Minority Report (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

April 19, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller, Tom Cruise

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, based on the short story by Philip K. Dick
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Despite a remarkable first hour, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report washes out as an overlong retread of tired thriller/mystery elements capped by the director's trademark propensity for moralizing epilogues. It suffers from mainstream cinema's squeamishness in regards to true ambiguity of character and character motivation, and for all its claims to a faithful reproduction of Philip K. Dick's dark dystopian future, the picture is ultimately about Spielberg's itch for restoration of order rather than Dick's entropic dissolution of it. Distracting and unforgivable plot holes yaw beneath the narrative, making it clear that Minority Report is just another failed attempt by Spielberg to tell an adult tale. Here is an attractively packaged summer bonbon with an essentially hollow, nutritionally empty centre.

The Wolfman (2010)

April 17, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, Werewolf

***/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving
screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self
directed by Joe Johnston

Wolfmanby Walter Chaw Gloriously, exuberantly awful, Joe Johnston's tone-perfect, imperfect-perfect update of Universal's horror legacy begs at any moment for grieving Gwen (Emily Blunt) to cry out, "He. Vas. My. BOYfriend!" It's easily the funniest movie I've seen in what seems forever–a comedy of imitation that clarifies, if anything, the extent to which our condescension to films from the '40s allows us to enjoy the Universal monster movies without irony. Not so lucky is this product of the post-modern era in which absolutely the only way to enjoy the film in any defensible way is to profess a deep knowledge and affection for the works of James Whale, Lon Chaney, and all the boys at the old studio who found themselves, not long into their run, making movie-mashups and Abbott & Costello vehicles. At the least, this redux demonstrates some respect for its source material, from its retro effects (credited to ace werewolf guy Rick Baker) to its joyful inability to assemble anything like a coherent narrative from the various bits and pieces Johnston and company have thrown into a bucket and then onto the screen. Consider the transition from a bloody, fountain-side flashback of dead mommy to prodigal son Lawrence (Benicio Del Toro) descending a few steps into a mysterious torture chamber beneath some kind of estate-bound cemetery, where his dad (Anthony Hopkins), eyes glowing mysteriously, advises that the beast "will out." It's really just a collection of non-sequiturs, of scenes that don't fit together in a landscape with no scale (Lawrence takes a full month to walk sixteen miles from London to his house and still manages to beat his carriage-riding pursuers there), strung together willy-nilly by Oedipal suggestions the film is clearly incapable, and uninterested, in exploring. The Wolfman is a big, giant, dumb movie made with such breathtaking stupidity that it actually ends with a "wolf-out" battle royale like the one in Mike Nichols's Wolf–the difference being that The Wolfman doesn't appear to take itself the tiniest bit seriously.

Kick-Ass (2010)

April 16, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Nicolas Cage, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Mark Strong, Nicolas Cage
screenplay by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, based on the comic book by Mark Millar & John Romita Jr.
directed by Matthew Vaughn

Kickassby Walter Chaw A wonderfully unlikely amalgam of Hong Kong-era John Woo and Shaolin Soccer/Kung Fu Hustle–era Stephen Chow, Matthew Vaughn's ebullient, often-unconscionable Kick-Ass reimagines Woo's iconic Tequila as an 11-year-old girl with a purple bob, an incredible potty mouth (she uses the "C" word correctly in a sentence, cunts), and absolutely no remorse in crushing a defenseless douchebag in a car cuber. Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) is destined to be an icon, a more popular tattoo-parlour fave than Calvin in evoking the cheerful, insouciant lawlessness of misdirected youth. Far from truly groundbreaking, though, sober minds could only identify her as a continuation of that quintessentially American, Huck Finn tradition of children as collective, societal Id and trickster gods. She's even employed in the picture as a punitive, apolitical, unapologetic champion of order who limits her victims to drug-dealers and gangsters, those disturbers of civilization. As her father (Nicolas Cage) clarifies in response to her unconventional upbringing, it's not his blame to shoulder, but arch-baddie Frank D'Amico's.

