Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 37 of 145

Don’t Breathe (2016)

August 30, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Daniel Zovatto, Stephen Lang
written by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues
directed by Fede Alvarez

by Walter Chaw Fede Alvarez is the real deal. He made a short film in 2009 called Ataque de Panico! and from it scored a gig directing the fantastic Evil Dead reboot. He has a clean style and a respect for the cinema as a narrative vehicle. What he introduces he inevitably pays off (Chekhov would approve), and he has a way with the camera that's as witty as it is wise. Consider a moment in his new film, Don't Breathe, where he introduces a workshop with a playful, loping push-in on a giant hammer, then pulls back to find one of our heroes where he was, rooting around below. Odd to say about things as extreme as Evil Dead or as unbearably tense as Don't Breathe, but Alvarez's pictures are delightful. They trigger a giddy response. They are knowing, ingratiating in that way that a secret shared between connoisseurs can be ingratiating. It's that feeling you feel when you're watching a movie by someone you trust won't make a hash of it. In just two features, Alvarez has earned that trust and more.

I, Madman (1989) – Blu-ray Disc

August 28, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Imadman1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Jenny Wright, Clayton Rohner, Randall William Cook, Steven Memel
written by David Chaskin
directed by Tibor Takacs

by Walter Chaw I like just about everything about I, Madman. It’s a pastiche picture coming at the end of the slasher era that cobbles together bits of De Palma and “Tales from the Darkside”, tosses in some wonderfully cheap stop-motion effects, and stars the incomparable ’80s dreamgirl Jenny Wright. Truly, it has everything. Wright is Virginia, a used-bookstore cashier (even her job is a super-nerd’s idea of a dreamgirl’s job) addicted to lurid pulps (sigh!) who is, as the film begins, reading a nasty thing about a “Jackal Boy” monster created in the unwitting womb of an unfortunate victim. Virginia’s cop boyfriend Richard (Clayton Rohner) disapproves of her reading habits because of the states they send her into, but, Virginia being Virginia, she persists. She becomes obsessed with tracking down a volume called I, Madman, written by a certain Malcolm Brand (Randall William Cook). It’s about a nutter who gets dumped because of his displeasing features and so he cuts them off. Alas, slicer’s regret has Brand attacking women in an attempt to take back the missing pieces of his face. Turns out Brand isn’t writing fiction, but memoir, and Virginia’s interest in him has attracted him to her through the pages of his book.

Barbershop: The Next Cut (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

August 24, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Ice Cube, Cedric the Entertainer, Regina Hall, Nicki Minaj
written by Kenya Barris & Tracy Oliver
directed by Malcolm D. Lee

by Walter Chaw It’s hard for me to find entry into Malcolm D. Lee’s Barbershop: The Next Cut (hereafter Barbershop 3), because the topics it broaches are generally topics I only intersect with philosophically. I hear about the gun violence in Chicago, I see gang violence portrayed in films like Boyz N the Hood and Colors and more recently David Ayer’s ugly End of Watch, and I do my best to be empathetic to horror stories about children shot in their beds as crossfire collateral. I see pictures of what Detroit looks like and read what I can about dystopias that make RoboCop‘s vision of the Motor City seem naive now. I agree entirely with the Black Lives Matter movement. I wonder why it is that even video of atrocity does little to bring rogue officers to justice. I wept when Dallas policemen were ambushed while protecting Black Lives Protestors’ right to rage. I felt righteous fury along with the protestors in Ferguson. Charleston, and the graceful response by the church during funerals to mourn their dead, broke me apart. One of my best friends is black; I resist saying that because it’s what non-black people say to pardon their racism. I watched both O.J. Simpson miniseries. And I realize I am entirely unsuited to speak to the black experience in the United States. It’s not my place. I don’t know anything.

The Nice Guys (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

August 22, 20162016, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Matt Bomer, Kim Basinger
written by Shane Black & Anthony Bagarozzi
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw Shane Black’s The Nice Guys is a delightful fusion of John D. MacDonald and Gregory McDonald; if it had a cover, it’d be painted by Robert McGinnis. It’s California noir, no doubt, the love child of The Long Goodbye and Inherent Vice, but with the flip social commentary and occasional bouts of ultra-violence found in Carl Hiaasen’s Florida noirs. Sufficed to say that Black, who’s often spoken of his love for crime fiction, has distilled pulp here and with his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang into breezy, post-modern concoctions. The Nice Guys is as smart as it is inconsequential, as brutal and exploitive as it is a commentary on brutality and exploitation. More than anything else, it’s a very fine critical pastiche of the kinds of books you read in an afternoon because they’re thrilling, socially irresponsible, and afire with misogyny, nihilism, and Byronic macho bullshit Romanticism. But cool, baby, and stylish.

