Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 67 of 149

Valentine’s Day (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

August 10, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by Katherine Fugate
directed by Garry Marshall

by Walter Chaw There are worse directors working today than Garry Marshall, but not many and then not much worse. I’ve vowed on a few occasions (like after Beaches, Pretty Woman, Exit to Eden, The Other Sister, Raising Helen, Georgia Rule) to never subject myself to another Marshall joint–certainly to never bother reviewing another one. What’s the point, really, of taking the piss out of this guy and his movies? They’re consistently, stridently tone deaf; unfailingly saccharine; morally suspect; visually uninteresting; casually racist/misogynist/classist/homophobic; and dangerously enervating to the point of meriting some kind of warning label. Marry Marshall’s adorable dog/kid reaction shots and wholesale white-rape of Motown standards to a bloated ensemble cast (everyone from Jamie Foxx to Kathy Bates–yes, it’s horrific) enacting a two-hour version of Marshall’s career-launching TV series “Love, American Style” and what you get is every bit the horror movie the title Valentine’s Day suggests.

Red Planet (2000) – Blu-ray Disc

August 7, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras D
starring Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss, Tom Sizemore, Terence Stamp
screenplay by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin
directed by Antony Hoffman

by Walter Chaw Watching Val Kilmer pretend not to have enough oxygen is very much like watching Val Kilmer at any other time, but there’s something about him in a helmet that works for me. (Frankly, upon further consideration, the two states don’t seem all that unrelated.) South African director Antony Hoffman’s Red Planet, working from a clunky screenplay by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin, is, despite its obvious shortcomings, an interesting contribution to the end-of-the-millennium sweepstakes. Counting most specifically among its contemporaries films like The Matrix and Dark City (and the same year’s Pitch Black), it’s an eco-terror flick at heart, positing that in 2056, with the Earth polluted beyond salvation, the last chance for mankind’s survival is terraforming Mars using a biologically-engineered algae that for some reason hasn’t taken, necessitating an investigative mission by Capt. (not Dave) Bowman (Carrie-Anne Moss) and her small crew of scientists. It’s the set-up of course to everything from Aliens to Supernova, and originality isn’t the strong suit of what boils down to one of those emergency-beacon-is-really-a-trap movies. (At least until it suddenly becomes one of those walking-on-a-soundstage-I-mean-strange-planet-with-an-animal-sidekick movies.) What works about Red Planet–and works extremely well–is that it confronts its problems with a bracing, earnest, seemingly honest attempt at resolving those problems, even though the biggest one (“Hey, I thought you said there wasn’t life on this planet”) is resolved with, “Yeah, how ’bout that.”

Get Low (2010)

July 30, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Poland, Theatrical

**/****
starring Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, Lucas Black
screenplay by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell
directed by Aaron Schneider

by Walter Chaw Affable, warm, kinda boring, and decidedly minor, Aaron Schneider’s Get Low doesn’t really do anything wrong so much as it presents as an edgeless, inconsequential, protracted encounter with someone you feel you should be interested in but mostly want to politely usher out the door. It’s a conversation killer: a movie about a performance, a particular kind of calling card bespeaking comfort with name actors who might be capable of delivering an awards-season prestige picture for a splinter company interested in a medium-return on a small investment. That’s it. At the least, for what it’s worth, Get Low operates with a great deal of compassion for its small-town denizens, resisting the easy shot at their provinciality in favour of something more along the lines of a Sling Blade. On that note, this South is neither as ugly nor as impoverished as Billy Bob’s.

Insomnia (2002) – [Widescreen Edition] DVD + Blu-ray Disc

July 27, 20102000s, 2010, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Maura Tierney
screenplay by Hillary Seitz, based on the screenplay by Nikolaj Frobenius and Erik Skjoldbjærg
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw Director Christopher Nolan follows up his justifiably hailed indie masterpiece Memento with Insomnia, a mainstream Hollywood remake of Erik Skjoldbjærg’s tremendous 1997 Norwegian film of the same name. Like the ill-fated American version of the French/Dutch Spoorloos (a.k.a. The Vanishing), what emerges from this studio remake is a frightened, sometimes patronizing, and ultimately ineffectual thriller that transforms all the controversy and introspection of the original into something rote and predictable. A close comparison between Skjoldbjærg and Nolan’s visions for the material brings to light the defective machinery of big-budget motion pictures in Hollywood. The sad irony of such a discussion is that Nolan’s Memento was so remarkable because it represented nearly everything that Insomnia is not.

