Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve (2013) + The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013)

September 26, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Theatrical


Trialsofali

MONEY FOR NOTHING: INSIDE THE FEDERAL RESERVE
**½/****
directed by Jim Bruce

THE TRIALS OF MUHAMMAD ALI
***/****
directed by Bill Siegel

by Walter Chaw It's difficult to review Jim
Bruce's incendiary, scholarly Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve (hereafter
Money), because even as I was understanding the role of the Federal
Reserve Bank for the first time in my adult life (how its adjustments of
interest actually drive the economy of not merely this nation, but every industrialized nation in our rapidly-shrinking world), I found myself comparing
the film to one of those informational videos that play on endless loops in
Natural History museums. It's immensely educational…and dry as a soda
cracker. What I find to be problematic about it is the same thing I found
problematic about Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth:
it's not really art, is it? Not to open that can of worms, but for me, as a
personal demarcation, art inspires something like Kierkegaardian fear and
loathing–existential trembling, yes: a mirror held to nature in all the
myriad, alien, surprising, often terrifying forms that nature assumes. What Money
does, and does admirably, is explain what the hell happened to the United
States' financial institutions right around 1998 or so and continuing on into
now–explain what the bailout was and how/why it affects the average
American. Most fascinatingly, it explains how far in estimation the once
god-like Alan Greenspan has fallen in the eyes of those who worshipped
him. But while these are noble achievements, they're not enough.

Day of the Dead (1985) [Divimax] – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

September 25, 2013Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Zombie

Dayofdead1

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Richard Liberty
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Far from the weak sister that critics and fanboys have branded George Romero’s conclusion to his zombie trilogy, Day of the Dead is at once the most hopeful and the most melancholy of the trio while falling short of the stark satirical perfection of the first (Night of the Living Dead) and the bloated satirical imperfections of the perhaps over-celebrated second (Dawn of the Dead). In fact, I find Day to be the equal of Dawn in almost every way and to exceed it in terms of its alacrity–its relative tightness in the development of its ideas about the nature of man unfolding against the backdrop of a rise of a new society. The obvious precursor to the zombie mythos is the Christian faith, with its saviour a zombie installing a new order (covenant) and its key ritual dedicated to a celebration of the eating of the saviour’s flesh and blood: a literal consumption of the Host that incorporates into its rite terms of infection and contagion. In fact, Day of the Dead, of the three, seems the most serious in exploring that spiritual/thaumaturgical connection with the introduction of what is essentially a demigod–an offspring of thought and body in the same way that Christ was meant to be God made flesh in all its weakness–in the form of the much-reviled Bub (Howard Sherman).

Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet Combo Pack

September 23, 2013Posted in2013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy

Jackthegiant

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor
screenplay by Darren Lemke and Christopher McQuarrie and Dan Studney
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw There's an interesting moment early on in
Bryan Singer's Jack the Giant Slayer, but don't get used to it. It's a
cross-cut sequence wherein peasant Jack (Nicholas Hoult) and princess Isabelle
(absolutely adorable Eleanor Tomlinson) reveal they're both products of neglect
and the devastation of a parent lost too young. This unites them in strife
and turmoil (in the way that wasn't properly addressed by the Mako/Raleigh
team-up in Pacific Rim) to (likewise) battle monsters of the theoretical
Id (Oedipus is the first guess, Electra the second), here literal giants
in a cloud-shrouded kingdom, accessed by a priapic growth sprouting in the dead
of night. It's the only time the film identifiably belongs to Bryan Singer, a maker of large films nonetheless invested
in personal, intimate deconstructions. People in my world are neatly divided
between the ones who didn't like Singer's Superman Returns and the ones who are
right. I want to believe that movie is the reason why Stanley Tucci, Ewan
McGregor, and Ian McShane said "yes" to Jack the Giant Slayer, and not because Tucci,
McGregor, and McShane are already just filthy impulses cashing paychecks à la
1980s Michael Caine.

