Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 53 of 150

La Notte (1961) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 26, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Lanotte1

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Bernhard Wicki
written and directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Walter Chaw The second film in a loose quartet of Modernist, existentially-despairing–some would say brutal–Michelangelo Antonioni pictures, La Notte is the one I would identify, if pressed, as the best among L‘avventura, L‘eclisse, and Red Desert. I’d even go so far as to call it Antonioni’s best movie overall: the one that most completely encompasses the filmmaker’s worldview and puts into sharpest relief the tools with which he expresses it. He’s at the height of his powers here. I would argue that although his Blow-Up both defined foreign film as a genre for American audiences (while proving instrumental in defeating the Production Code, heralding the level of acceptance and permissiveness that made the American ’70s in film possible) and is indisputably his most influential work (indeed, it’s among the most influential films of all time), it’s La Notte that offers the cleanest insight into who and what Antonioni is as an artist.

Le Week-End (2013)

March 20, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Jim Broadbent, Lindsay Duncan, Jeff Goldblum, Olly Alexander
screenplay by Hanif Kureishi
directed by Roger Michell

by Walter Chaw Nick (Jim Broadbent) has been fired from his professorship, and, not to celebrate but maybe to memorialize it, he and wife Meg (Lindsay Duncan) take a romantic trip to the City of Light. Well, a trip, anyway. After two awful films (Morning Glory and Hyde Park on the Hudson), Roger Michell returns to form (and to screenwriter/playwright Hanif Kureishi) with this bitter little pill, Le Week-End, whose title, read the way I think it was intended to be read, just drips with acerbic disdain. It reminds me of an exchange about midway through where a desperate Nick tells Meg that he loves her and Meg hisses, in a way that only a British actress at the absolute peak of her powers could hiss, “Love… DIES.” Yet Meg doesn’t hate Nick and Nick, for his part, isn’t quite the milquetoast he presents himself as in moments like these, when he falls on the street and injures his knee to the ringing, castrating laughter of his mate, or when he infers that Meg wants to leave him and starts to whimper like a child. Also at about the halfway mark, the couple encounters an old colleague of Nick’s, Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), who promptly invites them to a dinner party in honour of Morgan’s latest literary success (“It could happen to anybody,” he says; “It didn’t happen to me,” Nick responds), and suddenly Michell and Kureishi have the meat of professional and personal jealousy to worry off the bone, too.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

March 13, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Edward Norton, Tony Revolori
written and directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw I’d be hard-pressed to think of many sequences in the movies better than the two minutes from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums where Richie gets picked up at the Green Line Bus by his adopted sister Margot following a lengthy absence. It’s beautifully composed, emotionally weighted, and punctuated with the best use of Nico in a sentence, ever. There’s a rub there–my favourite Wes Anderson films are the ones that use music in this way; I ally him in my mind with artists like Sofia Coppola and, sure, Quentin Tarantino. I think the full potential of film is only really reached when all the elements that go into a movie–the seven arts, as it were–are used in concert. Wes Anderson, as he utilizes fewer and fewer pop songs in his films (his latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is his first without any), is losing emotional complexity as his hermetically-sealed, obsessive-compulsive dreamscapes become increasingly complex. Consider the moment from Django Unchained where our heroes ride into act two to Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name.” It’s iconic, transformative; the scene has a quarter of its power without the agency of that song. Tarantino truly gets it. When Anderson opens The Darjeeling Limited with The Kinks‘ “This Time Tomorrow,” letting the scene play in slow-motion as Adrien Brody’s character tries to outrun the ghost of his father, wow. I remember hearing about the introductory tracking shot of the research vessel in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, how Anderson was possibly planning on scoring it with a Radiohead song (“How to Disappear Completely,” if memory serves) and how that potential marriage gave me a shiver of anticipation. The farther Anderson falls into his navel, the clearer it is that he no longer gets what he used to get, swallowed whole by the grey beast solipsism.

