Authors: Bill Chambers Archives - Page 29 of 68

Mystic River (2003) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 10, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Dennis Lahane
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Opening like a Stephen King story of a group of friends falling from innocence into experience, Clint Eastwood’s latest elegy for the myth of man strains at the edge of hysterical, offering up a testosterone-rich soup of In the Bedroom parental melodrama that compels for its pervasive doom, but disappoints for its didactic simplicity. Still, there’s something to the tribal primitivism of the picture, the idea that man at his essence is composed of balanced portions of nobility and violence and that our society, perhaps, is no different–the past being the muddy headwaters of the titular mystic river. The picture is a rhyme of Eastwood’s A Perfect World, complete with spiralling shots of the sky through branches–the evocation of a Naturalism at war with any illusion of moral spirituality or humanism, with its heroes criminals shaded equally by the instinct to violence and the instinct to nurture.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Western Adventures – DVD + Jeremiah Johnson (1972) – Blu-ray Disc

February 7, 2010****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 2010, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance, Western

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates
screenplay by Walon Green and Sam Peckinpah
directed by Sam Peckinpah

McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
****/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, William Devane
screenplay by Robert Altman and Brian McKay, based on the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton
directed by Robert Altman

THE TRAIN ROBBERS (1973)
1/2*/**** Image B- Sound C Extras F
starring John Wayne, Ann-Margret, Rod Taylor, Ricardo Montalban
written and directed by Burt Kennedy

JEREMIAH JOHNSON
*/****
DVD – Image D+ Sound C- Extras F
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Robert Redford, Will Geer, Allyn Ann McLerie, Delle Bolton
screenplay by John Milius and Edward Anhalt
directed by Sydney Pollack

by Walter Chaw From John Ford to Akira Kurosawa to Sergio Leone then back to the United States with Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, trace the odd, international lineage of the American western genre as the seeds of its completion are sown by Ford, only to be harvested a few decades down the line with a singular bloodbath south of the proverbial border. You could say that the western was already nearing its completion in the postwar films noir set in the sunshine and bluffs of the Old West: homegrown oaters by Anthony Mann and Fritz Lang; William Wellman’s Yellow Sky and Robert Wise’s Blood on the Moon; Budd Boetticher’s subversive Ranowns; Arthur Penn’s glass darkly Billy the Kid pic The Left Handed Gun; Brando’s filthy One-Eyed Jacks; and even Ford himself with terminal pieces like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers. But it’s through Kurosawa’s admiration and transfiguration of Ford’s themes–then Sergio Leone’s incandescent prism of dirt and blood that transfigured Kurosawa’s (and Ford’s) ideas about heroics and individualism into something poetically base–from which Peckinpah¹ took his cues.

This Is It (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

January 25, 20102000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Concert Doc, Documentary, Music

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
directed by Kenny Ortega

by Ian Pugh Cobbled together from the rehearsals for Michael Jackson’s planned fifty-show tour, the almost-concert film This Is It is intended to provide a simulacrum of the man’s “vision” before his untimely death. However, its primary attraction may very well be the rumble you feel from the unforgettable basslines of “Smooth Criminal” and “Beat It” when played in a movie theatre. It proves an experience unto itself, as does watching Jackson perform his greatest hits with impossible elegance–but the picture stumbles whenever it slows things down to hold a love-in for Jacko, which is pretty often. This Is It gets itself into trouble off the bat, with the unending praise from the singer’s tearfully grateful dancers (pre-audition/pre-mortem) giving way to a screen bathed in white light and a choir of angels; the whole affair is so beatific that it crosses the line from loving eulogy to revival tent. It’s a feeling the film never quite shakes.