World War Z (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

September 22, 2013Posted in2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disaster Movie, DVD, Horror, Zombie

Wwz1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Max Brooks
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster’s World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks’s cause célèbre novel (think Stephen Ambrose on the zombie apocalypse) that had a production so troubled the real surprise is Terry Gilliam had nothing to do with it, lands as half an idea, handsomely mounted in a really expensive crater. With almost no relationship to the book beyond honouring its concept of a conflagration told in vignettes, it feels almost exactly like James L. Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything, which began life as a musical and ended up, after extensive reshoots and careening budget overages, song-free, yet whole somehow despite the trauma. That sense of a sudden change in direction, in genre, is all over World War Z–something in its almost apologetic reserve, something in its unmistakable indecision. Indeed, it serves as a fitting metaphor for a zombie as a corpse similarly brought to shambling half-life, but frankly, it could’ve been a lot worse. It works for what it is in the same way that Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion works, and with the same limitations, ambivalence, anticlimax, and handsome mounting. If, at the end, its Damon Lindelof-penned solution* (the twelfth-hour salvation of a freight train jumped its tracks) is as stupid as you would expect something Lindelof to pen, at least the journey there is interesting, even occasionally (if only very occasionally) arresting. A shame that Forster hasn’t gotten any better at directing action since Quantum of Solace.

Telluride ’13: FFC Interviews “Under the Skin” Director Jonathan Glazer

September 13, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, Telluride, Telluride 2013

Jglazertitle

On my way up the side of the mountain to the Chuck Jones Theater in the unlit gondola that serves as Telluride’s free public transportation, I watched a small cluster of lights recede beneath me, reminding me that Telluride is a tiny bubble in the middle of nowhere, really. Riding at night, all you hear is the whirr of the gondola’s gears and the whisk of wind whipping through the wires and trees. I was on my way to meet a good friend I only see once every two or three years, if that–she having just arrived after a day of delays and missed connections, me still acclimating to being back in the saddle, actively covering a festival I’d last attended in 2002. It was a hurried reunion: a quick hello, and then we were seated for what was, for me, the one film I felt I could not miss at this festival. Truly, I can’t imagine a better way to have seen Under the Skin for the first time.

Telluride ’13: “On Death Row” – Conversation with James Barnes + Portrait of Robert Fratta

September 12, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Film Festivals, Television, Telluride, Telluride 2013
"On Death Row" Conversation with James Barnes ***/**** directed by Werner Herzog "On Death Row" Portrait of Robert Fratta **/**** directed by Werner Herzog by Walter Chaw Two shot-for-television documentaries, running about 50 minutes apiece, serve as Werner Herzog's epilogue to 2011's Into the Abyss, each profiling a single inmate in the inimitable Herzog style that has evolved over the years into something that doesn't punish its subjects (as it once did) so much as it punishes the audience. Looking back to the way he shot coroner Franc G. Fallico in Grizzly Man, allowing him to twist a few beats…

Telluride ’13: The Invisible Woman

September 10, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013, UK
***/**** directed by Ralph Fiennes by Walter Chaw It opens with an almost literal invocation to the muse, segues into a stage play like the prologue to Olivier's Henry V, and bookends itself with a stage production that, again almost literally, drops the curtain on the proceedings. Ralph Fiennes's The Invisible Woman is every inch the literary production, a classical presentation that avoids the stuffiness that often attends these things, replacing it with intimations of doom in foley and script. Based on Claire Tomalin's book, which tells of the affair between an older Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and 18-year-old actress Nelly Ternan (Felicity…

Telluride ’13: Under the Skin

September 7, 2013Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2013

Undertheskin

****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Krystof Hádek, Jessica Mance
screenplay by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Michel Faber
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw Trouble Every Day and The Man Who Fell to Earth as directed by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing Under the Skin marks his return to feature filmmaking after a nine-year hiatus. The loosest of adaptations, cherry-picking from Michel Faber’s strong novel of the same name, Under the Skin is home to a trio (at least) of indelible images and a style and presentation that function as shunts into a thicket of thorny existential questions; it’s the best film I’ve seen this year and among the best films I’ve ever seen. Stripped to the bone, as capable of viciousness as it is tenderness, it achieves what seems impossible by creating a sense of the mysterium tremens in the body of a human-looking alien. When it works, it’s a stunner worthy of mention in the same breath as Blade Runner, but more significant than its immediate impact is its lingering afterimage. I liked it initially. In the six days since I saw it, scarcely an hour’s gone by that I haven’t thought about it. Under the Skin, not to be flip, burrows exactly there, and nests.

