Authors: Jefferson Robbins Archives

The Food of the Gods (1976)/Frogs (1972) [Double Feature] + Empire of the Ants (1977)/Jaws of Satan (1981) [Double Feature] – Blu-ray Discs

October 26, 20151970s, 1980s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

THE FOOD OF THE GODS
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Marjoe Gortner, Pamela Franklin, Ralph Meeker, Ida Lupino
screenplay by Bert I. Gordon, based on a portion of the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Bert I. Gordon

FROGS
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, Adam Roarke
screenplay by Robert Hutchison and Robert Blees
directed by George McCowan

EMPIRE OF THE ANTS
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C-
starring Joan Collins, Robert Lansing, John David Carson, Albert Salmi
screenplay by Jack Turley, story by Bert I. Gordon, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Bert I. Gordon

King Cobra
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C-
starring Fritz Weaver, Gretchen Corbett, Jon Korkes, Norman Lloyd
screenplay by Gerry Holland, from a story by James Callaway
directed by Bob Claver

by Jefferson Robbins If THE DISSOLVE had lasted, Keith Phipps's fine recurring genre feature "The Laser Age" might have gotten around to the SF subcategory of Nature Gone Wild–the movies that set animals against humanity, such as The Swarm, Night of the Lepus, Squirm, and Prophecy (The Monster Movie). Distinctly a 1970s phenomenon, as we fretted over the northward migration of killer bees and the health of our DDT-soaked bald eagles, the films usually boasted critters who turned on us bipeds after stewing too long in our toxic effluents, perhaps gaining bestial superpowers as a result. They were cheapies, by and large, although with The Swarm director Irwin Allen tried to pull off the same broad settings and large aging-star cast he'd managed in his previous disaster flicks. As a trope, humanity vs. nature works best in isolation, when solitary heroes or groups of victims are besieged in the sticks, with no outside help forthcoming.

Ghoulies (1985)/Ghoulies II (1988) [Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

October 7, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory

GHOULIES
**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Peter Liapis, Lisa Pelikan, Michael Des Barres, Jack Nance
screenplay by Luca Bercovici and Jefery Levy
directed by Luca Bercovici

GHOULIES II
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Damon Martin, Royal Dano, Phil Fondacaro, J. Downing
screenplay by Charlie Dolan and Dennis Paoli
directed by Albert Band

by Jefferson Robbins Not rip-off, not homage, but something in the water. Luca Bercovici's 1985 Ghoulies, from the lo-fi film factory of Charles Band, felt on release like a ploy to frack cash out of Joe Dante's Gremlins from the year before. In fact it had a parallel development, launching pre-production in 1983 under the working title Beasties and formally premiering in Britain in November of 1984. It also boasts a far weirder strain of presentation than Dante's peak, something Lynchian that goes beyond the mere presence of Jack Nance. It has its passel of '80s "teen" types harassed by horrors, sure: the stoner(s), the ladykiller, the nerd–not to mention their attendant ladies, none of whom are given much personality, resulting in a deeply uninteresting film debut for young Mariska Hargitay. But their mannerisms in large part are so outré and alienating, it's at times like watching an underfinanced dinner-theatre preview of 1986's Blue Velvet. And then the dead warlock bursts out of the ground to be attended by a clutch of grody puppets.

The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 3, 20151970s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection, West Germany

Händler der vier Jahreszeiten
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla, Hans Hirschmüller, Marian Seidowsky
written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

by Jefferson Robbins When beleaguered costermonger Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmüller) shouts his wares in the courtyard well of a grey Munich apartment block, he might as well be shouting into the void. Although his singsong calling of the prices of fruits is mesmeric, it summons practically no customers. Blocky and straining against his own skin, Hans has been humiliated all his life, and the manner in which he makes his livelihood is a further humiliation in the eyes of his family. The word used for "livelihood" in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons is the German noun Existenz. Clearly, it has multiple edges.

