Authors: Bill Chambers Archives - Page 12 of 68

The Nice Guys (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

August 22, 20162016, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Matt Bomer, Kim Basinger
written by Shane Black & Anthony Bagarozzi
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw Shane Black’s The Nice Guys is a delightful fusion of John D. MacDonald and Gregory McDonald; if it had a cover, it’d be painted by Robert McGinnis. It’s California noir, no doubt, the love child of The Long Goodbye and Inherent Vice, but with the flip social commentary and occasional bouts of ultra-violence found in Carl Hiaasen’s Florida noirs. Sufficed to say that Black, who’s often spoken of his love for crime fiction, has distilled pulp here and with his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang into breezy, post-modern concoctions. The Nice Guys is as smart as it is inconsequential, as brutal and exploitive as it is a commentary on brutality and exploitation. More than anything else, it’s a very fine critical pastiche of the kinds of books you read in an afternoon because they’re thrilling, socially irresponsible, and afire with misogyny, nihilism, and Byronic macho bullshit Romanticism. But cool, baby, and stylish.

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.

Vinyl: The Complete First Season (2016) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

July 24, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Music, Television

Image A- Sound A Extras B-
“Pilot,” “Yesterday Once More,” “Whispered Secrets,” “The Racket,” “He in Racist Fire,” “Cyclone,” “The King and I,” “E.A.B.,” “Rock and Roll Queen,” “Alibi”

by Bill Chambers A feeling of déjà vu pervades HBO’s “Vinyl”, and not just because it’s so prototypical of the network’s taste in weekly dramas. The first–and simultaneously last–ten episodes are a somewhat hellish loop of stylistic motifs, crutches, and tics. Refrains are a musical conceit, and this is a show about the record industry, so maybe there’s a thematic defense for the repetition. But with all the imbibing that goes on on screen, “Vinyl”‘s periodicities (running out of synonyms!) begin to make the most sense as cues to take a shot. This review should provide all the drinking prompts you need while also serving as a post-mortem for the series, which got cancelled just as I sat down to write about it.¹ At the risk of beating a dead horse, here’s what went wrong–and, occasionally, right–with “Vinyl”.

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.

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.

Anomalisa (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 6, 2016****/****, 2015, 2016, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
written by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson

by Walter Chaw Writing about a Charlie Kaufman film, if you do it honestly, is writing about yourself. I’ve said before, and it helps me to repeat it, that I don’t really understand Kaufman’s films, but that they do understand me. Kaufman is the most important, innovative voice in American cinema since Orson Welles, and though he has enjoyed more autonomy in expressing that voice than Welles, I would argue that the seven years separating his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, and this follow-up, a stop-motion collaboration with Duke Johnson called Anomalisa, suggest that it’s not as easy as it should be. Certainly, the journey that Anomalisa has taken is far from conventional, from Kaufman play written under the pseudonym “Francis Fregosi,” through a Kickstarter campaign, through the general challenge of making an adult-themed animation in a country that sees animation as a genre not a medium, to now this tour of festivals, looking for distribution. The play was introduced as part of a Carter Burwell project titled “Theater of the New Ear”. It was a late replacement on a Kaufman/Coen Bros. double-bill when the Coens “dropped out” at the eleventh hour, and this unknown Fregosi’s piece took its place.

Hail, Caesar! (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 5, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Mystery, Scarlett Johansson

