Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 55 of 146

The Apartment (1960) – Blu-ray Disc

January 2, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Billy Wilder, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

by Walter Chaw The older I get, the better I understand Billy Wilder. And the better I understand Billy Wilder, his weariness and acerbic sense of humour, the more I feel comfortable saying, with that complicated mix of affection and fair warning that I think indicates his work as well, that his movies are assholes and mean it. Billy Wilder, the ten-cents-a-dance Austrian gigolo, the roommate of Peter Lorre who learned English by listening to Dodgers games on the radio, the admirer of Ernst Lubistch. The guy who demanded he be allowed to direct his own screenplays and so made a legendary hyphenate debut with Double Indemnity. The writing partner of both Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond, the man who made whores of Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe and Shirley MacLaine, because nothing could ever be as simple, as innocent, as it appeared at first glance. The guy who lost family in Nazi concentration camps, who came up with the best closing line in movie history, which was “nobody’s perfect.” Maybe the last line of The Apartment–“Shut up and deal”–is a close second. Narrative context tells us the line refers to a card game; the Wilder context suggests a certain way of looking at the world: coping, acceptance, fatalism. Would you believe The Apartment is actually one of Wilder’s optimistic films? Optimistic because the way it views the world is through a scrim of absolute cynicism–and despite it, despite all the towers falling down, there’s the possibility of love, sweet and simple, between Ms. Kubelik and Mr. Baxter.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2012

January 1, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Directors: Steven Soderbergh

Top102012

by Walter Chaw I wish To the Wonder had been released this year–Take Shelter, too. The one because I love Terrence Malick and I’m excited that he’s working so much, the other because I fear that Take Shelter is the last time Michael Shannon will anchor a picture without being instantly Christopher Walken-ized. It’s his The Dead Zone, and he’s amazing in a movie that takes big risks and pays off in a meaningful way; if he were to star in it now, I think it would be mistaken for camp. I also wish I’d seen Margaret in time for my 2011 list. Alas, local publicity has never been terribly interested in my participation. Nevertheless, thanks mostly to Netflix and FYC screeners, I saw a great many great films this year.

Promised Land (2012)

December 28, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Matt Damon, John Kraskinski, Frances McDormand, Rosemarie DeWitt
screenplay by John Krasinski & Matt Damon, based on a story by Dave Eggers
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw The first warning sign is that Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land is named after a Natalie Merchant song, though that’s really all the warning you need. Give this to Steven Soderbergh, another director who, like Van Sant, has alternated small, personal projects with the occasional crowd-pleaser: At least when Soderbergh does it, it’s not simpering crap like Finding Forrester or Milk. (The best Van Sant film of the year, in fact, is Julia Loktev’s astounding The Loneliest Planet.) Here, alas, Van Sant is reunited with Good Will Hunting buddy Matt Damon, directing a screenplay Damon co-wrote with co-star John Krasinski from a story by (gulp) Dave Eggers. Featuring enough self-satisfaction to power Ed Begley, Jr.’s enviro-car for a century, Promised Land is the kind of movie that suggests everything Conservatives believe about Lefties being tree-hugging, privileged morons is pretty dead on the mark. What I’m saying is that it’s stupid; Ayn Rand ain’t got nothin’ on Damon and Krasinski.

Les Misérables (2012)

December 24, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Musical, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Sacha Baron Cohen
screenplay by William Nicholson, Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg, Herbert Kretzmer, based on Boublil & Schönberg’s stage play and the novel by Victor Hugo
directed by Tom Hooper

by Walter Chaw The title refers to the audience; imagine director Tom Hooper as James Cagney in The Public Enemy, and you’re Mae Clarke getting the grapefruit shoved in your face. Yes, Hooper’s glacial, note-for-note screen adaptation of Schönberg & Boublil’s smash musical Les Misérables is 157 minutes of extreme close-up/wide-angle theatre threatening, at every moment, to slide completely off the screen, given the accidental-auteur’s propensity to ignore half the frame. It’s ugly in the way that only films driven by fanatical vision, unfettered by checks, and galvanized by awards and money can be ugly–so much time is spent horning in up Hugh Jackman’s nose that I spent the first day or so of it thinking I was watching a musical about spelunking. It’s a picture that doesn’t respect your personal space: I’ve never more wanted to mace a movie than this, the umpteenth adaptation of Victor Hugo’s epic but the first of the Broadway phenomenon that pretty much defined the best way to get into a high-school girl’s good graces in the 1980s. After this ordeal, I’d offer that still the best way this musical’s ever appeared on film was its iconic poster making a cameo on Patrick Bateman’s bathroom wall in American Psycho.

