Go (1999) – Blu-ray Disc

July 29, 2009Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Crime, Drama

***½/**** Image B Sound A Extras C+
starring William Fichtner, Katie Holmes, Jay Mohr, Sarah Polley
screenplay by John August
directed by Doug Liman

by Walter Chaw I saw Doug Liman’s Swingers at the right age to recognize it as a pretty fair portrait of me and my buddies a couple of years removed from college, playing Sega hockey against each other into the small hours and doing our best to score with as wide a variety of women as possible while responsibility loomed. The dialogue struck us as true and hilarious. Three years later, 1999, I had met and married my wife and was taking for granted a genuinely great year at the movies. I remember loving The Matrix, and The Iron Giant; Fight Club changed my life a little, The Phantom Menace broke my heart, Being John Malkovich blew my mind, and Sleepy Hollow and The Blair Witch Project provided portholes backwards and forwards into beloved genres. It seems strange to say it, but without thinking much about it, I saw more films at the theatre in 1999 than I probably had in any year since the matinee of my movie-love in high school. And my wife and I have complementary tastes, always have; in retrospect, that film cemented our relationship in those first few years makes a lot of sense. But we were drawn to it insensate.

Southland Tales (2007)

July 28, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake
written and directed by Richard Kelly

by Walter Chaw Call it professional vanity, or just vanity vanity, but I like to be the iconoclast. I want to be the one who understands the movie nobody else seems to understand–the lone champion of Unleashed as a sharp critique of popular East/West relationships, for instance. There are times, I think, it's the only reason I go to films that are riding waves of negative buzz or frankly otherwise lacking much cause for confidence. Southland Tales, Richard Kelly's follow-up to his cult classic Donnie Darko, had the bad buzz (from a legendarily jeered screening at Cannes) but a great pedigree despite the extent to which Kelly had begun to cast Donnie Darko as a fortuitous accident through his DVD commentary for that film, his ill-wrought Director's Cut of the same, and his script for the excrescent Domino.

Valkyrie (2008) – DVD

July 27, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Thriller, Tom Cruise, UK, War

***/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras A
starring Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie & Nathan Alexander
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw Tight as a drum, deadly serious, and a mild corrective to not the enduring misconception that there were no men of conscience in Hitler's Germany, but rather to sickly, condescending awards-season bullshit like Defiance, The Reader, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Bryan Singer's Valkyrie swoops down like its titular winged avatar to deliver the Holocaust melodrama to a minor kind of Valhalla. It's sober-minded and fact-based, with another handsome-destroying performance by Tom Cruise (though he only loses one eye here after losing both in Minority Report) that places him in uneasy orbit alongside Warren Beatty as another pretty boy aspiring for seriousness through mutilation of the self. It's a sober thriller, and because the outcome is never in doubt in a historically-based plot to assassinate Hitler, it lives and dies by its ability to sound smart and cast well.

Watchmen: Director’s Cut (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

July 22, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino
screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse, based on the graphic novel by ALAN MOORE and Dave Gibbons
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw It knows the notes but doesn't hear the music. Watchmen, Zach Snyder's long-awaited, over-hyped adaptation of Alan Moore's venerated graphic novel, is technically proficient and occasionally beautiful-looking but also flat and nerveless. It has no heart and, more damning, no real understanding of the irony of itself, save for a title sequence set to the tune of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" that's bound to be the best five minutes I'm going to see in any movie this year. In this stirring montage, a travelogue through the three ages of comics against the backdrop of American history, Snyder captures the idea that what Moore accomplished in casting a conversation about idol-making through the most populist medium of pop culture is in fact translatable through film, this other most populist medium of pop culture. Where the picture missteps is in restoring the superhero group Watchmen to the heavens, resurrecting pop icons in impossible, perfect, virtual tableaux: the character designs are impeccable, the suits are clean, and the violence is obscene, yes, but glossy enough that when things stop for a moment to delve into one character's appalling creation story, it feels unearned and exploitive–so much so that the question that fast follows of why the rest of it feels removed and inhuman almost derails the entire enterprise. Coming from a guy who more admires the Moore source than loves it, it occurs to me that Watchmen is a movie made by Dr. Manhattan; it should've been made by Rorschach.

