Mystic River (2003) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 10, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Dennis Lahane
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Opening like a Stephen King story of a group of friends falling from innocence into experience, Clint Eastwood's latest elegy for the myth of man strains at the edge of hysterical, offering up a testosterone-rich soup of In the Bedroom parental melodrama that compels for its pervasive doom, but disappoints for its didactic simplicity. Still, there's something to the tribal primitivism of the picture, the idea that man at his essence is composed of balanced portions of nobility and violence and that our society, perhaps, is no different: the past the muddy headwaters of the titular mystic river. The picture is a rhyme of Eastwood's A Perfect World, complete with spiralling shots of the sky through branches–the evocation of a Naturalism at war with any illusion of moral spirituality or humanism, with its heroes criminals shaded equally by the instinct to violence and the instinct to nurture.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Western Adventures – DVD + Jeremiah Johnson (1972) – Blu-ray Disc

February 7, 2010Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 2010, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance, Western

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates
screenplay by Walon Green and Sam Peckinpah
directed by Sam Peckinpah

McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
****/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, William Devane
screenplay by Robert Altman and Brian McKay, based on the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton
directed by Robert Altman

THE TRAIN ROBBERS (1973)
1/2*/**** Image B- Sound C Extras F
starring John Wayne, Ann-Margret, Rod Taylor, Ricardo Montalban
written and directed by Burt Kennedy

JEREMIAH JOHNSON
*/****
DVD – Image D+ Sound C- Extras F
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Robert Redford, Will Geer, Allyn Ann McLerie, Delle Bolton
screenplay by John Milius and Edward Anhalt
directed by Sydney Pollack

by Walter Chaw From John Ford to Akira Kurosawa to Sergio Leone then back to the United States with Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, trace the odd, international lineage of the American western genre as the seeds of its completion are sown by Ford, only to be harvested a few decades down the line with a singular bloodbath south of the proverbial border. You could say that the western was already nearing its completion in the postwar films noir set in the sunshine and bluffs of the Old West: homegrown oaters by Anthony Mann and Fritz Lang; William Wellman’s Yellow Sky and Robert Wise’s Blood on the Moon; Budd Boetticher’s subversive Ranowns; Arthur Penn’s glass darkly Billy the Kid pic The Left Handed Gun; Brando’s filthy One-Eyed Jacks; and even Ford himself with terminal pieces like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers. But it’s through Kurosawa’s admiration and transfiguration of Ford’s themes–then Sergio Leone’s incandescent prism of dirt and blood that transfigured Kurosawa’s (and Ford’s) ideas about heroics and individualism into something poetically base–from which Peckinpah1 took his cues.

Shorts (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

January 27, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Family, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jon Cryer, William H. Macy, Leslie Mann, James Spader
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw George Bernard Shaw posited that one should "make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself." Transposed to film, it seems more often than not that when one refers to a "kid's movie," it means that it's a piece of shit no one in their right mind would watch, so: give it to your little ones. Go farther with it and find that said pieces of shit are also above critique for most, defended with the unassailable notion that if their toddlers enjoyed it, then what's the harm? Except that the reason children aren't allowed to make decisions for themselves is because they'd choose to watch stuff like Shorts, Robert Rodriguez joints rolled exclusively for the molly-coddling of his children, who come up with this shit for their rebel-with-a-crew daddy to crank out of his make-hole.

Hardware (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

January 20, 2010Posted in1990s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Dylan McDermott, Stacey Travis, John Lynch, Iggy Pop
written and directed by Richard Stanley

by Walter Chaw Hardware tries hard, it really does. Enfant terrible South African director Richard Stanley has built an entire cult of personality around how hard Hardware and its brother in theme and feel, Dust Devil, try–how, therefore, it's subsequently been impossible for him to get another project off the ground. But, a lot like Terry Gilliam, whose films Stanley's own resemble quite a bit, truth be told, at a certain point all that misdirected, aimless mess–all that excess and pretension, that empty production-design artiness–amounts to exactly what it should: frustration and failure and people figuring out this stuff is a bad investment. Hardware is a sometimes-eye-catching mess of derivative ideas and badly-executed dialogue, haloed 'round with this patina of high-falutin' ideas it's not fully capable of honouring–and hollow outrage it's not able to justify. Seems the pretext for the movie's atrocities has to do with Government's desire to thin its own herd because…because it's the post-apocalypse and, um, the government is evil, of course. Shut up. Try to pay attention.