This is 40 (2012)

December 20, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

***/****
starring Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, John Lithgow, Albert Brooks
written and directed by Judd Apatow

by Walter Chaw It’s scattershot, and sloppy, but any movie about fortysomethings dealing with familial, financial, sexual, and physical issues that ends with Ryan Adams performing “Lucky One” in a little club is a movie I will like. And I do: Judd Apatow’s This is 40 isn’t good, exactly, but it listens and it has a sense of humour, as well as a certain optimism about it. I bristle at Apatow’s desire in his other films to impose a traditionally moral conclusion on all the atrocity that’s preceded it, but in a “spin-off” of Knocked Up, about people exactly my age in roughly my situation discovering they’re the grown-ups for some reason and through no fault of their own, that desire for a hopeful conclusion is extremely compelling. This Is 40 is one of those works that gets you at the right time, I think. I’ve often wondered if the reason I’ve never liked Tolkien is that I didn’t read him when I was 12. I wish I had. For what it’s worth, I’m glad I saw This is 40 in these last six months before my own fortieth birthday. It’s my Twilight. I know it’s terrible–flabby, obviously tinkered with ’til the last minute (the commercials for the film are about 90% cut footage), and packed with digressions that distract rather than edify (a bit with Charlyne Yi is a particular lowlight), but it speaks to me, and when Apatow’s right, I realize, he’s spot on.

The Bourne Legacy (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + Ultraviolet

December 11, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Espionage, Japan, Thriller

Bournelegacy1

½*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Tony Gilroy & Dan Gilroy
directed by Tony Gilroy

by Walter Chaw By the end of Tony Gilroy’s unbearably long and talky The Bourne Legacy, one is left feeling as though the film hasn’t even started yet. Nothing happens in it, and the only thing it inspires is anticipation: it’s all first act; all supplementary material; all self-importance and hot air. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) sits this one out while another similar soldier, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), occupies a space parallel to the first three films, climbing mountains, Grey-ing wolves, and saving hot virologist Dr. Marta (Rachel Weisz) from the clutches of our evil government so that she can infect him with a virus that makes him smart. This leads to a moment, inevitable, where Cross suggests that losing 12 points off his artificially inflated IQ would result in some personal “Flowers for Algernon” apocalypse where 12 points would probably result in him forgetting his phone number at worst. It also leads to a series of incoherent flashbacks that fit in perfectly with Gilroy’s impossible-to-follow action sequences; if you’re just going to turn a camera on and throw it out a window, why bother trying to set it up? For those keeping score, there are more spinning Lazy Susan shots here than in Transformers: Asshole. You’ve been warned.

Umberto D. (1952) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 10, 20121950s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Italy, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari, Ileana Simova
screenplay by Cesare Zavattini
directed by Vittorio De Sica

by Walter Chaw Though he’s best known for The Bicycle Thief, Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. is, to my mind, the superior film, and ultimately one of the few pictures I’ve ever revisited from the era of Italian Neo-Realism–a movement I’ve never particularly understood nor, indeed, liked. It’s possible that there’s not much to understand, that as a reaction to the execution of Mussolini and during that brief “Italian Spring,” Italian cinema, freed by necessity from the studio and looking to present a more authentic representation of the country’s broken cities (film critics were to blame for the movement, of course, as they would later be for the French Nouvelle Vague), found non-professional actors to play out social melodramas. I wonder if I’ve always bristled at the notion that the Giuseppe De Santises and Luchino Viscontis produced during this time were anything like “realism” as I understood it; when I was first introduced to American films noir, I had no idea they were as stylized as they were because of an attempt at “realism,” too. Whatever the case, I see Umberto D. as something like an early Fellini, like La Strada or even 8½: There’s something that feels very much like a humanistic solipsism at its middle. Which is so much more interesting than the cries for social equality that inevitably turn to plaintive keening in my ear. Sometimes liberals damage their own cause–long-held close-ups of crying children have a way of doing that.