The Ruins (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

July 22, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore, Laura Ramsey
screenplay by Scott Smith, based on his novel
directed by Carter Smith

by Walter Chaw Based on a novel by the guy who wrote A Simple Plan and directed by first-timer Carter Smith, The Ruins was lost in the shuffle of a seeming barrage of beautiful-tourists-getting-slaughtered splatter flicks, which may prove to be one of the many genre legacies of the ugly-American, difference-abhorrent Bush Jr. administration. (Not to mention that the flick could easily be read as an eco-horror picture. Lots of legacies, that W., all of them fertile for the horror genre.) What distinguishes it from the Hostels and the Turistas' and Club Dreads is a seriousness in its execution and a feeling that there's nothing happening in the film that is a result of stupidity or even caprice–that the gauntlet our gorgeous heroes go through is only the best example of the futility of our evolution since The Blair Witch Project. It's a fable of that Sophoclean idea that knowledge brings no profit to the wise, and though it might be a reach, it feels in this time and place like a story about how knowing that we're going to get blown up by an angry young man over a large body of water doesn't do a thing to prevent it from occurring. It's a film that talks about hopelessness and, like in a powerful moment from Marcus Nispel's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the youth of its cast suddenly bespeaks of a squeezing-off of potential rather than just tits-and-ass exploitation. Closer to the point, the titillation you feel during the prologue of our cast bathing on a Mexican beach before embarking on their bloody, intimate deaths is brutally punished. The destruction of beauty in The Ruins (the title finally makes sense) becomes allegory for a collective fear of suffering: just as porn works on some level as a fantasy of "if she'll do that, she'll do me," The Ruins works on the level of, If it could happen to these kids, smart and beautiful, then it sure as shit is going to happen to me.

Chick Flick Politick – DVDs + Blu-ray Disc

July 12, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, ZERO STARS

BRIDE WARS (2009)
ZERO STARS/**** Image N/A Sound C Extras F
starring Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway, Kristen Johnston, Candice Bergen
screenplay by Greg DePaul and Casey Wilson & June Diane Raphael
directed by Gary Winick

CATCH AND RELEASE (2007)
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jennifer Garner, Timothy Olyphant, Kevin Smith, Juliette Lewis
written and directed by Susannah Grant

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS (2008)
[JACKPOT EDITION]
***/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras B+
starring Cameron Diaz, Ashton Kutcher, Rob Corddry, Dennis Miller
screenplay by Dana Fox
directed by Tom Vaughan

27 DRESSES (2008)
[WIDESCREEN EDITION]
**/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras B+
starring Katherine Heigl, James Marsden, Malin Akerman, Edward Burns
screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna
directed by Anne Fletcher

ENCHANTED (2007)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, Susan Sarandon
screenplay by Bill Kelly
directed by Kevin Lima

Bridewars

by Walter Chaw I’m not kidding: Bride Wars is reptilian, hateful stuff, biologically engineered to disrespect–with maximum efficiency–the precise demographic to which it targets itself. It’s like an antibody to the middle-class, medium-attractive girl by virtue of encouraging her to associate herself with upper-middle-class, gorgeous avatars and, through that agency, act in ways completely hostile towards common sense and decency. It’s an epidemic of bad taste: there’s no other way to read the suggestion that size-zero Kate Hudson is a fat, disgusting swine for gaining five pounds pounding chocolate and cookies for a couple of weeks, is there? What’s harder to explain is a scene in the middle where rivals/best friends Liv (Hudson) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) do a slutty dance-off in a strip-club for the crown of “sexiest bride.” Here’s the weird part: one of them actually cares when the other one wins. In the middle of a movie that can only hope to attract women as its audience, here’s a scenario that physically exploits women as opposed to just emotionally or situationally (as is more to be expected). It’s like a soul kiss and a reach-around between Vin Diesel and Paul Walker to cap off a nice street race. But does it have the same chilling effect on its would-be audience, or does it instead feed into the electric lesbian tension that serves as the motor for all these “Sex and the City” knock-offs? Never mind, it’s not important. What is somewhat important is that Gary Winick, the heir-apparent to Garry Marshall’s chick-flick throne, be discouraged from ever directing another movie.

