Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 57 of 146

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

June 20, 20122012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Horror, Russia, Superhero, Vampire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Benjamin Walker, Dominic Cooper, Anthony Mackie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith and Simon Kinberg, based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith
directed Timur Bekmambetov

by Walter Chaw That idiot Timur Bekmambetov continues his reign of terror with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, an adaptation of a Seth Grahame-Smith novel co-written by Grahame-Smith himself that tries to walk the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies line between reverence and camp but only manages to be ugly and stupid. Abe’s (Benjamin Walker) superpower is honesty, natch–and a silver-coated axe. One night, as a child, after witnessing a vampire kill his mother but somehow not turn her into a vampire (vampires don’t fear the sunlight in this one, either, or at least fear it only as much as Edgar Winter does), Abe embarks on a vengeance-crusade aided by vampire hunter-trainer Henry (Dominic Cooper). Henry has a secret! It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter inspires a sense of absolute despair and hopelessness in the viewer, as it’s not just bad, it’s misguided in every way a film can be misguided, from conception to execution. There’s a horse-stampede fight, a burning bridge and a train, grotesque misuse of slow-motion and CGI, and nary a naked Angelina Jolie anywhere to leaven the stew. I want to muster up some outrage at the portrayal of Confederate soldiers as bloodsucking legions of the damned, but that actually strikes me as the least offensive of the film’s myriad offenses.

Brave (2012)

June 20, 20122012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
screenplay by Mark Andrews and Steve Purcell and Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi
directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman

by Walter Chaw Brave…isn’t. Not very. It’s by far the most conventional Pixar film, and while it’s better than either Cars, that’s only because the Cars movies are simply awful. Brave has a plucky girl heroine who disobeys her mother, makes a hash of things, then solves everything at the end through the murder of the antagonist. It has an adorable animal sidekick (three of them, actually), treats an entire culture like a broad ethnic joke, and misses every single opportunity to be about something. Huzzah! When we say as a culture that something’s for children, we mean that it’s better–unless we’re talking about media culture. Brave is for children, and its only connection to things like WALL·E, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, or Ratatouille is its company’s pedigree, fading fast until Brad Bird or Andrew Stanton decides to strap ’em on and jump back in the ol’ computer-animated saddle, riding to the rescue as the company founded on their beautiful complexities descends into absolute, uncontroversial, shallow mendacity.

Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (2012)

June 7, 20122012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical

***/****
screenplay by Eric Darnell and Noah Baumbach
directed by Eric Darnell, Conrad Vernon, Tom McGrath

by Walter Chaw Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (hereafter Madagascar 3) is easily the best one yet and the product, I’ll bet, of co-directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath’s foray into the rigors of gag-writing for an animated TV series (“The Penguins of Madagascar”)–though I wouldn’t discount the influence of credited screenwriter Noah Baumbach, either. Madagascar 3 is deeply involved in surrealism, rivalling Disney’s pink elephants on parade in a circus sequence that, if not as good as Dumbo‘s, is not as good because it’s scored by a genuinely dreadful Katy Perry song. The picture’s so cheerfully, indefatigably strange, in fact, that at times it approaches the Golden Age of Looney Tunes. It’s an effervescent little artifact housing a psychotic, bestial gendarme named Capt. Chantel DuBois (voiced maniacally by Frances McDormand), who, in a moment of extreme cultural insensitivity, rouses her comatose henchmen with a rendition of Edith Piaf’s “Non, He Ne Regrette Rien,” right there in an Italian ICU. The picture is lawless in this way: Chris Rock’s Marty the Zebra has never been blacker (his signature song this time around has something to do with a circus afro), David Schwimmer’s Melman the Giraffe was never more of a kvetch, Bryan Cranston’s Russian tiger Vitaly is depressed and bellicose, and Martin Short’s brilliantly-conceived sea lion Stefano is enthusiastically, effervescently, Roberto Benigni-stupidly Italian.