The Lord of the Rings (1978) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

April 15, 2010Posted in1970s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, Musical, Spain, UK

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
**½/****
DVD – Image C Sound C-
BD – Image C+ Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle, based on The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Ralph Bakshi

by Walter Chaw An adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Rings" books that began with The Fellowship of the Ring and ended when the money ran out in the middle of The Two Towers, Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated feature The Lord of the Rings is unintentionally disturbing, occasionally brilliant, and fatally uneven. The film is faithful to the main movements of Tolkien's novels but told in the kind of narrative shorthand that favours truncation over summary. Its rotoscoping of actors combines uneasily with traditional modes of animation: they mix into an abstract soup of contradictory images that destroys our suspension of disbelief.

Night Moves (1975) – DVD

April 14, 2010Posted in****/****, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Edward Binns, Susan Clark
screenplay by Alan Sharp
directed by Arthur Penn

Nightmovescapby Walter Chaw On the strength of his scripts for The Hired Hand, Ulzana’s Raid, and Night Moves, Scottish novelist Alan Sharp seems well at home with the better-known, more highly-regarded writers and directors of the New American Cinema. Sharp’s screenplays are marked by a narrative complexity and situations gravid with implication and doom.1 Take the moment in the Arthur Penn-helmed Night Moves where broken-down P.I. Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman, reuniting with Penn for the first time since Bonnie and Clyde), after discovering a body in a sunken wreck off the coast of Florida, watches as his two sleazeball hosts (John Crawford and Jennifer Warren)–who’ve previously exchanged an odd nod and a knowing glance in which something is silently decided about how to handle this new, inquisitive element dropped in their midst–break into a broken tango to a tune on the radio. Harry salutes them in a way that suggests he understands what the hell is going on and shuffles off to bed. It’s one of the most harrowing moments in a harrowing decade of film, and nothing much happens in it except for the look Hackman gives as a damned soul caught on the horns of an unknowable mystery. The seduction scene that immediately ensues reminds in cadence and pace of the dream sequence from Hackman’s earlier The Conversation: “Where were you when Kennedy died?” “Which Kennedy?” “I dunno, any Kennedy.” Hackman is anchored to this period because he so ably portrays the everyman who desires enlightenment against the pervasive belief that there’s no longer hope for anything like enlightenment in this post-Vietnam/post-Watergate dystopia–that the solution to everything that’s wrong in this world is, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The slow, looping circles the boat “Point of View” describes at the end of the picture constitute perhaps the most trenchant metaphor for all of the New American Cinema.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

April 5, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Max Records, Catherine Keener, Lauren Ambrose, Mark Ruffalo
screenplay by Spike Jonze & Dave Eggers, based on the book by Maurice Sendak
directed by Spike Jonze 

Mustownby Walter Chaw Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are is the product of an artist who may only be able to assimilate art and the creation of it through the filter of celluloid and the music that animates its flickers. More, there’s the suggestion in its depth of emotion that this may be the only way Jonze knows to communicate at all, and so he tasks it to capture the breadth of human experience. If the “film brats” of the New American Cinema were the first reared on a diet of the French New Wave and critical theory, this new post-modernism to which Jonze belongs consists of artists reared on the entire panoply of popular culture…and maybe nothing else. What other explanation is there for the elasticity and strangeness of films by people like Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino? They create works that strive towards the ineffable, seemingly unaware of film’s limitations and therefore undaunted by ideas of what’s possible.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

April 1, 2010Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Norway, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller

Män som hatar kvinnor
*/****
starring Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Peter Haber
screenplay by Nikolaj Arcel, Rasmus Heisterberg, based on a novel by Stieg Larsson
directed by Niels Arden Oplev