In Treatment [Season One] (2008) + Tell Me You Love Me: The Complete First Season (2007) – DVDs

July 6, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Television

Image B Sound B Extras B ("Tell Me You Love Me")

by Walter Chaw It's a show about the traditional mode of psychoanalysis–a nine-week, five days-a-week series detailing shrink Paul (Gabriel Byrne) and four patients, culminating each "Friday" in Paul's own session with former mentor Gina (Dianne Wiest). It's based on a popular Israeli drama that was the brainchild of such filmmaking talents as Eran Kolarin and Nir Bergman. And though it begins stilted and ends badly, its thick mid-section is the enabler of our obsessive, maybe ugly, voyeuristic impulses, gratifying the viewer with the sensation that, for all the dense verbal webs spun in these little progressive one-acts, the real expert is the viewer. "In Treatment" clarifies the role of the observer in this media, how the active participant is always involved in an anthropological exercise deconstructing the characters' motives and actions–and how that critical facility, eternally underused, is occasionally gratified by material that's not quite smarter than you, but appears to be.

Two Evil Eyes (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

July 2, 2009Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Directors: Dario Argento, Directors: George A. Romero, Horror

*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Harvey Keitel, Adrienne Barbeau, Ramy Zada, Sally Kirkland
screenplay by George Romero and Dario Argento & Franco Ferrini
directed by George Romero and Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw George Romero's Dawn of the Dead is a groundbreaking satire of our consumerist state, says the party line, the first film to be shot in that new phenomenon of a shopping mall and full of cogent commentary on how capitalism has become at once a Skinner box and religion instead of merely an organizing principle. That it's also deadening and sophomoric–or that it's dated in a way that Night and Day haven't, or that it's just not very scary, or tense, or, at the end of the day, deep–is seldom mentioned. Still, and despite the failure of Land of the Dead, there's Night of, Day of, and Diary of to confirm that Romero's zombie flicks are worthy genre pieces alight with insight into social issues.

Public Enemies (2009)

June 30, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, Gangster, Japan, Theatrical

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup
screenplay by Ronan Bennett and Michael Mann & Ann Biderman
directed by Michael Mann

Publicenemiesby Walter Chaw It's possible that Johnny Depp in a zoot suit, firing a Tommy gun from the running board of a vintage Ford, is so distractingly perfect an image that all other considerations are shunted to the soft shoulder–possible for the audience to only realize afterwards that there was nothing much of substance revealed about John Dillinger in Michael Mann's gorgeous Public Enemies. (Possible for Mann, too, who in the process of creating another of his odes to masculinity and bloodshed, accidentally crafted this pedestal upon which to worship the cult of iconic stardom.) Maybe no accident at all, as the movie closest to this one is Terrence Malick's Badlands–right down to a scene amongst law-enforcement officials in which our Johnny is treated like a Hollywood demiurge of a street-thug bank robber. And if Mann is trying to craft a film along similarly fetishistic, Americana-informed lines, then the media is the massage as they say. Aside from that, somewhere down the road from today, we may look back and wonder about the sudden proliferation late in this decade of films centred on Robin Hoods literal and allegorical, robbing from a broken system of fiscal governance to give to (or, at least, not directly take from) the common guy. From our current vantage, though, what we see is the biggest movie star on the planet playing the most famous and admired "public enemy" of the outlaw era, 1931-1935 edition. While there are intimations now and again of darker contextual rumblings, they don't feel convicted; and in the end, there's left just a collection of beautiful pictures as inert as a coffee-table book.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009)

