Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 71 of 146

Zodiac (2007) [2-Disc Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 20092000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards
screenplay by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw The best film of its kind since All the President’s Men, David Fincher’s Zodiac is another very fine telephone procedural drawn from another landmark bit of investigative journalism–though more fascinatingly, it’s another time capsule of a very specific era, flash-frozen and suspended in Fincher’s trademark amber. Still, by the very nature of its subject matter, Zodiac deals in millennial anxieties: the un-‘catchable’ foe; the unknowable cipher; the futility of the best efforts of good and smart men; and the disintegration of the nuclear family smashed to pudding in a diving bell collapsed under the pressure of the sinking outside. The film is as remarkable as it is because it’s about something as simple and enchanted as the human animal–not just bedraggled San Francisco detective Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), but also Zodiac’s two female victims and, in a strange echo, two almost-invisible wives: Toschi’s (June Raphael) and that of newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). Easy to say that actresses Raphael and Chloë Sevigny are wasted by being given nary anything to work with outside a terrified moment and a single speech, respectively; better to say that they assume the only function they can in a picture revolving around male cooperation and survival in a world that has reduced itself to the barbarous niceties of macho religions and arcane rituals. No accident that the Zodiac Killer’s partiality to a medieval code is central to a key revelation.

Swing Vote (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

January 15, 20092000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Kevin Costner, Paula Patton, Kelsey Grammer, Madeline Carroll
screenplay by Jason Richman & Joshua Michael Stern
directed by Joshua Michael Stern

by Walter Chaw Another simple-minded liberal screed that does more harm to the liberal cause than the whole of Fox News could possibly dream, this salvo from the left positions itself as a wagging finger to the non-voters of the United States–so long as those non-voters are earnest (literally: the hero of the piece is named Ernest) and have precocious, politically-savvy preteen daughters. Yes, it's the Homer and Lisa Simpson dyad reproduced with Kevin Costner and Abigail Breslin 2.0 Madeline Carroll. This year's Man of the Year, Swing Vote is the kind of lefty pinko wet blanket that can't take a stand without providing narration for it, until finally it reveals itself as a public-service announcement for the sanctity of casting a vote that's properly counted. Hooray, Constitution! This doesn't preclude a few potshots at the press, natch–take that, stupid First Amendment! Every scene of the film is an exclamation point delivered from atop a worst-of-Capra soapbox; those bemoaning that they don't make 'em like they used to, take a big, heaving bite of Swing Vote, compared to which the Pollyannaism of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington reads like P.J. O'Rourke snark. Maybe it's better to see the picture as a scary-prescient prediction of what would happen if someone like Ernest were not only tasked with choosing the next President of the United States, but moreover tabbed as the vice-presidential nominee of a major candidate. Think of Swing Vote as the mother-loving Sarah Palin story and suddenly the movie's every bit the frightening satirical comedy it wasn't upon initial release.

Day of the Dead (2008) + Lost Boys: The Tribe (2008) [Uncut Version] – DVDs

January 14, 20092000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS, Zombie

DAY OF THE DEAD
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Mena Suvari, Nick Cannon, Michael Welch, Ving Rhames
screenplay by Jeffrey Reddick
directed by Steve Miner

LOST BOYS: THE TRIBE
*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Tad Hilgenbrinck, Angus Sutherland, Autumn Reeser, Corey Feldman
screenplay by Hans Rodionoff
directed by P.J. Pesce

by Walter Chaw As I'm an avowed fan of George Romero's severely underestimated Day of the Dead, imagine my unsurprised chagrin when über-hack Steve Miner's remake of Romero's third zombie outing falls far nearer in quality to Tom Savini's dishonourable remake of Night of the Living Dead than to Zach Snyder's better-than-the-original Dawn of the Dead. A mess from conception to execution, the picture's first misstep is to turn the splatter effects over to cheap-o CGI phantoms and allow the ridiculous cardboard stencils played by Mena Suvari and–horrors–Nick Cannon to run roughshod. The soul of Romero's flicks–of all good zombie flicks–lies in their social awareness and in the ultimate feeling that whatever chills and thrills enjoyed along the way, it was all a metaphor for something more interesting than an end-of-days high concept.

