Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

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

Dawnoftheplanetoftheapes

****/****
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, 2014Posted in2014, 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, 2014Posted in1980s, 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, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Michael Bay, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

Transformers4

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, 2014Posted in2014, 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, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

22jumpstreet

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.

The Double (2014) + Cold in July (2014)

May 29, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Thedouble

THE DOUBLE
**½/****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, James Fox
screenplay by Richard Ayoade & Avi Korine, based on the novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky
directed by Richard Ayoade

COLD IN JULY
***/****
starring Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, Vinessa Shaw, Don Johnson
screenplay by Nick Damici & Jim Mickle, based on the novel by Joe R. Lansdale
directed by Jim Mickle

by Walter Chaw Writer-director Richard Ayoade’s follow-up to his well-received feature debut Submarine, this loose interpretation of Dostoevsky’s The Double plays rather like Kafka adapted by David Lynch, or Terry Gilliam at his most restrained. It’s good. It doesn’t plough new ground, necessarily, but its dedication to a theme and a very fine performance by Jesse Eisenberg as a man and his titular doppelgänger carry it over its rougher patches. Visually engaging with its washed-out, diseased, Cronenbergian/Lars von Trier colour palette and packed with innovative, maybe self-conscious camera flourishes and affectations, it all plays out a bit insular, a little too obvious given the entire history of the double in this kind of movie, but at least it’s executed with a persistence of vision. What catches me up short about Ayoade’s films, though, is that ineffable quality of audition reel. They’re entirely identifiable by the breadth of their references: Submarine for its obvious connection to Harold and Maude (and why do I keep hearing “The Only Living Boy in New York” when it unspools?), now The Double with its portfolio of referents. If it happens to be assembled smartly, more’s the frustration. I can’t tell whether the movie is good because Ayoade’s a gifted filmmaker or simply a great scrap-booker. I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Maleficent (2014)

May 29, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Revenge, Romance, Theatrical

Maleficent

***/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Sharlto Copley, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley
screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Robert Stromberg

by Walter Chaw A gyno-centric reimagining of Disney’s own Sleeping Beauty, visual-effects guy Robert Stromberg’s directorial debut Maleficent (from a script by never-good Disney house-overwriter Linda Woolverton) takes all the ingredients for a horrible disaster and somehow wrestles a fitfully fascinating film from them. It hates men, that much is certain. Paints them as alternately servile and monstrous. Good men follow orders and are easily intimidated; bad men are sexually dangerous and violent. Good men know their place, led about on a tether and bullied into situations by women in groups or singly; and the rest, well…sufficed to say that Sharlto Copley, the most Ellis-from-Die-Hard human, is cast as chief BigBad, the good king Stefan. The film even goes so far as to suggest that romantic, heterosexual love is a sham, a dangerous one at that–something it tries to soften with a couple of doe-eyed exchanges during the epilogue, though I’m not buying it. In fact, had Maleficent truly committed to its themes of feminine empowerment and rage, had it linked them together hand-in-hand without entire agonizing stretches of Disney-fication, it could have entered into the same conversation as Tarantino’s Kill Bills. Here’s another film with a kick-ass female protagonist who finds strength in motherhood. Alas, for as often as it’s great, it’s limited by what its masters will allow.

Beneath (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

May 26, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Beneath1

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Daniel Zovatto, Bonnie Dennison, Chris Conroy, Mark Margolis
screenplay by Tony Daniel & Brian D. Smith
directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw Between producing films for promising newcomers (Ti West and Jim Mickle among them), acting in movies like You’re Next, and of course directing his own quartet of exceptional, loaded fright flicks (Habit, No Telling, Wendigo, The Last Winter), Larry Fessenden, quietly, surely, has become perhaps the most important independent voice in horror. He seems interested in the sociology of the genre, in how it’s very much the “indicator species” in the cinematic swamp–how it, more than any other genre, has the potential to pull back the curtain. It’s not just the affection for genre–and deconstruction is never the end goal–but also the understanding and reworking of the basic tenets of genre that distinguishes Fessenden’s work from disrespectful “post-modern” bullshit like Cabin in the Woods. It never feels as though he’s slumming (as it did when Coppola and Branagh dabbled in horror); his subtext remains subtext, his perspective is always the victim’s rather than the bully’s. His own take on the Spam-in-a-cabin/monster-in-the-lake concept, Beneath, showcases that intelligence, even as its energy–particularly when held against his last four films–flags through most of a soft introduction. But what it loses there it makes up for in spades in a piece that ultimately feels a great deal in mood and tone like Stephen King’s short story “The Raft.” For a child of the Eighties who devoured King’s Skeleton Crew upon publication, there can be no higher praise.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

