Cat People (1982) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, Horror, Romania, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Werewolf

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***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Nastassia Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard, Annette O’Toole
screenplay by Alan Ormsby, based on the story by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Paul Schrader

by Bryant Frazer Amid the American horror boom of the late-1970s and early-1980s, when everything old was new again and once-dormant studio properties like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World, and The Fly were suddenly valuable franchises, the script for a remake of Cat People, one of the most subtle of all horror classics, somehow ended up on Paul Schrader’s desk. Why Schrader? Dumb luck, mostly. Certainly he had no great love for the source material, a 1942 horror film directed by Jacques Tourneur that Schrader famously (and charmlessly) claimed “isn’t that brilliant.” But he must have seen in the raw material the opportunity to make a deeply weird movie, one that fused a new mythology with a contemporary melodrama of fear, desire, and violence. The result is not just a personal expression of Schrader’s own sex-and-death preoccupations, but a sort of high-water mark for the quixotic attempt to meld visually sophisticated erotica with commercially savvy narrative storytelling.

Thief (1981) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

Posted in1980s, 2014, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, DVD, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

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***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Robert Prosky, Willie Nelson
screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the novel The Home Invaders by Frank Hohimer
directed by Michael Mann

“Look, I have run out of time. I have lost it all. So l cannot work fast enough to catch up, and l cannot run fast enough to catch up. And the only thing that catches me up is doin’ my magic act. But it ends, you know? It will end. When l got this, right there, it ends, it is over. So I am just asking you…to be with me.”
-Frank (James Caan), Thief (1981)

“I’m catching up. On life. Meeting someone like you.”
-John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), Public Enemies (2008)

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Like the historical Dillinger, the fictional Frank was just a punk kid overzealously punished for a petty crime by a judge looking to make an example of him. Instead, he created the man Frank is as Thief begins: a master safecracker, taught his trade in the joint by fellow convict Okla (Willie Nelson, heartbreaking). As Frank recounts in a mesmerizing monologue that Caan, for what it’s worth, has counted as his finest piece of screen acting, the other thing he learned in Joliet is how to create a forcefield around himself by disengaging from fear. It’s not Zen detachment that he’s mastered; a man of flashy tastes, he’s too much the materialist to live like Heat‘s ascetic Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), whose Modernist house in the hills is all windows and no furniture. They are cut from the same cloth, though, in that they’re acutely aware of the temporariness of their stolen lifestyles and have no qualms about jumping ship to stay ahead of the enemy.

Tess (1979) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

Posted in1970s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, France, Romance, The Criterion Collection

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***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Nastassia Kinski, Peter Firth, Leigh Lawson, John Collin
screenplay by Gerard Brach, Roman Polanski, John Brownjohn, based on the novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
directed by Roman Polanski

by Bryant Frazer In the annals of feel-bad literature, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a corker, pitting natural beauty and goodness against a battery of opposing forces–the church, the aristocracy, modern technology, human avarice–and finding beauty debased. It was a loaded area of study for Roman Polanski, who adapted it as a Hollywood artist in exile, working in France rather than nearer the book’s setting of Wessex, England, for fear of his deportation to the U.S. on rape charges. Just as Polanski’s bloody Macbeth has been interpreted as a howl of pain following the murder of his beloved wife, Sharon Tate, his Tess can be read as an act of penance, if not a bid for rehabilitation.

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

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Italy, The Criterion Collection

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****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Bernhard Wicki
written and directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Walter Chaw The second film in a loose quartet of Modernist, existentially-despairing–some would say brutal–Michelangelo Antonioni pictures, La Notte is the one I would identify, if pressed, as the best among L‘avventura, L‘eclisse, and Red Desert. I’d even go so far as to call it Antonioni’s best movie overall: the one that most completely encompasses the filmmaker’s worldview and puts into sharpest relief the tools with which he expresses it. He’s at the height of his powers here. I would argue that although his Blow-Up both defined foreign film as a genre for American audiences (while proving instrumental in defeating the Production Code, heralding the level of acceptance and permissiveness that made the American ’70s in film possible) and is indisputably his most influential work (indeed, it’s among the most influential films of all time), it’s La Notte that offers the cleanest insight into who and what Antonioni is as an artist.

