Authors: Bill Chambers Archives - Page 3 of 68

The Fabelmans (2022) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

February 12, 20232022, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Spielberg

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogan, Gabriel LaBelle
written by Steven Spielberg & Tony Kushner
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) loves making movies. He loves it so much there’s a chance he’ll destroy his family because of it–showing things that aren’t for public consumption, mishandling the power of the medium, underestimating the magnitude of his gift. We know this because there’s a scene where Sammy, while editing raw 8mm footage of a family camping trip, notices his mom, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), getting a little too friendly with family friend Benny (Seth Rogen). He cuts all the incriminating clips together into a mini-reel he projects for Mitzi against the wall of his closet as explanation of sorts for why he’s sullen lately, and maybe as punishment for Mitzi, who has just struck him out of frustration. We know this, too, because his obviously insane grand-uncle, ex-lion tamer Boris (Judd Hirsch), has warned him, in a movie-stealing bit of scenery-chewing, that the tension between art and family always ends in tragedy. We know this, too…uh, too, because it’s ventriloquized through the mouths of more than one character, including Sammy’s bully, Chad (Sam Rechner). Word for tortured word. There are more monologues in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans than there are dialogues–more peaks than mountains, as it were. More waves than ocean. I don’t know why everyone in this movie talks like either a greeting card or a diagnosis, though I think it probably has to do with Spielberg wanting to excavate his past and, in the exhumation, to find easy and uplifting bows in which to tie his various strings. We all want that. I feel for him.

Invaders from Mars (1953) – 4K Ultra HD

February 2, 20231950s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Helena Carter, Arthur Franz, Jimmy Hunt, Leif Erickson
screenplay by Richard Blake
production designed and directed by William Cameron Menzies

by Bill Chambers Predating Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers by two years and Don Siegel’s seminal film adaptation, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by three, William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars makes for an apt precursor in featuring a child protagonist and beginning at the dawn of an invasion instead of the usual in media res. When his alarm clock reminds him in the middle of the night to check out “Orion in its zenith,” little David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) accidentally rouses his father, George (Leif Erickson), who is careful not to discourage the curiosity of a fellow “scientist” while tucking his son back into bed. David is awakened again by a commotion outside, and from his bedroom window sees a flying saucer disappear below the horizon. Dad agrees to check it out, which is of course not the wisest idea, yet his respect for his son’s intelligence is touching. While a twist ending recontextualizes this moment, suggesting it may have been wishful thinking on David’s part, that’s touching, too: Here’s a movie where the child’s fantasy of saving the world isn’t about demonstrating feats of heroism beyond his years, but about adults giving him the benefit of the doubt.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

December 20, 20221980s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, John Hughes

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A- Commentary B
starring Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, Randy Quaid, Miriam Flynn
written by John Hughes
directed by Jeremiah Chechik

Updated to correct an embarrassing blunder on 12/28/2022.-Ed.

by Bill Chambers After turning in a subpar first draft of National Lampoon’s European Vacation and ghosting the production thereafter, John Hughes made an unexpected return to the franchise by writing and producing National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, loosely basing his screenplay, like that of the first …Vacation, on one of his short stories for NATIONAL LAMPOON magazine. Both “Vacation ’58” and “Christmas ’59” are written as a childhood reminiscence and get their humour from the discordant pairing of morbid memories and misty-eyed prose. (Think Jean Shepherd in charge of the police blotter.) There is no Clark Griswold per se in these stories, only a hazy father figure coming unglued. As a result, Hughes butted heads with director Harold Ramis on the original, since Ramis was making a Chevy Chase vehicle, not a coming-of-age flick. By Christmas Vacation, Hughes was at a different place in his personal and professional lives, raising children and turning mogul, and the film finds him identifying with the patriarch almost to the exclusion of the kid characters. His screenplay, in fact, reclaims Clark from Amy Heckerling’s aimless and conceptually fuzzy European Vacation, seizing on the pressure cooker of the holiday season as a poignant trigger for Clark’s compulsive need to contrive Kodak, nay, Hallmark moments.

Nope (2022) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

November 3, 20222022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version.

