Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 67 of 150

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) – Blu-ray + DVD

October 26, 2010****/****, 1970s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

FFC Must-Own ****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by W.D. Richter, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
directed by Philip Kaufman

by Walter Chaw I’ve come to believe that Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not only better than Don Siegel’s honoured 1956 original but also one of the best films of the best era in filmmaking. Even in so deep a well as this New American Cinema of ours–one that has forgotten gems like Cockfighter, Fat City, Law and Disorder, Night Moves, and Electra Glide in Blue in there propping up films like Chinatown, The Godfather I/II, Apocalypse Now, Nashville, The Conversation, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and on and on, trailing into incandescent, brilliant eternity–this little work of absolute paranoid craftsmanship bears up under multiple viewings and close scrutiny and provides a succinct, prescient, terrifying précis of the decade before and the decade to come. What better analogy for the looming Reagan administration than pods stalking in lock-step, armed with arbitrary titles and senses of entitlement, steadfastly incapable of heeding the drumbeat of doom in the black jungles around us? It’s a film about the absolute horror of complete conformity and non-engagement, as well as a reintroduction to the McCarthy-ian ideal that the only thing to get terribly exercised about is the ferreting out and excoriation of differing values. Arriving as it does in 1978, at the tail end of the most creative period in American film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers offers up a warning against complacency in the immediate wake of Jaws and Star Wars, which sounded the death knell for the artistry of this period arm-in-arm with the dawning of some unknown, mass- consumed and marketed ethic.

THX 1138: The George Lucas Director’s Cut (1971/2004) – Blu-ray Disc

October 20, 20101970s, 2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Don Pedro Colley, Maggie McOmie
screenplay by George Lucas and Walter Murch
directed by George Lucas

by Walter Chaw THX 1138 is the only film George Lucas ever wrote and directed that will and should be remembered as a mostly artistic triumph rather than a largely financial one (recalling that the best of his Star Wars films, The Empire Strikes Back, was neither written nor directed by Lucas). The fact that he’s now tampered with it in much the same manner as he’s tampered with his original Star Wars trilogy seems, then, an almost bigger crime against posterity, even if it makes a kind of ironic sense within the thematic framework of the film. THX 1138‘s preoccupations with dehumanization, an abhorrence of imperfection and humanity in favour of machine-tooled precision, and the corruption of human perception and emotions with mass-produced opiates find sympathy with this new stage of its own existence as a film that hasn’t been just restored, but enhanced, too, by CGI that serves the same basic function for the audience as the drugged milk does for the protagonists of A Clockwork Orange. When Lucas made THX 1138, he was the prole toiling (stealing from Aldous Huxley and N.I. Kostomorov is toil, yes?) in obscurity; when he retooled the thing and went to Telluride with a streaming digital feed of it thirty-three years later, he completed his transformation into the faceless machine-priest of the film, sanctifying his zombified acolytes as good pods and ladling upon them the questionable bounty of blessings by the state.

Greenberg (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

October 5, 2010****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

FFC Must-Own by Walter Chaw The ideal follow-up to his Dorothy Parker-cum-Rohmer shrine Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg is a deepening of the filmmaker’s examinations of the peculiar voids over which we stretch the niceties of interaction betwixt the miserable intellectual elite. It’s the Algonquin Roundtable reconstituted as wits without an audience: all outrage without an outlet, there’s even this sense of panic attached to Greenberg’s little whorls of nervous intellectualism, as if Jonathan Edwards’s penitents were literati at risk of being cast into the hell of everyone else. Just as ignorance is bliss, the opposite is most assuredly also true, and it’s the product of that deep, consuming contemplation of the navel that is the foundation for Baumbach’s films, from his post-grad Kicking and Screaming through to his portraits of agonizing relational disintegrations The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding. The anxiety that drives his work is the fear that the armour equipped to defend against the perception of ordinariness doesn’t fit well, and that the discovery of the idiot driving the sage is not merely likely but inevitable. His are films, then, of a certain deep discomfort with the projection of the self–and Greenberg, ironically, is an examination of all of Baumbach’s issues carried off with what seems like absolute confidence. If Baumbach suffers from the same self-doubt as his characters, he’s no longer showing it in his films.