Che (2008) + Milk (2008)

January 9, 20092000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, France, Mexico, Spain, Theatrical, War

CHE
***½/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Demián Bichir, Santiago Cabrera, Vladimir Cruz
screenplay by Peter Buchman, based on the memoir Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War by Ernesto "Che" Guevara
directed by Steven Soderbergh

MILK
*½/****
starring Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna
screenplay by Dustin Lance Black
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw Steven Soderbergh's Che is the curative to the Hollywood biopic formula that insists on reducing interesting/important historical figures to their workshop elements. It sees Ernesto "Che" Guevara as a charismatic figure but no T-shirt deity, as a guerrilla fighter with blood on his hands but also a revolutionary almost holy in his single-minded conviction that things weren't fair in the world and that one man–or one small group of heavily-armed men–could affect change that mattered. It's not a political film in the sense that it takes sides, rendering it a political film by the fact of it having no agenda except to make it difficult to condemn or celebrate first the events leading up to the success of the Cuban Revolution, then the failure of the Bolivian Revolution (which ended in Che's death). Soderbergh goes from close and medium shots in the first half–known as Che Part One in its marathon "roadshow" incarnation and as The Argentine in parts of the country where it and Che Part Two (a.k.a. The Guerrilla) are being treated as unique films–to an increasing distance for the second, a subtle, evocative move away from Che's idealism.

Revolver (2005) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 6, 20092000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Thriller, UK

*/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
BD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Vincent Pastore, Andre Benjamin
written and directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw Give Guy Ritchie a little credit for being ambitious and take a little away from him for being so relentlessly pussy-whipped that Revolver, his return to the neo-Mod gangster genre that made his name, is one part rumination on the mystical mumbo-jumbo of his then-wife's Kabbalah, one part exploration of the self-actualized ego, and every part pretentious, pseudo-intellectual garbage. It's so fascinated with itself that the yak-track on the film's DVD and Blu-ray releases finds Ritchie periodically consulting his assistant as an augur of whether or not Ritchie has gotten too complicated for the audience of nitwits not put off enough by the movie to avoid watching it again with the commentary activated. He believes he's created something of such vast, far-reaching, ungraspable, existential implication that this cheap, showy action pic is the ne plus ultra of modern experience, with Ritchie our schlock Zoroaster, guiding us through avatar Jake Green (Jason Statham) as he emerges from years of solitary confinement, during which he learned the parameters of the perfect con by intercepting the chess moves of the two prisoners on either side of him. Jake has claustrophobia, something Ritchie helpfully offers is a "metaphorical fear," by which I think he means that it's a metaphor for all fear; his clumsiness with the articulation of this single concept illustrates how it is that the rest of it is such a godawful mess. Consider Revolver's interesting only to the extent that Ritchie's self-absorption is ironic when applied to a picture about the internal struggle between Freud's personality strata–never mind that Jake's Super-Ego is André Benjamin and his Id appears to be motherfucking Big Pussy. Jesus, this is a stupid movie.

Pineapple Express (2008) [Unrated Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 5, 20092000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Seth Rogen, James Franco, Gary Cole, Danny McBride
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw I'm willing to concede that I don't completely get it, but I'm still game to think about it because Pineapple Express has a peculiar pedigree. It boasts David Gordon Green as its director and his regular DP Tim Orr is in charge of shooting the gross-out gags and stone-faced stoner riffs. The union makes the most sense if we read the film as a throwback/homage to the Seventies cycle of grindhouse exploitation flicks (doobies and dismemberment), thus explaining the old-school wipes and funkadelic soundtrack, the mote-flecked cinematography, the cruel violence, and, if it's even possible, the air of reality throughout. Otherwise, the picture feels like a cynical patchwork stitching together this new comedy genre with a sensibility specifically designed to mock it. When über-stoner Saul (James Franco, in his Spicoli/The Dude breakout) runs through the dark woods, the flash I get isn't to Cheech & Chong but to the convulsive opening of Green's Undertow. And during an ending in an abandoned government research facility-turned-subterranean pot greenhouse, I couldn't shake Green's odd relationship with Asian stereotyping (remember the Feng Shui character from All the Real Girls?) in a troupe of black-clad Asian assassins clearly established as objects of derision. In truth, however, I don't know if the derision is levied at Asians or at the criticism levied against Green's perceived derision of the same.