The Last Man on Earth (1964) – DVD

January 12, 2010Posted in1960s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Italy, Sci-Fi, Vampire, Zombie

***/**** Image B- Sound C Extras D
starring Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart
screenplay by Logan Swanson & William F. Leicster, based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
directed by Sidney Salkow

by Walter Chaw If the execution of The Last Man on Earth, Sidney Salkow's adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, is sometimes clunky, the ideas contained therein seem prescient at least, profound at best. Disowned by Matheson and oft-derided as slow-moving, it's actually an exceptional film in an exceptional year for film, a beautiful, occasionally stunning piece about loneliness and alienation. I wouldn't call it a metaphor, but as a bleak emotional landscape–Eliot's "The Wasteland" committed to genre schlock–it boasts of an intimidating gravity. Take the scene where titular plague survivor Dr. Morgan (Vincent Price) refuses to turn over his freshly-dead wife (Emma Danieli) to an army crematorium crew, endeavouring instead to bury her in the woods. His act of love is rewarded that night with her undead corpse paying him a visit. Yes, the pacing is off, leaving the shock of a shambling loved one to be milked properly in four years' time by George Romero and his Night of the Living Dead, yet the duration of the attack by itself underscores the horror and revulsion of the dearly-departed now up and walking. Veteran television director Salkow isn't very good, it's true, but DP Franco Delli Colli (Strip Nude For Your Killer), on one of his first films, provides beautiful, empty tableaux littered with car husks and burning pits fed with the corpses of the baddies Morgan stakes in the daytime.

Leap Year (2010)

January 8, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Ireland, Romance, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Amy Adams, Matthew Goode, Adam Scott, John Lithgow
screenplay by Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont
directed by Anand Tucker

Leapyearby Walter Chaw A rite of passage for starlets aspiring to graduate from the B-list is this crucible of the romantic comedy where, governed by the suffocating strictures of a time-worn formula, the penitent are asked to prove their box-office appeal. See, the genre represents the only variable, however slight, in what shakes out to be something like the Royal Shakespeare Company's tradition of cycling Hamlets. Already through the corny gates, I imagine poor Amy Adams (remember when she used to be better than this?) welcomed into the fold by the unholy Moirae of Sandra Bullock, Renée Zellweger, and Julia Roberts as she teams with Limey Matthew Goode in a babysitter's club-safe series of delightful misunderstandings on the Emerald Isle. Adams, an exceedingly promising American actress as evidenced by turns in Catch Me If You Can, Junebug, and Doubt, demeans herself now in picaresque cash grab Leap Year when her Anna, wanting to be betrothed to douchebag cardiologist Jeremy (Adam Scott), is pushed into the brawny arms of bog-trotting Declan (Goode) in a happy-go-smacky Forces of Nature imbroglio. Seems Anna wants to propose to the reluctant Jeremy in Dublin, where, once every four years, local tradition allows the especially desperate to Sadie Hawkins their cold-footed beaus. But, uh oh, type-A Anna is forced to hire slovenly man of stinky action Declan to ferry her 'cross the proverbial Mersey and, in the process, learn something about herself while teaching him something about himself. Slapstick, interrupted kisses, awkward sleeping conditions, a dancing-at-the-wedding sequence, a food-prep montage, and provincial bumpkin comedy ensues.

Blue Valentine (2010); All Good Things (2010); Rabbit Hole (2010)

January 7, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

BLUE VALENTINE
***/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, John Doman, Faith Wladyka
screenplay by Derek Cianfrance, Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne
directed by Derek Cianfrance

ALL GOOD THINGS
*/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst, Frank Langella, Philip Baker Hall
screenplay by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling
directed by Andrew Jarecki