Road to Perdition (2002) [Widescreen (Dolby Digital)] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

July 26, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Gangster, Thriller

**½/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Tom Hanks, Tyler Hoechlin, Paul Newman, Jude Law
screenplay by David Self, based on the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw A shot near the end of Road to Perdition, Sam Mendes’s follow-up to his honoured American Beauty, needs to be singled out. It’s of a hotel room divided by a wall: on one end sits a boy in bed, weeping; on the opposite side of the partition enters the boy’s father, wet from the rain with blood on his hands. With painterliness, Mendes and cinematographer Conrad Hall present this moody tableau in what is a continuation of the picture’s running homage to the images, themes, even favourite subjects of American painter Edward Hopper, such as an all-night diner in the middle of nowhere, an unevenly lit apartment, and silhouettes imprisoned in blocks of yellow light.

Caddyshack (1980) + Funny Farm (1988)/Spies Like Us (1985) [Comedy Double Feature] – Blu-ray Discs

July 18, 20101980s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Espionage, Sports

CADDYSHACK
½*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight, Bill Murray
screenplay by Brian Doyle-Murray & Harold Ramis & Doug Kenney
directed by Harold Ramis

SPIES LIKE US
*/**** Image D+ Sound C+
starring Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Steve Forrest, Donna Dixon
screenplay by Dan Aykroyd and Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel
directed by John Landis

FUNNY FARM
**½/**** Image C+ Sound C+
starring Chevy Chase, Madolyn Smith, Joseph Maher, Jack Gilpin
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, based on the book by Jay Cronley
directed by George Roy Hill

by Walter Chaw Mean-spirited and essentially ugly, the inexplicably revered Caddyshack can be handily summarized by two moments with Chevy Chase’s Ty Webb–the first when he waggles his tongue lasciviously at a random woman walking by, the next when he says to town pump Lacey Underall (Cindy Morgan), “I’ve got an idea, let’s pretend we’re real human beings.” One identifies the general tenor of the piece as angry and cynical, the other as comedy dependant almost entirely–when it’s not angry and cynical–on arrogance and smugness. (The epitome of the latter might be Bill Murray’s mush-mouthed Carl the groundskeeper staring right at Harold Ramis’s bland camera in the midst of a torrential rainstorm.) Largely, proudly improvised by a gang of hedonistic assholes at the peak of their insufferability, it’s the fallout of “Saturday Night Live”‘s drug-fuelled, experimental-verging-on-hallucinogenic early years, which had felt like the last bastion of the counterculture.

Predators (2010)

July 13, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Laurence Fishburne
screenplay by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch
directed by Nimród Antal

by Walter Chaw It opens with a grab-bag of heavily-armed genre clichés–the world-weary man of action (Adrien Brody), the tough-talking Latina (Alice Braga), the mad-dog orange jump-suited killer (Walton Goggins), the Yakuza enforcer (Louis Ozawa Changchien), the Soviet (Oleg Taktarov), the savage (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), the nebbish (Topher Grace), and the wrong Mexican (Danny Trejo)–free-falling through a jungle canopy into bush that doesn’t make Cambodia look like Kansas so much as it makes Predators look like Avatar. They’re the game, see–the most dangerous game! And they’ve been dropped on an alien wildlife preserve for the express purpose of being hunted by a trio of the titular Predators. As if that weren’t enough, the film’s weak-ass script takes pains to establish that our “heroes” are also, vocationally, “predators.” Get it? It’s what passes for clever in a film that takes too long to get where we want it to go, diverting itself with one of those dumb nick-of-time animal-shooting sequences that didn’t thrill in Dances with Wolves and doesn’t thrill here (so they do it twice, why not), as well as an extended monologue delivered by a fish-eyed, paunchy Laurence Fishburne that, for all its kitsch pleasure, grinds the movie to a standstill. If it’s not going to be smart, it could at least have the decency to not also be boring.

