The Hangover Part II (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Craig Mazin & Scot Armstrong & Todd Phillips
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw I guess it says something about picking up speed at the bottom of that proverbial slippery slope that I thought The Hangover Part II was consistently funny and pleasantly vile throughout, and that the only time I felt genuinely offended was during the closing-credits snapshot montage, wherein Eddie Adams’s infamous VC execution photograph is re-enacted in a digital tableau mort. That’s the line, I guess, and kudos in a heartfelt way to director Todd Phillips and company for finding a lower place to draw it. Until then, The Hangover Part II is a vaguely linear instalment of Jackass, mapping the odd longitudes of male friendship set loose in fleshpot/den of iniquity Bangkok, the Asian equivalent of the first film’s Las Vegas; where the original tackles that Sodom’s sin-of-choice prostitution, this likewise spends some time with transvestitism and sex-trafficking. Ugly? Well, it’s not pretty–but it is pretty funny as it reunites pretty boy Phil (Bradley Cooper), sociopath Alan (Zach Galifianakis), non-descript every-guy Doug (Justin Bartha), and dentist Stu (Ed Helms), for whose wedding the boys have reconvened some ill-defined months after the events of the previous film. Along for the ride this time is adorable little-bro-of-the-bride Teddy (Mason “son of Ang” Lee), who has the de facto Dragon Daddy issues as a Stanford pre-med and concert cellist and who, of course, will go through a heart-warming transformation through the loving attention of unbridled hedonism, drug abuse, organized crime, and mutilation. Oh, and there’s a fellating, drug-dealing monkey in a denim Rolling Stones vest. Ah, Bangkok.

The Shawshank Redemption (1994) – Blu-ray Disc (Steelbook)

Posted in1990s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Prison, Stephen King

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Bob Gunton, William Sadler
screenplay by Frank Darabont, based on the novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King
directed by Frank Darabont

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There’s a moment in the middle of writer-director Frank Darabont’s commentary track for the tenth-anniversary DVD and now Blu-ray release of The Shawshank Redemption in which he marvels at how swiftly and completely that Christian fundamentalists embraced the film (thus allying it with other modern klatch classics like Christmas with the Kranks, The Passion of the Christ, and George W. Bush). He feared, he says, that because the demonic Warden Norton (Bob Gunton) is the film’s only overtly Christian character, the herd would flock to decry it. Apart from his shocking disingenuousness (if there’s a more blatant Christ parable than The Shawshank Redemption, I don’t know what it is), Darabont obviously doesn’t understand that for the reborn mind, the longer the climb, the better the proselytizing–hence the desertion, the nepotism, and the DUIs actually augmenting Dubya’s holiness instead of casting suspicion on it.

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

Posted in1960s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Japan, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Kichiemon Nakamura, Nobuko Otowa, Kiwako Taichi, Kei Sato
written and directed by Kaneto Shindo

by Walter Chaw A band of ronin alights on a clearing before a modest, thatched-roof hut and, like the dead before Odysseus’s offerings of a trough of blood, drinks deep from the stream running through it. They wipe their mouths. They are underfed. They enter the residence to find Yone (Nobuko Otowa) and Shige (Kiwaki Taichi) sharing a frugal repast the starving ronin wordlessly take from them and wolf down. We learn later that the entire Japanese feudal world is at war: “It’s a samurai’s world now… We eat our fill and take whatever we desire”–and so this band of rough men gang-rape, murder, and immolate the mother and her daughter-in-law before pressing on into the woods. The image of smoke billowing out of this little lodge is, for all the haunted moments to come, the one that lingers from Kaneto Shindo’s odd, savage Kuroneko. Yone and Shige emerge from the fire newly pasty-white and as formalized as Noh performers, making the intercession of a black cat*, in a scene borrowed directly by Tim Burton for Catwoman’s resurrection in Batman Returns (still Burton’s nakedest lunch), that much more glaring in its contrast.