Prometheus (2012)

June 6, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, UK

*/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Charlize Theron
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw It’s time, probably long past time, to admit that Ridley Scott is nothing more or less than Tim Burton: a visual stylist at the mercy of others to offer his hatful of pretty pictures something like depth. If either one of them ever made a great film (and I’d argue that both have), thank the accident of the right source material and/or editor, not these directors, whose allegiance is to their own visual auteurism rather than any desire for a unified product. For Scott, the conversation essentially begins and ends for me with Alien, Blade Runner, and Black Hawk Down (for most, it’s just the first two, with a political nod to Thelma & Louise)–genre films, all, and each about the complications of mendacity given over to lush, stylish excess: the gothic, biomechanical haunted house of Alien‘s Nostromo mining vehicle and its hapless band of blue-collar meatbags; the meticulously detailed Angelino diaspora of Blade Runner and its Raymond Chandler refugee; and Mark Bowden’s Mogadishu, transformed in Black Hawk Down into a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Again, there’s that utility. Without it, Scott’s films are impenetrable monuments to style, as smooth and affectless as a perfume advertisement–and the more you watch them, the less memorable that style becomes.

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

May 30, 20122012, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, Sam Claflin
screenplay by Evan Daugherty and John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw A handful of arresting images aside (and even those owe more than a passing debt to artist Bev Doolittle, or Terry Gilliam minus the tchotchkes–and here’s Lily Cole again, post-Parnassus), Rupert Sanders’s dreary Snow White and the Huntsman plods along without much sense on its way to producing not much with little impact and no purpose. Though beaten to it by Gary Oldman’s legendary turn in the inexplicable Tiptoes, it has a gaggle of hale British actors playing dwarves, including a humiliated Bob Hoskins, tasked with being blind-guy exposition for little miss Joan of Arc. And it has a gorgeous Charlize Theron, demonstrating in full fetish-wear that she has no idea she’s in a Twilight ripper by turning in a pretty good character performance as an evil step-witch who’s spent way too much time reading The Beauty Myth. Indeed, the Big Bad Wolf in this fairytale is Naomi Wolf.

John Carter (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD

May 27, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon, based on A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by Andrew Stanton

by Walter Chaw Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote grand, incendiary pulp. He in fact defined pulp for me as a kid, not so much with his Tarzan, but with his Barsoom. I remember the Gino D’Achille covers for the Ballantine run of the books, all eleven of them, and I remember how excited I felt once I finally completed my collection of them at a mildew-smelling (delicious) used bookstore that didn’t know what it had. It’s easy to forget the thrill of those discoveries in the pre-Internet bazaar. When I was on the fence about buying a Kindle last Christmas, I saw that Burroughs’s complete run of Barsoom (i.e., John Carter of Mars) novels was available for free; now I own a Kindle. Rereading the series this past year in preparation for Andrew Stanton’s John Carter, I was reminded of the scope of Burroughs’s work–its sociology, its uncompromising stance on religion, its unabashed chivalry and romance; when I read Sir Walter Scott years later, it couldn’t hold a candle to Burroughs. Barsoom was my gateway to works by Burroughs contemporaries H.P. Lovecraft (compare what Carter finds at the gate of the River Iss with the arctic nightmare of At the Mountains of Madness and tell me they didn’t influence one another) and Robert E. Howard, but at the end of it all was always, for me, Barsoom. I’ve been waiting for a big-budget, prestige presentation of this property for almost as long as I waited for the Star Wars prequels–and if I’m not as disappointed, it’s only because Episode I killed much of what was disappointable in me. John Carter is garbage.

Amadeus: Director’s Cut (1984/2002) – [Two-Disc Special Edition] DVD + [DigiBook] Blu-ray Disc

May 23, 20121980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Musical

Peter Shaffer's Amadeus: Director's Cut
***/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
BD – Image B Sound A Extras A
starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow
screenplay by Peter Shaffer, based on his play
directed by Milos Forman

by Walter Chaw Bringing the highbrow to the status-hungry middle in the same way as those "Bach's Greatest Hits" collections and the awful faux-llies of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Milos Forman's bawdy, jittery adaptation of Peter Shaffer's fanciful play "Amadeus" is not so much about Mozart as it is about genius and its burden on the mediocre. Mozart (Tom Hulce) is an adolescent boor touched by the hand of God; Emperor Joseph's (Jeffrey Jones) court composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) becomes obsessed and desperately jealous of Mozart's gift, leading him to the madhouse and confessions of murder. Amadeus works because of Forman's gift for the seedy (and portraying asylums–he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, after all) and because of Abraham's deeply-felt performance.