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw I don’t think you ever see the heroes getting hurt, but they limp around a lot, and I couldn’t stop wondering why. Just because it’s more dramatic to be out of breath and limpy? There’s a rule about not looking something in the eye, but I don’t know how the horses can obey it, or if horses look up and behind them when they run. I’ve never seen them do that, in any case. If there’s a rule about eyes, is the plan, in the end, to put eyes on the hood of that hoodie, and if it isn’t, why did he? I understand there’s a point being made here about how Hollywood doesn’t care about the people who work in it–especially minorities and child actors–once their usefulness has been used up, yet I worry if by equating their trauma with a television chimp who goes insane and starts eating faces that the analogy, assuming there is one, has gotten as out of control as the chimp. There’s a reveal that’s less a reveal of an important plot point than a reveal that the reveal of an important plot point was left out somewhere. There’s a powerful opening scene where something happens involving a nickel that is very effective up until the moment it’s explained, at which point it no longer makes sense; why did it do what it did and not what it does for the rest of the film? Is it attracted to movement? Noise? It seems like both–but if so, how are folks constantly escaping it by moving around and making noise? That picture she takes? It looks ridiculous and will be convincing to no one. Wouldn’t the camera and the film the famous cinematographer is shooting still be in one piece, like a black box, when the thing happens with the balloon? How is that the first balloon it’s ever seen or eaten? If I ate a balloon (and could, for instance, withstand multiple gravities of speed and possibly interstellar travel), would I explode?

Poltergeist (1982) + The Lost Boys (1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

October 25, 2022****/****, 1980s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Joel Schumacher, Directors: Tobe Hooper, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Spielberg, Teen, Thriller, Vampire

POLTERGEIST
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Heather O’Rourke
screenplay by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais & Mark Victor
directed by Tobe Hooper

THE LOST BOYS
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Corey Feldman, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Bill Chambers Although Walter Chaw’s already written definitive reviews of Poltergeist and The Lost Boys for this site, so much time has passed since they were published that I feel obliged to say something original about these films before moving on to the Blu-ray portion of this review. Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, each celebrating milestone anniversaries this year (fortieth and thirty-fifth, respectively), have aged unusually gracefully. Partly this is due to the Star Wars-festooned bedroom of Poltergeist and the comics-store hub of The Lost Boys being evergreen–though what was once indicated by Robbie’s C-3PO lightswitch cover (his middle-class privilege) and Sam’s pedantic knowledge of Superman lore (his lack of social life) may not come across as clearly to a generation of viewers that has grown up with Jedis and superheroes as the inescapable sum of pop culture. Moreover, these are not naïve films that invite condescension, and any doubts about their sophistication (aesthetic and otherwise) are laid to rest by the instantly dated attempts to drag them into the 21^st century: Gil Kenan’s remake of Poltergeist and the dtv sequel Lost Boys: The Tribe.

The Munsters (2022) – Blu-ray Disc

September 29, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Family, Horror, Streaming

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Sheri Moon Zombie, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Daniel Roebuck, Richard Brake
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw Rob Zombie only makes movies about families, and he does it with a wife he loves. It’s the kind of relationship John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands shared: the iconoclastic, combative director and his muse, living examples of a creative partnership built on mutual respect, come hell or high water. I call Rowlands Cassavetes’s “muse,” though I think closer to the truth is that their movies feel like watching great jazz musicians play off each other. Without exactly equating one of the greatest independent filmmakers of all time with Rob Zombie, I think Zombie and Sheri Moon Zombie go to some interesting places together they couldn’t get to on their own. I can’t claim Zombie’s for everyone–hell, Cassavetes ain’t for everyone, either–but he works on a specific wavelength where if you’re hip to it, if you fall into his groove, for his part he never loses the beat. I didn’t get it when I first saw House of 1000 Corpses, but from a second viewing of The Devil’s Rejects on, I’ve been ride or die with Zombie. Unlike most, when it was announced he was tabbed to do a reboot of “The Munsters” (which has turned out to be a prequel to the TV series), I was not only not surprised, given his penchant for family stories–I was excited. I wish it were better.

