Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 47 of 146

Telluride ’14: Wild

August 30, 20142014, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

**/****
starring Reese Witherspoon, Thomas Sadoski, Michiel Huisman, Laura Dern
screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the novel by Cheryl Strayed
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

by Walter Chaw Wild is exactly what you think it will be and is that for what feels like forever. It’s the inspirational true story of smack-addicted party girl Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon), who, after reading a lot of well-known volumes of collected verse, cleans out an REI store and sets out to walk the PCT up the Western coast. And she likes Snapple. Yeah, it’s a commercial about regaining white privilege after trying to give it away, complete with more rapey moments than expected. That’s not fair: Cheryl doesn’t so much give her privilege away as indulge in the perks of it to the point where a trio of hale, happy-go-lucky trail-bums dub her the “Queen of the PCT” for all the favours and special treatment she receives along the way. It also takes time for Cheryl to thank REI for being her most favouritest corporation ever for replacing her faulty boots, so that happened.

Telluride ’14: Birdman

August 29, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
*/****
starring Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough
screenplay Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. & Armando Bo
directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

by Walter Chaw A benighted, gangly thing midway between a mid-life crisis Black Swan and the Noises Off version of Brazil, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman is the lonesome yawp of a limited, one-trick-pony given now to defensiveness and self-consciousness. Assailing the tale of a washed-up former mega-star of superhero blockbusters, Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton, check), who's trying to gain a measure of self-respect on Broadway in a Raymond Carver adaptation he wrote, directed, and is starring in, the picture doesn't do anything it doesn't warn us about first and then apologize for after. It covers the three preview performances leading to opening night in one, digitally-unbroken take, making room along the way for Method asshole Michael Shiner (Method asshole Edward Norton)–who steals both the play Birdman is about and the play-within-a-play conceit of the movie by stealing the movie–and tons of narrative melodramatics, including a neurotic leading lady (Naomi Watts), Riggan's burnout daughter (Emma Stone), and his stressed-out lawyer/manager (Zach Galifianakis). The whole story roils with desperation and disappointment, and the film-as-object does the same–the transparency between those two things (cine-reality and sad-truth-of-it reality) cited repeatedly in the screenplay-by-committee in exhausting, self-abnegating fashion. Birdman is an incredible bore. The closest analogue in feel is Todd Solondz's unfortunate riposte to his detractors, Storytelling, but at least that one wasn't all tarted up in attention-grabbing technical pandering. Birdman is about as clever as that Blues Traveler song: the tedious offense of idiots calling you an idiot.

Telluride ’14: Second Variety or: An Introduction

August 29, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

by Walter Chaw You get into trouble when you expect the things you love the most in your life to be the salvation for bad choices. I was in a job last year that I hated. It paid well, and I took the money without thinking over-much that it was money for lying to people who trusted and respected me so they would continue to be productive for an organization that didn’t care about them. I was good at this. To quiet the little voices that began to fray around the edges of “everything I’m supposed to do,” I taught, and I wrote, and I identified myself as a writer and a critic and a teacher whenever someone asked me what I did. I came to Telluride last year at the invitation of a friend at a point where I thought of suicide a lot and couldn’t figure out why exactly that was. I didn’t review much anymore. I didn’t want to watch movies. I didn’t know what made me happy–I didn’t understand why nothing made me happy. Then there was the attendant self-loathing where you realize you have it made and shouldn’t you just stop complaining?

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] – Heart of Glass (1976)

August 19, 20141970s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

Herz aus Glas
***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound B Commentary B
BD – Image A- Sound A- Commentary B
starring Josef Bierbichler, Stefan Güttler, Clemens Scheitz, Volker Prechtel
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Hias (Josef Bierbichler) is a shepherd and a prophet, and his pronouncements pepper Heart of Glass like edicts from God. He defines the structure, in so much as there is one, of a picture that drifts in tone between Werner Herzog’s nightmarish, nostalgic Bavarian romanticism and a certain variety of gothic surrealism. Indeed, Heart of Glass, while hewing close to Herzog’s themes of the insufficiency of myth as a means to obscure truths about horror and beauty as well as of the artist as solitary, Byronic voyager, appears to be Herzog’s play at the stylization of Buñuel. After an aged glassblower dies in a small village, the out-of-time surviving villagers, reliant on the “ruby glass” that was the artisan’s specialty, spend the balance of the piece spiralling in a maddening gyre to divine the secret of the formula. Like Aguirre: The Wrath of God, the story behind the scenes–that Herzog hypnotized his cast daily to create a trancelike (glassy-eyed, if you will) mien–has become almost better known than the details of the film itself.