Justice League: War (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

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**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
screenplay by Heath Corson, based on the graphic novel Justice League: Origins by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee
directed by Jay Oliva

by Jefferson Robbins The red underwear is gone, and with it, all humility. Justice League: War marks the first true animated appearance of Superman and the rest of the DC Universe heroes since the comics publisher’s New 52 gambit launched in 2011, resetting at least twenty-five years of pulp history.¹ What that means for viewers is a militaristically clothed Superman (vocal chameleon Alan Tudyk) who threatens to choke people to death and a dangerously naive Wonder Woman (Michelle Monaghan) who’s definitely going to have sex with him after the credits. This, effectively, is the characters’ debut. Set aside all those past versions you know, toss out even the previous direct-to-video titles you may have collected (including four “Justice League” movies) since the DCU animated line officially launched in 2007. This is where the Justice League meets–and where we meet them–for the first time. And, boy, are they a bunch of pricks.

Game of Thrones: The Complete Third Season (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2013, 2014, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Television

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Image A Sound A Extras A+
“Valar Dohaeris,” “Dark Wings, Dark Words,” “Walk of Punishment,” “And Now His Watch Is Ended,” “Kissed by Fire,” “The Climb,” “The Bear and the Maiden Fair,” “Second Sons,” “The Rains of Castamere,” “Mhysa”

by Jefferson Robbins Kings and counsellors, indeed. George R.R. Martin’s fantasy cycle A Song of Ice and Fire–five very large novels deep now–is concerned with impassioned monarchs and their desperate ministers, as well as the deformations wrought by their egotistical wars. HBO’s series adaptation “Game of Thrones” maintains that fascination, the source of much of its continuing suspense and appeal: Anyone in the fragmenting kingdom of Westeros could die at any time, by sword or sorcery or simple dysentery, and the wounds of war upon the body politic are reflected on the characters.

Saturn 3 (1980) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

Posted in1980s, 2014, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, UK
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**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett, Harvey Keitel
screenplay by Martin Amis
directed by Stanley Donen

by Bryant Frazer There are bad movies and there are tantalizingly bad movies, and Saturn 3 is the latter–the type of bad movie that tickles the imagination and demands an explanation. On first blush, there’s nothing unusual about it. Released in 1980, it was clearly trading on the post-Star Wars mania for sci-fi movies. The casting of Farrah Fawcett, at the time a big star, was a reasonable commercial gambit. And the release of Alien a year earlier certainly explained the idea of a monster movie set in space. If you look at the credits, you simply get a sense of older Hollywood types–director Stanley Donen, actor Kirk Douglas–striving to keep up with the prevailing trends.

But then you watch the movie, and you wonder: what the hell happened here?

Homefront (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2013, 2014, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Stallone, Thriller
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**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Jason Statham, James Franco, Winona Ryder, Izabela Vidovic
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel by Chuck Logan
directed by Gary Fleder

by Bill Chambers After a drug bust goes farcically awry, undercover DEA agent–and ex-soldier, natch–Phil Broker (Jason Statham) retreats to rural Louisiana with his little girl, Maddy (Izabela Vidovic), hoping to give her a peaceful life raising horses while he makes ends meet as a carpenter. But like father, like daughter: When the school bully pushes Maddy too far on the playground one day, she fights back with a few Bourne-worthy movies, setting off a chain reaction that leads the boy’s humiliated, meth-head mother (Kate Bosworth) to sic her swamp kingpin brother Gator (James Franco) on Broker, who proves so invincible against all comers that it piques Gator’s curiosity. Some (too) light snooping on his part uncovers Broker’s former identity, and he enlists his girlfriend (Winona Ryder–the film has an eclectic cast, to say the least) to rat Broker out to the biker gang that’s looking for him. All because of an altercation in a schoolyard.

A Star is Born (1954) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

Posted in1950s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Musical, Romance
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***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Judy Garland, James Mason, Jack Carson, Tom Noonan
screenplay by Moss Hart, based on the screenplay by Dorothy Parker & Alan Campbell & Robert Carson
directed by George Cukor

by Walter Chaw A big, giant mess of a movie, big, giant mess of a director George Cukor’s A Star is Born–a remake of the 1937 Janet Gaynor vehicle as well as Cukor’s own 1932 What Price Hollywood?–finds big, giant mess of a gay icon Judy Garland quivering gallantly on the razor’s edge of total mental collapse for 176 famously-restored minutes. A miracle of single-mindedness and dedication to the film-preservation cause? No doubt. A movie that could easily withstand 90 minutes of liberal pruning? Indeed. And unlike that question posed rhetorically of Joseph II in Amadeus, it’s all too obvious which bits need trimming. Start with the 20-minute (might as well be 20-hour) “Born in a Trunk” number, inserted by Jack Warner unbeknownst to Cukor and intended to showcase Garland’s then-healthy stage act. A “showstopper” in every sense of the word, it’s unbelievably bad and, more than bad, it betrays everything that’s worked about A Star is Born up to that point. A film-within-a-film-within-a-film, it has Judy vamping her way through a series of surreal set-pieces, telling her origin story while doing a medley of standards from the Warner catalogue. It’s painful for all the wrong reasons.

