Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 11 of 47

War Dogs (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

November 28, 20162016, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, War

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana De Armas, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by Stephen Chin and Todd Phillips & Jason Smilovic, based on the ROLLING STONE article “Arms and the Dudes” by Guy Lawson
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw Like The Big Short before it, Todd Phillips’s War Dogs is a breezy, loose, “for dummies” gloss on recent history that says for all the things you thought were going to hell in the world, you don’t know the fucking half of it, buddy. It details how W.’s administration, after being accused of cronyism in making Dick Cheney’s Haliburton wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of wealth with the gift of bid-free defense contracts, opened the floodgates by essentially giving every unscrupulous asshole on the planet the opportunity to bid on defense contracts. In that pursuit, our government set up an “eBay” list where major arms dealers could pick off the larger contracts, and dilettantes and arms “day-traders” could, from the comfort of their basements, sell the United States military a few thousand handguns. War Dogs adapts a magazine article about two assholes in particular, David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who made a fortune, then made a terrible mistake when they decided to traffic a hundred million rounds of defective Chinese AK-47 ammo by disguising it as Albanian stock. Actually, their mistake is that Efraim is a psychotic loser so pathological in his incompetence that even the U.S. government had no choice but to do something about it. It’s a level of obviousness matched by the film in moments like one in the middle of the game where Efraim screams, “Fuck the American taxpayer!” OK, yes, we get it.

Vamp (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

November 23, 20161980s, 2016, Arrow Video, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Vampire

Vamp1

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Chris Makepeace, Sandy Baron, Robert Rusler, Grace Jones
screenplay by Richard Wenk
directed by Richard Wenk

by Bryant Frazer In concept a little bit After Hours and a little bit An American Werewolf in London, Vamp attempts to transplant some New York cool into a story set in the L.A. underground, where a downtown strip club is staffed by lithesome vampires who prey on losers and outsiders yearning for companionship in the lonesome city. Vamp isn’t scary, though it’s fairly stylish, thanks in large part to Grace Jones, who flew into Hollywood with an entourage (including artists Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Richard Bernstein) to play Katrina, an exotic dancer with an appetite for flesh. While the film is pleasantly weird whenever she’s on screen, that’s not much of the time. The bulk of it is a laid-back assemblage of moderately clever ideas–a bunch of clockwork gears that never mesh into anything much.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|[The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 21, 2016****/****, 2000s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Film Festivals, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Pdl1

****/****
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
DVD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw Indicated by spacious compositions and a bracing unpredictability, Paul Thomas Anderson’s romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love is a marriage, if you will, between Claire Denis’s audacious Trouble Every Day and Steven Shainberg’s sadomasochism fairytale Secretary. Here’s a trio of films that announce 2002 as a year perhaps best defined by its aggressively non-traditional, hopelessly romantic love stories (toss Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven, Cronenberg’s Spider, and Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction into that mix).

Finding Dory (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 15, 20162016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Pixar

Findingdory1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Victoria Strouse
directed by Andrew Stanton (co-directed by Angus MacLane)

by Walter Chaw Credit is due Pixar and writer-director Andrew Stanton (co-directing here with Angus MacLane) for wanting to right what I don’t know anybody really perceived as a wrong. I remember thinking when I first saw Finding Nemo that Dory’s inability to retain short-term memories was a product of her species. In the new Finding Dory, it’s revealed to indeed be a mental disability, one that her parents (voiced by Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton) worry over a great deal in a series of flashbacks. They create coping mechanisms for their daughter. They devise a literal shell game so that when Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) inevitably gets lost, she can find her way back home. It’s an interesting tactic to take, this mild scolding that what was funny at first is, in fact, a debilitating, dangerous disorder. And a good portion of the film looks for ways to valorize Dory’s condition, to avoid making her the butt of jokes or an object of pity. For the most part, it does this by surrounding her with characters who also have a disability: Hank (Ed O’Neill), an octopus that’s lost an arm (“Septipus!” says Dory, “I can’t remember, but I can count!”); and Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a hopelessly myopic whale shark. Lest we forget, Nemo (Hayden Rolence, taking over from Alexander Gould) has a deformed fin, something he flaps at dad Marlin (Albert Brooks) after Marlin says something disparaging about Dory’s memory issue.

