Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) + The Road (2009)

November 13, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

FANTASTIC MR. FOX
**/****
animated; screenplay by Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Roald Dahl
directed by Wes Anderson

THE ROAD
*½/****
starring Viggo Mortensen, Guy Pearce, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron
screenplay by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
directed by John Hillcoat

by Walter Chaw There's nothing much going on in Wes Anderson's stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox–which is a terrible shock, because there's generally so much going on in Anderson's and Dahl's respective canons. With Anderson's every attempt to infuse this piffle with his brand of Salinger-esque autumnal, familial melancholy registering as ever-so-slightly desperate, it strikes particularly pale in such close proximity to Spike Jonze's magnificent Where the Wild Things Are. Missing is the vein of emotionality that runs rich in Anderson's best films, the idiosyncrasies of his misfit family groups somehow rendered ordinary transplanted into foxes and opossums. I wonder if it isn't something to do with the idea that "cute" animation as a genre and not a medium has "quirk" as its bread and butter. More to the point, it probably has something to do with the fact that for all those charges of "pretentious" Anderson has collected over the course of a career, when you pile all of his pathos into a film that seems mainly interested in being adorable, they're actually deserved.

North by Northwest (1959) – DVD|North by Northwest (1959) [50th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 11, 2009Posted in****/****, 1950s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Mystery

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B Extras A
BD – Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is Alfred Hitchcock’s most mercurial anti-hero, the soup bone reduction of the Master’s wrong-man theme. An advertising executive so at ease with changing his identity at the fall of a hammer, he has, by film’s end, become/done all of the things he’s wrongfully accused of being/doing at the beginning of the film. Indeed, Hitchcock would never again mine the idea of the wrong man with this kind of heat–veering off as he did into a more metaphysical kind of guilt transference à la Vertigo with The Birds, Psycho, and Marnie. As North by Northwest opens, Thornhill gives his regards to a night porter’s wife (“We’re not talkin’!”), steals a cab from a Good Samaritan, and instructs his secretary to send a neglected lover a box of gold-wrapped candy because “she’ll think she’s eating money.” He’s a charmer–and he’s as oily, despicable, and fast-talking as almost every one of Grant’s romantic comedy heroes. Hitch undermines and exploits Grant for the fourth and final time here as a guy we love until we stop for a second to catch our breath and take stock of the myriad ways in which we’ve been bribed, glad-handed, misled, and led-on.

H.P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond (1986) [Unrated Director’s Cut] + Blood and Black Lace (1964) [Unslashed Collectors’ Edition] – DVDs

November 6, 2009Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, West Germany

From Beyond
**½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras B
starring Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree, Ted Sorel
screenplay by Dennis Paoli
directed by Stuart Gordon

Sei donne per l'assassino
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A+
starring Cameron Mitchell, Eva Bartok, Thomas Reiner, Mary Arden
screenplay by Giuseppe Barilla, Marcel Fonda, Marcello Fondato and Mario Bava
directed by Mario Bava

Mustown

BLOOD AND BLACK LACE

by Walter Chaw Stuart Gordon's follow-up to his flat-awesome Re-Animator reunites that film's Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton with source material by H.P. Lovecraft for From Beyond1, a nominal splatter classic that lacks the energy and cohesiveness of Re-Animator, even as it establishes Gordon as a director with a recognizable, distinctive vision. A picture that arrived concurrently with Clive Barker's "The Hellbound Heart" (the source material for Hellraiser), it's useful as a means by which Lovecraft's and Barker's fiction can be paired against one another as complementary halves of a symbolist, grue-soaked whole. With the latter's cenobites, his most enduring contribution to popular culture2, consider that Barker's vision of an alternate, infernal reality shimmering just beneath the surface of the mundane has its roots in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos–a dimension of Elder Gods lurking behind the doors of perception. Lovecraft and Barker give description to the indescribable, name to the nameless. They are in pursuit of the sublime and their quest underscores the idea that any such chase is, at its heart, inevitably a spiritual one.