Fright Night (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD

Posted in****/****, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Vampire

****/**** Image B- Sound A+ Extras C-
starring Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, Imogen Poots, David Tennant
screenplay by Marti Noxon, based on the screenplay by Tom Holland
directed by Craig Gillespie

by Walter Chaw After 28 Weeks Later, I wondered when Imogen Poots would become a star. It only took four years. As Amy in Craig Gillespie’s really frickin’ great Fright Night, she’s sexy without being vacuous and tough without being masculinized–her general kick-assness undoubtedly owing in part to screenwriter Marti Noxon, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”‘s showrunner from Season Six to completion. I’m spending time talking about Amy because she’s a wonderful character who manages to complete an arc or two in a mere supporting role. Consider a moment in which she mentions her boyfriend’s skin clearing up that locates her completely, and believably, in the film’s high-school environment–that’s a lot of expositional impact in a little package. A remake of Tom Holland’s cult classic that was itself one of my VHS favourites (worn to breaking during my formative decade with the movies), Fright Night is delightful because it’s absolutely certain of what it is and what it isn’t, delivers everything it promises it will (in spades), and genuinely has fun with the 3-D innovation that’s the bane of most other movies lately. Smart as hell and unapologetic about it, it presents character beats that matter and sports a performance from Colin Farrell as evil vampire-next-door Jerry that should, no shit, earn him Academy Award consideration. Between him and the chimp from Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it’d be a tough call.

The Debt (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Hungary, Israel, Thriller, UK

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington, Jessica Chastain, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Matthew Vaughn & Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan, based on the Israeli film Ha-Hov
directed by John Madden

by Walter Chaw End-of-year prestige porn so poor in its conception that it was released at the ass-end of summer, former Miramax darling John Madden’s The Debt enters into the Holocaust Remembrance sweepstakes and, in the process, demonstrates that probably nothing could slow Jessica Chastain’s rising star. Sure enough, she’s all that’s remotely worthwhile (well, her and Jesper Christensen as the best Nazi doctor since Olivier) in a film that also parades people like Tom Wilkinson and Dame Helen Mirren in embarrassing, compromised aspects. Despsite a couple of elderly “twists,” the only thing really surprising about this tale of a Mossad operation gone pear-shaped is that Mirren’s hack husband Taylor Hackford didn’t direct it–knowing that if he had, at least the action scenes in it, for what they’re worth, would’ve been a good deal tighter. Oh, what a state we’re in when we find ourselves wishing that Taylor Hackford had directed something instead of someone else.

The Devil’s Double (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Netherlands, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Dominic Cooper, Ludivine Sagnier, Philip Quast, Raad Rawi
screenplay by Michael Thomas
directed by Lee Tamahori

by Angelo Muredda The Devil’s Double might be the first bad movie about which you can non-figuratively say, “That looked like piss.” Director Lee Tamahori, who started off decently with 1994’s Once Were Warriors but has since become a dependable franchise killer (Along Came A Spider, Die Another Day, xXx: State of the Union) and a Hollywood hack behind the occasional Nicolas Cage abortion (Next), bathes every shot in garish yellow lights that transform white leather couches into urine-stained gilded bars. If you’re willing to excuse this aesthetic for the first few seconds of every shot as an uncomfortable and weirdly xenophobic bit of formalism–what better way to depict Iraq than to give it a nice golden shower?–good luck with the rest. When characters reposition themselves in the frame, they often seem to block the light source and thrust their companions into the dark for no good reason. DP Sam McCurdy surely considers this a clever trick, as he executes it over and over again, yet Tamahori’s film, a hollow adaptation of Latif Yahia’s unconfirmed autobiographical account of serving for many years as Uday Hussein’s political decoy, is such a bore that the effect is one of watching someone throw buckets of neon paint on a blank canvas.

Bridesmaids (2011) – [Unrated] DVD + Something Borrowed (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

BRIDESMAIDS
***½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras A
starring Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendon-Covey
screenplay by Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig
directed by Paul Feig