RABBIT HOLE
*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, Sandra Oh
screenplay by David Lindsay Abaire, based on his play
directed by John Cameron Mitchell

by Walter Chaw In the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf end-of-year awards-bait sweepstakes, the ingredients for prestige seem pretty clear: one part Ryan Gosling (or Ryan Gosling substitute), one part beautiful starlet going the Full Monty (it's good to be Gosling), and one part sad arguing. Mix well and reap a bounty of critics raving about career performances of intensity and courage (translation: lots of crying, lots of naked if girl), introduce bored-but-not-admitting-it audiences to indie-rock darlings like Grizzly Bear, and present the awards-season cinephiles with rosters of once and future Sundance savants. Films like Blue Valentine, All Good Things, and Rabbit Hole generally impress festival audiences and people who can't afford to go to festivals but wish they could–there's a certain hunger for movies screened in rarefied air that proffer misery and Sandra Oh for the arthouse schadenfreude freakshow. A long time in the company of people we're glad we don't know, call it reality television for assholes who don't admit they watch reality television. For my money, the gold standards for such remain Eye of God and Lars Von Trier's Antichrist.

Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 4, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, DVD, Film Festivals, Sports

***/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image C- Sound A Extras B
directed by Stacy Peralta

by Walter Chaw Winner of the Audience and Director's awards at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, the kinetic social history document Dogtown and Z-Boys suggests that the amalgamation of art and sport created a unique brand of protest performance art centred around eight kids growing up in the "dead wonderland" of Venice Beach (and the surrounding urban wasteland referred to by the locals as Dogtown). Directed by Stacy Peralta, a member of the legendary Zephyr Skating Team that almost single-handedly defined the modern X-Game at the 1975 Del Mar Nationals Bahne-Cadillac Skateboard Championship, Dogtown and Z-Boys accomplishes several tasks at once, evoking the ethic that captured the imagination of American punks, portraying the dangers of stardom, and telling a rags-to-riches fable about how boys (and a girl) from the wrong side of the tracks sometimes make good on their own terms. The film is so intent on harnessing the off-the-cuff spirit that informed the Zephyr Team ("Z-Boys") that we hear narrator Sean Penn cough and clear his throat.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2009

January 1, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

Top102009graphicsmall

The last year of any decade usually a watershed year, we come to the end of 2009 with a bounty of riches. A year that just a couple of months ago I feared wouldn't yield ten films from which to choose has, through a flurry of screeners and late-season additions, convinced me of its cinematic legitimacy. Find in the top ten three war films, five films about the state and politics of the modern family, one about a poet, and one about a cop. Discover that each of the first ten has a direct corollary in the next ten (suggesting that there's a good bit of synchronicity in 2009), and that although women directors remain a novelty, three penetrate the top ten for the first time in my decade of lists. Other threads include a continuation of the last two years' feelings of disconnection and entropy indulged, the notion that institutions of right are the ones perpetrating the bulk of atrocity, and investigations into the self that mainly fulfill Nietzsche's maxim of abysses looking into the lookers. It's a summary list, in a way, of the '00s.

Paranormal Activity (2009) [2-Disc Digital Copy Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 1, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery

*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Katie Featherston, Michah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs, Ashley Palmer
written and directed by Oren Peli

by Walter Chaw It's a good try from first-time hyphenate Oren Peli, but it's ultimately an exercise bereft of satisfying, thoughtful payoffs–a couple of generally effective sequences only that way because they cause one to anticipate that something will come of them. Nothing does. Comparisons to The Blair Witch Project aren't entirely off base, either, in that Paranormal Activity is about a decade past its sell-by date with a tale of irritating technophilia that would have felt more current in the Y2K Ludditism of 1999 than it did in the resigned technocracy of 2009–explanation in part for why it's already out of the conversation and never stirred much outrage or controversy when it was causing audiences of teens to collectively fake-shudder the way festival audiences collectively fake-cathect. The new conversation is the one introduced by George Romero's Diary of the Dead and Matt Reeves's Cloverfield, where the unnatural instinct isn't whipping out a digital camera or camera phone, but not. It's a communal experience if it's anything, and as far as such things go, there are still midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show floating around out there, aren't there? Its pleasures aren't replicable, in other words, and watching it at home reveals it to be little more than a one-trick pony with one brilliant moment that isn't enough to justify the rest of it.