Girlwithdragontattooby Walter Chaw Slick and overproduced and poised for a David Fincher-helmed American redux, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor), Niels Arden Oplev’s adaptation of the first of the late Steig Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy,” falls off the exploitation tightrope. The titular flicka may be insane in the mainframe, but when she gets naked and straddles, cowgirl-style, an old guy while resisting even the notion of a committed relationship, it is only what it is. It doesn’t matter what her issues are, in other words, because she’s a hot twentysomething Goth-chick fantasy into computers and casual sex–and when I’m watching a representation of same, I’m not growing a conscience, I’m getting a hard-on. Imagine Elisha Cuthbert playing this role in the United States: on the one hand, it’s theoretically harrowing to see her tied up and raped; on the other hand, I’m not complaining about seeing a hot twentysomething actress tied to a bed, completely prone and naked, pretending to be raped. It’s the kind of playacting porn is discouraged from engaging in because it’s actually too illicit for porn–but it’s not too illicit for an arthouse import that’s allegedly trying to have a conversation about what happens to little girls who are sexually abused.

Clash of the Titans (2010)

April 1, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

½*/****
starring Sam Worthington, Gemma Arterton, Mads Mikkelsen, Liam Neeson
screenplay by Travis Beacham and Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi, based on the screenplay by Beverley Cross
directed by Louis Leterrier

Clashofthetitans2010by Walter Chaw Absolutely awful in absolutely the most boring way possible, Louis Leterrier's update of Ray Harryhausen's swan song is made several degrees worse by the decision to blur and dim everything via the exhaustively-touted wonder of 3-D. Why anyone would pay 15 cents much less 15 bucks for the privilege of watching this turgid mess is beyond me, but if you go you'll find exhaustively-touted wonder Sam Worthington mashing together his last two roles as Terminator and blue cat to embody Greek demigod Perseus, who's on an incomprehensible quest to, um, get into the pants of immortal slut Io (Gemma Arterton), I think. Familiarity with the source mythology actually a terrible impediment, better to take this Clash of the Titans at face value as Perseus sees his adopted family murdered by Hades (Ralph Fiennes) and petulantly rejects his newly-discovered status as the Son of Zeus (Liam Neeson). Hades, meanwhile, hatches a half-assed plan to freak out the good people of Argos in order to steal followers away from Zeus, making one pine in the process for not only the better-than-you-remember original, but also a couple of hours in front of any "God of War". All of which results in Perseus traveling a long way to somewhere ill-defined so as to encounter giant, domesticated scorpions, people covered in bad wood makeup who remind a lot of the Cyclops from zero-budgeted craptavaganza Krull (which also featured Liam Neeson in a bit part), and a CGI Medusa that makes Uma Thurman's recent snake-haired turn in The Lightning Thief seem, erm, deep. For my part, I kept waiting for the moment Perseus shoves his black Pegasus's tail up his ass before he can ride it. Fear not, the Kraken is released and revealed to be an aquatic Cloverfield that spends a lot of time sort of flailing around waiting for Perseus to kill him. Spoiler alert: he does.

Lost: The Complete Third Season (2006-2007) – Blu-ray Disc

March 30, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
"A Tale of Two Cities," "The Glass Ballerina," "Further Instructions," "Every Man for Himself," "The Cost of Living," "I Do," "Not in Portland," "Flashes Before Your Eyes," "Stranger in a Strange Land," "Tricia Tanaka is Dead," "Enter 77," "Par Avion," "The Man from Tallahassee," "Exposé," "Left Behind," "One of Us," "Catch-22," "D.O.C.," "The Brig," "The Man Behind the Curtain," "Greatest Hits," "Through the Looking Glass"