Miami Blues (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

June 23, 20151990s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Fred Ward, Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nora Dunn
screenplay by George Armitage, based on the novel by Charles Willeford
directed by George Armitage

by Jefferson Robbins Remember when handheld camera was a technique deployed to signal disorientation, estrangement, and vulnerability and not simply "the way we shoot movies now"? In George Armitage's Miami Blues, the otherwise-steady camera first comes unhinged when ex-con Frederick "Junior" Frenger Jr. (Alec Baldwin) orders newly-requisitioned hooker Pepper (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to roll over on her belly, presumably so he can employ her the way male prisoners employ each other sexually. He can't, though, because there's something different there, and an afternoon's purchased pleasure becomes an affair. Armitage's use of the camera is a punctuation, a chapter break in Junior's story, reassuring us that while Junior is malevolent and unpredictable, Pepper won't immediately meet the same fate as the Hare Krishna that Junior (kind of accidentally) murdered an hour before. Still, you should probably worry for her.

Brazilian Western (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

June 2, 20152013, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Brazil, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Western

Faroeste caboclo
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Felipe Abib, Antonio Calloni, César Troncoso, Marcos Paulo
screenplay by Marcos Bernstein and Victor Atherino
directed by René Sampaio

by Jefferson Robbins If a few things fall too neatly into place in René Sampaio's Brazilian Western–like beautiful Maria Lúcia (Isis Valverde) jumping into bed with fugitive João (Fabrício Boliveira), who just held her at gunpoint in her own bedroom–well, it's a fable. That's meant literally, since the film is adapted from a megahit ballad of roughly the same name: Legāio Urbana's nine-minute barn-burner of calamity, bloodshed, love, and redemption spoke to something in the Brazilian psyche in 1987, charting João de Santo Christo's fatal misadventures with the corrupt forces that kept a boot on the underclass. Sampaio's adaptation has a lot to live up to in that respect, as well as in honouring the western genre to which the title nods. It winds up a Leone-ian Scarface of sorts, although the stakes are different–pot instead of coke, infatuation rather than the will to power, with imbalances of class and race at the forefront.

Game of Thrones: The Complete Fourth Season (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

March 24, 20152014, 2015, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, Television

click any image to enlarge

Image A Sound A Extras A-
"Two Swords," "The Lion and the Rose," "Breaker of Chains," "Oathkeeper," "First of His Name," "The Laws of Gods and Men," "Mockingbird," "The Mountain and the Viper," "The Watchers on the Wall," "The Children"

by Jefferson Robbins I suspect "Game of Thrones" has started to find its high-fantasy elements as tedious as I have. In the show's fourth season, the trio of dragons reared by Danaerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke)–the only thing that makes her a ruler, aside from her family name–is far more felt than seen, and momentarily more a curse than an asset. Brandon Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) and his young cronies have to fight off a frozen-lake's worth of Ray Harryhausen skeletons, a homage so derivative it adds up to me snorting my beer out of my nose. An epic assault on the epic-sized Wall includes an epic total of two giants. The fantasy convention of magic swords with hoity-toity names comes in for ridicule, too, when brutal asshole King Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) demands a title for his new enchanted blade and some wags in the audience yell back "Stormbringer!" and "Terminus!" Woman warrior Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie), the most gullible when it comes to matters of knightly virtue, gets a nifty pigsticker, names it "Oathkeeper," then spends her only battle of the season beating her adversary's face in with a rock. Magic, in this adaptation of contemporary fantasy's most successful novel series, is bogged down in human muck and mire.

The Palm Beach Story (1942) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 22, 20151940s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance, The Criterion Collection

click any image to enlarge

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor, Rudy Vallee
written and directed by Preston Sturges

WATCH IN iTUNES – USA|CANADA

by Jefferson Robbins The Palm Beach Story is lesser candy from a master confectioner–so it's still worth a taste. Preston Sturges's screwball portrait of a marriage upending itself braids together multiple comedic forms: road trip, Elizabethan comedy of errors, have-nots infiltrating the haves, and a distinct and strange but intriguing touch of fairytale. For instance, the yacht on which jillionaire J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee) absconds with disenchanted young wife Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) is christened The Erl King. Sure, Hackensacker is an obvious gloss on Rockefeller and there's the play on "oil king," but the Erl King of legend is a kidnapper of innocents. (Goethe's poem casts him as a child murderer.) Gerry's scratching a five-year itch, taking flight from glum husband Tom (Joel McCrea), partly on the advice of another "king." "Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destroying slowly but without pity that which yesterday was young," warns the millionaire Wienie King (Robert Dudley), after moseying into the Park Avenue duplex Gerry and Tom are about to lose. (A Tiresias who's deaf rather than blind, he can't hear anything anybody says, so he might as well be talking to himself.) Although "adventuress" Gerry, abandoning her marriage without money or clothing, can still wield youth and beauty as sword and shield, she pays a price for the attempt, first charming and then dodging the heavily-armed, dangerously inebriated Ale & Quail Club as it pursues her throughout a southbound train. They're a Wild Hunt straight out of pagan lore.

