Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 72 of 149

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

May 21, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, 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.

Being There (1979) – Blu-ray Disc

May 18, 20091970s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, West Germany

*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras D
starring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Warden, Melvyn Douglas
screenplay by Jerzy Kosinski, based on his novel
directed by Hal Ashby

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Arguably the last film of note for New American Cinema director Hal Ashby, Being There (adapted from the Jerzy Kosinski novel by Kosinski himself) is often cited as a withering satire of punditry when, to me, it appears to be more a rather winsome look at the relationship between the artist and the audience. It suggests, after all, that it’s not the messenger but the message–that a piece of art is only as important as the degree to which it’s raked over by historians and critics, and that if there’s a fundamental emptiness, a senselessness, in the creation of that art, then so be it. So long as the conduit is a true vessel for a larger cultural movement (like that reflected by television, for instance), ‘gives a shit about the vessel anyway? More, Being There implies that the only true vessels might be empty ones.

Changing Lanes (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

May 17, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Ben Affleck, Samuel L. Jackson, Toni Collette, Amanda Peet
screenplay by Chap Taylor and Michael Tolkin
directed by Roger Michell

by Walter Chaw If not for its target-audience ending, Changing Lanes is, in nearly every measure of quality, a Seventies movie about helpless protagonists adrift in the midst of an insurmountable system with which they are eternally at odds. It deals with consequences in a way that films just do not anymore and presents two actors who have perhaps never been better in roles indicated by nuance, ambiguity, and intelligence. The screenplay, by newcomer Chap Taylor and (brilliant) veteran Michael Tolkin, is wonderfully balanced and observant and matched step for step in tone and pace by Christopher Tellefson’s superior editing and Roger Michell’s surprisingly chill directorial eye.

A Bug’s Life (1998) – [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] DVD + Blu-ray Disc

May 11, 20091990s, 2009, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, Pixar

**/****
DVD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
BD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Donald McEnery & Bob Shaw
directed by John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton

by Walter Chaw The Seven Samurai by way of ¡Three Amigos!, Pixar’s A Bug’s Life stands as the company’s sole artistic disappointment, suffering from a weightlessness that is particularly troubling given that it is also the only Pixar production whose characters don’t interact with the human world. The revelation embedded in its relative failure is that the animation studio is better at satire than it is at fantasy–not a terrible thing, for sure (after all, anime legend Hayao Miyazaki has never made a film independent of the human realm), the picture still points to the damning difficulty of creating a fantasy unto itself and based on alien quirk that is more than an exercise in Flintstones-era visual punning wrapped around a familiar underdog-uplift narrative.

Star Trek (2009)

May 8, 20092000s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Theatrical

***½/****
starring John Cho, Ben Cross, Bruce Greenwood, Leonard Nimoy
screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw My long-held suspicion of J.J. Abrams as a no-trick pony has thawed completely now that after producing the exceptional Cloverfield, he has directed a reboot of Gene Roddenberry’s beloved “Star Trek” that walks the fine line between absolute seriousness and absolute cheese and does so in about the exact same, smart, swashbuckling way as the ’60s TV show, to which this movie serves not as a prequel, but as a delicious alternate possibility. Abrams’s Star Trek is faithful to Roddenberry’s vision in every way, including a restoration of the sexiness and spunk that’s been largely lost to decades of syndication. It’s easy to forget that the first interracial kiss on television belongs to the original series–not to mention all those ripped-shirt fights, tumbles with green girls, and “Bizarro-version” facial hair. The picture is faithful simultaneously to the spirit of this time, joining what looks to be a spate of films with apocalyptic visions of entire planets destroyed by unimaginable calamity. Spry and well-written, Star Trek plays up the idea of individual heroism for the collective good in high Trek fashion and, fascinatingly, works in the clay of deep-set parental issues to give its young characters the psychological framework for evolution in this new reality. If this James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is more of a brawler and a rake than Shatner’s rakish brawler, blame it on the premature loss of daddy; if this Spock (Zachary Quinto) has his humanity closer to the skin than the other Spock (Leonard Nimoy, who has a sizeable role), blame it on mommy (Winona Ryder). Yet for all its weighted subtext, it avoids the self-seriousness of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, finding in its material the spirit of discovery and bonhomie that made the franchise in its heyday one of the most affecting bits of popular relational drama on television.

