Blu-ray Disc Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Breathless (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Combo

October 29, 2024****/****, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, The Criterion Collection

À bout de souffle
****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Van Doude, Jean-Luc Godard
written and directed by Jean Luc Godard

by Walter Chaw Jean-Luc Godard is punk, and Breathless is his Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. If he’d only ever made this one film, it would have been enough: the sneer that launched a thousand film careers–the carbuncular adolescents gathered behind their enfant terrible king seeing a future in taking a giant piss on politesse and convention. Among the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, Godard carried the flag of disaffection first and longest. Like the other young men of his generation, he was force-fed the cinema of France’s American occupiers, who flooded French theatres post-WWII with what they saw as genre detritus: B-movies and cheap melodramas, gangster flicks and westerns, tabloid movies and smoky noir provocations. France the capitulated, the humiliated, the liberated, exploited as a clearinghouse for used Yankee culture that became grist for a generational film movement that came of age having ingested it, working it through their biology in a hormonal stew then expelling it in alien tributes now fawning, now excoriating, always defiantly, well, French. What we sent to France, we got back with an experimental jazz score, a Paul Klee print, and a Sartre quote about isolation.

Twisters (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

October 24, 20242024, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg, Thriller

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Kiernan Shipka
screenplay by Mark L. Smith
directed by Lee Isaac Chung

by Walter Chaw Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters is the whistle next to the graveyard, a fascinating companion piece to Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: the one a spectacle designed to desensitize against our ongoing climate collapse, the other to deaden us against widely-broadcast images of an ongoing genocide. Its only two points of interest are Glen Powell’s sudden ascendance as matinee idol and the astounding majesty of natural phenomena fuelled by man-made climate change–meaning, in its simplicity, the goal is to leave audiences with the dazed satiation one associates with the aftermath of an ostentatious fireworks display: half-deafened, eyes bedazzled, the smell of gunpowder sulphurous in the air. A gut full of barbecued meats and sugared drinks in the American fashion, celebrating our liberation from a monarchy on the back of our God-sanctioned manifest genocide of an Indigenous population. We had fun, but that hangover is a sonofabitch. For me, the best part of Twisters is the extended prologue, where I thought it was going to be a Kiernan Shipka movie.

Twister (1996) – Blu-ray Disc|4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

August 13, 20241990s, 2024, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg

The film portion of this review was written when Twister made its Blu-ray debut in 2008. I stand by it and don’t have much to add. It seems funny to cling to “they don’t make ’em like they used to” about a movie whose reboot-quel just came out, but there are more years between Twister and Twisters than there were between Psycho and Psycho II, and the industry has been through a sea change. High-concept blockbusters–of which Twister was one–have virtually gone the way of the dodo, replaced by “IP” blockbusters (of which Twisters is one), where all the focus is on branding. This, along with the kind of “technological progress” that’s a euphemism for the dismantling of time-honoured industry practices, has left today’s tentpoles feeling ersatz, if not curiously bespoke. The passing of Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2017 and 2014, respectively, only makes the sense of loss that much more palpable, though it hasn’t, in my experience, translated to a higher opinion of Twister, which is far from either actor’s best work. (The movie might, however, be Jami Gertz’s finest hour. Hopefully, Film Twitter’s recent reassessment of her character and performance will result in the Gertz-aissance that should’ve happened in 1996.)

**/****
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
4K UHD – Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, Cary Elwes
screenplay by Michael Crichton & Anne-Marie Martin
directed by Jan De Bont

by Bill Chambers Jan De Bont’s Twister has a host of problems that mocking its physics–a common pastime among smartasses the summer of its release–doesn’t begin to address, though if the film were even one degree more earnest than it is, moments like the bit where a tornado powerful enough to hoist a tractor leaves two people clinging tenaciously to a wooden support beam under a rickety bridge unscathed would make for prime “MST3K” fodder. (That’s the thing about notorious pedant Michael Crichton, who co-wrote Twister with then-wife Anne-Marie Martin: he figures getting the technobabble right buys him more poetic license than it really does.) For starters, Helen Hunt doesn’t belong in this milieu–and by that I mean the film’s, not that of the blockbuster. (I actually thought she acquitted herself fine in What Women Want and Cast Away.) Blame the contemporary compulsion to spell everything out: The picture saddles her character, Dr. Jo Harding, with a Tragic Past™ so that she’ll have a psychological motivation for chasing twisters, something that is not only completely gratuitous but also forces us to consider her provenance in a way that would never be an issue had the film stuck to the present tense. It’s impossible to imagine the immutably bicoastal Hunt as the Midwest offspring of the rednecks who leave an indelible impression in the opening flashback, and as a result, she wanders through Twister a virtual impostor.