Crawlspace (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller
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**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Klaus Kinski, Talia Balsam, Barbara Whinnery, Kenneth Robert Shippy
written and directed by David Schmoeller

by Bryant Frazer I’m pretty much on board with a horror movie about a creepy landlord who stalks his college-aged tenants, waging a low-level terror campaign against them by deliberately releasing pests into their living spaces. If he’s a sadist and a serial killer who keeps souvenirs of his victims (by which I mean body parts in jars), that just seems to go with the territory. If he’s also a hardcore Nazi sympathizer with a daddy fixation and a concentration-camp victim locked up in the attic, well, that sounds like it might be a little over the top. But if that creepy landlord-sadist-sociopath-Nazi is played by Klaus Kinski? Now you’re talking.

Hannibal: Season One (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Horror, Television, Thriller

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Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
“Apéritif,” “Amuse-Bouche,” “Potage,” “Œuf,” “Coquilles,” “Entrée,” “Sorbet,” “Fromage,” “Trou Normand,” “Buffet Froid,” “Rôti,” “Relevés,” “Savoureux”

by Walter Chaw I read Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon sometime in the summer of 1985, when puberty and a crippling stutter conflated new, confusing biological drives with defensive rage. It’s a wonder, really, that anyone gets out of junior-high alive. I had developed a taste for outré entertainments long around this time–thirteen, gawky, outcast in my mind, if not necessarily in reality. It was easier for me to identify with the Michael Myerses and Jason Vorheeses of the underverse: hiding, voyeuristic, jealous, yearning. I think we learn affinity with monsters as our own bodies betray us, metastasize around us, dosing our brains with liquid spikes of ecstasy and their attendant pitch-black abysses. I took refuge in movies rented from the local video stores in and around my suburban oubliette, and eventually in books like Harris’s masterpiece, which, once discovered, was something I came back to like a scab, like a totem to be worried. Watching Manhunter on VHS a year or so after its release, I was astounded to discover it was Red Dragon. I hadn’t considered that anyone else knew about, much less was interested in, the contents of my secret stash. In the years before Internet and the vast, instant dissemination of information, there were still such things as the private, the personal. Manhunter was validation, exposure, and sanctification of my perversion. I was outed.

The Jungle Book (1967) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in1960s, 2014, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical

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***/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras A
story by Larry Clemmons, Ralph Wright, Ken Anderson, Vance Gerry, inspired by the Rudyard Kipling “Mowgli” stories
directed by Wolfgang Reitherman

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Jungle Book receives only two passing mentions in Neal Gabler’s mammoth biography of Walt Disney, even though it has the distinction of being the last animated film Disney lived to produce and ended his career in a commercial triumph to bookend the early success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Gabler’s brevity on the subject suggests that The Jungle Book was of little consequence to Disney, but there are clues to the contrary between the lines, such as when Gabler writes tantalizingly about Walt’s opinion that early drafts of the script were too “sober.” Indeed, he was personally invested in the project to the point of choosing it over his relationship with long-time story man Bill Peet, who’d brought Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories to Disney’s attention in the first place. Peet’s adaptation was, as Walt saw it, beset by its fidelity to Kipling, and he solidified his vision for lighter-hearted fare by hiring radio icon Phil Harris, whose husky, hearty voice would become synonymous with Disney animation in those posthumous years. The energy and levity Harris brought to the minor character of Baloo the Bear led to a reconceiving of the narrative so that it pivoted, in Gabler’s words, on the Falstaff/Prince Hal dynamic between Baloo and child hero Mowgli.

Nebraska (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD

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***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It’s easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.