Sin City (2005) [Theatrical & Recut/Extended/Unrated Versions] – Blu-ray Disc

May 5, 2009****/****, 2000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Thriller

Frank Miller’s Sin City
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Jessica Alba, Benicio Del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Clive Owen
screenplay by Robert Rodriguez, based on the graphic novels by Frank Miller
directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw Until Frank Miller’s Sin City (hereafter Sin City), maverick Mexican director Robert Rodriguez frustrated the hell out of me: here’s this guy with all the talent in the world–an eye, an ear, an internal metronome as unerring as a clock tick–making incoherent movies literally without finished screenplays. Falling off high wires without nets and trying to look cool doing it–it ain’t smooth, man, it’s arrogance and it’s misplaced. I thought he’d spent himself on flotsam like the last two Spy Kids flicks, thought he’d really screwed the pooch on a fiasco like Once Upon a Time In Mexico, on which he mistook Sergio Leone’s formalist genre Diaspora for a mess of ideas trailing camera flourishes. But here, right before he unleashes some 3-D thing about a shark boy, Rodriguez slides in a movie for which he resigned from the Directors’ Guild of America just so he could credit comic book legend Frank Miller as his co-director. Here, in Sin City, is what Robert Rodriguez can do with brutal, draconian structure (what’s harsher than the cell of a comic-book panel?); here, finally, is productive fruit from his reputation as a rebel without a crew. Here’s Sin City down low, on the QT, and very, hush hush: the most anti-Hollywood Hollywood picture since Kill Bill, and a film that, likewise, feels like some kind of miracle it was ever produced, much less released.

WarGames (1983) [25th Anniversary Edition] + Saturday Night Fever (1977)/Staying Alive (1983) [Double Feature] – DVDs|Saturday Night Fever [30th Anniversary Special Collector’s Edition]- Blu-ray Disc

May 4, 2009****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Music, Sci-Fi, Stallone, Teen, Thriller, ZERO STARS

War Games
***½/**** Image B Sound C Extras A
starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy
screenplay by Lawrence Lasker & Walter F. Parkes
directed by John Badham

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
****/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+ Extras C
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring John Travolta, Karen Gorney, Barry Miller, Joseph Cali
screenplay by Norman Wexler
directed by John Badham

STAYING ALIVE
ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring John Travolta, Cynthia Rhodes, Finola Hughes, Steve Inwood
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Norman Wexler
directed by Sylvester Stallone

by Walter Chaw I hadn’t realized until I watched the 25^th Anniversary Edition DVD of it how intimately WarGames is embedded in my psyche. I saw it in the theatre as a ten-year-old in 1983 and, for the rest of that decade (the prime of my excited filmgoing experience), I didn’t know that movies were ever different. The first time, in fact, that I recognized that movies were human was the first time they revealed themselves as something that could fail to inspire any kind of response at all–and I wonder if that initial moment of disappointment had more to do with the development of my cynicism than any one picture’s deficiency. Film is a progressive addiction, says one theory: the more sophisticated you get as a viewer, the harder it is to find the fix. WarGames presented me with the idea of eroticism through mild scatological exhibitionism. It had a young man in his room, alone with a young woman, excusing himself to urinate in the next room–an act unthinkable to me as a ten-year-old and holding with it the thrill of taboo. The next time they meet, the world starts to explode and, better yet, the girl traps the boy between her legs when he tries to edge by.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