Lisa Frankenstein (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

June 6, 20242024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Romance, Teen, Zombie

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kathryn Newton, Cole Sprouse, Liza Soberano, Carla Gugino
written by Diablo Cody
directed by Zelda Williams

by Bill Chambers During what I suppose constitutes the climax of Zelda Williams’s Lisa Frankenstein, the “UK Surf” remix of The Pixies‘ “Wave of Mutilation” cues up on the soundtrack. It’s broadly fitting–three people have been mutilated over the course of the picture, and our antiheroine is preparing to claim a fourth victim with an axe–and period-appropriate. (“Wave of Mutilation” came out in 1989, the year in which the movie takes place.) It’s also, like a lot of the creative decisions driving Lisa Frankenstein, amateurish in its literal-mindedness, derivativeness (anyone who knows anything will tell you that “Wave of Mutilation” (UK Surf remix) belongs to Pump Up the Volume), and clunkiness, with the song fighting a losing battle to be heard through the prophylactic of Isabella Summers’s score. Lisa Frankenstein is the brainchild of writer-producer Diablo Cody, her first horror comedy since Jennifer’s Body, a film I didn’t care for in 2008 but suspect I was wrong about, having watched it back then as some sort of Megan Fox litmus test instead of as its own thing. I’m prepared to accept that I’m similarly wrong about Lisa Frankenstein–that I’m too old and male for it, that it will endear itself to me over time, the way today’s trash turns into tomorrow’s treasure. I dunno, though. I don’t think demographics are the issue–Cody conceived it as a distaff Weird Science (hence “Lisa”), and that’s kind of my wheelhouse–and I don’t think Lisa Frankenstein is epochal enough to age like anything other than milk.

Night Swim (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

May 1, 20242024, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Horror, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren
screenplay by Bryce McGuire
directed by Bryce McGuire

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Welp, it’s come to this: a haunted swimming pool. There was a slasher movie set in a public pool (2001’s The Pool), and pools have been at the centre of some seriously creepy set-pieces in films ranging from the original Cat People to the remake of Cat People, from Let the Right One In to the remake of Let the Right One In. As far as definitively haunted swimming pools go, however, the only precedent I can think of is in Poltergeist III, and that one came in a package deal with a haunted skyscraper so it’s a bit of a cheat. Swimming was the only form of physiotherapy that didn’t feel like penance when I was growing up. Before my family put a pool in the backyard, I would swim at my next-door neighbour’s place or the rehabilitation centre where I took swimming lessons as a child. At one of those lessons, I broke my arm, but it didn’t scare me off pools–it scared me off swimming instructors. One evening, on vacation with my parents in Florida, I swam in the hotel pool, and every time I went below the surface, a pretty girl followed me down. We would bob there near the bottom, staring at each other within kissing distance through a veil of chlorine. Not a word ever passed between us; it was strange and wonderful. The pool has since become my respite from screens. I don’t know how to meditate, although I suspect that’s what I’m doing in there. Swimming has always seemed to liberate me mind, body, and spirit. I’m sentimental about swimming pools, in other words, and looked forward to Night Swim, the new film from horror megaproducers Jason Blum and James Wan, ruining them for me.