The Legend of Tarzan (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 3, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD

Legoftarzan1

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer, based on the “Tarzan” stories created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw David Yates’s The Legend of Tarzan is at once a long-overdue, if massively fictionalized, biopic of George Washington Williams’s time in the Congo observing colonial Belgium’s abuses of the rubber, ivory, and diamond trades; and it’s an adaptation, nay, updating of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first five Tarzan books, with heavy creative license taken but the spirit kept largely intact. Although it’s more successful as the latter than as the former, both endeavours are carried through with seriousness and intelligence. It’s not a perfect film: the editing is terrible, particularly during the action sequences, suggesting this was probably a longer movie truncated out of fear of diluting the “good” bits. I also don’t love the washed-out colour palette that paints everything in a blue gloom–at least not as much as Yates seems to, between this and the last four Harry Potter films. And it bears mentioning that Samuel L. Jackson isn’t really an actor anymore and that Margot Robbie arguably never has been. Yeah, The Legend of Tarzan is hard to defend objectively. It does, however, understand the appeal of the Tarzan mythos, answering in grand moments why it is that he’s found his way into over 200 motion pictures and dozens more serials and television series (live-action and animated). I should disclaim, too, that I read (re-read, in some cases) all 24 original Burroughs Tarzan novels in the weeks leading up to the picture’s release. In other words, I’m a big, giant pulp nerd.

Blood Diner (1987) [Vestron Video Collector’s Series] – Blu-ray Disc

October 31, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror

Blooddiner1

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B+
starring Rick Burks, Carl Crew, Roger Dauer, LaNette La France
written by Michael Sonye
directed by Jackie Kong

by Bryant Frazer So bad it’s good? I wouldn’t go that far. But Blood Diner is definitely something–a no-frills pastiche of 1950s disembodied-brain sci-fi potboiler, 1960s Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter movie, 1970s cannibal-cuisine flick, and early-1980s buddy-cop movie. I’m tempted to say it stitches together a Frankenstein’s patchwork of genre movies because it has no vision of its own, but that’s too glib. If nothing else, 20-something Asian-American director Jackie Kong (Night Patrol) loves L.A.: she wrapped all of those genre influences around a love letter to the city’s underground music scene circa 1987, casting punk rockers and rockabilly singers as extras, bit players, and movie stars in a story about a pair of pretty-boy sibling serial killers who run a popular foodie destination on Hollywood Boulevard where the vegetarian dishes are, unbeknownst to patrons, boosted by the presence of human flesh in the recipe.

Lights Out (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

October 28, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Thriller

Lightsout1

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D+
starring Teresa Palmer, Gabriel Bateman, Alexander DiPersia, Maria Bello
screenplay by Eric Heisserer, based on the short film by David F. Sandberg
directed by David F. Sandberg

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. This year’s Brian Helgeland Award, named in honour of the man who wrote the Oscar- and Golden Raspberry-winning L.A. Confidential and The Postman, respectively, in the same year, goes to Eric Heisserer, who has somehow written one of the year’s best movies about motherhood, Arrival, and one of its worst, Lights Out. Lights Out is not a good movie about anything, really (save perhaps the value of crank flashlights); as with the Heisserer-penned remakes of The Thing and A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Lights Out screenplay is joylessly aspirational in the way of a personal assistant doing menial chores to accumulate credit–the thankless task in this case adapting David F. Sandberg’s simple but effective micro-short of the same name. That director Sandberg opted not to write it himself implies the short was intended as a calling-card rather than a proof-of-concept, and his direction of the feature hardly evolves its meat-and-potatoes style. He created a monster and now he’s riding its coattails; what Lights Out desperately needs is someone with a vision for the film, not just a career.