A Star is Born (1954) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

March 5, 20141950s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Musical, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Judy Garland, James Mason, Jack Carson, Tom Noonan
screenplay by Moss Hart, based on the screenplay by Dorothy Parker & Alan Campbell & Robert Carson
directed by George Cukor

by Walter Chaw A big, giant mess of a movie, big, giant mess of a director George Cukor’s A Star is Born–a remake of the 1937 Janet Gaynor vehicle as well as Cukor’s own 1932 What Price Hollywood?–finds big, giant mess of a gay icon Judy Garland quivering gallantly on the razor’s edge of total mental collapse for 176 famously-restored minutes. A miracle of single-mindedness and dedication to the film-preservation cause? No doubt. A movie that could easily withstand 90 minutes of liberal pruning? Indeed. And unlike that question posed rhetorically of Joseph II in Amadeus, it’s all too obvious which bits need trimming. Start with the 20-minute (might as well be 20-hour) “Born in a Trunk” number, inserted by Jack Warner unbeknownst to Cukor and intended to showcase Garland’s then-healthy stage act. A “showstopper” in every sense of the word, it’s unbelievably bad and, more than bad, it betrays everything that’s worked about A Star is Born up to that point. A film-within-a-film-within-a-film, it has Judy vamping her way through a series of surreal set-pieces, telling her origin story while doing a medley of standards from the Warner catalogue. It’s painful for all the wrong reasons.

Hannibal: Season One (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

March 2, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Horror, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
“Apéritif,” “Amuse-Bouche,” “Potage,” “Œuf,” “Coquilles,” “Entrée,” “Sorbet,” “Fromage,” “Trou Normand,” “Buffet Froid,” “Rôti,” “Relevés,” “Savoureux”

by Walter Chaw I read Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon sometime in the summer of 1985, when puberty and a crippling stutter conflated new, confusing biological drives with defensive rage. It’s a wonder, really, that anyone gets out of junior-high alive. I had developed a taste for outré entertainments long around this time–thirteen, gawky, outcast in my mind, if not necessarily in reality. It was easier for me to identify with the Michael Myerses and Jason Vorheeses of the underverse: hiding, voyeuristic, jealous, yearning. I think we learn affinity with monsters as our own bodies betray us, metastasize around us, dosing our brains with liquid spikes of ecstasy and their attendant pitch-black abysses. I took refuge in movies rented from the local video stores in and around my suburban oubliette, and eventually in books like Harris’s masterpiece, which, once discovered, was something I came back to like a scab, like a totem to be worried. Watching Manhunter on VHS a year or so after its release, I was astounded to discover it was Red Dragon. I hadn’t considered that anyone else knew about, much less was interested in, the contents of my secret stash. In the years before Internet and the vast, instant dissemination of information, there were still such things as the private, the personal. Manhunter was validation, exposure, and sanctification of my perversion. I was outed.

The Wind Rises (2013) + Frozen (2013)

February 25, 2014****/****, 2013, 2014, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Japan, Musical, Romance, War

THE WIND RISES
****/****
written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki

FROZEN
**½/****
screenplay by Jennifer Lee, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”
directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee

Editor’s Note: This review pertains to the original Japanese-language version of The Wind Rises.

by Walter Chaw Hayao Miyazaki’s alleged swan song The Wind Rises is mature, romantic, grand storytelling that just happens to be something like a romanticized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer behind the design of the Mitsubishi A5M, which led, ultimately, to the Zero. Indeed, for a Western audience, watching Jiro’s dreams of squadrons of Zeros buzzing over fields of green is chilling, and advance critics seemed unable to distinguish the Japanese war machine from the film’s focus on a life lived in pursuit of dreams. In truth, separating these two aspects of the picture–the proximate and the historical–is self-defeating. (Dismissing the movie out of hand is equally blinkered.) One without the other, The Wind Rises loses anything like substance, resonance, importance. It would fall on the one side into gauzy bullshit, on the other into Triumph of the Will. As is, it’s something more akin to Studio Ghibli’s own Grave of the Fireflies in its humanizing of a man whose dreams were corrupted into something terrible. Einstein would be one of the West’s potential Horikoshi corollaries–and if Miyazaki had done Albert’s biography, I’d expect to see mushroom clouds illustrating his fantasies of relativity. For Horikoshi, Miyazaki provides upheavals and disasters as highlight to each of his life events: He first meets his wife in a train crash; in a lilting epilogue, when Jiro bids farewell to his dead wife, Miyazaki offers fields of devastation and a village in flames. Throughout, Miyazaki presents earthquakes, rainstorms, sudden bursts of wind as reminders of…what? The inevitability of change? The portents of war? The cycles of life and death? All of that; but what compels is the idea of helplessness in the face of larger forces–that although we chase our dreams, we’re never really in control of our destinies.

