Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 53 of 146

To Have and Have Not (1944) + The Big Sleep (1945/6) – DVDs

July 8, 2013****/****, 1940s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
****/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Dolores Moran
screenplay by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Howard Hawks

THE BIG SLEEP
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone
screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett & Jules Furthman, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler
directed by Howard Hawks

by Walter Chaw While biographer Todd McCarthy refers to the two versions of Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep as marking the delineation point separating linear (early) Hawks from non-linear (later) Hawks, I feel like you can mark the director’s affection for bonzo non-sequiturs throughout his sultry To Have and Have Not. The picture tells its tale of immigrants marooned off the islets of war and sexual sophistication–an island bell jar and pressure cooker envisioned as a sequel of sorts to Casablanca. But where Casablanca‘s sex was mature and companionate (the sizzle replaced by simmer) and tinged with regret, To Have and Have Not has a slick of bestial sweat to it that promises that the explosion of really naughty stuff is looming rather than in the rear-view. (There’s no sexier film in all the Forties.) The story of the corrupt Vichy government and the brave French underground unfolding behind the red-hot flirtation between diplomatically non-affiliated fishing boat captain Harry “Steve” Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) and lost American teen “Slim” (Lauren Bacall) is punctuated helter-skelter by husky lounge numbers courtesy Slim and Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael) and riff sessions with Steve and Slim that have the cadence and unpredictability of jazz improvisation. It’s not so much a narrative as a medley in a bouncy key, and Hawks is not so much a director as a bandleader. Much has been made of Hawks’s skill in casting (and it’s hard to argue otherwise when he sniffs out the alchemical enchantment between old man Bogie and new thing Bacall (and Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell; and Dean Martin and a bottle)), but looking at To Have and Have Not–the first of Bogie/Bacall’s four collaborations–is to glimpse something more than a good casting eye: it’s to witness the evolution of a true musical genius. The rhythms are subterranean, the verses in between the words; to watch this and The Big Sleep (Hawks’s other collaboration with Bogie/Bacall) back-to-back is as close to rapture as this experience gets.

Swimming to Cambodia (1987) – DVD

July 7, 2013****/****, 1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Concert Doc, Directors: Jonathan Demme, DVD, Scream/Shout! Factory

****/**** Image C Sound C Extras B
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw I learned about memoir as art watching Spalding Gray in Jonathan Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia. Although I was a freshman in college when I first saw it, I’m not sure that I ever really knew what “memoir” was before, and, since, I’ve been hard pressed to find any examples that measure up to the bar it sets. Swimming to Cambodia also provides an impossible standard for direction, as Demme takes Gray’s “monolog” format (essentially him, alone, on a stage) and turns it into something like an expressionistic piece, something that is at once inside Gray’s mind and inside yours using thoughtful editing choices and clever sound and lighting design. In a year that saw the release of Predator, Full Metal Jacket, The Untouchables, Empire of the Sun, Raising Arizona, Near Dark, A Better Tomorrow II, Angel Heart, Evil Dead II, and RoboCop, it’s a little astonishing to realize the best-directed film is this one with a guy sitting at a table. For what it’s worth, as I was writing my own memoir of a very particular moment in my life, the only readership I really imagined for it consisted of my father and Gray–Gray, who killed himself over water in 2004, and my father, who died a year before that. If the one was the reason, the other was the way.

Byzantium (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Ireland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire

****/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley, Caleb Landry Jones
screenplay by Moira Buffini, based on her play
directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw What is it about the Irish character, that particular quality of melancholy fatalism, that seems to inform the great works of native sons Beckett, Joyce, and maybe Yeats in particular? I like G.K. Chesterton’s description of Ireland as a place of “men that God made mad,/For all their wars are merry,/And all their songs are sad.” It infects the folklore, the story of the crags and the heather, the looming, low skies pregnant with what Michael Almereyda’s criminally underestimated (and long forgotten) The Eternal fashioned into a creation story involving unimaginable losses and the sweet, bitter tears they inspire. To that film, add John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish, Neal Jordan’s Ondine, and now Jordan’s rapturous Byzantium: a quartet of supernaturally-tinged pictures that together form a lush polyptych that captures the very sensation of walking through Dublin in the rain, or along the shores of Galway, or through the pages of Ulysses in the company of Leo and Nora. As for Byzantium, it’s beautiful, and sad, and has an eternity to it that’s reflected in its tale of a “soucriant,” a succubus of sorts with a Dominican history and favoured by Jean Rhys in novels that were themselves attempts to come to terms with the tragedies of her life as an outsider. Jordan, well-read and never shy about expressing that literariness in his pictures, is producing in his later work the very evocation of a city from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (a book he once told me he admires): Ersilia, an abandoned city built not of walls, but of strings the lost inhabitants used to mark connections with one another. Jordan weaves an intricate web with Byzantium, a film that, before even attacking the tensions within, provides tensions without in its title, most likely taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which is itself about tensions between the “artifice of eternity” and the temporariness of youth. Turns out, the film is about that, too.

The Lone Ranger (2013)

July 1, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Superhero, Theatrical, Western

***/****
starring Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Tom Wilkinson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Justin Haythe and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw What Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger has going for it, in addition to a genuinely ugly streak of nihilism and a surprisingly high body count, is that it doesn’t seek to “darken” its titular boy-scout hero so much as offer that his brand of do-gooderism seems naïve and ineffectual in the modern conversation. It’s the same tactic taken by Arthur Penn’s own picaresque western Little Big Man, the film it most resembles right down to the framing story: an aged narrator relating his sometimes fanciful tale to a modern chronicler, used to amusing effect when the plot gets out of hand, Princess Bride-style. It’s like a lot of movies, I guess (including two Simon Wincer westerns, Quigley Down Under and Lightning Jack), which doesn’t mean it’s derivative so much as it means that it plays like any number of satires of the kind of innocence that made the Lone Ranger character a favourite of impressionable young Americans for generations. It’s more the anachronism of The Brady Bunch Movie than the update of Man of Steel, in other words–and the better for it, even if its ultimate message appears to be that the crimson tide has overtaken us, once and for all, and there’s no real room left in the world for the idealism represented by a hero with a list of creeds, the first of which is that to have friends one must first be a friend.

The Producers (1968) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray and DVD Combo Pack

June 30, 20131960s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Music, Satire, Scream/Shout! Factory

Producers2

Mel Brooks’ The Producers
*½/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, Kenneth Mars
written and directed by Mel Brooks

by Walter Chaw A seminal year for film, 1968: Once Upon a Time in the West, Rosemary’s Baby, Planet of the Apes, Night of the Living Dead, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barbarella, If…, Targets, Faces, Danger: Diabolik…and, some would say, Mel Brooks’s The Producers, a film back in the limelight thanks to the record-breaking, award-winning Broadway play on which it’s based now coming out as an extraordinarily ill-advised feature film of its own. Unlike Brooks’s other classics (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, even High Anxiety), The Producers has aged pretty poorly. It’s played broad, which is to say that everyone acts like they’re being defibrillated every five minutes, leading to a lot of high-decibel screeching and running around in circles. And I don’t really understand what the film is about: Is it an attack on the theatre, or is it an attack on Nazis? If it’s neither, if it’s instead some kind of vaudevillian farce about the last days of Jewish entertainment hegemony, then perhaps that’s as good an explanation as any for why its prehistoric rimshots, timing, and attitudes strike me as puzzling. Maybe it’s a satire of being a Jewish comic.

World War Z (2013)

June 20, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Zombie

**/****
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.

Man of Steel (2013)