Predator (1987) [Ultimate Hunter Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

July 5, 2010****/****, 1980s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mexico, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image C Sound A Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Bill Duke
screenplay by Jim Thomas & John Thomas
directed by John McTiernan

by Walter Chaw Appearing the same year as Stanley Kubrick’s great, enigmatic, dangerous Full Metal Jacket, the brilliant neo-noir of Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, John Hughes’s devastating Planes, Trains & Automobiles, and what many feel is the quintessential film of the 1980s, Wall Street, John McTiernan’s Predator is, in plain truth, one of the two real quintessential films of the decade, a distinction it shares with Back to the Future–pictures, both, that initially appear to toe the Reagan era’s line of worship at the altar of Eisenhower’s mythological Americana only to reveal that lost wars cannot, in fact, be re-fought and that the Good Old Days were always a little violent and randy. It’s a film, this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle all of oiled musculature and technological fetishism, of unusual kinetic power and intelligence, one that sets out to sate the popular audience’s hunger for such entertainments in the age of the modern blockbuster before leaving its hero battered, broken, frightened, alone. Its kinship is to movies from the period like Aliens and, yes, Rambo: First Blood Part II–films that understand that when Shane rode away at the end, he was probably just looking for a place to die.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

June 30, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire

**/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by David Slade

by Walter Chaw The first and greatest surprise of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (hereafter Eclipse) is that it’s not awful; it’s actually almost good for its first forty-five minutes or so, until the burden of Stephenie Meyer’s genuinely, legendarily poor source material catches up to it. Until such time, there’s some interest blossoming despite itself in the love triangle between mopey Bella (Kristen Stewart), fruity Edward (Robert Pattinson), and swarthy Jacob (Taylor Lautner): a hint of racial discomfort, a soupçon of class struggle, a glimmer of insight given over to the difficulties of teen relationships at a moment in life when Nancy Drew plays like Richard Wagner. Never mind that of the three leads, only Pattinson delivers a (surprisingly, too) good performance–and then only fitfully; never mind that Meyer has taken a giant, steaming dump on centuries of folklore and tradition to construct thin cardboard monsters that serve as bad metaphors for Mormon libido (as told by Judy Blume’s less talented soul sister); never mind that the picture’s entire last two-thirds devolves into constant repetition of the will she/won’t she theme punctuated by its stupid mythology. Really, the way that new director David Slade’s flat-to-the-point-of-garish camera brings out the faintest suggestion of corruption beneath the pancake makeup and baggy eyes of the film’s immortal underwear models–who are, literally, ancient beasts–lends the series the dread that was buried in the first two films under volumes of camp and dreary incompetence. Not to say that Eclipse doesn’t ultimately end as the same old bullshit, but for the first time, if only briefly, the clouds part for a brief, tantalizing twinkle of what it was that all this could have been.

Golden Age Romance on DVD

June 28, 2010****/****, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Billy Wilder, Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953)
[CENTENNIAL COLLECTION]
***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert, Hartley Power
screenplay by Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton
directed by William Wyler

SABRINA (1954)
[CENTENNIAL COLLECTION]
**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, William Holden, Walter Hampden
screenplay by Billy Wilder, Samuel Taylor and Ernest Lehman, based on Taylor’s play
directed by Billy Wilder

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1957)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
½*/**** Image C Sound B
starring Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, Maurice Chevalier, John McGiver
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, based on a novel by Claude Anet
directed by Billy Wilder

NOW, VOYAGER (1942)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D
starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper
screenplay by Casey Robinson, based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty
directed by Irving Rapper

MOGAMBO (1953)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
*/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Clark Gable, Ava Gardiner, Grace Kelly, Donald Sinden
screenplay by John Lee Mahin, based on a play by Wilson Collison
directed by John Ford

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Natalie Wood, Pat Hingle, Audrey Christie, Warren Beatty
screenplay by William Inge
directed by Elia Kazan