Defiance (2008)

January 2, 2009Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Thriller, War

½*/****
starring Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell, Alexa Davalos
screenplay by Edward Zwick & Clay Frohman
directed by Edward Zwick

by Walter Chaw It's finally happened: Red Dawn with Russian Jews. It's not so much unthinkable as inevitable after the fact. You could go your whole life without conjuring something so perverse; it's the kind of thing "South Park" might have done at a quarter the budget, with thrice the ingenuity, and without the star power of über-studs Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber making a pretty convincing play for inclusion in the bad accent hall of fame. When Craig, as heroic bandit Tuvia Bielski, delivers his St. Crispian's Day speech in half-pidgin/half-Queen's English ("Uff vee shut die? Tlyin to liff? At least we die like human beings!") as director Ed Zwick ladles on the Fiddler on the Roof score and we get reaction shots of a Dickensian urchin all dirt and eyes, what choice do we have but to harden our hearts and wonder how it is that every "true story" run through this prestige mill ends up exactly the same grain. The moment when Tuvia and his woodsman brother Zus (Schreiber) take on the responsibility of two fine young lasses at the behest of a set-upon farm family, however, is the moment that it clicks that this piece of macho bullroar is a direct blood descendant of John Milius's stupidest movie of 1984. There but for the grace of Swayze and Sheen goes Defiance–a film so bad that it's not only worse than Red Dawn, but worse because instead of positing an imaginary occupation of heartland America, it sets itself smack dab in the middle of the Nazi occupation of Belorussia circa 1941–suggesting in the process that while it's not true there was no Jewish resistance in WWII, it might be true that the reason so many were killed is because they weren't as macho as Tuvia and Zus. Kind of a sticky wicket, that.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2008

January 1, 20092000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

I'm going to call 2008 a "down" year, but not because there were fewer masterpieces produced–only because the theme that resonated for me the most was this sense of a cycle completing. If it's true that every generation flatters itself as the last one, it's equally true that every decade of film nears its completion with its full measure of anticipation/regret (liebestraum as zeitgeist, no?) in its eighth, sometimes ninth, year. Even films that on the surface seem filled with the fruit of human ambition and desire–like James Marsh's ebullient Man on Wire, in which the World Trade Center appears as the phantom lover of highwire artist Philippe Petit–take place, after all, at the ground zero of this epoch. What's dying throughout 2006 and 2007, all this sussing through father issues and the cult of masculinity and love and the courage of children, is dead now. It's not nihilism anymore, it's pragmatism. The dream is over, the insect is awake.

Into the Wild (2007) [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

December 29, 20082000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras C+
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Hal Holbrook
screenplay by Sean Penn, based on the novel by Jon Krakauer
directed by Sean Penn

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Young and full of piss, Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch, amazing) is an idealist brimming with the kinds of ideas that young men entertain fresh out of school: diploma in hand, bile in throat, knowing everything about the world that there could possibly be to know. His politics, stringently black-and-white, aren't that different from the very politics against which he'd rail; for as bleeding heart as kids can be, they tend to subscribe to the foundational belief that the United States is responsible for the welfare (and travails) of the rest of the planet, which is the basis for our self-declared status as moral policemen. In defense of Chris, whose saga has been documented in print by Jon Krakauer and now on film by Sean Penn, he doesn't presume to change the world, he only wishes to escape it–the idea of zero impact taken to its logical conclusion. But the ideal of rediscovering Eden is as illusory (naïve, retarded, you name it) as the idea that a young, educated man from a privileged background and a family who loves him could ever retreat to Walden Pond with nary a ripple to mark his submersion. Into the Wild sports as infuriating a cipher at its centre as Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, and it's to Penn's credit that he doesn't shy away from presenting Chris as a first-class Pinko asshole living his dream with just enough hypocrisy to get him killed and not quite enough to get him saved. Prophet/fool. It's a manifestation of the smug maxim "Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