SOMETHING BORROWED
*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Kate Hudson, Ginnifer Goodwin, John Krasinski, Colin Egglesfield
screenplay by Jennie Snyder Urman, based on the novel by Emily Giffin
directed by Luke Greenfield

by Jefferson Robbins On release, everybody tried to make Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids about sex (gender and the act), when its bigger issue is class. Working from a script by Annie Mumolo and star Kristen Wiig, frosted liberally with improv in the manner producer Judd Apatow has made inescapable, the creators spin Wiig’s failed cake-maker Annie for an early midlife crisis rooted in bad relationships as well as economic hardship. It’s easy to get stuck on the sex angle, given the opening scene: Singleton Annie is stuck in a self-hating friends-with-benefits cycle with sometime-lover Ted (Jon Hamm), doing exactly what he wants in bed–at length, in several variations, and noisily. She gets only smiling, sociopathic dismissal in return as he kicks her out of his lush Milwaukee McMansion. She’s pinned some vague hope on a pretty package of a man who’s not only bad for her, but vastly wealthier, too. Note how Annie is forced to vault an automatic gate to escape Ted’s one-percenter compound. Bridesmaids is not just about relationships in the mush-minded romcom sense–it’s about power relationships: who has the most money and thus can bring the most social clout to bear, in the snowglobe economy created by a best friend’s nuptials. Goddamn, that’s timely.

Rushmore (1998) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Rushmore (1998) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Olivia Williams, Mason Gamble
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Owen Wilson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Angelo Muredda It’s hard to talk about Wes Anderson these days without addressing the prevailing image of him among detractors as a precious aesthete who makes dioramas instead of movies. So let’s start there. As with most shorthand characterizations of idiosyncratic artists who carve out a niche for themselves instead of diversifying, there’s some truth to the charge: Mr. Fox didn’t accidentally wear the same corduroy blazer as his director, and surely Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman didn’t just frame themselves in the centre of the screen for the train-bound section of The Darjeeling Limited. Anderson, for his part, has owned up to his formal indulgences. On the audio commentary for Criterion’s excellent edition of Rushmore, he admits sheepishly that the film’s multi-ethnic, age-ranging rainbow coalition of players are basically clear types pulled from colour-coded storybooks–the sort of people you could get an easy sense of simply by drawing.

Ben-Hur (1959) [Fiftieth Anniversary Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc|[Fiftieth Anniversary] Blu-ray Disc

Ben-Hur (1959) [Fiftieth Anniversary Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc|[Fiftieth Anniversary] Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1950s, 2011, 2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, Haya Harareet, Stephen Boyd
screenplay by Karl Tunberg, based on the novel by Lew Wallace
directed by William Wyler

Editor’s Note: Warner has just reissued Ben-Hur on Blu-ray minus the third disc and material bonuses of the box set, although this release does include the commentary and isolated music score. Technical specs remain unchanged.

by Jefferson Robbins Charlton Heston’s Judah Ben-Hur is a Jew in a Roman world, but his emotional journey is all Greek. It’s 26 AD, and Judah’s bond of friendship, his philia, with Roman noble Messala (Stephen Boyd), is sorely tested. When this bond breaks and Judah’s entire family suffers under the Roman version of justice, his romantic love, eros, for his servant’s daughter, Esther (Haya Harareet), is smothered by hate and vengefulness. What is left him? Only a really bitchin’ chariot race–the paramount action-chase scene in movie history, not matched for twenty years (see below) and still never bettered–and the hope of agape, the love and yearning between Man and God. This faithful but frustrated son of the Torah must learn that path through brushing contact with the new rabbi in town: a humble carpenter’s son, bound for glory on the Hill of Skulls.

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2011, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, France, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto P. Quintaville, Aldo Valletti
screenplay by Pupi Avati (uncredited) and Pier Paolo Pasolini
directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

by Bryant Frazer There’s a tradition among purveyors of BDSM pornography to append a coda to their project in which the participants in various potentially alarming scenarios are finally glimpsed, all smiles, revelling in the afterglow of a clearly consensual exercise. I assume this custom has very practical benefits–for one thing, it might help stave off prosecution for obscenity or sex-trafficking. But it’s also a signal from the community making the videos to the community watching them that the performances are undertaken with high spirits, lest there be any misunderstanding about the actual circumstances of their making. Despite any apparent unpleasantness, dear viewer, all involved (top and bottom, dominant and submissive) are working towards the ultimate goal of pleasure, not pain.