Surrogates (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

January 18, 20102000s, 2009, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike, Ving Rhames
screenplay by John Brancato & Michael Ferris, based on the graphic novel by Robert Vendetti and Brett Weldele
directed by Jonathan Mostow

by Ian Pugh Fittingly, Surrogates is a patchwork substitute for any number of recent films that informed it. (All things considered, the ’05-’06 comic series from which the movie spawned may be the least of its sources.) Just look at its pedigree. Given that it’s about the schism between mortal man and unstoppable machine, it’s the second Terminator film for both director Jonathan Mostow (after Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) and star Bruce Willis (after Live Free or Die Hard), the third for screenwriters Michael Ferris and John Brancato (after T3 and Terminator Salvation), and perhaps the six-thousandth for 2009 alone–the latest in a long line of pictures that put the human soul behind the wheel of an automaton. Willis’s Tom Greer is prescribed the usual problems–dead son, distant wife (Rosamund Pike)–of a rough-and-tumble movie cop, and from there, Surrogates cribs WALL·E‘s missive about the dangers of excessive comfort and The Dark Knight‘s casual nihilism in exploring the weakness of flesh-and-blood. Almost exclusively cobbled together from recent trends in American cinema, there’s no denying its overfamiliarity–every twist and turn the movie has to offer is obvious at least forty-five minutes in advance. But as potentially the last straight action flick of the decade, Surrogates‘ derivative nature manages the improbable: it compacts the zeitgeist into a neat little package.

Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

January 14, 20102000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Music, Romance, Teen

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Miley Cyrus, Emily Osment, Jason Earles, Billy Ray Cyrus
screenplay by Dan Berendsen
directed by Peter Chelsom

by Bill Chambers Peter Chelsom may have sold his soul when he joined the ranks of Lasse Hallstrom and John Madden to become a house director for Miramax, but going to work at Disney–on a feature-film vehicle for one of the company’s biggest brands, no less–is a mercenary move, pure and simple. So it’s surprising, considering he probably could’ve treated the job as a paid vacation without incurring the wrath of “Hannah Montana” fans (who’ve been weaned on a particularly low-rent sitcom), to say nothing of the suits in charge (Disney favours foremen to filmmakers, after all), that Chelsom seems legitimately inspired by the material more often than not. The ‘Hannah Montana’ concept itself needs only gentle pushes to yield something resembling a story, but Chelsom doesn’t exactly coast on it; anyone who’s involuntarily endured the collected works of Kenny Ortega or Andy Fickman will notice a more idiosyncratic hand at the helm almost immediately. While I can’t say I’ve ever thought much of Chelsom’s films (they’re a bit twinkly for my tastes), he appears to have found his niche. As a work of Hollywood imperialism goes, it’s certainly preferable to his remake of Shall We Dance?.

Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 4, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, DVD, Film Festivals, Sports

***/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image C- Sound A Extras B
directed by Stacy Peralta

by Walter Chaw Winner of the Audience and Director’s awards at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, the kinetic social history document Dogtown and Z-Boys suggests that the amalgamation of art and sport created a unique brand of protest performance art centred around eight kids growing up in the “dead wonderland” of Venice Beach (and the surrounding urban wasteland referred to by the locals as Dogtown). Directed by Stacy Peralta, a member of the legendary Zephyr Skating Team that almost single-handedly defined the modern X-Game at the 1975 Del Mar Nationals Bahne-Cadillac Skateboard Championship, Dogtown and Z-Boys accomplishes several tasks at once, evoking the ethic that captured the imagination of American punks, portraying the dangers of stardom, and telling a rags-to-riches fable about how boys (and a girl) from the wrong side of the tracks sometimes make good on their own terms. The film is so intent on harnessing the off-the-cuff spirit that informed the Zephyr Team (“Z-Boys”) that we hear narrator Sean Penn cough and clear his throat.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2009

January 1, 20102000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

The last year of any decade is usually a watershed year, and we come to the end of 2009 with a bounty of riches. A year that just a couple of months ago I feared wouldn’t yield ten films from which to choose has, through a flurry of screeners and late-season additions, convinced me of its cinematic legitimacy. Find in the top ten three war films, five films about the state and politics of the modern family, one about a poet, and one about a cop. Discover that each of the first ten has a direct corollary in the next ten (suggesting that there’s a good bit of synchronicity in 2009), and that although women directors remain a novelty, three penetrate the top ten for the first time in my decade of lists. Other threads include a continuation of the last two years’ feelings of disconnection and entropy indulged, the notion that institutions of right are the ones perpetrating the bulk of atrocity, and investigations into the self that mainly fulfill Nietzsche’s maxim of abysses looking into the lookers. It’s a summary list, in a way, of the ’00s.