June 13, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Russell Crowe
screenplay by David S. Goyer
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is 44 beautifully constructed trailers strung together in the world’s most expensive promo reel; at this point in his career, it’s fair to wonder who it is Snyder’s still trying to impress. Shapeless, structure-less, the movie aspires towards nostalgic, grandiloquent, patriotic pastiche but succeeds only in being disjointed, muted, and frustrating. Take the casting of Kevin Costner as Superman’s terrestrial dad, Jonathan Kent. Perfect, right? But he’s reduced to a fantastic scene where he reveals his adopted son’s alien origin that is fantastic solely because Costner is not only magnificent when he’s allowed to be in his wheelhouse (baseball player, cowboy, farmer), but also because there’s a certain weight in the wrinkles on Costner’s face and the grey at his temples. He’s the embodiment of a specific brand of nostalgia all by himself, and the potential for him to be the spiritual centre of a soulless film isn’t merely squandered, it’s aggressively squandered. The Superman mythos at its best is about fathers and sons–the hero (Henry Cavill, playing Supes as Wolverine) has, after all, lost two fathers, orphaned twice in a strange land and compared visually and thematically to Christ in every incarnation. (“The last son of Krypton,” n’est-ce pas?) It’s a powerful theme, one that explains the enduring popularity of the character when wags have correctly identified that there are no real, viable external threats to someone who’s essentially all-powerful. The Jesus story is meaningless if Jesus never thought of Himself as merely a man carrying a terrible burden. Consider the elevation of Watchmen‘s Dr. Manhattan to inscrutable WMD, or The Incredibles‘ Mr. Incredible’s near-ruin in the role of family man. No, Superman’s weakness is existential. I fear that Snyder–a director who seems to abhor difference and adore surfaces in his pictures–is exactly the wrong person to explore the irony of an immaculate conception tortured in the role of outsider.

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 10, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Sam Raimi, Disney, Fantasy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams
screenplay by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Based on L. Frank Baum’s little-known Pussyhound of Oz, Sam Raimi’s career nadir Oz the Great and Powerful (hereafter O-Gap) answers the question of who you would ask to anchor your $300M+ tentpole extravaganza: yes, James Franco, who’s now claimed the mantle of the worst actor in the United States from the quiescent Paul Walker. Franco is an avatar of the picture’s bad decisions, from the Zach Braff-voiced CGI monkey sidekick to the sassy CGI Hummel figurine to the tragic miscasting of Mila Kunis as Theodora, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West. Yes indeedy, fans of the MGM original, of Baum’s wondrous series of books, and of the shit-show “Wicked” will all hate it equally–almost as much as neophytes to the whole damned mess who will come for what Raimi’s proudly proclaimed “the ultimate Disney movie” and leave with a mouthful of exactly as promised. It’s blindingly obnoxious, tasteless in a meaningless way, and occasionally makes reference to Army of Darkness just because, I suspect, Raimi’s last-resort defensive posture is to fall back on what he knows. But it’s not nearly enough to save him here. The argument with weight is that the more expensive a movie becomes, the less likely it’s going to be good; the first clue that Raimi is creatively bankrupt is that while his buddy Bruce Campbell appears in this film, Campbell isn’t the star.

Cabaret (1972) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

June 3, 2013****/****, 1970s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Music, Musical, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Marisa Berenson, Joel Grey
screenplay Jay Allen, based on the play by John Van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood
directed by Bob Fosse

by Walter Chaw Bob Fosse’s Cabaret is an astonishment. It’s a milestone for musical adaptations, a scabrous mission statement early on for the best period in American film (in film anywhere, really), and, taken with her turn in The Sterile Cuckoo (and arguably as Lucille 2 on “Arrested Development”), everything you need to know about Liza Minnelli as a very down, very particular American icon. Daughter of one Judy Garland, whose 1969 death from an abuse of drugs and alcohol was no longer considered spectacular in the shadow of poor, martyred Marilyn Monroe, she represents the broken legacy of Old Hollywood. Ray Bolger said at Garland’s funeral that she had just worn out. Poignant. Poignant especially because it happens the same year her daughter has a breakdown from a broken heart in The Sterile Cuckoo, and just three years before Minnelli’s Sally Bowles composes herself a split second before the curtains part and she, snap, justlikethat, puts on a happy face for a Weimar audience fiddling as the Republic burns. As endings go, it’s as horrifying as the editing error at the close of John Frankenheimer’s 1966 Seconds–the film that, for my money, is the real beginning of the New American Cinema, appearing less than a year before the “official” starting gun of Bonnie & Clyde. Cabaret is a quintessential ’70s picture, a devastating experience and an exhilarating one, too.