Telluride ’13: Nebraska

September 6, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Road Movie, Telluride, Telluride 2013

Nebraska

***½/****
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It’s easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.

Riddick (2013)

September 5, 2013Posted in2013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Riddick

**½/****
starring Vin Diesel, Jordi Mollà, Matt Nable, Katee Sackhoff
written and directed by David Twohy

by Walter Chaw Maybe it was the anticipation, maybe it’s because it’s too much like the first film, Pitch Black, but David Twohy’s Riddick is merely fine for what it is, lacking the kind of loopy, operatic invention of the franchise’s middle course and contenting itself with being a bug hunt in the James Cameron sense of the word instead of exploring more of this universe. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that, but I wanted to love this movie with all my heart, having declared to everyone’s exhaustion that of all the prestige movies prepping down the pike, this was the one I was waiting for. Turns out, the best science-fiction film of the last quarter of this year is Jonathan Glazer’s unbelievably good Under the Skin–not Gravity and, alas, not Riddick, either. To be fair, of the three, Glazer’s is the only one to deal with science-fiction as existentialism rather than as background and circus. More’s the pity, because Chronicles of Riddick, with its elementals and fringe religions, its funky spiritualism and its sense of fairy-tale hyperbole, is one of the genuinely great cult films of the last decade. If not for an ending to Riddick that promises Twohy’s ready for another swing at the plate if another ball is lobbed at him, I wouldn’t be in a very good mood at all.

Telluride ’13: Gravity

September 4, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2013, Thriller

Gravity

**½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

by Walter Chaw Alfonso Cuarón’s eagerly-anticipated, already-buzzy follow-up to the tremendous Children of Men is Gravity–a title that doesn’t reference the Ray Bradbury story “Kaleidoscope,” to which the film owes at least a little credit (in addition to the premise and theme, Gravity also lifts the character name “Stone”), or any real meat at the heart of the story. It’s not for lack of trying, as Cuarón and son/co-writer Jonás attempt, after the emotional tissue connecting the protags of Children of Men, to graft another lost-child drama onto a larger science-fiction conceit. What results is probably the most venue-dependant release of a year that includes Pacific Rim–if you can see it in IMAX 3D, you ought to: the biggest screen with the best sound. It’s possibly the first film since Avatar that actually works with the extra dimension, despite having been converted in post-production; at times while screening Gravity at the Werner Herzog Theater in Telluride, I felt a bit vertiginous. It’s an effect that no doubt had everything to do with the dual-projection and the custom-designed sound system by Meyers Sound. I talked to several techs from the company running around before the show, tweaking, testing, making sure that organs physically shifted during the presentation. My favourite story of the festival is how Cuarón, from the auditorium, instructed the booth to turn up the audio to just less than twice the “acceptable” volume.

Telluride ’13: 12 Years a Slave

September 4, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

12yearsaslave **½/****
starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano
screenplay by John Ridley, based on the book by Solomon Northrup
directed by Steve McQueen

by Walter Chaw With performances this good, with a director this astonishing, the only thing that could make it less than transcendent, I’m afraid, is source material so well-respected, so revered truth be known, that it limits the places the cast and director might otherwise go. What I’m saying is that the prospect of Steve McQueen making a slave narrative is one to savour, celebrate, induce chills in the hearts of every serious scholar of cinema as experiential philosophy–and the prospect of Steve McQueen adapting Solomon Northrup’s (as related to white lawyer David Wilson) 12 Years a Slave is one to inspire some level of inevitable disappointment. What I expected was to be blown away by Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performances–and I was. What I didn’t expect was to be disturbed by a few instances of manipulation of the document that seem driven by something other than good faith. Why, for instance, would one portray the death of a black conspirator on a slaver ship bound for Louisiana at the hand of a white crewman about to rape a sympathetic figure, when the document reveals this conspirator was taken by smallpox? For the sake of drama? Were the roles reversed, this kind of narrative manipulation would take on a decidedly different hue.