The Big Heat (1953) – Blu-ray Disc

December 6, 2012****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Gangster, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound C+ Extras B
starring Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando, Alexander Scourby
screenplay by Sydney Boehm, based on William P. McGivern’s SATURDAY EVENING POST serial
directed by Fritz Lang

by Walter Chaw The pinnacle of Fritz Lang’s American noir output, The Big Heat vacillates between hard-bitten and surprisingly tender. A movie of dualities, it positions Glenn Ford’s Det. Sgt. Bannion on the liminal borders between dialectic states: he presents a familiar hardboiled veneer on the one side, a broken, exhausted, eventually devastated family man on the other. The picture partitions noir bodily, forcefully into the margins of the gender divide, and it confronts, full-on, the popular conception of the ’50s nuclear family. It appears fully formed, an irritant to the hegemony of the American myth of nuclear/consumer nirvana, and it suggests that the cultural upheaval that would result in the helter-skelter ’60s started showing its fatigue early. The Big Heat is Rebel Without a Cause, except the mother is killed and the gay kid lives.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

December 3, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Disaster Movie, Drama, Superhero, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw For all its overreaching (and what’s perilously close to a training montage), Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is fascinating, engaging, and aggressively present. It’s a wonderfully-performed melodrama about the sad, intractable state of our sorry state, painted in broad strokes in a muted palette. It’s what many would think impossible despite the evidence of its predecessor: a comic book for grown-ups. And it accomplishes what it sets out to do without much in the way of action sequences or hero moments–the irony being, of course, that The Dark Knight Rises is fated to become the best-reviewed and most-lucrative release of 2012 for having the very same qualities for which the deeply-underappreciated Superman Returns was lambasted. I would argue that a wide swath of the people who will adore it will have difficulty articulating exactly why.

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

November 30, 20122012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Horror, Zombie

Paranorman3

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Chris Butler & Sam Fell
directed by Chris Butler

by Walter Chaw Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) can see and speak with ghosts, which, if you squint a little, is only a metaphor for the kind of sensitivity that, in a boy, will invariably lead to about a decade of being brutalized by his disconnected male peer group. (Everything will change once he invents Microsoft or Pixar.) Norman’s chief tormentor is barely-verbal Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, already past his sell-by date); his shallow and image-obsessed teenaged sister with a heart of gold™ is Courtney (the awesome Anna Kendrick), who has the hots for the captain of the football team, pre-verbal Mitch (Casey Affleck); and Norman’s best friend, whether he likes it or not, is Mitch’s weird, fat little brother, Neil (Tucker Albrizzi). The first problem of ParaNorman is that, in its rush to be sensitive to intelligent outcasts like Norman and Neil, it dehumanizes and mocks its tormentors, robbing them of the depth and complexity that would have resulted in a better film than this beautifully-wrought, entirely predictable package. (It’s like a jack-in-the-box made by Faberge.) The only moment in which one of these “inside” characters is given any kind of depth (it’s Mitch) is used as a sort of sitcom punchline that doesn’t lend the moment gravity so much as it continues the road of taking sloppy aim at an easy target.

Hitchcock (2012)