The Spirit (2008)

December 25, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Gabriel Macht, Eva Mendes, Sarah Paulson, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Frank Miller

by Walter Chaw Frank Miller is something like a god in the modern comics era–at least he is to me. The guy who invented the graphic-novel form for most non-true-believers with his The Dark Knight Returns, he's recently been in the conversation because of the film made from his Sparta book (300) and Robert Rodriguez's excellent, Miller-driven Sin City, and he's the one who introduced to me the idea that comic books were a medium and not a genre. So when Miller reveals that he's taking the reins of a big-budget comic-book adaptation, there's reason for excitement that something from his extensive backlog could see the light of day under its creator's hand. (I have the same hope for that asshole Alan Moore, as well as Grant Morrison–and, hell, Sergio Aragones.) Astonishing, then, that he would first choose to adapt Will Eisner's seminal, 1940s comic inset "The Spirit", then to adapt it as an acid, unfunny ape on the kinds of films Miller himself has helped to popularize. It tastes like a bitter pill, like sour grapes masquerading as satire without a real clear indication of what Miller so dislikes about the recent hits based on his work. A waste of time to say that The Spirit is dreadful (and an understatement besides: The Spirit makes dreadful look like Van Gogh); and it's hardly more fruitful to poke holes in the whys and wherefores of its failure when those are obvious from the first five minutes of its benighted existence. Time is better spent, perhaps, trying to pull out of it some sort of insight into why no one called "shenanigans" on this abortion at any point. It's unbelievable, really. And far from dissuading me from the idea that Miller is a genius, I'd argue that it takes a special kind of genius to make something this full of bile, this incompetent, this unwatchable, this bad.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

December 25, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, Tilda Swinton
screenplay by Eric Roth, based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw Based on an evergreen F. Scott Fitzgerald short story that had the decency to be a short story, David Fincher’s extravagant, OCD-extruded The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is less one of this year’s astounding ruminations on loss, regret, melancholy, and the ephemeral nature of love than it is a remake–tonally, structurally–of Forrest Gump. It highlights just how good, how complex and ambitious, Coppola’s similar Youth Without Youth is–and it clarifies, if clarification were needed, how a high-concept becomes a gimmick without a core of gravity to keep it from spinning off into butter. The picture is thick with exploitive gestures, from its comic-relief mammy all the way through to Hurricane Katrina being used as the catastrophic backdrop that lends…what, gravitas?…to the melo-tragic love story that is the end-all of its Titanic framing story. How best to unite an ossified granny with her long-lost love than the mass-drowning and general devastation of a lot of people who don’t matter one iota to our central drama? It’s not deplorable in the traditional sense, I guess, but it’s so saccharine and dumbed-down that it’s aggressively offensive anyway. Benjamin Button painfully articulates everything subtle, melancholic, and beautiful about stuff like Synecdoche, New York, A Christmas Tale, and The Wrestler in broad pronouncements for the slowest students in class. When dealing with existential matters, it’s best not to go the Celestine Prophecy/Jonathan Livingston Seagull route with platitudes and easy solutions to thorny, baseline questions about what it is to love, to age, to die. There’s a scene in the film, probably more than halfway through, where one character says to the other that things pass too quickly and, more, isn’t that a shame. A little later, those same two hold each other in front of a mirror and one says he’d like to remember how they are, right at this moment, as time plays its tricks on our affections. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is Fincher’s own Se7en, except it shows the head in the box.