TIFF ’22: I Like Movies

September 13, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**½/****
starring Isaiah Lehtinen, Krista Bridges, Romina D’Ugo, Percy Hynes White
written and directed by Chandler Levack

by Bill Chambers At the beginning of this pandemic without end, I bought a used camcorder off eBay so that I could digitize the mountains of footage I generated making movies with friends as a teenager. It was a trip down memory lane that confirmed something I’d always suspected and feared: I was a complete tyrant. Make that dick. I was a misfit with control issues stemming from disability, and I was obsessed with movies. Add a video camera to that–at least in the early ’90s, when they were still novel–and you get Napoleon. With his black moptop and squat frame, high-schooler Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen) could be a live-action Gene Belcher–but the huge chip on his shoulder and his voluminous clothing sooner bring Ignatius J. Reilly to mind. He’s funny in small doses. Certainly the opening scene of film critic Chandler Levack’s feature debut I Like Movies is so uncanny I could only laugh. Lawrence and his best friend–his only friend–Matt Macarchuck (Percy Hynes White) have made a silly video for class. The teacher, Mr. Olenick (Anand Rajaram), shuts it off after it fades out, and Lawrence protests that he’s skipped the blooper reel and end-credit outtakes. Mr. Olenick asks what their spoof of A Christmas Carol had to do with the assigned topic (“bias in the media”), and Lawrence says, “I just decided I wanted to do something, you know, more personal and from the heart.” A classmate, Lauren (Eden Cupid), sticks up for the video by calling it “cute”–a word that only makes Lawrence apoplectic. Everything that comes out of Lawrence’s mouth here probably came out of mine during my senior year of English, when I made a movie about Elvis faking his death to hide from Satan and called it a book report on The Great Gatsby.

12 Monkeys (1995) – Blu-ray Disc|4K Ultra HD

July 12, 20221990s, 2019, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Arrow Video, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

Twelve Monkeys
***½/****
BD – Image A Sound A- Extras B
4K – Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt, Christopher Plummer
screenplay by David Webb Peoples & Janet Peoples, inspired by the film La Jetée written by Chris Marker
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Bryant Frazer Twelve Monkeys is a movie about a moment. Yes, sure, it’s a decades-spanning science-fiction tale about time travel, the illusion of free will, and a romance at the end of the world. Yet its defining facet is its repeated, soulful depiction of a few terrible minutes in the life of a young boy who witnesses an event that’s tragic in ways he can’t comprehend. That’s how the story starts and how it ends, the first thing we see and also the last–a child’s eyes, open wide, as he is exposed to the spectacle of death, probably for the first time. Although Twelve Monkeys deals with the destruction of human civilization by a lethal contagion, and the plague’s aftermath, less of the action centres on the plague itself than on this little boy. Mostly, it’s concerned with a man named James Cole (Bruce Willis), who believes he’s a time-travelling agent sent back from the 2030s, after a small number of survivors retreat to the safety of underground caves. Liberated from a prison cell for the mission to contemporary Philadelphia (ground zero for the virus release), Cole is trying to discover information about its origins that can be used, decades hence, to help make the earth’s ruined surface safe for human habitation. Success means redemption, since Cole would return to his future world a hero. But in an ironic twist, Cole is almost immediately institutionalized; only psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), a specialist in “madness and apocalyptic visions,” and fellow patient Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), who may be a nascent environmental terrorist, suspect Cole’s references to upcoming cataclysmic events may be more than just delusional.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

June 27, 20222022, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Nicolas Cage, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Sharon Horgan, Tiffany Haddish
written by Tom Gormican & Kevin Etten
directed by Tom Gormican

by Bill Chambers There’s a lot I don’t understand about Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent that has nothing to do with its alleged postmodernism. I don’t understand why Nicolas Cage, David Gordon Green, and Demi Moore play “themselves” while Neil Patrick Harris, who plays himself in everything, does not. I don’t understand the point of Green playing himself–that is to say, I don’t understand the point of the director character being David Gordon Green, since a) he’s just an avatar for clout one doesn’t necessarily associate with Green, b) his prior relationship with Cage is never excavated or exploited (they made the not-uninteresting Joe together in 2013), and c) it’s doubtful that enough viewers will know who Green is to justify the casting. I don’t understand Green’s reaction to Cage’s impromptu audition, either, whether his awed “Jesus” is because he’s blown away, appalled, or reacting to an actor–a star–of Cage’s calibre grovelling to the director of The Sitter and Halloween Kills. I don’t understand why the movie spells Nic Cage’s name “Nick Cage”: if it’s to separate onscreen “Nick” from offscreen “Nic,” then why has Nick appeared in all the same stuff as Nic? That “k,” like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent itself, ersatzes Cage. This movie isn’t meta or satire, it’s the Dollar Store version of an American original.