Hailcaesar1

Hail, Caesar!: A Tale of the Christ
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes
written and directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Halfway through the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, studio head/fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin playing Jon Polito) stands against the opulent, grand entrance to his golden-age Hollywood movie studio and talks about the coming of the future. There’s a scene in a Chinese restaurant where someone pulls out a photograph of a mushroom cloud taken at a freshly-nuked Bikini Atoll and declares, solemnly, that it’s a picture of the future. There’s another scene where waves crash against a pair of rocks in a direct callback to Barton Fink, the Coens’ other golden-age Hollywood homage, outside the bachelor-pad mansion of Gene Kelly-type Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), who happens to be the head of an enclave of Communists (are there ten?) calling themselves “The Future.” The Coens at their best describe spiritual blight. They do it in a lot of ways, across multiple genres. Hail, Caesar! opens with Mannix, a real-life figure in Hollywood tangentially connected to George Reeves’s death (murder? Suicide? Who knows?), in a confessional just a day after his last confession and a day before his next. (“Really, it’s too much, Eddie. You’re not that bad.”) Mannix–more fictional than actual, it should be noted, in exactly the same way that O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the most faithful adaptation of The Odyssey there ever was despite having almost no relationship to the literal text–indeed doesn’t seem all that bad when most of what he confesses is lying to his wife (Alison Pill) about quitting cigarettes. “It’s hard, Father.” And he cries. The movie is about spiritual blight, and the sin that Mannix is constantly trying to confess is that he doesn’t know what he believes. For me, the Coens are at their best when they tackle this spiritual blight through the prism of artists and their attempts to create. Every artist is a Frankenstein. Every work is a monster.

Zoolander No. 2 (2016) [The Magnum Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 30, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

Zoolander 2
**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Penélope Cruz
written by Justin Theroux and John Hamburg & Ben Stiller and Nicholas Stoller
directed by Ben Stiller

by Bill Chambers It opens with Justin Bieber taking more bullets than Sonny Corleone. So far, so good. Bieber commemorates his death with an Instagram selfie, which makes me want to purse my lips against my fingertips and blow a kiss to the chef–mwah! News of Bieber’s assassination raises alarms at Fashion Interpol, where his death selfie is compared against those of several other musicians, all of whom died making the same pouty face as Bieber. (Madonna being among them strikes me as more of a production designer’s idea of a joke.) Struggling to decipher the meaning of the pose, Agent Valentina Valencia (Penélope Cruz) finally surrenders to the idea that there’s only one person who might have the insight she needs: Austin Powers! No, wait–Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller)!

Manhunter (1986) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

May 23, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Manhunter2

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring William L. Petersen, Kim Greist, Joan Allen, Brian Cox
screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon
directed by Michael Mann

by Walter Chaw Director Michael Mann’s third film is the remarkable Manhunter, the second cinematic adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel (the first being 1977’s John Frankenheimer-helmed Black Sunday) and the first to feature Harris’s dark serial-killer antihero, Hannibal Lecter (spelled “Lecktor” in Manhunter). It is visually lush and possessed of the attention to craft and detail that has become a hallmark of Mann’s work; to say that it’s superior in nearly every way to the much-lauded and wildly popular The Silence of the Lambs would be something of an understatement.

Hot Docs ’16: No Man is an Island

May 7, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2016

**/**** directed by Tim De Keersmaecker Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers The white sands and turquoise waters of Lampedusa, Italy's southernmost island, have attracted tourists like iron filings in the age of TripAdvisor. It's paradise found, an oasis in the Mediterranean. And it's "the door to Africa," a European outpost at which migrants dock en masse. No Man is an Island alternates between two young refugees who've established themselves there in some capacity. Omar, who fled Tunisia during…

Hot Docs ’16: Sonita

April 29, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2016, Iran, Switzerland

***½/****directed by Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers By coincidence or zeitgeist design, Sonita is my third consecutive Hot Doc about the disenfranchised's quest for "personhood." Here it's the titular Sonita Alizadeh, an Afghan teenager who fled the Taliban and, as the film begins, is living in a fleapit in Tehran with her sister and young niece; an unseen brother apparently resides nearby, close enough to duck in and trash her belongings while she's out. Sonita's…

Hot Docs ’16: Unlocking the Cage

April 26, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2016

**½/****directed by Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers As an idealistic young lawyer, Harvard law professor Steven Wise went looking for the biggest "underdog" he could possibly represent and realized that animals were it. He founded the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) to aid any and all "autonomous" wildlife in cases of abuse, but Unlocking the Cage, the latest from the prolific team of Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker, zeroes in on his…

