Authors: Bill Chambers Archives - Page 31 of 68

The French Connection (1971) [Five Star Collection] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

March 10, 20091970s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A+
BD – Image D+ Sound B- Extras A+
starring Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey, Roy Scheider, Tony Lo Bianco
screenplay by Ernest Tidyman
directed by William Friedkin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's no denying the skill that went into The French Connection. It's the runner-up exciting film about people doing almost nothing, second only to All the President's Men–and I'm only half-joking when I say that. It takes a director with vision to make a couple of guys tailing a couple of other guys interesting, and William Friedkin definitely has the vision: he single-handedly creates the meaning that holds the sketchy script together and keeps us caring about whether our heroic flatfoots get their dubious man. That meaning, however, ought to give us pause, as it makes that same year's hit Dirty Harry look like Easy Rider by comparison.

Pretty Woman (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

March 2, 20091990s, 2016, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

***½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, Ralph Bellamy, Hector Elizondo
screenplay by J.F. Lawton
directed by Garry Marshall

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Well, I'm willing to admit this much: Pretty Woman has a ridiculous premise. Corporate raider Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) buys up struggling companies and liquidates their assets. While in Los Angeles planning the purchase of ship manufacturer Morse Industries, he gets lost on the way back to his Beverly Hills hotel and stops on Hollywood Blvd. to ask for directions. This is where he meets Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts), a hooker desperate to pay off a few debts. She subsequently drives him to his hotel; as Edward recently broke up with his girlfriend in New York and feels bad about making Vivian take the bus home, he invites her to spend the night. They bargain over her price, arrive at the figure of three-hundred dollars, and sleep together. In the morning, Edward has a phone conversation with his lawyer, Philip Stuckey (Jason Alexander), who suggests he have dinner with James Morse, the owner and founder of Morse Industries, and that he bring a date to keep things social. Still on the phone, Edward walks in on Vivian singing along to Prince in the bathtub and offers to pay her for the entire week to be at his "beck-and-call."

Nights in Rodanthe (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

February 24, 20092000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Romance

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Scott Glenn, Christopher Meloni
screenplay by Ann Peacock and John Romano, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks
directed by George C. Wolfe

by Walter Chaw I will say this about Nights in Rodanthe: spoken Nicholas Sparks is preferable to written Nicholas Sparks, because when people speak, complete sentences and thoughts that go somewhere aren't necessarily at a premium. If there was ever an artist ill-suited for his chosen medium, it's Sparks; and if there was ever proof (as if proof were needed after the success of Robert James Waller, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and Dean Koontz) that cuddling ignorance was a growth industry, well, there's Sparks again. And here, as further cause for divorce from the great nation of culturally-retarded people who have always comprised our metaphorical heartland, is the fourth adaptation of a bound stable of Sparks's saccharine logorrhoea (Gertrude Stein in practice in the unlikeliest of places), Nights in Rodanthe, which, in the great tradition of pieces of shit, is exactly like every other piece of shit in every other genre. (Be thankful, at least, that the picture, in a futile attempt to separate itself from The Notebook, jettisons the novel's framing device, that great staple of books by people like Sparks and Mitch Albom–in so doing depriving some dusty, geriatric, beloved television star one last paycheck.) Helpless before the towering majesty of the formula god it worships, the picture plays out like a slasher pic for girls, where the only sport is trying to figure out which of the heroes is going to die, how, when, and by what grievous hand. I'd argue that the catharsis parceled out by garbage like this is identical to the "happy ending" whored out by lower-aspiring slasher cinema: the curiosity about the hows is delicious–and perverse. If you think I've dropped a spoiler, by the way, you haven't seen Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, or The Notebook, and–more than likely–you're not going to see Nights in Rodanthe, either.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 23, 20091970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Directors: Dario Argento, DVD, Horror, Mystery