The Holdovers (2023) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

January 9, 2024****/****, 2023, 2024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Paul Giamatti, Da’vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa, Carrie Preston
written by David Hemingson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw It was never like this, but it’s how I remember it: snow on the ground, ice in patches, a well-appointed office wall-to-wall with books, a fireplace, and me and a classmate, a dear friend, doing an independent study with my favourite professor. I have looked my whole life for my people. I think sometimes they are the fragments I shore against my ruins, that thing T.S. Eliot said to describe the whole of Western civilization informing his writing–but thinking of them as fragments seems wrong. Just as how their spark in my life is not the holding me up but the giving me a reason to want to persist. It would be so much easier not to. I saw an old friend the other day, and he told a story about how I said something to him once that aided him when he was at his lowest point. I didn’t remember saying it, though I remembered the feeling of fear I had for him at the time and was moved to tears that I had helped him as he had so often helped me. You can’t really know the wake you leave behind as you go. My favourite poem is William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, particularly for how it speaks of the “best portion of a man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.” This line has meant different things to me at different times in my life. I wonder what it means to me now.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

November 3, 2023****/****, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Thriller, Tom Cruise

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny
written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw I’ve liked every film in this series to some extent, the last few very much. Yet, pressed, I couldn’t tell you what any of them are about. If you ask me to recount the plot of this latest entry, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (hereafter Dead Reckoning), I would have a tough time only a few minutes out of the screening. This isn’t an inherently bad thing. If you were to ask most people who’ve seen North by Northwest, they wouldn’t know it’s about microfilm being smuggled in South American figurines, just as they will not question whether a crop duster is the best way to kill someone waiting for a bus in the middle of nowhere. They wouldn’t remember that Notorious is about radioactive ore hidden in wine bottles, or that Psycho is about a petty embezzlement scheme. That’s because it doesn’t matter. You’d probably even get pushback about how that’s not really what those films are about anyway, which is correct. Hitchcock called those things that matter a lot to everyone in the film–and almost nothing to anyone watching it–the “MacGuffin.” The Mission: Impossible films are the quintessential modern example of an old concept: if you do everything well enough, if you understand how to keep things snappy and populate the story with characters who feel like real, live people (thus imbuing all the noise with stakes), well, it doesn’t matter what the picture’s about, because what it’s actually about is so instantly relatable. Will they survive? Will they fall in love? Archetype and craft. There’s nothing simpler and nothing more complex.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

October 22, 2023****/****, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Ralph Bellamy
based on the novel by Ira Levin
written for the screen and directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw Rosemary is everything. He’s just Guy. It’s that tension–between a woman fully actualized and a man forever frustrated, the Grail vs. the Knights of the Round Table–that serves as the tightrope in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. As portrayed by Mia Farrow, Rosemary is precious and flawed, full of life and surrounded by death. She is the venerated object, the cathedral she imagines the night she’s drugged and violated; the most precious thing, the sanctified earth planted with the pestilential corruption of masculine ambition. Rosemary’s Baby opens with a lengthy consideration of the buildings that surround Central Park like vultures in their priestly black, voracious and solemn, gathered around a carcass that is, in this configuration, the sole hint of life in a metal savannah. Polanski is a genius of architecture and the consideration of it. His spaces are predatory, or at least become so: “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” and the apartment that sprouts hands from its walls and, here in Rosemary’s Baby, the “Black Bramford.” He puts pretty blondes into the maw of his constructions–sacrifices to the Minotaur wandering through his Labyrinth–and watches them get swallowed by the Stygian black. He is the Minotaur. The pitch is his, along with the appetites. Rosemary’s Baby is his masterpiece, as well as one of the greatest films about what women endure in a world that sees them as seed incubators, nesting fowl, and finally trophies: meek and pretty. But Rosemary isn’t meek, simply outmatched, surrounded, flanked by the men she’s supposed to be able to trust.

Roman Holiday (1953) [Centennial Collection] – DVD|[70th Anniversary] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

August 22, 20231950s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Romance

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***½/****
DVD – Image B- Sound B Extras C
4K UHD – Image B Sound A- Extras C+
starring Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert, Hartley Power
screenplay by Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton
directed by William Wyler