June 30, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, UK

*/****
screenplay by Michael Berg, Peter Ackerman, Yoni Brenner
directed by Carlos Saldanha

Iceage3by Walter Chaw It's not entirely accurate to say that I've hated the Ice Age movies. They're not, after all, the Land Before Time series, the post-classic Disney output just prior to the Pixar revolution, or, heaven forefend, the Shrek trilogy. No, better to say that the Ice Age franchise is at worst merely the quintessence of inconsequence: they're films so bereft of wit and vigour that their biggest crime isn't the constant shit and hit routines, nor the predictable parade of unearned sentimentality, but rather that they're as inert as the right side of the Periodic Table. The message in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (hereafter Ice Age 3)–that no matter what our heroes look like on the outside (two mammoths, two opossums, a giant sloth, a sabre-toothed tiger), on the inside, they're members of one tribe–is the same as in the first two instalments, and by this time, its constant mantric recitation begins to take on the air of unaware self-parody. Of course, despite its incessant championing of a non-traditional family unit, like Shrek, it still has a mammoth (Manny (voiced by Ray Romano)) marry a mammoth (Ellie (Queen Latifah)), leaving cross-species miscegenation, unlike the otherwise execrable Madagascar sequel, to the actors voicing them. What I wouldn't give for the same premise in live-action with Romano married to Latifah, the latter morbidly knocked-up and royally pissed-off.

Roxanne (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

June 24, 2009Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Romance

*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steve Martin, Daryl Hannah, Shelley Duvall, Rick Rossovich
screenplay by Steve Martin, based on the play “Cyrano de Bergerac” by Edmond Rostand
directed by Fred Schepisi

by Walter Chaw After The Devil’s Playground and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith–both appearing in the middle of the Australian New Wave–the conventional wisdom was that Fred Schepisi was someone to watch. Then Hollywood called and he did what fellow ‘wavers Peter Weir and Phillip Noyce did, punching the timecard on shit like Patriot Games, Sliver, and Dead Poets Society. A re-telling of Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmund Rostand’s play about a proboscis-challenged swordsman armed with the Blarney (in spades), Schepisi’s noxious Roxanne stars a downhill-sliding Steve Martin and a Daryl Hannah who didn’t yet know that Blade Runner and Splash would be the only things anyone would know her for until a career resurrection of sorts some 15 years later with Kill Bill. I used to love this film. Time has been unkind.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

June 24, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Michael Bay, Revenge, Spielberg, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro
screenplay by Ehren Kruger & Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw Transformers2The worst summer in recent memory continues as Michael Bay brings his slow push-ins and Lazy Susan dolly shots back to the cineplex with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (hereafter Transformers 2), the ugliest, most hateful, most simple-minded and incomprehensible assault on art and decency since the last Michael Bay movie. It’s bad (that goes without saying), and it’s possible that even its fans will have the brute sense to recognize that it’s bad–but it’s bad in such a way that defies easy description. It’s so bad, it’s exasperating. The action, as you’d expect, is impossible to follow, with long stretches cascading in on one another without the slightest notion of who’s winning, where, and to what end. But that’s not why it’s bad. It suggests that the evil robots have perfected Terminator technology in the manufacture of a gorgeous slut-bot (Isabel Lucas), who, before trying to kill the returning Sam (Shia LaBeouf) with her go-go-gadget tongue, is humiliated by having heroic Autobot Bumblebee money-shot robot semen all over her face. But that’s not why it’s bad, either. Ridiculously poor filmmaking and Bay’s wearying misogyny aren’t “bad,” per se, so much as they’re the tools of his auteur canon, of his absolute gold-standard grasp of what it is that prepubescent boys are into and his desire to, as fast as he can, create undercover hardcore porn to gratify those desires. What else to make of the weird girl issues–the entire co-ed Michael Bay U campus populated with hot bimbo chattel, Bay’s camera leering obligingly? It’s tough to make someone feel sorry for Megan Fox, yet the extent to which she’s objectified in this flick has you looking for track marks, smeared mascara, and other evidence of bus-stop porn-star exploitation.