L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo
***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Tony Musante, Suzy Kendall, Eva Renzi, Enrico Maria Salerno
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Dario Argento’s uncredited adaptation of Fredric Brown’s The Screaming Mimi (brought to the screen once before in 1958 by Gerd Oswald), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage marks the “Italian Hitchcock”‘s directorial debut as well as the moment at which the Italian giallo genre gained international currency. Though the genre’s invention (named after the yellow/giallo covers of Italian penny dreadfuls) is credited to compatriot Mario Bava (see, especially, his astonishing Blood and Black Lace), Argento’s scary polish and cunning for film language bridged the cultural, mainstream/arthouse gap with agility and audacity. He’s not just borrowing from Hitchcock, he’s filtering the Master’s work through his own sensibilities. Argento did for the slasher genre with his “supernatural” pictures like Suspiria and Inferno what Sergio Leone did for the Western, making them dirtier, sexier, rhythmic, and more acceptable to the literati; and he does here for the police procedural/neo-noir a similar kind of post-modern hipster reinvention. But it’s not merely an intellectual exercise (in fact, the obscurity of the clues (its title at once revealing the identity of the killer and referring obliquely to the red herring of The Maltese Falcon) makes deciphering the procedural improbable at best)–rather, it’s the visceral nature of the exercise that delights. It’s Argento’s revelry in one part in the unrelieved nihilism and delicious confusion that would characterize the best of the ’70s’ paranoia cinema–and in the other part, in the joy of great genre filmmaking.

Max Payne (2008) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 19, 20092000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image N/A Sound B Extras C
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Olga Kurylenko
screenplay by Beau Thorne
directed by John Moore

by Walter Chaw Valkyries: a staple of Norse mythology, right? Picking sides in fights, flying the fallen to Valhalla, and becoming winged waitstaff in that eternal beer hall in the sky. (Or fat women in Wagner.) First thing that comes to mind isn't a mind-blowing, Timothy Leary-esque freak out–unless you're John Moore's ridiculous Max Payne. That isn't the worst thing about Max Payne, but it's one of them. And while there's no crime in appropriating concepts you don't entirely understand, there probably should be. This is not a smart movie, and it doesn't know whether it should be a faithful adaptation of its videogame source material or a post-modern take on films noir, though it should be said that it looks beautiful anyway, a successful iteration of the Sin City aesthetic. The only thing really missing from its retinue of noir tropes is a stoic anti-hero at its centre; Max Payne badly miscalculates not in casting professional lump of meat Mark (Talks to Animals) Wahlberg, but in subsequently allowing him to attempt a fully fleshed-out performance when his usual monotone would've fit the pomo/homage portion of this film perfectly.

Mirrors (2008) [Unrated] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 16, 20092000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, France, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Romania

ZERO STARS/****
DVD – Image N/A Sound A Extras D+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Cameron Boyce, Erica Gluck
screenplay by Alexandre Aja & Grégory Levasseur
directed by Alexandre Aja

by Ian Pugh You have to hand it to Alexandre Aja: Although he applies his marginal talent to different ends from within his genre of choice, he remains fairly consistent in his psychotic bursts of rage and complete obliviousness to the same. Whether he's making awful, sadistic horror flicks that pretend to be about nothing (his anti-lesbian screed High Tension) or–somehow worse–awful, sadistic horror flicks that pretend to be about something (his remake of The Hills Have Eyes and now Mirrors), his targets are clear. In his eyes, women and rural folk are by turns cowardly, evil, and idiotic, deserving of nothing but a horrific death. How anyone could lump his brand of bloodthirsty hatred in with Tarantino or Argento–both real artists who have grappled with their own desires and talents in the context of fiction and reality–is, frankly, beyond me. Hell, even Eli Roth, for all his puerile masturbation and inexplicable worship of the nasty Cannibal Holocaust, has questioned his own methods on occasion. When Aja rips off Amy Smart's mandible just seconds after she steps into a bathtub in Mirrors, there's no thrill, no shock, no sense of accountability–only the niggling, terrifying conjecture that this man would go out and hurt someone given half the chance.