Sansho the Bailiff (1954) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 29, 2013****/****, 1950s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Japan, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
starring Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa, Masao Shimizu
screenplay by Fuji Yahiro, Yoshikata Yoda
directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

by Walter Chaw A little late to the party, I know, but Kenji Mizoguchi’s magisterial jidaigeki Sansho the Bailiff is the source material for Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Both are initiated by the filmmakers as fairytales, mythologies; and both are initiated within the text by a specific fatal flaw in parental figures. In Sansho, it’s hubris when the father, a principled public servant, stands up under an unjust edict and is exiled, leaving his family in peril. In Spirited Away, the parents engage in an endless banquet, indulging their gluttony until they’re transformed into literal swine despite the protests of their child. Both films are withering indictments of the cultures that produced them, and each is opened to a greater depth of interpretation by an appreciation of the other. Coming here from the Miyazaki, it’s fruitful to consider why it is the Mizoguchi is named after the villain, the cruel slave-owner who tortures the film’s heroes, while the Miyazaki is named for the innocents (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) and the loaded act/word “Kamikakushi,” which once referred to abduction by angry gods but has a contemporary implication of sex trafficking. Arguably, Mizoguchi sets up this read of the later text in his own canon, with many of his films addressing the problem of sexual exploitation among the lower class in Japanese history–a problem that persisted through the war years and, some would say, beyond. With its naming, it’s possible to infer that the source for the ills in Sansho the Bailiff is too strong a hold on the traditions of an antiquated past; in Spirited Away, it’s the frittering away of the future by a generation too solipsistic, too blinkered by its own sense of entitlement, to save itself from obsolescence. See the two films as bookends of a particularly Japanese introspection, equal parts humility and nihilism. (As one of the characters in Sansho the Bailiff sings, “Isn’t life a torture?”) And in the contemplation of the Mizoguchi, find also an undercurrent of warning–and doom–in the Miyazaki.

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

May 21, 20131990s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Brian De Palma, Drama, Satire

*/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Michael Cristofer, based on the novel by Tom Wolfe
directed by Brian De Palma

by Walter Chaw Based on Tom Wolfe’s instantly-legendary (and instantly dated, truth be known) novel about the upper crust of Manhattan society in the ’80s, Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities is a disaster mitigated now and again by the odd extraordinary shot–exhibit A in what happens when too much money is spent in the creation of too sure a thing. The production was besieged by distraction and calamity, all of it captured in Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy in what, after watching the movie again for the first time since its release, seems too measured a hatchet job. After all, Salamon’s book is really just proof of what’s evidenced on screen and observed by contemporary audiences: Decisions were made to pander to the lowest common denominator, and say what you will about the lowest common denominator, but it often knows when it’s being condescended to. More, it confirms that Bruce Willis was outmatched by the demands of the material; that Tom Hanks was disengaged; that Melanie Griffith was badly miscast; and that Morgan Freeman was inserted as a sop to an African-American community that not only would have to endure multiple comic-effect uses of the word “nigger” during the course of the film, but would likely never go see it in the first place. The great irony of pandering to the lowest common denominator in an adaptation of an arch Tom Wolfe novel, is…well, you finish it. Frankly, when you can’t get Peter Travers to like it, you’re in seriously deep shit.

The Last Stand (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

May 20, 20132013, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Schwarzenegger, South Korea, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Forest Whitaker, Johnny Knoxville, Rodrigo Santoro
screenplay by Andrew Knauer
directed by Kim Jee-woon

by Walter Chaw I think, and I don’t say this lightly, that South Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-woon is a genius. His landmark A Tale of Two Sisters is lush and at times unbearably frightening; his A Bittersweet Life is an elegiac crime saga with the best, most innovative knife-fight in a movie until the naked scuffle in Eastern Promises; his The Good, the Bad, the Weird (which his latest most resembles) is a dizzy, hilarious take on the Spaghetti Western; and his I Saw the Devil is the slickest, and stickiest, exploitation serial-killer/torture flick I’ve ever seen. He’s his country’s Takashi Miike, its Quentin Tarantino. And his American-made, English-language debut, unceremoniously dumped in the middle of the deadly first quarter of 2013, is, I guess you could say, at least better than John Woo’s Hollywood baptism, Hard Target. The tragedy of it all is that the picture will be more ballyhooed not for the arrival of Kim on our shores, but for the return to the action genre of one Arnold Schwarzenegger (Expendables cameos notwithstanding), here cast as a soft-around-the-middle aging lawman in the Stallone-in-Copland mold who stands up against a cabal of snarling baddies in defense of the AARP and the NRA in one fell, sometimes ironic, swoop. I’ve never not liked a Kim film, but he’s testing me. Ultimately, it’s impossible to completely hate a movie that references, in addition to all the pictures Schwarzenegger’s made, one–Paul Verhoeven’s forever-gestating Crusades epic–he never got to.