Extract (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

December 21, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime

½*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D+
starring Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis, Kristen Wiig, Ben Affleck
written and directed by Mike Judge

by Ian Pugh It’s fitting that Mike Judge’s latest film, a pale imitation of a past success that endeavours to capture its essence with a bare minimum of the same charm and profundity, should be titled Extract. Perhaps it’s not entirely fair to say that Judge’s Office Space achieved cult status for its portrayal of nine-to-five banality even though it’s actually about a wayward asshole who used that banality as an excuse to become a lazy, belligerent thief. Nevertheless, with Extract, Judge essentially confirms he thinks you liked Office Space for its company setting–and now, ten years later, he responds in kind. Work is hell in Judge’s world, and hell is other people. Although Judge is at his best when he’s telling you what you don’t want to hear–that teenagers are capable of some pretty vile things, that the presence of a work ethic might override your distaste for the work itself, that anti-intellectualism is going to be the death of American culture–at the precise moment you don’t want to hear it, in Extract he says nothing provocative beyond the occasional attempt at sucker-punching the viewer with politically-incorrect comedy that stopped being subversive around a decade ago. (Coincidence?) It’s impossible to say where the shock or amusement is supposed to come from at the sight of Ben Affleck (another remnant of the P.C. ’90s and its reactionary counterculture), gussied up to look like Arlo Guthrie as he curses, deals drugs, and smokes out of ridiculous bongs.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

December 10, 20092000s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, UK

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw It’s easily worse than Mike Newell’s go at The Goblet of Fire, and it’s satisfying to note that it fails for many of the same reasons. For all the gorgeously-decayed gothic architecture, the German Expressionism, the bleached colour palette, etc., Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (hereafter Harry Potter 6) isn’t the moody requiem before the bloody mass of parts 7 and 7a in the next couple of years, but instead this ungainly tween romcom with a sudden horde of amphibious zombies (not unlike the aquatic sequence in Harry Potter 4), inexplicable cameos from Ursa, Non, and Zod, and silly broomstick rugby. Dark undercurrents? No question. But they’re allowed to wither as the film focuses its attention on three non-professional actors doing their best to transform ridiculous, sweet-sixteen romantic imbroglios into Chekhov and Shakespeare, with the combined might of what seems the entire pantheon of great modern British movie actors milling around behind them. The problem isn’t that the film is character-driven; the problem is that the characters’ problems are insipid. Gone is the intense, sticky, stunningly emotional father issues tackled by Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban–the first real hint that this series could become the grown-up artifact the books never quite will given their much-publicized “meh” denouement. Gone is the continuation of that unsolvable Oedipal complexity that arose when the father figures were revealed as less than godlike in Yates’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the best film of the series by a nose–and one of the best American films of that year). In their place is a lot of insufferable slapstick carried off by actors no one would assume capable of screwball in environments better suited to Hammer. horrors: it’s “Abbott & Costello Meet the Dementors.”

Terminator: Salvation (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 29, 20092000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Germany, Italy, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

Terminator Salvation
*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Bryce Dallas Howard, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris
directed by McG

by Walter Chaw The movie pretends that it’s about discovering that which separates humans from machines–an idea of “functional equivalence,” if you will, that Duncan Jones does a much better job with in his zero-budget Moon than McG does with in his small-country-GDP-budget Terminator Salvation. But what it’s really about is blowing shit up real good for two hours. A tanker blows, a gas station blows, a field of satellite towers blows, a hole blows, and, accordingly, the movie blows. The real secret for success that the human freedom fighters of 2018, led by saviour guy John Connor (Christian Bale), should search for is the one that allows the evil Skynet robots to distinguish man-made fires in the desert that it should examine from those it should leave alone. What they discover instead is a “kill code” they can play on their futuristic boom boxes that “turns off” the machines hunting the people remaining after a nuclear holocaust has left the planet completely habitable for the hundreds of huddled masses tuning their transistor radios to fireside chats with Connor. (But not the types of fires the robots are interested in–see, the robots are only drawn to fires that humans set as ambush traps (and Guns N’ Roses (you wouldn’t understand)).)

