Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 17 of 48

Annabelle (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 14, 20152014, 2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Tony Amendola, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Gary Dauberman
directed by John R. Leonetti

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Some kind of as-yet-unclassified spin-off/rip-off hybrid, Annabelle is a prequel to The Conjuring‘s prologue that recycles said prologue for the purpose of reacquainting viewers with its title character, even though Annabelle is in fact an origin story. The Conjuring, of course, purports to be based on the actual exploits of the paranormal researchers fictionalized in Poltergeist, which was shot by Matthew F. Leonetti, brother of The Conjuring‘s DP John R. Leonetti, who moves into the director’s chair with Annabelle, a movie that arguably owes less to The Conjuring (despite labouring to evoke it) than to the malicious clown doll from Poltergeist. That low-frequency thrum you sometimes hear on its soundtrack is Hollywood getting ready to fold in on itself.

The Vanishing (1988) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 23, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Netherlands, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Spoorloos
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege, Gwen Eckhaus
screenplay by Tim Krabbé and George Sluizer, based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé
directed by George Sluizer

by Bryant Frazer What scares you the most? If you chew on that question for a while, then imagine a narrative that gets you to that terrible place, your story might look a little like the one told by The Vanishing (Spoorloos). Completed in 1988, this downbeat thriller didn’t reach the U.S. until a couple of years later, when it coincidentally landed in New York within weeks of The Silence of the Lambs. The Vanishing isn’t, strictly speaking, a serial-killer movie like Silence, though it shares that film’s deep interest in the psychopathology of its villain. Like a good (and by “good,” I mean “lurid”) true-crime book, its interest is similarly piqued by the painful, quotidian details of an abhorrent crime.

Vengeance is Mine (1979) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 17, 20141970s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Japan, The Criterion Collection

Vengeanceismine1

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Ken Ogata, Mayumi Ogawa, Mitsuko Baisho, Frankie Sakai
screenplay by Masaru Baba, based on the novel by Ryuzo Saki
directed by Shohei Imamura

by Walter Chaw It would be tempting to say that nature is appalled by all the terrible things Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) does. Just after Enokizu hammers an old man to death in a garden and takes his stuff, Nature erupts in a windstorm–furious witness, it seems: a tempest as analogy for the rough gales driving the mysterious tides of this murderer’s soul. Yet Shohei Imamura has something else entirely on his mind. Vengeance is Mine is about the fallacy of a moral universe. It’s not that it believes there’s no reason for atrocity; rather, it believes there’s no definition for atrocity. Imamura is the spiritual brother of guys like Werner Herzog and Terrence Malick. The questions he asks aren’t about ethics and morality, they’re about all the ways that men lie to themselves about being bound by ethics and morality, only to transgress those boundaries they create, whether they be bans on religion, law, or philosophy. They’re not evil. They can’t help it. No one can.

Looney Tuesdays: “Gorilla My Dreams” (1948)

December 16, 20141940s, 2014, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Looney Tunes, Short Films

**½/****directed by Robert McKimson by Bill Chambers Bugs Bunny floats in a barrel to the ape colony of Bingzi-Bangzi, where Mrs. Gorilla, in the throes of baby envy, mistakes him for a delivery from the stork. A sympathetic Bugs goes along with it, but her husband Gruesome--an obvious relative of Bunny Hugged's The Crusher--is vexed by the impostor, and opens up a can of whup-ass on "Junior." Although Bugs's pantomime of a gorilla brings down the house (Robert McKimson's paunchier Bugs really lends itself to the gag), ultimately the central conflict is too esoteric to sustain a 7-minute cartoon, as…

F for Fake (1973) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 9, 20141970s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Orson Welles, Documentary, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

Fforfake1

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Orson Welles, Oja Kodar, Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving
written and directed by Orson Welles

by Bryant Frazer In 1971, Pauline Kael did her best to kill Orson Welles. In “Raising Kane,” an essay originally published in THE NEW YORKER and later used as a lengthy introduction to the published screenplay, she argued that Welles had unfairly taken authorial credit for a film whose real creative force was Welles’s credited co-screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz. Kael’s piece was persuasive but hardly comprehensive, cherry-picking evidence in an effort to make a liar of Welles. (In his definitive 1978 book The Making of Citizen Kane, Robert Carringer described Kael’s charge that Welles did not contribute to the script as “a flagrant misrepresentation,” although he did allow that Welles may have hoped not to credit Mankiewicz.) Making the case against Kane was an opportunity for Kael to escalate her ongoing crusade against the auteur theory; it doesn’t seem that she held any personal grudge against Welles, especially given her loving notice for his Chimes at Midnight, made just a few years earlier. But for the aging Welles, by that time a subject of mockery in Hollywood who struggled to finance even the most bargain-basement film projects, the apparently unprovoked attack must have stung. F for Fake is his elegant response: a good-natured but deeply-felt riposte, executed with his considerable showmanship and meant to humble artist and critic alike.