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

February 17, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD

Nebraska1

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
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.

RoboCop (2014)

February 11, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Joshua Zetumer, based on the screenplay by Edward Neumeier & Michael Miner
directed by José Padilha

by Walter Chaw There’s a scene at the end of José Padilha’s RoboCop reboot where nearly-widowed Clara Murphy (Abbie Cornish), nervous about being reunited with her nearly-murdered husband, Det. Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), takes care to put on makeup and something nice. (For me, Cornish trying to get prettier is like a tree trying to get tree-ier.) Padilha lingering here tells me a lot about both him and a film that doesn’t touch the Verhoeven original, of course (few movies could, just in terms of sheer force of personality), but does care about developing its relationships, if not necessarily its characters. It reminded me of the kind of helpless love I feel when my wife tries to dress it up for me–I mean, honey, you don’t have to do that. It’s human, in other words, and if the franchise–a subgenre of machine/man existentialism–is about anything, it’s about the difference between the little moments that make us human and all the other ones that align us more closely with machines. You could go deeper and describe it as an Apollonian/Dionysian thing–a mind/body dichotomy, the marriage of Heaven and Hell and on and on; or you could simply look at RoboCop as a pretty good action flick with lots of PG-13 fatalities that features more than its share of good actors in supporting roles as familiar action-movie staples. It’s clear after the halfway point that that’s what it’s really aspiring to be. Either way, it manages a few times to make a case for this mythos to be, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, one of those things each generation should consider adapting to their particular dysfunctions. It’s no satirical masterpiece, no Grand Guignol exercise, but as slight entertainment, there’s some meat on the bone.

Argento’s Dracula 3-D (2012) – Blu-ray 3D & Blu-ray

February 5, 20142012, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy, Romance, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS

Dracula2

Dario Argento’s Dracula
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Thomas Kretschmann, Maria Gastini, Asia Argento, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Dario Argento, Antonio Tentori, Stefano Piani, based on the novel by Bram Stoker
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw I used to love Dario Argento. Heck, who didn’t? But at a certain point, it became clear that the quality of Argento’s work is directly proportional (or it was for a while) to the quality of work he’s riffing on. A shame that lately he appears to be mostly riffing on himself–the elderly version of a vital artist doing his best to recapture something he’s lost. It was Hitchcock as muse, of course, initially, joining Argento at the hip for a while with Brian DePalma, who was doing kind of the same thing at the same time with about the same audacity in the United States. There was genius there in the Deep Reds and Suspirias, certainly in the logic-bumfuddling submerged ballroom the heroine must enter to retrieve a key in Inferno. Argento didn’t really start to make bad movies until after Tenebre. Since, with notable half-exceptions like Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome, he’s made almost nothing but. It all comes to a head–or a tail, as it were–with Dario Argento’s Dracula: the worst entry in a filmography that includes stuff like Sleepless and Giallo, and frankly belonging somewhere in the conversation of the worst films of all time. Until you’ve endured it, I can’t quantify it. Coming from someone once revered for his innovative camera, for his groundbreaking work with music and production design–coming from the guy involved at some level with the conception/production of Once Upon a Time in the West and Dawn of the Dead, fer chrissakes (who, indeed, counted Leone and Bertolucci and George A. Romero as friends and collaborators), it’s a fucking tragedy.

