Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 3 of 47

Super 8 (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy|Super 8 – 4K Ultra HD + Digital

September 2, 20212011, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/****
BD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
4K UHD – Image B Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso
written and directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw J.J. Abrams’s Spielberg shrine Super 8 mines the birth-of-the-blockbuster nostalgia vein so doggedly that you actually wish it was better than it is. Still, what works about it works really well, the best result of it being that it offers a vehicle for young Elle Fanning that should catapult her to the real superstardom Somewhere would have had anyone seen it. She’s stunning; every second she’s on screen, no matter whether she’s sharing the frame with a two-storey monster, it’s impossible to look away from her. She’s the natural lens-flare Abrams offsets with his trademark visual tick. Fanning’s Alice, the daughter of town drunk Louis (Ron Eldard), is enlisted by a pack of Goonies-stratified youngsters to be the female lead in their kitchen-sink zombie flick. The erstwhile director is the Stand By Me chubby one Charles (Riley Griffiths), and along for the ride are the one who pukes (Gabriel Basso) and the one who likes to blow shit up (Ryan Lee). And, yes, there’s that scene where the kids throw their stuff over a fence, gather up their bikes, and recreate an entire sequence from the Amblin Entertainment logo that opens the picture.

Almost Famous (2000) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital

August 18, 20212000s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Music

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc. Click any image to enlarge.

Almost Famous **½/****
Untitled ***/****
Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Bryant Frazer Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s fondly remembered period piece about a bygone era of rock stars and the various satellites in their orbit, is a bit of a relic these days. Even on its release in 2000, when it was almost 30 years removed from its subject matter, Almost Famous was a notably uncritical celebration of a moment in 20^th-century music history. Another 20 years on, having centred the phallic sexual and creative powers of a white guy with a guitar, Almost Famous is increasingly disconnected from the prevailing pop and hip-hop zeitgeist, and the film feels even more like cultural hagiography. On the other hand, it is a hell of a story. The fundamentals are autobiographical: Cameron Crowe really was a 15-year-old whiz kid who earned early graduation from high school; he really did seek career advice from legendary rock-and-roll critic Lester Bangs; and he really landed a ROLLING STONE assignment to hit the road with a group of next-big-thing cock-rockers. The story, as Crowe retells it here, has intrepid young journo William Miller (a fresh-faced Patrick Fugit) on assignment with the fictional rock group Stillwater–dealing with celebrity egos, yearning for the teenaged groupies who sprinkle their figurative fairy dust around a series of interchangeable ballrooms, basketball arenas, and hotel suites, and checking in with a protective mother (Frances McDormand) who can only peer helplessly into her son’s wonderland from her world outside the circus tent. Finally, William meets with his editors back at HQ to bang out a chunk of blistering reportage that will lay bare the raw emotional state of a band on tour and cement his status as a rock journalist. What could go wrong?

Howard the Duck (1986) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

August 3, 20211980s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disability, Romance, Sci-Fi

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B
starring Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins, Ed Gale
written by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, based on the Marvel Comics character created by Steve Gerber
directed by Willard Huyck

by Bill Chambers If you’ll indulge me, as I recall it was at my local Sunrise Records that I first laid eyes on the egg with the hatched beak chomping on a cigar, which became as emblematic of Howard the Duck, albeit not as iconic or enduring, as the gleaming bat symbol would become of Batman three summers later. It was on the cover of a 12″ EP of the movie’s title track, performed by Dolby’s Cube featuring Cherry Bomb, a fictitious band consisting of actresses Lea Thompson, Liz Sagal, Holly Robinson, and Dominique Davalos, who did all their own singing. (Thomas “She Blinded Me with Science” Dolby wrote and produced their songs.) When I flipped the jacket, I encountered a photo spread of Thompson in rock-‘n’-roll leathers and big, crimped hair, and I reacted how any 11-year-old boy hot for Marty McFly’s mom would: I begged my dad to buy it for me.

