TIFF ’15: The Family Fang

September 27, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, TIFF

Tiff15familyfang

**½/****
directed by Jason Bateman

by Bill Chambers David Lindsay-Abaire is the poor man's Tom Stoppard and Jason Bateman smothered whatever vulgar charms his directorial debut Bad Words may have possessed in an incongruous autumnal burnish, but they have a neutralizing effect on each other: Together, the strained seriousness of the former and the preposterous seriousness of the latter (Bateman shoots this one like The Godfather) create a curiously palatable harmony. The Family Fang is every inch The Skeleton Twins or some other brother-sister Sundance yarn but with a wonderfully specific source for the siblings' dysfunction: raised by performance artists, they were from a young age incorporated into their parents' notorious act, which tended to prey upon the sympathies of innocent bystanders. (In a very funny early flashback, for example, they stage a mock bank robbery that ends in the alleged shooting death of matriarch Camille Fang (Kathryn Hahn here, Maryann Plunkett in present day).) As adults, Buster (Bateman) and Annie (Nicole Kidman, looking supernaturally restored to her Peacemaker days) have distanced themselves from their past and channelled any lingering impulses towards exhibitionism into the more legitimate avenues of writing and acting, respectively. When Buster is shot in the head with a potato (don't ask), he is summoned home and drags Annie with him to serve as a buffer. Back in the family nest, father Caleb (Christopher Walken) immediately tries to rope them into a "piece," but not only have they moved on–so has society at large, now too insular to be a viable canvas for the Fangs' art. Walken's fury as he quits a prank involving counterfeit coupons is poignant; one senses a touch of the actor's own frustration with the world no longer appreciating his unique genius.

TIFF ’15: Freeheld

September 21, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
**½/****directed by Peter Sollett by Bill Chambers Based on the Oscar-winning documentary short of the same name, Freeheld is the true story of policewoman Laurel Hester and mechanic Stacie Andree, who in the recent past, before the legalization of gay marriage, waged a public battle against Ocean County, NJ legislature when it denied the dying Hester the right to leave her pension to domestic partner Andree. Julianne Moore, enduring a protracted screen death for the second year in a row, plays Laurel beneath a cloche of Farrah Fawcett hair and Ellen Page, who produced, plays Stacie, and, um...when Back to…

TIFF ’15: Mr. Right

September 19, 2015Posted in2015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, TIFF
½*/****directed by Paco Cabezas by Bill Chambers Max Landis follows up his American Ultra script with another action comedy about slick killing machines but abandons the Manchurian Candidate backstory in a grotesquely cynical fashion: When Sam Rockwell throws knives at new girlfriend Anna Kendrick to prove she can catch them, his conviction is based on nothing more substantial than her being the star of this particular show. Over and over, Mr. Right acknowledges that it's a cartoon, and not in an enjoyably meta, Duck Amuck sort of way--more in a "you don't care, so why should we?" sort of way.…

TIFF ’15: The Girl in the Photographs

September 18, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF
*/****directed by Nick Simon by Bill Chambers Written by the son of Norman Bates and directed by a protégé of the late Wes Craven, The Girl in the Photographs is an illusorily-pedigreed resurrection of the slasher genre featuring scattered compositional glories courtesy of legendary DP Dean Cundey, returning to horror for the first time since, what, Psycho II? The picture opens with its Janet Leigh (horror muse Katharine Isabelle)--literally named Janet--being abducted from her home by a pair of masked fiends (one's a harlequin, the other a Trash Humper) who eventually leave a photo of her corpse on the bulletin…

TIFF ’15: Where to Invade Next + Ninth Floor

September 14, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

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Where to Invade Next. (pictured)
**½/****
written and directed by Michael Moore

NINTH FLOOR
**/****
written and directed by Mina Shum

by Bill Chambers The narrative pretext for Michael Moore’s globetrotting that lends Where to Invade Next its title is so low-concept, jokey, and finally immaterial as to be the documentary equivalent of the cable repairman arriving at the beginning of a porno. After a solid five minutes of trolling the Right with an inventory of recent conflicts that makes the United States look at once war-happy and, despite its exorbitant military spending, not very good at the whole war thing, Moore satirically sets off on a mission–shabby haircut, gummy smile, and Tigers cap (sometimes in camo green) intact–to find a good place for America’s next big skirmish. What he’s really doing is touring the world in search of proven ideologies his own tailspinning country would do well to adopt. In Italy and Germany, he discovers a happy, fruitful middle class in factories, of all places. In France, he encounters a gradeschool cafeteria where the chef opts for fruit-and-cheese platters over burgers and fries and the children regard Moore’s can of Coke dubiously. In Slovenia, he can’t find a single university student in debt until he happens on an American transplant who owes money back home. In Iceland, he becomes enamoured of an emergent matriarchy, which might be why he recedes as an on-camera presence: to curb the irony of his film mansplaining women in leadership to us.