Looking: The Complete First Season (2014) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

February 10, 20152014, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Romance, Television

click any image to enlarge

Image A Sound A Extras C
"Looking for Now," "Looking for Uncut," "Looking at Your Browser History," "Looking for $220/Hour," "Looking for the Future," "Looking in the Mirror," "Looking for a Plus-One," "Looking Glass"

by Jefferson Robbins Not fair to call it a gay "Girls", in part because it dodges the character grotesques of that show in favour of…a less provocative mix of personality types, shall we say. That's a polite way of calling Michael Lannan's HBO dramedy "Looking" boring by comparison–and finally, prettily, boring on its own merits, however better-lensed and more grounded in real personal motivations it might be than Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow's zeitgeister. Handsome gay men abroad in San Francisco's fully actuated sexual culture is a fine launchpad; Lannan and collaborator Andrew Haigh treat their core trio of characters with respect and care; and the cast is all-pro, managing the mini-crises thrown their way as if they actually matter. But while there's no there there in either "Looking" or "Girls", at least the latter goes big and madcap enough to tempt continued viewing; it's not afraid to entertain, or to anger. The curtainfall on "Looking"'s first season incites little hunger for the second.

True Detective (2014) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

June 29, 20142014, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Television

Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
“The Long Bright Dark,” “Seeing Things,” “The Locked Room,” “Who Goes There,” The Secret Fate of All Life,” “Haunted Houses,” “After You’ve Gone,” “Form and Void”

by Jefferson Robbins SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. On the original 2003 recording of The Handsome Family‘s “Far from Any Road,” husband-and-wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks intertwine their voices sinuously, trading the song’s lonesome-death verses on equal footing. Her part pared down for the mesmeric opening credits of HBO’s “True Detective”, Rennie’s whisper becomes a sudden intrusion, jarring both the lyrical and visual narrative. It’s a hint of what’s to come in the eight-episode series itself. When a woman character exerts an active pull upon the story of tormented Louisiana State Police detectives Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), it’s an interruption, a vitriolic hiccup. Prompted by Marty’s stalking and volcanic abuse, his much younger mistress Lisa (Alexandra Daddario) reveals his serial infidelity to his wife Maggie (Michelle Monaghan). To poison Marty for his adulteries, Maggie seduces a drunken Cohle. The two cops have no female peers, only suspects, victims, bereaved mothers, hookers, and strippers to be interrogated, rescued, or ignored.

Death Wish (1973) – Blu-ray Disc + Stone Cold (1991) – DVD

May 27, 20141970s, 1990s, 2014, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Revenge, Thriller

click any image to enlarge

DEATH WISH
***½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Charles Bronson, Vincent Gardenia, William Redfield, Hope Lange
screenplay by Wendell Mayes, based on the novel by Brian Garfield
directed by Michael Winner

STONE COLD
**/**** Image C+ Sound B-
starring Brian Bosworth, Lance Henriksen, William Forsythe, Sam McMurray
screenplay by Walter Doniger
directed by Craig R. Baxley

by Jefferson Robbins The urban vigilante is one of cinema's most potent, enduring figures, and it's worth asking how he got there. Michael Winner's influential but derided Death Wish drafts an explicit genealogy for its cosmopolitan avenger, granting him claim to the mantle of the lone lawman of the Old West. Bereaved through violence, Manhattan architect Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) takes an assignment revising a valuable development plan near Tucson. There he pauses to watch a cowboy shootout re-enacted for tourists, the bad guys toppling until the besieged sheriff is the sole, righteous survivor. It's a cheap, thrilling, thoroughly Hollywood portrayal of frontier justice, and it represents an ethos Paul's host Jainchill (Stuart Margolin) urges him to carry in his heart back to New York, where unlicensed firearm possession has been illegal since 1911. This tension isn't original to Wendell Mayes's relatively terse screenplay–it originates in Brian Garfield's 1972 source novel, published after the author spent a decade cranking out pulp western yarns. But Death Wish uses this element to make its own statement, grafting the mediated concept of frontier self-justification onto an urban morality play. The western may be dead, and it may have been a lie to begin with (and it may be the cinema of the '70s that killed it), but Death Wish is among the genre's inheritors. Don't all children eventually hope to supersede their parents?