May 1, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Breckin Meyer, Michael Douglas
screenplay by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore
directed by Mark Waters

by Walter Chaw Watching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, a musty relic of Eisner’s reign at Disney that first dreamed Ben Affleck as its star and a decade later settled on Matthew McConaughey (opposite, in some weird nepotistic recompense, Mrs. Affleck, Jennifer Garner), is excellent justification for the crib death of cynical, Eisner-hijacked, RKO-minted philosophies like Commerce over Genius. It’s a retelling, I’m embarrassed to need to articulate, of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that substitutes Scrooge with serial womanizer Connor Mead (McConaughey) and Marley with old philanderer Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas, doing a broad lounge-lizard caricature the spitting image of a mummified hybrid of Robert Evans and Howard Hefner). On the eve of brother Paul’s (Breckin Meyer) marriage to shrill harridan Sandra (Lacey Chabert), Connor is visited by Wayne and the Ghosts of Girlfriends Past/Present/Future to show him that true love exists in the world beyond one-night-stands with supermodels–that it in fact exists between oily Connor and first love Jenny (Garner). What this means for the audience gaping in slack-jawed awe at this thing is a good thirty minutes of unearned sentiment tacked onto the end of a noxious payload of open misogyny, fag jokes, and gags that fall square on their face. Very simply, it’s the most appalling, hateful, reptilian, inept film I’ve seen since Love Actually, and I wish I could say that I’m surprised that it was directed by Mark Waters and written by the braintrust behind Four Christmases.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

May 1, 20092000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Liev Schrieber, Danny Huston, Ryan Reynolds
screenplay by David Benioff and Skip Woods
directed by Gavin Hood

by Walter Chaw The action sequences are bad, the plot is bad… Hugh Jackman? He’s fine. Everything you might expect, in other words, from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, wherein that most popular of muties (although I always preferred Gambit, marking me as about 42% gay) receives his first official vehicle with shaky Gavin Hood at the wheel. Was it the deadening piece of shit Tsotsi or the gravid piece of shit Rendition that convinced them Hood was the right person for this gravid, deadening piece of shit? True to form, the movie is laden with misplaced gravitas, magic-hour tableaux, and awkward drivel that makes me think that of the film’s two credited writers, it’s Hitman/Swordfish scribe Skip Woods and not 25^th Hour scribe David Benioff who took the final run at the screenplay. (“Now I know why the moon is lonely,” says our macho man of action Wolvie (Jackman) at one point–and the audience howls.) It has a Watchmen opening montage following Wolvie and brother Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) through history’s most picturesque battles (Trenches! Beaches! Paddies!) before they’re finally enlisted by mysterious government stooge Stryker (Danny Huston), who has a plan for these and other genetic misfits. Think of it as “X-Men: Episode One”, as dorks are encouraged to trainspot famous mutants in the background while the foreground gets cluttered with lots of bad dialogue, grammar-school sentimentality, and oodles of special effects.

…and spice: FFC Interviews Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck

April 25, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

April 26, 2009|So here’s the deal: I don’t care about casting, I don’t care about locations, and I don’t really even care about how or why an idea came into being. Inspirations are interesting sometimes, sometimes not; you ask the inspirations question, and you usually get either apathy or irritation. Very seldom do you get something revelatory. Do any kind of research before most any kind of movie-related interview and you’ll find that if the questions weren’t already asked, the what-was-it-like-to-work-with?s and how-did-so-and-so-get-involved?s and what-did-it-feel-like-when?s, then the answers were already spoken without provocation. It would be a particular shame to burn a promo-tour/DVD supplement-type inquiry on filmmakers like Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who, between the surprising Half Nelson and the even more surprising Sugar, actually seem interested in having a dialogue with their audience. Sugar essays a good dozen hot-button issues without giving a one of them soapbox or short shrift; it treats its characters with the same respect with which it treats its audience. I came away from meeting Ms. Boden and Mr. Fleck in the “Tokyo Room” of Denver’s Hotel Monaco with a gratifying reminder that, on occasion, it’s still possible to divine the wellspring of the art through conversation with the artists.