by Walter Chaw By now, "Lost" is resolving as an interminable adaptation of that old PC puzzle game "Myst": lush environments, episodic brain teasers of medium intensity, and a mystery revolving around the failed construction of a society that suffers from a paucity of real forward momentum. The rate at which new characters are introduced accelerates rapidly in Season Three as Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are taken by the Ben-led Others to a neighbouring island on which the Others have built a quiet little bedroom community complete with outdoor cages, a surgical theatre, and a book-club. (This month's selection? Of all things, Stephen King's Carrie.) It's all very "Days of Our Lives"–particularly that show's supernatural stint from a decade or so ago which saw purportedly massacred citizens of Salem actually spirited away to the secluded island of Melaswen. Is "Lost" the further adventures of our Melaswen castaways? Why not. It's ultimately not more preposterous than this framework set for returns from the dead, alternate timelines, and suggestions that that glimpse of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in the hatch in the middle of Season Two will finally bear middle-school fruit in the show's dedication to slack foreshadowing and Gen-X/pomo 101 pop-culture references piling up thicker than desiccated corpses on the main island. If it bugs you that the characters periodically take breaks from worrying about their continued, casual existence amid polar bears and carnosaurs to do shtick on "Skeletor" and Thundercats while hot-wiring a VW bus to play Three Dog Night in an episode that blows the dust off Cheech Marin for a cameo as Hurley's no-account daddy (why not have him light up a spliff and shove his arm elbow-deep up a horse, too?), phew, then you're not the right audience for "Lost", a series that now averages one slo-mo musical interlude per episode to match its pace of introducing new people and storylines.

Sherlock Holmes (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

March 28, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Germany, Mystery, UK

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong
screenplay by Michael Robert Johnson and Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw On page 31 of the first book of Frank Miller's seminal The Dark Knight Returns, there's a sequence in which Batman takes a few seconds to assess the seven options he has to either kill, disarm, or cripple his quarry whilst crouched in a darkened stairwell. That last option, Miller informs his reader, hurts, and I thought of this–the moment as a kid I gave myself over to the hard noir of The Dark Knight Returns–during the opening of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes as the exact analog for our Holmes (a mesmerizing Robert Downey Jr.) calculating the damage he's about to do to an antagonist. The film that follows is akin to Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, with the same weaknesses (pacing in a saggy middle) but the same considerable strengths as well as it rescues Holmes from the lovely yet stuffy Rathbone/Bruce serials and reintroduces the detective as the man capable of bending an iron poker with his bare hands ("The Adventure of the Speckled Band")–the man with a cocaine (the familiar "seven percent solution" is a solution of Bolivian marching powder, of course) and intravenous morphine habit ("The Sign of the Four"*) he indulges to fend off bouts of depression, having suffered one ("The Adventure of the Reigate Squire"), possibly two ("The Adventure of the Devil's Foot") nervous breakdowns. Holmes, in other words, is a fucking mess and a bit of a badass, and this doesn't scratch the surface of his faithful sidekick Dr. Watson (Jude Law), a veteran of a brutal Afghan campaign that's left him with shrapnel in his shoulder.

Toy Story (1995) [Special Edition] + Toy Story 2 (1999) [Special Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

March 23, 2010Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2010, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, FFC Must-Own, Pixar

TOY STORY
**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
screenplay by Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow
directed by John Lasseter

TOY STORY 2
****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A-
screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Rita Hsiao, Doug Chamberlin & Chris Webb
directed by John Lasseter

Toystory2cap

Mustown

TOY STORY 2

by Walter Chaw What time and memory seem to obscure about Pixar's Toy Story is that it is, for the most part, shrill and unpleasant, though it's easier to identify now that Pixar's technical facility is familiar. The picture's thick with bad behaviour, with everybody's favourite vintage cowboy doll Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) acting the spoiled, wounded, ultimately dangerous brat, jilted by his owner for a newer model, Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and determined to murder his rival until some moral compass asserts itself and Woody, grudgingly, comes to Jesus with his inevitable obsolescence. Toy Story plays a weird game with the idea of mortality in that its heroes are toys and, as such, doomed to a kind of infernal immortal half-life during which they can be tortured any number of ways–de-limbed, decapitated and reconstituted, melted, waterboarded we presume–in the name of a child's development. A memorable moment places our frenemies in a "bad" kid's bedroom where all the toys have been mutilated (our tiny Dr. Frankenstein provides the tension of the film's third act)–the message of the encounter retreating into that old kid's-flick saw that you can't judge a book by its cover.