Chopping Mall (1986) [Vestron Video Collector’s Series] – Blu-ray Disc

October 25, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi

Choppingmall2

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Kelli Maroney, Tony O’Dell, John Terlesky, Dick Miller
written by Jim Wynorski & Steve Mitchell
directed by Jim Wynorski

by Bryant Frazer Chopping Mall is not the shopping-centre slasher movie its title suggests. Here’s what you really need to know: It includes a scene where a woman clad in light-blue Playboy panties runs screaming through the spacious halls of the Sherman Oaks Galleria in a hail of laser fire, chased by a killer robot resembling a cross between a Dalek from “Doctor Who” and Number Five from Short Circuit. The opening sequence features Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov in a cameo as their Paul and Mary Bland characters from the cult classic Eating Raoul. The always-game Barbara Crampton, who had just shot Re-Animator, takes her top off. And, like the maraschino cherry on top of a soft-serve strawberry sundae, the great character actor Dick Miller plays a crusty janitor who trash-talks one of the malevolent tin-can tyrants like a Jet giving the finger to Officer Krupke.

Swiss Army Man (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

October 24, 20162016, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Musical, Romance, Zombie

Swissarmyman1

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
written and directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan

by Walter Chaw Bridging the gap between Charlie Kaufman movies, the Daniels’ Swiss Army Man is one high-concept conceit carried through to every possible ontological end. It veers, dizzily, between slapstick scatological comedy and poignant existential philosophy, doing so with the sort of invention generally credited to silent-film clowns. Open with Hank (Paul Dano), shipwrecked, about to hang himself when he notices the corpse of Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washed ashore. He looks for signs of life. There aren’t any, save the rapid decomposition that’s causing Manny to fart. A lot. Manny’s farts carry Hank back to civilization, in fact, in a trailer-spoiled motorboat sequence that would be indescribable were it not right there. Like so many things in the film, it’s not clear that this is “actually” happening or just a fantasy of Hank’s before dying. By the middle of the picture, it’s apparent that challenging the border between the cinema real and the cinema imagined is the point. If it destroys that conversation, it allows for a better one about the nature of friendship and honesty, whether it’s possible to ever truly be open with another human being and, if it is, whether it would be something welcomed or rejected. Unconditional acceptance is a charming romantic fantasy, but that’s all it is.

London Has Fallen (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo

October 21, 20162016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Bulgaria, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK

Londonhasfallen1

*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Alon Moni Aboutboul, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Creighton Rothenberger & Katrin Benedikt and Christian Gudegast and Chad St. John
directed by Babak Najafi

by Walter Chaw It’s a corker. Playing exactly like another instalment in the “Call of Duty” FPS videogame franchise, Iranian-born Babak Najafi’s London Has Fallen is a gobsmacking, jingoistic, political exploitation horror-thriller that traffics in contemporary paranoia with unusually exuberant brutality. It loves killing people. Loves it. The picture’s packed full of xenophobia and all the other insidious forms of fear infecting our modern apocalypse: hatred of the Other, terror of invasion, terror of the self. It fashions what is essentially another 28 Days Later sequel by recasting the rage zombies as Islamic Fundamentalists, simultaneously creating in the process a recruitment video for bellicose young men in the West wanting to kill Arabs–and one for bellicose young men in the Middle East wanting to kill Americans. Tidy. London Has Fallen is propaganda with a budget, a few recognizable faces, and some directing chops to boot. I’m equally glad and appalled it exists. I wish I were more surprised that it does.

The Immortal Story (1968) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 19, 20161960s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Orson Welles, Drama, Esoterica, France, Television, The Criterion Collection

Immortalstory4

Histoire immortelle
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jeanne Moreau, Roger Coggio, Norman Eshley, Orson Welles
written by Orson Welles, from a short story by Karen Blixen
directed by Orson Welles

by Bryant Frazer It’s one of those salutary coincidences of movie history that the final narrative film completed by Orson Welles would turn out to be this rumination on an old man’s obsession with storytelling. It’s not that Welles was exactly elderly at the time (he was 51 when he made it), but there’s a matter-of-fact finality to the work that becomes just a touch spooky in retrospect. Commissioned by the French national television agency as a Jeanne Moreau vehicle to commemorate the transition to colour television, The Immortal Story required that Welles work in colour for the first time, catalyzing a fairly dramatic evolution of his style. But it gave him the opportunity to adapt a short story by Karen Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen), one of his favourite writers, and to work again with Moreau, one of his favourite actors. Less than an hour long, it has remained an obscure film for a variety of reasons, but it’s intermittently remarkable despite its modesty.