Snatch (2000) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

November 23, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, UK

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image C Sound A Extras A
starring Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina, Brad Pitt, Rade Sherbedgia
written and directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw Guy Ritchie’s sophomore effort Snatch opens with a hyperkinetic homage to the first violent robbery of Ringo Lam’s City on Fire and continues by aping the slick mod-cool of the British gangster films of the late-’60s and early-’70s. It is a bizarre beast that borrows, steals, re-invents, and winks knowingly when its hand is caught in the imagistic cookie jar. Guy Ritchie laughs at your erudition. He’s in it for the money shots–a new champion of the gangster drama as pornography: ultimately empty but undeniably efficient.

Up (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 19, 20092000s, 2009, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Pixar

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras N/A
screenplay by Bob Peterson
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw There’s still something breathless about Up, but I wonder if the Pixar formula isn’t starting to show its seams now in its second decade of producing masterpieces–if there’s a lack of freshness here in its familiarly exhilarated, cozily excited spaces. None of that fatigue is in evidence in the film’s miraculous, wordless prologue, however: destined to compete with the opening-credits sequence of Watchmen as the single best stretch in any film this year, it establishes character, motivation, story of place, and sense of time without leaving a dry eye in the house. Shame the picture also peaks in these first ten minutes. It reminds of the wordless bit describing Jessie’s abandonment in Toy Story 2, or the entire first half of WALL·E, and it suggests that Pixar is unparalleled in exploiting the possibilities for visual storytelling in its cavernous digital medium. The comparison of WALL·E to Chaplin is on point: When Pixar trusts the expressiveness of its mainframe and the beautiful, liquid clarity of its animation techniques, I don’t know that there’s ever been a better “silent” filmmaking collective. In their roster, it’s arguable that they’ve only really faltered twice: once with the tedious Seven Samurai redux A Bug’s Life, and again with the noxious redneck-baiting Cars. And while Up is nowhere near that bottom, it finds itself somewhere in the middle thanks to the peculiar ceiling to its invention (an entire Lost World and all you got is a giant bird and a talking dog?) and sentimentality that edges from sweet to mawkish. There are one too many cutaways to a dead wife’s portrait and one too many winsome sighs as a plan made in childhood looms tantalizingly near.

North by Northwest (1959) – DVD|North by Northwest (1959) [50th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 11, 2009****/****, 1950s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Mystery

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B Extras A
BD – Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is Alfred Hitchcock’s most mercurial anti-hero, the soup bone reduction of the Master’s wrong-man theme. An advertising executive so at ease with changing his identity at the fall of a hammer, he has, by film’s end, become/done all of the things he’s wrongfully accused of being/doing at the beginning of the film. Indeed, Hitchcock would never again mine the idea of the wrong man with this kind of heat–veering off as he did into a more metaphysical kind of guilt transference à la Vertigo with The Birds, Psycho, and Marnie. As North by Northwest opens, Thornhill gives his regards to a night porter’s wife (“We’re not talkin’!”), steals a cab from a Good Samaritan, and instructs his secretary to send a neglected lover a box of gold-wrapped candy because “she’ll think she’s eating money.” He’s a charmer–and he’s as oily, despicable, and fast-talking as almost every one of Grant’s romantic comedy heroes. Hitch undermines and exploits Grant for the fourth and final time here as a guy we love until we stop for a second to catch our breath and take stock of the myriad ways in which we’ve been bribed, glad-handed, misled, and led-on.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

November 2, 20091970s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, DVD, Horror, Italy, Spain, Zombie