Siberia (2020) – Blu-ray + Digital

July 27, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Germany, Greece, Horror, Italy, Mexico, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Willem Dafoe, Dounia Sichov, Simon McBurney, Christina Chiriac
screenplay by Abel Ferrara and Christ Zois
directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw I had a dream when I was very young. A fever dream, while tangled in my parents’ bed sheets, delirious and afraid, soaked and burning. I bore horrified witness to a line of bald monks stretching into an impossible black, all awaiting their execution by beheading and various other cranial offenses. I couldn’t make out the executioner. I wondered why my parents couldn’t see what I was seeing, and in my confusion, I didn’t know if they were angry with me or lying to me. Abel Ferrara’s Siberia has somehow manifested this fever dream of mine in a sequence where its ex-pat protagonist, the Jack London-ian Clint (Willem Dafoe), rides a dog team through the arctic on his way to a cave carved into the side of a jagged rockface. He passes a village in the midst of some sort of violent cleansing where gunmen force a group of men, naked and bald, into the cold to be executed, one after the other. When I had my hallucination as a child, I couldn’t have been more than five or six. I had never, at that point in my life, actually seen a monk. When I finally did, some years later, I felt as though I’d already borne witness to their martyrdom. When you first read Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, you’re confronted with two beginnings–two approaches to what is one of the most profound works of self-examination in the history of Western thought. The first is in the prologue, the next in the first chapter (called “First Years”). In the prologue, Jung writes:

Full Metal Jacket (1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

July 11, 2021****/****, 1980s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, UK, War

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc. Click any image to enlarge.

****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D’Onofrio, Lee Ermey
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, based on Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Bryant Frazer It’s obvious from the beginning that Stanley Kubrick loves R. Lee Ermey. Loves him. Though Ermey is only the fourth-billed actor in Full Metal Jacket, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman may as well be the star of the show. He’s described in Gustav Hasford’s source novel as “an obscene little ogre in immaculate khaki.” His barked insults and obscenities dominate the first section of the film–a tour de force showing how Hartman wears down (and, supposedly, toughens up) a barracksful of U.S. Marine draftees, blasting away at their natural aversion to aggression and reprogramming them as soldiers. Kubrick was lucky to find him; a Vietnam War vet and former Marine Corps drill instructor, Ermey brings an irresistible combination of outrageousness and authenticity to the part. Hartman could have come across as an unlikely caricature but for Ermey’s ferociousness.

Indiana Jones: 4-Movie Collection – 4K Ultra HD + Digital

July 4, 2021****/****, 1980s, 2000s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD discs. Click any image to enlarge.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)
****/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984)
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri
screenplay by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989)
**½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Denholm Elliot, Alison Doody
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (2008)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Shia LaBeouf
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Bryant Frazer Paramount has reissued the first four Indiana Jones films on 4K UHD disc in a box set with vouchers for digital copies of the tetralogy. (For a detailed review of the movies proper as well as their 2012 Blu-ray counterparts, our own Walter Chaw has you covered. (The star ratings above are his, the letter grades are mine.)) The new 4K scans capture the camera negatives in all their Panavision glory. Grain is quite present and the image sometimes goes a wee bit soft, especially in shots that were optically printed (i.e., titles, dissolves, wipes, and the like), but it’s never inappropriate or distracting, and I didn’t notice any obvious compression-induced flaws. Many of the special-effects shots look better than ever, as the original elements have been recomposited digitally to fix thick matte lines, imprecise rotoscopes, and similar technical holdovers from the analog domain.

Lisa (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

June 20, 2021****/****, 1990s, 2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Horror, Teen, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Cheryl Ladd, D.W. Moffet, Staci Keanan, Tanya Fenmore
written by Gary Sherman & Karen Clark
directed by Gary Sherman

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s cheesy, right? He stakes out beautiful women, breaks into their apartment while they’re out, and decorates their place with enough candles for a Meat Loaf video. When they return home and check their messages, they hear one from him: “Hi, this is Richard. I’m in your apartment. I’m going to kill you.” Then he pounces, doing exactly what he promised to do. I went to see Gary Sherman’s Lisa with a friend on opening weekend in May of 1990; we had planned on going to Ernest Goes to Jail but were late for the matinee. We were late for everything, in fact, except Lisa, and the only competition for a seat was the tumbleweeds–a reflection of the skeletal marketing budget and maybe Siskel & Ebert’s downcast thumbs. Anyway, my buddy and me, both 15 at the time, were snorting derisively at Richard’s M.O.–the media has christened him, ooh, the Candlelight Killer–as Lisa got underway, mainly because it involved the type of aesthetic jive we put up with for a flash of nipple on late-night cable. (Did I mention the saxophone music?) Then came the introduction of the title character, a 14-year-old girl who lives with her florist mother Katherine in a cozy little womb of a loft, and any residual laughter took on a nervous edge. Safe to say that Scooby-Doo-ish frisson of siccing a sociopath on the territory of Apple Paperbacks worked like a charm: We were on tenterhooks for the next 90 minutes or so, like air-traffic controllers monitoring the progress of Lisa and Richard’s inevitable, inexorable collision.

