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) inevitably gets lost, she can find her way back home. It’s an interesting tactic to take, this mild scolding that what was funny at first is, in fact, a debilitating, dangerous disorder. And a good portion of the film looks for ways to valorize Dory’s condition, to avoid making her the butt of jokes or an object of pity. For the most part, it does this by surrounding her with characters who also have a disability: Hank (Ed O’Neill), an octopus that’s lost an arm (“Septipus!” says Dory, “I can’t remember, but I can count!”); and Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a hopelessly myopic whale shark. Lest we forget, Nemo (Hayden Rolence, taking over from Alexander Gould) has a deformed fin, something he flaps at dad Marlin (Albert Brooks) after Marlin says something disparaging about Dory’s memory issue.

The Legend of Tarzan (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 3, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD

Legoftarzan1

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer, based on the “Tarzan” stories created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw David Yates’s The Legend of Tarzan is at once a long-overdue, if massively fictionalized, biopic of George Washington Williams’s time in the Congo observing colonial Belgium’s abuses of the rubber, ivory, and diamond trades; and it’s an adaptation, nay, updating of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first five Tarzan books, with heavy creative license taken but the spirit kept largely intact. Although it’s more successful as the latter than as the former, both endeavours are carried through with seriousness and intelligence. It’s not a perfect film: the editing is terrible, particularly during the action sequences, suggesting this was probably a longer movie truncated out of fear of diluting the “good” bits. I also don’t love the washed-out colour palette that paints everything in a blue gloom–at least not as much as Yates seems to, between this and the last four Harry Potter films. And it bears mentioning that Samuel L. Jackson isn’t really an actor anymore and that Margot Robbie arguably never has been. Yeah, The Legend of Tarzan is hard to defend objectively. It does, however, understand the appeal of the Tarzan mythos, answering in grand moments why it is that he’s found his way into over 200 motion pictures and dozens more serials and television series (live-action and animated). I should disclaim, too, that I read (re-read, in some cases) all 24 original Burroughs Tarzan novels in the weeks leading up to the picture’s release. In other words, I’m a big, giant pulp nerd.

Swiss Army Man (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

October 24, 20162016, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Musical, Romance, Zombie

Swissarmyman1

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
written and directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan

by Walter Chaw Bridging the gap between Charlie Kaufman movies, the Daniels’ Swiss Army Man is one high-concept conceit carried through to every possible ontological end. It veers, dizzily, between slapstick scatological comedy and poignant existential philosophy, doing so with the sort of invention generally credited to silent-film clowns. Open with Hank (Paul Dano), shipwrecked, about to hang himself when he notices the corpse of Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washed ashore. He looks for signs of life. There aren’t any, save the rapid decomposition that’s causing Manny to fart. A lot. Manny’s farts carry Hank back to civilization, in fact, in a trailer-spoiled motorboat sequence that would be indescribable were it not right there. Like so many things in the film, it’s not clear that this is “actually” happening or just a fantasy of Hank’s before dying. By the middle of the picture, it’s apparent that challenging the border between the cinema real and the cinema imagined is the point. If it destroys that conversation, it allows for a better one about the nature of friendship and honesty, whether it’s possible to ever truly be open with another human being and, if it is, whether it would be something welcomed or rejected. Unconditional acceptance is a charming romantic fantasy, but that’s all it is.

Fantastic Fest ’16: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

September 27, 20162016, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Tim Burton, Family, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '16, Fantasy, Time Travel

*/****
starring Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Chris O’Dowd, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Jane Goldman, based upon the novel by Ransom Riggs
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw The right material and collaborator can bring out the best in Tim Burton, but it’s mostly a one-way street. Before it soured, his work with Johnny Depp compelled because of the pathos Depp imported into projects like Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood. When Burton lands the right material, as he did with Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, he’s capable of masterpieces. I would argue that his most personal picture by far, the only one that plumbs the exquisite gulfs of loneliness and disconnection suggested by his other pieces, is Batman Returns. There’s a scene in it where Bruce Wayne drinks soup, recoils that it’s cold, then digs in again without hesitation when told by his long-term keeper that it’s supposed to be. Bruce is a broken clockwork and wholly dependent; it’s a fascinating read of the Batman character. Burton’s Catwoman is the purest representation of the gender injustice that results in her mania and rise to power. The film is a spiritual predecessor to Burton’s poetry collection The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories, the contents of which speak of misbegotten births, misunderstood childhoods, and unimaginable betrayals that lead to lonesome deaths. These themes are always on the periphery of Burton’s films. I wonder if as he’s gotten more monolithic whether they don’t become commensurately more difficult to tease out.