Night of the Comet (1984) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

February 3, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Zombie

Nightofthecomet1

½*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B
starring Robert Beltran, Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Geoffrey Lewis
written and directed by Thom Eberhardt

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There’s a quote from the seventh season of “The Simpsons” that applies to the problem before us where Bart, happening on a “Schoolhouse Rock” thing and learning from Lisa that it’s one of “those campy ’70s throwbacks that appeals to Generation X-ers,” says, “We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little.” If there were, and if it had, we might’ve avoided the current rage for hipsterism–if the Joss Whedons of the world (and David Cranes and so forth) had found themselves casualties in some hostile jungle setting, then would this current youth generation have adopted, ironically, that last generation, and would people like me at my tender age of 40 be fuelling demand for hale distribution/archival companies like Shout! to produce exhaustively-supplemented HiDef releases of garbage like Thom Eberhardt’s excruciating Night of the Comet? Look, I’m not immune–I wrote an entire monograph (200+ pages, no kidding) on Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile that, in my defense, was more memoir than anything else (or is that more disclaimer than defense?). Still, I’ll proclaim to my grave that Miracle Mile has substance, while Night of the Comet has none. The first and greatest danger of nostalgia is that, having grown up with certain artifacts, we treat them like family and tend to love them unconditionally, as family does. This affection doesn’t mean that Junior isn’t a grinning idiot, however, because at least in this instance, he is. And I’m a strong believer that if one of your family members is a grinning idiot, it’s actually your job not to inflict him or her on other people.

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 20141970s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Robert Blake, Billy (Green) Bush, Jeannine Riley, Elisha Cook
screenplay by Robert Boris
directed by James William Guercio

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. By 1973 in the United States, film had already become chronicles of listless motion, failed ideologies, ironic Westward expansion, and rampant paranoia. American cinema was in the process of cannibalizing itself in great gulps of genre reconsideration, taking the lead of the movies-by-critics of the French New Wave and reassessing the western/film noir/thriller cycle of studio-era Hollywood through a new mirror darkly: The iconography of the hero mythology Americans hold most dear (cowboy, hardboiled detective, two-fisted man of action), forced now to be populated by incoherent psychopaths and, worse, effeminate ones–lawyers, journalists, ex-cons, ex-soldiers back from an unpopular war, unloved, disrespected, lost and still losing.

We’re the Millers (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 23, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Road Movie

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts, Ed Helms
screenplay by Bob Fisher & Steve Faber and Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber

by Walter Chaw Rawson Marshall Thurber’s return to the territory of the screwball gross-out comedy that put him on the map, the better-than-it-should-be Dodgeball, is the better-than-it-should-be (but not as good as Dodgeball) We’re The Millers, an essentially plotless road-trip intrigue that nonetheless glances off 2013’s concern with the decline of the middle class while providing a couple of chuckles along the way. It’s the lowbrow version of Albert Brooks’s Lost in America if looked at through a particularly sympathetic lens–a hint of a conversation about class, a whiff of something about how hard it is to make a living on streets getting meaner by the day. Ultimately, it’s probably just lucky that the cast assembled has an impressive improvisational pedigree (and that the director is open to making adjustments midstream), lending a stale comedy of mistaken identity a degree of perhaps-undeserved life. It probably doesn’t hurt that We’re the Millers never, at any point, tries to be something it’s not: rescued by a total lack of ambition.