Groundhog Day (1993) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 10, 20091990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Time Travel

***½/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Chris Elliot, Stephen Tobolowsky
screenplay by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis
directed by Harold Ramis

by Bill Chambers I've heard the argument that Groundhog Day fails because it proposes the redemption of world-class crank Bill Murray–but, boy, does redemption fight an uphill battle against him. I suspect the criticism is misdirected at the prolific cinéma du redemption in general. Maybe the finest film yet directed by Harold Ramis (who's unfortunately been stuck in a high-concept rut since–his own personal Groundhog Day), Groundhog Day turns the titular Americana celebration into an existential abyss for Phil Connors (Murray), a self-centred weatherman for a TV station he considers a pit stop on the way to bigger and better things.

Zodiac (2007) [2-Disc Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 20092000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards
screenplay by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw The best film of its kind since All the President’s Men, David Fincher’s Zodiac is another very fine telephone procedural drawn from another landmark bit of investigative journalism–though more fascinatingly, it’s another time capsule of a very specific era, flash-frozen and suspended in Fincher’s trademark amber. Still, by the very nature of its subject matter, Zodiac deals in millennial anxieties: the un-‘catchable’ foe; the unknowable cipher; the futility of the best efforts of good and smart men; and the disintegration of the nuclear family smashed to pudding in a diving bell collapsed under the pressure of the sinking outside. The film is as remarkable as it is because it’s about something as simple and enchanted as the human animal–not just bedraggled San Francisco detective Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), but also Zodiac’s two female victims and, in a strange echo, two almost-invisible wives: Toschi’s (June Raphael) and that of newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). Easy to say that actresses Raphael and Chloë Sevigny are wasted by being given nary anything to work with outside a terrified moment and a single speech, respectively; better to say that they assume the only function they can in a picture revolving around male cooperation and survival in a world that has reduced itself to the barbarous niceties of macho religions and arcane rituals. No accident that the Zodiac Killer’s partiality to a medieval code is central to a key revelation.

Dead & Buried (1981) [Limited Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc + I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 22, 20091980s, 1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

DEAD & BURIED
***/****
DVD – Image B- Sound C+ (Remixes)/B (Mono) Extras A
BD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring James Farentino, Melody Anderson, Jack Albertson, Lisa Blount
screenplay by Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon
directed by Gary A. Sherman

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
**/****
DVD|BD – Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze, Jr.
screenplay by Kevin Williamson, based on the novel by Lois Duncan
directed by Jim Gillespie

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gary A. Sherman's Dead & Buried and Jim Gillespie's I Know What You Did Last Summer, released theatrically fourteen years apart, together demonstrate that the more the horror genre stays the same, the more it changes. Each of these B-movies resorts to similar cheap tricks (first and foremost a coastal setting (the atmospheric equivalent of a non-perishable in horror)) and traffics in pessimism, yet one is genuinely hopeless and the other is trendily nihilistic–karo syrup as late-Nineties fashion accessory. A great gulf stands between the sensibilities of the two pictures that's unearthed by drawing other such subtle distinctions: one is cruel, the other callous; one is about death, the other about killing; one is sexy, the other exploitive; and so on and so forth. Virtually indescribable to modern audiences despite its familiar elements, Dead & Buried is a Darwinian fossil of the horror cinema, whose DNA has been perverted by the progressive commercialization of the culture and weakening of the intellectual position. Simplified: Current scare flicks still sometimes enjoy provocative subtext (like the recent Freddy Vs. Jason); more often, they die on the vine from WB-itis.

Revolver (2005) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 6, 20092000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Thriller, UK