Sex and the City 2 (2010) + Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

October 3, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

SEX AND THE CITY 2
ZERO STARS/****
starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, Kim Cattrall
written and directed by Michael Patrick King

PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ben Kingsley, Gemma Arterton, Alfred Molina
screenplay by Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard
directed by Mike Newell

by Walter Chaw One may be a misguided liberal screed and the other a misguided conservative screed, but Sex and the City 2 and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (hereafter Prince of Persia) are very much alike in that they’re what a Tea Party meeting would look like with a budget. They’re politically-confused hodgepodges of bad ideas and misplaced, incoherent outrage–most of it gleaned from the one or two times some idiot accidentally read the A-section of a newspaper, the rest gathered from Dummies primers on how to be cursorily informed in the Information Age. They’re similarly infused with healthy doses of arrogance and cultural empiricism that speak directly to the reasons the United States is the target of fundamentalist whackos convinced we’re all just like the randy quartet of aging bitches on a hedonism bender in the Middle East in Sex and the City 2. Hateful, vile, both films are also indicated by a distinct lack of artistry, representing a world post-Michael Bay in which a goodly portion of movies are dependent on not only other cultural touchstones (a TV series, a videogame) for the entirety of their alleged appeal, but on some of the most vapid cultural touchstones in the brief history of our popular culture, period.

A Scanner Darkly (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

October 3, 2010****/****, 2000s, 2006, 2010, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder
screenplay by Richard Linklater, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick
directed by Richard Linklater

FFC Must-Own by Walter Chaw Our reality has almost outstripped Philip K. Dick’s paranoid fantasies, and Richard Linklater’s grim A Scanner Darkly is the slipperiest take yet on the war between perception vs. reality in a year that knows United 93. Keanu Reeves, so often woefully miscast, is wonderfully imagined here as a guy in a “scramble suit”: his appearance constantly shifting in a kaleidoscope of mismatched parts–the uniform of future-narcs (seven years from now, announce the opening titles) sent undercover to ferret out the dopers and dealers of Substance D. It’s a hallucinogen that eventually causes a rift in the individual consciousness (the left hemisphere atrophies and the right tries to compensate) and Reeves’ Agent Fred is sent to find out where dealer Donna (Winona Ryder) is getting her shit. But the scramble suits seem mainly used to keep the vice squad’s identities from one another instead of their quarry, meaning that Fred goes underground as himself, Robert Arctor, in full grunge, inhabiting his once-cozy suburban nook with tweaked conspiracy theorists Ernie (Woody Harrelson) and Barris (Robert Downey Jr.). Meaning, too, that Fred is asked to spy on Arctor, and that Barris, in a pair of hilarious scenes, informs on Arctor to Arctor. It’s not the labyrinthine audacity of Dick’s delusions that so enthrals, but rather the mendacity of them. What’s complicated about A Scanner Darkly isn’t the compression of identity or the various plots to which its characters imagine themselves hero and victim, but the idea that reality conforms itself to belief–that because life has stopped making sense to you, life has stopped making sense, period.

Let Me In (2010)

October 1, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire

**/****
starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chloë Grace Moretz, Richard Jenkins, Elias Koteas
screenplay by Matt Reeves, based on the novel Låt den rätte komma in by John Ajvide Lindqvist
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Matt Reeves’s redux of Swede Tomas Alfredson’s lovely, understated, doom-laden Let the Right One In finds magnification in the wrong places while betraying what seems to be its better nature in order to present something more “palatable” to a popular audience. Wrong to call it a “dumbing down”–better to say that elements left unspoken or at arm’s length in the original film are presented in Let Me In in as confrontational, uncontroversial a way as possible. More’s the pity, as the movie begins with Ronald Reagan quoting Alexis de Tocqueville in his “Evil Empire” speech (delivered to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983) on a television in a snowed-in New Mexico E.R.: “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America… America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” It’s a thread of Christian fervour that weaves through much of the first twenty minutes of the picture, through the introduction of our hero, Owen (a tremendous Kodi Smit-McPhee), suffering an extended Grace delivered by a faceless mother (Cara Buono) and, later, an admonition by an also-faceless father over the telephone that Owen’s mother is unbalanced and should stow her Christian shit a bit more tightly. The lack of the father as a physical presence in the film becomes a poignant elision in this respect: in a film about good and evil, the divorce between Father and Son, as it were, is a pithy one.