Plus One (2013) – DVD

January 19, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller, Time Travel

+1
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Rhys Wakefield, Logan Miller, Ashley Hinshaw, Natalie Hall
screenplay by Bill Gullo
directed by Dennis Iliadis

by Walter Chaw David (Rhys Wakefield) screws up and loses girlfriend Jill (Ashley Hinshaw), only to run into her the night of a gigantic, hedonistic, Gatsby-esque party attended by rave strippers, DJs, and drug dealers. An unlikely place to stage a comeback, David, with buddy Teddy (Logan Miller), coaxes Jill into a conversation that goes south–but then the lights cut out, there’s a weird meteorite event outside, and David finds himself with the opportunity to try the conversation again: same place, different Jill. It seems that something’s created a quantum split–a little bleed-over maybe from a parallel dimension that twists time and creates doubles of all the revellers, though only a few notice. The ones who don’t party on in a kind of nightmarish inattention that reminds of the dreamscapes of Miracle Mile and After Hours; the ones who do begin to wonder what will happen when the time-slips overlap and they find themselves attempting to share the same space as their doppelgängers.

Ms. 45 (1981)

January 17, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Revenge, Theatrical

Ms. .45
***½/****
starring Zoë Tamerlis, Bogey, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto
screenplay N. G. St. John
directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I first saw Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 the way I suspect most men my age saw it: furtively, in my bedroom, on VHS. It had about it that aura of skeeviness I spent a good portion of my time hunting for at the local video store. My nose for such things had been rewarded with likes of I Spit on Your Grave and The Last House on the Left, films that never failed to be prurient in their rape sequences, no matter their nods to subsequently avenging our fair, fairly defiled, maidens. What Ferrara presents with this, arguably his second-most notorious film (The Addiction is unbelievable, and still only available on VHS), is a rape-revenge tale that does nothing to de-feminize its heroine–rather correctly, powerfully, identifying that the loci of a woman’s power is indeed her sexuality, even as that sexuality draws the objectifying, dehumanizing gaze. It’s why, after all, so many fertility goddesses are also destroyers, isn’t it? There’s a moment in the third Terminator where the female Terminator, played by the already-intimidating Kristanna Loken, makes a decision to enlarge her breasts prior to confronting a male victim. If only the rest of that film were so wise.

Message from Space (1978) – DVD

January 15, 20141970s, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory

***/**** Image C+ Sound C- Extras C Madness A
starring Vic Morrow, Sonny Chiba, Philip Casnoff, Peggy Lee Brennan
screenplay by Hiroo Matsuda
directed by Kinji Fukasaku

by Walter Chaw Essentially a big-budget, feature-film version of Calvinball if Bill Watterson were a manga artist undergoing a psychotic break, Kinji Fukasaku’s balls-insane Message from Space is a very special brand of genius. It honours no structural logic that I can discern, though it does have a kinetic kid-logic, the kind honed from endless summer afternoons tromping around with your buddies, making shit up and being happier than you’ll ever be again in your life. Message from Space captures that headiness, that heedlessness, the sort of reckless creativity that charts the course between memorable films by someone like Ed Wood and forgettable films by every other hack with the same level of talent but not the same joyful dedication. I’m not saying Message from Space is a good movie–I can’t even say that the reasons for its existence are particularly honourable (it’s an obvious Star Wars cash-grab). But I can say that Message from Space is crazy-energetic and has more delightful moments packed into it than a dozen “normal” movies. I also wouldn’t underestimate its influence on a generation of kids Star Wars-hungry during that three-year gap between the first film and The Empire Strikes Back. Herein, find the source of Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy at least, and, incidentally, the better version of Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs (and Stewart Raffill’s The Ice Pirates).

Synchronicity: FFC Interviews Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado, writers/directors of “Big Bad Wolves”

January 12, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, Israel

Just a couple of weeks after I caught writer-director Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s Big Bad Wolves at the 4^th Mile High Horror Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino, having seen it himself at the Busan International Film Festival, declared it to be his favourite movie of 2013. Turns out QT screening the picture at a South Korean event represents a special kind of synchronicity, given that both he and South Korea’s fulsome genre cinema were key influences on Kehsales & Papushado. Seeing both of Keshales and Papushado’s films when I did (before I got a chance to screen Big Bad Wolves, I was inspired by the buzz on it to track down their 2010 debut, Rabies) felt like a bit of synchronicity in itself–or, at least, I felt lucky that I was able to catch this wave right at the moment that it crests and heads to shore. When I reached out to Mr. Keshales to see if he might be interested in an interview, he was quick to agree and then, over missed connections, a miscommunication about time zones (8 p.m. in Israel is 11 a.m. in Colorado, go figure), a bad Skype link, a newly-purchased cell-mike still package-fresh, and finally a cell call from a street in Israel (where Papushado almost got creamed by a car) to a suburb in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I was able to chat at last with Keshales and Papushado: the faces–the only ones, as it happens–of Israeli horror and a new day dawning in Israeli cinema.