by Walter Chaw It’s one of those seminal moments that movies provide the culture with now and again, like the swoop up a little rise to an impossibly fresh John Wayne in Stagecoach, or the intervention of a fortuitous steam vent in The Seven Year Itch, this introduction we have to Audrey Hepburn as she’s whirled around in a barber chair in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday to reveal the pixie-cut heard ’round the world. That she’s adorable is a given–the real issue is whether she’s an actress or just a bundle of inexplicable charisma, a ganglion of celluloid starlight that evaporates under the slightest critical scrutiny. I love Roman Holiday, but I vacillate between indifference and actual dislike of the rest of Hepburn’s films. I don’t find her winsome in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, am irritated by her in Charade, think she’s appallingly twee in Love in the Afternoon. She doesn’t hold her own against Sean Connery in Robin and Marian and gets blown off the screen by Albert Finney, Alan Arkin, and Rex Harrison in Two for the Road, Wait Until Dark, and My Fair Lady, respectively. If you ask me, Audrey isn’t an actress so much as someone you would like to have known and maybe had the opportunity to cuddle, which makes her mega-stardom in the Fifties and Sixties all the more testament to her ineffable appeal. Happening right when Method was rendering personalities like Hepburn déclassé, she was making a career of being terminally anachronistic. It’s Ozzie’s Harriet, sashaying while Rome burns. Instant nostalgia; even when she was introduced for the first time, it must have seemed like ages ago.

After Hours (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Combo

July 18, 2023****/****, 1980s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Thomas Chong
written by Joseph Minion
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is an asshole. Let’s get that out of the way. He’s doing a shitty, half-assed job of training the new guy, Lloyd (Bronson Pinchot), in his daytime cubicle hell when Lloyd confesses that his dream isn’t mastering the antiquated data-entry system at their non-descript job, but to start a publication where struggling writers might find an outlet for their work. Paul doesn’t bother hiding his…not disdain, but complete disinterest in what Lloyd’s saying, finding himself distracted by the romance of sheaves of financial documents being moved from one desk to another before standing up and walking away. Paul is detestable. He is The Company rep Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) from the next year’s Aliens, the prototypical yuppie who shows up for a late-night booty call with a stranger in Soho wearing dress pants and a button-down shirt and tie. He is the American Psycho. Paul could give a shit about the voice of the oppressed looking for a creative outlet to contribute to the collective pool of art. He’s all about numbers. He is the reincarnation of North by Northwest‘s unctuous, mercurial ad-man Roger O. Thornhill, whose monogram is “ROT.” (The “O” stands for “nothing.”) After Hours, much like North by Northwest, becomes a nightmare of commodification in which numbers are the source of dehumanization and disassociation. The only reason we really like Paul at all is that we can empathize with his desire to go to bed with 1985 Rosanna Arquette.

The Truman Show (1998) [25th Anniversary] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

July 12, 2023****/****, 1990s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Satire

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Ed Harris
written by Andrew Niccol
directed by Peter Weir

by Walter Chaw The Truman Show appeared during a period when we were taking a hard look at how quickly and thoroughly we had given our lives over to technology, bracing for the Y2K bug to drop airplanes out of the sky and launch nuclear arsenals. The cruel irony of successfully averting disaster is that the morning after, having learned nothing, we redoubled our efforts to sell ourselves to our things. Introspection is like a nightmare upon waking: If it doesn’t disappear on its own, you do your best to wave it away. Orwell’s 1984 didn’t predict how we pay subscriptions for the right to be surveilled constantly, every detail of our lives documented surreptitiously for corporate information harvesters and publicly through social media, where we manufacture the best versions of ourselves to entertain, and shame, others. We line up around city blocks for the right to plant the world’s most sophisticated tracking devices on ourselves; there is a fundamental, exploitable flaw in our programming. We overestimated the extent to which we desired anonymity, underestimated our longing to matter and our vulnerability to flattery. Our will to power through influence, evolutionarily favoured, is the suicide pill encoded into our hardware. In our pursuit of a self to proliferate, technology allowed us to redraft our image and curate our environments. The films at the end of the millennium–Pleasantville, Dark City, The Matrix, and The Thirteenth Floor, to name a few–are warnings about what happens when we project our subjectivity upon the world. Perhaps none cautioned more definitively than Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich, which has the balls to literalize the horror of living among undifferentiated versions of the self in a simulation of the outside that is merely an interpretation of an eternity of insides.