May 22, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Time Travel

Xmen7

***½/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James McAvoy
screenplay by Simon Kinberg
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw The seventh X-Men film including the two Wolverine flicks, Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days of Future Past (hereafter X7) is a sterling return to form for Singer, exiled after X2 for choosing to helm the spectacularly-underestimated Superman Returns. He brings with him, as he brought to the Superman mythology, a complete empathy with the material. He understands that the X-Men property–comic-book mutants battling human bureaucrats aiming to outlaw them as alien threats–is, just like the Superman property, at its heart about the pain and complexity of being born different. They're assimilation melodramas that present their heroes with the seductive choice to pass as "normals" when possible, to seek vengeance against bigotry as it presents itself, or to rise above it to achieve a sense of self and carve out a corner of the world for themselves.

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) – Blu-ray Disc

May 21, 2014Posted in1970s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Werner Herzog, France, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

Vlcsnap-2014-05-21-21h07m15s10

Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B Extras A
BD – Image D+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz, Roland Topor
screenplay by Werner Herzog
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Nosferatu, the Vampyre isn’t scary so much as it’s just delightful; it’s not topical so much as it’s an extremely competent, sometimes inspired tribute to F. W. Murnau and his classic 1922 Nosferatu. Werner Herzog’s hand at the rudder is steady and Klaus Kinski’s performance as Count Dracula is definitive, but the picture is an exercise in style generally lacking in the New German auteur’s main throughlines, i.e., representation, class, and the vagaries of the creative process. What does survive relatively intact is Herzog’s nascent surrealism, which flowers during the picture’s endlessly disturbing tableaux of plague victims celebrating the last of life with rat-infested banquets and danses macabre. One could extend a little and support that the film’s scenes of apocalypse and pestilence hint at a loathing of immigrants and the perception of cultural corruption, but there’s a damning ornamental emptiness at the centre of Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (henceforth Nosferatu) that places it forever out of time–without a father, as it were. The film’s reason for being (it’s a shrine to Herzog’s favourite German director) is also the end of the conversation.

Amistad (1997) – Blu-ray Disc

May 20, 2014Posted in1990s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Spielberg

Amistad1

*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
starring Morgan Freeman, Nigel Hawthorne, Anthony Hopkins, Djimon Hounsou
screenplay by David Franzoni
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Mid-career, Sergei Eisenstein wrote a book-length study of film form. He did it with humour and a Coleridge-ian wistfulness. He writes that, once he’s finished with this book, he’ll try some of the things he’s talking about in it. Among them is an idea that, what if instead of using montage (which he calls “vulgar”), someone were to evoke the idea of “murder” just by showing ten sequences, not otherwise linked by linear exposition, that separately evoke murder? In more ways than this, but in this particular way, Steven Spielberg is the prodigal. He evoked “war” in twenty impossibly harrowing minutes to open Saving Private Ryan; he evoked “Holocaust” in a similar stretch in the middle of Schindler’s List; he evokes “slavery” in an absolutely tremendous, wordless chunk about halfway through Amistad; and he sandwiches all of it in patronizing, ham-handed treacle, massively, criminally over-scored by chief enabler/collaborator John Williams.

Godzilla (2014)

May 14, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Godzilla2014

***½/****
starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston
screenplay by Max Borenstein
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw Gareth Edwards's Godzilla, the 32nd Godzilla film just including the Toho series and the three previous American contributions, manages somehow to walk the line between nostalgia for the guy-in-a-suit heroism of the earlier installments and the demands and expectations of the modern CGI wonderland. It has Japanese actor Ken Watanabe be the mournful, grave centre of the piece, allowed at one point to utter "Gojira" (later, on a radar, we see it spelled out in obeisance to the movie's origins) and given the film's most crowd-pleasing line, right before shit gets real in San Francisco. It cares deeply about the monster's place in Japanese culture as a simultaneous reminder of what happened to the country during the war, its humiliation afterwards, and its ambiguous place in the world as Japan reconstructed its image. What confused me most when I watched the Toho flicks on Saturday afternoons on a 9" b&w television was that Godzilla seemed heroic–every bit as nuanced, as conflicted, as ronin as a Mifune samurai; a hero who would return, like Arthur did for England, when the nation needed him. The Godzilla legend is a fable of reconstruction and self-sufficiency–a Leda and the Swan story, where power is drawn from the very source of victimization. He's a complex national symbol, perhaps the definitive cross-cultural Japanese signifier, and the movies that get that (my favorite is Destroy All Monsters, with its dabbling in female hive minds) are brilliant bits of sociology and history. Edwards's Godzilla gets it.