Spellbound (1945) – Blu-ray Disc

May 13, 20121940s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock

*/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras B
starring Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov, Leo G. Carroll
screenplay by Ben Hecht, suggested by Francis Beeding’s novel The House of Dr. Edwardes
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw It’s tempting to give Hitchcock’s Spellbound a pass because there’s a good chance the whole thing was intended as either a childish, depressive prankster’s most expensive prank or a passive-aggressive jab at Selznick (or, more than likely, both). Tempting, because like all of Hitchcock’s films, its qualities are directly relatable to Hitch’s own inconquerable peccadilloes. In a movie that’s essentially about an individual’s ability, or lack thereof, to banish his or her personal demons, Spellbound gets a little credit just for being so damned ironic for the fact of it. It’s successful, in other words, if its intention was to be a disaster–a grenade offered up to a hated creative rival (Hitch would pretend the camera was broken whenever Selznick visited the set, only to have it spring back to life upon his departure) as a gambit to not only get closer to getting out of his seven-year contract with Selznick, but also provide celluloid testimony to the fact that, contract or not, he’s nobody’s bitch. It makes sense, too, to recruit Ben Hecht–he of Lifeboat and later Notorious, it’s true, but of His Girl Friday and The Shop Around the Corner as well–to write a script packed to the gills with bad screwball and Catskills Freud bits, the better to put David O.’s much-ballyhooed therapy out there formulated to the motion picture frame. This is Hitchcock ridiculing his boss on the most conspicuous stage one could imagine and, here’s the punchline, using that same boss’s money to do so. Let’s feel safe in surmising that when Hitch told Selznick he had the perfect idea for a movie about Selznick’s new psychotherapy jones (brought on in part by his affair with Jennifer Jones, no doubt), he wasn’t suddenly, spontaneously displaying compassion and the desire to collaborate with Selznick.

The Lady Vanishes (1938) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 9, 20121930s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Mystery, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

Ladyvanishescap3small

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood, Paul Lukas, Cecil Parkerscreenplay by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw There’s something ephemeral about Ms. Froy (Dame May Whitty), from her sudden appearance at a hotel desk to her first words obscured by ambient noise, to her initial exit facilitated by an invisible hand. She seems from the start a metaphor, the first of Hitchcock’s women-as-metaphor, leading up to his gaggle of Birds and an unlikely companion in that way to the seagulls-into-women who discover a body at the beginning of the previous year’s Young and Innocent. She occupies a space as well with the unnamed second Mrs. De Winter in Hitch’s American debut, Rebecca: a cipher, without an identity of her own, the MacGuffin made flesh and the embodiment, in The Lady Vanishes, of perhaps the director’s desire to pursue his career across the pond, with only a contractual obligation to Jamaica Inn standing in his way. (The Lady Vanishes starts in a way station, yes? Gateway to greater adventure.) Indeed, the picture cemented David O. Selznick’s interest in Hitchcock, the irony being that unlike the majority of his work before and after, The Lady Vanishes‘ production was already well underway before he hopped onto the saddle. On second thought, maybe it was the idea that Hitchcock could be a hired gun that attracted Selznick–a belief that holds countless ironies of its own.

Vertigo (1958) – Universal Legacy Series DVD

May 7, 2012****/****, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore
screenplay by Alec Coppel & Samuel Taylor, based on the novel D’Entre Les Morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. What Vertigo lacks that others of Alfred Hitchcock’s undisputed late masterpieces do not, just in terms of sheer bulk volume, is scholarship. Weird, because the film is Hitchcock’s most complex, albeit in many ways also his most opaque. It’s as if it defies analysis by being at once too obvious and too obscure, enough so that critical reads of it are inevitably both naïve and pompous. It’s true that attempts at unlocking the film are akin to diagnosing a particularly-disturbed patient’s dysfunction: that you’re fucked up is right there on the surface for everyone to see, but the reasons why are damnably difficult to beat from the grey bramble. Attempts to articulate what works about the picture invariably wind up describing the technical mechanism (the perspective distortion, the monumentalism, the voluminous and self-announcing rear projection) rather than the ineffable, perverse rapture that it provokes.