The Soloist (2009)

April 23, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, France, Music, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Jaime Foxx, Robert Downey Jr., Catherine Keener, Tom Hollander
screenplay by Susannah Grant
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw Black, crazy, homeless, and a prodigy–it’s A Beautiful Mind and Searching for Bobby Fischer and The Fisher King and The Green Mile all wrapped up in a tight little Oscar ball. And The Soloist is a true story, of course, from LA TIMES columnist Steve Lopez’s affecting series on homeless guy Nathaniel Ayers, which he turned into a book that’s been adapted into a movie scripted by seasoned middlebrow emotional rapist Susannah Grant and directed by rapidly-developing first-class hired-hack Joe Wright. A problem, you’ll agree, that it was pushed by its own studio out of the catbird seat late last year to make room for, of all things, that non-starter Revolutionary Road. The issue–arguably the only issue–of exploitation is raised, and well, in the film’s most honest scene: at an awards banquet feting Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) for his profile of Nathaniel (Jaime Foxx), the former’s editor/ex-wife Mary (Catherine Keener) excoriates Lopez for his reluctance to fully engage what had at that point become his near-total responsibility. If that central issue of the picture lies fallow until an ill-fated recital (set up by ill-used, slapstick laughing-stock Christian cellist Graham Claydon (Tom Hollander)) ends with a few wild swings of a nail-studded bat, at least it’s introduced as an elephant in a room full of people in that darkened theatre clucking at how adorable and somehow inspirational it is that a hobo is a world-class cellist.

Event Horizon (1997) – Blu-ray Disc

April 23, 20091990s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson
screenplay by Philip Eisner
directed by Paul Anderson

by Walter Chaw Event Horizon approaches the science-fiction idea of a mysterium tremens, hints that it will be about the inscrutability of an alien intelligence–like Lem’s and Tarkovsky’s (and Soderbergh’s) variations on the theme of Solaris, for instance, or that monolith in 2001. But with lowbrow hack Paul W.S. Anderson (then simply Paul Anderson) at the helm, Event Horizon washes out as just another assembly-line jump-scare factory. A particular shame, as with this project Anderson attracted an unusually competent cast, only to ask the likes of Laurence Fishburne, Joely Richardson, Sam Neill, Jason Isaacs, and Kathleen Quinlan to respond to cats-by-any-other-name jumping through allegorical windows. It goes beyond wearisome to actually being insulting. The first hour is spent establishing the brave crew of the Lewis & Clark, setting off to somewhere near Neptune on the rescue and salvage of experimental ship Event Horizon, which disappeared a few months prior. Outfitted with a new “gravity drive” suspiciously like the fold-space/grasshopper spice drive from Dune, the Event Horizon has not only managed to travel beyond our Universe–it has also succeeded in theologically blowing our minds! Weird visions ensue (bad dreams and worse), and then there’s the captain’s log that our heroes spend the bulk of the film “filtering” before finally discovering that the warnings contained therein are in Latin for a reason. Doesn’t anyone in the future watch The Exorcist? Good thing medico D.J. (Isaacs) speaks Latin, or they’d never know what it wouldn’t help them to know.

American Gangster (2007); I’m Not There (2007); No Country for Old Men (2007) + No Country for Old Men [’08 BD + 2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

April 15, 2009****/****, 2000s, 2007, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Coen Brothers, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Gangster, Germany, Music, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

AMERICAN GANGSTER
***/****
starring Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cuba Gooding, Jr.
screenplay by Steven Zaillian
directed by Ridley Scott

I’M NOT THERE
***½/****
starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere
screenplay by Todd Haynes & Oren Moverman
directed by Todd Haynes

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
****/****
’08 BD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
CE – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly Macdonald
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Consider the moment when an overly enthusiastic police search results in the demolition of a replica dresser commissioned by Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) for the Carolina plantation he’s bought to house his extended family. In one canny instant, there’s the suggestion that nothing ever changes: the things we lose in time we will always lose. The image Ridley Scott provides for us as he moves the Lucas clan into their new digs is loaded and dangerous, with a group of African-Americans walking up the lush green lawn of an antebellum plantation–usurpers of a corrupt American Dream that, American Gangster posits, is still corrupt and in essentially the same way. True, there’s a cartoon bogey in a New York cop (Josh Brolin) erected as the straw man for all of New York’s Finest who’s profiting off French Connection junk (gasp, he shoots a dog, and probably also smokes)–but the real villainy in the picture is the idea that the path to true status and achievement in the United States is on the backs of not just others, but entire groups of others.