Grey Gardens (1976) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 7, 2014****/****, 1970s, 2014, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

click any image to enlarge

GREY GARDENS
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer and Susan Froemke

THE BEALES OF GREY GARDENS (2006)
***/****
directed by Albert Maysles & David Maysles

by Jefferson Robbins "It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and present." That cast-off remark from Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale early in Grey Gardens, the documentary molded from her enclosed and deluded life, is a cornerstone truth in so many sad domestic stories like hers. Every Gothic romance novel knows it, with their living ghosts rattling around grand old manses much like Little Edie's 19^th-century East Hampton estate–not least Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, a work she returns to over and over. It's an affliction, this unstuckness in time, and it besets the aged and the ill until nostalgia becomes, essentially, the place where they live. Her mother, Edith Ewing "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale, the more insightful of the pair, recognizes it in her daughter as well as herself. "I've certainly got ideas about living in the wrong time," the matriarch says from the stained twin bed at Grey Gardens she seldom bestirs herself to leave. And then one of her many cats defecates in a corner, sheltering behind the vivid oil portrait of Big Edie in her beautiful, younger years.

Justice League: War (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 25, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

click any image to enlarge

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
screenplay by Heath Corson, based on the graphic novel Justice League: Origins by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee
directed by Jay Oliva

by Jefferson Robbins The red underwear is gone, and with it, all humility. Justice League: War marks the first true animated appearance of Superman and the rest of the DC Universe heroes since the comics publisher's New 52 gambit launched in 2011, resetting at least twenty-five years of pulp history.¹ What that means for viewers is a militaristically-clothed Superman (vocal chameleon Alan Tudyk) who threatens to choke people to death and a dangerously naive Wonder Woman (Michelle Monaghan) who's definitely going to have sex with him after the credits. This, effectively, is the characters' debut. Set aside all those past versions you know, toss out even the previous direct-to-video titles you may have collected (including four "Justice League" movies) since the DCU animated line officially launched in 2007. This is where the Justice League meets–and where we meet them–for the first time. And, boy, are they a bunch of pricks.

Game of Thrones: The Complete Third Season (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

March 16, 20142013, 2014, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Television

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Image A Sound A Extras A+
"Valar Dohaeris," "Dark Wings, Dark Words," "Walk of Punishment," "And Now His Watch Is Ended," "Kissed by Fire," "The Climb," "The Bear and the Maiden Fair," "Second Sons," "The Rains of Castamere," "Mhysa"

by Jefferson Robbins Kings and counsellors indeed. George R.R. Martin's fantasy cycle A Song of Ice and Fire–five very large novels deep now–is concerned with impassioned monarchs and their desperate ministers, as well as the deformations wrought by their egotistical wars. HBO's series adaptation "Game of Thrones" maintains that fascination, the source of much of its continuing suspense and appeal: Anyone in the fragmenting kingdom of Westeros could die at any time, by sword or sorcery or simple dysentery, and the wounds of war upon the body politic are reflected on the characters.

Arrow: The Complete First Season (2012-2013) + Supernatural: The Complete Eighth Season (2012-2013) – Blu-ray Discs

February 12, 20142012, 2013, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Television, Werewolf

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ARROW: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image A Sound B Extras B-
"Pilot," "Honor Thy Father," "Lone Gunmen," "An Innocent Man," "Damaged," "Legacies," "Muse of Fire," "Vendetta," "Year's End," "Burned," "Trust but Verify," "Vertigo," "Betrayal," "The Odyssey," "Dodger," "Dead to Rights," "The Huntress Returns," "Salvation," "Unfinished Business," "Home Invasion," "The Undertaking," "Darkness on the Edge of Town," "Sacrifice"