Seven Pounds (2008)

December 19, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Will Smith, Rosario Dawson, Woody Harrelson, Michael Ealy
screenplay by Grant Nieporte
directed by Gabriele Muccino

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I'm gonna take a stab at the title: Seven pounds is how much an Oscar weighs, am I right? Will Smith reunites with his Pursuit of Happyness director Gabriele Muccino to fashion another awards-season failure that proves every bit as icky and misguided. An extended episode of "Secret Millionaire", Seven Pounds transforms a Melvin and Howard conceit into the story of an undercover Samaritan intent on changing the lives of seven worthy strangers. Why? It doesn't really matter, does it? Not when Smith, as Ben Thomas, a guilt-wracked IRS agent/aerospace engineer trying to atone for the tragedy that is his life, turns on the red-rims and the waterworks, all quivery lips like the box jellyfish Ben keeps as a pet. There's poor little Emily (Rosario Dawson), with a rare blood type and an enlarged heart (four sizes too big!); and poor little Ezra (Woody Harrelson), who can't get a second look from a truck-stop waitress because, eww, he's blind!; and poor Connie Tepos (Elpidia Carrillo), who's afraid to leave her abusive boyfriend even though her two small children are in peril. Enter Bagger Vance–er, Ben Thomas–to sweep Emily off her feet, insult Ezra to see if he has a temper (or a spine), and give Connie his house. Throughout, we're treated to flashes of the calamity that's brought Ben so low as Smith's charisma and innate likeability remain the only things keeping the film remotely compelling to the extent that it is. It's an old-timey melodrama at its heart, nothing on its mind except tugging at the heartstrings and bothering awards-season viewers with the irritating tickle that they're being diddled without their consent by another smooth-talking, empty-headed bit of unforgivable–and gross–treacle.

The Heartbreak Kid (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

December 15, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Romance

*½/****
DVD – Image B- Sound A- Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Ben Stiller, Michelle Monaghan, Malin Akerman, Rob Corddry
screenplay by Scot Armstrong and Leslie Dixon and Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly & Kevin Barnett, based on the short story "A Change of Plan" by Bruce Jay Friedman
directed by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw Elaine May used to be the comedy writing and performing partner of Mike Nichols, and because I like her 1972 film The Heartbreak Kid so much, I've always wondered how much better The Graduate would have been had May directed it. Indeed, a May-helmed Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? could be excruciating–well, more so. For a while, anyway, May was the brave one, ethnically and otherwise, and I don't know of many people who could've turned the premise that drives the original The Heartbreak Kid into such a delicate, even sensitive (certainly human) piece. If it were going to be remade (and it has, with Ben Stiller in the Charles Grodin role and Malin Akerman in the Jeannie Berlin role), Peter and Bobby Farrelly would seem to be the right ones for the job.

Timecrimes (2008) + Wendy and Lucy (2008)

December 12, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

Los Cronocrímenes
**/****
starring Karra Elejalde, Candela Fernández, Bárbara Goenaga, Nacho Vigalondo
written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo

WENDY AND LUCY
**/****
starring Michelle Williams, Wally Dalton, Will Patton, Larry Fessenden
screenplay by Jonathan Raymond & Kelly Reichardt
directed by Kelly Reichardt

by Walter Chaw Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes), Nacho Vigalondo's zero-budget exercise in kitchen-sink quantum metaphysics, doesn't fuck itself with an unearned sense of smug self-satisfaction like Shane Carruth's Primer, but it does prove to be more tantalizing than satisfying. All garnish, no calories; take time travel and turn it into a series of unfortunate events that, although it plays with matter/anti-matter lore, doesn't go much farther in developing either its philosophy or its narrative. The result isn't pomo expressionism, but rather this taste of something, these suggestions of something other, that don't amount to a hill of beans once the whole thing morphs into a breakneck thriller. It makes some sense, then, that the hero of the piece is a non-descript schlub of a man, soft, no shoulders, falling over the edge into middle-age–enough so that when he spies a naked woman in the hills behind his house through his binoculars, of course he doesn't look away (who would, right?), and of course he doesn't tell his wife.