TIFF ’15: Dheepan

September 13, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Palme d'Or Winner, Thriller, TIFF

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***/****
starring Antonythasan Jesuthasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Vincent Rottiers, Claudine Vinasithamby
screenplay by Noé Debré, Thomas Bidegain, Jacques Audiard
directed Jacques Audiard

by Bill Chambers “Well, not exactly,” a critic acquaintance gently scoffed after I shrugged that Dheepan was “y’know, Taxi Driver.” (“So Dheepan is basically the second time Taxi Driver‘s won the Palme d’Or,” I snarked on the Twitter.) He’s a grinder, and I respect the hell out of grinders–the ones who see everything and interview everybody and indefatigably churn out coverage: They are the heavyweight champions of the film-festival circuit. But they are a literalminded bunch (they have to be, for efficiency’s sake), and the Taxi Driver parallels are admittedly by no means 1:1. In Dheepan, three refugees of a Sri Lankan military conflict form a makeshift family out of stolen identities in order to start a new life abroad. They land in France, where “Dheepan” (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) scores a job as the caretaker of an apartment complex, finds “wife” Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) work as a housekeeper for one of the building’s tenants, and enrols 9-year-old “daughter” Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) in public school. Yalini, still in the prime of her youth, bristles at having to maintain the charade, particularly the fact that she’s become an insta-mom, with Dheepan direly overestimating her maternal instincts and capacity for sentiment. Of all the women he could’ve been paired with, he got Kelly Kapoor.

TIFF ’15: Black; We Monsters; Keeper

September 9, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Romance, Switzerland, Teen, Thriller, TIFF

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BLACK
*/****
directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah

Wir Monster, a.k.a. Cold Days
**/****
directed by Sebastian Ko

KEEPER (pictured)
***/****
directed by Guillaume Senez

by Bill Chambers My random sampling of #TIFF15’s Discovery programme yielded a loose trilogy of bildungsromane. The most ‘problematic’ of these, as the kids say, is Black, a West Side Story redux set on the surprisingly mean streets of Brussels, where rival gangs of Moroccan and (I think) Congolese immigrants antagonize the locals and each other. Marwan (charming Aboubakr Bensaihi) and Mavela (gorgeous Martha Canga Antonio) meet-cute in police custody. He’s Moroccan, she hangs with “the Black Bronx,” whose name very purposely evokes American ghettos for that soupçon of danger. When he hits on her, she asks him how he’d feel if his sister brought a black man home; Marwan admits there’s a double standard, then reassuringly points out they’re both African. Within days they’re a couple on the DL, whispering dreams of an honest future together. Alas, Mavela becomes inextricably tethered to the Black Bronx when she baits a female member of Marwan’s posse to their clubhouse to be gang-raped, then endures the same torment herself after they find out about her affair with Marwan. Note that the first rape happens offscreen while Mavela’s does not, and though I don’t condone any rape scene, there is something ultra-nauseating about graphically violating the Maria/Juliet figure, like when Edith Bunker endured a rape attempt: It breaks some socio-artistic contract we have with our most wholesome archetypes. It didn’t make me hate her attackers so much as it made me hate the filmmakers.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

August 31, 2015Posted in2015, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

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***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne
written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nico Lathouris
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw The best parts of Mad Max: Fury Road (hereafter Fury Road) are, as it happens, those that are most like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The parts about civilization rising from the ruins of an atomic war; the parts about misplaced hope and how unlikely alliances can sometimes speak to the human tendency towards faith and the possibility of eternity. The series was always about the myth of the lone hero, striding into whatever situation and facilitating a return to a prelapsarian (pre-poc-y-clypse?) state before disappearing again. Shane, for instance, where a child’s development–or in the case of Thunderdome, a great many children’s development–has been mythologized as the intervention of a mysterious stranger who appears from nowhere and returns there. Max is a metaphor. For courage, heart, intelligence, the yearning for home; he touches in turn each of The Wizard of Oz‘s quartet of self-actualization while keeping the Wizard behind the curtain. If there’s a specific modern mythology to which this series most obviously hews, it’s the Arthur myth, and in Thunderdome, when asked if he’s the return of the fabled Captain Walker, Max responds that he isn’t. But we know that he is.

