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

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

Posted in****/****, 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 25th 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)

Posted in2000s, 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)

Posted in2000s, 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 25th 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

Posted in2000s, 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)

Posted in2000s, 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

Event Horizon (1997) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 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

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

Posted in****/****, 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

FFC Must-OwnNO 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

Posted in2000s, 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)

Posted in****/****, 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

Posted in2000s, 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)

Posted in2000s, 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)

Quantum of Solace (2008)

Posted in2000s, 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

Posted in2000s, 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

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

Posted in2000s, 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.

Ghosts of Mars (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Ghosts of Mars (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars
*/****
DVD – Image B Sound B Extras C-
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras C-
starring Ice Cube, Natasha Henstridge, Jason Statham, Clea DuVall
screenplay by Larry Sulkis & John Carpenter
directed by John Carpenter

by Walter Chaw An uneasy, hippified version of a cowboys and Indians shoot-’em-up, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars is an exhausted shade of the once-hip director’s oeuvre, baldly stealing from his Assault on Precinct 13 before partially resurrecting later works The Fog, Escape from N.Y./L.A., The Thing, and even They Live in the focus on an interracial pair hooking up to kick alien ass. It sounds like an agreeable enough concoction, especially when one considers the presence of the lovely Natasha Henstridge in a tight sweater perspiring alongside cult personalities Pam Grier, Ice Cube, and Snatch‘s Jason Statham, but Ghosts of Mars is a rudderless enterprise that doesn’t know what it’s doing and bores while doing it. The most disturbing thing about this aggressively tame production is the suspicion that the John Carpenter who used to make interesting socio-political genre films has been taken over by one of his own mindless zombie Martians.

Meet Dave (2008) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Eddie Murphy, Family, Romance, Sci-Fi

*½/**** Image N/A Sound B- Extras F
starring Eddie Murphy, Elizabeth Banks, Gabrielle Union, Scott Caan
screenplay by Rob Greenberg & Bill Corbett
directed by Brian Robbins

by Walter Chaw I’m eternally grateful to the infernal chemistry alchemized betwixt Mephistophlean Eddie Murphy and chowderhead Faust Brian Robbins for sparking the second-funniest headline in THE ONION’s gallery of classic one-liners: “Eddie Murphy fucks self for $20M.” (The funniest, for the record, is Gene Siskel’s obit headline: “Ebert Victorious.”) Who knew that Robbins’s extraordinary inability to contribute anything of value to anything he’s ever turned his baleful attention towards would be the mendacity needed to allow a couple of the gags in the latest Mur-Bins collaboration Meet Dave to work to whatever extent they do? Also helping is that the rampant misogyny and racism that marked their previous film together, Norbit, is toned down to a family-friendly sizzle this time around. Of course black people dance to hip hop and love processed meat stuffs; of course women like to cry and hold hands; and of course gay men come out not long after witnessing their first Broadway revue. Nothing says Grand Old Family Values like merrily sanctioning divisive stereotypes.

Nights in Rodanthe (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Nights in Rodanthe (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Romance

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Scott Glenn, Christopher Meloni
screenplay by Ann Peacock and John Romano, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks
directed by George C. Wolfe

by Walter Chaw I will say this about Nights in Rodanthe: spoken Nicholas Sparks is preferable to written Nicholas Sparks, because when people speak, complete sentences and thoughts that go somewhere aren’t necessarily at a premium. If there was ever an artist ill-suited for his chosen medium, it’s Sparks; and if there was ever proof (as if proof were needed after the success of Robert James Waller, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and Dean Koontz) that cuddling ignorance was a growth industry, well, there’s Sparks again. And here, as further cause for divorce from the great nation of culturally-retarded people who have always comprised our metaphorical heartland, is the fourth adaptation of a bound stable of Sparks’s saccharine logorrhoea (Gertrude Stein in practice in the unlikeliest of places), Nights in Rodanthe, which, in the great tradition of pieces of shit, is exactly like every other piece of shit in every other genre. (Be thankful, at least, that the picture, in a futile attempt to separate itself from The Notebook, jettisons the novel’s framing device, that great staple of books by people like Sparks and Mitch Albom–in so doing depriving some dusty, geriatric, beloved television star one last paycheck.) Helpless before the towering majesty of the formula god it worships, the picture plays out like a slasher pic for girls, where the only sport is trying to figure out which of the heroes is going to die, how, when, and by what grievous hand. I’d argue that the catharsis parceled out by garbage like this is identical to the “happy ending” whored out by lower-aspiring slasher cinema: the curiosity about the hows is delicious–and perverse. If you think I’ve dropped a spoiler, by the way, you haven’t seen Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, or The Notebook, and–more than likely–you’re not going to see Nights in Rodanthe, either.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Directors: Dario Argento, DVD, Horror, Mystery