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

August 21, 20161990s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, The Criterion Collection

Mrjohnson1

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Maynard Eziashi, Pierce Brosnan, Edward Woodward, Beatie Edney
screenplay by William Boyd, based on the novel by Joyce Cary
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw I’m not sure exactly when or why Aussie director Bruce Beresford became the cinematic spokesman for the African experience. It probably, in Hollywood’s peculiar racial calculus, had something to do with his appalling Driving Miss Daisy being the Oscar juggernaut that Do the Right Thing was not. Credit Beresford for the years he spent living in Nigeria and the stands he took in films like The Fringe Dwellers to work with an Aboriginal cast against counsel, but something nettles that, with the remake of “Roots” still warm and Beresford and fellow Aussie new-waver Phillip Noyce at the helm of half of its four episodes, somehow Beresford is the acceptable choice to tell these Black stories. This isn’t even an indictment of his pictures, mind, but rather an indictment of a system so heavily skewed towards one racial group and gender that whatever the quality of the product, there’s a good conversation to be had about the people making it. There’s dissonance.

War Dogs (2016)

August 20, 20162016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, War

**/****
starring Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana De Armas, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by Stephen Chin and Todd Phillips & Jason Smilovic, based on the ROLLING STONE article “Arms and the Dudes” by Guy Lawson
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw Like The Big Short before it, Todd Phillips’s War Dogs is a breezy, loose, “for dummies” gloss on recent history that says for all the things you thought were going to hell in the world, you don’t know the fucking half of it, buddy. It details how W.’s administration, after being accused of cronyism in making Dick Cheney’s Haliburton wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of wealth with the gift of bid-free defense contracts, opened the floodgates by essentially giving every unscrupulous asshole on the planet the opportunity to bid on defense contracts. In that pursuit, our government set up an “eBay” list where major arms dealers could pick off the larger contracts, and dilettantes and arms “day-traders” could, from the comfort of their basements, sell the United States military a few thousand handguns. War Dogs adapts a magazine article about two assholes in particular, David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who made a fortune, then made a terrible mistake when they decided to traffic a hundred million rounds of defective Chinese AK-47 ammo by disguising it as Albanian stock. Actually, their mistake is that Efraim is a psychotic loser so pathological in his incompetence that even the U.S. government had no choice but to do something about it. It’s a level of obviousness matched by the film in moments like one in the middle of the game where Efraim screams, “Fuck the American taxpayer!” OK, yes, we get it.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) [Special Edition] – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

August 16, 20161980s, 2016, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Romance, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory

Buckaroo2

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
Buckaroo Bonzai
***/****
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
DVD – Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Earl Mac Rauch
directed by W.D. Richter

by Walter Chaw It isn’t so much that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension (henceforth Adventures) is hard to follow, it’s that it’s hard to assimilate. Once you’re drawn into the deadly serious heart askew of W.D. Richter’s film, its Gordian plot begins to unravel, its tangled web unweaves, and it becomes clear that the most disturbing thing about this legendarily convoluted camp masterpiece is that it makes perfect sense. That moment of clarity occurs somewhere in the middle of the fourth viewing, and while I can’t necessarily guarantee that the trial is worth it for everyone, it was for me. Adventures reveals itself as a commentary on racism, an exploration of Communism in the Reagan era, a surprisingly influential genre piece, and a sly statement on early-Eighties excess and malaise. What I’m trying to say is that the film is holding my brain hostage, and I would like it back.