Easy Virtue (2008)

June 16, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Jessica Biel, Colin Firth, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ben Barnes
screenplay by Stephan Elliott & Sheridan Jobbins, based on the play by Noël Coward
directed by Stephan Elliott

by Walter Chaw At first glance, it would seem that Stephan Elliott’s pictures follow no conventional line. Start with 1993’s Frauds, starring Hugo Weaving and (yes, that) Phil Collins, then proceed to Elliott’s landmark The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Then it’s on to that film’s tonal antidote (think an Outback Woman in the Dunes with Rogers & Hammerstein interludes), Welcome to Woop Woop; a Hollywood sojourn (the criminally-underestimated serial killer/FBI procedural Eye of the Beholder); and finally, one near-fatal ski accident later, an oddly appropriate return to form in the Noël Coward adaptation Easy Virtue. These movies are almost Billy Wilder-ian in their variety–literally, in that Elliott seems above all keenly attuned to the comic opportunity–the Lubitsch, if you will–in relational dynamics, but also in that he begins with something like a thriller, goes to camp, goes to camp thriller, returns to thriller, and now does something almost entirely genre-peculiar. It’s a vertiginous enough trajectory that for the first half-hour of Easy Virtue, I’d forgotten I was watching a Stephan Elliott film–that the fact that Elliott directed it was indeed the only reason I was interested in seeing Jessica Biel spar with Kristin Scott Thomas on a sprawling English estate in the 1920s.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) [Extended Version] – Blu-ray Disc + Waterworld (1995) [2-Disc Extended Edition] – DVD

June 15, 2009Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES
½*/**** Image C Sound B Extras B
starring Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
screenplay by Pen Densham & John Watson
directed by Kevin Reynolds

WATERWORLD
***/**** Image B Sound B
starring Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tina Majorino
screenplay by Peter Rader and David Twohy
directed by Kevin Reynolds

by Walter Chaw In the “careful what you wish for” sweepstakes, here’s Kevin Costner, fresh off an Oscar victory for his naïve idyll Dances with Wolves, spending his hard-won Hollywood currency indulging best buddy Kevin Reynolds in a trilogy of pictures (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Rapa Nui, Waterworld) he produced for the express purpose of giving Reynolds more than enough rope. If you’re in the sport of charting the positively Greek decline of the late-’80s box-office king, mark 1991 as Exhibit A, as his sad attempt at an English accent for Robin of Loxley was notoriously overdubbed in post-production after being deemed the stuff of legend in initial cuts. Aside from providing schadenfreudians endless fodder, it was the first real evidence that the Golden Boy’s tragic flaw was the belief that his charm was based on something other than Gary Cooper’s mantle of Everybody’s All-American Doofus.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009)

June 12, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Denzel Washington, John Travolta, John Turturro, James Gandolfini
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by John Godey
directed by Tony Scott