*/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
BD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Vincent Pastore, Andre Benjamin
written and directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw Give Guy Ritchie a little credit for being ambitious and take a little away from him for being so relentlessly pussy-whipped that Revolver, his return to the neo-Mod gangster genre that made his name, is one part rumination on the mystical mumbo-jumbo of his then-wife's Kabbalah, one part exploration of the self-actualized ego, and every part pretentious, pseudo-intellectual garbage. It's so fascinated with itself that the yak-track on the film's DVD and Blu-ray releases finds Ritchie periodically consulting his assistant as an augur of whether or not Ritchie has gotten too complicated for the audience of nitwits not put off enough by the movie to avoid watching it again with the commentary activated. He believes he's created something of such vast, far-reaching, ungraspable, existential implication that this cheap, showy action pic is the ne plus ultra of modern experience, with Ritchie our schlock Zoroaster, guiding us through avatar Jake Green (Jason Statham) as he emerges from years of solitary confinement, during which he learned the parameters of the perfect con by intercepting the chess moves of the two prisoners on either side of him. Jake has claustrophobia, something Ritchie helpfully offers is a "metaphorical fear," by which I think he means that it's a metaphor for all fear; his clumsiness with the articulation of this single concept illustrates how it is that the rest of it is such a godawful mess. Consider Revolver's interesting only to the extent that Ritchie's self-absorption is ironic when applied to a picture about the internal struggle between Freud's personality strata–never mind that Jake's Super-Ego is André Benjamin and his Id appears to be motherfucking Big Pussy. Jesus, this is a stupid movie.

Pineapple Express (2008) [Unrated Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 5, 20092000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Seth Rogen, James Franco, Gary Cole, Danny McBride
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw I'm willing to concede that I don't completely get it, but I'm still game to think about it because Pineapple Express has a peculiar pedigree. It boasts David Gordon Green as its director and his regular DP Tim Orr is in charge of shooting the gross-out gags and stone-faced stoner riffs. The union makes the most sense if we read the film as a throwback/homage to the Seventies cycle of grindhouse exploitation flicks (doobies and dismemberment), thus explaining the old-school wipes and funkadelic soundtrack, the mote-flecked cinematography, the cruel violence, and, if it's even possible, the air of reality throughout. Otherwise, the picture feels like a cynical patchwork stitching together this new comedy genre with a sensibility specifically designed to mock it. When über-stoner Saul (James Franco, in his Spicoli/The Dude breakout) runs through the dark woods, the flash I get isn't to Cheech & Chong but to the convulsive opening of Green's Undertow. And during an ending in an abandoned government research facility-turned-subterranean pot greenhouse, I couldn't shake Green's odd relationship with Asian stereotyping (remember the Feng Shui character from All the Real Girls?) in a troupe of black-clad Asian assassins clearly established as objects of derision. In truth, however, I don't know if the derision is levied at Asians or at the criticism levied against Green's perceived derision of the same.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2008

January 1, 20092000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

I'm going to call 2008 a "down" year, but not because there were fewer masterpieces produced–only because the theme that resonated for me the most was this sense of a cycle completing. If it's true that every generation flatters itself as the last one, it's equally true that every decade of film nears its completion with its full measure of anticipation/regret (liebestraum as zeitgeist, no?) in its eighth, sometimes ninth, year. Even films that on the surface seem filled with the fruit of human ambition and desire–like James Marsh's ebullient Man on Wire, in which the World Trade Center appears as the phantom lover of highwire artist Philippe Petit–take place, after all, at the ground zero of this epoch. What's dying throughout 2006 and 2007, all this sussing through father issues and the cult of masculinity and love and the courage of children, is dead now. It's not nihilism anymore, it's pragmatism. The dream is over, the insect is awake.

Into the Wild (2007) [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

December 29, 20082000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras C+
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Hal Holbrook
screenplay by Sean Penn, based on the novel by Jon Krakauer
directed by Sean Penn

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Young and full of piss, Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch, amazing) is an idealist brimming with the kinds of ideas that young men entertain fresh out of school: diploma in hand, bile in throat, knowing everything about the world that there could possibly be to know. His politics, stringently black-and-white, aren't that different from the very politics against which he'd rail; for as bleeding heart as kids can be, they tend to subscribe to the foundational belief that the United States is responsible for the welfare (and travails) of the rest of the planet, which is the basis for our self-declared status as moral policemen. In defense of Chris, whose saga has been documented in print by Jon Krakauer and now on film by Sean Penn, he doesn't presume to change the world, he only wishes to escape it–the idea of zero impact taken to its logical conclusion. But the ideal of rediscovering Eden is as illusory (naïve, retarded, you name it) as the idea that a young, educated man from a privileged background and a family who loves him could ever retreat to Walden Pond with nary a ripple to mark his submersion. Into the Wild sports as infuriating a cipher at its centre as Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, and it's to Penn's credit that he doesn't shy away from presenting Chris as a first-class Pinko asshole living his dream with just enough hypocrisy to get him killed and not quite enough to get him saved. Prophet/fool. It's a manifestation of the smug maxim "Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) – [Studio Classics] DVD|Blu-ray Disc