November 21, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Toni Collette
screenplay by John J. McLaughlin, based on Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello
directed by Sacha Gervasi

by Walter Chaw It’s hard to know where to even begin to pick apart Sacha Gervasi’s dishonourable drag show Hitchcock, a schlock domestic melodrama with Anthony Hopkins delivering a freak impersonation of Alfred Hitchcock from under a ton of prosthetics that make him look not like Sir Alfred, but like Jim Sturgess as a heroic celestial from Cloud Atlas. Start with the framing story, in which Wisconsin necrophiliac and amateur taxidermist Ed Gein (Michael Wincott, one of the only inspired bits of casting in the entire benighted project) acts as Hitch’s father confessor, greatest confidant, and Freudian conduit to the darker recesses of the auteur’s soul. He appears, see, the way Dustin Hoffman’s imaginary monk appeared to Milla Jovovich’s Joan of Arc in Luc Besson’s The Messenger: In one scene, Hitch, on a couch, admits to Ed that he has unwholesome thoughts about his leading ladies now and again. It’s that obsession for the “Hitchcock blonde” that leads to the discovery of a few sticky headshots in Hitch’s den, and for the everlasting resentment of mousy wife Alma (not-mousy Helen Mirren), who decides to have her own fling with failed writer Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston)–one of several credited writers on Hitchcock’s Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train, though Hitchcock doesn’t mention that. It doesn’t mention much. I suspect that’s because no one involved knows anything, which is quite extraordinary when you consider that possibly no other director in the history of Hollywood has had more written about him than Alfred Hitchcock.

Tippi: FFC Interviews Actress Tippi Hedren

November 17, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Interviews

A conversation with the last of the Hitchcock Blondes

According to Donald Spoto’s 1983 biography The Dark Side of Genius, Alfred Hitchcock’s tendency to become overly enamoured with his blonde stars reached an ugly head with Tippi Hedren during the filming of Marnie. Revisiting the book now, several years after first reading it and resisting some of the allegations therein, I see an author whose love for Hitchcock the auteur is at war with the unpleasant details of his subject’s emotional life. As Ms. Hedren so delicately put it when I had the pleasure of chatting with her the other night: “As a man, [Hitchcock] was found wanting.” Spoto’s declaration that Marnie is a result of sloth but also unusually personal and effective as art and even memoir illustrates, I think, the schism at which most scholars of Hitchcock at some point arrive. When I read The Dark Side of Genius as a college freshman, it was a gateway to understanding better exactly what was going on in Notorious, and exactly what Hitchcock’s men are always playing out.

In the Mood for Love (2000) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 13, 2012****/****, 2000s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, Hong Kong, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Inthemood8

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk
written and directed by Wong Kar-wai

by Walter Chaw The middle film in a loose trilogy by Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar-wai (the others are Days of Being Wild and 2046), In the Mood for Love is a love-drunk ode to the confusion, the intoxication, the magic, and the tragedy of being in love. It speaks in terms proximate and eternal, presenting lovers cast in various roles across years and alien geographies, placing some objects in the position of totem and memento and others in historical dustbins to be abandoned, forgotten. It links the act of watching a film to the act of seduction (Days of Being Wild might be even better at this), and there’s a strong sense in In the Mood for Love that Wong is playing the artifactor of both sign and signifier: He’s doing the T.S. Eliot two-step of authoring Prufrock while simultaneously providing the distance to criticize it.

Lincoln (2012)

November 8, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Spielberg, Theatrical

**/****
starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Tommy Lee Jones
screenplay by Tony Kushner
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Bearing no relationship to the Gore Vidal biography with which it shares its name, Steven Spielberg’s predictably uneven Lincoln features moments of real grandeur narrated to death by John Williams’s inspiring™ and rousing™ score. No speech from Honest Abe (Daniel Day-Lewis) goes without ample and gaudy decoration, making me wonder which one Spielberg doesn’t trust to deliver the goods: Day-Lewis, or Lincoln. More to the point, what Spielberg probably doesn’t trust is the viewer’s intelligence and humanity, meaning the real question is whether he thinks the kind of people who would go to a movie about Abraham Lincoln are morons. Either way, it’s not the sort of behaviour that should be rewarded or go unremarked upon. Consider that the absolute best, most powerful moment of the film arrives within the first five minutes as Lincoln sits in a bivouac, taking questions from foot soldiers–and consider that this instance of naturalism is neatly destroyed by Spielberg’s instinct towards swatting flies with Buicks. What could have been an affecting, quiet bit with our most revered national figure ends with a clumsily proselytized mission statement as a black soldier recites the end of the Gettysburg Address–a not-subtle reminder that the mandate of Lincoln’s second term carried with it the responsibility to push the 13^th amendment ending slavery through a divided Congress.