Hot Docs ’16: The Pearl of Africa

April 26, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2016, Sweden

***/****directed by Jonny von Wallström Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers Cleopatra Kambugu and her husband Nelson Kasaija board a train. Although the seats in their sleeping car are discouragingly narrow, Nelson consults the passenger guidelines and sure enough sex is not explicitly forbidden. It's sitcom-cute that he checks, but his impulse to do so also creates a palpable unease; the accumulation of ominous imagery at the start--a barbed-wire fence; a front door, open though not beckoning; the word…

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) [The Gruesome Edition] – DVD + The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

April 18, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
***/****
BD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A
DVD – Image B+ Sound B- Extras B
starring Dennis Hopper, Caroline Williams, Jim Siedow, Bill Moseley
screenplay by L.M. Kit Carson
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw If the first film is about living with malevolent ghosts–the sins of the father made flesh and leather, if you will–then the second is a cunning piece about the Reagan ’80s: the fantasia, the nostalgia, the delusions of grandeur, the inflationary monomania, and, finally, the decay of actual values in a society believing itself to be the illusory City on the Hill. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is also a highly sexualized film, the American Psycho of its day, mixing sex with money until the two are indistinguishable from the great gouts of blood, bluster, and designer suits used in their acquisition. The picture’s smart enough to be a commentary on its time while its time is still unspooling. Undeniably, there’s something bankrupt about the morality of this story told in this context–the rise of corporations in the McDecade skewered as the monster Sawyer clan of the original launches a successful man-meat chilli business with affable, no-longer-reluctant Cook (Jim Siedow) as its clown pitchman. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 can be read as every bit the product of its era as the following year’s Wall Street and Predator–a science-fiction of regression and animalism that is not entirely unlike its star Dennis Hopper’s Blue Velvet, also from 1986. It feels like the twelve years separating source and sequel (just like the ten that separate the first two George Romero “Dead” movies) mark director Tobe Hooper as a sharp sociologist when painting with this very specific brush, evolving the tumor of the Vietnam War manifested as a pair of lumpen bogeys on a young girl’s back into this florid bloodbath erected on those conservative tent poles of mass media, mass consumerism, and misguided phallic projection. No accident, either, one supposes, that its central avenging angel is a dim-witted, swaggering cowboy figure, ambling in from the 1950s to win fights we’ve already lost.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + DigitalHD

April 3, 20162015, 2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Star Wars

Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Max Von Sydow
written by Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw I was four when I saw Star Wars. It was the first time I’d seen a film in a theatre; it was the first film I’d seen, period. I didn’t speak a word of English. It was overwhelming, and I’m discovering, after watching J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens (hereafter Star Wars 7), that it imprinted itself on my DNA. Thirty-eight years later, I collect the toys my parents couldn’t afford to buy me when I was a kid–the ones I played with at friends’ houses, when I pretended to be Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) as a child of immigrants doing his best to fit into a society that promised blond and blue-eyed messiahs. My office is full of these toys. They are fetishized relics for me. I hold them and they possess a totemic value. The curve of a molded plastic stormtrooper’s helmet reminds me of the department store where I looked at it through the packaging–and of my delight at my mom one day buying me one, which I opened on the way home in the backseat of the family car.

The Hateful Eight (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 28, 20162015, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, Western

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film, The Hateful Eight, features eight hateful people trapped in a small space during a blizzard. The hullabaloo surrounding its release has to do with the production shooting in an extinct widescreen format (70mm anamorphic) and putting up a lot of money so that it can be screened accordingly in select theatres. A few critics have misidentified its vistas as belonging to Wyoming (it was filmed in Telluride, Colorado), which is understandable given that only about five minutes of the 187-minute running-time is spent outside. There hasn’t been a Tarantino feature until this one that I haven’t loved; I believe he is our finest working film critic. He understands things about the movies he pulls from–that certain traditions of Japanese and exploitation filmmaking are strongly feminist, that blaxploitation was initially empowerment before it was instantly gentrified, that the best slave narratives involve legacies of violence, which is why Lalee’s Kin and Django Unchained have a biological connective bridge. I’ve learned more about movies from watching Tarantino than I have from watching Godard, who’s actually trying to teach me something. I think the Kill Bill saga is a remarkable statement about motherhood. I find his dialogue to be distinctive and sometimes exhilarating. I struggled with disliking The Hateful Eight for each of its 187 minutes. It’s the first time I’ve ever understood the popular criticism of Tarantino as self-indulgent, nihilistic, misogynistic, even racist. I don’t agree with every charge, but I do get it now. It’s the first time, too, that I was troubled by a plot point in his film: there’s someone in the piece who hates Mexicans, see, but when we get a flashback to this person engaging with a Mexican, we see that this is a fallacy. I can’t figure out if this was intentional; I fear that it wasn’t. I fear, more, that this is evidence that, for the first time, Tarantino has lost control of his screenplay. I also finally felt the loss of Sally Menke, who was his Marcia Lucas. I hope it’s not a harbinger of things to come.