The Cell 2 (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 3, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Tessie Santiago, Chris Bruno, Frank Whaley
screenplay by Lawrence Silverstein & Alex Barder and Erik Klein and Rob Rinow
directed by Tim Iacofano

by Walter Chaw Blaringly shot on digital video so that the whole of this shitstorm looks like someone's bat mitzvah, The Cell 2's only reason for existing appears to be to clarify just how underestimated is Tarsem's original The Cell. This dtv trainwreck substitutes Jennifer Lopez with another Latina, Tessie Santiago, seemingly because the producers thought it the best way to soften the blow of the realization that this is an otherwise-unfilmable script retrofitted to launch a franchise. Santiago, a kind of Eva Longoria/Sandra Bullock hybrid, is Maya, the requisite "seer" in another serial-killer intrigue full to bursting with macho exchanges between the men and hysterical exchanges between Maya and anyone else. Tortured by not having thwarted Jigsaw-like murderer The Cusp three years prior, she's brought back on the case not merely because she's a psychic or something, but also because she was The Cusp's only fish that got away, thus giving her unique, erm, insight? Who knows? The Cusp's MO, see, is to repeatedly kill and revive his victims, which actually explains both Frank Whaley's appearance in this thing and what happens to his career by being in it. Irony. They should've called it "The Cell 2: Poor Frank Whaley."

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

November 2, 2009Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, DVD, Horror, Italy, Spain, Zombie

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
***/****
DVD – Image B Sound C+ Extras B
BD – Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Ray Lovelock, Christine Galbo, Arthur Kennedy
screenplay by Sandro Continenza & Marcello Coscia
directed by Jorge Grau

by Walter Chaw Without having to squint much, you could see the hero of Jorge Grau's The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, art-dealing Easy Rider hippie George (Ray Lovelock), trying to deliver the airplane propeller his spiritual brother, David Hemmings' mod-photog from Blowup, buys in tribute to form over function midway through Antonioni's counterculture classic. Instead, George is trying to deliver the sister of the fatal fertility juju from Arthur Penn's Night Moves through titular Manchester into the green countryside on the back of his too-cool motorcycle. He's thwarted initially by the bumper of maiden fair Edna (Cristina Galbo), then by the hungry undead stalking the countryside in search of meaty sociological metaphors, then by an ossified Scotland Yard dick (Arthur Kennedy). Luckily, there's plenty of allegorical beef for everyone, as Grau paints a vivid picture of Mod Madness in steady, deteriorating orbit around the entropy and hedonism of the time–sprinkling it liberally with a disdain for dictatorships Grau no doubt nursed whilst working under the heel of Francisco Franco's regime.

Night of the Creeps (1986) [Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

October 30, 2009Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Zombie

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jason Lively, Steve Marshall, Jill Whitlow, Tom Atkins
written and directed by Fred Dekker

by Walter Chaw A childhood favourite, Fred Dekker's Night of the Creeps generally underscores the danger of revisiting childhood favourites with a jaundiced eye; this and his sophomore feature, The Monster Squad, show that Dekker was rejected from the USC and UCLA film schools for a reason. I realize it's all supposed to be a cozy, funny-scary homage to the terribleness of low-budget B-movies as a genre unto themselves, but the picture is terribly edited and disastrously paced–the very things that effectively kill both comedy and horror. Unconvinced? The first misstep might be its choice to leave a charming, 1950s-set black-and-white prologue in favour of a faux-Hughesian '80s fandango that, like most of the era's mainstream teen dramas not made by John Hughes, lacks an ear for how we actually talked, and insight into how we actually felt. In any case, it's hopelessly incongruous to go from Ozzie & Harriet to leg-warmers and Wall of Voodoo, resulting in something that isn't a spoof of bad filmmaking so much as an example of it. Night of the Creeps joins The Goonies for me as one of those cult classics I just can't wrap my head around. I remember sort of loving it when I was twelve, meaning only that twelve-year-olds are idiots.