December 22, 20081950s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi

***½/****
DVD/BD – Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe
screenplay by Edmund H. North, based on a story by Harry Bates
directed by Robert Wise

by Bill Chambers Fusing charm and menace to singularly imposing effect, Michael Rennie is Klaatu, a man who falls to Earth bearing important news for humankind only to be silenced almost immediately upon exiting his flying saucer in a case of the U.S. army literally shooting the messenger. His entreaty to the leaders of the free world to put aside their "stupidity" and let him hold a global press conference having fallen on deaf ears, a healed Klaatu breaks out of the military facility in which he's being kept prisoner and embarks on a fish-out-of-water scenario, adopting the name "Mr. Carpenter" and landing in the home of single mother Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) and her excitable son Bobby (Billy Gray). Old-fashioned American jealousy soon jeopardizes Klaatu's "plan B"–to receive assistance in spreading his gospel from the Einstein-like Prof. Barnhardt (a haunted Sam Jaffe)–when Helen's boyfriend (Hugh Marlowe), feeling threatened by the new border, decides to play detective.

The Heartbreak Kid (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

December 15, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Romance

*½/****
DVD – Image B- Sound A- Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Ben Stiller, Michelle Monaghan, Malin Akerman, Rob Corddry
screenplay by Scot Armstrong and Leslie Dixon and Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly & Kevin Barnett, based on the short story "A Change of Plan" by Bruce Jay Friedman
directed by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw Elaine May used to be the comedy writing and performing partner of Mike Nichols, and because I like her 1972 film The Heartbreak Kid so much, I've always wondered how much better The Graduate would have been had May directed it. Indeed, a May-helmed Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? could be excruciating–well, more so. For a while, anyway, May was the brave one, ethnically and otherwise, and I don't know of many people who could've turned the premise that drives the original The Heartbreak Kid into such a delicate, even sensitive (certainly human) piece. If it were going to be remade (and it has, with Ben Stiller in the Charles Grodin role and Malin Akerman in the Jeannie Berlin role), Peter and Bobby Farrelly would seem to be the right ones for the job.

Die Another Day (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

December 11, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, James Bond, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image B Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Toby Stephens, Rosamund Pike
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade
directed by Lee Tamahori

by Walter Chaw There's just no currency in deriding James Bond for being a clichéd, doddering, misogynistic boy's club that trundles into the new millennium with the same entendres, leering, and boom-boom the franchise has ridden for four decades now. It's a lack of currency made all the more glaring for a film, Lee Tamahori's Die Another Day, desperate to please Bond-philes (Republicans and children, literal and figurative) by being an overt rehash of every Bond entry preceding it rather than the usual unintentional rehash. As futile as it has become to criticize the next instalment in this never-ending series, it appears that the filmmakers have decided to stop pretending they haven't been plundering the same well of travel-worn ideas since Connery up and quit.

Black Christmas (1974) – Blu-ray Disc

December 5, 2008****/****, 1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, FFC Must-Own, Horror

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon
screenplay by Roy Moore
directed by Bob Clark

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. At the beginning of Bob Clark's other yuletide favourite, the influential horror classic Black Christmas, college student Clare Harrison (Lynne Griffin) is getting ready to go home for the holidays. The sorority she belongs to receives an obscene phone call; when her "sister" Barbie (Margot Kidder) humours the pervert, sensible Clare–at the risk of making them sound one-dimensional, these characters are deftly drawn with a minimum of brushstrokes–suggests they not antagonize him. She then goes upstairs to pack, investigates a noise coming from her closet, and is asphyxiated with a plastic bag. A dread-bound dissolve from some hideous nativity scene in the attic in which Clare serves as a mummified Madonna takes us to a spot on campus the following day, where Clare's father (James Edmond), a prudish but decent man, is waiting to pick up his daughter. Not knowing what we know but indeed perplexed when Clare fails to materialize at the appointed time and place, he absently scans his surroundings, only to be struck hard by a snowball like a cosmic pie to the face. The fates clearly have it out for this family.