The Jungle Book (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

September 4, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, Scarlett Johansson

**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Neel Sethi
screenplay by Justin Marks
directed by Jon Favreau

by Bill Chambers Confession: As a child, I used to fantasize about live-action versions of the Disney animated features–especially Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty, because of the design extremes in those films. Thinking back on this, I was at a loss to explain why my kid brain–which had a bottomless capacity to suspend disbelief–wanted to see a “real” purple-and-black dragon spit green flames at a “real” prince, or a “real” wooden boy sprout donkey ears, until earlier this week, when a piece of clickbait unveiling the “real” Lumière and Cogsworth from the upcoming Beauty and the Beast jogged my memory: ghoulish curiosity. “Ghoulish curiosity” is, I believe, the unspoken draw of this recent spate of live-action Disney remakes, starting with 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, which doubled down by promising the Tim Burton rendition of that world. The reason Alice Through the Looking Glass tanked, Johnny Depp’s recent toxicity notwithstanding, is that we’ve seen all the freaks in that tent; true fascination lies the way of Dumbo, another Tim Burton joint. (I have a pretty good idea of what the circus stuff will look like, but I’m dying to see that elephant fly.) Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book got us there via the truly perverse notion to remake one of Disney’s animal-driven musicals in live-action. Of course it opened big ($103M, in friggin’ April!), just like of course the RNC scored higher ratings than the DNC. But if the latter rewarded our cynical rubbernecking, Favreau transcended it.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) [Special Edition] – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

August 16, 20161980s, 2016, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Romance, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory

Buckaroo2

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
Buckaroo Bonzai
***/****
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
DVD – Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Earl Mac Rauch
directed by W.D. Richter

by Walter Chaw It isn’t so much that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension (henceforth Adventures) is hard to follow, it’s that it’s hard to assimilate. Once you’re drawn into the deadly serious heart askew of W.D. Richter’s film, its Gordian plot begins to unravel, its tangled web unweaves, and it becomes clear that the most disturbing thing about this legendarily convoluted camp masterpiece is that it makes perfect sense. That moment of clarity occurs somewhere in the middle of the fourth viewing, and while I can’t necessarily guarantee that the trial is worth it for everyone, it was for me. Adventures reveals itself as a commentary on racism, an exploration of Communism in the Reagan era, a surprisingly influential genre piece, and a sly statement on early-Eighties excess and malaise. What I’m trying to say is that the film is holding my brain hostage, and I would like it back.

Suicide Squad (2016)

August 3, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller, Will Smith

½*/****
starring Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie, Joel Kinnaman
written and directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw Ugly garbage that will make a lot of money, David Ayer’s Suicide Squad begins where Batman v Superman left off by positing that in a world without its big, mopey, solipsistic, Byronic Boy Scout, there will come a time when the good guys (i.e., us) will need to enlist the help of a bunch of psychopathic mutants and contract killers to protect our way of life. It’s a little bit like Escape from New York but not cool and not fun; and it’s a little bit like a satire, except that it’s more of a documentary. Marvel films are aspirational and DC films in this new cycle are diseased and beaten. Both are bloated beyond repair and slavish to a core fandom they daren’t betray, making them essentially unwatchable along their tentpole storylines–though you want less to kill yourself after the Marvel films. The bright light lately has been one-offs and side projects: Marvel’s television universe, for instance, has blossomed on Netflix and DC’s own TV series “The Flash” and “Supergirl” seem to hear the music. Then, of course, there’s Guardians of the Galaxy. The only thing worse than the kernel of an idea at the centre of Suicide Squad is its unlikely choice of writer-director to bring it to life, Ayer, perhaps the most vile, pessimistic filmmaker in the United States, whom Warner Bros. has given the task of appealing broadly somehow with this material: a little softening here, an extra scene/hero moment there after gauging the breakout star from the reaction to early teaser trailers. If you’re going to hire Ayer to do this, make it a hard-R and take out the yuk-yuk comedy. He’s not funny. He’s not for kids. The strain of pleasing dozens of masters shows. It shows in the select mix of fondly-remembered oldies à la Guardians of the Galaxy, and it shows in the flop-sweat of an entire production so badly compromised by its too-big star and its too-threatened masculinity.