Crimewave (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

May 19, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Sam Raimi, Scream/Shout! Factory

*½/**** Image B- Sound C+ Extras A
starring Louise Lasser, Paul L. Smith, Brion James, Reed Birney
screenplay by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen & Sam Raimi
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Sam Raimi’s sophomore picture Crimewave is a nightmare, a mess, a calamity of rare scope but also one possessed of a singular, maybe misguided but definitely committed, vision. It wants very badly to be a feature-length Three Stooges sketch or Warner Bros. cartoon (one of the early Tex Averys), and so the thing it most resembles is Joe Dante’s segment of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, stretched to a truly sadistic length (a deceptively scant-sounding 83 minutes) and thrown together by misadventure, studio interference, and a lot of talented people who didn’t know what they didn’t know. It’s so consistently and dedicatedly cross-eyed badger spit, in fact, that it eventually takes on the surreality of a Max Ernst gallery, or an acid trip in a travelling funhouse. It’s deeply unpleasant, even as fans of Raimi and the Coen Brothers (who co-wrote the screenplay with Raimi) busily trainspot all the auteur signatures in double time. What Crimewave represents is that peculiar artifact of a film that should have ended careers instead getting “lost” by a bumfuddled, betrayed studio for long enough to allow Evil Dead II and Blood Simple the opportunity to cement reputations before this one could bury them.

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

May 15, 20131990s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Roy Scheider
screenplay by David Cronenberg, based on the book by William S. Burroughs
directed by David Cronenberg

“A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.” —William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

by Walter Chaw “Sexual ambulance, did you say?” asks Bill Lee (Peter Weller), erstwhile exterminator of rational thought (and cockroaches) and stand-in for William S. Burroughs (who used the nom de guerre himself in Junkie) in David Cronenberg’s impenetrable, impossibly complex, surprisingly funny, curiously pleasurable Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch. Bill is responding to a statement–an introduction, really–to a creature called a “Mugwump,” named after a political group that split from the Republican party in 1884 to support Grover Cleveland in protest of their own candidate James Blaine’s financial corruption. Those Mugwumps were members of a social elite; these Mugwumps, Cronenberg’s, are reptiles or insects (or should I say “also reptiles or insects”?), each voiced by Peter Boretski in his insistent, Columbo-esque rasp, asking just one more clarifying question. This Mugwump declares itself to be a master of sexual ambivalence, leading to Bill Lee’s miscomprehension of it as “sexual ambulance”–which, as mondegreens go, is a fairly loaded one. Naked Lunch is, after all, invested in language and corruption. Describing to Bill what it’s like to get high by injecting the toxin Bill uses to kill roaches, Bill’s wife Joan (the great Judy Davis) says, “It’s a very literary high–it’s a Kafka high, you feel like a bug”–the processing of which provides by itself a kind of literary high.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

May 8, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald
directed by Baz Luhrmann

by Walter Chaw The great irony of Baz Luhrmann’s unwatchable farrago The Great Gatsby is that it’s not so much an interpretation of its titular hero’s self-aggrandizing fandangos as a literalization of one. It’s all surface, all façade, and not coincidentally, the most successful thing about it is Luhrmann’s shooting of Gatsby’s legendary parties as infernal bacchanalia. But that bit of useful critique is clearly a fluke, an accident of Luhrmann’s one-trick pony kicking over the single element in Fitzgerald’s book that is remotely compatible with Luhrmann’s style. The marriage of Baz with Fitzgerald, in fact, is a little like asking Michael Bay to adapt The Brothers Karamazov–it’s Timur Bekmambetov’s A Farewell to Arms. It’s showing off in the loudest, most obnoxious way possible, without any kind of critical, nay, useful, rationale for all the bread and circus–an asshole at play with Welles’s “best train set a boy could ever want,” with the casualty only what’s possibly the best American novel ever written. It’s an effrontery to taste, the sole consolation being that as Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is something of a motherless child, there’s no one who will love it. No one could.