Practical Magic/The Witches of Eastwick [Comedy Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

September 29, 20101980s, 1990s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, Horror, Jack Nicholson, Romance

PRACTICAL MAGIC (1998)
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest, Aidan Quinn
screenplay by Robin Swicord and Akiva Goldsman and Adam Brooks, based on the novel by Alice Hoffman
directed by Griffin Dunne

THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (1987)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B-
starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer
screenplay by Michael Cristofer, based on the novel by John Updike
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw Some would say, and be correct in saying, that Griffin Dunne’s “women’s picture” Practical Magic is the perfect distillation of both George Cukor’s tradition of gynecological melodramas and Alice Hoffman’s assembly-line ladies’ relationship novels. Edgeless, in love with its own whimsy, shot through with the sort of autumnal glow more at home in instant-coffee commercials, it could, as sophomore directorial efforts go, be worse–credit for that going mostly to an amiably under-achieving cast of superstars and ace character actors. It’s the very model of the classic Studio picture in that sense: a quiet, contract-satisfying flick based on a safe property, set in a picaresque locale with vaguely populist supernatural undertones in which no one’s particularly invested. Call it The Bishop’s Wife for 1998–one of the oddest years in movies of the last twenty, among which crop this film maintains a comfortable medium-buoyancy. It’s possible to try to pull something like a feminist read out of its obsessive focus on women and their sexuality–what else is witchcraft about, after all, than a fear of the Other made manifest as girl parts? But not only is the picture too stupid to bear up under such scrutiny, such a read is also hopelessly complicated by an adaptation courtesy a triumvirate composed of snag Adam Brooks and genuine blights Akiva Goldsman and (not quite worse but somehow close) Robin Swicord. A bad sign when the only female in the creative process is Swicord, who, by working as a Mata Hari, as it were, as the woman behind The Jane Austen Book Club and Memoirs of a Geisha, has arguably done more harm to her gender than Michael Bay.

The Karate Kid (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

September 26, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, China, Drama, Family, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Sports, Will Smith

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jaden Smith, Jackie Chan, Taraji P. Henson, Wenwen Han
screenplay by Christopher Murphey
directed by Harald Zwart

by Walter Chaw So here’s the thing: there’s something really powerful about the archetype of a child losing his father and finding a mentor and, on the flipside, of a father losing a son and finding an apprentice. Easy to scoff, it’s also the worn-through, threadbare foundation for stuff like the Dardennes’ arthouse favourite The Son, Beat Takeshi’s Kikujuro, and Pixar’s Up–so why not another go-round with a remake of The Karate Kid? The only places it truly fails are in its deviations from formula: a little too much faithless razzle-dazzle here, a bit too much equivocal bullshit there, and a whole lot of nepotism as overmatched Jaden Smith (spawn of producers Will and Jada Pinkett) grimaces his way through a cipher of a character. It’s high-concept fat that clogs the arteries of a lean, John G. Avildsen-sculpted framework, this inner-city-to-Forbidden-city crap that sees li’l Dre (Smith) jetting off to Beijing when mommy (Taraji P. Henson) gets a job at an auto plant. Should there be an undercurrent of irony here about moving from Detroit to Beijing to work on cars? Doesn’t matter, as in the place of subtext, The Karate Kid quickly introduces a deeply uncomfortable love story between 12-year-old Dre and little Mei (Han Wenwen) that culminates in a stolen kiss and a sexy dance set to Lady Gaga that has blank Dre slacking his jaw in the very approximation of Forrest Gump finally fucking Jen-nay. Is there a racial element when bully Cheng (Wang Zhenwei) warns Dre to “stay away from all of us”? Doesn’t matter, as in the place of all that stuff about internment camps that so beautifully complicated the 1984 flick is the drama of Mr. Han née Miyagi (Jackie Chan) losing control of his car on a dark and stormy night (because just as every chink knows kung fu, none of them can drive–Han totals a car in the film while it’s parked in his living room), thus opening the door for a ragamuffin to come calling like some funked-up changeling.