SUPERNATURAL: THE COMPLETE EIGHTH SEASON
Image A Sound B+ Extras B
"We Need to Talk About Kevin," "What's Up, Tiger Mommy?," "Heartache," "Bitten," "Blood Brother," "Southern Comfort," "A Little Slice of Kevin," "Hunteri Heroici," "Citizen Fang," "Torn and Frayed," "LARP and the Real Girl," "As Time Goes By," "Everybody Hates Hitler," "Trial and Error," "Man's Best Friend with Benefits," "Remember the Titans," "Goodbye Stranger," "Freaks and Geeks," "Taxi Driver," "Pac-Man Fever," "The Great Escapist," "Clip Show," "Sacrifice"

by Jefferson Robbins Kindred shows in more ways than just their sharing a network, a Vancouver, B.C. shooting base, and a David Nutter-helmed pilot, The CW's "Arrow" and "Supernatural" also share a gestalt. Post-"The X Files", post-"Buffy", they grapple with family legacies, duty versus desire, and bonds (specifically male) threatened by the intrusion of a) monsters and b) lovers. Watching the debut season of the former alongside the eighth season of the latter, it becomes clear that "Arrow"'s showrunners, headed by Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and Andrew Kreisberg, are just as steeped in the modes and methods of this youth-oriented action programming as "Supernatural" creator Eric Kripke. Both series find young, handsome protagonists consumed with the bloody twilight work left undone by their dead fathers; and both–despite "Arrow"'s roots as a second-tier DC Comics property straining for multimedia relevance–are better, and bloodier, and in some ways more relevant, than one has any right to expect.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

October 31, 20131970s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

click
any image to enlarge

THE
TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN
**½/****
BD – Image B+
Sound B-
Extras B+
starring
Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine, Jimmy Clem, Dawn Wells
screenplay
by Earl E. Smith
directed
by Charles B. Pierce

THE
EVICTORS
**½/****
Image B
Sound B-
starring
Vic Morrow, Michael Parks, Jessica Harper, Sue Ane Langdon
screenplay
by Charles B. Pierce, Gary Rusoff, Paul Fisk
directed
by Charles B. Pierce

by
Jefferson Robbins Charles B. Pierce's
1976 thriller The Town That Dreaded Sundown makes
a fetish of breath.
The bag-headed killer, ripped from the headlines of 1946 Texarkana, is
a
mouth-breather, his mask working like a bellows whether he's exerting
himself
or not. He's announced by his respiring, as when rural housewife Helen
Reed (Dawn
Wells) ceases brushing her rich black hair to listen for him outside
her home.
And his most artful, or perhaps comical, kill is executed with a
bayonet
trombone, stabbing with each exhalation. He's the old stereotype of the
heavy-breathing phone pervert writ deadly, shambling up to parked
teenagers and
taking his jollies as he may. Sexual assault is implicit in his
approach but
quickly disavowed, although he heavily bites his earliest female
victim. An
oral compulsion that is sexual but not; a murder that is penetrative
rape but
not… As scripted, the never-captured Phantom Killer of Texarkana
would be a
pretty interesting psychological study.

Halloween Horror Video Essay: The Monster In The Painting

October 22, 20131950s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blog, Horror

by Jefferson Robbins Back in September, I published the Kindle ebook The Curse of Frankenstein: A Dissection–a scene-by-scene analytical love letter to a film that shaped me, and discloses hidden depths the more one looks at it.

Slacker (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 15, 2013****/****, 1990s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Richard Linklater, Rudy Basquez, Jean Caffeine, and a whole bunch of people
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Jefferson Robbins Before it became a lazily-applied shorthand for my generation in particular, Slacker was a film about doom. It’s pervasive throughout this seemingly casual, meticulously constructed, 24-hour baton-pass through bohemian Austin, Texas, in which characters confront intimations of death, their own or that of the species in general, and respond with rhetoric, bemusement, a fatalistic shrug, or a joyride. Writer-director Richard Linklater awakens from vivid dreams on a bus in the opening scene, then unspools his vision to a Buddha-silent cab driver (Rudy Basquez). His most memorable dreams, he reports, often feature sudden death: “There’s always someone gettin’ run over or something really weird.” Fair enough to wonder if we’re not dreaming along with him, in some dress rehearsal for Waking Life, when he quickly happens upon a mother (Jean Caffeine) sprawled in a residential Austin boulevard, freshly driven over by her disturbed son (Mark James).

