Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 10 of 47

Howling II (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

May 23, 20171980s, 2017, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, UK, Werewolf

Howling II: …Your Sister is a Werewolf
Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Annie McEnroe, Reb Brown, Sybil Danning
screenplay by Robert Sarno and Gary Brandner, based on the novel Howling II by Brandner
directed by Philippe Mora

by Sydney Wegner Let’s get this out of the way first: Howling II–a.k.a. Howling II: …Your Sister is a Werewolf, a.k.a. Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch–is a mess, an entity that refuses to be judged on any conventional, objective scale. Though originally intended as a comedy, the studio sliced it up to come across as more of a horror movie, and the bizarre result is a tone that changes with each scene. Half new-wave werewolf erotica, half Hammer horror, Howling II‘s themes of grief and rebirth and female sexual empowerment swirl together in a campy, indecipherable whirlwind. Just as things begin to approach being scary, they’re kicked right back down with a novelty wipe effect or a cartoonish facial expression. Christopher Lee, playing werewolf hunter Stefan Crosscoe, was allegedly so appalled by the acting of his co-stars that he spent much of his time offscreen trying to flee the planet using only the power of his mind. You can feel the ennui behind his eyes with every line delivery, yet the attention he commands is undeniable. In a way, his performance is a microcosm of the entire film. The opening shot finds Lee suspended in a sea of stars, reciting werewolf legend from a book, and that is probably the most normal thing that happens in Howling II. It’s ridiculous, it’s stupid; it’s occasionally embarrassing and endlessly fascinating.

The Creeping Garden (2014) [Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

May 1, 20172014, 2017, Arrow Video, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary, UK

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
directed by Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharp

by Sydney Wegner Earth is so full of tiny things, an infinite variety of life. You might step on fifty species you’ve never heard of on your walk to work, and most of us will spend our lives in ignorance of these obscure wonders. But for every known organism, one can safely assume there is a fan club somewhere devoted to studying it. The Creeping Garden wants to share that devotion with the world while attempting to answer the all-important question: Who are these fanatics, and why do they care? Says co-director Tim Grabham on the Blu-ray’s commentary track, “What is a slime mould?…It depends on who you are and what you’re looking for,” an offhand musing that could have been the film’s tagline. Above all, this is a documentary about looking.

Hidden Figures (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

April 19, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner
screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly
directed by Theodore Melfi

by Walter Chaw Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures is so inextricably bonded to the rote motions of awards-season biographical uplift melodrama that it functions as proof of a template studios give to directors who won’t kick too much about art and individuality and expression and all that high-falutin’ stuff. Better, it’s proof of an attachment that fits onto the Studio sausage press ensuring that all the mashed and salted discards are extruded in the proper proportion into the collective cow gut. Hidden Figures is the story of three African-American women in the 1960s who go to work for NASA’s Mercury program in the days after the Sputnik launch. It talks about how they’re brilliant but forced to pee in segregated bathrooms; how they’re proud family women but treated like second-class citizens or worse. It positions a white man of power who sees their value all the way through to letting one of the ladies be a co-author on a report she seems to have written herself. It has the end-credits thing where pictures of the real women whose stories the movie ostensibly tells are shown with titles detailing the horrific shit they endured to get their names on a building. Well, one of them anyway. It even has that thing in movies about numbers where there’s a lot of running to try to make math exciting to watch. What it doesn’t have is any lingering impact whatsoever: no gravitas, no surprise, no interest, nothing. The only thing to say about Hidden Figures, really, is that if you spend time praising it, you’re being patronizing–and that is the very definition of irony.

The Bye Bye Man (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

April 13, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Horror, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount, Cressida Bonas, Faye Dunaway
screenplay by Jonathan Penner, based on “The Bridge to Body Island” by Robert Damon Schneck
directed by Stacy Title