New on Our Patreon

June 22, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog

by Bill Chambers Heads-up, current and future Patreons: We recently launched SlipStreams, a weekly column in which Walter Chaw and I take turns recommending four titles currently streaming in either the U.S., Canada, or both. In the current "volume" (#3), which went up this afternoon, I pay tribute to the late, great Ray Liotta in choosing three semi-forgotten films that are among his late-career highlights. Meanwhile, the latest edition (#27) of Walter's regular feature Life During Wartime finds him screening Don't Look Now with his daughter; it might be my personal favourite of this long-running series. These pieces are available to any and all subscribers of our Patreon. We don't do "tiers," since the primary purpose of our Patreon is to support this, the mothersite, but we did feel we owed a few bonus goodies to those generous souls keeping FILM FREAK CENTRAL afloat.

25 Candles: Film Freak Central Turns the Quarter-Century Mark

May 31, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog

The Screenplay Closet

by Bill Chambers It’s hard for me to remember the BW (Before Walter) times now, but this site was already four years old when Walter Chaw joined it in 2001. In 1997, I was writing reviews for one of my hometown newspapers and living in the only dorm on the campus of York University that offered free broadband in every suite. So I taught myself basic HTML and established a GeoCities page in order to “syndicate” my print reviews. My time at the paper ended pretty much when I graduated from film school; I kept the site going because I needed something to take my mind off the crickets that had suddenly replaced my social life. I convinced myself that FILM FREAK CENTRAL–known, in those first few months, as FILM GEEK CENTRAL, to my everlasting shame–was only temporary and that screenplays, which I’d been writing in my spare time for a decade, were how I was really going to unlock the door to fortune and glory.

Scream (2022) – Blu-ray + Digital Code

May 17, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, Wes Craven

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Melissa Berrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Neve Campbell
written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven’s Scream cycle, in terms of its influence on modern film, constitutes the most important metatext of the last 25 years in that it’s not only self-referential, it’s curious about how self-reference can be an essential ontological tool as opposed to a mere existential exercise. They’re better movies, in this respect, than The Matrix and its sequels, and, at least in terms of their popularity, they’re more important than even Charlie Kaufman’s extraordinary but limited-appeal body of work. The Scream saga, for lack of a better word, matters. Not for nothing does Scream 3, despite being the weakest installment of the original four and the only one of those that didn’t involve Williamson in any significant way, take place mainly on a simulacrum of hero Sidney’s childhood home and neighbourhood, recreated inside a soundstage like the to-scale streets of Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. If the first film is a watershed, the second is perhaps the series’ masterpiece: a phenomenal bit of pop philosophy that sees Sidney (Neve Campbell) as a Cassandra figure, literally forced onto the stage with a pack of masked murderers to re-enact her trauma from and into eternity. It’s her role in these Passion Plays to be preyed upon–and through her suffering, the “rules” of engagement between women coming of sexual age and men wanting to possess and punish them for that are forged. She has become an archetype, a thing that is representative of a fundamental truth, and the movies understand that. When she makes her entrance in the new Scream (hereafter Scream 5), standing up in a hospital waiting area to greet a young woman initiated into the abattoir, it is framed and shot as though we are all in the presence of a divine visitation.

Dexter: New Blood (2021-2022) – Blu-ray Disc

May 12, 20222021, 2022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Disability, Drama, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A Extras C+
“Cold Snap,” “Storm of Fuck,” “Smoke Signals,” “H is for Hero,” “Runaway,” “Too Many Tuna Sandwiches,” “Skin of Her Teeth,” “Unfair Game,” “The Family Business,” “Sins of the Father”

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It begins with a white buck. Dexter is tracking it through the woods, a regular Natty Bumppo. Though he has a clear shot, something stops him from pulling the trigger, and he falls to his knees in a parody of biblical defeat. A second attempt the following day is foiled when a sharp noise from elsewhere causes the wildlife to scatter, while a third and final try sees him lowering his rifle and surrendering to the beauty of the beast. Dexter and the white buck are kindred spirits–outliers of their species, yet built to blend into their surroundings. Trophies, ultimately, for their rarity. The premiere episode of “Dexter: New Blood”, “Cold Snap,” might be my favourite of the character’s entire television run, because it allows him this brief state of grace. There was a season of “Dexter” where he went searching for signs of a higher power, but it’s here that he finds one, and what makes this so different from our serial-killer Pinocchio’s previous real-boy epiphanies is that, for once, there’s no noise in his head. In fact, this most compulsive of narrators only starts talking to us again after the tranquillity of the moment is shattered, which is a surprisingly understated gambit for “Dexter”. It’s a crowd-pleasing thing, I suppose, when he finally pipes up (it’s Clark Kent ducking into a phone booth, or Popeye squeezing a can of spinach), but it plays to me as bitter commentary on how short-lived inner peace is these days for anyone with a moral compass–even one as faulty as Dexter’s.