Iron Man 3 (2013)

May 2, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Revenge, Superhero, Theatrical

Iron Man Three
*½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Drew Pearce & Shane Black
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw I laughed once during Shane Black’s Iron Man 3–an unfortunate milestone for me and Black’s films, which I have found, without exception, pretty amusing. That one moment is a reference serial post-modernist and industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) makes to Michael Crichton’s 1973 cult fantasia Westworld. The Tony Stark character is not just the cocksure pop-cultural embodiment of Roland Barthes’s work on semiotics and myth: he’d be Barthes’s greatest subject for analysis–the object that presumes a pop-cultural universal constant. The place where Black works, in other words, is that place where everyone’s seen and read and heard everything they “should have” seen and read and heard. When Stark drops the Westworld bomb, then, we understand the implication that Stark is observing an evil henchman to not only appear to be robotic and indestructible but maybe sexy and Yul Brynner-esque as well–maybe a female fantasy, maybe a “stupid sexy Flanders” homosexual fantasy. Certainly, there’s a recognition that dropping a reference like this is pleasurable in a way that structuralism would appreciate, but only for the nerd bourgeoisie. It’s a moment meant to create a sense of exclusionary cloister in the midst of one of the most widely-dissembled entertainments in human history, and I liked that.

Django Unchained (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 14, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Revenge, Theatrical, Western

Djangounch2

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw If Inglourious Basterds was an ambiguous, brilliant indictment of “Jewish vengeance” wrapped in this impossibly canny exploration of violence through screenwriting, performance, and love of film, think of Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up, Django Unchained, as a glorious continuation of what has become a singular artist’s evolving theme. It demonstrates an absolute command of the medium, of what film can do when tasked to do more than usual, and it does it by being some of the finest film criticism of the year. If the Coens are our best literary critics, then Tarantino is our best film critic cum sociologist, and his topics, again, are how we understand history through specific prisms and how violence can be both catharsis and atrocity–often in the same breath and almost always in the same ways. Consider that this difficult film’s most difficult moment comes, as it does in Inglourious Basterds, at the very end, in an unbearably ugly act of violence perpetrated against not the expected slave-owner antagonist, Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), but his manservant Stephen/Stepin (Samuel L. Jackson). Consider, too, the idea that vengeance–particularly in our post-9/11 environment–is the proverbial tiger we’ve caught by the tail: our cultural legacy that we try to justify through any means, given that our ends are so very righteous.

True Blood: The Complete Second Season (2009) + True Blood: The Complete Third Season (2010) – Blu-ray Discs

April 10, 20132000s, 2010, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Television, Thriller, Vampire, Werewolf

Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
S2: “Nothing But the Blood,” “Keep This Party Going,” “Scratches,” “Shake and Fingerpop,” “Never Let Me Go,” “Hard-Hearted Hannah,” “Release Me,” “Timebomb,” “I Will Rise Up,” “New World in My View,” “Frenzy,” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin'”

S3: “Bad Blood,” “Beautifully Broken,” “It Hurts Me Too,” “9 Crimes,” “Trouble,” “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” “Hitting the Ground,” “Night on the Sun,” “Everything Is Broken,” “I Smell a Rat,” “Fresh Blood,” “Evil Is Going On”

by Walter Chaw “True Blood” is pulp crap. Yet as Bryant and Bill have already so eloquently pointed out, it’s highly-addictive pulp crap–the sort of shallow, handsomely-mounted titillation that fosters the craze that sprung up around prime-time soaps like “Dynasty” and “Falcon Crest”. White-collar smut that traffics in the currency of the age: once upon a time, it was the super-rich; now, it’s the supernatural. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme. It’s certainly soapier than showrunner/creator Alan Ball’s previous pay-cable drama, “Six Feet Under”, but to its credit what “True Blood” does in returning sexuality–and gore, and (southern) Gothic trappings–to the vampire mythos, it does well. The shame of it is that it seems to be ashamed of itself and so continually strives for relevance in aligning the plight of its vampire underclass to gay rights. Bill said it first, but is the appropriate supernatural analogue to gays really vampires? Is it wise to suggest that gays present that same kind of sexual allure? The same kind of blood contagion? Doesn’t that play into the Conservative storyline a bit too neatly? At least it’s not “The Walking Dead”.