Marvel’s The Avengers (2012)

May 3, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero

The Avengers
**½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Joss Whedon
directed by Joss Whedon

by Walter Chaw Joss Whedon delivers his definitive artistic statement with the completely inoffensive, agreeably stupid Marvel’s The Avengers. It’s a giant, loud, sloppy kiss planted right on the forehead of a fanboy contingent that will somehow find jealous dork solidarity in the largest product excreted this year by a Hollywood machinery that’s the playground now of Whedons and Apatows and Farrellys, where it used to be the domain of John Fords and Sam Peckinpahs and Von Sternbergs. Not a full-grown man among them, they’re drunk on power and nerd cred, making references to their references and amazed that someone like Scarlett Johansson returns their calls (or that they could be married to someone like Leslie Mann in a world not gone mad). The Avengers is a brilliant balance of indecipherable against crowd-pleasing, with bouncy fight scenes, one-liners as character development, and the absolute confidence that everyone in the audience has on purpose seen each of the films designed as a prequel to this one. As the pendulum swings back to pleasuring 18-year-old boys vs. 16-year-old girls (despite Titanic in 3D‘s attempts at swinging it back), take heart that if, at the end, it only reminds of the loudest, most expensive team-up episode of “Shazam!”, it at least has the sense to deliver the best Hulk moments…ever.

The Bodyguard (1992) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

May 2, 20121990s, 2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music, Romance, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras C
BLU-RAY – Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Kevin Costner, Whitney Houston, Gary Kemp, Bill Cobbs
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Mick Jackson

by Walter Chaw Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston have a conversation about Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (whose title means “The Bodyguard”) in the middle of Mick Jackson’s hilarious camp artifact The Bodyguard, the one where Costner plays a barely-vocal lunk and Houston plays a singer-turned-actress with severe personality flaws. And that little chat, occupying a minute-and-a-half or so of screentime, encapsulates everything that’s priceless about this flick: It’s stupid, embarrassing, and watered-down, but it’s also surreal, queer, and hermetically sealed in a rhinestone-studded mason jar. Have no fear, though, as that revelatory discussion of one of the great films in world cinema segues in record time into a heartfelt rumination on the lyrics of a Dolly Parton song and then into a courtship ritual involving a big samurai sword and a piece of silk. Is Kevin going to sheathe his blue steel in Whitney’s purple scarf? Ah, the decadent ribaldry! What could it all mean?

Shame (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 26, 2012****/****, 2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, UK

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D+
starring Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale, Nicole Baharie
screenplay by Steve McQueen and Abi Morgan
directed by Steve McQueen

by Walter Chaw Brandon is a cipher from beginning to end, and while that’s usually a detriment, in Steve McQueen’s extraordinary, gruelling Shame, it’s key to why the whole thing works. Even better is that Brandon, a widely-presumed sex addict (to my mind, the film works better without a pop diagnosis), is played by Michael Fassbender, he of the matinee-idol looks and piercing green eyes. It’s interesting that what he plays best is ambiguity (next up: a robot in Prometheus), an unknowable quality that inspired McQueen’s previous installation piece, Hunger, making the lonesome protest of hunger-striker Bobby Sands into a holy mystery, a relic unknowable and his English bull tormentors Romans with spears knowing not what they do. No less ecclesiastical, Shame is a feature-length indulgence and scourging, making it fair to wonder if McQueen’s aim isn’t to assail each of the Deadly Sins in due course–his own septet on glowing, adjoined celluloid panels. It’s a great explanation of the title, and makes me wonder if the next one won’t be “Avarice.” Anyway, the film only works because Fassbender is beautiful. Ugly guys don’t get to be ashamed of sex.