The Lovely Bones (2009) + The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009)

December 25, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, Fantasy, France, Mystery, New Zealand, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE LOVELY BONES
½*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by Alice Sebold
directed by Peter Jackson

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS
½*/****
starring Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Verne Troyer, Tom Waits
screenplay by Terry Gilliam & Charles McKeown
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Walter Chaw It's all a little too Puff, the Magic Dragon, isn't it. The Lovely Bones finds Peter Jackson regressing into his worst instincts and a newfound squeamishness in a film about, ick, a fourteen-year-old girl's rape and murder, leaving the most unsavoury details of Alice Sebold's revered source novel to the golden-lit imagination. (Give this to Precious: it's exploitation with the decency to titillate.) This isn't to say the book is worth much of a shit, but to say that it at least has the courage to talk about a rape and a murder where the film only has the mustard to romanticize loss and suggest that 1973 was so long ago the freak next door didn't raise any flags. It's also to say that what began its existence as a study of the bonds that hold a family together through the caprice of living has been reduced in its film adaptation to a murder mystery without a mystery, and a supernatural thriller that at every turn reminds of how much better Jackson's The Frighteners is in dealing with almost the exact same set of themes.

Falling Down (1993) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

December 8, 2009Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, France, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras C-
starring Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey, Tuesday Weld
screenplay by Ebbe Roe Smith
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw Atrociously written by actor Ebbe Roe Smith and atrociously directed (it goes without saying) by Joel Schumacher, it's also got a really terrible old-person performance by Robert Duvall, who would court Oscar with this exact hand-patting, repeating himself, huffy-giggly shtick at the end of the '90s with The Apostle. The whole thing is dreadful, rife with an unbearable self-satisfied rattle of social outrage that it's entirely unwilling to decipher to any useful end. Falling Down is a barely-literate rant, delivered at the top of the proverbial lungs, that suggests not-shockingly that L.A. is the epicentre of immigrant tension, gang violence, racial warfare, and class resentments. It postulates at the centre of this ever-swirling maelstrom crew-cut cipher Bill, known mainly by his vanity plate "D-FENS," who cracks one day in the middle of a Fellini homage and decides to abandon his car to the fates and walk to the house of his ex-wife (Barbara Hershey) and daughter. They've got a restraining order against him, of course, because he's a nutball. And because we're talking social satire here, Bill's been laid off for a month without telling anyone and, man, this recession sure is taking its toll, isn't it? Over the course of his Swiftian travels, Bill encounters a Korean grocer charging too much at his mini-mart; Hispanic gang-bangers who try to kill him in a drive-by; a white supremacist NRA nut (Frederic Forrest, who, like Duvall, used to be better than this) running an army surplus store; and a little black kid who knows how to use a bazooka.

The Young Victoria (2009) + Antichrist (2009)

December 4, 2009Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Horror, Italy, Poland, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE YOUNG VICTORIA
**/****
starring Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend, Paul Bettany, Miranda Richardson
screenplay by Julian Fellowes
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

ANTICHRIST
****/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg
written and directed by Lars von Trier

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As the beginning of an emotional history for Queen Victoria, Jean-Marc Vallée's The Young Victoria makes for an interesting bookend to John Madden's Mrs. Brown. A lavish, romantic depiction of the monarch's courtship with future husband Prince Albert (Rupert Friend), it's the very definition of a quotidian costume drama, skirting over the major issues of the early years of Victoria's reign to speak in broader terms about her idealism, the problems presented to her by her youth, and the manipulation of her affections by courtly politics. It's something like the older sister to Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette: less hip, but still in love with its naivety, its evergreen youth. It says something to me that in 2009, there's a film about Queen Victoria that's less interested in the stuffiness for which the Monarch is probably most popularly known than in her liberalism, her progressive attitude towards the humanism inspired by first the Colonies, then the French Revolution, then Britain's own Reform Act, enacted just five years before her coronation. An early film churned up in the wake of the optimism engendered by an Obama presidency? It's tempting to read it as such, not simply because you do hope this administration is better than the last, but also because, as the decade of the aughts draws a curtain on nine years of increasing outer and inner dark, there's at least the faint hope for some cloudbusting in the cinema, too.