The Hills Have Eyes (1977) – DVD + Wrong Turn (2003) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

October 29, 2009Posted in1970s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, DVD, Germany, Horror, Thriller

THE HILLS HAVE EYES
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Susan Lanier, Robert Houston, Martin Speer, Dee Wallace-Stone
written and directed by Wes Craven

by Walter Chaw Released the same year as Star Wars, Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes boasts of its own Luke Skywalker in the character of a blue-eyed towhead named Bobby (Bobby Houston) who, at an unwelcome call to adventure, finds himself embarked against the forces of evil with a patchwork band of heroes out of their depth. Chewbacca subbed by a ridiculously Rin Tin Tin German Shepherd hermaphrodite (sometimes a girl, sometimes a boy, always a hero), The Hills Have Eyes is Craven's zero-budget follow-up to his astonishingly unpleasant (and influential) exploitation version of The Virgin Spring, The Last House on the Left. A rough, raw, often amateurish take on the Sawney Beane cannibal family legend, the piece derives its power from the canny paralleling of its antagonistic families and its use of archetype and mythology in the telling of what is essentially a caste horror picture.

Trick ‘r Treat (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

October 28, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Dylan Baker, Rochelle Aytes, Anna Paquin, Brian Cox
written and directed by Michael Dougherty

by Walter Chaw Less a portmanteau than a Tarantino time-shift/overlap, Trick 'r Treat is a handsomely-mounted bit of fluff that dribbles out like the Cat's Eye redux for which no one was clamouring, with more than a few images borrowed from other Stephen King errata such as Creepshow and Pet Sematary. Michael Dougherty's hyphenate debut, it, a lot like co-writer-on-X2 Dan Harris's own first feature, Imaginary Heroes, has a pedigree and the benefit of the doubt in its corner but washes out as something that needed to marinate longer to reach the full flower of any potential. The buzz surrounding Trick 'r Treat, though, in particular the Internet outrage over the studio's alleged mishandling of it, is peculiarly deafening and–as with most buzz around most projects falsely promised theatrical distribution–in large part hysterical and unjustified.

The Val Lewton Horror Collection – DVD

October 22, 2009Posted in****/****, 1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller, Zombie

VlewtontitleCAT PEOPLE (1943)
****/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph
screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Jacques Tourneur

THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph, Ann Carter
screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Gunther V. Fritsch and Robert Wise

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)
****/**** Image C Sound B-
starring James Ellison, Frances Dee, Tom Conway
screenplay by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray
directed by Jacques Tourneur

THE LEOPARD MAN (1943)
***½/**** Image C- Sound B-
starring Dennis O’Keefe, Margo, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell
screenplay by Ardel Wray, based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich
directed by Jacques Tourneur

THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943)
****/**** Image C+ Sound C
starring Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell, Kim Hunter
screenplay by Charles O’Neal and DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Mark Robson

THE GHOST SHIP (1943)
***½/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Richard Dix, Russell Wade, Edith Barrett, Ben Bard
screenplay by Donald Henderson Clarke
directed by Mark Robson

THE BODY SNATCHER (1945)
***½/**** Image C- Sound C+
starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Daniell, Edith Atwater
screenplay by Phillip MacDonald and Carlos Keith
directed by Robert Wise

ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945)
*/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer
screenplay by Ardel Wray & Josef Mischel
directed by Mark Robson

BEDLAM (1946)
*½/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Boris Karloff, Anna Lee, Billy House, Richard Fraser
screenplay by Carlos Keith and Mark Robson
directed by Mark Robson

VAL LEWTON: THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS (2007)
**½/**** Image N/A Sound N/A
directed by Mark Robson

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNINGS IN EFFECT. It’s not too much to speak of Val Lewton as the American Jean Cocteau. An enigmatic figure with his hand, like Cocteau, in more than one media (a novelist, he often did uncredited work on the screenplays for his films), the movies produced under his RKO watch are a repository of dream sleep, enough so that an overview of his key pictures–something made possible by Warner’s rapturous DVD collection of his horror fare–uncovers a treasure trove of indelible nightmare images. Where Cocteau affected a studiedly casual mien and came to film in his sixties, however, Lewton (who died at 47) seems the product of financial expediency and, perhaps more impressively, stamped the products of his hand despite roadblocks placed in his way. Yet the similarities are striking: Above and beyond the dreamscapes affected, there’s a common fascination with masks and false identities; an obsession with budding sexuality turned subtly aberrant; and a cycle of seduction tied to corruption in the move from innocence to experience. I see in these recurrent themes a man fascinated by the blinds that men throw before them to deny the unknowable tides governing their emotions and actions. It’s that illusion of civilization that informs Lewton’s pictures; the horror of them is in the ripping away to expose the insect underneath.