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) – Blu-ray + Digital Code

May 25, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Martin Sheen
screenplay by Will Berson & Shaka King
directed by Shaka King

by Walter Chaw Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah is a fantastic Vietnam War movie that is not simultaneously a fantastic biopic of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. It reminded me a lot, and directly, of Brian De Palma's moral opera Casualties of War, which first challenged me to reckon with the American military not as a source of global good but as the perpetrators of atrocity at the whim of an inexorable capitalist, expansionist empire hiding behind the cowl of religion and white supremacy. In that film, '80s emblem of white, "compassionate" conservatism Michael J. Fox plays a green soldier who turns whistleblower as the witness to the misdeeds of his rapacious, brutal company commander, (Sean Penn). Based, like Judas and the Black Messiah, on true events, Casualties of War, again like King's film, sees white America as engaged in war crimes against minority populations. Alas, like De Palma's indisputably powerful piece, King's film is a better cultural self-excoriation than it is an examination of whatever's embedded in the American character that sees the flaying of Black (and Asian) bodies as both inevitable and isolated throughout our short history. In each film, there is the implication that justice of a sort has been served: in the one with trial and imprisonment for the malefactors, in the other (Judas and the Black Messiah) with the reported real-life suicide of the rat in Fred Hampton's cupboard. Neither movie really reckons with the growing silence of minority voices in our discourse.

The Ten Commandments (1956) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

May 7, 20211950s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, Edward G Robinson
screenplay by Æneas MacKenzie, Jesse L. Lasky, Jr., Jack Gariss, Fredric M. Frank, in accordance with the ancient texts of Philo, Josephus, Eusebius, the Midrash, and the Holy Scriptures
directed by Cecil B. De Mille

by Bill Chambers A harbinger of the pageantry to come, Cecil B. De Mille's 1956 The Ten Commandments begins with a pair of ornate drapes. De Mille himself emerges from behind them and steps up to a microphone. Back then, this would've had an uncanny effect on filmgoers, who were used to seeing curtains shield the silver screen from view until the lights went down. (To my recollection, curtains went the way of the dodo in the late-'80s, when they were deemed impractical by the new cookie-cutter multiplexes that would drive the traditional movie palace to extinction.) De Mille, then a name synonymous with "director" to the American public, proceeds to all but invent William Castle as he introduces The Gimmick: What you are about to see will fill in all the gaps in the biblical account of Moses, thanks to an investigative technique seldom used in Hollywood known as research. Well, not all of the gaps: kid Moses and teen Moses, who was surely elected Prom King in De Mille's imagination, still get the short-shrift.

Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) [John Hughes: 5-Movie Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 14, 20211980s, 2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, John Hughes, Teen

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Eric Stoltz, Mary Stuart Masterson, Craig Sheffer, Lea Thompson
written by John Hughes
directed by Howard Deutch

by Bill Chambers “Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. In order to criticize a movie, you have to make another movie.” John Hughes may have had this famous Jean-Luc Godard quote in mind when he embarked on the screenplay for Some Kind of Wonderful, a gender-swapped version of his heavily-compromised Pretty in Pink that came out less than a year later. But Some Kind of Wonderful did not start out like it ended up: The script that director Howard Deutch originally signed on to direct was about a citywide first date between a social pariah and the prettiest girl in school that notoriously called for the Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron to put on a private show for the couple. A broad comedy, it opened with its hero masturbating into a pillow. If you’ve seen Some Kind of Wonderful, this will all sound pretty incongruous.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

April 9, 20212020, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Spain, Streaming, Superhero, UK