Scarecrows (1988) – Blu-ray Disc

October 17, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Zombie

*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A+
starring Ted Vernon, Michael Simms, Victoria Christian, Richard Vidan
written by Richard Jefferies and William Wesley
directed by William Wesley

by Walter Chaw Terrible in that plucky way that earnest shoestring products can be terrible, William Wesley’s Scarecrows has a few memorable gore moments and a lot of bad dialogue, execrable performances, and senseless exposition. I saw this movie on VHS in high school as part of my weekend ritual of renting a shelf and staying up all night shotgunning the dregs. This led to a few remarkable discoveries, of course–and it led to discoveries like this as well. The hook of Scarecrows is a strong one, taking the somehow underutilized image of the scarecrow in the horror genre and making a grand bogey of it, but the result is essentially a zombie-cum-spam-in-a-cabin flick featuring a paramilitary group fresh off a heist engaged in a supernatural backcountry rigmarole. Still, the film’s greatest crime isn’t a bad premise but that it’s boring. Really boring. Mainly it’s boring because every character acts like an idiot at all times, making it hard to muster much in the way of stakes. That’s also why Scarecrows isn’t scary or tense, and because I think it wasn’t long enough and they ran out of money, there are tons of filler close-ups of scarecrows just sort of, you know, hanging there. Kuleshov or something.

Café Society (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

October 16, 20162016, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

Cafesociety1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras F
starring Jeannie Berlin, Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda Woody Allen can’t seem to make two consecutive films worth thinking about. Despite an abysmal trailer, pre-emptively dismantled online as insensitive or worse amidst revelations about his personal crimes, 2015’s Irrational Man proved a surprisingly gritty respite from Allen’s nostalgic euro-tourist cinema of the Aughts. True to its maker’s aversion to progress, though, its follow-up Café Society is practically a jukebox-musical treatment of Allen’s old (which is to say tired) hits, from the ennui L.A. inspires in native (which is to say white) New Yorkers to the beauty of other periods that aren’t the present to romances strained under the weight of vast age discrepancies. Beautifully lensed and defiantly dumb, it’s another testament to Allen’s surprisingly incremental growth as a filmmaker in his seventies, at the same time as he continues to atrophy as a writer.

The Neon Demon (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

October 5, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Elle Fanning, Karl Glusman, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by Nicolas Winding Refn and Mary Laws & Polly Stenham
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

by Walter Chaw There’s a quote from The Right Stuff I love that I thought about constantly during Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon: “There was a demon that lived in the air.” I found in it something of an explanation for, or at least a corollary to, the picture’s title, in that the demon in The Right Stuff refers to the sound barrier while the demon in Refn’s film refers to, perhaps, soft obstructions of other kinds. Artificially lit. Poisonous. The quote continues with “whoever challenged [the demon] would die…where the air could no longer get out of the way.” The first film I saw by Refn was Valhalla Rising, an expressionistic telling of the Odin myth–the part where he spent time on Earth (went missing, basically) before returning–that touches on the scourge of Christianity and how that relates to feeling lost, or losing what you believe in. Valhalla Rising led me to Bronson and to Pusher and then I followed Refn through Drive, which talks about the difficulties of being male, and Only God Forgives, which talks about the difficulties of being a son. Now there’s The Neon Demon, completing a trilogy of sorts by talking about the difficulties of being a girl becoming a woman and an object for men, eviscerated in certain tabernacles where women are worshiped as ideals and sacrificed to the same. It’s astonishing.