The Blind Side (2009)

December 2, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron, Kathy Bates
screenplay by John Lee Hancock, based on the book by Michael Lewis
directed by John Lee Hancock

Blindsideby Walter Chaw Just in time for Christmas, professional schmaltz peddler John Lee Hancock updates Richard Pryor's The Toy by giving another privileged white brat a black man he can fuck with, call his victories his own, and keep in the guest room. This Michael Oher–as played sub-vocally by gentle, Lenny-ian giant Quinton Aaron–is not only the Super Duper Magic Negro who heals a household of rich shitkickers ("Shoot! We done gots a Black Man living with us 'fore we ever even MET a Democrat! Hoot!"–forgetting that wealthy southern landowners have a long tradition of keeping black people on their grounds without commensurately progressive attitudes), but is the passive, mute object around which every single person who likes The Blind Side convinces themselves they aren't racist for the liking of it. If this movie doesn't piss you off, if it doesn't make you nauseated with its dangerous smugness, you're part of the problem.

Terminator: Salvation (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 29, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Germany, Italy, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Bryce Dallas Howard, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris
directed by McG

by Walter Chaw The movie pretends that it's about discovering that which separates humans from machines–an idea of "functional equivalence," if you will, that Duncan Jones does a much better job with in his zero-budget Moon than McG does with in his small-country-GDP-budget Terminator Salvation. But what it's really about is blowing shit up real good for two hours. A tanker blows, a gas station blows, a field of satellite towers blows, a hole blows, and, accordingly, the movie blows. The real secret for success that the human freedom fighters of 2018, led by saviour guy John Connor (Christian Bale), should search for is the one that allows the evil Skynet robots to distinguish manmade fires in the desert that it should examine from those it should leave alone. What they discover instead is a "kill code" they can play on their futuristic boom boxes that "turns off" the machines hunting the people remaining after a nuclear holocaust has left the planet completely habitable for the hundreds of huddled masses tuning their transistor radios to fireside chats with Connor. (But not the types of fires the robots are interested in–see, the robots are only drawn to fires that humans set as ambush traps (and Guns N' Roses (you wouldn't understand)).)

Orphan (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

November 27, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, France, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard, Isabelle Fuhrman, CCH Pounder
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra's Orphan is a cheap, schlocky, shameless kid-peril flick with an unlikely–cowardly, even–twist and standard resolution. But I'll be damned if it isn't, despite all that, almost worth it just for its nastiness. Alas, in the end, it's not nasty enough. Without a thought in its head, without much understanding of how to earn legitimate frights without maiming (or threatening to maim) adorable children, it joins this year's similarly lost zombie girl-baby flick Grace among end-of-a-cycle, misogynistic shots at the Bad Seed genre. It's the kind of film that's more interesting for the fact of its relationship to other bad-seed flicks post-9/11 (e.g., Japanese redux The Ring and little-seen creeper Soft For Digging) than for anything it does itself. Interesting, too, that it's a relatively big-budget, mainstream picture starring a couple of extremely appealing actors (Peter Sarsgaard as John and Vera Farmiga as his wife, erm, Kate) as the patsies who adopt the titular hellchild, a Russian immigrant named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), from one of those autumnal orphanages run by nuns like cuddly Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder). Unfortunately, it's loaded with–there's that word again–cheap jump scares that, at least half the time, are so self-aware as to be parodies of themselves. Post-modernism it ain't, though–post-modernism is smart.

Snatch (2000) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

November 23, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, UK

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image C Sound A Extras A
starring Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina, Brad Pitt, Rade Sherbedgia
written and directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw Guy Ritchie's sophomore effort Snatch opens with a hyperkinetic homage to the first violent robbery of Ringo Lam's City on Fire and continues by aping the slick mod-cool of the British gangster films of the late-'60s and early-'70s. It is a bizarre beast that borrows, steals, re-invents, and winks knowingly when its hand is caught in the imagistic cookie jar. Guy Ritchie laughs at your erudition. He's in it for the money shots–a new champion of the gangster drama as pornography: ultimately empty but undeniably efficient.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

November 20, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, Vampire, Werewolf, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Chris Weitz