Dead Like Me: The Complete Collection + Dead Like Me: Life After Death (2009) – DVDs + Pushing Daisies: The Complete First Season (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

April 13, 20092000s, 2007, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Fantasy, Television

DEAD LIKE ME (2003-2004)
Image B+ Sound B Extras D
“Pilot,” “Dead Girl Walking,” “Curious George,” “Reapercussions,” “Reaping Havoc,” “My Room,” “Reaper Madness,” “A Cook,” “Sunday Mornings,” “Business Unfinished,” “The Bicycle Thief,” “Nighthawks,” “Vacation,” “Rest in Peace,” “Send in the Clown,” “The Ledger,” “Ghost Story,” “The Shallow End,” “Hurry,” “In Escrow,” “Rites of Passage,” “The Escape Artist,” “Be Still My Heart,” “Death Defying,” “Ashes to Ashes,” “Forget Me Not,” “Last Call,” “Always,” “Haunted”

DEAD LIKE ME: LIFE AFTER DEATH
½*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras D
starring Ellen Muth, Callum Blue, Sarah Wynter, Henry Ian Cusick
screenplay by John Masius and Stephen Godchaux
directed by Stephen Herek

PUSHING DAISIES: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image A Sound B Extras D
“Pie-lette,” “Dummy,” “The Fun in Funeral,” “Pigeon,” “Girth,” “Bitches,” “Smell of Success,” “Bitter Sweets,” “Corpsicle”

by Walter Chaw Diagnosing the ills of Showtime original productions is a tricky deal, but whatever’s wrong with them seems consistent across the board. Compared against HBO’s output, there’s nothing that can hold a candle to “The Sopranos” or “Six Feet Under” or “Big Love”; there aren’t any masterpieces like “Deadwood”, much less fascinating failures like “Carnivàle” or “Rome”. To be brutally honest, it doesn’t matter if we lower the bar, since not a single Showtime series could be called good on network TV terms, either. Flagships “Dexter” and “Weeds” are both overwritten and under-thought, jumping sharks regularly beginning somewhere around the middle of their first seasons and betraying their unsustainability faster than “Heroes”. It’s not for lack of star power or high concept that Showtime shows suck–not a surfeit of budgets or production values, no. I’d argue that the reason they’re awful is because Showtime is incapable of hiring writers who aren’t twee asswipes molding themselves to pop morality and rote, conventional character sketches and plot outcomes. Those hailing “Dexter” as an antiheroic crime thriller need to consider the storyline about the tough-talking Latina cop who has her heart softened by an Elian Gonzalez clone, or the revelation that Dexter might not be a serial killer after all, but a teddy bear with issues. And just as “Dexter” wastes the wonderful Michael C. Hall in its title role (ditto “Weeds”/Mary-Louise Parker), so, too, does another bit of Showtime dreck, “Dead Like Me”, boast the excellent Ellen Muth and Mandy Patinkin in the pursuit of decidedly modest returns.

Sugar (2009) + Tokyo Sonata (2008)

April 7, 2009****/****, 2000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Dominican Republic, Drama, Hong Kong, Japan, Netherlands, Sports, Theatrical

SUGAR
***½/****
starring Algenis Perez Soto, Rayniel Rufino, Andre Holland, Ann Whitney
written and directed by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck

TOKYO SONATA
****/****
starring Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyôko Koizumi, Yû Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki
screenplay by Max Mannix, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sachiko Tanaka
directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Walter Chaw In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a cinematic trend afoot that looks to the fringes for stories of survival in a world where it’s suddenly chic to shop at the thrift store. I credit Harmony Korine and David Gordon Green with first finding the poetry in destitution in this new American cycle, with maybe Gus Van Sant (with his Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho) acting as the accidental primogenitor. If it’s not Frozen River‘s trailer-park heroine and her dalliance with human trafficking, it’s Wendy & Lucy‘s despair from the bottom of the capitalist food chain. In the mainstream, there’s Sean Penn’s fantastic Into the Wild and the reboot of 3:10 to Yuma, which at its heart is a drama about the toll of being the breadwinner. Even Hancock, a movie that keeps improving in the rearview, can be read with profit as a document of how tough it is for the everyday Joe to eke out a living in a culture designed for the affluent, the physically gifted, the innately well-spoken. Like any social movement in film, however, a lot of the stuff is minimally affecting, message-oriented garbage that seems very pleased with itself as it, like the exec pushing a broken cart through Goodwill, wears its limitations as if dragging a cross uphill. There appears to be a race to the bottom: the first to total, Warholian inertia wins the booby prize. Most of it’s destined to be remembered as symptoms of the affliction and not as the illness itself; the runny nose, not the Plague.