The Newsroom: The Complete First Season (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

July 18, 20132011, 2012, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image
A Sound B+ Extras B
"We
Just Decided To," "News Night 2.0," "The 112^th
Congress," "I'll Try To Fix You," "Amen,"
"Bullies," "5/1," "The Blackout, Part 1: Tragedy
Porn," "The Blackout, Part 2: Mock Debate," "The Greater
Fool"

by
Jefferson Robbins The more
I think about Aaron Sorkin's chimerical HBO beast "The Newsroom", the more I think it would work far, far better as a Broadway musical.
That may
be because Sorkin loads the ranks of his ensemble drama with
accomplished
theatre vets, or it may be because of the endless dialogue references to stage
classics,
beginning and ending with Man of La Mancha.
But it's also
a matter of timing: The show offers strange eruptions of relationship
palaver,
set in the midst of world-altering sociopolitical changes and the daily
churn
of building a TV newshour around them. They arrive oddly, maddeningly,
and
frequently, just when the storylines involving real-world events are
beginning to
compel, and they feel almost uniformly dishonest and manufactured. What
I'm
saying is, they'd go down easier if they were sung.

Superman: Unbound (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

June 24, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Superhero

***/****
Image B-
Sound B+
Extras C+
screenplay
by Bob Goodman, based on the graphic novel Superman: Braniac
by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank
directed
by James Tucker

click
any image to enlarge

by
Jefferson Robbins With Superman: Unbound,
DC
Universe's appropriation of anime elements for its superhero cartoons
reaches
its logical endpoint: tentacle rape. Our first glimpse of longstanding
Superman
nemesis Brainiac, a semi-organic humanoid computer, features his
natural eye
getting plucked out by a pincered appendage to be replaced with an
upgraded
model. Later, a bound and helpless Superman will have terabytes of
deadly
information pumped straight into his cortex by other such squidlike
injectors.
The last five years of direct-to-video DC Comics adaptations, many
engineered
by Korean production house MOI Animation, have all gone East for key
sequences–the lonely drift of a Gotham cityscape, robot foes ripped
from the
comics to be redesigned as mechas. So I guess it was only a matter of
time
before weird snaky appendages tried to skull-fuck the Man of Steel.

The Blob (1958) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 22, 20132013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Teen, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Steven McQueen, Aneta Corseaut, Earl Rowe, George Karas
screenplay by Theodore Simonson and Kate Phillips, from an idea by Irvine H. Millgate
directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.

click any image to enlarge

by Jefferson Robbins Burt Bacharach and Mack David’s sock-hoppin’ title-track lyrics aside, the key creature of Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.’s The Blob never “leaps.” Sure, it sort of lunges up a stick to absorb an old hermit’s paw, but mostly what it does is ooze around, digest flesh, and act as the centring point for the film’s fine balance of character, pacing, and grace in the face of certain doom. While The Blob has its light moments, it’s seldom again as carefree as its opening credits would seem to portend. The blob crashes within its meteor-case into a riven small-town society and drives it–the way all good monsters do–to better know and reconcile with itself.

“Zero Dark Thirty”: The Ashes Of American Flags

April 9, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blog, War

by Jefferson Robbins Kathryn Bigelow's Zero
Dark Thirty is politically abhorrent, an ideologue's digest
of how torture "works" on behalf of democratic governments seeking to
defend from or avenge themselves upon terrorism. There's no debate: by
means of torture, CIA operative Maya (Jessica Chastain) digs her way
from Osama bin Laden's outer network to his inner circle, one, two,
three. As journalist Malcolm
Harris put it, "That Kathryn Bigelow used to be involved in left aesthetics
should make us shiver in fear about who we may yet become." But subtly,
in the way Bigelow presents her lead character's view of the
battlefield and the flag under which she strives, Zero Dark
Thirty betrays mixed feelings about its own ramifications.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) + The Rains of Ranchipur (1955) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Discs

February 1, 20131940s, 1950s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Romance, Thriller

THE
POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
***/****
Image B+
Sound A
Extras A
starring Lana Turner, John
Garfield, Cecil Kellaway, Hume Cronyn
screenplay by Harry Ruskin
and Niven Busch, based on the novel by James M. Cain
directed by Tay Garnett