Superman: 5-Film Collection (1978-1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 25, 2023****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, UK

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD discs

SUPERMAN (1978)
****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman and Robert Benton
directed by Richard Donner

SUPERMAN II (1981)
***/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN II – THE RICHARD DONNER CUT (2006)
***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN III (1983)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by David and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)
*½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras B
starring Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal
directed by Sidney J. Furie

by Walter Chaw The split in Superman–his faultline where he’s the weakest, the most vulnerable to attack–is there from the beginning. He is a Zen kōan whose existence represents the essential riddle at the heart of any mythology for an infallible, omniscient, omnipotent being. He is an eggshell’s impregnable yet permeable surface: incredibly strong and prone to shatter; seamless but filled with life; unknowably alien and a reflection of everyone’s secret self. An incubator and vessel, the source and the end. He is the immovable object and the irresistible force, the “eternal boy scout,” branded at various times by the terminally unempathetic as “boring”–the rejoinder to which is that he’s been the centre of thousands of stories (tens of thousands?) in uninterrupted serialized adventures since his first appearance in Action Comics on April 18, 1938. Superman has persisted through every era of the United States from the Great Depression to now and every war since WWII, through the fall and rise again of the Ku Klux Klan and every form of mass media, in endless rejuvenating cycles bleeding into each other until their borders become a meaningless melange coalescing into a logo that is as archetypal in the West as the outline of a mushroom cloud. He is the literal “super” man, and somehow he means the most to the bullied and the broken–not as a fantasy of retribution, but as hopeful indication that even the most perfect of us are beset by doubt and alienation. He is the essential shining metaphor for post-modern existentialism.

Flashdance (1983) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

May 31, 20231980s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music, Romance

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Jennifer Beals, Michael Nouri, Belinda Bauer, Lilia Skala
screenplay by Tom Hedley and Joe Eszterhas
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Bill Chambers "FLASHDANCE." It's hardly a coincidence the Rocky movies started this way, with the title scrolling horizontally across the screen like a ring girl's sign for the upcoming round. Then we fade up on our heroine, mythologized via obscured features, cycling confidently through the city to the anthemic strains of the late Irene Cara's "Flashdance… What a Feeling"–a montage that riffs on the iconic opening titles of Saturday Night Fever. And that, in a nutshell, is Flashdance: Rocky meets Saturday Night Fever, albeit with a female lead and considerably less dramatic tension than either. It is perhaps more that referencing these pop-culture juggernauts at the outset establishes a vernacular, translating a movie for the masses that only half-heartedly yields to formula. Flashdance is weird with a beard. It's elliptical and largely free of plot, featuring a modern-day fairytale heroine navigating an urban jungle awash in mimes and breakdancers (but curiously few cars), which is captured voyeuristically with long lenses and natural light like cinéma vérité on Mars.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

April 30, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek Pinault, Ayub Khan Din, Vicki Pepperdine
written by Reid Carolin
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Bill Chambers Loosely based on star and co-scenarist Channing Tatum’s exotic-dancer past, Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike was a pleasant surprise for treating the world of male strippers seriously–if finally too seriously, as the buoyant first half gives way to a heavy-handed moralizing reminiscent of Soderbergh’s Traffic in the second. Sex work in Magic Mike is something to transcend through drugs or a trade skill. Gregory Jacobs’s terrific follow-up, Magic Mike XXL, washed away the Afterschool Special aftertaste of the original by taking shame out of the equation: A road movie that finds Mike and the remaining “Kings of Tampa” travelling to a stripping convention in Myrtle Beach, it’s a celebration of a certain esprit de corps. Despite the instantly iconic scene of Joe Manganiello dancing to “I Want It That Way” for the amusement of a supermarket cashier, Magic Mike XXL wasn’t zeitgeist-defining like its predecessor, but it nails the hangout-movie vibe Soderbergh was chasing in his Ocean’s sequels, and will no doubt endure as the Godfather Part II/Empire Strikes Back of Magic Mike movies. And what will Magic Mike’s Last Dance go down as? Something like the Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo of the trilogy is my best guess. I have no idea if Soderbergh’s longtime AD Jacobs was merely a figurehead on Magic Mike XXL, which was made in that weird period of Soderbergh’s “retirement” from feature filmmaking (though he still served as the picture’s cinematographer), but in returning to the helm for Magic Mike’s Last Dance, Soderbergh directs like someone who’s been shown where the g-spot is and can’t for the life of him remember, so he’ll have to bluff his way through it.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] – DVD|4K Ultra HD