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
***/****
DVD – Image B Sound C+ Extras B
BD – Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Ray Lovelock, Christine Galbo, Arthur Kennedy
screenplay by Sandro Continenza & Marcello Coscia
directed by Jorge Grau

by Walter Chaw Without having to squint much, you could see the hero of Jorge Grau’s The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, art-dealing Easy Rider hippie George (Ray Lovelock), trying to deliver the airplane propeller his spiritual brother, David Hemmings’ mod-photog from Blowup, buys in tribute to form over function midway through Antonioni’s counterculture classic. Instead, George is trying to deliver the sister of the fatal fertility juju from Arthur Penn’s Night Moves through titular Manchester into the green countryside on the back of his too-cool motorcycle. He’s thwarted initially by the bumper of maiden fair Edna (Cristina Galbo), then by the hungry undead stalking the countryside in search of meaty sociological metaphors, then by an ossified Scotland Yard dick (Arthur Kennedy). Luckily, there’s plenty of allegorical beef for everyone, as Grau paints a vivid picture of Mod Madness in steady, deteriorating orbit around the entropy and hedonism of the time–sprinkling it liberally with a disdain for dictatorships Grau no doubt nursed whilst working under the heel of Francisco Franco’s regime.

The Hills Have Eyes (1977) – DVD + Wrong Turn (2003) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

October 29, 20091970s, 2000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, DVD, Germany, Horror, Thriller

THE HILLS HAVE EYES
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Susan Lanier, Robert Houston, Martin Speer, Dee Wallace-Stone
written and directed by Wes Craven

by Walter Chaw Released the same year as Star Wars, Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes boasts of its own Luke Skywalker in the character of a blue-eyed towhead named Bobby (Bobby Houston) who, at an unwelcome call to adventure, finds himself embarked against the forces of evil with a patchwork band of heroes out of their depth. Chewbacca subbed by a ridiculously Rin Tin Tin German Shepherd hermaphrodite (sometimes a girl, sometimes a boy, always a hero), The Hills Have Eyes is Craven’s zero-budget follow-up to his astonishingly unpleasant (and influential) exploitation version of The Virgin Spring, The Last House on the Left. A rough, raw, often amateurish take on the Sawney Beane cannibal family legend, the piece derives its power from the canny paralleling of its antagonistic families and its use of archetype and mythology in the telling of what is essentially a caste horror picture.

Drag Me to Hell (2009) [Unrated Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

October 26, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Sam Raimi, Horror

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver, Dileep Rao
screenplay by Sam Raimi & Ivan Raimi
directed by Sam Raimi

by Ian Pugh The Evil Dead was one of the primary altars at which I prayed as a young student of the cinematic arts–a vital entry in that education for how it left me shocked, nay, stupefied that such a work could actually exist, with its twitching limbs and tree-rapes and fountains of oatmeal ichor. How did they get away with that stuff? So it goes, I think, with Sam Raimi’s best efforts, these four-colour horror comics put on film, blindsiding you with their towering insanity before you can understand just how deeply they’ll worm into your psyche with their sadness and panic. Sounds incredibly petty to say, but I have to admit that when he found mainstream success and acceptance with the Spider-Man franchise, a little piece of that anarchic spirit died for me. Raimi himself was transparently nostalgic for it in Spider-Man 3, a decidedly misguided attempt to hark back to the themes of his original superhero masterpiece, Darkman.

Natural Born Killers (1994) – Blu-ray Disc (Digibook) + Natural Born Killers: The Director’s Cut [Original Uncut Version] – Blu-ray Disc