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

August 10, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Thriller

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**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Renee Olstead, Jacob Wysocki
written by Nelson Greaves
directed by Leo Gabriadze

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Unfriended‘s formal constrictions–the action unfolds entirely as a screenshot–aren’t unique (the Canadian short film Noah got there first, and then there was that one segment of V/H/S), but they still make for a novel storytelling engine, especially in the uncharted realm of feature filmmaking, where Unfriended‘s closest precursor may be 2000’s hugely-dated Thomas in Love. (Dated less by its technological crudity than by its unprophetic view of cyber-living as deviant behaviour.) It’s fascinating to see the effect that being tethered to a computer monitor has on cinematic syntax. The task of laying out the horror-bogey’s tragic backstory is here accomplished with a couple of YouTube clips, for instance, and this kind of graceless infodump in lieu of structured flashbacks or verbal exposition feels perfectly valid. Moreover, the moment the protagonist, Blaire (former Miss Teen USA Shelley Hennig), is revealed via webcam feed as the computer’s owner, these videos–conveying the suicide of a high-school student named Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman)–become retroactively poignant: the idle guilt-surfing of a teenage girl. Everything is diegetic in Unfriended; even the on-the-nose soundtrack cues come straight from Blaire’s playlist. For a century, people have argued the superiority of books over movies because the latter “can’t tell you what a character is thinking,” but Unfriended and its ilk have stumbled on something: To espy a person’s mouse-clicks is to be privy to their mood, their impulses, their leaps of logic. It’s like reading their mind. While I wouldn’t want to watch too many movies in this narcissistic key, the innovation is undeniable.

It Follows (2015) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

July 13, 2015Posted in****/****, 2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

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****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary
written and directed by David Robert Mitchell

by Walter Chaw For me, David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover occupies a space in recent nostalgia films alongside stuff like Adventureland or the theatrical cut of Donnie Darko. It properly identifies a certain period in adolescence as grand drama and surreal dreamscape–when everything takes on magnified import both romantic and Romanticist–and paints that world in rich, velvet strokes. Mitchell’s follow-up, It Follows, exists in the same time and place, pools in the same crepuscular half-light of fading youth. It’s a horror movie, it’s true, and it has a bogey, sure, but what works about the film is that it’s actually about a fear of experience as it progresses, inexorable and unstoppable. Its bad guy is time, should you survive–which is really, truly fucking terrifying.

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

July 7, 2015Posted in2015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK

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*½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Sean Penn, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Don McPherson, Pete Travis, Sean Penn, based on the novel The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette
directed by Pierre Morel

by Bill Chambers Sean Penn seems like the last guy who would walk into his agent’s office and say, “Give me the Liam Neeson™,” because his work doesn’t operate on that kind of cynicism. Even I Am Sam, in which he courts an Oscar by playing mentally-challenged, fits neatly into a career whose primary auteurist concern has been the sanctity and fragility of daughters’ lives (see also: The Crossing Guard, The Pledge, 21 Grams, and Mystic River). So it’s reassuring, sort of, to see him use The Gunman as a pulpit for his humanitarian concerns (presuming I’ve correctly extrapolated the political firebrand’s credited contribution to the screenplay), but there is a disappointing transparency to the character, as if he’s afraid that reinventing himself too much in the Neeson mold will reveal, God forbid, a desire to stay popular in a profession he has threatened to quit numerous times. In The Gunman, one of our most transformative actors–a guy who as recently as 2011 turned himself into the spitting image of The Cure‘s Robert Smith and affected a childlike drawl for the length of a feature–comports himself with a tedious self-seriousness, makes time to surf, and smokes way too much to be a credible action hero. He’s Sean Penn in all but name, and he’s kind of a drag.

Get Hard (2015) [Unrated] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 30, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

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½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras Oy
starring Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, Alison Brie, Craig T. Nelson
screenplay by Jay Martel & Ian Roberts and Etan Cohen
directed by Etan Cohen