April 4, 2023****/****, 1970s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tobe Hooper, Disability, FFC Must-Own, Horror

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A+
4K UHD – Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow
screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw If we start from the position that Sally (Marilyn Burns) is burdened from the get-go by two misfit monsters, then we can look at Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as not only a keen autopsy of a particular moment in our country’s history (circa 1974), but also a profoundly sensitive look at social prejudices and the toll said prejudices take on the human social organism. More than the typical rise-of-the-bumpkins horror conceit, it is, along with John Boorman’s Deliverance from two years earlier, the classic example of a film that isn’t about what it’s ostensibly about. Look at the assiduous reduction of wheelchair-bound outcast Franklin (Paul A. Partain), a character who remains for the efforts of Hooper and Partain (apparently so irritating in real life that his cohorts were relieved by his on-screen demise) one of the most unapologetically irritating and pathetic figures in film and find noteworthy not that a handicapped person is allowed to be a self-pitying asshole, but that we’re not let off the hook (as it were) for our own prejudices. Franklin is an anchor–and we’re glad that he’s dead, too.

Dragonslayer (1981) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

March 23, 2023****/****, 1980s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image B- Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Peter MacNicol, Caitlin Clarke, Ralph Richardson, Chloe Salaman
screenplay by Hal Barwood & Matthew Robbins
directed by Matthew Robbins

by Walter Chaw When I first reviewed Matthew Robbins’s Dragonslayer upon its DVD release 20 years ago, I said the picture could be read as an allegory for the passing of the 1970s and, with it, the auteur-driven New American Cinema, which was losing favour to the blockbuster mentality that dominates Hollywood production to this day. The directors were the wizards, tied to their decrepit and pain-ridden dragons, and they were, in 1981, up against the reality of an administration perpetuated by a myth of American exceptionalism that would serve as a course correction from the predominantly downbeat, paranoid films of the previous decade. I don’t know that I’ve gotten any smarter in the years following my initial assessment of a work that has been dear to me since I saw it as a terrified eight-year-old, cowering beneath my seat in the long-defunct and paved-over Lakeside Twin, but I do know I’ve gotten measurably more pessimistic about our prospects. I think you can know things are broken when you’re young (and 29 didn’t seem so young at the time, but it is) without knowing how irreparably broken they are. And you can feel hopeless without knowing just how hopeless. When I watch Dragonslayer in 2023, I see a work about the rise of Christofascism and the prosperity gospel, about governments we trust to protect us making deals with monsters to enrich and empower themselves at the expense of the people who rely on them, and about the steady eradication of belief that there are any heroes left with the will or the wherewithal to save us.

M3GAN (2023) [Unrated Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

March 21, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by Gerard Johnstone

by Walter Chaw That the Internet works the way it does and evolved as quickly as it did likely had everything to do with it being the finest distributor of pornography the world had ever seen. If a band of apes created something like the Internet, for instance, they would use it primarily to inflict violent dominance over others–and for sex, if possible. No “ifs” about it: we are, and we did. When an artificial intelligence was tasked with machine learning via the Internet, it became a misanthropic, misogynistic racist almost instantly. The Internet is also the single greatest anthropological bellwether ever created, diagnosing who we are when we’re not obsessively adjusting our mask of civility; 100% pure id. I love Alex Garland’s Ex Machina because it understands that if a robot that looked like Alicia Vikander were invented, men would try to fuck it, and no expense would be too great in that pursuit. It doesn’t even have to resemble Alicia Vikander–it can just be a flashlight with a rubber hole in it. Which brings us to the question M3GAN refuses to confront. If you make a little blonde doll that looks like a 12-year-old Fiona Gubelmann, you’re opening an entire hornet’s nest of uncomfortable issues that would be fascinating to address. What happens when unfettered tech capitalism collides with pedophilia? I mean, the Replicants in Blade Runner are soldiers, teachers…and prostitutes. Even Spielberg’s A.I. recognizes that great leaps in technology are historically tied to warfare and rutting.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