October 18, 2009****/****, 1990s, 2009, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/****
R-RATED Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
FFC Must-Own NC-17 Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tommy Lee Jones
screenplay by David Veloz & Richard Rutowski & Oliver Stone
directed by Oliver Stone

by Walter Chaw Lodged in there like the apple in Gregor Samsa’s back next to the spine of the American character is this corrupt speck of frontier spirit, transmogrified in the heat of late-’50s cynicism and irony by heartland bogies Ed Gein and Charles Starkweather–the veneration of them in our collective heart of darkness stoked by a long tradition of outlaw worship from Jesse James to Bonnie and Clyde. The cinematic children of Gein and Starkweather, erupting from the Eisenhower Eden of rocket ships and Cadillacs, range from epoch-shaking pictures like Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to New American Cinema masterpieces like Badlands and Take the Money and Run. The heartbeat of the zeitgeist can be kenned in this finger to this pulse, in the individualism we celebrate and the establishment against which we secretly nurse these little serpentine malignancies. Enter Oliver Stone, not so much the provocateur as a perverse, self-indulgent chronicler of that American disease–and why not Stone, who’s only ever good when he’s talking about the United States and only ever talking about the United States when he’s talking about anything else. He takes the Starkweather case and fashions it, from a story by Quentin Tarantino, into a work of extreme, fanatical patriotism: Natural Born Killers.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula/Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [Collector’s Box Set] – DVD|Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) + Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) – Blu-ray Discs

October 5, 20091990s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Japan, Robert De Niro, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK, Vampire

BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA
Dracula
**/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+
BD – Image C Sound A Extras A+
starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by James V. Hart
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN
**½/****
DVD – Image D Sound B+
BD – Image B+ Sound B
starring Robert De Niro, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hulce, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw The first thirty minutes of Francis Ford Coppola’s retelling of the Dracula legend are dazzling and assured: a self-consciously cinematic, fulsome display of technique and loud emotions–expressionism writ large against lurid backdrops and red, backlit shadow plays. It seems impossible that Coppola could keep this up for the duration of the picture, could see to fruition the kind of viable update/continuation of Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that the Akira Kurosawa film he helped produce, Kagemusha, with its sanguineous, medieval battlegrounds painted with heavy brushes, aspired to be. And sure enough, what begins as a clarion call settles into a somewhat familiar period costume drama spiced up now and again with racy sequences nonetheless sobered by the memory of the delirious hedonism of that opening, wherein we get Dracula’s backstory as a hero of a holy war, repulsing Muslim invaders in Romania, turning to blasphemy when the vengeful Turks fool his wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) into believing that her beloved has died on the battlefield, and gleefully chewing artificial scenery with toothy relish.

Observe and Report (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

September 30, 2009****/****, 2000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Seth Rogen, Anna Faris, Michael Peña, Ray Liotta
written and directed by Jody Hill

by Ian Pugh The tide is changing, that much is clear. In just the last month alone, Paul Rudd and Jason Segel have turned a dependence on male bonding into a crisis of sexual identity (I Love You, Man), while Greg Mottola has deromanticized teenage nostalgia (Adventureland). Now, with their thoroughly disturbing Observe and Report, Jody Hill and Seth Rogen finish prying loose the grip that Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow have had on American comedy these past few years. More importantly, the film finally gives a clear voice to the ineluctable madness that the cinema of 2009 has poked and prodded at up to this point. The deadly sociopathy of Alan Moore’s Rorschach blooms at last in security guard Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen), approached with frightened apprehension and a full understanding as to why he would nevertheless be lauded as a hero. As a result, the movie he inhabits is difficult, devastating, and paints our most recent cycles of vulgar, man-child humour as an empire built on unspoken psychosis and violent outbursts. Suddenly, the idea of Ferrell beating up a swarm of grade-schoolers in Step Brothers doesn’t seem so hilarious.

2009 TIFF Bytes #3.5: A Shine of Rainbows

September 23, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Ireland, TIFF

Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF: A SHINE OF RAINBOWS (dir. Vic Sarin) Gawd, this movie is so nauseatingly nice. And generic. And hackneyed--any seasoned moviegoer will be able to predict every single story beat in advance. Connie Nielsen and Aidan Quinn--neither of whom is from Ireland (the director, meanwhile? From India)--play an Irish couple who adopt an adorable stuttering moppet (John Bell) from the local Dickensian orphanage. Because the kid is timid, kind of effeminate, and more than happy to learn the ropes from Nielsen,…