Lakeview Terrace (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

April 6, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Thriller, Will Smith

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson, Kerry Washington, Jay Hernandez
screenplay by David Loughery and Howard Korder
directed by Neil LaBute

by Walter Chaw It’s wrong to say that Neil LaBute’s Lakeview Terrace, despite its literal miscegenation subplot and the openness of its main character’s intolerance, is about race and racism in a year that’s already seen its fair share of the renewal of the race conversation in the United States, both in and out of the cineplex. Because it’s a LaBute picture, closer to the truth that Lakeview Terrace is a film about misanthropy–that no matter the cloth, the uniform is the general shittiness with which we treat each other–and, more, how easily we shed the raiments of civilization when confronted with the brute, caveman essence of competing for sex. It’s not as scabrous as LaBute’s early work, but I wonder if that isn’t a function in part of the spirit of a year that found miscegenation as a secondary conceit of the mainstream’s Fourth of July tentpole flick, Hancock. The twist in Lakeview Terrace is that the bigot front and centre is a black man (named after Biblical Abel, no less) and that it’s all been genre-mixed in the cop-gone-rogue, Internal Affairs/Unlawful Entry tradition, speaking ultimately to the distinct ’70s feeling of paranoia towards authority that’s resurfaced in films of the last eight Bush years while trying, with some success, to refocus racism into generalized rage, confusion, frustration, and intolerance. After seven years of examining the lines against which society coalesces when the world falls down, here’s a film about the tenuous handshake that tenants of the new world order have with the re-gelling of society. In a lot of ways, Lakeview Terrace belongs in a conversation about the recent spate of flicks concerning war veterans returning from the front (like The Lucky Ones, or Home of the Brave (also starring Samuel L. Jackson)) of an unpopular war broken, angry, and unfit for the hypocrisy of peaceful coexistence.

Monsters Vs Aliens (2009)

March 31, 20092000s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Maya Forbes & Wallace Wolodarsky and Rob Letterman and Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger
directed by Rob Letterman & Conrad Vernon

by Walter Chaw As a joke, a pal and I once described the ideal movie as an epic, feature-length battle between robots and dinosaurs. DreamWorks, as a kind of joke, too, I think, have now released the animated Monsters Vs Aliens in a vaunted 3-D technique that enhanced a few scenes in Coraline last month but feels more the gimmicky affectation here. It feels, in fact, like the entire reason behind making a film that’s content to trot out those old kid-flick standbys of accepting differences and learning to love who you are as the entire backbone for grand, city-destroying slapstick. The most interesting thing about it might be that a sequence buried in the middle of the closing credits posits a world-ending nuclear holocaust initiated in a war room set borrowed directly from Dr. Strangelove. It’s a weird thing to have in a children’s movie (odd, too, appearing so soon after Alex Proyas’s own apocalyptic Knowing), and the zeitgeist sweepstakes are up and running in 2009 with the possibility that we’re at the end of days infecting even this most optimistic, empty, popular of films. The rest is your run-of-the-mill kid’s flick: noisy, senseless, and, save a couple of moments where Seth Rogen’s voice made me giggle, not terribly entertaining. It has an ugly bad guy, Gallaxhar (voiced by Rainn Wilson), who clones himself, setting up the tension between individuation and the politics of mass hysteria, the unsubtle suggestion being that while good guys Bob (Rogan) and Link (Will Arnett) are stupid, they’re not anywhere near as stupid as the enemy.