March 7, 20232022, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Family, Fantasy, UK

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law, Ezra Miller, Mads Mikkelsen
screenplay by J.K. Rowling & Steve Kloves
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw I have watched and reviewed the first nine films in the Harry Potter franchise, skipping the first Fantastic Beasts sequel (though I think I saw it), and for my sins, here I am returning for the eleventh installment with nary a memory of any of them except that I liked the one directed by Alfonso Cuarón. And while I’m glad chief screenwriter Steve Kloves has secured his retirement a few hundred times over, I do lament that the writer-director of The Fabulous Baker Boys and Flesh and Bone didn’t make more of those kinds of movies in his nearly 40-year career. Such is the suppurative contagion of the IP age that the best minds of my generation are destroyed by the madness, starving hysterical naked–as Ginsberg might describe them–as they drag themselves through bales of ignominious piffle during their prime creative years. Is this garbage really the best use of Kloves? Of Jude Law? Of Mads Mikkelsen, Katherine Waterston, or Eddie Redmayne? The only person who deserves this mess is Ezra Miller, let’s be honest, though even Miller–if one can disregard the harm they inflict on seemingly every other human being in their orbit–is a gifted performer who’s also and obviously too good for this. These movies aren’t socially destructive in the sense that there’s something offensive about them thematically–mainly because there’s not a lot about them thematically. They’re all second acts in competing Telenovelas: breathless melodramas in which one thing bleeds into the next like cells ravaged by Ebola. There’s no hope for an end to the suffering so long as there’s money to be squeezed thick from its black buboes: another amusement-park attraction, another opportunity to be relevant in an era where tentpoles are the only currency. Was a time a film with ten sequels was regarded as a cheap joke. That time is now.

Training Day (2001) – DVD|4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

March 1, 20232000s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
4K ULTRA HD – Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Scott Glenn, Eva Mendes née Mendez
screenplay by David Ayer
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw In Antoine Fuqua and Dominic Sena’s race to become David Fincher, Fuqua, with his colour-bleached urban noir Training Day, pulls slightly ahead. Essentially a feature-length version of the Fuqua-helmed video for Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Training Day is dankly lit, grim, and edited with a veteran music-video director’s need for speed (though there are considerably fewer cuts than those found in Fuqua’s previous efforts Bait and The Replacement Killers). So smooth and accomplished is the harsh vérité look of the piece that the sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles are as much a player in the film as its leads. But the striking cinematography, sharp screenplay by David Ayer, and undeniable chemistry between Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke aren’t enough to disguise that Training Day is one bravura performance away from being the umpteenth rote grizzled vet/greenhorn rookie policier. (With a healthy dash of Casualties of War tossed in for that Captain Bligh/Mr. Christian dynamic.)

The Fabelmans (2022) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

February 12, 20232022, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Spielberg

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogan, Gabriel LaBelle
written by Steven Spielberg & Tony Kushner
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) loves making movies. He loves it so much there’s a chance he’ll destroy his family because of it–showing things that aren’t for public consumption, mishandling the power of the medium, underestimating the magnitude of his gift. We know this because there’s a scene where Sammy, while editing raw 8mm footage of a family camping trip, notices his mom, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), getting a little too friendly with family friend Benny (Seth Rogen). He cuts all the incriminating clips together into a mini-reel he projects for Mitzi against the wall of his closet as explanation of sorts for why he’s sullen lately, and maybe as punishment for Mitzi, who has just struck him out of frustration. We know this, too, because his obviously insane grand-uncle, ex-lion tamer Boris (Judd Hirsch), has warned him, in a movie-stealing bit of scenery-chewing, that the tension between art and family always ends in tragedy. We know this, too…uh, too, because it’s ventriloquized through the mouths of more than one character, including Sammy’s bully, Chad (Sam Rechner). Word for tortured word. There are more monologues in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans than there are dialogues–more peaks than mountains, as it were. More waves than ocean. I don’t know why everyone in this movie talks like either a greeting card or a diagnosis, though I think it probably has to do with Spielberg wanting to excavate his past and, in the exhumation, to find easy and uplifting bows in which to tie his various strings. We all want that. I feel for him.