Die Another Day (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

December 11, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, James Bond, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image B Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Toby Stephens, Rosamund Pike
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade
directed by Lee Tamahori

by Walter Chaw There's just no currency in deriding James Bond for being a clichéd, doddering, misogynistic boy's club that trundles into the new millennium with the same entendres, leering, and boom-boom the franchise has ridden for four decades now. It's a lack of currency made all the more glaring for a film, Lee Tamahori's Die Another Day, desperate to please Bond-philes (Republicans and children, literal and figurative) by being an overt rehash of every Bond entry preceding it rather than the usual unintentional rehash. As futile as it has become to criticize the next instalment in this never-ending series, it appears that the filmmakers have decided to stop pretending they haven't been plundering the same well of travel-worn ideas since Connery up and quit.

The Dark Knight (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

December 1, 2008****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Superhero, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw It's the best American film of the year so far and likely to remain that way. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is revelatory, visceral, grim stuff–a vision of the failure of our idealism before the inexorable tide of entropy, another masterpiece after last year's No Country for Old Men that as much as says that the only morality in the midst of chaos is chance. No coincidence that both films feature villains who let a coin-flip act as judge and jury. But what's adjudicated? What shape does the court take? The failure of reason is the great bogey of this modern day–and the inability to properly frame questions, much less ken answers, feeds this feeling of hopelessness. That widening gyre, it turns out, is a labyrinth, or an Escher print, illuminating a Sartrean paranoia of no hope for escape, no possibly of exit. Nolan's Gotham City is a beatification of Chicago: the city's glass and metal elevated into holy relic and presented in such grand, panoramic vistas that the little things done in spite of it or on its behalf seem like so many futile pittances–the dreamlife of mice in their sterile maze that is this sprawling microcosm of all of the miseries and suffering of the world.

Psycho (1960) [Special Edition – Universal Legacy Series] – DVD

December 1, 2008****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, John Gavin, Vera Miles
screenplay by Joseph Stefano, based on the book by Robert Bloch
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I’d wager there aren’t any films that have been more analyzed than Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the expanse of scholarship spent on it a curious echo of its own curious psychobabble anti-climax. Find studies of this film as the wellspring for everything from feminist film theory to measured leaps into psychoanalytic theory, from technical dissertations to Citizen Kane-style forays into authorship pitting the contributions of Hitch against those of graphic designer Saul Bass. I’ve read pieces on composer Bernard Herrmann’s unparalleled work in the picture; on the artwork used in the Bates Motel; on the ways that Hitch’s own queasy obsessions–themselves on the verge of explosion with his collaborations with poor Tippi Hedren–bled into the production. I’ve read about how the film was shot with Hitch’s television crew on a minimal budget and about the controversy surrounding, of all things, the depiction of a toilet for the first time since the pre-Code silent era in the United States. I even recall writing something about how this film, along with the other miraculous releases of 1960 (Peeping Tom, Eyes Without a Face, Breathless, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Rocco and His Brothers, Shoot the Piano Player, The Stranglers of Bombay, and Nabuo Nakagawa’s miraculous Jigoku), announced that cinema after this very particular point would never be the same. I’ve heard Janet Leigh’s oft-repeated tale of how the flesh-coloured pasties on her breasts peeled away as they tried to get that shot of her hanging over the tub and how, damnit, she wasn’t going to move even if it meant the crew in the rafters getting a good look at those world-class goodies. I know my favourite quote regarding the Sixties in film belongs to Ethan Mordden’s indispensable Medium Cool, comparing the previous decade to the new day dawning like so: “Surrender to the Wild Ones yields a dissolution of society. Surrender to Mrs. Bates turns you psycho.” I’ve heard the apocryphal tales, the legends; I’ve listened to Truffaut interview Hitch about the shoot. Hell, I’ve taught the picture a few times in my own limited way to classrooms still surprised to learn there are more things left to discover in Psycho.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