Forbidden Planet (1956) [50th Anniversary Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

September 23, 20101950s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller, ZERO STARS

FORBIDDEN PLANET
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens
screenplay by Cyril Hume
directed by Fred McLeod Wilcox

THE INVISIBLE BOY (1957)
ZERO STARS/****
Image B- Sound C+
starring Richard Eyer, Philip Abbott, Diane Brewster, Harold J. Stone
screenplay by Cyril Hume, based on the story by Edmund Cooper
directed by Herman Hoffman

by Walter Chaw Outrageously influential and utterly unlike its contemporaries, Fred Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet today suffers from prosaic pacing and long stretches where its groundbreaking special effects take centre-stage as the cast gapes in slack-jawed, dim-witted appreciation. I suppose it’s not altogether antithetical to the themes of the picture, one that finds its heroes pontificating on their primitiveness in the face of an awesome (and extinct) alien culture–but this open love of its own coolness ultimately represents Forbidden Planet‘s broadest, most negative impact. The worst of our mainstream spectaculars, after all, are buried under reaction shots as the characters who should be the least mesmerized by their surroundings are impelled to be audience surrogates. What still works about Forbidden Planet is its high-mindedness: those moments where mad scientist Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) declares that the knowledge gleaned from the new technologies he discovers by reverse-engineering a cache of alien artifacts will be jealously rationed by him alone. The dangerous idea that one entity would take on the moral and intellectual superiority to judge who should and should not be allowed to educate themselves was germane here in the middle of the Cold War and remains applicable to our current state of foreign affairs, where just the threat of knowledge acts simultaneously as a spur to aggression and as a deterrent for invasion. Considered by many to be the best of the ’50s science-fiction cycle, Forbidden Planet, at once Luddite and in love with the potential for technological expansion, is at least unique for its unabashed indulgence in its subtext–though mining subtext tends to have the obvious effect of leaving the subtext barren.

The Social Network (2010)

September 22, 2010****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Theatrical

****/*****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer
screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw An asshole movie about an asshole, David Fincher’s The Social Network is an exacting, brutal celluloid treatise on the theory that the only reason anything ever gets made in this world is because some smart guys don’t get laid enough. It’s the misandrous analogue to Camille Paglia’s once-inflammatory assertion in her Sexual Personae that if women were in charge of civilization, we’d still be living in grass huts. Freud at its mud-wallow base, The Social Network isn’t thoughtful–it’s not a conversation unto itself, not much more than pocket philosophizing easily turned into a weapon for either side. In the end, it’s just a series of loose, out-of-sequence vignettes chronicling the creation of a 25-billion-dollar enterprise on the back of a painful break-up and a best friend getting into an exclusive campus club that said 25-billion-dollar enterprise’s creator could not. But it’s good. Good because Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin have tapped into a vein of male anxiety in a way that feels like mainlining a particularly hot, particularly angry fix. It’s Fight Club again, but with an ending that’s more about the toothed pit at the middle of male loneliness and obsession–drawing that line between genius and psychosis instead of, as in Fight Club, pandering to some notion of a romantic solution capable of soothing eons of atavistic penis crises. It’s Fight Club without Marla.