sex, lies, and videotape (1989) – Blu-ray Disc

August 12, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, Palme d'Or Winner

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
starring James Spader, Andie MacDowell, Peter Gallagher, Laura San Giacomo
written and directed Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Appearing in 1989 at the very end of the blockbuster decade and on the cusp of a digital revolution, Steven Soderbergh’s micro-budgeted sex, lies, and videotape heralded a doomed renaissance in independent film that would find it melded, ultimately and inseparably, with mainstream concerns. It posits that people only tell the truth when they’re captured on celluloid–that when the video camera starts running, the assumption of roles begins. By the end of the ’90s, precisely a decade later with American Beauty, there’s another character with a video camera, but in that one, everything has turned: the lies are on film, and the truth is digital. (See also: Michael Almereyda’s endlessly rewarding Hamlet (2000) and the still-incomparable The Blair Witch Project (1999).)

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] – My Best Fiend (1999)

August 11, 20141990s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Scream/Shout! Factory

Mein liebster Feind – Klaus Kinski
**/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B+
BD – Image B+ Sound B+
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw My Best Fiend is Werner Herzog trying to dispel some of the myths surrounding his career by magnifying a few of the myths surrounding Klaus Kinski’s. As such, it feels a lot more like a cheap shot than like a tribute, burying as it does Kinski’s indisputable genius beneath a lot of documentary evidence that Kinski was a slavering lunatic. And though Herzog betrays a definite affection for Kinski (nowhere more so than in a hilarious/warm reminiscence offered to the very proper German couple living in the apartment once shared by the director and actor), more often the piece is given to obfuscating outtakes and anecdotes. Consider the eclipsing impact that B-roll footage of a raving Kinski on the set of Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Herzog’s comments about the natives offering to kill the actor for him have on Kinski’s astonishingly reserved, haunted performance in the film. If you’ve never seen Aguirre, you’d think that Kinski was awful in it–and if you have seen Aguirre, your mind begins to blur what’s actually on the screen. It’s subtle, but it starts to resemble a snowjob akin to the belief, held by most (even those who’ve seen the films), that Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are splatter flicks, when in fact there’s more blood in Psycho than in those two films combined.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

August 8, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, Johnny Knoxville
screenplay by Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec and Evan Daugherty
directed by Jonathan Liebesman

by Walter Chaw Jonathan Liebesman’s brutally awful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a Michael Bay co-production in conjunction with kid’s basic-cable network Nickelodeon, meaning it’s a PG-13 piece of shit aimed at preteens that packs a payload of sexual objectification, mild torture, and assorted grotesquerie. That’s really all there is to say about it. It implies bestiality in the constant come-ons aimed at Bay’s favourite target (Megan Fox) by a foul-looking monster, then makes a joke out of a human counterpart staring at her ass while she’s dangling out a car window. Best is the moment where one of the monsters declares Ms. Fox to be “so hot I can feel my shell tightening,” which comes just after she’s equated with a “sexy bird,” because birds are slim animals as opposed to fat animals like pigs and cows. Later, Whoopi Goldberg appears as that Cabbage Patch doll you didn’t get for Christmas because you’re going to a Michael Bay-produced movie advertised on a children’s cartoon channel, and one of the bad guys instructs his henchmen to “drain every last drop of blood” from our heroes, “even if it kills them.”