Jason Bourne (2016)

July 30, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel
written by Paul Greengrass & Christopher Rouse
directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw There are two modes in Paul Greengrass’s Jason Bourne, his and star Matt Damon’s return to the franchise after almost a decade away from it: thudding tedium, and incomprehensible chaos. By this fifth instalment (which follows the Jeremy Renner-starring spin-off attempt, The Bourne Legacy), it all plays a little too much like self-parody. Every time there’s a conversation about THE TRUTH now, it feels like a bad SNL skit. I still love The Bourne Identity. Watching it in comparison with the Greengrass films (and with most any modern action movie) underscores exactly how superior is Doug Liman as an action director. Liman shoots an action scene like the dance sequences in Saturday Night Fever: with respect for geography and the skill and physicality of his stunt performers and cast. The car chase through Paris in the original begins with a careful consultation of a map, a few questions about the state of the car, and some light but crucial character development, then proceeds into a nice, clean set-piece that establishes stakes, spatial geometry, and destination in a way that is Friedkin-esque. It’s a textbook, as good as the L-train underpass pursuit in The French Connection and the wrong-way freeway chase in To Live and Die in LA.. The Bourne Identity is defiantly classical action filmmaking and that’s why it still seems fresh, even though it will be fifteen years old next year.

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

July 21, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Idris Elba
screenplay by Simon Pegg & Doug Jung
directed by Justin Lin

by Walter Chaw The cultural watershed isn’t when it’s revealed that Sulu (John Cho) is gay, but rather a moment just before that, when an interracial couple–an Asian man and a white woman–are used as an example of a “good” relationship. I’m Chinese, my wife is a tall redhead. When my kids watch Star Trek Beyond, it’ll be the first time they see their parents reflected in a major American tentpole. There are a lot of things wrong with Star Trek Beyond, which at its best is great in the same way that David Twohy’s The Chronicles of Riddick is great–and at its worst is bad in the same way the last film in this reboot series is bad (that is, self-conscious and fan-pleasing, torturously so). But when Sulu is given the one, true, rousing hero moment in the piece, it speaks not just to the vision of a multicultural United States that Lin’s The Fast and the Furious movies proposed, but also, perhaps, to the real impact of an Asian-American director behind the camera. It makes sense that a Lin-directed Star Trek would make Sulu the hero; I just wasn’t expecting to be so affected by it.

The Secret Life of Pets (2016)

July 9, 20162016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
written by Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio and Brian Lynch
directed by Chris Renaud

by Walter Chaw Brutally bad, from the exhausted hip-comic improvisational patter to the endless slapstick pratfalls that comprise the entirety of the film, Chris Renaud and co-director Yarrow Cheney's abominable The Secret Life of Pets excretes into theatres for the express purpose of distracting your young ones for 90 minutes in an air-conditioned setting. It's not remotely witty, never for a second clever, and with a typecast Kevin Hart voicing a one-trick racial pastiche of a bunny, it underscores the cultural divide between those who think Minions and The Lorax are unwatchable dreck and those who are wrong. It's machine-tooled to make money, which it will after the manner of other things that make money at the expense of your children, but it's worth considering that the reason for most of the terrible things in this world is our agreement that critical thinking is a burden, while anti-intellectualism is a roadmap to our survival as first a civilization, then as a species. In our society, saying that something is "for kids" means that it's better, safer…unless it's entertainment. The greatest trick the devil played is convincing an entire culture that it's better not to waste time wondering if what you put in your child's head is productive and smart. So long as there's no sex in it, game on. If The Secret Life of Pets (hereafter Pets) were a chair, it would be made of broken glass and rusty nails. But hey, never mind, why criticize? It's just for kids.

The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

July 3, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical

***/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer, based on the “Tarzan” stories created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by David Yates

Swiss Army Man (2016)

June 30, 20162016, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Musical, Romance, Theatrical, Zombie

***½/****
starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
written and directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

June 25, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*/****
starring Liam Hemsworth, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Maika Monroe
screenplay by Nicolas Wright & James A. Woods and Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich and James Vanderbilt
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Walter Chaw About a third of the way through the slog of Independence Day: Resurgence (hereafter ID4.2), the hopelessly misguided and bellicose POTUS (Sela Ward), dressed smartly in a pantsuit with her hair pulled back in a severe-but-sensible bun, makes the first of a couple of really, really stupid mistakes before being executed off-screen by the alien scourge. And good riddance, for in her place rises man-of-action legacy POTUS Whitmore (Bill Pullman), suffering from some kind of alien-inflicted dementia but, you know, a man who hears voices and occasionally lapses into a coma is still better than a woman, amiright ‘murica? High five. There’s also a younger, less-demented POTUS on standby, Adams (William Fichtner), who is also obviously preferable to a woman. (High five.) There’s a heroic team of fighter pilots that reminds me a lot of the Thunderbirds or the Power Rangers (because there’s a Chinese one–the surprise is that her plane isn’t yellow), and then there’s Whitmore’s now-grown daughter Patricia (Maika Monroe), who gave up flying to care for her demented father but is back in the cockpit again, though she still needs her flyboy fiancé, roguish Jake (Liam Hemsworth), to save her in the end and she STILL almost shoots him because she’s scared and has a vagina. This is Roland Emmerich’s world. Try to keep up.