American Beauty (1999) [The Awards Edition] + Forrest Gump [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVDs + American Beauty [Sapphire Series] – Blu-ray Disc

September 20, 20101990s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Drama, DVD, Romance

AMERICAN BEAUTY
**/****
DVD – Image C+ Sound B- Extras C-
BD – B Sound A- Extras C
starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Alan Ball
directed by Sam Mendes

FORREST GUMP
*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Sally Field
screenplay by Eric Roth, based on the novel by Winston Groom
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Walter Chaw People who say the Oscars suck aren’t entirely wrong, but saying this tends to obscure the fact that most Best Picture honourees aren’t terrible so much as dedicatedly mediocre. They’re masterpieces of toeing the centreline, and in so doing they manage to offend neither side of the divide overly: The great American strive, Hollywood-style, isn’t to rewire the mousetrap, as it were, any more than it is to produce a pile of crap on purpose. No, the goal is to achieve medium buoyancy. Too bloated to float, too fat to sink; if you don’t reach too ambitiously, you won’t get slapped down–and a career constructed around formula-prestige, 140-minute pictures is suddenly within your grasp, Ron Howard-like. The trick is to appeal as broadly as possible without appearing to do so–to recast convention in vague middlebrow hot-button terms and neither speak above the heads of your audience nor be obvious in your condescension.

Machete (2010)

September 2, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Germany, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Danny Trejo, Jeff Fahey, Michelle Rodriguez, Steven Seagal
screenplay by Robert Rodriguez & Alvaro Rodríguez
directed by Ethan Maniquis & Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw The only kind of movie Robert Rodriguez should be making as well as the kind of movie The Expendables should have been, the knowing, balls-out Machete is unforgivable, reprehensible, sleazy, disgusting fun, and somehow not entirely stupid. It gives props to the eternally quickly-dead character actor Danny Trejo as the titular ex-Federale, a grab-bag of Mexican stereotypes who in the course of his bloody rampage (for justice, of course) uses a weed-whacker and a pick-axe, among other day-labourer tools. Meanwhile, when he’s picked up as a patsy in a senator’s ploy, he more fears that he’s being tapped for a “septic job.” It’s unabashed in its politics, taking on the illegal immigration debate in the United States with a naïve brio and outrage. But it’s all the more winning, I think, for its complete lack of embarrassment about itself. The thought even occurs that the reason it works is the exact reason a few of the better drive-in/grindhouse/exploitation films of the Seventies worked: Born of low pretensions, it frees itself to explore its outrage with a simple-mindedness that rings with the earnest “geez!” of a Kevin Costner joint.

Blood Simple (Director’s Cut) (1985/2000) – Blu-ray Disc

August 28, 20101980s, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Crime, Thriller

Blood Simple.
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras F
starring John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, M. Emmett Walsh
screenplay by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
directed by Joel Coen

by Walter Chaw For all the entirely justified bile levelled at George Lucas’s art-hating, self-abnegating decisions to redux his movies into oblivion while stashing the originals in dead formats and special features, there’s been no commensurate disdain levied against the Coen Brothers for their desecration of their directorial debut, Blood Simple. Only long out-of-print VHS and LaserDisc editions offer access to the version of the film, compromised though it is, that most of us grew up with–the one that uses Neil Diamond instead of a Four Tops standard; the one that has Carter Burwell’s brilliant score cue up a few seconds earlier as Abby (Frances McDormand) and her new lover Ray (John Getz) go to the house Abby shares with husband Marty (Dan Hedaya) to gather her things; the one that allows Meurice (Samm-Art Williams) an extra line as he’s explaining to a hillbilly patron of the bar where he and Ray work (for Marty) why they’ll be listening to Diamond’s cover of The Monkees‘ “I’m a Believer” on the jukebox. I understand that the song was a substitution because initially they couldn’t secure the rights to “The Same Old Song” for home video; what I don’t understand is the further elision of an additional three minutes and the lack of any option to watch Blood Simple in that more complete form.