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

WW84
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins

by Walter Chaw At some point, someone in some boardroom should have pushed away from the table and asked whether it was a good idea to have a subplot in their new Wonder Woman movie about a person in the Middle East wishing that colonizers would be expelled from occupied territories. (The granting of said wish subsequently leading somehow to nuclear holocaust.) I mean, with or without an Israeli actress in the lead role. Not to say it’s not geometrically worse with an Israeli actress in the lead role, because it is. Look, the real wonder of WW84 is that this maybe isn’t the worst thing about it. Neither is how flat it looks, or how it starts with 45 minutes of poorly-timed slapstick before shifting into absolutely deadening action sequences, a weird body-possession intrigue, and a horrifying message about how you should never wish for things because everything has consequences attached to it. With so much riding on its shoulders, the burden to be all things to all people has resulted in a vivisected monstrosity of plastic inauthenticity. WW84 additionally has one of the most beautiful people in the world–who’s playing an immortal superhero–tearfully proclaim that she wants something to go right for her for once in her life. What I’m saying is, WW84 is a very particular, very limited kind of fantasy gratification that also happens to have fantasy gratification as its needlessly magical plot.

She’s Having a Baby (1988) [John Hughes: 5-Movie Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 28, 20211980s, 2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, John Hughes

*½/**** Image C Sound A Extras B-
starring Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth McGovern, Alec Baldwin, James Ray
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers I rented She’s Having a Baby the moment it hit video out of brand loyalty to John Hughes, whose teen movies had had an epic and indoctrinating influence on my peers and me. And I was largely indifferent to it up until the closing-credits montage of celebrities tossing out names for the titular baby, at which point my lack of enthusiasm gave way to dismay.^* At the time, I assumed the film’s subject matter was too adult for 13-year-old me (and it was), but 18 years later I didn’t like it any better, and after revisiting it with another 15 years’ distance–which brings us to 2021–I’ve decided that when it comes to She’s Having a Baby, “it’s not me, it’s you” suffices. Even though the travails of one Jefferson “Jake” Briggs remain as hypothetical to me as they were when I was a kid, movies, as Roger Ebert was fond of saying, are empathy machines; the cinema would never have flourished if films demanded a 1:1 relationship with the viewer’s experiences. (Granted, this is also how they’ve gotten away with being so lily-white for so long.) Definitive proof of She’s Having a Baby‘s mediocrity came for me when I saw Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life, in which a cultured New York couple struggles with infertility as their biological clocks wind down. It was, next to First Reformed, my favourite film of 2018. I’ve never been on that side of the family equation and I’m not a churchgoer, either.

Possessor (2020) + Freaky (2020); Freaky (2020) [Killer Switch Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

February 10, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Teen, Thriller

Possessor Uncut
****/****
starring Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Rossif Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

FREAKY
**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finneran, Alan Ruck
written by Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon
directed by Christopher Landon

by Walter Chaw “You’ve gone strange on me,” Ava (Tuppence Middleton) says to her boyfriend Colin (Christopher Abbott) one morning when he, frisky in the kitchen, reacts to her rejection of his advances with an expression that’s impossible to read. Colin has gone strange. He really isn’t himself. Ava is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man, John Parse (Sean Bean), who has earned wealthy and powerful enemies, and though he’s surrounded himself with all of the things wealth can buy, including a reasonable level of separation from the rabble, he’s vulnerable to the mistakes he’s made as the bad father he knows himself to be. I appreciate that his name derives from a word meaning “parts” or, colloquially, a deconstruction of a whole into the small, individual components of which it is composed. Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor has both nothing and everything to do with Ava and John and Colin; it is a multitude I haven’t been able to shake for days, and so I watched Possessor a second time to try to exorcise it from me. I don’t think it worked. Time will tell. Possessor is a science-fiction film the way Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a science-fiction film, and a horror movie the way Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a horror movie, but what it most resembles is Kathryn Bigelow’s nightmare chimera of the two, Strange Days. All of these movies make you sick (heartsick, soulsick, sick-sick), but Possessor has about it the massive, impersonal nihilism of Philip K. Dick. We are cogs in a machine, and the machine is broken. But also it never worked in the first place. The picture is a true fable of our deconstruction.