by Bill Chambers The Bye Bye Man begins as Terminator: Nebbish, with a Poindexter in a sweater vest named Larry (Leigh Whannell, of Saw fame) pulling up to a suburban home and asking the lady of the house, Jane (Lara Knox), if she told anybody “about the name.” Affirmative. Larry then returns to his vehicle, retrieves a shotgun, and blasts a hole through Jane’s front door. We see a man jump out of his wheelchair in the living-room window in a tiny, easy-to-miss background detail I suspect would’ve been airbrushed out of a more respectable film, because the prologue ends there in the theatrical cut. In the unrated version on Blu-ray, it continues on to show Larry entering the house, finishing Jane off, executing the wheelchair dude, Rick (Andrew Gorell), as he futilely drags himself across the carpet, and grimly, dutifully marching down the street to kill some neighbours Rick just threw under the bus. Smoothly staged in one take, the sequence reminds not unfavourably of A Serious Man, getting most of its period authenticity–the year is 1969–and middle-class dread from an aesthetic ape of that film. (The chyron-ascribed Madison, WI setting is pretty close to Coen Brothers territory, too.) It’s suitably horrific. Until, that is, you start thinking about Rick: Why does his escape plan involve slumping to the floor like a sack of potatoes? The whole point of wheelchairs, see, is that they have wheels–an innovation that gave disabled people an efficient, dignified way to get a bag of chips from the kitchen or flee an axe murderer. As we will soon discover, the titular Bye Bye Man makes his marks do absurd, irrational things; the problem is, The Bye Bye Man doesn’t quite know how to portray this without being hilarible itself.

Collateral Beauty (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

April 9, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras F
starring Will Smith, Edward Norton, Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren
written by Allan Loeb
directed by David Frankel

by Walter Chaw Collateral Beauty is the conversation you had that one time with the stupidest person you’ve ever met, in that it’s so stupid it poses an existential problem for you. It happened to me once when, as a bartender, one of the waitresses asked me with concern how she could transform the Coke float she’d ordered into the Sprite float the customer had ordered. I didn’t know. I still don’t. And not having the answer to a question posed by the stupidest person you’ve ever met is horrifying. It’s like you come home one day and your guinea pig greets you with a zen kōan. It’s Kafka’s great unwritten tale. It’s Collateral Beauty: a question with no answer posed by the stupidest movie ever made. Really, the only solution is to dump it out and start from scratch. Collateral Beauty is about grief, sort of, and gaslighting, and it’s shot like a visit to Whole Foods in the sense that it’s burnished with a classy patina and full of pretty people you’d like to be. Then you get to the checkout lane and it’s too much, but you’re too embarrassed to put anything back. Also, the food tastes like ass.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

April 7, 20172016, 2017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Star Wars

Rogue One
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Alan Tudyk
screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw A deep cut for Star Wars fanatics, Gareth Edwards’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story also happens to be the single most topical fiction of 2016, talking as it does–in bold, melodramatic strokes befitting a space opera–about the importance of rebellion in the face of fascism. “Order,” says Empirical stooge Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn). “Terror,” corrects brilliant weapons engineer Galen (Mads Mikkelsen). And the representative of the fascist regime smiles, as though it were all just a matter of semantics, this idea that terror and order are opposite sides of the same devalued coin. He’s engaged in a kind of political double-speak, in gaslighting–things that until this year were the scourge of banana republics and other backwards backwaters. The Empire that Krennic represents needs Galen to help them complete their Death Star superweapon, with the ’80s-era Reagan/Thatcher rationale that overwhelming destructive deterrents are the only way to truly keep the peace. Galen is compelled to cooperate to keep his daughter, Jyn (Felicity Jones), safe and anonymous in the protection of violent revolutionary Saw (Forest Whitaker). The rest is Jyn’s quest to clear her father’s name by stealing plans for the Death Star and delivering them to a fractured resistance that isn’t entirely sure if it wouldn’t be a good idea to give the Empire a chance. You know, maybe they won’t do all the things they said they were going to do?

Wishmaster Collection: 4-Film Set [Vestron Video Collector’s Series] – Blu-ray Disc

March 31, 20171990s, 2000s, 2017, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror

WISHMASTER (1997)
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Tammy Lauren, Andrew Divoff, Chris Lemmon, Robert Englund
written by Peter Atkins
directed by Robert Kurtzman

WISHMASTER 2: EVIL NEVER DIES (1999)
*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Andrew Divoff, Paul Johannson, Holly Fields, Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister, Jr.
written and directed by Jack Sholder

WISHMASTER 3: BEYOND THE GATES OF HELL (2001)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jason Connery, A.J. Cook, Tobias Mehler, John Novak
screenplay by Alexander Wright
directed by Chris Angel