Dolls (1987) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 26, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory

Dolls1

***/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras B-
starring Stephen Lee, Guy Rolfe, Hilary Mason, Carrie Lorraine
screenplay by Ed Naha
directed by Stuart Gordon

by Bryant Frazer A cross between “Hansel and Gretel” and The Old Dark House, Dolls is director Stuart Gordon’s idea of a family-friendly horror movie. That is, it puts a little girl in peril from square one and admires her serenity and good-heartedness in the face of danger all around. The dark house belongs to the Hartwickes, an adorable elderly couple with an extensive collection of murderously ambulatory dolls. The little girl is 7-year-old Judy Bower (Carrie Lorraine), and the peril comes not from the old folks or their killer figurines but from her lousy parents–a loveless father and stepmother who have brought her on vacation only because joint custody keeps the child-support payments low. Joining the unhappy family at Hartwicke Manor on a dark and stormy night are fellow travellers-in-refuge Ralph (Stephen Lee), an earnest but overgrown man-child, and Isabel (Bunty Bailey, best-known from A-Ha‘s “Take on Me” music video) and Enid (Cassie Stuart), the shifty rocker-girl hitchhikers he picked up. Naturally, the guests start to disappear one by one. Who will be left at the end of the night?

Tammy (2014) [Extended Cut] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 23, 20142014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

Tammy3

*½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Melissa McCarthy, Susan Sarandon, Allison Janney, Kathy Bates
screenplay by Melissa McCarthy & Ben Falcone
directed by Ben Falcone

by Bill Chambers Though in the vein of the crude, crass characters Melissa McCarthy has given us since her breakout performance in Bridesmaids, McCarthy’s Tammy swaggers onto the screen with a presumptuousness for which the actress’s young but popular big-screen persona can’t fully account. Even more than other SNL spinoff Sims like Joe Dirt or Hot Rod, there’s something uncannily familiar about Tammy, and the maddening struggle to contextualize her makes her, ironically, all the more inexplicable. Tammy is about the adventure that spirals out from one very bad day for the title heroine: In quick succession, her car hits a deer, she gets fired, and she catches her husband (Nat Faxon) wining and dining their neighbour (Toni Collette, in perhaps the most thankless role of her career). But Tammy’s slovenliness, minimum-wage job, and obvious lack of education–she doesn’t know what “pattern” means–contrast sharply with details like the good housekeeping of her home, Faxon’s zombie-like unflappability, and the mis-typecasting of Allison Janney in soccer-ready Solondz mode as her mom. A shorthand bit of characterization the filmmakers seem to nurture (by putting Tammy on a jet ski and casting Steve Little) sees the overbearing Tammy as the distaff equivalent to Kenny Powers of “Eastbound and Down”–but Kenny had legitimate talent and success behind him, thus explaining, if not justifying, not only his monstrous ego, but also some of the slack people cut him. Without either that foundational backstory or the luxury of an established cultural identity, Tammy remains a private joke between McCarthy and her co-writer/director/husband, Ben Falcone.

Jersey Boys (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 16, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, Musical

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Christopher Walken
screenplay by Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda Clint Eastwood has never been the most self-referential filmmaker, preferring shopworn competence to flashy displays of idiosyncrasy. But it’s hard to imagine he’s not at least slightly gaming his audience throughout Jersey Boys, an otherwise limp tour through the Four Seasons‘ early discography. What else are we to make of the gag where baby-faced songwriter Bob Gaudio (Chris Klein dead ringer Erich Bergen) catches an image of his director’s grizzled mug in “Rawhide” on a hotel TV? While that feels like a pretty straightforward joke on Eastwood’s uncanny endurance all the way from “Sherry” (1962) to Jersey Boys the Broadway musical (2005), it’s a bit harder to read an equally surreal moment like the dispute between producer and sometime lyricist Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle) and wise-guy guitarist Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) over the band’s sound. “I’m hearing it in sky blue,” Crewe whines in the middle of a recording session, “and you’re giving me brown.” On the one hand, it’s not like Eastwood to take the piss out of his own work, but on the other, what better analogy for his adaptation process can there be than the conversion of a sky-blue all-American songbook to a shit-brown sung résumé, rendered all in blacks and greys save for the odd splash of salmon and the occasional scrap of tweed?