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] – Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)

August 5, 2014****/****, 1970s, 2014, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mexico, Peru, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

Aguirre1

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes
****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Commentary A
BD – Image A- Sound B+ Commentaries A
starring Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Ruy Guerra
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw A work of holy madness about acts of holy madness, Aguirre, The Wrath of God is a transcendent, haunting film that defies description and captures, somehow, what it means to be human in all the venal, small, sometimes grand things that being human implies. Once seen, it’s never forgotten, and upon repeat viewings, it’s one of those pictures that makes you want to cry for no particular reason but that it is, in almost every non-quantifiable way, perfect, a film alight with invention, love, and passion–a memoir of the worm in the gut that demands blood and glory. Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) is an under-lieutenant in the bona fide Peruvian expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés) to find the lost city of gold, El Dorado, a fiction of the Peruvian Indians meant as a suicide pill for their conquistadors. Once the expedition bogs down in the mud of the rainy season, Pizarro sends nobleman Don Pedro de Ursua (Ruy Guerra) off with Aguirre on a satellite mission to scout a path ahead for the main body. Though neither party was ever heard from again, Aguirre, The Wrath of God proposes to tell the final days of Ursua’s doomed men.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

July 30, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Benicio Del Toro
written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman
directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw After years of looking for a Star Wars for my son (too little for Lord of the Rings; nothing to attach to in Pacific Rim), here’s James Gunn’s awesome Guardians of the Galaxy to fit the bill. It’s science-fiction in exactly the same way that Star Wars is science-fiction–essentially a serial western, with Chris Pratt as both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, green Zoe Saldana as Princess Leia, and a raccoon and a tree subbing for Wookiee and droid. It has a secret history for our hero, a scary baddie in a black cloak, and an entire universe of wonders it treats like an amusement park. It’s also fun in the same way Star Wars was fun, and fresh in the same way, too: heedlessly, carefree, even bratty, which explains the post-credits cut-scene that’s easily the best of them. Furthermore, it has a soundtrack packed with AM Gold that lends the picture camp and hipster cred simultaneously. Heavy on exposition at times, squandering a few opportunities to demonstrate a better team action dynamic, and not about anything at the end of the day, Guardians of the Galaxy‘s sword and shield is that its irreverence and self-awareness land as self-deprecating and warm. Doesn’t hurt that it’s a blast.

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] – Even Dwarfs Started Small (1971)

July 29, 20141970s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Werner Herzog, DVD, Esoterica, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

Evendwarfs2

Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen
***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Commentary A
BD – Image A- Sound B+ Commentary A
starring Helmut Döring, Gerd Gickel, Paul Glauer, Erna Gschwendtner
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Even Dwarfs Started Small opens with a disquieting montage featuring a young girl rending live birds with her teeth that also culminates in the image of a chicken eating another chicken (shades of Magritte’s 1927 painting “Pleasure”). Both actions speak to a sort of insensate savagery, the divorce between the Freudian Id and Ego so favoured by the surrealists–and in setting the film in a fictitious place populated entirely by the little people of the title, it touches on the surrealist belief that non-Western civilizations were closer to an undifferentiated nature. The story proper concerns the uprising of a “Prisoner”-like colony against an ineffectual, Kafkaesque godhead (Pepi Hermine) and the Institution he represents. Rebelling against the imprisonment of leader Pepe (Gerd Gickel, tied to a chair throughout), the rebels devolve from a semi-organized protest into bedlam, crucifying monkeys, organizing cockfights, and, in one of the most hopeless conclusions in film, watching as rebel leader Hombre (Helmut Döring) laughs until he chokes at the sight of a defecating camel.

Lucy (2014)

July 23, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked, Choi Min-Sik
written and directed by Luc Besson

by Walter Chaw I recall Luc Besson confessing that his The Fifth Element was based on an idea he’d had as a child; I’m going to wager the same is true of his dreadful Lucy. It’s a pre-pubescent boy’s fantasy of cool: a mash of silly pop-science buoying a beautiful woman’s mutation from impossible party girl into deity through the agency of stem-cell-related drug abuse. The good news is that South Korean superstar Choi Min-Sik (Oldboy) gets a mainstream American debut in a juicy role that nonetheless feels like a wasted opportunity (see: Beat Takeshi in Johnny Mnemonic). The bad news is Lucy is prurient pap that pup-critics will declare proof of “vulgar auteurism,” no matter the redundancy and ignorance of the term itself. Perhaps fitting, then, that the only defense of a movie this obnoxious and wilfully dumb is a term and movement founded on the same principles. I’ve defended Besson in the past–I’m an unapologetic admirer of Leon/The Professional and The Messenger (and Danny the Dog, which he produced, is a peerless statement on the relationship between Western and Asian action stars). But Lucy is reductive, sub-La femme Nikita effluvia that takes a premise niftily played with in Ted Chiang’s beyond-brilliant 1991 short story “Understand” and grinds it into a grey paste.