Lone Survivor (2013)

January 7, 20142013, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

***/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Eric Bana
screenplay by Peter Berg, based on the book by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw Peter Berg is a great action director. He does it with verve, a good sense of space (which is increasingly rare these days), and a sense of both weight and humour. He has excellent timing, as well as an understanding of what’s meaningful visual information in there among the dross of motion and impact. Moreover, he seems obsessed with working through issues surrounding what it means to be a man–how, too often, it means your social interactions are limited to violence, threats to your sexuality, and hazing rituals dangerous and bestial. I’m a huge fan of his debut feature, Very Bad Things; visually, I think it’s wrong to underestimate how influential is his romantic rack-focus gimmick from Friday Night Lights. I love Berg’s Hancock, the movie that Man of Steel aspired to be (and if we’re talking secondary influences, Zack Snyder owes much of his cinematic vocabulary to Berg). I love The Rundown, and while Battleship is inarguably a misfire, it’s also less of a misfire than it could have been. With Lone Survivor, based on the memoir of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, the titular lone survivor of a botched four-man special forces mission in Afghanistan, Berg’s examinations of the masculine take their logical turn from bachelor parties to football to superheroes to military action. And for long moments, Lone Survivor is fantastic.

Eyes Without a Face (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 5, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Les yeux sans visage
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, François Guérin, Edith Scob
screenplay by Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon and Claude Sautet, based on the novel by Jean Redon
directed by Georges Franju

by Walter Chaw Five films changed the conversation in 1960. They were the fire, though the embers were stoked in the years leading up to them. Looking for signposts in the Eisenhower Fifties, you find the juvenile-delinquent cycle, plus the outré horror flicks of England’s Hammer Studios, or Japan’s tokusatsu, or France’s Nouvelle Vague. More directly, you find a pair of films based on works by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Diabolique and Vertigo. But in 1960, there was this quintet, each the product of parallel genesis, each proof after a fashion of a Jungian collective unconscious, perhaps, certainly that things long-simmering inevitably boil over. There’s an idea in my head, put there by Ethan Mordden’s Medium Cool, that everything that happened in the arts in the United States throughout the Fifties points to what was about to happen in our culture in the Sixties. Mordden is the source of my favourite teaching point when it comes to the two eras: that in the Fifties, if you didn’t listen to Mother, society was doomed; and in 1960, if you listened to Mother, you were Psycho.

FFC’s Best of ’13

January 1, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

by Walter Chaw Searching for themes in 2013, you come upon the obvious ones first: the frustrations of the forty-five percenters; the growing income gap; and the death of the middle class, encapsulated in brat-taculars like The Bling Ring and Spring Breakers and prestige pics like Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, David O. Russell’s American Hustle, and, um, Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. You see this preoccupation with the economy in Nebraska‘s quest for a million-dollar Clearinghouse payday, and in Frances Halladay’s desire for a place to sleep and a career that can subsidize it (see also: To the Wonder and Byzantium). It’s there in the identity theft of Identity Theft and the motivations of the prefab family from We’re the Millers, paid off with picket fences in an ending with echoes of My Blue Heaven and Goodfellas. Consider All is Lost, an allegory for pensioners who’ve lost everything to the wolves of Wall Street, adrift on a limitless span, taking on water but plucky, damnit. Too plucky, in the case of Redford’s Everyman hero–who, frankly, would’ve better served his allegory had he drowned with salvation in sight.

Her (2013)

December 18, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
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.