The River (1951) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 12, 2016****/****, 1950s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Jean Renoir, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, India, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A+
starring Nora Swinburne, Esmond Knight, Arthur Shields, Suprova Mukerjee
screenplay by Rumer Godden, Jean Renoir, based on the book by Godden
directed by Jean Renoir

by Walter Chaw There’s something ineffable about Jean Renoir’s same-named adaptation of Rumer Godden’s The River. It has to do with how the light is different in our memories of childhood, the good days and especially the bad, captured here in three-strip Technicolor that understands at last Impressionism as a birthright of film. It’s more real than real ever was, the “real” of nostalgia and melancholy and Romanticism. It’s not possible to see in any other visual medium, though I confess I’ve seen it in certain poetry by certain poets. But there are moments–like in the films of Powell & Pressburger, who did their own Rumer Godden adaptation, the socio-sexual horror flick Black Narcissus–where you can definitely see it in cinema. The past, I mean. Not as it was, but as you remember it. The River captures the fear and longing of lazy summers on the cusp, of passing from innocence over to experience, of remembering things you never experienced so that you know you’re connected to the entire stream of lives you’ve lived and lives you haven’t, or haven’t yet. I don’t know how The River does it, but it does.

Suicide Squad (2016)

August 3, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller, Will Smith

½*/****
starring Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie, Joel Kinnaman
written and directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw Ugly garbage that will make a lot of money, David Ayer’s Suicide Squad begins where Batman v Superman left off by positing that in a world without its big, mopey, solipsistic, Byronic Boy Scout, there will come a time when the good guys (i.e., us) will need to enlist the help of a bunch of psychopathic mutants and contract killers to protect our way of life. It’s a little bit like Escape from New York but not cool and not fun; and it’s a little bit like a satire, except that it’s more of a documentary. Marvel films are aspirational and DC films in this new cycle are diseased and beaten. Both are bloated beyond repair and slavish to a core fandom they daren’t betray, making them essentially unwatchable along their tentpole storylines–though you want less to kill yourself after the Marvel films. The bright light lately has been one-offs and side projects: Marvel’s television universe, for instance, has blossomed on Netflix and DC’s own TV series “The Flash” and “Supergirl” seem to hear the music. Then, of course, there’s Guardians of the Galaxy. The only thing worse than the kernel of an idea at the centre of Suicide Squad is its unlikely choice of writer-director to bring it to life, Ayer, perhaps the most vile, pessimistic filmmaker in the United States, whom Warner Bros. has given the task of appealing broadly somehow with this material: a little softening here, an extra scene/hero moment there after gauging the breakout star from the reaction to early teaser trailers. If you’re going to hire Ayer to do this, make it a hard-R and take out the yuk-yuk comedy. He’s not funny. He’s not for kids. The strain of pleasing dozens of masters shows. It shows in the select mix of fondly-remembered oldies à la Guardians of the Galaxy, and it shows in the flop-sweat of an entire production so badly compromised by its too-big star and its too-threatened masculinity.

Jason Bourne (2016)

July 30, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel
written by Paul Greengrass & Christopher Rouse
directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw There are two modes in Paul Greengrass’s Jason Bourne, his and star Matt Damon’s return to the franchise after almost a decade away from it: thudding tedium, and incomprehensible chaos. By this fifth instalment (which follows the Jeremy Renner-starring spin-off attempt, The Bourne Legacy), it all plays a little too much like self-parody. Every time there’s a conversation about THE TRUTH now, it feels like a bad SNL skit. I still love The Bourne Identity. Watching it in comparison with the Greengrass films (and with most any modern action movie) underscores exactly how superior is Doug Liman as an action director. Liman shoots an action scene like the dance sequences in Saturday Night Fever: with respect for geography and the skill and physicality of his stunt performers and cast. The car chase through Paris in the original begins with a careful consultation of a map, a few questions about the state of the car, and some light but crucial character development, then proceeds into a nice, clean set-piece that establishes stakes, spatial geometry, and destination in a way that is Friedkin-esque. It’s a textbook, as good as the L-train underpass pursuit in The French Connection and the wrong-way freeway chase in To Live and Die in LA.. The Bourne Identity is defiantly classical action filmmaking and that’s why it still seems fresh, even though it will be fifteen years old next year.