Skyfall (2012)

November 7, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Crime, Espionage, James Bond, Theatrical, Thriller, Turkey, UK

**/****
starring Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Judi Dench
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and John Logan
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw For me, the James Bond films are the literalization of a very particular Conservative fantasy in which a suave, quippy, emotionally-arrested sociopath battles Cold War foes, beds beautiful women without consequence, always has the latest technology, and engages in the endless murder of foreigners. Just suggesting a “license to kill” reveals a certain level of arrogance; and it’s their confrontation of the noisome wake left by those attitudes that makes On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and the more recent Casino Royale the powerhouses they are. Skyfall, the latest in the decades-spanning series, tries but fails to do the same. A good part of the problem can be traced back to non-action director Sam Mendes (superseding Marc Forster, non-action director of the disastrous Quantum of Solace), who, in trying to honour the visceral requirements of the genre, finds himself unable to produce either a meaty melodrama or a capable action vehicle.

Strangers on a Train (1951) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

October 31, 2012****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Thriller

Strangers5

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, Robert Walker, Leo G. Carroll
screenplay by Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Alfred Hitchcock’s queerest film (Rope notwithstanding) and proof positive of the director’s knack for casting men of ambiguous sexual mooring in roles that cannily exploit it, Strangers on a Train, shot in vibrant contrasts by the great Robert Burks, is best read as a dark comedy–a noir in the most perverse sense of the term. Find in it the finest performance by troubled Robert Walker, tormented to his grave by David O. Selznick’s infatuation with and eventual theft of wife Jennifer Jones and committed, not long after Strangers on a Train finished shooting, to a mental institution, where he was the victim of an accidentally-lethal dose of sedative. Playing a character named after the kidnapper and murderer of the Lindbergh baby, Walker is Bruno, a spatted dandy who bumps shoes with hero Guy (Farley Granger–the “girl” in the Rope dyad) on a train and ostensibly hatches a plan with the pliant tennis star to “criss-cross” murders (trade assassinations, as it were), freeing each of them from the burden of blood motive. Bruno wants his father dead; Guy, involved in a very public affair with the senator’s daughter Anne (Ruth Roman) but shackled to loathsome Miriam (Kasey Rogers), would benefit from Miriam’s timely demise. So when Miriam turns up dead by Bruno’s hand, Guy is trapped by circumstance into either murdering Bruno’s dad or going to the police and implicating himself and his lover in a conspiracy.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) – Blu-ray Disc

October 30, 20121980s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras A
starring Grant Cramer, Suzanne Snyder, John Allen Nelson, John Vernon
screenplay by Charles Chiodo & Stephen Chiodo
directed by Stephen Chiodo

by Walter Chaw Boy, you know, I really like the Chiodo Brothers’ Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I can’t help it. I like it more than Night of the Creeps, more than Matinee, more than any other film that would see 1950s creature features resurrected, be it through homage or farce or satire. I like it because it’s unapologetic, and because its high concept is broad enough that there are sufficient gags to peanut-butter across the entire runtime. I like, too, that they don’t end a scene without a groaner, meaning they’re unerringly true to their stated mission of erecting a shrine to Irvin S. Yeaworth’s The Blob (truer, even, than the contemporaneous remake of The Blob) and doing it with a relentlessly light touch. It’s never scary (unless you’re a true coulrophobe), but it is often uproarious–like when one of the titular alien Bozos squirts angry Officer Mooney (John Vernon, just fantastic) with gag flowers, to which Mooney, out of proportion to the affront, responds, “I oughta shoot you right now.” I also appreciated the moment when head girl Debbie (Suzanne Snyder) asks why they’re being shot with popcorn and her boyfriend Mike (Grant Cramer) replies, “Popcorn? Because they’re clowns!” Well, no shit, Debbie, try to pay attention.