Newmoonby Walter Chaw Let's play a Mad Libs game with Chris Weitz's appalling The Twilight Saga: New Moon (hereafter New Moon) and, by so doing, avoid talking about how a new moon is actually the absence of a moon in the sky, or how moon cycles remind me of menstruation, which would be a terrible thing to happen to heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) around her boyfriend Ed (Robert Pattinson). Let's replace every time they say "do it"–and by that they mean "bite me and make me a member of the walking undead"–with "fuck" and see if this whole Twilight atrocity still appears the benign thing for your daughters to gobble up whole. When Bella implores Ed to fuck her after she graduates from high school, for instance, and Ed says that he won't fuck her until she turns twenty-one and they can get married…well, listen, this is a fairytale without any teeth, meaning it's a really, really dangerous fairytale. More, it's illiterate, invasive, moronic proselytizing from some Mormon housewife's blinkered belief system. Unconvinced? Consider that it's stated early on in this instalment of the saga that the reason Ed doesn't want to turn Bella into a vampire–oops, I mean, fuck her–is that he's afraid he'll damn her soul to eternal hellfire.

Up (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 19, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Pixar

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras N/A
screenplay by Bob Peterson
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw There's still something breathless about Up, but I wonder if the Pixar formula isn't starting to show its seams now in its second decade of producing masterpieces–if there's a lack of freshness here in its familiarly exhilarated, cozily excited spaces. None of that fatigue is in evidence in the film's miraculous, wordless prologue, however: destined to compete with the opening-credits sequence of Watchmen as the single best stretch in any film this year, it establishes character, motivation, story of place, and sense of time without leaving a dry eye in the house. Shame the picture also peaks in these first ten minutes. It reminds of the wordless bit describing Jessie's abandonment in Toy Story 2, or the entire first half of WALL·E, and it suggests that Pixar is unparalleled in exploiting the possibilities for visual storytelling in its cavernous digital medium. The comparison of WALL·E to Chaplin is on point: When Pixar trusts the expressiveness of its mainframe and the beautiful, liquid clarity of its animation techniques, I don't know that there's ever been a better "silent" filmmaking collective. In their roster, it's arguable that they've only really faltered twice: once with the tedious Seven Samurai redux A Bug's Life, and again with the noxious redneck-baiting Cars. And while Up is nowhere near that bottom, it finds itself somewhere in the middle thanks to the peculiar ceiling to its invention (an entire Lost World and all you got is a giant bird and a talking dog?) and sentimentality that edges from sweet to mawkish. There are one too many cutaways to a dead wife's portrait and one too many winsome sighs as a plan made in childhood looms tantalizingly near.

The Prisoner: The Complete Series (1967-1968) – Blu-ray Disc

November 17, 2009Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Prison, Sci-Fi, Television, UK

Image A Sound A- Extras B
"Arrival," "The Chimes of Big Ben," "A, B, and C," "Free for All," "The Schizoid Man," "The General," "Many Happy Returns," "Dance of the Dead," "Checkmate," "Hammer into Anvil," "It's Your Funeral," "A Change of Mind," "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling," "Living in Harmony," "The Girl Who Was Death," "Once Upon a Time," "Fall Out"

by Walter Chaw The closest television came to true surrealism until the inception of "Twin Peaks", Patrick McGoohan's remarkable, landmark brainchild "The Prisoner" is the headwaters for a dizzying array of modern genre confections. It's audacious in its ironclad refusal to provide the happy ending; in its determination to bugger expectation with every complex set-up and sadistic resolution, the show effectively honours the surrealist manifesto of defeating classification. The fact of it is the function of it–the delight of it being that the series functions as a tonal sequel to Antonioni's Blowup, using the disappearance of that film's photog protag as the launching point for its hero's imprisonment in his Welsh oubliette. Colourfully, quintessentially mod, it even looks the part, after all, acting in 1967 as prescient post-modern (po-Mod?) commentary on the elasticity of this genre model (Bond films in particular, the lead in said franchise McGoohan was offered, er, once upon a time) as allegory for the plastic-fantastic of a progressively absurd world. In its setting of a small town, isolated and beset by what seems a common psychosis, find a connection to Robin Hardy and Anthony Schaffer's claustrophobic The Wicker Man (1973), John Frankenheimer's similar-feeling Seconds (1966), and, yes, Godard's structuralist textbook Alphaville. Of all the ways to approach "The Prisoner", in fact, the most fulsome–if also potentially the most obscure–is that, like Alphaville, it establishes itself as a structuralist (as in Claude Levi-Strauss) exercise while predicting through its execution the post-structuralism/deconstructionism (and eventually surrealism) of, say, a Jacques Derrida.