Takingofpelham09by Walter Chaw It's amazing that a film that takes place on a metal tube in a dank tunnel should have no trace of come in it. Less amazing when one considers that it's Tony Scott at the helm of this redux–the same Tony Scott who arguably reached the zenith of his potential with his vampire-erotica cult debut The Hunger, whose best film is the result of a superior screenplay by Quentin Tarantino (True Romance), and whose main claim to fame may be that he's behind one of the most homoerotic sequences ever captured on film in his gay amusement park Top Gun. Scott's The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (hereafter Pelham) is packed to the gills with meaningless, hyperactive visual gawping every bit as bad here as it is in his unwatchable Domino, so frantic that it has the opposite effect oPublishn the audience by rendering itself static and boring. (There's a lot going on in a screen full of snow, too, but all it does is put you to sleep.) The picture reunites Scott with his go-to leading man Denzel Washington, whose Garber, an MTA operator fallen under suspicion of taking a bribe, replaces Walter Matthau's weary, hangdog transit cop from the Joseph Sargent original. When ridiculous goon Ryder (John Travolta) hijacks the titular subway car with a pack of the usual suspects (including Luis Guzmán, of course), it's up to smooth-talking every-dude Garber to cover up the deficiencies of hostage negotiator Camonetti (John Turturro), the gasbag Mayor (James Gandolfini), and all the bumblefuck NYPD who manage to accidentally snipe one of the bad guys, crash a car racing through Manhattan, and decorate a couple of baddies with a good twenty clips of ammunition in the middle of Uptown. It also, as a way to give the film a contemporary slant against which the terminally un-hip Scott is well over-matched, demonizes Wall Street by having its chief baddie be a former securities trader who hatches a plan to fuck the stock market by making New Yorkers afraid that his plot is a terrorist attack. Pelham is, in other words, rather tasteless in addition to being awful.

The Fall (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

June 8, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, India, South Africa

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Lee Pace, Justine Waddell, Catinca Untaru
screenplay by Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis & Tarsem
directed by Tarsem

by Walter Chaw Beware the film that positions itself as being told from the perspective of a child, because unless you’re a child or that specific child’s parent, you’re eventually going to wish that someone would slap the kid in question. Tarsem’s labour of love The Fall, his unlikely follow-up to his serial killer movie as shot by Salvador Dali-cum-Caspar David Friedrich The Cell, is such a film, told from a child’s perspective–and rather than as an artistic decision, it plays as a plea for leniency. It’s a fairytale about a little girl’s emergence into maturity… No, it’s a fairytale about the delicacy of life… No, it’s not anything much of anything. By touching on a suicidal movie star’s convalescence after an impressively shot accident on a film set (involving a horse, Tarsem scholars take note), the picture seems to want to access some discussion concerning artificiality and its intrusion into reality–something that would make sense if The Fall positioned itself as a dyad with The Cell (which was, after all, only about film as a dream medium that acts as the brain does), but it doesn’t really do that, either. All it does, in fact, is provide Tarsem an excuse to indulge his prurience and affection for elaborate set-pieces awash in saturated colours and tableaux that often border on the grotesque. Freed of the necessity to be coherent, freed of much understanding of Bruno Bettelheim or Jung or Freud, it’s a fairytale without purpose and pretentious to boot, reminding more than a little of the also-pretty, also-empty Neil Gaiman/Dave McKean collaboration Mirrormask. It’s too bad, really, as there are images in here genuinely affecting for their visual splendour. I wonder if it’s unforgivable heresy to say The Cell is badly underestimated and due for revisionism while The Fall, despite its relative obscurity (no J-Lo anywhere in sight), is badly overestimated.

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

June 2, 2009Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

2010
*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras F
starring Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Helen Mirren, Bob Balaban
screenplay by Peter Hyams, based on the novel 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke
directed by Peter Hyams

by Walter Chaw As we slide ever closer to the reality of artificial intelligence, the question of functional equivalence becomes ever more pressing to our sense of ourselves. It's because of this, I think, that Peter Hyams's 2010 seems more pertinent now than it necessarily did in 1984. I watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time just a few months before I saw 2010 (this would be the summer of '84; I was twelve years old), and to that pre-teen me, 2010 gave the impression in most ways of being the better film. It appeals to the pragmatist instead of the philosopher, to the childish belief that there is nothing without an explanation under the sun and that should we encounter an alien intelligence, it will inevitably have the same desires and motivations we do. My first viewing of 2001 left me feeling angry and bored–the moments that tickled at something greater weren't moments I was able to isolate and examine (I wouldn't learn the term mysterium tremens until at least a decade later)–and in a sense 2010 allowed me to appreciate the Kubrick picture as a linear narrative. Which is, after all, not the point, and perhaps even ultimately destructive of 2001. It's easy to understand benevolence (whether it's from an alien "creator" to us, its possible creations, or from us to our machine creations), because benevolence is within the human capacity to comprehend. It's much harder to understand an astronaut waking up in a hotel room after a trip down the rabbit hole and then coming back to Earth as a glowing fetus.