We’re Still Here

May 2, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog

Thanks for your patience, folks. Lots of good stuff on the way, asap. In the meantime, check out our Master Review Index, which has ballooned of late as we get closer to fully restoring the archives.-Ed.

Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision – Books

April 21, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Books About Movies

Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision
FFC rating: 7/10
by Charles Elton

by Bill Chambers Six years after his death, Michael Cimino remains an enigma, shrouded by a swirling mass of rumours and contradictions. A biographer has their work cut out for them. Before reading Charles Elton’s Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision, I took stock of everything I knew about the mercurial filmmaker: that he helmed seven movies during a span of 22 years, the second of which he was fêted for (The Deer Hunter), the third of which he went to director jail for (Heaven’s Gate); and that he gradually began to look different in ways for which time alone cannot account. I also had some preconceived notions about Cimino–that he was vain, an egotist, one who burned a lot of bridges–that are more or less borne out by Elton’s overview, but it’s important to note that Cimino was not around to defend himself when the author went rummaging through his past. (I feel fairly confident in saying, again from the picture Elton paints, that he probably would’ve spent more energy trying to halt the book’s publication altogether.) Though Cimino is not one of the great posthumous bios on the order of David Weddle’s If They Move…Kill ‘Em! or Lee Server’s Baby, I Don’t Care, it does have unique virtues (which I’ll get to) and is reasonably good at preserving Cimino’s dignity while countering or outright demolishing his own unreliable narrative.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

March 23, 20222021, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Esoterica, Sci-Fi

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

½*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Neil Patrick Harris
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & David Mitchell & Aleksandar Hemon
directed by Lana Wachowski

by Walter Chaw I guess I wouldn’t mind that The Matrix: Resurrections (hereafter Matrix 4) is so stupid if it didn’t spend so much of its bloat trying to explain itself. Just let it go. If you’re riding with the same plot as Space Jam: A New Legacy, own it–run with it, for fuck’s sake. Exposition is always a delicate if necessary evil, but here it’s particularly undignified. It’s Glen from Raising Arizona explaining his Polack jokes. The plot of Matrix 4 is essentially that conversation with the guy who’s way too stoned who has this great idea for a Matrix sequel. “Okay, okay, see, Neo is–haha–NEO is Mr. Anderson again and–haha, check it–he’s like this programmer dude, real boring piece of shit, and he made a game back in 1999 called ‘The Matrix’, and yo, yo, yo, wait, wait… What if Trinity was The One, too?” You’ve heard of the concept of “raising all boats”? Well, an hour of deadening exposition devoted to explaining a plot this contrived, this smug and half-cocked, this simultaneously convoluted and simplistic, sinks the boat–sinks all fucking boats. Good poker players have confidence and chill; not only does Lana Wachowski have a real bad tell, she gives speeches about what she’s holding. “Hi, I’m Lana, creator of The Matrix, and I’m drawing on an inside straight.” Small wonder Lilly refused to participate in this boondoggle, leaving Lana to recruit their Cloud Atlas partner-in-crime David Mitchell as one of her co-writers. That either of these people kept their names on this is evidence of an almost majestic, feline confidence.

Patreon exclusive: The 50 Best Witch Movies, by Walter Chaw

March 20, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog

Now live for our Patreons, Walter Chaw chooses the 50 best witch movies. Lots of great streaming ideas in there if you want to throw your own mini-festival of witch classics. (Why? Why not?) And as you may or may not know, Walter's regular "Life During Wartime" column was also recently updated with entries on The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. We don't post a lot of subscriber-exclusive content--our Patreon is there mainly to subsidize this, the mothersite--but when we do it's available to read at whatever dollar amount you've chosen to pledge. Happy reading!