For Your Eyes Only (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

December 4, 20081980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, James Bond, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Roger Moore, Carole Bouquet, Topol, Julian Glover
screenplay by Richard Maibum and Michael G. Wilson
directed by John Glen

by Ian Pugh Already something of a dinosaur in a season that saw Indiana Jones explode onto the cinematic landscape, For Your Eyes Only was the first 007 film that found Roger Moore looking too old to be a roguish, oversexed secret agent. Having played Bond four times previously over the course of eight years, it was readily apparent that Moore aged well, better than most–which clearly accounted for his longevity in the role. I have to wonder, then, if his suddenly-elderly appearance here is a reflection of the fact that he's so clearly out of his element. He found his footing in the part once the powers-that-be realized he could succeed where Connery had failed: The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker were overblown and more than a little silly, but they were legitimized in part by their star's sly grin and complete comfort in tackling the largest, most preposterous schemes possible–something to which the admirably analog Connery could never entirely adjust. For Your Eyes Only was intended to bring the series back to its down-and-dirty roots, but it only managed to remind that Moore was a square peg unfit for the round hole his predecessor occupied.

The Dark Knight (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

December 1, 2008****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Superhero, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw It's the best American film of the year so far and likely to remain that way. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is revelatory, visceral, grim stuff–a vision of the failure of our idealism before the inexorable tide of entropy, another masterpiece after last year's No Country for Old Men that as much as says that the only morality in the midst of chaos is chance. No coincidence that both films feature villains who let a coin-flip act as judge and jury. But what's adjudicated? What shape does the court take? The failure of reason is the great bogey of this modern day–and the inability to properly frame questions, much less ken answers, feeds this feeling of hopelessness. That widening gyre, it turns out, is a labyrinth, or an Escher print, illuminating a Sartrean paranoia of no hope for escape, no possibly of exit. Nolan's Gotham City is a beatification of Chicago: the city's glass and metal elevated into holy relic and presented in such grand, panoramic vistas that the little things done in spite of it or on its behalf seem like so many futile pittances–the dreamlife of mice in their sterile maze that is this sprawling microcosm of all of the miseries and suffering of the world.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

December 1, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson
screenplay by Zach Helm
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is a thinly-sketched IRS agent who obsessively measures out his life in coffee spoons. One day he hears the stentorian, patrician voice of his own personal narrator, reclusive author Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), providing him an interiority with Douglas Adams-like serendipitous surreality. Marc Forster's Stranger than Fiction even winks at the Adams connection with a sentient wristwatch and a moment where Crick's apartment gets demolished, Arthur Dent-like, by an uncommunicated work order. It also features sudden, unexpected love at the end of the universe with Crick's opposite, a free spirit baker named Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who falls under the eye of Crick's glum audit and, as literature professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) informs Crick, only hates him until she loves him if Crick's narrator is writing a romantic comedy. The struggle within the film is the same as the struggle without, then, as Crick tries to determine whether or not Eiffel's calm (and, as it happens, excellently-written) exposition will result in his poignant death or–good for him, bad for us–in his resurrection as a bland, non-descript leading man in another piece too frightened to allow itself the most appropriate ending. One way leads to a surprise masterpiece that soars on the chemistry (surprise again) between Ferrell and Gyllenhaal–the other leads to a film that's a lot better than I expected it to be, weighed down by a resolution that it itself comments on as equivocal, cowardly, and disappointing. To crib the analysis of Prof. Hilbert, Stranger than Fiction is just "okay."