by Walter Chaw The title pretty much says it all, as screenwriter Etan Cohen’s gay-panic directorial debut Get Hard works as the exact antidote to his own work on the smart, occasionally vital Tropic Thunder. It’s puerile and indelicate–that much to be expected, I suppose, but it’s laboured, too, and flat as a pancake. If Get Hard were a middle-aged man, you’d be calling an ambulance for all the wheezing. Two scenes: in the first, Wall Street wolf James King (Will Ferrell) does a patented Will Ferrell freak-out, mistaking attendant Darnell (Kevin Hart) for a carjacker, ending with Darnell saying, “I didn’t mean to freak you out, man;” in the second, two scary-looking Boyz N the Hood-era gangbangers say, “Wall Street is where the real criminals at!” The former demonstrates how poorly matched are the improvisational styles of the leads, with Ferrell needing a deadpan straight world to his shenanigans; one wonders at the wisdom of casting two alpha-comedians in a film–with no one setting up the jokes, there’s never anything to pay off. (It’s why Jeff Daniels is Jim Carrey’s counterpart in the Dumb and Dumber movies and not Robin Williams.) The latter demonstrates how desperate the film is in trying to be smart and relevant. What could be more sophisticated and racially sensitive, after all, than a screenplay written by a bunch of identical-looking white guys imagining a Los Angeles street gang called the Crenshaw Kings transitioning their drive-by and street-smart jive business into day-trading?

The Films of Hayao Miyazaki (1979-2001)|Spirited Away (2001) – Blu-ray + DVD

June 25, 2015Posted in****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2015, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan, Romance, Sci-Fi, War

Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro) (1979)
***/****
Buy DVD at Amazon.com|Buy Blu-ray at Amazon.com
Adapted from a Monkey Punch manga that was itself based on Maurice LeBlanc’s popular super-spy Lupin, Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature-length film The Castle of Cagliostro came about as an offshoot of his experiences producing television episodes of a popular Lupin series (1977-1981). As such, the animation and backgrounds are more simplistic, the story is more cartoonish (though the very basic Miyazaki hallmarks of a girl in transition, flight, and gadgetry are already in place) and one-dimensional, and the pace is more relentlessly breakneck than occasionally meditative. Beginning as a heist comedy and continuing as an impenetrable fortress/princess in a tower action adventure film, The Castle of Cagliostro is a light, irreverent slapstick exercise with a healthy share of nifty gadgets and derring-do. Missing is a sense of completion and the deeper examination of themes that one will come to associate with the director’s work, but The Castle of Cagliostro stands on its own merits; despite being shackled somewhat by the artistic and thematic requirements of an in-place franchise, the picture reveals the burgeoning promise of a filmmaker who would become the most important voice of the new anime medium. 100 minutes

Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets (2014)

June 18, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Concert Doc, Documentary, Music, UK

Pulp

**½/****
directed by Florian Habicht

by Bill Chambers There's an episode of "The Larry Sanders Show" where tragic sidekick Hank Kingsley asks producer Artie what he thinks of him opening his solo act with Blood, Sweat & Tears' "Spinning Wheel." "It's a showstopper, Hank," Artie says, briefly raising Hank's hopes before delivering the kicker: "Never open with a showstopper." I was reminded of this at the outset of Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets, which opens with the title band giving a rousing performance of their "Common People" that is, for those of us watching after the fact, vicariously thrilling. "[1996] won't produce a more indispensable song," wrote rock authority Robert Christgau, and indeed, "Common People" went on to crystallize the Britpop movement and be covered by the disparate likes of Tori Amos and William Shatner. If you're a dilettante like myself, you go into this first sanctioned documentary about Pulp (lead singer Jarvis Cocker receives a "concept" credit alongside director Florian Habicht) wishing to hear "Common People," and what follows pales for the instant gratification–at least until it becomes clear that "Common People" had to be up front: for purposes of this film, it's nothing less than the national anthem.

Run All Night (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 15, 2015Posted in2015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

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*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Harris
screenplay by Brad Ingelsby
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra’s Run All Night fulfills every requirement of the Liam Neeson subgenre of elder-vengeance while simultaneously completing the Grumpy Old Men trilogy in an unexpected way. It’s a hollow stylistic exercise that mainly exposes how good We Own the Night was, and while some slight comparisons have been to Phil Joanou’s underestimated State of Grace, really the only thing Run All Night resembles is everything else Neeson has decided will be his legacy since the first Taken movie about seven years ago. What’s most painful, I think, is how consistently great Neeson is at doing this one thing over and over again. He makes it hard, in other words, to stop wishing he’d go back to doing something worthy of him.