Silverado (1985) – Blu-ray Disc

March 11, 2010Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Romance, Western

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Rosanna Arquette, John Cleese
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan & Mark Kasdan
directed by Lawrence Kasdan

by Walter Chaw Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado is a quintessential film of the 1980s, boasting that odd combination of slick production values and musty Eisenhower-era morality. It’s also exactly the western you’d expect from that product of the Eighties, Kasdan, screenwriter of milestones like Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back and writer-director of classics in adult contemporary ensemble mawkishness like The Big Chill and Grand Canyon. Kasdan should be considered historically as one of the film brats, a peer to guys like Spielberg who never quite developed enough muscle to allow movies to break their heart–fashioning from the medium an endless, deadening succession of handsome, movie-loving movies that consistently betray themselves with bullshit Hollywood endings brought home in triumphal swathes of swollen violins.

Lost: The Complete Second Season (2005-2006) – Blu-ray Disc

March 10, 2010Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A Sound A+ Extras B
“Man of Science, Man of Faith,” “Adrift,” “Orientation,” “Everybody Hates Hugo,” “…And Found,” “Abandoned,” “The Other 48 Days,” “Collision,” “What Kate Did,” “The 23rdPsalm,” “The Hunting Party,” “Fire + Water,” “The Long Con,” “One of Them,” “Maternity Leave,” “The Whole Truth,” “Lockdown,” “Dave,” “S.O.S.,” “Two for the Road,” “?,” “Three Minutes,” “Live Together, Die Alone”

by Walter Chaw The problem so far, as I see it, is that the first season’s episodes–with the possible exception of the two-part pilot and the three-part closer–were too, how to phrase this, episodic. Predictable rises and falls in action ending in either a cliffhanger or poignant musical montage or some mutant hybrid of the two do not a sustainable experience make. (Perhaps it’s easier to take when you’re not watching it in six-hour chunks.) I feel almost the same way about “Lost”–and many would count this as a positive comparison, though I would not–as I do about Dickens, and concede the same: that maybe it was different reading Great Expectations in bite-sized chunks separated by days and weeks. Anything designed for parcelling out and serialization dooms itself to a certain viewer-fatigue when consumed all at once. Still, I watched the first two seasons of “Deadwood” in the space of something like three days and didn’t feel anything close to the disdain and exhaustion I felt after just one season of “Lost”. It’s not that it’s tense so much as it’s generally bereft of imagination and, therefore, repetitive early and often. Its only consistency is this steadfast observance of its staid narrative ebb and flow; its only innovation is that it sometimes begins an episode with a flashback instead of going to flashback midstream.

The Crazies (2010)

March 5, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, United Arab Emirates

***½/****
starring Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker
screenplay by Scott Kosar and Ray Wright
directed by Breck Eisner

Crazies2010by Walter Chaw A military plane transporting a biological agent designed to destabilize civilian populations is headed for incineration when it crash-lands in tiny Ogden Marsh, IA, causing a few of the local yokels to start acting on all the urges that the veneer of civilization holds in check. A father kills his wife and son, a school principal dispatches a few of his students, a coroner begins stitching up the living, and Sheriff Dutton (Timothy Olyphant, good as sheriffs) is left to consider that for as naughty as these actions are, they're not so out of character for the people he protects. (It takes a while for him to deadpan that they might be in a little bit of trouble.) The Crazies plays with the thought that there's not only not much of a line separating acceptable behaviour from homicidal, there's also not much of a line between the infected townspeople and the military choppered in to contain them. In a good film's best moment, Dutton and his deputy capture a young soldier (Joe Reegan) and allow him a few minutes to be afraid and to enact a moment of grace that, if you think about it later, facilitates the complete destruction of another, larger urban population. A lot like the mordant epilogue of the also-fantastic 28 Weeks Later (another film that deals with the problem of occupation armies and the suppression of insurgencies), the ultimate source of trouble here is the heroic, quintessentially American desire to survive no matter the cost to the greater good.