God’s Pocket (2014)

May 13, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

Godspocket

**/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Richard Jenkins, Christina Hendricks, John Turturro
screenplay by John Slattery & Alex Metcalf, based on the novel by Pete Dexter
directed by John Slattery

by Walter Chaw A few things become clear as John Slattery’s God’s Pocket unspools unsteadily in the titular, fictional Philadelphia slum: that it’s perhaps as difficult to adapt Pete Dexter as it is Ray Bradbury, for many surprisingly similar reasons (like him, Dexter’s power is in the rhythm and economy of his prose and the poetry of his characters’ interior lives); that Philip Seymour Hoffman is irreplaceable and doomed to be remembered for too rarely finding roles worthy of him; and that young Caleb Landry Jones is consistently an astonishment and someone to follow. Indeed, the cast is mostly above reproach; the problems are all in the scripting and directorial decisions by first-timer Slattery that betray a certain indecisiveness in pruning repetitive sequences. It’s not a matter of too much patience, but of too little interpretation. As is, it lands somewhere between the voices of Armistead Maupin and Michael Chabon, neither of whom are nearly as dangerous as Dexter, causing one to wonder if God’s Pocket wants to be widely loved rather than admired at arm’s length. It shouldn’t be cuddly or adorable (and it isn’t)–but it tries. What’s left is another exceptional Hoffman turn wrapped in layers of undifferentiated bland. Maybe it seems that way so often because Hoffman was so difficult to match.

Her (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 12, 2014Posted in****/****, 2013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi

Her1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Scarlett Johansson
written and directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw Two moments early on in Spike Jonze’s Her. The first when our hero, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), initiates his new operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and is asked to characterize his relationship with his mother; the second when, in flashback, Theodore and his ex, Catherine (Rooney Mara), pretend to choke each other. They’re waypoints Jonze establishes for his piece: in one direction, there’s Blade Runner and its questions of proximate humanity; in the other, there’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and its mad love. Jonze establishes, too, that this will be a work of science-fiction owing its parentage to the best sources, that its premise will be fantastic but grounded in characters and their place in the world. Of all the compliments I can think to pay this film, the best is that Her is at least the equal of its waypoints. More, when its solution recalls the metaphysical coda to the great The Incredible Shrinking Man, it’s the equal of that as well.

The Terminal (2004) – Blu-ray Disc

May 6, 2014Posted in2000s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Spielberg

Terminal1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Chi McBride
screenplay by Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Early in the latest Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks collaboration The Terminal, Russian splinter exile Viktor Navorski (Hanks) runs up a staircase, throwing his suitcase onto the “up” escalator as he goes so that his baggage, in essence, is left to finish its journey on its own. It’s a lovely, complicated visual metaphor for abandonment or freedom, for Spielberg the scenarist’s twin obsessions with the idea of little boys lost and of little boys escaping and for Spielberg the director’s inability to take responsibility for his subtext so that he might finally make that mature film he’s so desperately wanted to since The Color Purple. But The Terminal is film-festival offensive, encouraging its audience to coo over the adorable antics of its madcap cast of society’s blue-collar “invisibles” (playing in this respect like the slick, imminently forgettable version of Stephen Frears’s working class morality play Dirty Pretty Things) in a way that isn’t sympathetic so much as paternalistic. Foreigners and minorities are resourceful children, operating eternally at the mercy of the dominant majority, and Neverland is the big cities of the United States, where grown-ups have families and problems.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

April 30, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

Amazingspiderman2

***/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Sally Field
screenplay by Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci & Jeff Pinkner
directed by Marc Webb

by Walter Chaw A notable improvement in almost every way on Marc Webb’s first film in this reboot series, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (hereafter Spidey 2) sports the same weaknesses, the same bloat, the same catering to the summer cult of boom-boom, but it ramps up the intelligence and a certain comfort with darkness that pays off in a pair of genuinely gratifying character resolutions. Despite what the trailers would spoil, it really only has one antagonist, Jamie Foxx’s Electro–well, him, and our hero’s (Andrew Garfield) struggles with trust in his relationships, whether they be with his Aunt May (Sally Field) or girlfriend Gwen (Emma Stone) or best friend Harry (Dane DeHaan) or lost father Richard (Campbell Scott). It’s a film about class struggle, as May picks up double-shifts and moonlights in nursing school to provide tuition for her adopted boy (giving Sally Field the chance to resurrect her blue-collar Norma Rae), while shut-in Max (Foxx), electrical engineer at monolithic Oscorp and low man on the corporate totem pole, comes clear, fascinatingly, as a riff on the unnamed protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Darkman (1990) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