Natural Born Killers (1994) – Blu-ray Disc (Digibook) + Natural Born Killers: The Director’s Cut [Original Uncut Version] – Blu-ray Disc

October 18, 2009Posted in****/****, 1990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/****
R-RATED Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
NC-17 Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tommy Lee Jones
screenplay by David Veloz & Richard Rutowski & Oliver Stone
directed by Oliver Stone

Mustownby Walter Chaw Lodged in there like the apple in Gregor Samsa's back next to the spine of the American character is this corrupt speck of frontier spirit, transmogrified in the heat of late-'50s cynicism and irony by heartland bogies Ed Gein and Charles Starkweather–the veneration of them in our collective heart of darkness stoked by a long tradition of outlaw worship from Jesse James to Bonnie and Clyde. The cinematic children of Gein and Starkweather, erupting from the Eisenhower Eden of rocket ships and Cadillacs, range from epoch-shaking pictures like Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to New American Cinema masterpieces like Badlands and Take the Money and Run. The heartbeat of the zeitgeist can be kenned in this finger to this pulse, in the individualism we celebrate and the establishment against which we secretly nurse these little serpentine malignancies. Enter Oliver Stone, not so much the provocateur as a perverse, self-indulgent chronicler of that American disease–and why not Stone, who's only ever good when he's talking about the United States and only ever talking about the United States when he's talking about anything else. He takes the Starkweather case and fashions it, from a story by Quentin Tarantino, into a work of extreme, fanatical patriotism: Natural Born Killers.

St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) + About Last Night… (1986) – Blu-ray Discs

October 13, 2009Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance, ZERO STARS

ST. ELMO’S FIRE
ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound C+ Extras C
starring Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore
screenplay by Joel Schumacher & Carl Kurlander
directed by Joel Schumacher

ABOUT LAST NIGHT…
½*/**** Image C- Sound C Extras C
starring Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, James Belushi, Elizabeth Perkins
screenplay by Tim Kazurinsky & Dennis DeClue, based on the play Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet
directed by Edward Zwick

by Walter Chaw The Brat Pack as a phenomenon is something that largely, blissfully escaped this child of the Eighties–just a touch too young, just a tad too disinterested. When Sixteen Candles came out, I was embarrassed by the Asian caricature enough to avoid talking about it (ditto The Goonies and Temple of Doom–though not, oddly enough, The Karate Kid); when St. Elmo’s Fire came out, I was busy sneaking into consecutive showings of Back to the Future. I remember a party where The Breakfast Club was playing in the background, and a girl I had a crush on exclaiming how much she loved it. Later, they played A Nightmare on Elm Street, and whoever’s mother it was at whoever’s house it was broke up the festivities not long after the bodybag in the hall. (I don’t know that I ever saw either movie in its entirety until I was well into my twenties.) Ferris Bueller was my connection to John Hughes, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Marty McFly were my thing–not a Molly Ringwald in sight. The closest I came to assimilation was Red Dawn, which, while awful, is also awesome in a deadening, testosterone-sick way. Looking back, the moment the ’80s matured for me was Near Dark, The Evil Dead, Predator, and David Cronenberg’s The Fly and not, as it was for many people in my peer group, Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful. I remember hosting a sweltering screening of Broadcast News in my bedroom with a couple of dozen pals, a considerably less well-attended showing of Angel Heart a few weeks later, and a private viewing of Pump Up the Volume with a girl I really liked and to whom I crystallized my theory of how it was always better to watch a movie in the theatre…but not tonight. It was a hot evening. All my memories of movies in the ’80s are accompanied by suffocating heat. The decade in my memory is one long summer.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula/Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [Collector’s Box Set] – DVD|Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) + Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) – Blu-ray Discs