Draft Day (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 13, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Sports

Draftday1

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Denis Leary, Chadwick Boseman
screenplay by Rajiv Joseph & Scott Rothman
directed by Ivan Reitman

by Walter Chaw The first Broncos game I remember watching was on the couch with my father. October 16, 1977. I was four. They were playing the Oakland Raiders–hated rivals, I’d come to understand–and featured players from my eternal morning like Craig Morton, Haven Moses (who I had the pleasure of sharing a couple of pitchers and a few dozen hot wings with a decade ago), Riley Odoms, Louis Wright, and Otis Armstrong. I have all of their signatures on an old ball, gathering dust on a bookshelf in my office. I have all of their rookie cards in little plastic holders. Since that first game, I’ve seen every one in its entirety save four, most of them in real-time. (I was in the hospital for some reason or other for three of those.) When the Broncos won their first Super Bowl against the Green Bay Packers in 1998, I cried like a baby and worried for hours afterwards that there had been some mistake–that the universe could take it all away.

The Innocents (1961) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 10, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Horror, The Criterion Collection, UK

Innocents1

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Deborah Kerr, Peter Wyngarde, Megs Jenkins, Michael Redgrave
screenplay by William Archibald and Truman Capote, based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
directed by Jack Clayton

by Walter Chaw Jack Clayton’s incomparable tale of sexual repression and a very particular vintage of Victorian feminine hysteria opens with shadows, wrung hands, and the sound of weeping. The Innocents is of a kind with Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” and Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: that marriage of high burlesque and menacing metaphysics that is on the one hand dense and open to unravelling, and on the other as smothering and lush as a Raymond Chandler hothouse. By opening in the exact same way as Jacques Tourneur’s/Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie–a flashback/forward to a non-diegetic scene, a sitting-room interview, a claustrophobic setting laced with musk and frustration and the ghosts of the sins of the father–it announces itself as an expressionistic piece orbiting around a Brontë heroine. Having Truman Capote adapt Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, right in the midst of his In Cold Blood period (two taxonomists of beasts in the jungle of the Id), is an act of genuine inspiration. Their shared illness infects the film.

The Normal Heart (2014) – Blu-ray Disc + Digital HD

November 9, 20142014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Television

Normalheart1

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, Julia Roberts
written by Larry Kramer, from his play
directed by Ryan Murphy

by Bryant Frazer The Normal Heart begins in 1981, as a ferry pulls into Fire Island Pines, the nexus of social life for well-off gay New Yorkers who prize sunshine and sexual freedom. Stepping off that boat is Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), a writer from New York who seems at once titillated and disturbed by the buff, barely-dressed men suddenly surrounding him. Weeks, it turns out, is a notorious buzzkill. He wrote an infamous novel criticizing promiscuity (“All I said was having so much sex makes finding love impossible,” he objects when called on it), and he resists joining the party with his sexually active friends, instead watching from the sidelines when their dancing gets dirty. Still, he’s human, and wanders into the woods in search of more ephemeral–and anonymous–companionship. As he leaves the island, a newspaper headline draws his attention: “Rare Cancer Is Diagnosed in 41 Homosexuals.” And so it begins.

Maleficent (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 2, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance

Maleficent1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Angelina Jolie, Sharlto Copley, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley
screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Robert Stromberg

by Walter Chaw A gyno-centric reimagining of Disney’s own Sleeping Beauty, visual-effects guy Robert Stromberg’s directorial debut Maleficent (from a script by never-good Disney house-overwriter Linda Woolverton) takes all the ingredients for a horrible disaster and somehow wrestles a fitfully fascinating film from them. It hates men, that much is certain. Paints them as alternately servile and monstrous. Good men follow orders and are easily intimidated; bad men are sexually dangerous and violent. Good men know their place, led about on a tether and bullied into situations by women in groups or singly; and the rest, well…sufficed to say that Sharlto Copley, the most Ellis-from-Die-Hard human, is cast as chief BigBad, the good king Stefan. The film even goes so far as to suggest that romantic, heterosexual love is a sham, a dangerous one at that–something it tries to soften with a couple of doe-eyed exchanges during the epilogue, though I’m not buying it. In fact, had Maleficent truly committed to its themes of feminine empowerment and rage, had it linked them together hand-in-hand without entire agonizing stretches of Disney-fication, it could have entered into the same conversation as Tarantino’s Kill Bills. Here’s another film with a kick-ass female protagonist who finds strength in motherhood. Alas, for as often as it’s great, it’s limited by what its masters will allow.