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s one of those seminal moments that movies provide the culture with now and again, like the swoop up a little rise to an impossibly fresh John Wayne in Stagecoach, or the intervention of a fortuitous steam vent in The Seven Year Itch, this introduction we have to Audrey Hepburn as she’s whirled around in a barber chair in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday to reveal the pixie-cut heard ’round the world. That she’s adorable is a given–the real issue is whether she’s an actress or just a bundle of inexplicable charisma, a ganglion of celluloid starlight that evaporates under the slightest critical scrutiny. I love Roman Holiday, but I vacillate between indifference and actual dislike of the rest of Hepburn’s films. I don’t find her winsome in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, am irritated by her in Charade, think she’s appallingly twee in Love in the Afternoon. She doesn’t hold her own against Sean Connery in Robin and Marian and gets blown off the screen by Albert Finney, Alan Arkin, and Rex Harrison in Two for the Road, Wait Until Dark, and My Fair Lady, respectively. If you ask me, Audrey isn’t an actress so much as someone you would like to have known and maybe had the opportunity to cuddle, which makes her mega-stardom in the Fifties and Sixties all the more testament to her ineffable appeal. Happening right when Method was rendering personalities like Hepburn déclassé, she was making a career of being terminally anachronistic. It’s Ozzie’s Harriet, sashaying while Rome burns. Instant nostalgia; even when she was introduced for the first time, it must have seemed like ages ago.

Jonah Hex (2010)

June 17, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Superhero, Thriller, Western

*/****
starring Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Shannon
screenplay by Neveldine & Taylor
directed by Jimmy Hayward

by Walter Chaw Distilling a fairly popular Weird West comic series down to a tight little 80-minute ball that plays like another adaptation of the Max Payne videogame, ex-Pixar animator Jimmy Hayward’s Jonah Hex is a whole lotta boom-boom executed in a borrowed, curiously flat style that has one pining for the days when Sam Raimi was making stuff like Darkman and The Quick and the Dead–those two films, incidentally, the ones Jonah Hex most wants to be. The eponymous Jonah (Josh Brolin) is a disfigured Confederate hero gifted–through hatred, a near-death experience, and healing from mysterious Injuns–with the ability to withstand point-blank shotgun blasts, briefly reanimate the dearly departed, and suffer Megan Fox’s typecast performance as a really popular whore. Her Lilah keeps weapons all over creation, natch, because she might be an oft-visited saloon girl but she ain’t nobody’s bitch. Well, except Jonah’s, I guess. But Jonah is too busy trying to kill evil Col. Quentin Trumbull (John Malkovich) to make an honest woman out of her. Jonah Hex may not know much, but he knows he’s no fucking magician.

Easy Rider (1969) [40th Anniversary] – Blu-ray Disc

June 15, 2010****/****, 1960s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Jack Nicholson, Road Movie

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Luke Askew
screenplay by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern
directed by Dennis Hopper

FFC Must-Own by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s not easy to mark the beginning of the Sixties as an idea. Me, personally, as it’s the way I’m wired, I like to use as the starting gun the trilogy of dysfunctional pictures–Psycho, Eyes Without a Face, Peeping Tom–that literally inaugurate the decade, but I’d also accept that 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis was enough for many of the nearly-disaffected to become completely what-the-fuck disaffected. And if you go with that, then what happens at the end of 1963 with the assassination of JFK is that Zapruder places film as the end-all of Truth. A lot changed with those 26.6 seconds of film–or, should we say, a lot changed back, to a period where the newsreel, no matter how doctored or fabricated, was the primary mass means of information-gathering before television began to encroach on it. A lot of ink’s been spilled about the extent to which movies in the mid-to-late-Fifties tried to outdo the boob-tube with grand Technicolor visions; comparatively little has been written about Zapruder’s 486 colour frames, which stole the thunder of television’s hold on vérité–remember, in 1960, Hitch wanted to shoot Psycho in a televisual style for its implicit realism–as elegantly as a shell fired from a mail-order Carcano. TV achieves a stalemate by broadcasting Vietnam during the dinner hour, yet it doesn’t win outright until the ’90s when it embraces shakycam and film unveils itself once and for all as a magician’s medium: smoke, mirrors, Forrest telling LBJ he needs to piss, and the Titanic going down again to the tune of a tween tearjerker.

Alice in Wonderland (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 14, 20102000s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Italy, Japan, Mystery, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Mia Wasikowska
screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw A diary of missed opportunities but not the disaster it could have been, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland reminds a great deal of Walter Murch’s Return to Oz in that both are closer in spirit to the respective dark of their inspirations while still falling tantalizingly shy of the beguiling murk of their headwaters. (In terms of adaptations, No Country for Old Men holds the gold standard for cinema that understands its source well enough to use it in its own sentence.) It’ll be compared of course to the Disney animated classic that mistook Lewis Carroll’s misanthropy-soaked surrealism for whimsy–a comparison Burton tries to sidestep by incorporating more elements (the Bandersnatch, the Jabberwocky, the Jub-Jub Bird, snickersnack) from the largely-ignored second book, Alice Through the Looking Glass, but one that’ll hound a film featuring plucked-out eyeballs and a castle moat traversed by skipping across severed heads.