December 1, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson
screenplay by Zach Helm
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is a thinly-sketched IRS agent who obsessively measures out his life in coffee spoons. One day he hears the stentorian, patrician voice of his own personal narrator, reclusive author Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), providing him an interiority with Douglas Adams-like serendipitous surreality. Marc Forster's Stranger than Fiction even winks at the Adams connection with a sentient wristwatch and a moment where Crick's apartment gets demolished, Arthur Dent-like, by an uncommunicated work order. It also features sudden, unexpected love at the end of the universe with Crick's opposite, a free spirit baker named Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who falls under the eye of Crick's glum audit and, as literature professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) informs Crick, only hates him until she loves him if Crick's narrator is writing a romantic comedy. The struggle within the film is the same as the struggle without, then, as Crick tries to determine whether or not Eiffel's calm (and, as it happens, excellently-written) exposition will result in his poignant death or–good for him, bad for us–in his resurrection as a bland, non-descript leading man in another piece too frightened to allow itself the most appropriate ending. One way leads to a surprise masterpiece that soars on the chemistry (surprise again) between Ferrell and Gyllenhaal–the other leads to a film that's a lot better than I expected it to be, weighed down by a resolution that it itself comments on as equivocal, cowardly, and disappointing. To crib the analysis of Prof. Hilbert, Stranger than Fiction is just "okay."

Australia (2008)

November 26, 20082000s, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK, War, Western

*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Bryan Brown
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Stuart Beattie & Ronald Harwood & Richard Flanagan
directed by Baz Luhrmann

by Walter Chaw Baz Luhrmann's Titanic begins–as you know that it must–with fusty, dusty-britches Mrs. Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) tumbling out of a plane into the wilds of WWII Australia and the brawny arms of fair dinkum frontiersman The Drover (Hugh Jackman). They hate each other–she his disgustingly rugged physique and brusque manner, he her high-falutin' snobbery and belief that all men want to shag her. How miraculous, then, that the two come to love one another before the one-hour mark of the longest two weeks you'll spend in a theatre this year. But first, in a nod to Australia's "Lost Generation," of course, but more directly in most viewers' minds to Rabbit-Proof Fence, introduce pint-sized product of settler/aboriginal miscegenation Nullah (Brandon Walters), who lives on Sarah's late husband's cattle farm. Nullah is the emotional glue of the film (besides more importantly being the one who brings the cast's collective age down from AARP levels), the character imperilled, monumentalized, sought after, lost, recovered, hugged over, longed over, kissed over, and, in a stupid film's deeply stupid end titles, patronized with trivia about how the POME government at last apologized to the Aborigine people for their policy of forced intermarriage. How this saccharine, torpid love saga ends as a bromide is one of those things only the genuinely gifted can achieve: set in Darwin, Australia earns a Darwin Award for its dedication to self-destruction.

Bolt (2008)

November 26, 20082000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Disney, Drama, Family, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Dan Fogelman, Chris Williams
directed by Byron Howard, Chris Williams

by Walter Chaw What counts as a revolution for Disney animation nowadays is tellingly only a shadow of Pixar's gracefully loaded pictures. It demonstrates that any film completed under the supervision of John Lasseter can't be that bad, but also that all the things wrong with The Mouse over the last couple of decades won't clear up with just one picture. Bolt isn't a bad start, though, handling in its light, rote way a couple of nice moments with orphaned cat Mittens (voiced by Susie Essman) that remind of Jessie's heartache from Toy Story 2 and a few well-paced action sequences that recall a superhero highlight reel from The Incredibles (speaking of films that need a sequel). The point of greatest interest is that Bolt represents the second major movie this year after Tropic Thunder that has as its protagonist an actor who doesn't realize he's no longer on a soundstage. (Collective commentary on the end of our time in Oz or Kansas?) Even without a deeper interest in answering the questions that it asks (in sharp contrast to the introspective, almost silent WALL·E), it's still light years ahead of Disney's spate of racist, misanthropic entertainments and/or direct-to-video sequels that cynically transform their Vault™ into a McDonald's franchise.