The Ghost Writer: FFC Interviews “The Innkeepers” Writer-Director Ti West

April 24, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

THE INNKEEPERS writer-director Ti West on the right way to use a train set

April 23, 2012|The irony of identifying Ti West as a member of the new guard in the horror genre is twofold in that first, there doesn’t appear to be a new guard in the horror genre, and secondly, if he does represent a revolution, it’s a revolution in retrograde. What seems refreshing about West’s films, particularly his lauded The House of the Devil and now The Innkeepers, is his dedication to character-driven pictures, shot on real film, with long takes and small moments–a babysitter listening to The Fixx on her Walkman, an asthmatic girl struggling to take out the garbage–that build, gradually, to “the goods” in the finale.

In conversation, West is direct to the verge of impatient, quick with unguarded opinions and apparently weary of the usual junket questions. I didn’t, therefore, ask him to rehash the story about meeting Kelly McGillis over Skype, or how cast and crew stayed at the Yankee Pedlar in Connecticut while filming The House of the Devil and how fortunate it was that they didn’t stay at a chain (specifically The Marriott) during that time, because it would have killed The Innkeepers in its cradle. I didn’t want to rehash the 17-day shoot, the strict limits on stock and the fear that they wouldn’t be able to complete the film should any reshoots be necessary…

But I did want to ask Mr. West about his relationship to FFC fave Larry Fessenden, producer for all of West’s films (except Cabin Fever 2, which was taken away from West–for reasons I also didn’t wish to rehash) to date. We spoke briefly via telephone last Wednesday in conjunction with the Blu-ray release of The Innkeepers.–Walter Chaw

The Woman in Black (2012) + The Innkeepers (2011)|The Innkeepers – Blu-ray Disc

April 23, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE WOMAN IN BLACK
*/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Ciarán Hinds, Janet McTeer, Liz White
screenplay by Jane Goldman
directed by James Watkins

THE INNKEEPERS
***½/**** | Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis, George Riddle
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw A beautifully outfitted, brilliantly designed Victorian jack-in-the-box, James Watkins’s The Woman in Black will likely be remembered, if it’s remembered at all, as Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter commencement (given that no one saw December Boys). Alas, it squanders a pretty nice, ‘Tim Burton Sleepy Hollow‘ set-up in bumfuck England for a solid hour of crap jumping out of shadows. Popping up from behind bushes is startling, but it isn’t art (it’s not even clever), and at the end of the day, it’s only really entertaining if you or your date is a sixteen-year-old girl. Carrying the Hammer imprint and boasting production design so good that long stretches of the film are devoted to looking at it, the piece only ever honours its legacy and appearance with the brutality with which it handles its dead children and a delirious dinner scene in which a grief-besotted lady (Janet McTeer) treats her little dogs like babies and carves something on her dinner table whilst possessed of a hilarious fit. The rest of it is garbage.

Rebecca (1940) – Blu-ray Disc

April 21, 2012****/****, 1940s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Drama

****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, Judith Anderson
screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison;
adaptation by Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan, based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
–“The Idea of Order at Key West,” Wallace Stevens

Let’s take a moment to talk about water.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012) + Lockout (2012)

April 20, 20122012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS
*/****
starring Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz
screenplay by Joss Whedon & Drew Goddard
directed by Drew Goddard

LOCKOUT
**/****
starring Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace, Vincent Regan, Peter Stormare
screenplay by Stephen Saint Leger, James Mather & Luc Besson
directed by Saint & Mather