Attack the Block (2011) + Super 8 (2011)|Super 8 – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Attack the Block (2011) + Super 8 (2011)|Super 8 – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, France, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

ATTACK THE BLOCK
***/****
starring Jodie Whittaker, John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh
written and directed by Joe Cornish

SUPER 8
***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso
written and directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw Joe Cornish’s low-budget creature-feature Attack the Block is a charmer, a delight, the kind of rare film–like Jack Sholder’s The Hidden, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, or Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile–that devotees will latch onto, and for good reason, with the fervour afforded genuine cult classics. It has energy to burn, a strange affinity with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and a super-cool monster that looks like a cross between Ira from the “Moonshadow” comic and a grizzly bear. That most of it was carried off with practical effects is a shot in the arm for practical effects and a bearer of the nostalgia banner that seems to be popular lately, what with our dreams and memories fodder again for the celluloid couch. Better still, it introduces a new star into the future pantheon in John Boyega, who has charisma to burn as gang leader-cum-saviour Moses. The movie’s tale of a group of street toughs has drawn comparisons to The Warriors, but I think the better analogy is Spielberg’s E.T., not just in that alchemy between the fantastic and the absolutely mundane (South England’s Lambeth neighbourhood), but also in the crafting of a living youth subculture alive with its own language, ritual, and custom. It’s not too much to say that, at its best, Attack the Block makes you feel the way you did when the guys took things into their own hands to deliver the flying, omniscient, omnipotent E.T. to his landing site. It taps into the irrational cool. Which doesn’t happen very often.

The Conversation (1974) – Blu-ray Disc

The Conversation (1974) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Palme d'Or Winner, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+
starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams
written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola

by Walter Chaw The moment I decided that movies were something to be respected, studied, opened layer-by-layer rather than merely enjoyed and cast aside was at a 16mm screening, in a college film course, of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterwork The Conversation. If we were speaking in different terms, film before it for me is the equivalent of the girls I dated until I met my wife. It taught me about what it is to respect the medium; it showed me the joys of complexity and investment, and it showed me what it was to be in love. It hit me like a freight train. And not only had I never seen The Conversation prior to that hot, close afternoon in the common room where that seminar took place, I had never so much as heard of it. I was humbled by my ignorance, and that helped. I was also at a personal crossroads in my life–that didn’t hurt, either. My sense memory of The Conversation is bifurcated between the feeling of my feet in socks walking along the carpeted hall of my dorm, down the concrete stairs, and into the screening area and sitting next to the girl I liked, who was wearing her sweats, no make-up–and the feeling, years and years later, of watching it on a shitty old laptop in bed with my wife while we waited for the first terrible contractions to happen during the first of our trio of miscarriages. Neither of us ever questioned the wisdom of putting it on, knowing that the toilet backflow scene was coming down the pike. We were naïve. We didn’t know why we wanted to watch it so desperately that night. When people ask me what my favourite movie is, I tell them it’s The Conversation. I don’t even have to think about it.

Pulp Fiction (1994) + Jackie Brown (1997) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

Pulp Fiction (1994) + Jackie Brown (1997) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Palme d'Or Winner, Robert De Niro, Romance, Thriller

PULP FICTION
****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

JACKIE BROWN
****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, based on the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard
directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Seventeen years on, Pulp Fiction still works like a motherfucker. It might, indeed, benefit from the shock of its gleeful use of “nigger,” the surprise of its sodomy and ultra-violence, and the sheer pleasure of hearing Sam Jackson say those lines and John Travolta dance again in a movie having faded. What’s left is this appreciation of a film that is delighted with cinema and experimental without being a jerk about it (very much like Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa, specifically in a black-and-white rear-process cab ride with none of that feeling that Tarantino’s trying to make a point as opposed to recognizing something that looks cool and feels right)–a film that is Tarantino in all his gawky, hyperactive, movie-geeking, idioglossic splendour, fully-formed and trying only a bit too hard. Beginning life as a proposed portmanteau to be helmed by a trio of directors (à la Tarantino’s later, disastrously-received foray into the anthology format, Four Rooms), the picture retains elements of its three-headed inception by intertwining a trilogy of hard-boiled crime stories in a way superior, it’s clear now, to Frank Miller’s career-long attempts at the same. Tarantino’s purer. The stakes for him are simpler. Pulp Fiction is evidence not of someone with something to prove but of an artist entirely, and genuinely, in love with his medium. He loves film enough to push it to be everything. And Pulp Fiction almost gets there.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon
screenplay by Dan Fogelman
directed by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

by Angelo Muredda There’s a pretty good movie inside Crazy, Stupid, Love., but no one involved seems to put much trust in it. Lightly melancholic and affecting when it finds its cast at their manic lows, the film at first cavalierly launches its ensemble like discrete pinballs, to great comic effect, only to collapse in a fit of contrived set-pieces torn from the Paul Haggis playbook. It’s a shame. If the third act’s everyone-at-the-garden-party resolution is economical, it’s also distressingly uncrazy: a geometrically tidy solution to a film that’s begging for something gawkier.