The A-Team (2010)

June 10, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson
screenplay by Joe Carnahan & Brian Bloom and Skip Woods
directed by Joe Carnahan

by Walter Chaw Not the full-on prison rape its preview promises, Joe Carnahan’s is-what-it-is The A-Team is a sometimes-affable acceptance that the best this film will possibly be, given that it has not one spark of inspiration in its creation, is an expensive knock-off of a kitschy cultural artifact. It doesn’t quite go the route of surreal post-modernism like the The Brady Bunch movies, but neither does it try to play it Leave it to Beaver straight, instead walking a middle road through occasional flashes of self-awareness amid much stupid action. Credit where credit’s due that, prior to its bombastic finale, disgraced Col. Hannibal Smith (a miscast Liam Neeson) mutters, “Overkill is greatly underrated,” despite that overkill in bad movies like this is neither overrated nor unexpected. I guess I just appreciate the opportunity to chortle smugly. Rather, The A-Team is a Michael Bay joint without the overt racism and dangerous misogyny–a picture for nostalgic and/or stupid people that doesn’t also make them bellicose and agitated. At the least, it holds the honoured distinction of being the first movie I’ve ever seen that uses a quote from Gandhi to shake a career assassin out of his newly acquired distaste for violence. That, my friend, takes a certain level of genius and chutzpah.

Invictus (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

June 8, 20102000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Sports

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon, Tony Kgoroge, Patrick Mofokeng
screenplay by Anthony Peckham, based on the book Playing the Enemy by John Carlin
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw During an awards season seemingly devoted to surveying the racial divide, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus lands a glancing blow as a Reconciliation sports melodrama that avoids the hysterical outburst even as it fails to hit one out of the park. Of the two, I think I’d rather the former. Expecting a (more) self-important Hoosiers, I was pleasantly surprised by Eastwood’s leisurely, cocksure, tempered-by-age stroll through the first days post-Apartheid as Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman, finally playing Abraham Lincoln) is tasked with the near-impossible job of suturing a nation coming out from under a long Plantation nightmare without his administration becoming exactly what the minority Afrikaner fears. It locates sports as one quick avenue to the heart of the lowest common denominator (just as the existence of Invictus locates film as another), and it fires dual salvos at its audience by first being a sports underdog uplift flick without much sports or uplift, then in not deigning to explain the fundamentals of rugby to its American audience, instead launching a quick jab at America’s reluctance to engage the worlds’ pastimes (rugby and soccer, notably). What it really does for the race conversation is allow Eastwood the opportunity to at last feature Freeman in a movie designed around him as opposed to having him–as he did in Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven–function as a comparative component against which the white protagonist is memorialized and measured. Better late than never.

Legion (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

June 6, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Fantasy, Horror

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Paul Bettany, Lucas Black, Tyrese Gibson, Dennis Quaid
screenplay by Peter Schink and Scott Stewart
directed by Scott Stewart

by Walter Chaw I actually don’t mind a portrayal of God that’s more in line with Milton’s: voyeuristic, sadistic, inscrutable, unmerciful, absent. I prefer it, truth be told. The problem with Legion is that it plunks this high-minded, utterly humanistic idea in the middle of garbage the likes of which the world outside of SyFy original flicks has never known. Bad doesn’t begin to describe it–“futile” is closer to the truth, as ex-ILM geek Scott Stewart does his best to make a complete hash of one possible apocalypse, departing from “Revelations” to find an angry God, “sick of all the bullshit,” divinely possessing a posse of Los Angelinos so that they may lay zombie siege to a dusty roadside diner populated by a collection of spam-in-a-cabin archetypes. Take grizzled diner owner Bob (Dennis Quaid), for instance, a longtime ex-smoker who still keeps a lighter named “hope” in his breast pocket because, as anyone who’s ever seen a movie knows, he’s going to have to use it at some point to ignite a propane tank in a moment of selfless sacrifice. It’s one of several martyrdoms in a film that’s fairly relentless about the great unknowable nature of this Christian God. He’s pissed, no question, and no amount of brotherly grace will make Him un-pissed.