April 22, 2014Posted in1990s, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Sam Raimi, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Darkman1

***½/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras A
starring Liam Neeson, Frances McDormand, Colin Friels, Larry Drake
screenplay by Chuck Pfarrer and Sam Raimi & Ivan Raimi and Dan Goldin & Joshua Goldin
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II is among the best American films of the 1980s. It’s audacious and ingenious, the kind of movie people describe as having been made by the seat of one’s pants–the kind of movie that’s doomed to be underestimated because its genre is disreputable and its sensibilities are too cartoonish. Indeed, the energy in Raimi’s early, best work is akin to Tex Avery and Three Stooges, but he controls it, wields it; the anti-David O. Russell. Only in Crimewave does he overuse that muscle. In Evil Dead II, the humour is low, there is absolutely no shame, and in a real way, the picture encapsulates what was delirious and sloppy about ’80s blockbuster cinema. It’s a thing of beauty, exaggerated pathos, and Wagnerian derring-do. Raimi followed it in 1990 with what’s essentially a rebuttal to Tim Burton’s Batman, the “biggest movie of the moment” from the year before. Batman was the first salvo in a barrage of prestige “pulp” entertainments that presented the Comic Book as “A” material; Raimi drags it back into “B,” at least for a little while. His movies are EC and off-Code and Bernie Wrightson and Jack Davis and Al Williamson, while Burton’s are German Expressionism and sad, sometimes inscrutably solipsistic tales of Oyster Boys. Raimi, in 1990, made the best comic-book movie there ever was, a title only challenged by Raimi’s own Spider-Man 2: Darkman.

Hateship Loveship (2014)

April 17, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

Hateshiploveship

*½/****
starring Kristen Wiig, Guy Pearce, Hailee Steinfeld, Nick Nolte
screenplay by Mark Poirier, based on the short story by Alice Munro
directed by Liza Johnson

by Walter Chaw A knuckle-biting bounty of casting riches, Liza Johnson’s twee, somewhat over-directed, generally overdone Hateship Loveship features dozens of lovely actorly moments that add up to not a whole lot, although the movie tries. Boy, does it try. In its put-on listlessness, it wants to belong to the Matthew Porterfield/Nathan Silver school of contemplative indie flicks, but it’s not quiet enough nor patient enough in withholding its epiphanies and emotional rises and falls. It tends to narrate; it wants to tie up loose ends; and it’s not comfortable with entropy as much as it wants to be, what with its central character odd, awkward caregiver Johanna (Kristin Wiig) and its central setting a broken-down hotel, uninhabited but burdened with poor junkie Ken’s (Guy Pearce) dreams of restoration. It’s a big, clumsy metaphor for Ken trying to rebuild his life after killing his wife, McCauley’s (Nick Nolte) daughter and Sabitha’s (Hailee Steinfeld–thank God she’s getting work) mom, in a tragic speedboat accident. It all kind of sounds like a Wes Anderson sub-story. Anyway, Sabitha and her queen bitch bestie Edith (Sami Gayle) pen fake love letters from Ken to erstwhile nanny Johanna, leading to not the painful story we want, but a different painful story involving why you shouldn’t sway your camera back and forth when shooting dialogue exchanges and how poignant zooms don’t substitute for genuine feeling.

Ernest & Celestine (2012) + Jodorowsky’s Dune (2014)

April 10, 2014Posted in2012, 2014, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Family, France, Luxembourg, Theatrical

Ernest et Célestine
**½/****
screenplay by Daniel Pennac, based on books by Gabrielle Vincent
directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner

JODOROWSKY’S DUNE
**½/****
directed by Frank Pavich

by Walter Chaw Broad, earnest, unassuming animation from France, Ernest & Celestine is the tale of a little girl mouse, Celestine (voice of Pauline Brunner), and gruff bear Ernest (Lambert Wilson), who overcome their cultural prejudices to become fast friends. Celestine is outcast because she’d like to be an artist instead of a dentist; Ernest is outcast because he’s a busker struggling to eke out a subsistence living. Over a series of misadventures, the two end up doing the Badlands in Ernest’s ramshackle hideaway, awaiting their fate and trying to enjoy their borrowed time. It’s all leading to a grim ending, but it’s not that kind of movie.