300: Rise of an Empire (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 20, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, War

30021

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, Lena Headey, Rodrigo Santoro
screenplay by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad
directed by Noam Murro

by Walter Chaw If Kenji Misumi made gladiator movies instead of the legendarily violent, indisputably awesome Lone Wolf and Cub series, they’d probably have played a lot like Noam Murro’s ludicrous but committed 300: Rise of an Empire (hereafter 300 II). Pornographically (in the best way) violent and generous with Eva Green’s ample, and horrifyingly-intense, charms, it tells a parallel story to Zack Snyder’s gay porn-meets-military-recruitment video 300–a naval (and navel–ha!, priceless) intrigue involving Greek general Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) fending off Persian commander Artemisia (Green) in a sea of sometimes-literal blood. The film is completely unapologetic in its hard-R excess, counting among its atrocities child-rape and sexual slavery in the baddie’s backstory with more squarely-clenched jaws than a Dick Tracy convention. It’s a testosterone-sloppy cock-opera, of course, lending its countless skewerings the musky weight of sadomasochistic homoeroticism, but by sprinkling in Green’s bonzer performance and, late in the game, Lena Headey’s grief-stricken Queen Gorgo, 300 II suddenly becomes this rape-revenge/avenging-angel exploitation slasher. It’s good, in other words. In a weak moment, I might admit it’s even better than that.

Venus in Fur (2013)

July 17, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Theatrical

La Vénus à la fourrure
***½/****
starring Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric
screenplay by David Ives, based on his play
directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw If it’s stagebound, Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, an adaptation of David Ives’s play that is itself an adaptation in part of the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novel, is at least not stagebound without a purpose. It reminds of Adaptation. in its awareness of itself as an object open to deconstruction (and Derrida is mentioned in the text to make it metacritical in that sense as well); the fact that it’s a play captured on film only underscores its conceit. Venus in Fur is also a career summary for the octogenarian director at a point where his contemporaries are declining steeply in their dotage. Spry and clever, surprisingly funny at times, and at all times indisputably alive, it finds Polanski’s themes of gender subversion in high dunder, opening with a quote from the Apocryphal Book of Judith where the titular heroine seduces enemy general Holofrenes and decapitates (read: emasculates/castrates) him as he reclines in post-coital bliss. Polanski casts an actor who could be his younger doppelgänger, Mathieu Amalric, and opposite him in this two-person drama Polanski’s own wife, Emmanuelle Seigner–transparent, vulnerable, courageous casting that reminds very much of Hitchcock in his late masterpiece period. Venus in Fur is Polanski’s Marnie: a grand survey of all of his sexual peccadilloes that works as apologia, confession, and explication, eventually conveying Polanski’s acceptance of himself as deeply flawed, but better for the wisdom.

Noah (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 16, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, DVD

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins
screenplay by Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw Unapologetic, curious, atavistic in its single-mindedness and simplicity, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is more impactful in the rearview than in the moment. It’s got a hell of a wake. The film is beautiful to look at, it almost goes without saying–as grand and ambitious as its ideas, with one sequence depicting what appears to be the case for intelligent design. It’s truly audacious. In many ways the movie The Fountain wanted to be in terms of scale (and featuring another Clint Mansell score that sounds every bit like a continuation of themes), Noah is a deeply insane interpretation of one of the Bible’s briefest (essentially Genesis 5:32-10:1), most contentious, most instantly-relatable and hence most-beloved of all Old Testament stories. I can only speculate what the Christian response will be (somewhere between mine and Glenn Beck’s assignation of it as the “Babylonian Chainsaw Massacre” is my guess), but for an atheist who counts many strong Christians among his friends, this interpretation is full of the menace and wonder that scripture must hold for the devout. It’s a stirring creation mythology in that it makes no bones about the interference in the affairs of men by a vengeful God. Likewise, it makes no apologies for the atrocities it represents in its visions of suffering and sin. (I can only imagine what Aronofsky’s Sodom would look like.) Noah even finds time for a dialogue about religious fundamentalism and what happens when absolute faith becomes rationale for atrocity. It’s a story about the annihilation of 99.9% of human life on the planet that’s ultimately about the value of compassion, and it’s a critical read of divine texts that skew in that direction. After a series of films attempting to explain the ways of the divine to the mundane, here’s hoping for an Aronofsky adaptation at last of “Paradise Lost”: a most comfortable marriage of material and artist.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