Night of the Living Dead (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

October 28, 20121990s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: George A. Romero, Horror, Zombie

Notld6

**½/**** Image C- Sound B Extras B
starring Tony Todd, Patricia Tallman, Tom Towles, McKee Anderson
screenplay by George A. Romero, based on the screenplay by John A. Russo and Romero
directed by Tom Savini

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is a watershed: a quintessential drive-in/B-movie that demonstrated without equivocation how horror/exploitation pictures are often “indicator species” in the cultural swamp–the ones that most quickly, most effectively locate the toxins in the ecosystem. Appearing in 1968, Night of the Living Dead addressed the rise of televangelism in its legion of communion-taking, slow-walking white people; predicted the generation gap (alongside Rosemary’s Baby) and a spate of evil-children flicks that appeared in the early-’70s; and spoke to the Civil Rights war in its blithe casting of black actor Duane Jones and not-so-blithe murder of his character by a posse of hillbilly vigilantes in the final frames. There’s something super-charged in the image of Jones holing up in a farmhouse with whiter-than-white, meeker-than-meek Barbra (Judith O’Dea), something explosive in the social microcosm represented by survivors trying, unsuccessfully, to work together to affect their escape from what’s really just a metaphorical threat. The movie resonated then; it resonates still.

Steel Magnolias (1989) – Blu-ray Disc

October 25, 20121980s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras D+
starring Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah
screenplay by Robert Harling, based on his play
directed by Herbert Ross

by Walter Chaw Submitted for your approval, shrill, neo-Tennessee Williams actress-posturing from the pantheon of late-’80s harpies, featuring a special martyr performance from a Julia Roberts just months away from achieving sociopathic superstardom as a high-priced whore in Pretty Woman. Not being able to relate to Herbert Ross’s demographically-precise Steel Magnolias in any way, I nevertheless see in its popularity an opportunity for introspection about how little I actually understand other peoples’ tastes. From my vantage, Steel Magnolias is two hours of nattering and bon mots set in a home-salon run by Truvy (Dolly Parton, the very definition of down-home warmth and genuineness), assisted by dizzy Arnelle (Daryl Hannah), and frequented by diabetic Shelby (Roberts), her mother M’Lynn (Sally Field), happy widow Clairee (Olympia Dukakis), and cranky widow Ouiser (Shirley MacLaine). Ouiser basically stalks around swearing like a sailor and getting shat on by birds, Clairee floats on momentum won (and fast flagging) from Moonstruck, and M’Lynn turns into MacLaine from Terms of Endearment. My favourite is when she force-feeds Shelby a glass of orange juice in a vision of Hell I’d like to one day mash-up with the brainwashing sequence from A Clockwork Orange. Along the way, the young ones become pregnant, a stray man wanders through now and again, and each of the grey old iron ladies gets a moment to demonstrate her humanity and humour in the face of life’s little, and big, tragedies.

The Raven (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

October 24, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Horror, Hungary, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring John Cusack, Luke Evans, Alice Eve, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Ben Livingston & Hannah Shakespeare
directed by James McTeigue

by Walter Chaw I’m no nineteenth-century cop, but I personally would begin by interrogating the guillotine-pendulum maker. James McTeigue’s abominable The Raven posits legendary Marylander Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) as a crazed, alcoholic, frustrated-artist type who has a bar tab the length of his arm to go with a fiery temper and a quite-requited, it turns out, affair with toothy Emily (from Aardman Studios: Alice Eve), daughter of Captain Hamilton (Brendan Gleeson). Alack-alay, what should happen but a wax museum breaks out as a critics-hating serial killer (just like Theatre of Blood, which I should’ve revisited instead) enacts scenes from Poe’s stories whilst dressed in the hat and cape of McTeigue’s V for Vendetta protag. Good copper Det. Fields (Luke Evans) is hot on the miscreant’s trail, enlisting Poe as a Poe expert to try to get one step ahead of the well-read marauder. There is, alas, no ratiocination the equal of the mystery of Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare’s (no relation, I hope) bewilderingly bad screenplay. No one, no one, could deliver these lines–a mush of anachronistic phrases and “period” posh–with conviction, much less the miscast Cusack and a motley band of supporting players. The good news is that The Raven is funny. The bad news is that it’s so awful, it makes you the kind of person who watches a movie just to be superior to it.