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Drew Goddard’s (and Joss Whedon’s, you won’t be able to forget) unfortunate giant middle finger The Cabin in the Woods takes a shit-eating high-concept only to do nothing interesting with it for about 80 of its 100 minutes. Because the high concept is the crux of the film and the elbow of the argument, as they say, stop right here if you want to stay a spoiler virgin. For me, I went in not knowing anything about the movie–didn’t even see the trailer–on the back of assurances from many respected friends and colleagues that this was, in fact, a must-see for the genre fan. What I should have asked was, “What genre?” The Cabin in the Woods is Scream for what Joe Bob Briggs used to call “Spam in a cabin” flicks, in which a group of nubile youngsters piles into an unreliable junker to spend a fateful weekend in some backwoods hick oasis where they’re picked off, one by one, by some combination of demons and Ted Nugent. The difference being that Scream was cold, nihilistic, scary as hell, and a lovely example of the thing it was simultaneously deconstructing. The reason The Cabin in the Woods is neither revolutionary nor “ground-breaking” is that everything it does has already been done, repeatedly and better, and that rather than serving as a sterling example of that which it is trying to pinion (thus establishing its credibility as satire, see?), it’s really just another instalment in the live-action Scooby-Doo franchise.

Unforgiven (1992) – Blu-ray Disc (Digibook)

April 19, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Western

***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris
screenplay by David Webb Peoples
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Even if time and HBO’s “Deadwood” have made Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven into something less revisionist and more just a furthering of the Siegel/Leone mythology, the fact remains that the picture’s earned its place in the company of other flawed masterpieces like The Searchers and The Man from Laramie. At the time of its release in 1992, as my editor Bill once ably laid out, its pending release was actually seen as a joke, earned at the expense of a trio of legendary, completely indefensible flops. Its serious-mindedness–what appeared to be an unsentimental accounting for the remorseless bastards Eastwood had parlayed into immortality–therefore took audiences expecting another Heartbreak Ridge, “western edition,” by surprise.

Goon (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Sports, Theatrical

***/****
starring Seann William Scott, Jay Baruchel, Alison Pill, Liev Schreiber
screenplay by Jay Baruchel & Evan Goldberg
directed by Michael Dowse

by Walter Chaw The best hockey movie since Slap Shot and the most pleasant and well-meaning Canuck-sploitation flick since Strange Brew, Michael Dowse’s Goon is a prime example of how to make an insightful guy-movie without indulging in the cheap scatology of American Pie and its offspring. Not that there’s anything wrong with cheap scatology, mind, only that it seems played-out, and so it’s something of a revelation to find that franchise’s own secret weapon, Seann William “Stifler” Scott (who, let’s face it, is impossible not to like ever since he was brought to orgasm through manual stimulation of his prostate in that franchise), so quiet and unassuming in the title role as dim, sweet Doug Glatt. Doug’s a natural-born bouncer in an armpit dive, see, who, after laying out a local bruiser taking his beef into the stands, is offered a shot at becoming a full-time enforcer for a bus-and-motel league. He shows up at his first practice wobbly in figure skates, proceeds to give his teammates a sound beating for their hooted derision, and is promptly called up to the bigger minor-league team the Halifax Highlanders.

The Hunger Games (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Gary Ross and Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray, based on the novel by Collins
directed by Gary Ross

by Walter Chaw Now that the United States has remade Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, it’s fair to wonder when it’ll tackle Ichi the Killer or Tetsuo, the Iron Man. It’s all part of a greater conversation around what it is that made the U.S. more sympathetic to Japan after 9/11, whereas before, films like Fukasaku’s grim little sociological masterpiece were seen as contraband in America. Marinating in social superiority only gets you so far, I guess, until the detonation of a WMD over a civilian population suddenly redraws the lines and changes your worldview. It’s no accident that Suzanne Collins’s series of tween dystopia books is wildly popular in this post-millennial zeitgeist–no accident, either, come to think of it, that the “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” books, featuring brutal rape and unforgivable fantasy vigilantism (and a fetching girl-hero, it bears mentioning), were the rage of blueblood, blue-haired reading circles: grandma in the Times Square grindhouse circa 1974. What’s genuinely frightening about the wide, middlebrow acceptance of such traditionally deviant fare is that it’s a glimpse into what happens when a country founded by Puritans suddenly has its apocalyptic paranoia and hardwired xenophobia briefly confirmed. If you’re a Republican with a moral barometer in these, our United States of America in 2012, take a good, hard look at what’s happened to your party and tell me that I’m wrong. It takes a hell of a lot of crazy to make Margaret Atwood seem prophetic–to make Mel Gibson trend towards the middle.