Revolutionary Road (2008) + Doubt (2008) – Blu-ray Discs

June 1, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Mystery, Romance, UK

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon, Kathy Bates
screenplay by Justin Haythe, based on the novel by Richard Yates
directed by Sam Mendes

DOUBT
**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis
written and directed by John Patrick Shanley

by Walter Chaw Impeccably acted and playing out what seems to be a collective cultural fascination with the pre-Flower Power '60s (not quite Ward and June, not quite Jimi and Janis), Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road and John Patrick Shanley's Doubt help 2008 meet its quota of prestige-y actor's studio pieces. Both are based on well-regarded (renowned, in the case of the first) literary sources, both sport high-octane casts in the pursuit of that delicate balance in adaptations between literal and spiritual faithfulness, and both, ultimately, have considerably less to say than the surrounding hullabaloo would suggest. Revolutionary Road plots another point on the graph of Mendes's steeply-declining returns–he's a stage director whose greatest weakness is his desire for little epiphanies that play like Everest off the boards, and he's guilty of too much intoxication with the medium besides. Mendes spends so much time fiddling around with his camera to a noodling Thomas Newman score that you feel like giving him some privacy.

Anaconda (1997) – Blu-ray Disc

May 25, 2009Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Brazil, Horror, Peru, Thriller

**½/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz
screenplay by Hans Bauer and Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Luis Llosa

by Walter Chaw Almost worth it just for Jon Voight's post-regurgitation wink, Luis Llosa's B-movie creature-feature Anaconda is a deadpan riff on the nature-amuck flicks of the mid-Seventies in general and Steven Spielberg's Jaws in particular. (Cinematographer Bill Butler shot both films.) It borrows the Moby Dick conceit of a mad hunter forcing a hapless crew to take a personal vision quest against an aquatic foe and post-modernizes it with a passel of genre in-references, an unusually dry script, and a supporting cast of accomplished character actors. The only real failure of the film in respect to its modest aspirations, in fact, is the snake itself, a frankly awful CGI phantom that destroys the tension with its every appearance. It's hard to be afraid of a glorified screen-saver.

Yes Man (2008) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

May 21, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance, UK

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D
starring Jim Carrey, Zooey Deschanel, Bradley Cooper, Terence Stamp
screenplay by Nicholas Stoller and Jarrad Paul & Andrew Mogel, based on the novel by Danny Wallace
directed by Peyton Reed

by Walter Chaw I look at Jim Carrey nowadays with a little bit of bittersweetness, in that his attempts to go "legit" in movies like Man on the Moon and especially Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were essentially swatted aside, dismissed as brief indulgences between talking-asshole gigs. I believe that Carrey is a serious guy, possibly a melancholy guy, certainly a smart guy–and I believe the closest anyone's come to finding the right vehicle for his elasticity is Charlie Kaufman. Maybe they'll work together again. Until then, Carrey's fate is to shoehorn into endlessly reducible slapstick romcoms like Peyton Reed's Yes Man–easy cash-grabs with an ephemeral shelf-life doomed to be referenced for its one or two scenes that make any impact before becoming ancient history. The formula for this shit is etched in tintype by now: the Lovesick Dork Protag is Carl (Carrey), the High Concept is that he pathologically rejects everything, and the object of his l'amour fou is avant-garde punk band frontwoman Allison (Zooey Deschanel™). Can this button-up, white-collar stiff (Carl's a loan officer) learn to embrace spontaneity and break free of the workaday while setting up his own quirky business and saving the world in the process? Yes, man.