The Crazies (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

March 4, 2010Posted in1970s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Directors: George A. Romero, Horror, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Lane Carroll, W.G. McMillan, Harold Wayne Jones, Lloyd Hollar
screenplay by Paul McCollough & George A. Romero
directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw It's tough for a dyed-in-the-wool George Romero apologist to observe that a film of Romero's in good repute is an amateurish, exploitative piece of shit that banks heavily on the afterglow of his seminal Night of the Living Dead. The Crazies, his third movie in the wake of that masterpiece, finds itself ripping off the last half-hour of Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers–in lurid colour with a cast of atrocious actors in high-'70s, porn-ugly wardrobe and appearance–in its tale of how you shouldn't trust anyone over 30, so keep on truckin', man, steal this book, and if it feels good, do it. Its tragedy is airless and ineffectual, played as it is as this instantly (and hopelessly) dated relic of the flower-power generation that already had its epitaph with Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider four years prior. While its philosophy is tired and childish (a product of reading HIGH TIMES rather than an actual newspaper), it's also dreadfully paced, with the lion's share of time given over to exhausted harangues about how the government doesn't really care about the little guy and how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Never mind the greater good here, as The Crazies is so fervently incomprehensible in its hippie politic that the threat of real contamination for the rest of the country/world should one of our erstwhile heroes escape into the general population forces the audience to ally its sympathies with the jack-booted thugs. Besides, there's already a problem of identification in the film when its ostensible villains, dressed in contamination suits to save on the extras budget, are clearly just underpaid civil servants who most definitely do not deserve to be slaughtered by the yokel populace–crazy or not.

Maid in Manhattan (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

February 22, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras D
starring Jennifer Lopez, Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Bob Hoskins
screenplay by Kevin Wade
directed by Wayne Wang

by Walter Chaw Less another version of the Cinderella story than a remake of the dreadful Ever After, Wayne Wang's Maid in Manhattan (why Wang is trying to make the same kind of magical Manhattan love tripe as Nora Ephron is only the first of the film's head-scratchers) manages ill-advisedly to remind of the Ally Sheedy vehicle Maid to Order whilst degenerating into the sort of dead-eyed quasi-political femi-bullshit tailor-made for divas in decline looking for a reason for their existence other than as subject of the next blaring headline. Ironic, then, that the central issues of the picture are resolved through snapshots of fake magazine covers.

Whiteout (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

February 16, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Crime, France, Mystery, Thriller, Turkey

½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Kate Beckinsale, Gabriel Macht, Columbus Short, Tom Skerritt
screenplay by Jon Hoeber & Eric Hoeber and Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes
directed by Dominic Sena

by Walter Chaw The first thing you notice about Whiteout is that it looks like shit. Though it was shot on location in Manitoba (subbing for Antarctica), they could've saved everyone the trouble and shot it in a green warehouse for all that anything in the film resembles anywhere outside. Not unreal, merely artificial. Take the moment, for example, when unbelievably-hot U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale) and cohort Dr. John Fury (Tom Skerritt, well into the Kris Kristofferson portion of his career) discover the body that will be the centre of their stupid investigation into the film's stupid mystery. The middle of an ice canyon, it looks more like something out of a Quatermass flick, sixty years old on a shoestring, and it only gets worse when we come to sepia-toned flashbacks trying to explain why Stetko is damaged goods and, therefore, hiding from herself at the bottom of the world. Everything seems to have been manufactured in a mainframe–even the performances. It's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and, brother, that ain't good for something trying hard at edgy realism.