October 5, 2009Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Japan, Robert De Niro, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK, Vampire

BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA
Dracula
**/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+
BD – Image C Sound A Extras A+
starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by James V. Hart
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN
**½/****
DVD – Image D Sound B+
BD – Image B+ Sound B
starring Robert De Niro, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hulce, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont
directed by Kenneth Branagh

Bramdracvidcap3by Walter Chaw The first thirty minutes of Francis Ford Coppola’s retelling of the Dracula legend are dazzling and assured: a self-consciously cinematic, fulsome display of technique and loud emotions–expressionism writ large against lurid backdrops and red, backlit shadow plays. It seems impossible that Coppola could keep this up for the duration of the picture, could see to fruition the kind of viable update/continuation of Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that the Akira Kurosawa film he helped produce, Kagemusha, with its sanguineous, medieval battlegrounds painted with heavy brushes, aspired to be. And sure enough, what begins as a clarion call settles into a somewhat familiar period costume drama spiced up now and again with racy sequences nonetheless sobered by the memory of the delirious hedonism of that opening, wherein we get Dracula’s backstory as a hero of a holy war, repulsing Muslim invaders in Romania, turning to blasphemy when the vengeful Turks fool his wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) into believing that her beloved has died on the battlefield, and gleefully chewing artificial scenery with toothy relish.

Zombieland (2009)

October 1, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Zombie

½*/****
starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
directed by Ruben Fleischer 

by Walter Chaw Bad by every measurable, objective standard, Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland is a shining, sterling example of what happens when a bunch of idiots get together with their asshole high-concept and proceed to make an abominable hash of it. It’s a conversation halfwits have: what would happen if you married the teen romance with the zombie flick? The problem being that Fleischer and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick don’t have much of a grasp on what it is about teen romances and zombie flicks that are interesting in the first place. It’s the right choice, casting the poor man’s Michael Cera, Jesse Eisenberg, in his second “-land” movie of the year (after the fantastic coming-of-age flick Adventureland); it’s entirely the wrong choice to have Eisenberg provide film-long voiceover narration that takes the piss–without the benefit of wit or trenchant observation–out of zombie flicks before dropping him in the middle of that old familiar wistful love intrigue. The object of his desire is a fellow survivor of an apocalyptic zombie plague, Wichita (Emma Stone, deee-lish), who is travelling with little sis Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). Ohio (Eisenberg), meanwhile, has hooked up with Woody Harrelson’s redneck-with-a-heart-of-gold Tallahassee–yes, if these characters are actually named after the places from which they hail, they have some ‘splainin’ to do. Our four ragamuffin protags proceed through the long middle of the movie with no zombies in sight, alone with reams of smug, moronic, self-satisfied dialogue that has as the basis of every punchline how much of a virgin pussy is Ohio, and how much of an inbred thug is Tallahassee.

Fatal Attraction (1987) + Indecent Proposal (1993) – Blu-ray Discs

September 9, 2009Posted in1980s, 1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Romance, Thriller

FATAL ATTRACTION
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, Anne Archer, Stuart Pankin
screenplay by James Dearden
directed by Adrian Lyne

INDECENT PROPOSAL
½/**** Image C+ Sound B Commentary C-
starring Robert Redford, Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson, Oliver Platt
screenplay by Amy Holden Jones
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Walter Chaw Adrian Lyne films live and die by the success of their moments of poignant epiphany. It’s why 9½ Weeks and Jacob’s Ladder work and Flashdance and Indecent Proposal do not–why his obvious and constant pandering to cultural stereotypes and softcore eroticism identifies him as the premiere commercial director of his time (more so than even Ridley Scott, who sometimes tries not to be a ponce), trafficking in easy images and the kind of strained tableaux you’d expect to see in a first-year photography classes (explanation as well for why his films are almost invariably blockbusters): a pair of Converse sneakers on a lonesome, foldout kitchen table; seagulls on a fog-shrouded pier; long shots down cluttered, penthouse-suite corridors; rubbing off to a slideshow1; dogs and bunnies… Adrian Lyne flicks are about what happens when dicks slip into chicks, oops; it’s not possible to make fun of them, because how do you make fun of an artifact that has no intrinsic weight, tells no compelling tale, and imparts no particular insight?