July 9, 2014****/****, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Andy Serkis, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Mark Bomback
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw Matt Reeves’s remarkable Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (hereafter Dawn) isn’t the best sequel since The Empire Strikes Back, but it is the best sequel since The Dark Knight. It’s uncomplicated but beautifully executed–so pure and genuinely felt that its conclusions about the unavoidable zero-sum game of tribalism land are not didactic but poetic. That certain sense of Tennyson bleeds into the overgrown post-apocalyptic landscape, all torpid acedia in its human ruins and in a tree-bound ape village that represents a sort of circular hopelessness. We recognize it as the beginning of a successor civilization that is unfortunately exactly like the beginnings of the civilization on which it’s being built. Dawn‘s best trick is in balancing our sympathies in this way. We cast our lot with heroic Caesar (Andy Serkis, in a motion-capture performance that is one of the great silent-movie turns, ever), who’s pushing against a Cheney-manqué in Koba (Toby Kebbell). Caesar gratifies our instinct for the underdog: it’s easier to identify with Adam than with Nero. And then Reeves shifts to a human refuge and populates it with people, specifically Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and Ellie (Keri Russell), working on a peaceful solution against the more bellicose and paranoid of their number (Kirk Acevedo and Gary Oldman). No fair guessing which philosophy wins out–it’s the only one that ever seems to.

Winter’s Tale (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 6, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Mystery, Romance, Will Smith

Winterstale1

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras D+
starring Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Jennifer Connelly, Russell Crowe
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Mark Helprin
directed by Akiva Goldsman

by Walter Chaw Cloud Atlas for the early buffet crowd, Akiva Goldsman’s unsurprisingly dreadful Winter’s Tale hits every single number in the legendary shipwreck lotto, vacillating wildly between unwatchable dreck and oddly-compelling unwatchable dreck. That it’s badly-written is no shocker, given that it’s Goldsman; the treat this time is that the awful script is matched by a horrific first-time director (Goldsman, too) whose dream it was to adapt an essentially unadaptable magic-realist novel by Mark Helprin that offers the again not-shocking glad-handing Carlos Castenada philosophy of healing light and Manifest Destiny. Just like Cloud Atlas, it’s killed most any desire I may have held to read the source material (which I’m sure is a pity), but unlike Cloud Atlas it resists employing yellowface to make its point. That’s an improvement. Not an improvement is casting Will Smith as a monologue-delivering Lucifer–yes, that Lucifer; Eva Marie Saint as a 110-year-old woman; and young Jessica Brown Findlay, a casualty of “Downton Abbey”, who boasts the sucking void of the vacuous and the genuinely uncharismatic. To be fair, she doesn’t get a lot to work with.

Assassins/Cobra/The Specialist [Triple Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

June 30, 20141980s, 1990s, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Stallone, Thriller

Cobra1

COBRA (1986)
*/**** Image C+ Sound C Extras D
starring Sylvester Stallone, Brigitte Nielsen, Reni Santoni, Andrew Robinson
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel Fair Game by Paula Gosling
directed by George P. Cosmatos

THE SPECIALIST (1994)
*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, James Woods, Eric Roberts
screenplay by Alexandra Seros
directed by Luis Llosa