WISHMASTER: THE PROPHECY FULFILLED (2002)
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Michael Trucco, Tara Spencer-Nairn, Jason Thompson, John Novak
screenplay by John Benjamin Martin
directed by Chris Angel

by Sydney Wegner The Wishmaster saga begins with a quick infodump about angels and demons from narrator Angus Scrimm, the folklore giving way to a lush array of reds and purples and sandy earth tones as a sorcerer forges a magic red gemstone over the opening credits. In 1127 Persia, something is wreaking havoc on a crowded square; a skeleton rips its way out of a man’s skin and walks around to join several other horrifying atrocities. The sorcerer (Ari Barak) pushes his way through the screaming crowd to the King (Richard Assad), who’s being advised by a Djinn (a.k.a. the Wishmaster, played by a ferociously campy Andrew Divoff) that he must make a third wish to stop the violence. But the sorcerer manages to trap him in the gemstone, stopping the King before his third wish can grant the Djinn the power to rip through dimensions and unleash his Djinn brethren onto the earth. This prologue sets up a world of magic and fantasy and folklore the series never quite re-establishes. While the ancient imagery is vaguely referenced hereafter, the world of Wishmaster won’t feel this sensual or mystical again.

20th Century Women (2016) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

March 27, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, FFC Must-Own

20thcenturywomen2

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup
written and directed by Mike Mills

by Walter Chaw Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women is beautiful for the way that it listens. It hears how people talk, and it lets them. It watches the way people interact and allows that to speak volumes for them. It’s a film, like so many lately, about communication. There’s a moment, late, where a young man–a boy, really–says to his mother that he’s an individual: “I’m not all men, I’m just me.” And she says, “Well… yes and no.” It’s a beautiful exchange, performed exquisitely, timed perfectly. It’s sublime, not the least for being smart and dead-on. Kind and pointed and impossibly eloquent about certain uncomfortable truths, 20th Century Women is an invitation to have ultimate conversations about how we ruin our children with our best intentions and how that has always been so and will always be so. In multiple interludes, Mills speeds up the film, blurring the action with lighting effects and throwing in archival images while including narration like “the world is very big.” It is. The picture holds to the idea that the world is incomprehensible and that we’re acted on by forces we cannot control–and at the end of it, after we’re gone, it goes on without having known we were there. There’s a certain piquancy to that that needs to be earned, and is earned.

Allied (2016) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

March 22, 20172016, 2017, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Simon McBurney
screenplay by Steven Knight
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Bill Chambers

“Back in those days I was much more of a taskmaster. I would make my actors hit those marks and always be in their light, and now I’ve kind of–I don’t care as much anymore. I wouldn’t allow there to be a camera bobble in any of those films. If the camera jiggled one frame, I’d have to do the take again. But nowadays, audiences are so different. I don’t think they appreciate the attention to detail. Maybe subconsciously they feel it, maybe they don’t. Having a perfectly composed shot doesn’t matter if you are watching it on an iPhone, does it? You wouldn’t see it.”

That’s Robert Zemeckis, speaking to We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy author Caseen Gaines. When I first read those words, I have to admit I had a little moment of “Dylan goes electric” heartbreak, because the precision craftsmanship of Zemeckis’s films had always been a comfort. Then I reread them, taking into account the resounding shrug that greeted both his lengthy detour into motion-capture animation and his subsequent return to live-action (Flight), and his sour grapes became considerably more pungent. Many filmmakers relax their standards as they get older; few make a point of announcing it. Fewer still do so with spite. If the prolific Zemeckis is fatigued, he shouldn’t pass the buck: it’s hard-won–I can’t begin to imagine the intensity of effort it took to pull off, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or Death Becomes Her. When he belittles the iPhone he gives away his age (62 at the time), but he also sells himself out, as someone who’s been at the forefront of the digital revolution for decades. Of course, between his waffling commitment to 3-D and MoCap and his punking of a nation’s kids in a 1989 TV special in which he claimed that Back to the Future Part II‘s hoverboards were a real technology suppressed by parents’ groups, it’s hard to take Zemeckis at his word.