Living in Oblivion (1995) – DVD|[20th Anniversary] – Blu-ray Disc

March 17, 20161990s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Satire, Scream/Shout! Factory

***/****
DVD – Image B Sound B Extras B-
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, Danielle Von Zernick
written and directed by Tom DiCillo

by Walter Chaw A film carefully structured in three parts, Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion demands tired adjectives like “offbeat” and “quirky” while dancing dangerously close to hyperbole along the lines of “brilliant” and “incisive.” What it is, though, is its own beast–a meta-structure of dream sequences (the first two segments “are,” the third is “about”) concerning six takes of scene six–the devil’s number applied to the trials of filmmaking, including technical accidents, the egos of the stars, and behind-the-scenes relationships that threaten professionalism. With those plates spinning, DiCillo layers in elements of fantasy bleeding into reality (the second section ends with the oft-repeated scene sloughing into “reality,” then into dream), the final segment integrating spoof symbols (an apple, a little person) with a real symbol (the mother).

In the Heart of the Sea (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 14, 20162015, 2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disaster Movie, Drama, DVD

Intheheartofthesea1

*/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Charles Leavitt, based on the book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
directed by Ron Howard

by Bill Chambers In the Heart of the Sea is Ron Howard’s water movie, just like Backdraft is his fire movie, Far and Away is his earth movie, and Apollo 13 is his air movie. It’s also his first fish movie since Splash, suggesting that Howard is retracing his steps in a career reboot that began with Rush, his first car movie since his directorial debut, Grand Theft Auto. But one waits for history to repeat itself with some sign of accrued wisdom beyond obvious markers like technical proficiency. In fact, in its show-off-iness and ersatz emotionalism, In the Heart of the Sea seems the less mature film next to Splash, which has a formal self-control and hints of real pathos despite a fantastical premise that sees a landlubber falling in love with a woman who’s secretly a mermaid. (It’s the first film to seize on Tom Hanks’s Jimmy Stewart quality, as well as the rare one to tap into his anger.) There’s hardly a genuine moment in In the Heart of the Sea, and a framing device only exacerbates the problem by adding another layer of dramatization to something that already plays like a big-budget History Channel re-enactment.

Creed (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 2, 20162015, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Sports, Stallone

Creedblu1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad
screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Aaron Covington
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I do. It’s not perfect. The love interest is underbaked and the fight choreography of the final match is unfortunately disjointed. But I love this movie–unconditionally, I guess. The story goes that Ryan Coogler, the young director of Fruitvale Station, pitched Sylvester Stallone on the idea of rebooting Rocky with Apollo Creed’s son. (Something the Indiana Jones series needs to do with a grown-up Short Round, by the way.) The auto-critical analysis of the film is that it’s essentially a father/son intrigue, which lends some insight into the Rocky/Mickey relationship of the original Rockys, and there are enough references to same to gratify the cultists. What I liked most about Stallone’s willingness to take a shot on a fresh idea from a minority perspective–this is the first instalment of one of his two venerable franchises not to spring from a Stallone-written script–is that it feeds into the idea of Stallone as an auteur maybe, a canny cultural anthropologist definitely. Every Rocky, every Rambo, is distinctly a product of its time. I don’t feel qualified to talk about this, but to the extent that I understand the theory, I’m sold.