Point Break (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 26, 20162015, 2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Sports, Thriller, ZERO STARS

Pointbreak1

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras F
starring Édgar Ramírez, Luke Bracey, Teresa Palmer, Ray Winstone
screenplay by Kurt Wimmer
directed by Ericson Core

by Walter Chaw Not enough can be said about Kathryn Bigelow’s action sense. The honkytonk slaughter sequence in Near Dark, from the first moment (when the vampires crest the hill) to the last (when the lone survivor defenestrates), is a triumph of design, of score–including the high lonesome tones of a George Strait classic on the jukebox–and editing and execution. It’s that perfect economy of ideas-into-motion that indicates her cult classic Point Break, too–that, paired with absolutely perfect casting, from Keanu Reeves’s Everybody’s All-American football hero-turned-FBI dude Johnny Utah and Patrick Swayze’s blissed-out charismatic leader all the way down to Gary Busey and Lori Petty, the best supporting staff a film about a surf-zen cult-cum-bank-robbing crew could ask for. It’s a lovely marriage between ludicrous high-concept and the period immediately following the 1980s, which found the country in a reflective mood, perched there on the verge of upsetting the primacy of film for the coming digital age. Bigelow’s Point Break was a showcase for practical stuntwork and, philosophically, a nice metaphor for the excess of the “greed is good”/City on the Hill period drawing to a close. The bad guys rob banks to pay their way to enlightenment. Of course it all ends in tears.

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

July 21, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Idris Elba
screenplay by Simon Pegg & Doug Jung
directed by Justin Lin

by Walter Chaw The cultural watershed isn’t when it’s revealed that Sulu (John Cho) is gay, but rather a moment just before that, when an interracial couple–an Asian man and a white woman–are used as an example of a “good” relationship. I’m Chinese, my wife is a tall redhead. When my kids watch Star Trek Beyond, it’ll be the first time they see their parents reflected in a major American tentpole. There are a lot of things wrong with Star Trek Beyond, which at its best is great in the same way that David Twohy’s The Chronicles of Riddick is great–and at its worst is bad in the same way the last film in this reboot series is bad (that is, self-conscious and fan-pleasing, torturously so). But when Sulu is given the one, true, rousing hero moment in the piece, it speaks not just to the vision of a multicultural United States that Lin’s The Fast and the Furious movies proposed, but also, perhaps, to the real impact of an Asian-American director behind the camera. It makes sense that a Lin-directed Star Trek would make Sulu the hero; I just wasn’t expecting to be so affected by it.

Equals (2016)

July 18, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi

*/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Kristen Stewart, Jacki Weaver, Guy Pearce
screenplay by Nathan Parker
directed by Drake Doremus

by Walter Chaw Drake Doremus’s Equals is Gattaca and Equilibrium and THX 1138 and Code 46 and Michael Radford’s great 1984, all mashed up into an easy-to-conceptualize and even easier to swallow twenty-something romance that posits simply that love conquers all. It’s inoffensive at all times, is only “science-fiction” because there’s a blue filter on the lens, and offers so little that is its own that it’s easy to miss an exceptional cast doing exceptional work. Equals is another prize example of one of those movies that people will struggle to remember (like Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go–just like, in fact) or come upon some time later on down the line only to remark how such-and-such is a big star now and how you never knew so-and-so was in this and, hey, how is it they got so many amazing folks in such a blah picture; did it even get a release?

Green Room (2016) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

July 17, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Music, Thriller

Greenroom1

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras B
starring Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Patrick Stewart
written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw I wonder if Jeremy Saulnier has ever made something that wasn’t, in its dark heart of hearts, a comedy. I hadn’t considered this before a dear friend suggested it after a screening of Green Room, and it caused me to reassess Saulnier’s previous films, Murder Party and Blue Ruin. The labels “hardcore” and “brutal” don’t feel exactly right, though his work is certainly both at times. There’s a Mel Brooks quote I like that defines tragedy as you getting a paper-cut–it hurts, it’s awful, it’s terrible–and comedy as somebody else falling into a sewer and dying. Saulnier’s films are litanies of horrible, unimaginable calamities befalling generally well-meaning schlubs who are altogether unequipped to deal with them. Murder Party, his feature debut, set the template. Its protagonist is a lonely guy who answers a general invitation to attend a Halloween “Murder Party,” where he discovers that he’s the only guest and that all of the hosts have decided to murder him. It’s the most obviously comic of his pictures, and it ends with a moment of crystal-blue melancholy as it becomes clear that the audience has sutured not just to this guy’s guilelessness, but to the loneliness driving him as well. Blue Ruin is a masterpiece of the same sort of mechanics. It’s delightful: delightfully funny, delightfully smart, delightfully brutal. The hero of that piece, played by Macon Blair (who has a key role in Green Room), is another nebbish pulled from obscurity to be, briefly, the hero of his own life.