Dead-End Drive-In (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

October 2, 20161980s, 2016, Action, Arrow Video, Australia, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Prison, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Ned Manning, Natalie McCurry, Peter Whitford
screenplay by Peter Smalley, from a story by Peter Carey
directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith

by Bryant Frazer Australia’s signature entry in the cinematic encyclopedia of dystopian hellscapes will always be the Mad Max series, and rightly so. But if you dig just a little deeper into the corpus of down-and-dirty genre movies from Down Under, you’ll discover this B-grade entry from Aussie action impresario Brian Trenchard-Smith, which daydreams about confining rebellious youth culture to a dusty prison camp way out on the edge of town. Trenchard-Smith is best known abroad for 1983’s BMX Bandits, an early Nicole Kidman feature widely available for home viewing in the U.S., and his corpus comes with the Quentin Tarantino seal of approval. Dead-End Drive-In isn’t great cinema, but it has some well-executed stuntwork that bolsters a speculative premise just goofy enough to catch the imagination.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection – Blu-ray Disc

September 18, 2016****/****, 1970s, 2016, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Japan, Prison, Thriller

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972)
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Meiko Kaji, Natsuyagi Isao, Rie Yokoyama, Fumio Watanabe
written by Fumio Kônami and Hirô Matsuda, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Shunya Itô

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972)
****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Meiko Kaji, Kayoko Shiraishi, Fumio Watanabe, Eiko Yanami
written by Shunya Itô, Fumio Kônami and Hirô Matsuda, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Shunya Itô

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (1973)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Meiko Kaji, Mikio Narita, Koji Nanbara, Yayoi Watanabe
written by Hirô Matsuda, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Shunya Itô

Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701’s Grudge Song (1973)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Meiko Kaji, Masakazu Tamura, Toshiyuki Hosokawa, Sanae Nakahara
written by Fumio Kônami, Hirô Matsuda and Yasuharu Hasebe, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Yasuharu Hasebe

by Bryant Frazer One of the most audacious debuts in cinematic history is rookie Shunya Itô’s expressionist rape-revenge saga, the Female Prisoner Scorpion trilogy. These three films, released in the 11-month period between August 1972 and July 1973, elevate Japanese studio Toei’s series of “pinky violence” sexploitation films with daring, theatrical visuals reminiscent of the bold work that got Seijun Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu and a subversive sensibility that could be described as genuinely feminist. Of course, Itô’s studio bosses didn’t have art in mind. Loosely adapted from a popular manga, the first Scorpion was conceived as a gender-swapped take on Teruo Ishii’s popular Abashiri Prison film series, on which Itô had worked as assistant director. Moving the story from a men’s prison to a women’s prison accommodated sensationalized images of nudity and sexual violence, which even major Japanese studios were relying on in the early 1970s as a way to compete with American imports. But Itô talked his screenwriters into throwing out their derivative original script and starting anew. He also convinced Meiko Kaji, a rising star thanks to her appearances in the popular Stray Cat Rock movies about Japanese youth street culture, to take on the title role. (Kaji arrived at Toei from Nikkatsu after the latter studio diverted its production resources to so-called “Roman porno” softcore in an attempt to compete with the popularity of television.) The results are singular. Itô’s flamboyant visuals created florid showcases for Kaji’s riveting screen presence, especially her oft-deployed 1,000-yard stare–a stone-cold, daggers-to-your-eyeballs glare of the type seen elsewhere in only the most unnerving of horror films. Itô and Kaji turned out to be an electrifying combination.

The Jungle Book (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

September 4, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, Scarlett Johansson

**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Neel Sethi
screenplay by Justin Marks
directed by Jon Favreau

by Bill Chambers Confession: As a child, I used to fantasize about live-action versions of the Disney animated features–especially Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty, because of the design extremes in those films. Thinking back on this, I was at a loss to explain why my kid brain–which had a bottomless capacity to suspend disbelief–wanted to see a “real” purple-and-black dragon spit green flames at a “real” prince, or a “real” wooden boy sprout donkey ears, until earlier this week, when a piece of clickbait unveiling the “real” Lumière and Cogsworth from the upcoming Beauty and the Beast jogged my memory: ghoulish curiosity. “Ghoulish curiosity” is, I believe, the unspoken draw of this recent spate of live-action Disney remakes, starting with 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, which doubled down by promising the Tim Burton rendition of that world. The reason Alice Through the Looking Glass tanked, Johnny Depp’s recent toxicity notwithstanding, is that we’ve seen all the freaks in that tent; true fascination lies the way of Dumbo, another Tim Burton joint. (I have a pretty good idea of what the circus stuff will look like, but I’m dying to see that elephant fly.) Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book got us there via the truly perverse notion to remake one of Disney’s animal-driven musicals in live-action. Of course it opened big ($103M, in friggin’ April!), just like of course the RNC scored higher ratings than the DNC. But if the latter rewarded our cynical rubbernecking, Favreau transcended it.