The Initiation (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

March 14, 20171980s, 2017, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Vera Miles, Clu Gulager, James Read, Daphne Zuniga
written by Charles Pratt, Jr.
directed by Larry Stewart

by Bryant Frazer Turning up at the tail-end of the late-1970s/early-1980s slasher boom, The Initiation is another one made with little ambition by people with no special inclination towards horror, but at least it doesn’t look down on the genre: Despite the sorority-house trappings, it aspires to a perfectly middlebrow level of quality, like a network movie-of-the-week or mass-market paperback original. That’s some kind of achievement for a film that opens with a delightfully ridiculous dream sequence (or is it?) depicting an episode of coitus interruptus involving a little girl with a knife and an intruder who catches on fire and ends with a half-dozen college kids being tracked down by a serial killer with knives and a harpoon gun. Trouble is, The Initiation works a little too hard to lay a foundation for its killing spree in a drama of dark family secrets. The result is a messy amalgam that doesn’t work especially well as a soap opera or a teen sex comedy, let alone as a slasher movie.

Moana (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 13, 20172016, 2017, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical

Moana1

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Jared Bush
directed by Ron Clements & John Musker (co-directed by Don Hall & Chris Williams)

by Walter Chaw Arguably, the only place it really matters in terms of the diversity tango in Disney’s new animated musical Moana is in the songwriting and voice-acting, and so although there are only white people directing (four credited directors) and writing (eight credited scenarists), find Opetaia Foa’i and Lin-Manuel Miranda behind the music and Dwayne Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho behind the Pacific Islander characters. This is progress. Also progress is what seems, to this non-Polynesian, like a real effort to not appropriate a culture so much as represent its mythology, tied as it must be to a narrative about a young woman, Moana (Cravalho), a stout Disney heroine of that certain mold for whom adventure calls, declaring her independence from the patriarchy. We’ve seen her before, is what I’m saying, but she’s neither sexualized nor given an aspirational mate/therapeutic marriage. Progress. I’ll take it. There’s even a moment where demigod Maui (Johnson) makes a crack about Moana being in the Disney canon. Progress? Self-awareness, at least. I’ll take that, too. What’s unfortunate is that for everything that’s very good about the film, there’s something very familiar. The argument should probably be made that familiarity is the sugar that helps the medicine of its progressive elements go down. It worked for The Force Awakens.

Rules Don’t Apply (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 2, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

Rulesdontapply3

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Matthew Broderick, Lily Collins
screenplay by Warren Beatty
directed by Warren Beatty

by Walter Chaw The title refers to Howard Hughes, I think, and becomes a song its ingénue sings a couple of times over the course of the film. Moreover, it refers to Warren Beatty at this point in an extraordinary career that began in the New American Cinema and that wave of Method actors filling in the spaces left behind by the Golden Age. He was impossibly beautiful, and played against it whenever he could. He was whip-smart. Unabashedly political. Unapologetically a legendary philanderer who made perhaps his greatest single impression on my generation with a surprise cameo in then-girlfriend Madonna’s documentary monument to herself, Truth or Dare. Any investigation, though, finds that Beatty is a definitive voice of a definitive moment in the cinematic history of the United States. It’s been fifteen years since his last film as an actor, twenty as a director. In the meantime: rumours and speculation about this long-gestating production–his dream project, the culmination of a storied career behind and in front of the camera. And now here it is, Rules Don’t Apply, and it’s exceedingly uncomfortable, a film that leaves Beatty, acting here as co-star, director, producer, and credited screenwriter, exceptionally vulnerable. As capstones go, it’s an interesting one.

The Exterminating Angel (1962) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 28, 2017****/****, 1960s, 2017, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

El Ángel Exterminador
****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Silvia Pinal, Jacqueline Andere, José Baviera, Augusto Benedico
screenplay by Luis Buñuel, based on the story “Los Náufragos de la Calle de la Providencia” by Luis Alcoriza and Luis Buñuel
directed by Luis Buñuel

by Bryant Frazer The first scene of The Exterminating Angel takes place at the gate outside a stately mansion where the house’s butler, Julio (Claudio Brook), confronts Lucas (Ángel Merino), a servant trying to sneak off the grounds just as the staff is preparing a dinner party for twenty. The worker hesitates for a moment, then continues on his way, the butler calling angrily after him: “Never set foot in this house again.” It’s the beginning of a very long night for the steward, who is vexed as his waiters and kitchen staff, one by one or in pairs, desert their posts for the evening at the worst possible time. The servants know something’s wrong, and though they’re not sure what it is, none of them–save the unflappable Julio, who keeps the gears turning smoothly–are willing to stick around to find out. When Lucia (Lucy Gallardo), the frustrated lady of the house, barks her offense at this betrayal, Julio is there to reassure her. “Domestic help grows more impertinent by the day, madam,” he declares.

