Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 57 of 146

The Rite (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

August 1, 20122011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Hungary, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Anthony Hopkins, Colin O'Donoghue, Alice Braga, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Michael Petroni, suggested by the book by Matt Baglio
directed by Mikael Håfström

by Walter Chaw Though it's not particularly surprising that The Rite isn't scary or innovative, it is a bit of a surprise that The Rite doesn't completely suck. It's not good, but there's some ambition in its tale of a tortured seminarian. Michael (Colin O'Donoghue) is dealing with his odd childhood at the knee of his dad, a widower and overzealous mortician (Rutger Hauer), as well as a crisis of faith handily addressed by the traumatic, traffic-related death of an innocent whom God, the picture suggests, throws in front of a truck to get Michael to reconsider leaving the priesthood. In the same stroke, God cripples Michael's mentor, Father Matthew (Toby Jones), leading one to revisit Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star" for a dose of non-Scriptural skepticism and rage if one were so inclined. No matter, as Michael, because of his lack of squeamishness, is packed off to The Vatican to attend a modern exorcism school. Which is also something of a surprise, I guess–that said exorcism school really exists and is alive and well, well into the 21^st century. Although that surprise is ameliorated a little by the fact that Catholicism also still believes in a literal transubstantiation of the host. Small wonder that Catholicism is my favourite Christian sect.

“Miracle Mile” by Walter Chaw — NOW ON SALE

July 24, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Books About Movies

If you follow our Facebook or Twitter accounts, you’re probably aware that we’ve had another book in the works for quite some time. Today that book–Miracle Mile, by Walter Chaw–finally goes on sale.

In the tradition of Jonathan Lethem’s They Live monograph and the 33⅓ series of longform album reviews, Miracle Mile offers a mix of cultural commentary, film criticism, and memoir as Walter dissects Miracle Mile‘s therapeutic function in his life following a traumatic event in the summer of 1989.

Blood Work (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 20122000s, 2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
starring Clint Eastwood, Wanda De Jesús, Jeff Daniels, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Michael Connelly
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw You can figure out the pivotal clue in Blood Work if not by the title alone–which gives altogether too much away–then surely come the thirty-minute mark. You can deduce the identity of the murderer as soon as he saunters on screen, and you can predict the love story almost before it happens just by dint of the kind of movie that Blood Work is. The only thing you can’t figure out is why Clint Eastwood, who sometimes makes interesting movies like Bird, A Perfect World, White Hunter, Black Heart, and Unforgiven, almost as often makes boring, predictable, prosaic movies like The Rookie (1990), Absolute Power, True Crime, and now Blood Work.

Savages (2012)

July 5, 20122012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Blake Lively, Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson, John Travolta
screenplay by Shane Salerno & Don Winslow & Oliver Stone, based on the novel by Winslow
directed by Oliver Stone

by Walter Chaw Another disgusting piece of crap that Oliver Stone makes watchable and even fitfully interesting, Savages sees Stone returning to ground he already plowed in Salvador, his screenplay for Scarface, and arguably his best film in hindsight, the filthy U-Turn. One possible excuse for its foulness, in an ocean of possible excuses, is a cast headlined by Taylor Kitsch, the new Paul Walker; Aaron Johnson, the new Skeet Ulrich; and Blake Lively, the new…I don’t know, Bridget Fonda? Another possible explanation is a godawful script by Don Winslow (author of the novel upon which the film is based), Shane Salerno, and Stone hissownself that opens with a ridiculously bad voiceover tease and ends with same, sandwiching in between a tale of blissed-out California marijuana kingpins Chon (Kitsch) and Ben (Johnson) vs. the Mexican cartel, led by Lado (the always amazing Benicio Del Toro) and Elena (Salma Hayek). Sound awful? It’s awful. And it would have been even without an embarrassing John Travolta, wheedling and whinging through an entire performance as a corrupt DEA agent. With him, however, Savages at least has the benefit of occasionally elevating from entirely-useless to sometimes-whimsical camp artifact.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