L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo
***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Tony Musante, Suzy Kendall, Eva Renzi, Enrico Maria Salerno
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Dario Argento’s uncredited adaptation of Fredric Brown’s The Screaming Mimi (brought to the screen once before in 1958 by Gerd Oswald), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage marks the “Italian Hitchcock”‘s directorial debut as well as the moment at which the Italian giallo genre gained international currency. Though the genre’s invention (named after the yellow/giallo covers of Italian penny dreadfuls) is credited to compatriot Mario Bava (see, especially, his astonishing Blood and Black Lace), Argento’s scary polish and cunning for film language bridged the cultural, mainstream/arthouse gap with agility and audacity. He’s not just borrowing from Hitchcock, he’s filtering the Master’s work through his own sensibilities. Argento did for the slasher genre with his “supernatural” pictures like Suspiria and Inferno what Sergio Leone did for the Western, making them dirtier, sexier, rhythmic, and more acceptable to the literati; and he does here for the police procedural/neo-noir a similar kind of post-modern hipster reinvention. But it’s not merely an intellectual exercise (in fact, the obscurity of the clues (its title at once revealing the identity of the killer and referring obliquely to the red herring of The Maltese Falcon) makes deciphering the procedural improbable at best)–rather, it’s the visceral nature of the exercise that delights. It’s Argento’s revelry in one part in the unrelieved nihilism and delicious confusion that would characterize the best of the ’70s’ paranoia cinema–and in the other part, in the joy of great genre filmmaking.

Gomorrah (2008) + Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Drama, France, Germany, India, Italy, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Gomorra
***½/****
starring Salvatore Abruzzese, Simone Sacchettino, Salvatore Ruocco, Vincenzo Fabricino
screenplay by Maurizio Braucci & Ugo Chiti & Gianni Di Gregorio & Matteo Garrone & Massimo Gaudioso & Roberto Saviano, based on the book by Saviano
directed by Matteo Garrone

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
*/****
starring Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal, Anil Kapoor
screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, based on the novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup
directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan

by Walter Chaw Dropping us in the middle of Italian slum Scampia, itself smack dab in the middle of nothing, Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (Gomorra) is the Hud of gangster flicks, all deglamourized, harsh, expressionist stripping-away of illusions and idealism to reveal the gasping, grasping emptiness underneath. Like Hud, the source of that idealism is years of cinema supporting a romanticized iconography: the American western in Martin Ritt’s film, the collected works of Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese in Garrone’s peek inside the ways of this thing of ours. Unlike Hud, there’s no intimation of a “happy” ending for the sociopaths of Gomorrah–no feeling that for whatever the cost to a normalized (idealized?) existence, the outcasts and opportunists living their lives in imitation of Tony Montana are doomed to their tough-guy surfaces and the anonymous deaths predicted for them during a brutal prologue. Non-narrative and populated by a non-professional cast of locals and unusual suspects, the picture, however steeped in naturalism, is finally a formalist piece about as free of structure as Sartre–and every bit as meticulous. This “No Exit” (and the French title of Sartre’s play fascinatingly translates, when applied to a discussion of a film, as “In Camera”) and its unlocked oubliette is Scampia: The players in organized crime are imprisoned there by choice, trapped by the validation they desire from one another.

Max Payne (2008) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Max Payne (2008) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image N/A Sound B Extras C
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Olga Kurylenko
screenplay by Beau Thorne
directed by John Moore

by Walter Chaw Valkyries: a staple of Norse mythology, right? Picking sides in fights, flying the fallen to Valhalla, and becoming winged waitstaff in that eternal beer hall in the sky. (Or fat women in Wagner.) First thing that comes to mind isn’t a mind-blowing, Timothy Leary-esque freak out–unless you’re John Moore’s ridiculous Max Payne. That isn’t the worst thing about Max Payne, but it’s one of them. And while there’s no crime in appropriating concepts you don’t entirely understand, there probably should be. This is not a smart movie, and it doesn’t know whether it should be a faithful adaptation of its video game source material or a post-modern take on films noir, though it should be said that it looks beautiful anyway, a successful iteration of the Sin City aesthetic. The only thing really missing from its retinue of noir tropes is a stoic anti-hero at its centre; Max Payne badly miscalculates not in casting professional lump of meat Mark (Talks to Animals) Wahlberg, but in subsequently allowing him to attempt a fully fleshed-out performance when his usual monotone would’ve fit the pomo/homage portion of this film perfectly.