Manchester by the Sea (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

February 20, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

Manchesterbythesea

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler, Lucas Hedges
written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan

by Walter Chaw Kenneth Lonergan is a brilliant writer who specializes in small interpersonal moments. His plays are extraordinary. The two previous films he directed, You Can Count on Me and Margaret, are masterful portraits of human failure and weakness. He is a poet of imperfection and imperfect resolution. Margaret gained attention for the lengths to which Lonergan fought for a cut that exceeded a contracted-upon two-and-a-half-hour running time. Martin Scorsese, with whom Lonergan collaborated on the script for Gangs of New York, helped facilitate a 165-minute cut that, to my knowledge, has never been screened. When Margaret finally hit home video after a swell of support from online advocates, the long version had inflated to 186 minutes. I’ve only seen the theatrical and extended cuts of the film. I love them both. I rarely wish movies were longer; Lonergan’s are the exception. That has something to do with his writing, of course, and something to do with his casts, who, to a one, have contributed extraordinary work–perhaps the best work of their careers. Crucially, Lonergan trusts them to deliver his words. He doesn’t garnish them with gaudy camera angles, or underscore them with expository soundtrack cues. Mark Ruffalo once said of Lonergan, affectionately, that the playwright was only playing at being humble. For me, however Lonergan is with other people, his humility comes through in the extent to which he allows his actors to do their job.

Woman in the Dunes (1964) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 5, 2017****/****, 1960s, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Japan, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Womaninthedunes1

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Eiji Okada, Kyōko Kishida, Kōji Mitsui, Hiroko Itō
screenplay by Kōbō Abe, based on his novel The Woman in the Dunes
directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara

by Walter Chaw The first morning amateur entomologist Niki (Eiji Okada) wakes in a house at the bottom of a hole carved into a sand dune, he finds his lessor–the titular, nameless Woman (Kyoko Kishida)–asleep in the nude, with sand crusted over her body like a thin, granular mantle. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara sweeps over her body with a sculptor’s attention. It’s intensely erotic, though for all its voyeuristic intention, it’s not prurient. No, there’s a sense of intimacy in this: it’s the attention you give a lover when her skin is near your eye and you love her and desire her: you want to touch her, to taste her, to consume her. There’s much talk of “the flesh” in David Cronenberg’s The Fly; flesh makes you crazy. The way Teshigahara shoots surfaces in Woman in the Dunes makes you crazy. When they finally make love, Niki and the Woman, each individual grain of sand on Niki’s skin stands out like a monument. When the Woman bathes him, rubbing suds between her hands and running them down his legs and back, you can feel her hands play across your own calves, and you can feel him beneath your hands. Not just flesh, but the textures and tides of the dunes over which Niki practices his minor distractions from the day-to-day of whatever it is he does in the city, where he’s nothing, accomplishes nothing of note, and will not be missed but for the missing-person’s report we see at the end as the film’s pithy epilogue. Based on Kōbō Abe’s novel of the same name, Woman in the Dunes is in one way the best, most insightful and evocative adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” there ever was, from Eliot’s winsome protagonist looking to escape regret into experience to, literally, these lines about entomology as a metaphor for being seen clearly and judged wanting:

Dead Ringers (1988) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 31, 2017****/****, 1980s, 2017, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

****/**** Image B- Sound D Extras B
starring Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold, Heidi Von Palleske, Stephen Lack
written by David Cronenberg and Norman Snider, based on the book Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland
directed by David Cronenberg

by Bryant Frazer Dead Ringers begins and ends extraordinarily, with the soft swelling of Howard Shore’s title music. It starts with the slow emergence of strings, which are eventually layered with harp and woodwinds, mining uncommon veins of sadness in a major key. Set against on-screen illustrations of an anatomical and explicitly gynecological nature, the music serves the obvious function of undercutting the film’s pointedly unsettling subject matter with unalloyed lyricism. It’s like a statement of purpose. But Shore’s melody goes farther than that, somehow. It’s remarkably haunting, for one thing–the theme is one of the most potent sensory triggers I know, instantly evoking both beauty and despair. Just the first four bars are enough to set me weeping. And it’s penetrating. More than elegiac, it’s specifically regretful, and bittersweet. According to Royal S. Brown’s liner notes on the first CD release of the movie’s score, the director knew it right away. “That’s suicide music,” Cronenberg told Shore when he first heard the theme. “You’ve got it.”