July 2, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Sally Field
screenplay by James Vanderbilt
directed by Marc Webb

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The only reason for choosing (500) Days of Summer helmer Marc Webb to steer the Spider-Man property in a new direction is the hope that Webb would somehow inject into it a twee, precious, emo-romantic pheromone irresistible to Zooey Deschanel-brand nerd-chicks. Think: Twilight for girls who aren’t illiterate. It’s not a bad movie in and of itself, but I’m ambivalent about its nominal success, just because rebooting a franchise that’s still so fresh (Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 was a mere five years ago) proves a terrible distraction. As much as I like Andrew Garfield, the new Peter Parker, I spent a lot of time comparing his performance to Tobey Maguire’s in the same role (ditto Emma Stone (the new Gwen Stacey) and Kirsten Dunst (the former Mary Jane)) and wondering what Raimi would have done with a Lizard (Rhys Ifans) voiced/motion-captured by Dylan Baker, had he been allowed to finally pay off that thread. I spent a lot of time, too, distracted by cool emo touches, like having Peter decorate his room with a lovely, vintage Rear Window poster, ostensibly because this Parker is soulful enough a 17-year-old to not only have seen the film but also perhaps modelled his own photography jones after that film’s shutterbug protagonist. But what about Rear Window‘s hero being a voyeur? A scene early on in The Amazing Spider-Man where Parker snaps a surreptitious photo of Gwen hints at a draft of the screenplay that maybe wanted to deal with Parker as a real, honest-to-goodness fucked-up kid. Sad that only moments now and again suggest any kind of depth or greater purpose. Sad, too, that the movie’s not otherwise exciting or innovative.

Deliverance (1972) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD/(DigiBook) – Blu-ray Disc

June 27, 2012****/****, 1970s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Thriller

****/****
DVD – Image B Sound C Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox
screenplay by James Dickey, based on his novel
directed by John Boorman

by Walter Chaw Deliverance is mesmerizing. Emerging fully formed from the rich, black loam of the best period of filmmaking definitely in the United States and possibly in the history of cinema, it pistons its roots unerringly into the darkest corners of our species’ memory. In the second-most memorable moment of the film (the one where kind-hearted city-slicker Drew (Ronny Cox) eases into a guitar/banjo duel with a local kid (Billy Redden)), Boorman dangles the possibility that there could be civility between the spoilers and the spoiled before retracting it for the remainder of the picture’s running time. If Boorman is our pre-eminent keeper of the Arthurian legend, it’s useful to wonder in this particular quest undertaken what are the dark spirits of the wood, and what is the grail? The final image of the piece, after all, suggests a corruption of the Excalibur iconography offered from some fathomless underneath. The essential Western phallus is perverted in Deliverance into the promise that the primal will never be repressed for long.

Being John Malkovich (1999) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 25, 2012****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw The moment you realize that Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich is more than just another ultra-high-concept indie calling-card is right at the end, when all that quirk reveals itself as bleak, desperate, lonesome. It’s the first time most of us conceptualized the idea of Charlie Kaufman, in fact–the moment that any follow-up became a cause célèbre. It’s silly, really, to bother trying to synopsize the film, but for the uninitiated, it’s about a failed puppeteer’s discovery of a portal behind a file cabinet on the low-ceilinged floor of an office designed for the dwarf wife of a sea captain. (“Curs-ed t’ing,” he calls her.) The portal leads, of course, to the inside of John Malkovich’s skull for around fifteen minutes before expelling the interloper to the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Looking here, it’s possible to begin to trace Kaufman’s auteur obsessions with interiors, with language (in a job interview hinged on malaproprisms and miscommunications), with doubling, identity, surrealism, systems of belief, and, sneakily, science-fiction. What’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, after all, but a fairly extraordinary SF piece that just happens to be one of the best movies about love ever made?

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.