Telluride ’13: Tim’s Vermeer

September 2, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

Timsvermeer

**½/****
directed by Teller

by Walter Chaw Teller, of magician/illusionist/debunking/bullshitting duo Penn & Teller, makes his directorial debut with a documentary that, even at
a fleet 79 minutes, feels a little long. For a while, though, Tim's Vermeer
paints a compelling picture of inventor (fellow illusionist and 3-D designer) Tim Jenison
as he indulges his peculiar obsession with proving that Dutch master Johannes
Vermeer used some kind of camera obscura optical trickery to achieve his
photo-realistic style. The case seems ironclad by the end as Jenison recreates
the entire room depicted in Vermeer's "The Music Room," sets up his
little gizmo-whatsit, then sits down, the consummate non-painter, to produce a
Xerox-accurate replica of Vermeer's masterpiece. Various talking heads
weigh in, day titles depict the passage of time, and by the end it's clear that
the topic isn't so much technology's role in art (there's a proximate reality
problem presented by the film that pushes it near to a place of
science-fiction) as it is Jenison's apparent illness, his meticulousness becoming obsessive and even, at times, frightening, possibly to the point of
self-destruction. For the experiment to work, see, Jenison must be unschooled
in every required discipline of his project: architecture, costume design, construction,
and finally painting. It makes the definitive last image suddenly ambiguous:
how do we measure success, and what price is too steep?

Telluride ’13: The Unknown Known

September 2, 2013Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

Uknownknown

****/****
directed by Errol Morris

by Walter Chaw Errol Morris returns
to The Fog of War form in what could be seen as a complementary piece: a
feature-length conversation with Donald Rumsfeld called, appropriately, The
Unknown Known. It's a phrase that repeats throughout a picture that's scored
in a Philip Glass-ian way by Danny Elfman (who at one point channels Michael
Small's music for The Parallax View) and ends with a rimshot that would
be funnier if it weren't terrifying. Different from The Fog of War and
an apparently repentant Robert McNamara, The Unknown Known's Rumsfeld
comes off as not so much unrepentant as incapable of reasonable
self-reflection. There's a story I like to tell about talking with Capturing
the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki, who revealed to me that at an
initial screening one of the subjects of his documentary, watching herself
speak, muttered, "I didn't say that." Rumsfeld appears to be like
that: he's not lying, he's having some kind of psychotic break. I don't
mean it flippantly, and Morris, whose line of questioning ranges from WMD to the
popular public misconception that Hussein was involved with 9/11, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, allows Rumsfeld to clarify his non-equivocal equivocations.
When Rumsfeld laughs, it's frightening–an alien thing's attempt to simulate a human
emotion. Another highlight: a portion of the Nixon tapes where Tricky Dick
reveals his mistrust of Rumsfeld to Haldeman. The Unknown Known is as fine a film as Morris has
made, all the more timely now that the United States–under new leadership, elected
on a platform of hope and change–is on the eve of another act of war.

Telluride ’13: Tracks

September 2, 2013Posted in2013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013
*/****directed by John Curran by Walter Chaw Kind of like a dustier Eight Below, in which Mia Wasikowska walks four camels and a dog across the Australian Outback in a whimsical death march that I find, at my age (40), amazingly selfish and borderline sociopathic. Tracks is based on the true story of "camel lady" Robyn Davidson, who, in 1977, walked across a huge stretch of Australia because she really hated being around other people. Davidson says, by way of charming voiceover narration, that she didn't want to be a whiny bitch like the rest of her generation, but she replaces…

Telluride ’13: An Introduction or, The Stand

August 31, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

Telluridethestand

by Walter Chaw It's a six-and-a-half hour drive from my
home in Arvada, CO to Telluride on the Western Slope, and there are two ways to get
there. One way is all highway; the other way is all beauty. I took the
second route, and it made all the difference. I've been in a dark, difficult
place for a long time now, or, at least, long enough in the parlance of
near-crippling depression. I was caught in eddies; I had become inert. I had
almost completely stopped writing. Not just essays like this one, but reviews,
too, which I used to be able to pump out with I think alarming speed and ease.
Early on, someone asked my editor how I did it; at times over the last couple months, I wondered if I'd ever write like that again. Things are hard when you're dark.
Getting out of bed was a negotiation–getting out to a screening was a near act
of God. The thought of accidentally eavesdropping other people's thoughts was
agony. The times I did, of course, were good, because the guilt I would have
felt had I gone and not written on the privilege would have been untenable.
Would that the guilt of not writing on home-video releases have the same
lubricative effect.