The King’s Man (2021) [Ultimate Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

March 17, 20222021, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, Thriller, UK, War

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Charles Dance
screenplay by Matthew Vaughn & Karl Gajdusek
directed by Matthew Vaughn

by Bill Chambers Make no mistake, 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service is reactionary horseshit, but I got a kick out of its shock tactics and couldn’t deny that this new chapter in producer-turned-director Matthew Vaughn’s career held some unlikely appeal as an alternative if not an antidote to the antiseptic Marvel and faux-gritty DC cinematic universes. The film was tacit confirmation that Vaughn, after courting controversy with Kick-Ass, had embraced his inner Droog: he would now revel in the violence and latent fascism of his favoured crime and superhero fiction–albeit drolly, like a more cartoonish S. Craig Zahler. In retrospect, however, it’s probably more accurate to say that Vaughn let muse Mark Millar, who wrote the graphic novels Kingsman and Kick-Ass were based on, Pied Piper him into a brick wall, i.e., the dead-end that is The King’s Man, the third chapter in a trilogy that had nowhere to go and so goes backwards to tell an origin story–complete with the dulled edges that tend to happen to adult-skewing franchises as kids become their prevailing consumer. Unlike RoboCop 3 or Police Academy III: Back in Training, The King’s Man retains the R rating of its predecessors, though here it feels like the MPA is primarily trying to protect children from boredom.

The Lover (1992) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

February 21, 20221990s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, France, Romance, UK

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jane March, Tony Leung, Frederique Meininger, Arnaud Giovaninetti
adapted by Gerard Brach, Jean-Jacques Annaud, based on the novel by Marguerite Duras
directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud

By Bill Chambers

“What must have happened is: I try it on just for fun, look at myself in the shopkeeper’s glass, and see that there, beneath the man’s hat, the thin awkward shape, the inadequacy of childhood, has turned into something else. Has ceased to be a harsh, inescapable imposition of nature. Has become, on the contrary, a provoking choice of nature, a choice of the mind. Suddenly it’s deliberate. Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire. I take the hat, and am never parted from it. Having got it, this hat that all by itself makes me whole, I wear it all the time.”

That’s author Marguerite Duras in the opening pages of her best-selling 1984 memoir L’Amant, describing the “brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon” she wore as a girl of 15-and-a-half. If you remember anything about Jean-Jacques Annaud’s eponymous 1992 feature-film adaptation The Lover (apart from its prurient reputation, that is), chances are it’s that hat, which actually captures some of the mythic quality Duras is getting at in the above-quoted passage. Watching the recent Holler, I realized that when I think back on it, I will likely remember it not as a movie about scrappers living in poverty but as the one with the girl in the Steve Zissou-esque red-knit beanie. Hats are incredibly cinematic, bestowing story and subtext on an actor’s face. Yet while the hat that 19-year-old newcomer and former teen cover girl Jane March wears in The Lover may strike the right note of self-assurance, the pigtails sticking out from under it combine to give her an Anne of Green Gables look that hardly contradicts “the inadequacy of childhood,” and I think that’s deliberate. From the get-go, she’s not just exotic fruit, she’s forbidden fruit. The Lover takes a short, discursive book without dialogue typical of the Hiroshima mon amour screenwriter and almost miraculously extrapolates a linear, if episodic, framework from it, but it leans into the sordid details that Duras almost glosses over.

John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. (1996) – Blu-ray Disc|4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

February 14, 20221990s, 2014, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect either of the discs covered herein.

**/****
BD – Image A- Sound B+
4K – Image A- Sound A-
starring Kurt Russell, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Cliff Robertson
screenplay by John Carpenter & Debra Hill & Kurt Russell
directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer The 1990s were unkind to John Carpenter: The stock market was booming, there was a Democrat in the White House, and the American horror film was at a low ebb. That was the decade when Carpenter–arguably the best B-movie auteur in the world during the 1980s and certainly the most audacious–lost his mojo. Exhausted from the experience of making two genre classics (They Live and Prince of Darkness) back to back, Carpenter took a couple of years off from filmmaking. When he was ready to work again, he considered making The Exorcist III but eventually settled on an ill-fated Chevy Chase vehicle, the $40 million sci-fi adaptation Memoirs of an Invisible Man, that torpedoed his attempted return to big-budget filmmaking. Carpenter tore through three more projects in the next three years–the Showtime horror anthology Body Bags, the Lovecraft riff In the Mouth of Madness, and a Village of the Damned remake–before deciding to pillage his own back catalogue with a sequel to the dystopian Escape from New York.