9 (2009)

September 9, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
screenplay by Pamela Pettler
directed by Shane Acker

9by Walter Chaw There's something missing from Shane Acker's 9, and I'm having a hard time putting my finger on it. I think it's that for as much as I like my nihilism, there's a flavour to this year's variety of Apocalypse that suggests to me the only thing left to win is the Wasteland. There's no moral stake in scrambling for scraps, just this Pyrrhic duty to compete, lust fast-cooling on the proverbial sheets, damp and rumpled as they are from a lot of impotent thrusting. So 9 exists in an Industrial Revolution Steamboy alternate universe, ended when an evil fascist dictator creates, with the help of a scientist (Alan Oppenheimer–weird, non?), a sentient machine capable of building other machines to do its bidding. Imagined as a weapon of peace, no surprise that it turns on Man and apparently kills all living creatures, blots out the sun, and spends its time hunting down little burlap rag dolls animated with the scientist's–wait for it–soul. It's the second Terminator film of the summer, in other words, as well as the second to mention the idea of horcruxes after Harry Potter 6. Accordingly, it's a pretty empty, if visually startling, picture. Based on a celebrated, Oscar-nominated short, 9 hasn't made the transition to feature-length with much of an emotional, or intellectual, payload to justify its extended runtime. The best comparison is to Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, alas: the seed of something left fallow.

Duplicity (2009) – DVD

August 24, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

*½/**** Image B Sound A- Commentary B+
starring Clive Owen, Julia Roberts, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Giamatti
written and directed by Tony Gilroy

by Walter Chaw Tony Gilroy's droll, deadly dull Duplicity is the kind of movie Cary Grant made in the Sixties: wheel the old dear out in a nice suit and have him recite reams of dialogue to some woman in various scenic locales. It's not an elderly movie, it just seems that way. The "some woman" in this scenario is Julia Roberts (fresh from Maria Shriver's face-sharpener), making her umpteenth triumphant return to the silver screen on the sloping, mopey, rumpled, shoulders of fading A-lister Clive Owen, who apparently can't say "no" lately to would-be prestige pictures abandoned in the doldrums of the first part of the year.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

August 21, 2009Posted in****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, Theatrical, War

****/****
starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Mélanie Laurent
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

Inglouriousbasterdsby Walter Chaw There are two stars in Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino and Christoph Waltz), the one to be expected, the other a shoo-in for Oscar consideration in what’s easily the most mesmerizing, commanding performance I’ve seen in any film this year. The opening sequence, in which Waltz’s SS Col. Hans Landa interrogates a French dairy farmer as to the whereabouts of a Jewish family that’s gone missing, is, how to say this, perfect, but unlike the other perfect sequences of 2009 (the prologue of Up, the main titles of Watchmen), Inglourious Basterds matches this exceptional moment with another as Landa has a little confection with a rare survivor of his attentions, Shosanna (a stunning Mélanie Laurent); then another as German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) does her best to cover for her three suspicious pals in an underground speakeasy; then another with Landa again as he asks von Hammersmark to put her foot in his lap. At first glance two separate films that only fit together roughly, if at all, it becomes clear during Inglourious Basterds‘ final chapter, as the ghostly image of a beautiful woman cackles in the smoke above a burning auditorium (“This is the face of Jewish vengeance!”), that this is Tarantino no longer making something new and strange out of his obsessive movie-love, but something dangerous and risky about the ethics of vengeance and the shifting ground beneath moral quagmires we thought we’d put to bed. What better conflict than the last popular war to stage a conversation about whether or not the only reason the winners weren’t held accountable for their atrocities is that they were the winners.