The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (1990/2020) – Blu-ray Disc

January 27, 20211990s, 2020, 2021, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, Gangster

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone
*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Andy Garcia
written by Mario Puzo & Francis Ford Coppola
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

by Bill Chambers I wasn’t a fan of 2019’s Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, but I’m OK with it existing because Apocalypse Now is Francis Ford Coppola’s Great American Novel, and I don’t think he’ll ever truly finish writing it. I don’t care that he recut The Cotton Club, either, especially since his intentions with that one were to give the movie back to its Black performers, who got marginalized in the theatrical version of a film designed to celebrate the Roaring Twenties from inside the Harlem jazz scene. And I enjoyed the bloat of The Outsiders: The Complete Novel, though I’m bummed it knocked the original cut out of circulation–the real scourge of these variant editions. Alas, The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (hereafter Coda), Coppola’s shortened remix of the famously flawed conclusion to the Godfather trilogy, finally tested my patience for his compulsive tinkering. The Godfather Part III‘s problems were always foundational, the result of a studio’s impatience and parsimony and a filmmaker’s baffling interpolation of his own dynasty into the fictional one he helped create, and these are bells that can’t be un-rung. To believe that a new edit was the magic bullet is to blame the heroic Walter Murch–who discovered the movie hiding in The Conversation‘s hot mess of footage back in the day–for the picture’s shortcomings. (Patently absurd, in other words.) It’s interesting to me that in 1991, The Godfather Part III was upgraded to a so-called “Final Director’s Cut” in which Coppola and Murch tried to solve the issue of too much Sofia Coppola by adding more of her, reinstating most notably a rooftop heart-to-heart between Michael (Al Pacino) and Mary Corleone (Sofia) that resurfaces in an abridged form in Coda. (Sadly, the 170-minute Final Director’s Cut permanently resigned the 162-minute theatrical cut to the dustbin of history.) Sans Murch, Coppola sentimentally snips a few of Sofia’s more girlish line readings, as if it’s not too late to spare her from ridicule–as if those weren’t the endearing parts of her uncomfortable performance.

Tenet (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

December 29, 20202020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Sci-Fi

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw The misbegotten love child of Christopher Nolan’s own Memento and Michael Lehmann’s Hudson Hawk, Nolan’s Tenet is chonky Looper, a bloated, high-concept actioner that, alas, lacks Rian Johnson’s light touch and deftness with moments of genuine wonder and delight. It’s not the Titanic, it’s the iceberg; not a towering example of man’s hubris, but the ironic, frozen engine of its spectacular undoing. Freud liked to talk about how the unconscious was like an iceberg: only the very tip is visible, while the bulk of its mass is subsumed beneath. Freed from metaphor and employed instead as a simile, the hidden depths of an iceberg are more ice, just wetter. Tenet is like the first two Back to the Future movies but longer, not as good, and, uh, wetter.

Coming to America (1988) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital

December 10, 20201980s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Eddie Murphy

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, James Earl Jones, John Amos
screenplay by David Sheffield & Barry W. Blaustein
directed by John Landis

by Bill Chambers When I interviewed the great documentarian Steve James of Hoop Dreams fame, he asked me if I’d ever seen Coming to America, and I didn’t know quite how to answer him. There was a time, during my adolescence in the mid-to-late ’80s, when not seeing the latest Eddie Murphy movie would’ve put a serious crimp in my social life–when the extremely homophobic routines of Eddie Murphy “Delirious” (a.k.a. Eddie Murphy: Comedian, which my friend Joel gave to me on vinyl for my 12^th birthday) constituted the lingua franca of my peers, for worse or for worse. This was also the age of PayTV and home video, when it was not uncommon to watch a film you liked over and over again until you practically fused with it; I liked Coming to America. I liked it, and lots of kids my age liked it, I suspect, because it made us feel like adults with its titties and swears but basically coddled us with a plot out of Disney and a laid-back vibe to match. I’d soured on it in the years since, partly out of fear it was a low-key minstrel show. I’m still not sure that it isn’t, but anyway, in answer to James’s question, I said “yep.”

Total Recall (1990) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

December 9, 20201990s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Mexico, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Thriller