Deep Red (1975) + Inferno (1980) – Blu-ray Discs

Deep Red (1975) + Inferno (1980) – Blu-ray Discs

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Directors: Dario Argento, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

Profondo rosso
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Clara Calamai
screenplay by Dario Argento and Bernardino Zapponi
directed by Dario Argento

INFERNO
***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D
starring Eleonora Giorgi, Gabriele Lavia, Veronica Lazar, Leopoldo Mastelloni
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Deep Red is a transitional film from the middle of Dario Argento’s most creative period, one that sees the Italian Hitchcock (better: the Italian De Palma) building surreal temples on Hitchcock’s meticulous foundations before abandoning them–disastrously and without explanation–following the release of 1982’s Tenebrae. With little scholarship on Argento that’s current and/or comprehensive, and with the director himself seldom asked about his steep decline, what’s left is this notion that Argento wanted to escape the Hitchcock-derivative label (only to return to it after the spark had fled or, more likely, proved illusory all along), or that he wanted a psychic divorce from De Palma, whose career Argento’s paralleled for a while in theme and execution. Whatever happened eventually, Argento in 1975 seemed to be casting about for a new direction. He’d just completed his “animal” trilogy of gialli (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat O’ Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet) and nursed a belief that the genre had, if not run its course entirely, at least run its course for him. He dabbled in a failed period piece (Five Days in Milan), the function of which appears to be to demonstrate that Argento is no Sergio Leone (though to be fair, almost no one is Sergio Leone), and he contributed to a portmanteau for Italian television–a format to which he’d one day return with buddy George Romero and Two Evil Eyes.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Chris Evans, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw Given the opportunity to finally do the sequel to his The Rocketeer that I’ve sort of been hoping to see for the last twenty years, Joe Johnston comes through with flying colours. The absolutely, unapologetically cornpone Captain America: The First Avenger achieves exactly the right tone of Greatest Generation wartime propaganda without any winking post-modern irony to befoul the stew. It’s an earnest, genuine underdog story about a wimpy kid, Steve (Chris Evans, digitally reduced), who’s beaten up for defending the sanctity of the movie theatre before finally, on his sixth try, being accepted into the army under the kind auspices of mad scientist Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci). Erskine sees an essential goodness in Steve, a decency born from the Great War heroism of his long-gone parents, it’s suggested (in high-Fifties style), while crusty Col. Philips (Tommy Lee Jones) is persuaded by this twerp’s willingness to dive on a grenade to save a platoon made up of the type of men who spent their childhood tormenting guys like Steve. Asked if he wants to kill Nazis, Steve replies that he doesn’t want to kill anyone–he simply hates bullies. Steve, see, is an idealist. And any film that paints America’s bedrock idealism as heroic is not just the right kind of patriotic (the kind that doesn’t demean other cultures) and the right shade of nostalgia (i.e., in love with the essential purity of the hope behind the foundation of our country)–it’s more than okay by me, too.

My Life as a Dog (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Sweden, The Criterion Collection

Mitt liv som hund
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Anton Glanzelius, Tomas von Brömssen, Anki Lidén, Melinda Kinnaman
screenplay by Lasse Hallström & Reidar Jönsson & Brasse Brännström & Per Berglund, based on the novel by Reidar Jönsson
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Angelo Muredda Before Oscar powerbrokers Scott Rudin and Harvey Weinstein entrusted their yearly contenders to can’t-fail Stephen Daldry, there was Lasse Hallström. A three-time Academy award nominee whose Chocolat is still roundly (and somewhat unfairly, given the company of trash like Crash) dismissed as one of the most undeserving Best Picture nominees of recent years, Hallström best encapsulates the notion, popular in Oscar-watching circles, of the “fifth nominee”: the uncelebrated contender who presumably just made the cut. Consecutive star-studded nonstarters like The Shipping News and An Unfinished Life–which, lest we forget, quasi-romantically paired a maimed Morgan Freeman with the existentially-troubled bear who gored him–have dimmed his reputation considerably since then, but Hallström has nevertheless assured himself a strange place in American filmmaking (not least because he is Swedish) as simultaneously one of the most-awarded and least-loved directors of the Miramax era of upmarket indies.