THE
RAINS OF RANCHIPUR
**½/****
Image A
Sound A
Extras B
starring Lana Turner,
Richard Burton, Fred MacMurray, Michael Rennie
screenplay by Merle Miller,
based on the novel by Louis Bromfield
directed by Jean Negulesco

click
any image to enlarge

by
Jefferson Robbins There's a series
of doublings in The
Postman Always Rings Twice, Lana Turner's best-known
vehicle, that
illuminate its obscure title. Disillusioned young wife Cora Smith
(Turner) and
drift-through handyman Frank Chambers (John Garfield) try twice to make
way for
their illicit love by eliminating her diner-impresario husband, Nick
(Cecil
Kellaway). There are two court cases steered by suspicious chief
prosecutor
Sackett (Leon Ames) and defended by wonderfully shifty lawyer Arthur
"I'm
Handling It" Keats (Hume Cronyn). There are two moonlight swims, each a
turning
point in the criminal couple's courtship. Twice the action bends when
ailing
female relatives, never seen, summon a main character to their
sickbeds. There
are even two roadside-diner femmes fatale: Cora,
and her
double Madge (Audrey Totter), who diverts Frank while he's on the outs
with the
woman he killed to obtain. Finally, the murder itself creates a literal
echo.
These aren't anvils falling from the heavens, but instead
the patterns
life presents only in retrospect: This moment, that
day, that was
when God was trying to get my attention. Like Frank, we're too
preoccupied to
ever hear the first ring.

Les visiteurs du soir (1942) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 17, 20121940s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, France, Romance, The Criterion Collection

a.k.a. The Devil's Envoys
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Alain Cuny, Arletty, Marie Déa, Jules Berry
screenplay by Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche
directed by Marcel Carné

click any image to enlarge

by Jefferson Robbins Fairytale
is the oldest way we know to exorcise trauma or repurpose it to didactic ends.
The moving image, probably the newest. So Marcel Carné's Les visiteurs du
soir (literally, The Night Visitors, though its international title
is The Devil's Envoys), created in France during a period of repression
equalled only by the Terror, pulls both tricks. It's a film, therefore it's not
reality, but it's also shaped as a magical courtly romance and set in a distant
past where romances were both entertainment and cultural transgression.
Gilles (Alain Cuny) and Dominique (Arletty) are figures out of a medieval
fresco or some monk's illuminated pages, from Gilles's suggestively forked
mullet to Dominique's graceful, benedictory poses. The two are minstrels on
horseback in 1485–when troubadours carried news, gossip, and forbidden
literature from one feudal estate to the next, singing songs of organic,
passionate love for nobles trapped in arranged marriages. A long way from Vichy
France, under the Nazi occupation, yet either world offered death as punishment
for dissent, and both found succour in art that trespassed boundaries.

New Year’s Eve (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 9, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Robert De Niro, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound C+ Extras C-
starring Halle Berry, Jessica Biel, Jon Bon Jovi, Abigail Breslin
screenplay by Katherine Fugate
directed by Garry Marshall

click any image to enlarge

by Jefferson Robbins Refining the Hollywood gravity well–the kind of cinematic drain-spiral that A-listers and aspirants can't not be in–he first manufactured with Valentine's Day, Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve hinges for me on the thought that Robert De Niro got paid at least seven figures to literally lie in bed. The movie feints at the larger symbolism of the holiday: A progression forward in light of what's come before, the passages between immaturity and adulthood and life and death. But this is a romcom from the godfather of the modern romcom, albeit a too-long one that's neither very funny nor very romantic, and it ultimately takes its importance from the infantile imperative to kiss somebody, almost anybody, at midnight when the year turns. If you don't, you're worth nothing.

Shallow Grave (1995) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 2, 20121990s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston, Ewan McGregor, Ken Stott
screenplay by John Hodge
directed by Danny Boyle

by Jefferson Robbins The title, in retrospect, is an indictment. Danny Boyle’s debut feature Shallow Grave made a splash both in the UK and abroad, but his flatmate protagonists are so thin and hastily sketched, their interfaces with the world beyond their stylish fourth-floor walk-up so glancing and limited, that even the inevitable comeuppances for their bad behaviour don’t interest us much. When three striving young Edinburgh roommates happen into a questionable cash windfall and run afoul of brutal gangsters and nosy coppers, the real marvel is that we’re buffaloed into caring by some forthright performances and by Boyle’s visually striking helmsmanship. The characters’ motivations beyond the suitcase MacGuffin are pretty much absent: They’re fatally shallow, with grave consequences. Boyle misdirects us away from these concerns, already hinting towards the vertiginous risks he’d take two years later with Trainspotting (there’s even a creepy animated baby, of a sort), and his cast is frighteningly talented and appealing. Yet it’s hard to shake the notion that we’ve unwrapped a prettily-wrapped gift package containing nothing but socks.