Ghostbusters (2016)

July 13, 20162016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones
written by Kate Dippold & Paul Feig
directed by Paul Feig

by Walter Chaw Sort of the George Cukor to Melissa McCarthy’s Katharine Hepburn, director Paul Feig has shown over multiple collaborations that he knows how to make a Melissa McCarthy vehicle pretty well, perhaps explaining why none of the other funny people in his Ghostbusters reboot are funny in the slightest. “Melissa McCarthy vehicle” is a low bar besides, if a reasonably lucrative one–a low bar matched by the low bar of Ivan Reitman’s terrible but revered original film. Reitman’s Ghost Busters (’84 spelling, to be anal and to differentiate the two titles) shares a cultural space with other terrible movies like The Goonies and Purple Rain and pretty much everything starring Bill Murray before Quick Change. It’s an aggressive movie, painfully unfunny, and for a few months when I was 11, it was the best thing I’d ever seen. 11-year-olds are very smart at being 11 and very stupid in almost every other respect. I didn’t know a ghost was giving Dan Aykroyd a blowjob until years later, after I’d had one. Oh yeah, I said, that ghost gave Dan Aykroyd a blowjob. Was it to save herself from getting “busted”? That’s a pretty sexually violent pill in the middle of all that arrogant improvisation. Think of it as a slave narrative where a slave woman gives a slave master a blowjob in the middle of a montage. Right, I get it, it’s a comedy, lighten up; but Mel Brooks it ain’t. What I wouldn’t have given for a scene in the new film where one of the women receives cunnilingus from a member of the tormented undead. That would’ve been pointed, taboo, and smart. Looking at it again years later, the best part of Ghost Busters is Rick Moranis, because Rick Moranis is the best part of every movie he’s in. He always plays a real character. He’s never too good for the material.

The Secret Life of Pets (2016)

July 9, 20162016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
written by Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio and Brian Lynch
directed by Chris Renaud

by Walter Chaw Brutally bad, from the exhausted hip-comic improvisational patter to the endless slapstick pratfalls that comprise the entirety of the film, Chris Renaud and co-director Yarrow Cheney's abominable The Secret Life of Pets excretes into theatres for the express purpose of distracting your young ones for 90 minutes in an air-conditioned setting. It's not remotely witty, never for a second clever, and with a typecast Kevin Hart voicing a one-trick racial pastiche of a bunny, it underscores the cultural divide between those who think Minions and The Lorax are unwatchable dreck and those who are wrong. It's machine-tooled to make money, which it will after the manner of other things that make money at the expense of your children, but it's worth considering that the reason for most of the terrible things in this world is our agreement that critical thinking is a burden, while anti-intellectualism is a roadmap to our survival as first a civilization, then as a species. In our society, saying that something is "for kids" means that it's better, safer…unless it's entertainment. The greatest trick the devil played is convincing an entire culture that it's better not to waste time wondering if what you put in your child's head is productive and smart. So long as there's no sex in it, game on. If The Secret Life of Pets (hereafter Pets) were a chair, it would be made of broken glass and rusty nails. But hey, never mind, why criticize? It's just for kids.

In a Lonely Place (1950) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 2016****/****, 1950s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Romance, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Inalonelyplace5

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid
screenplay by Andrew Solt, adaptation by Edmund H. North, based upon a story by Dorothy B. Hughes
directed by Nicholas Ray

by Walter Chaw In another time and place, they would’ve called Gloria Grahame “one sick twist,” and the brand would’ve stuck. There are stories, a few of them true. There’s the one about her stepson, and the thing where she keeps getting plastic surgery until her face is paralyzed, which was the alleged goal after Grahame became morbidly devoted to Kuleshov’s editing theories. There’s the weird book an ex-lover wrote about her last days, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, and indeed, her story has been told largely through the men who wanted her, the men who had her, and the men who ruined her. In many ways, she’s the quintessential femme fatale of the noir era, not just for the roles she took, but because the roles she took reflected the traps she was in. She’s the patron saint of the way we treat women first as objects of desire, then as objects of disgust. Her late moment as the girl who “cain’t” say no encapsulates the perversity of Rodgers & Hammerstein, sure, and the sad decline of a woman who confessed at the end of her life that she never quite figured out Hollywood–though it sure looks like Hollywood had her figured. She is one of the great tragic figures of the age, both microcosm and avatar of that wonderland of image-fixers and dream-crushers. For my money, the film that best captures Grahame in her complexity, in all her multifoliate relationships with the world and her millions of voyeurs, is Nicholas Ray’s scabrous In A Lonely Place. It’s a masculine confession and an apology. It’s hollow. Aren’t they all?