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

June 7, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Will Smith

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**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Rodrigo Santoro, Gerald McRaney
written and directed by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

by Walter Chaw The world’s most polite heist/caper/con-man Charade thing, which feels it’s finally time to continue that death trudge towards completion of a Matchstick Men trilogy, John Requa and Glenn Ficarra’s Focus is a studiedly-inoffensive star vehicle for Will Smith that’s interesting only because of Will Smith’s casual attitude towards miscegenation. Easy to say that in 2015 a black guy with a white girl isn’t that big a deal, but I still can’t think of too many examples where a superstar like Smith is willing to repeatedly cast himself opposite a cross-racial leading lady. Smith is even a producer of Will Gluck’s intriguing Annie, which, in addition to being a very strange bookend to the surveillance-state nightmare of The Dark Knight, features at its centre an interracial love story between characters played by Jamie Foxx and Rose Byrne. I’m spending a lot of time on this, because Focus, aside from the sexy shenanigans of Smith’s expert con-man Nicky and his ingénue protégé Jess (Margot Robbie) and the fact of their race-mixing in a mainstream, medium-big studio flick, isn’t about anything and isn’t otherwise that interesting about it.

American Sniper (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 26, 2015Posted in2014, 2015, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, War

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***/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Kyle Gallner, Luke Grimes
screenplay by Jason Hall, based on the book by Chris Kyle
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda After delivering the first funereal jukebox musical in Jersey Boys just last summer, Clint Eastwood returns to better-fitting material with American Sniper, his most muscular and dramatically charged work in years, for whatever that’s worth. The common thinking about Eastwood these days–at least, outside the critical circle that deems his every tasteful composition and mild camera movement a classical masterstroke–is that his internal compass for choosing projects has been off for a while, making him susceptible to the bad taste of undistinguished screenwriters. What’s interesting about American Sniper, which works from a dicey script by Jason Hall that’s always in danger of becoming either a rote action thriller meted out in shootouts or a rote antiwar melodrama about how veterans never quite make it back home, is how obstinately it resists this narrative. Contrary to the vision of Eastwood as an efficient director prone to gliding on autopilot, American Sniper shows him forging something tough and difficult to grasp out of what might have been on-the-nose material.

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] – Stroszek

May 13, 2015Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Germany, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

Stroszek

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Commentary A
BD – Image B Sound A- Commentary A
starring Bruno S., Eva Mattes, Clemens Scheitz, Wilhelm von Homburg
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw I love this film. I’m enthralled by it. And every time I revisit it, it has a new gift for me. Bruno S. plays the titular Stroszek, a street performer released from a two-year institutionalization and left to his own devices with hooker girlfriend Eva (Eva Mattes) and pal Mr. Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz). There’s a transparency to the performances that transcends naturalism: you sense that the actors are not only playing themselves (more so than usual), but also that they’re playing themselves as allegorical figures in a metaphor for their lives. It’s Spider, but it’s at once more and less expressionistic than David Cronenberg’s film–and while the long, quiet, empty reaches of living in the giant abandoned warehouse of a mind in flux is a constant melancholy the two films share, there is something in Stroszek, crystallized in the haunting image of a premature baby pawing at its bedding, that does more to traumatize the human condition. When the film’s heroic triumvirate flees Germany for the gilded shores of Wisconsin (“Everybody’s rich there”), in a migration that reminds a little of Aguirre’s doomed hunt for El Dorado, Stroszek is suddenly a picture about pilgrimage to a holy land that exists solely in the windy spaces conjured by the promise of westward expansion.

The Boy Next Door (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 3, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Thriller

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½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jennifer Lopez, Ryan Guzman, John Corbett, Kristin Chenoweth
screenplay by Barbara Curry
directed by Rob Cohen

by Bill Chambers Every once in a while, the absence of Roger Ebert becomes piercingly clear–like when J-Lo is gifted with a “first edition” of The Iliad in The Boy Next Door, a moment of Hollywood illiteracy so quintessential that it might’ve once seemed contrived for the sake of an Ebert quip. But whether or not the filmmakers realized how inapt their choice of Homer was (screenwriter Barbara Curry has disavowed any credit), this is an effective bit of characterization. The gifter is the titular boy next door, Noah (Ryan Guzman); the giftee is Jennifer Lopez’s Mrs. Claire Petersen, an English teacher at his new school. Noah, although capable of bluffing his way through a conversation about Classics, can’t be expected to know the publishing history of The Iliad–it’s a nice, antiquey copy he thought would impress her, though he plays it cool, claiming he found it at a yard sale when he probably shoplifted it from a vintage bookstore. Claire should correct him, given her vocation, but why spoil a thoughtful gesture? And besides, that sort of pedantry bespeaks age, ultimately, and the generation gap between them is not something she wants underscored, because she’s a middle-aged single mother enjoying the attentions of a younger man. Far from being the picture’s nadir, it’s really as elegant as its writing ever gets.