Hell of the Living Dead (1980)|Rats: Night of Terror (1984) [Blood-Soaked Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

October 28, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, France, Horror, Italy, Sci-Fi, Spain, Zombie

Virus
*/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B
starring Margit Evelyn Newton, Franco Garofalo, Selan Karay, Robert O’Neil
screenplay by Claudio Fragasso, J.M. Cunilles
directed by Bruno Mattei

Rats – Notte di terrore
*½ Image C- Sound B Extras B
starring Richard Raymond, Janna Ryann, Alex McBride, Richard Cross
screenplay by Claudio Fragasso, Hervé Piccini
directed by Bruno Mattei

by Bryant Frazer It’s quite possible there is no better-known director of truly terrible genre movies than the late Italian filmmaker Bruno Mattei. Though I’ve not seen any other Mattei films, I feel comfortable making that assessment based solely on the “blood-soaked double feature” assembled here by the B-movie mavens at Blue Underground. By any rational measure, Hell of the Living Dead and Rats: Night of Terror are cheesy barrel-scrapings, budget-starved and blandly offensive horror counterfeits. But by the standards of Mattei’s oeuvre–which also includes nunsploitation, Nazisploitation, women-in-prison flicks, and mondo-style “documentaries”–they are the cream that rises to the top of the milk. Unless you’re willing to make a case for his nunsploitation flick The Other Hell, or maybe one of the early Nazi sexploitation pictures, these two films seem to form the cornerstone of Mattei’s reputation, such as it is, among genre buffs.

Motel Hell (1980) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

October 22, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Motelhell1

**/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Rory Calhoun, Paul Linke, Nancy Parsons, Wolfman Jack
screenplay by Robert Jaffe and Steven-Charles Jaffe
directed by Kevin Connor

by Bryant Frazer SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. If you give Motel Hell credit for anything, score it full marks for its infamous abattoir-set climax, in which an overalls-clad farmer wearing a grotesque pig mask and wielding a chainsaw battles the local sheriff–also wielding a chainsaw–over the body of a damsel in distress bound to a conveyer belt feeding an industrial meat slicer. Motel Hell wasn’t particularly original, even in the annals of American B-movies of the era, and it’s not especially scary or creepy–director Kevin Connor doesn’t have much of a taste for horror. But he was certainly able to recognize a spectacle. During a long career, Connor directed Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Mickey Rooney in a fantasy called Arabian Adventure, shot on location in Japan another horror film starring Susan George, and even helmed a TV biopic of Elizabeth Taylor starring Sherilyn Fenn. It’s the signature image of Farmer Vincent wearing a hog’s head and brandishing a power saw, though, that has followed him through the decades.

Insomnia (1997) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 21, 20141990s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Mystery, Norway, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Insomnia2

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Stellan Skarsgård, Sverre Anker Ousdal, Bjørn Floberg, Gisken Armand
screenplay by Nicolaj Frobenius & Erik Skjoldbjærg
directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg

by Walter Chaw A rather astonishing feature debut, Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia is dour, surreal, nihilistic, and steadfast in its theme of masculine self-reflection. It’s as slippery to pin down and single-mindedly purposeful as its protagonist–a procedural only inasmuch as Oedipus Rex is a procedural. It’s a work of Expressionism, in other words: its exteriors are projections of its interiors in all their canted, perverse, blighted ugliness. An essential misnomer to call it a “noir,” Insomnia in its best moments is an absurdist nightmare that pinions male behaviour as these constant vacillations between violence and frailty. (This choice to discuss the world in terms of gender relationships is likely why it’s considered a noir at all.) It’s the movie that brought Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård to international prominence via a role that suggested a departure, hot on the heels of Breaking the Waves, though a quick peek at his earliest work (especially Zero Kelvin) hints at the volatility of Insomnia‘s Det. Engstrom. He’s the centre of a dark universe. Setting the film in a place above the Arctic Circle where the sun doesn’t set has the interesting effect of lighting Engstrom, as he commits his many black deeds, like a particularly ill patient in a doctor’s examining room.