The Box (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

February 15, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella, James Rebhorn
screenplay by Richard Kelly, based on the short story "Button, Button" by Richard Matheson
directed by Richard Kelly

by Walter Chaw As if to dispel any whisper of a doubt after Richard Kelly's Southland Tales that whatever ephemeral magic was captured in his Donnie Darko was completely accidental, along comes Kelly's third film as writer-director, The Box. I don't know yet whether it's the worst film of the year, but I will say that next to it Alex Proyas' similar disaster Knowing seems like a goddamn masterpiece. It's excruciatingly written, for starters, with the all-timer coming when vanilla paterfamilias Arthur (James Marsden), fresh from a 2001 light tunnel, says to vanilla materfamilias Norma (Cameron Diaz) first that "it's beyond words," then, a few dozen words later, that it's "neither here, nor there…but somewhere in between" and that it's a place "where despair is not the governor of the human soul." It was around this time that I bore down like a Civil War soldier getting a limb sawed off and watched as The Box magically made its 115-minute running time feel like a day spent undergoing oral surgery. It's that bad. Badly edited, too, as the awful script (based on a pretty good Richard Matheson short story)–which already jumps around haphazardly between cheap, moronic comparisons of itself to Sartre's No Exit and egregious exposition that makes M. Night Shyamalan's leisurely verbal masturbations look like Mamet by comparison–is matched by bizarre jump-cuts and senseless, arrhythmic pacing. Despite how long it feels, it's over before it really begins.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)

February 12, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Sean Bean
screenplay by Craig Titley, based on the novel by Rick Riordan
directed by Chris Columbus

Percyjacksonby Walter Chaw You don't have to have read Ovid to enjoy Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (hereafter The Lightning Thief), because, hell, no one involved in the production appears to have read him. In fact, having a cursory knowledge of Greek mythology will mostly serve to irritate you, as the picture runs roughshod over a whole other religion whilst merging many of its images with Christian myth in an attempt to somehow justify itself to an imaginary audience of affronted, I don't know, Protestants? What other reason could there be to bastardize the Greek conception of the underworld by mixing it with Milton's? Actually, in conception, the movie's Hades (Steve Coogan) owes a lot more to Peter Jackson's Balrog than to Blake's illuminations, and suddenly director Chris Columbus's motivations come into sharper focus. Not having any familiarity with Rick Riordan's popular tween novels, the first of which is adapted for this film, I can only comment that I also didn't appreciate a Stepin Fetchit character, Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), who fulfills a threefer function as talking animal/pet (he's a satyr), token black guy comic relief, and uncomfortable throwback to the bad old days of sideshow coon. No better way to inject levity than to have a hilarious black guy crack wise, widen his eyes, and declare his everlasting fealty to massah. Maybe he exists under the same rationale as Jar Jar Binks and the Na'vi: that fictional creatures can't be racist caricatures and, besides, this venomous stereotyping is in a children's film, so we should all just relax. Regardless, The Lightning Thief could play on a double bill with The Blind Side for a cozy trip back to the '30s in American cinema.

Lost: The Complete First Season (2004-2005) – Blu-ray Disc

February 11, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
"Pilot," "Tabula Rasa," "Walkabout," "White Rabbit," "House of the Rising Sun," "The Moth," "Confidence Man," "Solitary," "Raised by Another," "All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues," "Whatever the Case May Be," "Hearts and Minds," "Special," "Homecoming," "Outlaws," "…In Translation," "Numbers," "Deus Ex Machina," "Do No Harm," "The Greater Good," "Born to Run," "Exodus"

by Walter Chaw From the two-part pilot, I gotta tell you, I don't trust it. I like the gore, I like the United Colors of Benetton centrefold models as castaway chic, I love Terry O'Quinn and invisible dinosaurs… What I don't like so much is this sinking feeling that "Lost" is a throw-it-all-at-the-wall creation cashing in on post-9/11 discomfort and zeitgeist Ludditism that was genuinely surprised to be asked to hang around for six years. Meaning I have my doubts that any of this cool-ass shit has been remotely plotted out to provide for a commensurately cool-ass resolution–especially since it's not on HBO and therefore not privy to HBO's seemingly bottomless roster of brilliant short-form, long-term dramatists.