Midnight Special (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

June 22, 20162016, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Road Movie, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Sam Shepard
written and directed by Jeff Nichols

by Walter Chaw Jeff Nichols’s Midnight Special is beautiful. It’s a film about aspiration and sacrifice. It believes that the world is still a mysterious place anchored by love and hope and devotion to simple ideas about how hard it is to be a parent–and how important. It’s about nurturing a thing with all your heart and letting it go when it’s strong enough. It’s about listening when it’s the last thing you want to hear; it’s about believing there’s a future for your kids even if all evidence seems to suggest the opposite. It’s like Tomorrowland in many ways, but mostly in its suggestion that there’s a place maybe where things feel like they used to feel when you were a kid and everything was still possible. Even though nothing made sense, things would make sense one day when you were big. Midnight Special deserves its comparisons to films like E.T. and Starman and especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It works in the same small places with ordinary characters who grow to fill larger, echoing spaces. Nichols puts us in medias res with Roy (Michael Shannon) and his best friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) on the run from cult leader Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), having fled at some point before the movie starts with Roy’s son, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher). We learn it was around Alton’s oddities that the cult largely formed. We learn that Alton’s oddities are perhaps supernatural, or extraterrestrial, or interdimensional. It doesn’t really matter. They’re profoundly strange, and there are times it appears that he’s able to tell a little of the future.

Finding Dory (2016)

June 20, 20162016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Theatrical

**/****
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Victoria Strouse
directed by Andrew Stanton

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) [Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

June 20, 2016****/****, 1980s, 2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Vincent Suarez, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi, Star Trek

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, Ricardo Montalban
screenplay by Jack B. Sowards
directed by Nicholas Meyer

The film portion of this review comes from a piece originally published in July of 2000 that also critiqued the A/V quality of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan‘s very first DVD release. I opted not to repost Vincent’s comments on the DVD proper because they no longer seemed relevant, especially in this context.-BC

by Vincent Suarez Legend has it that, despite the popularity of television reruns and the stunning phenomenon of “Star Trek” conventions, Paramount green-lighted Star Trek: The Motion Picture only after the success of Star Wars, in an envious bid for a sci-fi blockbuster of its own. In the minds of many fans and critics, however, director Robert Wise delivered a film that more closely approximated Star Bores. (For the record, I love the film’s slow pace and its oft-neglected reprisal of themes from my favourite classic “Trek” episode, “The Changeling.”) While not the huge grosser the studio was hoping for, fans turned out in strong enough numbers to warrant a sequel, and a cash cow was born. There have since been eight additional films and three spun-off television series, but the most brilliant Trek effort remains that first sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Zootopia (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 13, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Disney, DVD, Family

Zootopia1

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
screenplay by Jared Bush & Phil Johnston
directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore

by Walter Chaw Early on in Disney’s Zootopia, directed somehow by a triumvirate (Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush) from a screenplay by Bush and Phil Johnston, a baby fox declares that it would like to grow up to be an elephant. It even has an elephant hoodie; the creature idolizes, it appears, elephant culture. It gets a laugh. It’s worth the conversation to wonder what about this is funny. At its essence, the idea that something could grow to be something else is funny. It’s also funny because it knowingly, gently pokes fun at our culture of “you can be anything you want to be,” the source of more sometimes-murderous disappointment than any other child-rearing strategy endemic to the West. Astronaut? No problem. And Zootopia opens on a children’s pageant where a little animal solemnly declares that where in primordial times he would have been predator or prey, in civilized times, he has the choice to maybe be an astronaut, or an accountant. The third way this is funny is harsher, in that it begins to touch on the truism that there are certain traits you’re born with, and while that’s a no-brainer when it comes to the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s a tough thing for most proud Judeo-Christians to accept. We have hardwiring, see, and accepting that means there are a lot of other things we need to accept as well, almost none of them politically correct and all of them fraught with delicate dancing around the issue. Zootopia is complicated as hell.