The Burning (1981) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

August 21, 2013Posted in1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory

Burning1

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Brian Matthews, Leah Ayres, Brian Backer, Lou David
screenplay by Peter Lawrence and Bob Weinstein
directed by Tony Maylam

by Walter Chaw The pleasures of Tony Maylam’s The Burning, such as they are, arise when one engages it in an extra-textual conversation about why at the end of the American ’70s there suddenly bloomed an exploitation slasher subgenre to provide a nihilistic gateway into the Reagan ’80s. Really, when you look at the wonderland of ’80s blockbuster cinema, there is throughout an undercurrent of Friday the 13ths and Elm Street flicks, of course, but also stuff like Slumber Party Massacre, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, Maniac, Camps Cheerleader and Sleepaway, Mother’s Day (which Roger Ebert referred to as a “geek” show–the kind that bit heads off chickens, not the kind that founded Apple)…all the lurid VHS covers that made browsing the neighbourhood rental joint such delicious taboo delight. It’s that thrill that The Burning captures and evokes still–that feeling adolescent boys of a certain age got, pre-Internet, by renting something they shouldn’t rent with the suspicion, nay, promise, it would provoke the same erotic tingle as hardcore porn would in a couple years’ time. It’s a movie very much like Tolkien’s writing: if you don’t discover it in junior high, you’ll never appreciate it the way it was meant to be appreciated again.

Europa Report (2013)

August 13, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Pseudo-Documentary, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Christian Camargo, Anamaria Marinca, Michael Nyqvyst, Sharlto Copley
screenplay by Philip Gelatt
directed by Sebastián Cordero


Europareport

by Walter Chaw Sebastián Cordero's found-footage sci-fi  flick Europa Report tells the tale of the first manned trip to
the titular moon of Jupiter in search of some kind of lifeform lurking there
beneath a thick layer of ice. Never mind that this is a premise Arthur C.
Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two already explored to similar consequence, nor
that Europa Report is essentially an intergalactic The Blair Witch Project: best to focus on an unfortunate framing story that dumbs down the
proceedings, emotionally and intellectually, at the exact moment the picture
appears to be gaining momentum. It's all the more puzzling, given the existence
of something so pandering and condescending, that the group apparently most
enamoured with this movie is the scientific community, who I would
have guessed would have taken more offense at being talked down to. Maybe they're
so beaten into submission by the idiotic things Damon Lindelof passes off as "science"
that they're willing to forgive Europa Report its more minor trespasses.

The Wolverine (2013)

August 8, 2013Posted in2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Will Yun Lee, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tao Okamoto
screenplay by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank
directed by James Mangold

Thewolverine

by Walter Chaw James Mangold's The Wolverine is lovely, unusual, novel enough that the moments it makes concessions to its genre and comic-book origins are the same moments that feel like a shame. It's not that they don't work, exactly–it's that when a brooding character study offset by a few delightful action scenes introduces an adamantium samurai mecha and a Poison Ivy manqué to bring it all home, well…it's that it works too well at being something the film is otherwise not. It's two movies, really: a unique one about women in tension; and a more common one about a grief-stricken man taking on the responsibility of protecting a surrogate. Both are complex. It's a pity that, by dint of license and expectation, The Wolverine had to be a literal superhero movie and not something more covert like The Caveman's Valentine or The Brave One. At the end, the only place to put the blame is the impossibility of funding a picture like this without the license and expectation: no one would invest, it would seem, in an anonymous story about a man's mute, impotent melancholy and the many females around him engaged in the maintenance of their separate, disintegrating orbits.