Arrow: The Complete First Season (2012-2013) + Supernatural: The Complete Eighth Season (2012-2013) – Blu-ray Discs

Posted in2012, 2013, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Television, Werewolf

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ARROW: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image A Sound B Extras B-
“Pilot,” “Honor Thy Father,” “Lone Gunmen,” “An Innocent Man,” “Damaged,” “Legacies,” “Muse of Fire,” “Vendetta,” “Year’s End,” “Burned,” “Trust but Verify,” “Vertigo,” “Betrayal,” “The Odyssey,” “Dodger,” “Dead to Rights,” “The Huntress Returns,” “Salvation,” “Unfinished Business,” “Home Invasion,” “The Undertaking,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “Sacrifice”

SUPERNATURAL: THE COMPLETE EIGHTH SEASON
Image A Sound B+ Extras B
“We Need to Talk About Kevin,” “What’s Up, Tiger Mommy?,” “Heartache,” “Bitten,” “Blood Brother,” “Southern Comfort,” “A Little Slice of Kevin,” “Hunteri Heroici,” “Citizen Fang,” “Torn and Frayed,” “LARP and the Real Girl,” “As Time Goes By,” “Everybody Hates Hitler,” “Trial and Error,” “Man’s Best Friend with Benefits,” “Remember the Titans,” “Goodbye Stranger,” “Freaks and Geeks,” “Taxi Driver,” “Pac-Man Fever,” “The Great Escapist,” “Clip Show,” “Sacrifice”

by Jefferson Robbins Kindred shows in more ways than just their sharing a network, a Vancouver, B.C. shooting base, and a David Nutter-helmed pilot, The CW’s “Arrow” and “Supernatural” also share a gestalt. Post-“The X Files”, post-“Buffy”, they grapple with family legacies, duty versus desire, and bonds (specifically male) threatened by the intrusion of a) monsters and b) lovers. Watching the debut season of the former alongside the eighth season of the latter, it becomes clear that “Arrow”‘s showrunners, headed by Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and Andrew Kreisberg, are just as steeped in the modes and methods of this youth-oriented action programming as “Supernatural” creator Eric Kripke. Both series find young, handsome protagonists consumed with the bloody twilight work left undone by their dead fathers; and both–despite “Arrow”‘s roots as a second-tier DC Comics property straining for multimedia relevance–are better, and bloodier, and in some ways more relevant, than one has any right to expect.

Argento’s Dracula 3-D (2012) – Blu-ray 3D & Blu-ray

Posted in2012, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy, Romance, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS

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Dario Argento’s Dracula
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Thomas Kretschmann, Maria Gastini, Asia Argento, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Dario Argento, Antonio Tentori, Stefano Piani, based on the novel by Bram Stoker
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw I used to love Dario Argento. Heck, who didn’t? But at a certain point, it became clear that the quality of Argento’s work is directly proportional (or it was for a while) to the quality of work he’s riffing on. A shame that lately he appears to be mostly riffing on himself–the elderly version of a vital artist doing his best to recapture something he’s lost. It was Hitchcock as muse, of course, initially, joining Argento at the hip for a while with Brian DePalma, who was doing kind of the same thing at the same time with about the same audacity in the United States. There was genius there in the Deep Reds and Suspirias, certainly in the logic-bumfuddling submerged ballroom the heroine must enter to retrieve a key in Inferno. Argento didn’t really start to make bad movies until after Tenebre. Since, with notable half-exceptions like Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome, he’s made almost nothing but. It all comes to a head–or a tail, as it were–with Dario Argento’s Dracula: the worst entry in a filmography that includes stuff like Sleepless and Giallo, and frankly belonging somewhere in the conversation of the worst films of all time. Until you’ve endured it, I can’t quantify it. Coming from someone once revered for his innovative camera, for his groundbreaking work with music and production design–coming from the guy involved at some level with the conception/production of Once Upon a Time in the West and Dawn of the Dead, fer chrissakes (who, indeed, counted Leone and Bertolucci and George A. Romero as friends and collaborators), it’s a fucking tragedy.

Night of the Comet (1984) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Zombie

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½*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B
starring Robert Beltran, Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Geoffrey Lewis
written and directed by Thom Eberhardt