Quantum of Solace (2008)

March 23, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Espionage, Italy, James Bond, Mystery, Thriller, UK

½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C
starring Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench
screenplay by Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Sex without foreplay, Marc Forster’s limp dick of a James Bond flick Quantum of Solace takes the kinetic, angry ugliness of Casino Royale and, together with Paul Haggis’s Dances with Wolves screenplay of affected naivety and wide-eyed, late-blooming outrage, fashions a most-unwelcome return to the hoary Bond franchise of old. As if aware that all that stuff about Bolivian peasants pining for water might be connected, and queasily, to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (a daring cargo-jet escape is similarly cribbed from that film), Quantum of Solace does its level best to strip entire set-pieces from the Bourne series (a knife fight, the close-quarters disarming of government agents, the roof-top flight), forgetting in the process to port over the coherence of Doug Liman or Paul Greengrass choreography. The picture’s idea of an action sequence consists of extreme close-ups of two vehicles involved in some kind of ill-defined skirmish intercut with extreme close-ups of Bond and some bad guy who looks just like him intercut with flashes and body parts, ending in Bond walking away with a wry grimace on his face. What a real director could have done with the prologue on a winding mountain road in Italy that has a truck nudged off it by the baddies almost pancake 007 on the way down. And what a real screenwriter could have done with the concept of Bond as the remorseless liquid terminator from T2. Instead we get admittedly only the logical offspring of this ill-begotten union between the guy who directed The Kite Runner and Finding Neverland and the asshole who wrote Crash and a few episodes of “The Facts of Life”. Whoever had the bright idea that this would be the magical, gritty duo to continue the resuscitation of Albert Broccoli’s dusty old wet-dream of a crusading GOP avatar desperately needs to be shown the door.

The One (2001) – [Special Edition] DVD|Blu-ray Disc

March 19, 20092000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Jet Li, Carla Gugino, Delroy Lindo, Jason Statham
screenplay by Glen Morgan & James Wong
directed by James Wong

by Walter Chaw The confused child of “Sliders” and Highlander, the latest attempt to translate Jet Li’s appeal for an American audience is James Wong and Glen Morgan’s asinine-but-breezy sci-fi actioner The One. Li is good cop Gabe, who, in a world of 124 parallel universes, discovers that he is one of two “Gabes” left. Li is also, in the great tradition of Twin Dragons and Double Trouble, evil universe-hopper Yulaw, who has discovered that each incarnation of himself he kills increases the strength and intelligence of his remaining selves. Blazing a trail of terror through 123 universes, Yulaw intends to become “the one” Jet Li: a super-genius killing machine.

Dan in Real Life (2008) + Rachel Getting Married (2008) – Blu-ray Discs

March 17, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Jonathan Demme, Drama, Romance

DAN IN REAL LIFE
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
starring Steve Carell, Juliette Binoche, Dane Cook, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Pierce Gardner and Peter Hedges
directed by Peter Hedges

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger
screenplay by Jenny Lumet
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw The Darwin chart of this breed of American indie, otherwise known as unlikely shrines to The Celebration (or Festen, if you prefer), follows in the United States with something like Margot at the Wedding near the top as most-evolved down mid-way to Rachel Getting Married and its histrionic Demme-tasse reduction, down to ankle-deep–we’re talking primordial muck–with Dan in Real Life. That last one, from Pieces of April perpetrator Peter Hedges, squanders an unusual amount of currency in Steve Carell (at his melancholic zenith), pairing him with Juliette Binoche in a bittersweet romantic imbroglio that absolutely does not deserve the happy horseshit ending slathered on it to apologize for its occasional poignancy. It’s not that I enjoy being sad, it’s that I enjoy getting a condescending handjob even less. I’m willing to forgive the bad slapstick of a group aerobics session, the casting of Dane Cook, and the set-up/knock-down mentality of it that, in fairness, mars more honest films like Rachel Getting Married, too. The picture begins in the title’s “real life,” only to sail away to a privileged, impossible Rhode Island wonderland that may as well be the setting of every Nicholas Sparks book ever written and to-be-written. It’s a movie that makes you feel good, like a barium enema, or Rolfing. What I’m saying is that a lot of things make you feel good in a dumb, animal way–not a lot of them are also art.