Terri (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Teen

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Jacob Wysocki, Olivia Crocicchia, Creed Bratton, John C. Reilly
screenplay by Patrick deWitt
directed by Azazel Jacobs

by Angelo Muredda On paper, Terri looks insufferable. From its unfortunate trailer, which sells a uniform-outfitted protagonist and whimsical, quintessentially Sundance plot in which a young misfit bonds with a fortysomething man (John C. Reilly, naturally) and feels the first pangs of young love, you’d think it was assembled from the discarded organs of Wes Anderson movies past. What’s most surprising about Terri, though, is its skepticism towards the calculated quirkiness of botched American indies about social rejects. When people behave strangely in this film, it isn’t the result of a screenwriter groundlessly insisting on his creations’ idiosyncrasy (Natalie Portman is thankfully not on hand to make a series of unique sounds when dialogue dries up), but rather a token of what Reilly, in one of many lovely moments, affectionately calls the “unknowability” of people. That curiosity about the unusual and sometimes dark impulses that decent individuals wrestle with makes director Azazel Jacobs’s first feature since 2008’s Momma’s Man something special: a humane portrait of people who speak in fits and starts, throw inappropriate temper tantrums, and awkwardly test their sexual boundaries. Most importantly, it doesn’t presume to have its young protagonists figured out. The result is an affecting twist on the coming-of-age narrative, as well as a rare film about teenagers that’s in no hurry to turn the amorphousness of late adolescence into something solid and prescriptive.

Scre4m (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Scre4m (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Satire, Wes Craven

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Emma Roberts
screenplay by Kevin Williamson
directed by Wes Craven

by Walter Chaw It seemed like a neat idea, didn’t it, to offer a riff on horror movies while making a horror movie? To prove smarter than the genre while producing an effective genre product just the same–something Wes Craven couldn’t quite pull off with his New Nightmare (though it was a good try). He did pretty well with the first Scream film, however, which not only gave faint, and ultimately false, hope that Craven was back, but also launched Kevin Williamson as a geek flavour of the month in the Joss Whedon mold. But looking back, Scream is the proverbial slippery slope, pulling off a neat trick at the cost of a couple of sequels (the underestimated first, the godawful second) that require that this deconstructionist urge be carried through to its only logical end: the destruction of the subject. What made Craven interesting initially, with stuff like Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, wasn’t the lo-fi, kitchen sink aspect of his films (the lousiness of them, truth be told), but that they understood essential horror. Fear for your children, mainly–the thing that really moves A Nightmare on Elm Street, and powerful enough that even Craven’s shitty sense of humour and timing (remember the banjo music in Last House?) couldn’t undermine it. The problem with the long-postponed fourth instalment of the Scream franchise, Scre4m, is that it doesn’t have anything essential about it. Built on a specious concept and the backs of films that actually have something at their centres, it’s a smug, arch, irritating thing that hates its audience, hates genre films, and, curiously, hates itself most of all.

The Phantom Carriage (1921) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1920s, 2011, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Silent, Sweden

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Victor Sjöström, Hilda Borgström, Astrid Holm, Tore Svennberg
screenplay by Victor Sjöström, based on a novel by Selma Lagerlöf
directed by Victor Sjöström

by Bryant Frazer The Phantom Carriage, a seminal achievement in silent filmmaking from that other great Swedish auteur, Victor Sjöström, is a stern, supernatural moral drama that rails against social problems of the day by enlisting an emissary from the Great Beyond to lecture the feckless, abusive protagonist on what a rotten shit he is. Sjöström remains best known internationally for his later Hollywood films, made with the likes of Lillian Gish and Greta Garbo, but The Phantom Carriage already testified to genius behind the camera as well as in front of it. When the movie finished playing, I picked up the disc’s keepcase and squinted at it, in all my ignorance, to determine who so expertly essayed the central character of the alcoholic David Holm. When I read the answer (Sjöström himself), I wanted to fling the box across the room. Show-off.