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990) [30th Anniversary] – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 2017****/****, 1990s, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Michael Rooker, Tracy Arnold, Tom Towles
written by Richard Fire & John McNaughton
directed by John McNaughton

by Walter Chaw John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (hereafter Henry) is one of the great black comedies. At its heart is the basis of Judd Apatow’s gross-out flicks: body horror, deviant sexuality, deep ignorance-unto-actual stupidity, questionable decisions and their consequences, and brilliant bits of deadpan humour dependent upon timing and situation. Similarly, it derives its effectiveness from a keen observation of male heterosexual relationships and the peril implicit therein. The sole distinction, really, is that Apatow and his followers believe in conservative, family-values resolutions whereas Henry ends in essential, sucking nihilism. It’s a distinction that draws the line between something that’s considered to be a comedy and something that’s widely discussed as possibly the most unpleasant American film ever made. What most have identified as pessimistic, however, I would just call vérité, now more than ever. At least for me, Henry had about it an almost palpable air of taboo. Though shot in 1986, it was released in Denver in 1990, when I was 17. I read Roger Ebert’s cautionary, celebratory review of it, which made me afraid. When I saw it, I saw it alone. For its wisdom, it’s never quite left me.

Pinocchio (1940) [The Signature Collection] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 23, 2017****/****, 1940s, 2017, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Family, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
story adaptation Ted Sears, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, William Cottrell, Joseph Sabo, Erdman Penner, Aurelius Battaglia
supervising directors Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske

by Bill Chambers Bambi was supposed to be Walt Disney’s second feature film, but the phenomenal success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs¹ had thrown his fledgling empire into such chaos–most of it created by Walt’s manic spending and multitasking–that it got swapped out for Pinocchio, ostensibly the easier to animate as well as the more commercial of the two. It’s not that Disney was playing it safe, it’s that he thought he could bank some time and audience good will for experimentation in the years ahead. But before Pinocchio even opened, Disney was apologizing for falling into a sophomore slump, and the film wound up being a box-office disappointment, grossing less than Bambi eventually would.² It’s interesting to try to watch Pinocchio from a contemporary perspective and determine what’s lacking (the crude sentimentality of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, for starters), having grown up with it as a brand classic. Is it possible this idiosyncratic motion picture–more of a dry run for Fantasia than Walt maybe realized or intended–was ahead of its time, and time caught up? It’s possible, though Pinocchio undoubtedly benefited from Disney’s practice of cyclically reissuing their animated features: people started to appreciate that it had in abundance what modern Disney movies lacked, chiefly, personality, inspiration, and ambition.

Sully (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 4, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD

Sully1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney
written by Todd Komarnicki, based on the book Highest Duty by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw An elderly film by an elderly filmmaker for an elderly audience, everybody’s favourite says-appalling-things old bastard Clint Eastwood directs the guy everyone can agree on, Tom Hanks, in a rah-rah hagiography of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the most uncomplicatedly heroic figure in the United States in the last…how long ago was Abraham Lincoln? 151 years? If you don’t know, Sully landed an airplane with 155 passengers on it in the Hudson River when bird strikes disabled both of the plane’s engines. Multiple dream sequences have Sully imagining what would’ve happened had he turned his plane over populated areas. 9/11 is referenced often–explicitly and obliquely. An applause-geeking closing title card informs that lots of New Yorkers helped rescue the passengers from the water after the splashdown because New Yorkers are good and America is great, raising the question, Mr. Eastwood, if it needs to be “great again.” Maybe it’s all gone to hell since 2009. The timing is interesting. Let’s call it that.

Slugs (1988) – Blu-ray Disc

December 27, 20162016, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Spain

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B+
starring Michael Garfield, Kim Terry, Philip MacHale, Concha Cuetos
screenplay by Ron Gantman, based on the novel by Shaun Hutson
directed by J.P. Simon

by Bryant Frazer “I recognize terror as the finest emotion,” Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre, his 1981 book-length rumination on horror and storytelling, “and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.” That’s where the late Juan Piquer Simón (or J.P. Simon, as it became anglicized) must have found himself on the set of Slugs. The native Spaniard was only so-so as a director: He was technically competent, with a decent eye for composition, but he wasn’t so adept with English-speaking actors and had no real knack for generating suspense or escalating tension. Fortunately, Simón is pretty good with the gory stuff. And that’s why, decades later, his Slugs still crawls tall as a minor classic for creature-feature completists.