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There’s a quote from the seventh season of “The Simpsons” that applies to the problem before us where Bart, happening on a “Schoolhouse Rock” thing and learning from Lisa that it’s one of “those campy ’70s throwbacks that appeals to Generation X-ers,” says, “We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little.” If there were, and if it had, we might’ve avoided the current rage for hipsterism–if the Joss Whedons of the world (and David Cranes and so forth) had found themselves casualties in some hostile jungle setting, then would this current youth generation have adopted, ironically, that last generation, and would people like me at my tender age of 40 be fuelling demand for hale distribution/archival companies like Shout! to produce exhaustively-supplemented HiDef releases of garbage like Thom Eberhardt’s excruciating Night of the Comet? Look, I’m not immune–I wrote an entire monograph (200+ pages, no kidding) on Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile that, in my defense, was more memoir than anything else (or is that more disclaimer than defense?). Still, I’ll proclaim to my grave that Miracle Mile has substance, while Night of the Comet has none. The first and greatest danger of nostalgia is that, having grown up with certain artifacts, we treat them like family and tend to love them unconditionally, as family does. This affection doesn’t mean that Junior isn’t a grinning idiot, however, because at least in this instance, he is. And I’m a strong believer that if one of your family members is a grinning idiot, it’s actually your job not to inflict him or her on other people.

John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, Sci-Fi, Thriller

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**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kurt Russell, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Cliff Robertson
screenplay by John Carpenter & Debra Hill & Kurt Russell
directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer The 1990s were unkind to John Carpenter: The stock market was booming, there was a Democrat in the White House, and the American horror film was at a low ebb. That was the decade when Carpenter–arguably the best B-movie auteur in the world during the 1980s and certainly the most audacious–lost his mojo. Exhausted from the experience of making two genre classics (They Live and Prince of Darkness) back to back, Carpenter took a couple of years off from filmmaking. When he was ready to work again, he considered making The Exorcist III but eventually settled on an ill-fated Chevy Chase vehicle, the $40 million sci-fi adaptation Memoirs of an Invisible Man, that torpedoed his attempted return to big-budget filmmaking. Carpenter tore through three more projects in the next three years–the Showtime horror anthology Body Bags, the Lovecraft riff In the Mouth of Madness, and a Village of the Damned remake–before deciding to pillage his own back catalogue with a sequel to the dystopian Escape from New York.

Weekend (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Road Movie, Satire, The Criterion Collection

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WEEK END
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Georges Staquet, Juliet Berto
written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

by Angelo Muredda “The horror of the bourgeois can only be overcome with more horror.” So says a militant cannibal as he stands over the remains of one such bourgeois husk late in Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s farewell to the alienated pop art and American genre gerrymandering of his early period. As the line about horrors piled upon horrors implies, Weekend is nasty, as valedictory addresses go–a scorched-earth attack on France under Charles de Gaulle that finds nearly all of its citizens massacred in car crashes of their own design and converted into consumable products, namely food. The humanism of minor tragedies like Vivre sa vie and the heedless joy of Frank Tashlin homages like Une femme est une femme has here curdled into a new, ugly form. Although its title suggests a world of leisure and free play, one doesn’t enjoy Weekend so much as one endures it.

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

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***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Robert Blake, Billy (Green) Bush, Jeannine Riley, Elisha Cook
screenplay by Robert Boris
directed by James William Guercio

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. By 1973 in the United States, film had already become chronicles of listless motion, failed ideologies, ironic Westward expansion, and rampant paranoia. American cinema was in the process of cannibalizing itself in great gulps of genre reconsideration, taking the lead of the movies-by-critics of the French New Wave and reassessing the western/film noir/thriller cycle of studio-era Hollywood through a new mirror darkly: The iconography of the hero mythology Americans hold most dear (cowboy, hardboiled detective, two-fisted man of action), forced now to be populated by incoherent psychopaths and, worse, effeminate ones–lawyers, journalists, ex-cons, ex-soldiers back from an unpopular war, unloved, disrespected, lost and still losing.

We’re the Millers (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Road Movie
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**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts, Ed Helms
screenplay by Bob Fisher & Steve Faber and Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber

by Walter Chaw Rawson Marshall Thurber’s return to the territory of the screwball gross-out comedy that put him on the map, the better-than-it-should-be Dodgeball, is the better-than-it-should-be (but not as good as Dodgeball) We’re The Millers, an essentially plotless road-trip intrigue that nonetheless glances off 2013’s concern with the decline of the middle class while providing a couple of chuckles along the way. It’s the lowbrow version of Albert Brooks’s Lost in America if looked at through a particularly sympathetic lens–a hint of a conversation about class, a whiff of something about how hard it is to make a living on streets getting meaner by the day. Ultimately, it’s probably just lucky that the cast assembled has an impressive improvisational pedigree (and that the director is open to making adjustments midstream), lending a stale comedy of mistaken identity a degree of perhaps-undeserved life. It probably doesn’t hurt that We’re the Millers never, at any point, tries to be something it’s not: rescued by a total lack of ambition.