District 9 (2009)

August 14, 2009Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, South Africa, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Nathalie Boltt, Sylvaine Strike
screenplay by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
directed by Neill Blomkamp

District9by Walter Chaw An unlikely marriage of Alien Nation and David Cronenberg's The Fly, Neill Blomkamp's remarkable District 9 is that occasional genre picture that's both topical and so good it made my stomach knot. Set in South Africa, it opens by rejecting the Eurocentrism of most science-fiction pictures. Here, the little green men don't hover over the Lincoln Memorial or the Eiffel Tower, but rather Johannesburg, where the malnourished, crustacean-like denizens (they're called, derogatorily, "prawns") of a giant mothership are quickly relegated to a barbed-wire enclosed slum, the titular "District 9." Its parallel to Alien Nation is obvious, down to that film's equation of aliens with Chinese immigrants in San Francisco; these are the "bestial" blacks of Afrikaner nightmares: physically powerful, engaged in illicit activities, and blamed for every casualty outside their heavily-segregated "district." But where Alien Nation identified the threat to that immigrant community as an insidious ghost of its traditional past (an opium allegory? How 18th-century), District 9 satirizes the numbing effect of cable news networks, as well as the dangers faced by any outcast culture trying to eke out subsistence existences on the fringes of majority society. In a very real way, District 9 is a film about not only the corrosive potential of grossly-overfed public perception, but also the immigration debate that rages on worldwide.

Sleuth (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

August 10, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Mystery, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Michael Caine, Jude Law
screenplay by Harold Pinter, based on the play by Anthony Shaffer
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw Call it an actor's workshop, if you must, but it's more like an actor's mausoleum, and the Anthony Shaffer source material, as punched-up by Harold Pinter just prior to Pinter's death in the classic unfilmable Pinter style, is hopelessly stagebound and déclassé. It's old people playing at Patrick Marber, falling into the exact trap that most adaptations of Ian McEwan have fallen: mistaking the author fucking with us for great insights into the human condition. Sleuth, Kenneth Branagh's reboot of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's museum piece starring Laurence Olivier and a thirty-six-years-younger Michael Caine, brings Caine back in the Olivier role, with Jude Law once again taking over for Caine after the Alfie remake. It's terrible stuff, stiff and laboured and crippled by self-importance, self-aggrandizing camera trickery, and foreground symbolism that fails from its Osterman Weekend surveillance paranoia all the way through to its willing suspension of disbelief in a pair of performances that never for a moment feel like anything but performances. Most disappointingly, there's a conspicuous lack of fun in a picture that seems more interested in the antagonists' psychology than in exploiting the possibilities of a piece surgically tuned to being a lark. Excavations of male psychology beyond the urge to gamesmanship have absolutely no place in Sleuth: you can talk about why guys lay their dicks on the bar, but you shouldn't do it for an entire feature. Branagh's strength as a director of Shakespeare is as an ambassador for the Bard's latent themes of sociological aggression and animism, while his Dead Again proved that even without Shakespeare, his ear for the operatic could carry the day in an artfully campy supernatural melodrama. But in applying his anthropologist's touch to Sleuth, he's met his match: there's nothing to unearth because the dig site is, frankly, sterile.

Funny People (2009)

July 31, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Eric Bana
written and directed by Judd Apatow

Funnypeopleby Walter Chaw I liked the first hour of Judd Apatow's Funny People quite a lot–the last four not so much. Needless to say, focus and pacing are a problem. Focus and pacing are a problem for just about any film that runs two-and-a-half hours. It starts as something different and strange, an experiment that seems to be working whereby Adam Sandler's sociopathic persona is put under the microscope and left to squirm. And then it turns into a James L. Brooks melodrama, and then a Kevin Smith joint. (Its epilogue, taking place in a deli between two protagonists after the storm, is shot in exactly the same way as Brooks's conclusion to Broadcast News, while a late-film kiddie rendition of "Memory" from "Cats" exhumes musty memories of Jersey Girl's Sondheim desecration.) What I'm saying is that Funny People starts as Punch-Drunk Love, transmogrifies into Spanglish, and metastasizes into Jersey Girl. If this were a boxing match between film and audience, the rope's the only thing holding us up for the last six rounds. It would be wrong to say that I hated Funny People; it squanders so much potential that it's closer to the truth to say the overwhelming feeling it engenders is one of intense disappointment.