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

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox
screenplay by Ronald Shusett & Dan O’Bannon and Gary Goldman, based on the short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bryant Frazer Before watching Studiocanal’s new restoration of the 30-year-old science-fiction adventure Total Recall, I had only vague memories of seeing it on opening night. I mean, I remembered that I hated it, but I wasn’t sure why. I was already a Paul Verhoeven fan based on RoboCop, though I didn’t know anything else about his work. I know I was put off by the scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger puts a bullet in a woman’s head and then yuks it up with one of his trademark murder jokes. Sure, the screenplay has taken pains to establish the character’s unforgivable duplicity, but that’s the problem: She’s disposable, and she’s a punchline. (No wonder Sharon Stone jumped at the chance to play a serial murderer of men in Verhoeven’s next film.) And I recall that I was annoyed beyond reason by the film’s climax, which involves a very sudden change to the environment on Mars. The science behind it struck me as insultingly preposterous. Still, I think what I really objected to, what actually offended me, was the light tone. After RoboCop, which struck me as an appropriately sick joke about fascist tendencies in American law enforcement (still in the news!), I guess I expected Verhoeven to treat Philip K. Dick’s epochal ruminations on human consciousness, thought, and identity with some gravity (cf. the similarly Dick-inspired Blade Runner) instead of turning them into a wildly overblown comic-book complete with an absurdly-ripped muscleman as the self-doubting superhero at the centre of the action. That’s on me; Looking back on Total Recall after three decades, I can see it more clearly. For Verhoeven, the cartoonishness is the point.

Requiem for a Dream (2000) [Director’s Cut] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

November 26, 20202000s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Esoterica

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

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans
screenplay by Hubert Selby Jr. and Darren Aronofsky, based upon the book by Selby Jr.
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Bryant Frazer Few films are anywhere near as well made–as fierce and committed–as Requiem for a Dream, which stands as a 20-year-old landmark in an especially fertile era of New York indie filmmaking and one of the most expertly executed feel-bad narratives in the history of popular culture. Darren Aronofsky is a hell of a director, but he’s always been a little, well, intense for my taste. He’s got vision and passion to spare, and he clearly inspires dedication and devotion from his actors, yet I always feel there’s something critical missing from the films themselves. If π is David Lynch without an angle on the truly bizarre and Black Swan is David Cronenberg without the painful psychological acuity, then Requiem for a Dream is John Waters without the sense of humour. I know Waters is friendly with Aronofsky, but imagining him watching this in a dark theatre and positively cackling at its most painfully outré gambits is what helps get me through its pitiless final act.

The Goonies (1985) + Beetlejuice (1988) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

November 6, 20201980s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Family, Fantasy, Spielberg

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p versions

THE GOONIES
*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Corey Feldman, Kerri Green
screenplay by Chris Columbus
directed by Richard Donner

Beetle Juice
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A-
starring Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren
directed by Tim Burton

by Bill Chambers Although Walter Chaw and Alex Jackson already covered The Goonies and Beetlejuice (hereafter Beetle Juice), respectively, for our humble little website, I feel obliged to say something about these films before moving on to the technical portion of this review. Firstly, I don’t think I’d seen The Goonies from beginning to end since the ’80s, and it took me a week to get through it this time. I summed up the experience on Letterboxd as “like being buried alive in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese,” which was equally true no matter where I started from; The Goonies is just so screamy. To a certain extent, that’s verisimilitude–this is, after all, a movie about a gaggle of teens and preteens on a treasure hunt, hopped up on sugar, hormones, and the fantasy of instant wealth. But it isn’t merely that they’re rambunctious–they’re also mean.

Shivers (1975) [Vestron Video Collector’s Series] – Blu-ray + Digital

September 29, 2020****/****, 1970s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Sci-Fi

They Came from Within
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Paul Hampton, Joe Silver, Lynn Lowry, Barbara Steele
written and directed by David Cronenberg

by Bryant Frazer SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In some sense, Shivers, a venereal horror movie that invites you to track the vectors of sexual intercourse among a group of apartment-dwellers, is a parody of a soap opera where the point is who is sleeping with whom. It’s also a spit-take on those sex-ed hygiene films that try to frighten teenagers into abstinence. Set almost entirely in a Montréal apartment complex and photographed in a jaundiced palette that leans towards yellow-green, it’s about the proliferation of parasites that make their way from body to body by a variety of sickening means, transforming their hosts into insatiable sex maniacs. Shivers was Cronenberg’s first commercial feature, and by the director’s own admission he was hardly equipped at the time to head up a production with any significant budget. And yet it’s some kind of masterpiece. If it’s a naive film in some respects, it benefits from naivete. The hurried, sometimes awkward mise en scène may as well be deliberate, given that it jibes so well with the film’s chilly, alienating tone. Any cut corners in lighting, design, and special-effects work only enhance the generally grody feel. And there’s a lot that’s grody about Shivers. That’s why it works so well as a chilling overture to a filmmaking career that critics have described as The Cronenberg Project, one in which the director uses film after film to explore love, sex, physical transformation, and mortality.