All That Jazz (1979) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

October 15, 2014****/****, 1970s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Palme d'Or Winner, The Criterion Collection

Allthatjazz

****/***** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Roy Scheider, Jessica Lange, Ann Reinking, Leland Palmer
written and directed by Bob Fosse

by Bryant Frazer Celebrated as an incisive, self-lacerating backstage spectacle and razzed as an indulgent and pretentious passion project, genius director-choreographer Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz is one of the most ambitious American films of the 1970s. At this point in his career, Fosse had nothing to prove to the show-business establishment (in 1973, he won the Oscar, the Tony, and the Emmy, all for directing), but a 1974 brush with death–exhaustion, heart attack, life-saving surgery–put him in an introspective mood, and the results were spectacular. Not content with reaching a dazzling apotheosis in the on-screen presentation of song and dance, Fosse wove singing and dancing into a semi-autobiographical narrative chronicling the final days in the life of Joe Gideon, a genius director-choreographer whose non-stop work regimen is making him physically ill. Underscoring the threat, All That Jazz opens with a line attributed to the high-wire artist Karl Wallenda, who fell to his death during a performance in 1978: “To be on the wire is life; the rest is waiting,” Joe’s work is his life, and the irony is that his work–along with the pills and smokes that keep him going–is what kills him.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

October 7, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Time Travel, Tom Cruise

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, based on the graphic novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
directed by Doug Liman

by Angelo Muredda Whatever one thinks of his weaselly insouciance as a performer, it’s hard to argue against Tom Cruise’s record of choosing solid collaborators to bring a certain kind of high-concept amuse-bouche to life. From Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, a derivative film about derivatives, to the more or less solid auteurist permutations of the Mission: Impossible franchise, the results have varied, but Cruise’s reputation as the sort of star who can get moderately interesting pulp bankrolled and realized by moderately interesting talents has deservedly persisted. So we arrive at Edge of Tomorrow, Doug Liman’s first kick at the Cruise can–a clever, fleetly-paced sci-fi riff on Groundhog Day with all the paradoxes of Duncan Jones’s structurally similar Source Code but a more playful demeanour.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

October 5, 20141970s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Brian De Palma, Drama, Esoterica, Musical, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Paul Williams, William Finley, Jessica Harper, Gerrit Graham
written and directed by Brian De Palma

by Bryant Frazer When did Brian De Palma become Brian De Palma? Some of the director’s pet themes were already taking shape in his earliest films, and–following his abortive, disowned studio debut, Get to Know Your Rabbit—Sisters proved he could make something out of a lurid, over-the-top indie thriller. But only Phantom of the Paradise suggested the real scale of his outré ambition. Mixing slasher-movie tropes into a supernatural romantic fantasy with elements of rock opera, in collaboration with an actual star singer-songwriter? In 1974, apparently Brian De Palma believed he could do anything.

Godzilla (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

September 16, 20142014, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/**** Image C+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston
screenplay by Max Borenstein
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla, the 32^nd Godzilla film just including the Toho series and the three previous American contributions, manages somehow to walk the line between nostalgia for the guy-in-a-suit heroism of the earlier installments and the demands and expectations of the modern CGI wonderland. It has Japanese actor Ken Watanabe be the mournful, grave centre of the piece, allowed at one point to utter “Gojira” (later, on a radar, we see it spelled out in obeisance to the movie’s origins) and given the film’s most crowd-pleasing line, right before shit gets real in San Francisco. It cares deeply about the monster’s place in Japanese culture as a simultaneous reminder of what happened to the country during the war, its humiliation afterwards, and its ambiguous place in the world as Japan reconstructed its image. What confused me most when I watched the Toho flicks on Saturday afternoons on a 9″ b&w television was that Godzilla seemed heroic–every bit as nuanced, as conflicted, as ronin as a Mifune samurai; a hero who would return, like Arthur did for England, when the nation needed him. The Godzilla legend is a fable of reconstruction and self-sufficiency–a Leda and the Swan story, where power is drawn from the very source of victimization. He’s a complex national symbol, perhaps the definitive cross-cultural Japanese signifier, and the movies that get that (my favorite is Destroy All Monsters, with its dabbling in female hive minds) are brilliant bits of sociology and history. Edwards’s Godzilla gets it.

Death Spa (1989) [Unrated] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

September 14, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Horror

Deathspa1

Witch Bitch
**/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring William Bumiller, Brenda Bakke, Robert Lipton, Merritt Butrick
screenplay by James Bartruff and Mitch Paradise
directed by Michael Fischa

by Bryant Frazer The title sounds awkward in a not-ironic way and the 1987 copyright date suggests a cheap direct-to-video cheesefest. But director Michael Fischa is swinging for the B-movie fences from the very first shot–a Steadicam number that pans across its view of Sunset Boulevard, animated lightning bolts flashing over the Hollywood Hills, before craning down into the parking lot in front of the Starbody Health Spa. Dreamy, Tangerine Dream-esque synths well up on the soundtrack. Upon touchdown, the Steadicam glides forward towards the building as another lightning strike knocks out most of the figures on the whimsically-lettered neon sign up front, so that only eight letters remain lit: DEATH SPA.