I, Madman (1989) – Blu-ray Disc

August 28, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Imadman1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Jenny Wright, Clayton Rohner, Randall William Cook, Steven Memel
written by David Chaskin
directed by Tibor Takacs

by Walter Chaw I like just about everything about I, Madman. It’s a pastiche picture coming at the end of the slasher era that cobbles together bits of De Palma and “Tales from the Darkside”, tosses in some wonderfully cheap stop-motion effects, and stars the incomparable ’80s dreamgirl Jenny Wright. Truly, it has everything. Wright is Virginia, a used-bookstore cashier (even her job is a super-nerd’s idea of a dreamgirl’s job) addicted to lurid pulps (sigh!) who is, as the film begins, reading a nasty thing about a “Jackal Boy” monster created in the unwitting womb of an unfortunate victim. Virginia’s cop boyfriend Richard (Clayton Rohner) disapproves of her reading habits because of the states they send her into, but, Virginia being Virginia, she persists. She becomes obsessed with tracking down a volume called I, Madman, written by a certain Malcolm Brand (Randall William Cook). It’s about a nutter who gets dumped because of his displeasing features and so he cuts them off. Alas, slicer’s regret has Brand attacking women in an attempt to take back the missing pieces of his face. Turns out Brand isn’t writing fiction, but memoir, and Virginia’s interest in him has attracted him to her through the pages of his book.

Barbershop: The Next Cut (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

August 24, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Ice Cube, Cedric the Entertainer, Regina Hall, Nicki Minaj
written by Kenya Barris & Tracy Oliver
directed by Malcolm D. Lee

by Walter Chaw It’s hard for me to find entry into Malcolm D. Lee’s Barbershop: The Next Cut (hereafter Barbershop 3), because the topics it broaches are generally topics I only intersect with philosophically. I hear about the gun violence in Chicago, I see gang violence portrayed in films like Boyz N the Hood and Colors and more recently David Ayer’s ugly End of Watch, and I do my best to be empathetic to horror stories about children shot in their beds as crossfire collateral. I see pictures of what Detroit looks like and read what I can about dystopias that make RoboCop‘s vision of the Motor City seem naive now. I agree entirely with the Black Lives Matter movement. I wonder why it is that even video of atrocity does little to bring rogue officers to justice. I wept when Dallas policemen were ambushed while protecting Black Lives Protestors’ right to rage. I felt righteous fury along with the protestors in Ferguson. Charleston, and the graceful response by the church during funerals to mourn their dead, broke me apart. One of my best friends is black; I resist saying that because it’s what non-black people say to pardon their racism. I watched both O.J. Simpson miniseries. And I realize I am entirely unsuited to speak to the black experience in the United States. It’s not my place. I don’t know anything.

The Nice Guys (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

August 22, 20162016, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Matt Bomer, Kim Basinger
written by Shane Black & Anthony Bagarozzi
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw Shane Black’s The Nice Guys is a delightful fusion of John D. MacDonald and Gregory McDonald; if it had a cover, it’d be painted by Robert McGinnis. It’s California noir, no doubt, the love child of The Long Goodbye and Inherent Vice, but with the flip social commentary and occasional bouts of ultra-violence found in Carl Hiaasen’s Florida noirs. Sufficed to say that Black, who’s often spoken of his love for crime fiction, has distilled pulp here and with his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang into breezy, post-modern concoctions. The Nice Guys is as smart as it is inconsequential, as brutal and exploitive as it is a commentary on brutality and exploitation. More than anything else, it’s a very fine critical pastiche of the kinds of books you read in an afternoon because they’re thrilling, socially irresponsible, and afire with misogyny, nihilism, and Byronic macho bullshit Romanticism. But cool, baby, and stylish.