ASSASSINS (1995)
*½/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, Julianne Moore, Anatoly Davydov
screenplay by Andy Wachowski & Larry Wachowski and Brian Helgeland
directed by Richard Donner

by Walter Chaw As easy as it is to dismiss Sylvester Stallone as your everyday, run-of-the-mill swinging dick, another in the pantheon of Eighties-into-Nineties box-office meatsticks assembled anew by Sly in his Expendables franchise, it becomes clear in retrospect that Stallone has his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist in his most personal projects, if not always in his contract jobs. Although an obvious and atrocious failure whose Stallone-authored screenplay, the end-product of a series of rewrites Stallone took it upon himself to inflict on Beverly Hills Cop, Cobra manages still to deliver a few smart genre mash-up moments, a few topical reflections of late-’80s crime-wave paranoia. Sandwiched in there right between his second and third Rambo films and fourth and fifth Rockys, Cobra is the kind of vanity piece that appears now and again in Stallone’s repertoire to distract attention away from all the other stuff that only looks like a vanity project. Stallone is sneaky in a very particular way. As a sociologist, intentional or not, he is absolutely brilliant, and just on the strength of his Rocky and Rambo pictures, he’s managed as good a diary of the fears and hopes of the last twenty years as any other body of work from any other single artist. He’s the Bruce Springsteen of popular cinema. Bruce produced a lot of crap, too.

Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

June 26, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Michael Bay, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Nicola Peltz, robutts
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw Early on in Transformers: Age of Extinction (hereafter Trans4), director Michael Bay seems to be equating the unjust hunt for our noble robot allies the Autobots with the Tea Party’s persecution of immigrants, and then it goes to shit. It’s a meaningless, impossible-to-follow trainwreck in the patented Michael Bay style that, also in the Michael Bay style, is deeply hateful of women and difference. What’s new this time out is that the central object of violation for our lascivious appreciation is 17-year-old Tessa (19-year-old Nicola Peltz), who, upon introduction, is leered at by an assortment of older gentlemen before Bay whips out a (no-kidding) legal justification for our statutory interest. It reminds of the Tony Danza vehicle She’s Out of Control not only in that its father figure, Cade YEAGER-because-it’s-America-fuck-yeah (Mark Wahlberg), is over-interested in his daughter’s budding sexuality, but also in that Trans4 is awful. Awful in its misogyny, sure, and awful because, in what has become a tradition in Bay’s Transformers franchise, the only African-American character is comic relief…and a slave. Never mind. Oh, and it hates the infirm and misses no opportunity to mock their infirmity. Again, never mind.

Non-Stop (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 12, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

Nonstop1

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Scoot McNairy, Anson Mount
screenplay by John W. Richardson & Chris Roach and Ryan Engle
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Furthering the all-signs-point-to-yes idea that the greatest threat to national security is an ill-informed white guy with a grudge of some kind, Jaume Collet-Serra’s execrable Non-Stop is the latest stop on the Liam Neeson winsome-badass tour. In this one, he plays alcoholic air marshal Bill Marks, grieving the death of his daughter and about to get one last chance to make right with the universe. At this point, it’s fair to ask if Neeson is exploiting the tragic loss of wife Natasha Richardson for added gravitas in shit like this or genuinely drawn to these roles from an insensate expression of pain. Whatever the case, as this is not much different in feel and quality from his soon-to-be-completed Taken trilogy, it might be time for him to find a different agent. Lucky for Bill, sharing the fateful flight essayed in the film is an adorable moppet he can pretend is a version of his daughter and save from death, as well as a middle-aged but exactly-attractive-enough woman, Jen (Julianne Moore), he can pretend is the mother of his dead kid and quasi fall in love with. It’s all so gratifyingly tidy.

22 Jump Street (2014)

June 11, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Peter Stormare, Ice Cube
screenplay by Michael Bacall and Oren Uziel and Rodney Rothman
directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

by Walter Chaw The smart parts are unbelievably stupid and the stupid parts are unendurable, making 22 Jump Street, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s follow-up to their well-regarded The Lego Movie, one of those things like Shrek that should do pretty well. Itself a sequel to a reboot of a cult television show about twenty-something cops pretending to be teenagers, the film finds buddy-cop heroes Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) going undercover in college, the better to bust some drug dealer. They have a tough-talking superior in Capt. Dickson (Ice Cube), who, this time out, gets a glass office someone refers to as a “cube of ice.” Get it? There’s much acknowledgment that sequels are often terrible, inflated things deficient in new ideas and reliant on amplification, and it’s delivered with this exhausted, arch air. At least that’s how I read it. I didn’t even crack a smile.