Fame (1980) – Blu-ray Disc + Fame (2009) [Extended Dance Edition] – DVD

August 26, 20101980s, 2000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Musical, Romance, Teen

FAME (1980)
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Irene Cara, Lee Curreri, Laura Dean, Antonia Franceschi
screenplay by Christopher Gore
directed by Alan Parker

FAME (2009)
*/**** Image N/A Sound C Extras D
starring Debbie Allen, Charles S. Dutton, Kelsey Grammer, Megan Mullaly
screenplay by Allison Burnett, based on the screenplay by Christopher Gore
directed by Kevin Tancharoen

by Walter Chaw Alan Parker seems to fancy himself a bit of a sociologist–a chronicler of Truth surveying man’s inhumanity to man and the injustices perpetrated in the United States especially, offering up pictures that seek to expose just exactly what’s wrong with his non-native land. When he makes a good movie, like Angel Heart, it’s good because he’s not proselytizing about corruption so much as he’s indulging in his suspicions about the Home of the Brave. (Filthy with evil, right?) The matinee of appreciation for Parker is not surprisingly around fifteen, when stuff like Mississippi Burning and Midnight Express has the weight of sagacity rather than the reek of puerile outrage and unbecoming grandstanding. He’s Stanley Kramer with a drug and counterculture fixation that marks him as a product less of Mod than of Free Love. Fame is the perfect Parker vehicle because it’s an anthology of Parker’s perception of inner-city woes, and as it appears at the end of the Seventies, the decade that was America’s crucible of self-reflection, the sort of prison-wallet Passion Play of which Parker’s most fond finds a more tolerable climate. It’s perfect, too, because Parker’s background in commercials often leads him to make films that are told in images impossible to misconstrue with concepts that aren’t necessarily substantial enough for a feature. (See: his big-screen adaptations of Pink Floyd‘s “The Wall” and Webber’s awful Evita.) Fame‘s structure is a sequence of vignettes and its characters a collection of types, so that the demand to sustain itself over the course of two hours is ameliorated by the fact that it’s basically an anthology piece.

Natural Habitat: FFC Interviews David Michôd & Ben Mendelsohn

August 21, 20102000s, 2010, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

August 22, 2010|I met up with David Michôd and Ben Mendelsohn–director and star, respectively, of the exceptional Aussie crime drama Animal Kingdom–in the dining room of Denver’s Panzano for a little breakfast and espresso. In the middle of an exhausting schedule for the duo that saw them shuttling back and forth across the United States in support of their film, they appeared to be mutually nursing some variety of respiratory ailment–just one symptom (along with red eyes and a pale complexion) of too much time spent breathing recirculated air in the company of strangers. Entirely unpretentious and unfailingly polite, both wore torn T-shirts and shabby jeans, sported two-day growths of stubble, and seemed completely comfortable with me, probably because I was dressed, more or less, in exactly the same way. I liked them instantly.

Animal Kingdom (2010) + Valhalla Rising (2010)

August 11, 2010****/****, 2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

ANIMAL KINGDOM
***½/****
starring Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Luke Ford, Guy Pearce
written and directed by David Michôd

VALHALLA RISING
****/****
starring Mads Mikkelsen, Maarten Stevenson, Gordon Brown, Andrew Flanagan
screenplay by Roy Jacobsen & Nicolas Winding Refn
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

by Walter Chaw David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom respects its audience, a rare commodity during the best of times. The film flatters us by leaving exposition and backstory to our knowledge of anthropology–in fact, Animal Kingdom is best indicated by its unwavering reserve–a reluctance, almost–to say too much when slow, fluid tracking motions and static, medium-distance establishing shots may suffice. Consider a frankly gorgeous tableau late in the film as three people meet in Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria: framed against an open space, Michôd allows an extra beat, then another, before continuing with his family gothic. The story isn’t an afterthought, but the dialogue, however minimal, seems to be. The picture’s told through its actions and its images and, in that way, reminds of a Beat Takeshi film, of all things, what with its focus on criminality and its enthralling slowness. If there’s another indie demiurge to which Michôd pays obeisance, it’s Michael Mann–and the success of the picture (as shrine to masculinity, as introspective character study) suggests that cribbing from Kitano and Mann, if it’s as successful a larceny as this, can be successful in no other way.

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.