No Way Out (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

July 4, 20161980s, 2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Espionage, Mystery, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

***/**** Image B- Sound B Commentary C
starring Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Sean Young, Howard Duff
screenplay by Robert Garland, based on the book The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw I was lucky enough to be 14 in 1987, right at that age where my buddies and I were dropped off at the theatre by our parents for whatever we wanted to see. Because we were generally not well-supervised in such matters, we talked them into buying us tickets for stuff like Hellraiser, RoboCop, Lethal Weapon, Full Metal Jacket, and The Untouchables. My first R-rated theatrical experiences were, in other words, magical. They were gleefully violent, extravagantly so, and the sex… Jesus. The sex in mainstream movies in 1987 was combustible–enough so that it formed the backbone of my onanism for the next several years. I saw Angel Heart this way, and Fatal Attraction of course. Key in there is Roger Donaldson’s largely-forgotten but durable political-paranoia thriller No Way Out. Starring Kevin Costner, cementing a legendary winning streak that began a month or two earlier with his star-making turn in The Untouchables and continued with the dead sexy Bull Durham the following year and the legendarily-chaste Field of Dreams a year after that. Lost in conversations about Costner’s stardom during this period is his preternatural ability to be an Everyman sex symbol. Girls loved him, and guys didn’t mind because Costner isn’t really all that threatening. He sure is likable, though. When he introduced a note of menace into his nice-guy archetype in A Perfect World, he, in fact, discovered his perfect role. The problems came when he tried to be something more than that. Cowboy, baseball player, fish-man, all-around all-American? No problem. Attorney, doctor–now we got issues.

The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

July 3, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical

***/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer, based on the “Tarzan” stories created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw David Yates’s The Legend of Tarzan is at once a long-overdue, if massively fictionalized, biopic of George Washington Williams’s time in the Congo observing colonial Belgium’s abuses of the rubber, ivory, and diamond trades; and it’s an adaptation, nay, updating of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first five Tarzan books, with heavy creative license taken but the spirit kept largely intact. Although it’s more successful as the latter than as the former, both endeavours are carried through with seriousness and intelligence. It’s not a perfect film: the editing is terrible, particularly during the action sequences, suggesting this was probably a longer movie truncated out of fear of diluting the “good” bits. I also don’t love the washed-out colour palette that paints everything in a blue gloom–at least not as much as Yates seems to, between this and the last four Harry Potter films. And it bears mentioning that Samuel L. Jackson isn’t really an actor anymore and that Margot Robbie arguably never has been. Yeah, The Legend of Tarzan is hard to defend objectively. It does, however, understand the appeal of the Tarzan mythos, answering in grand moments why it is that he’s found his way into over 200 motion pictures and dozens more serials and television series (live-action and animated). I should disclaim, too, that I read (re-read, in some cases) all 24 original Burroughs Tarzan novels in the weeks leading up to the picture’s release. In other words, I’m a big, giant pulp nerd.

Swiss Army Man (2016)

June 30, 20162016, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Musical, Romance, Theatrical, Zombie

***½/****
starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
written and directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan

by Walter Chaw Bridging the gap between Charlie Kaufman movies, the Daniels’ Swiss Army Man is one high-concept conceit carried through to every possible ontological end. It veers, dizzily, between slapstick scatological comedy and poignant existential philosophy, doing so with the sort of invention generally credited to silent-film clowns. Open with Hank (Paul Dano), shipwrecked, about to hang himself when he notices the corpse of Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washed ashore. He looks for signs of life. There aren’t any, save the rapid decomposition that’s causing Manny to fart. A lot. Manny’s farts carry Hank back to civilization, in fact, in a trailer-spoiled motorboat sequence that would be indescribable were it not right there. Like so many things in the film, it’s not clear that this is “actually” happening or just a fantasy of Hank’s before dying. By the middle of the picture, it’s apparent that challenging the border between the cinema real and the cinema imagined is the point. If it destroys that conversation, it allows for a better one about the nature of friendship and honesty, whether it’s possible to ever truly be open with another human being and, if it is, whether it would be something welcomed or rejected. Unconditional acceptance is a charming romantic fantasy, but that’s all it is.