Evil Dead (2013) + Beyond the Hills (2012)

April 4, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Romania, Theatrical

EVIL DEAD
***½/****
starring Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas
screenplay by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues, based on the screenplay by Sam Raimi
directed by Fede Alvarez

BEYOND THE HILLS
****/****
starring Cosmina Stratan, Cristina Flutur, Valeriu Andriuta, Dana Tapalaga
screenplay by Cristian Mungiu, inspired by the non-fiction novels of Tatiana Niculescu Bran
directed by Cristian Mungiu

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The greatest irony of Fede Alvarez’s otherwise laudably straightforward reboot of Sam Raimi’s Spam-in-a-cabin classic The Evil Dead is that the moments where it references its primogenitor are actually the movie’s weakest. I’m thinking, in particular, of handsome young hero David (Shiloh Fernandez) getting thrown around a wet cellar in high Raimi smash-zoom style, which only underscores how much the original films drew their tone from Bruce Campbell–and how much this new one misses him. The danger of casting a group of beautiful people and taking itself deadly seriously (and jettisoning the “The,” in a gesture that reads as hipster insouciance) is that Evil Dead might draw closer to the mainstream and farther from its grindhouse roots. The small miracle of it, then, is that in both its absolute glee in finding the line of how much gore to show and then crossing it (a pair of glasses stop a hypodermic needle…but only for a moment) and its surprising efforts at locating a deeper thread in a frayed brother/sister relationship and the impact of drug addiction, Alvarez’s film is a solid, even affecting genre piece that allows for an abundance of memorable money shots. Compare its intelligence and earnestness, its infernal energy, against the disrespectfulness and self-satisfaction of The Cabin in the Woods to see that Evil Dead is not just a taste of the old religion, it’s really pretty great.

The Pelican Brief (1993); A Time to Kill (1996); Primal Fear (1996) – Blu-ray Discs

April 2, 20131990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Thriller

THE PELICAN
BRIEF
½/**** Image C+ Sound C+
starring Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, Sam Shepard, John Heard

screenplay by Alan J. Pakula, based on the novel by John Grisham

directed by Alan J. Pakula

A TIME TO KILL
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Matthew McConaughey, Donald
Sutherland

screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by John Grisham

directed by Joel Schumacher

PRIMAL FEAR
***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, John Mahoney, Edward Norton

screenplay by Steve Shagan and Ann Biderman, based on the novel by
William Diehl

directed by Gregory Hoblit

by Walter Chaw Hand-in-hand with the digital revolution of the 1990s is
this backlash against the same as technical paranoia pictures like The
Net and Hackers cohabit multiplexes with
an epidemic of John Grisham adaptations. Starting with The
Firm in 1993 and running through to The Client (1994),
The Pelican Brief (1995), A
Time to Kill and The Chamber (1996), The
Rainmaker (1997), and The Gingerbread Man
(1998), these pictures share a deep interest in not just the low-grade
hackery of Grisham's declarative-prose style, but also super-secret
societies in the halls of power. Thus was limply resurrected the
paranoid New American Cinema. It was different this time around because
the ways our realities were being manipulated by the popular culture
and mass media were no longer a product of a governmental conspiracy,
but of a perceptual mutation.^* It's not about not trusting the
government (nobody has trusted the government since 1972)–it's about
not trusting the medium of film itself. Not surprisingly, directors who
carved out their reputations in the Seventies–like Francis Ford
Coppola, Robert Altman, and Alan J. Pakula–jumped on board the Grisham
train, finding familiar ground in his gallery of paper-based heroes
(lawyers, judges, newspapermen) and perhaps thinking they'd bought a
ticket back to relevance when in fact they were working in an odd
parallel phenomenon that would fail almost entirely to have any kind of
relevance or longevity. Instead of producing classics, these legends
were excavating mines they'd already exhausted three administrations
ago.