Shutter Island (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

June 1, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw The first thirty minutes of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island left me breathless with delight. The rack-focus through mess-hall implements; swaying along a ceiling as we peer beyond the door to the head, where our hero, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), is losing his lunch; the way a ferry blows through a fog bank like Travis Bickle’s cab through the steam escaping a New York sewer cap. When it snows, it snows up like in the dream sequences from Bringing Out the Dead (there’s even a moment when the smoke from Teddy’s cigarette retreats into the butt)–and when a shadowy figure named Laeddis (Elias Koteas) finally materializes in the midst of Teddy’s fugue, he bears a striking resemblance to Travis Bickle. (It’s not until later that we understand the full extent of this self-reference.) Shutter Island is among the director’s handsomest films, and moments of it suggest there’s a masterpiece here–as a WWII Holocaust drama, or a ghost story, or a period Red Menace piece, or a 1960s Manchurian Candidate manqué, or a 1940s Freud clinic, or a G-Man noir, or a straight procedural, or a modernist existential piece–if he wants it. But it’s less than the sum of its tantalizing parts, providing instead a hackneyed climax that proves just another votive lit in Dennis Lehane’s church of dead children.

War of the Worlds (2005) – Blu-ray Disc

May 31, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Tom Cruise

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. A lot like Minority Report, the first 90% of War of the Worlds is among the best movies of the year, and the last 10% is among the worst. Spielberg is the only one who can ruin his films and he does it over and over again because he’s Peter Pan in a Captain Hook world. There has never been a more gifted visual storyteller than Steven Spielberg; in the five minutes of shorthand that opens his War of the Worlds, he creates three characters we care about, a world that we recognize, and a real hope that this time, this one time, he’ll be courageous enough to follow a narrative through to its logical end instead of the one he thinks will least disturb his audience. His audience being one that he underestimates with such stunning regularity that it can be said with confidence at this point that he’s not really underestimating anybody–that he knows for whom he’s making movies, posterity be damned. War of the Worlds is a work of obvious genius that is about nothing, which is an amazing and disheartening thing to say because so much of the picture is composed of jaw-dropping–I mean it, it’s astonishing–Holocaust tableaux mixed with 9/11 imagery.

The House of the Devil (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

May 18, 20102000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery

***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov, Dee Wallace
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw Her hair’s a little longer, but she’s a dead ringer for Karen Allen from Starman (with a touch of Brooke Adams from Invasion of the Body Snatchers thrown in), this girl dancing to The Fixx‘s classic “One Thing Leads to Another,” Walkman clapped to her ears, in a creepy house in the middle of nowhere. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue, a real find) is there because she answered one of those tear-away babysitting ads posted outside her dorm, and who cares if it’s not really a kid the guy, Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan), wants her to look after but instead a demented old mother-in-law socked away in the attic^*–he’s giving her four hundred bucks so he and his wife (Mary Woronov) can enjoy the lunar eclipse. I know what you’re thinking, but Ti West’s gorgeous ode to ’80s exploitation shockers comes off as more than mere pomo exercise or homage; The House of the Devil is a lovingly crafted little gem that owes as much to Roman Polanski’s paranoia trilogy and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas. (Come to think of it, Donahue also bears a resemblance to Margot Kidder around the time of the latter and DePalma’s Sisters.) Smarter than hell about its sources, it employs all of them to a full seventy minutes of unbearable tension capped by twenty minutes of payoff. It’s the same ratio of foreplay-to-climax as Rosemary’s Baby, and lo, The House of the Devil would play wonderfully on a double-bill with the same.

Avatar (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD

May 17, 20102000s, 2009, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Sam Worthington, Zoë Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver
written and directed by James Cameron

by Walter Chaw A morally, historically, socially, and politically childish amalgam of Pocahontas and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, Avatar finds James Cameron–still the Cameron of Titanic (or the uncomfortably simpering T2, if we’re honest with ourselves) rather than the Cameron of Aliens and The Terminator–trying his hand at being Kevin Costner: powerful, dim, and only relevant for a tiny window of time he doesn’t realize has already closed. The more simple-minded liberal proselytizing he perpetrates like Avatar, the farther away he gets from the B-movie muscularity that indicated his early career. It’s a bad thing, believe me, that the first set of movies people think to compare your latest to is first George Lucas’s ridiculous prequel trilogy–then Dances with Wolves.