Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 34 of 48

Tron: Legacy/Tron: The Original Classic [2-Movie Collection] – Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray Disc + DVD + Digital Copy

February 18, 20111980s, 2000s, 2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, Sci-Fi

TRON (1982)
*½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan
screenplay by Steven Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird
directed by Steven Lisberger

by Walter Chaw When Tron came out in theatres in 1982, it was touted as a revolution in digital imaging technology (which it certainly was), but the film lost any momentum it might have garnered due to the kind of lock-step exposition that characterized the Disney formula of the Seventies and Eighties. (Think The Cat from Outer Space, or the Love Bug phenomenon.) To this day, Disney animation relies upon anthropomorphic animal sidekicks (there is a floating .gif ball named “BIT” in Tron) and the addled old geezer who’s a genius and also the father of the beautiful young love interest–hoary old chestnuts that provide as good an explanation as any for the extent to which Disney has fallen behind animé and even its Pixar affiliates in the realm of animated entertainment. Tron stinks of that kind of laziness and worse (for instance, it rips off images whole-cloth from Star Wars), leading to the surprising realization that while it touts its technological influence, Tron is actually more instructive a model for the special effects extravaganzas that continue to litter the multiplex: all bells and whistles with nary a hint of plot or character development.

The Exorcist (1973) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

February 15, 2011****/****, 1970s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: William Friedkin, FFC Must-Own, Horror

THE EXORCIST
****/****

THE EXORCIST (THE VERSION YOU’VE NEVER SEEN)
**½/****
Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Ellen Burstyn, Max Von Sydow, Lee J. Cobb, Kitty Wynn
screenplay by William Peter Blatty, based on his novel
directed by William Friedkin

by Walter Chaw The most visible of a spate of evil-children movies littering the cinescape in the late-Sixties and early-Seventies (remembering that even Night of the Living Dead had a baby eating her mother), William Friedkin’s blockbuster The Exorcist raked in the cash even as it offered up the goods–in spades. Its “happy” ending is filthy with melancholy and menace, suggesting that whatever’s been exorcised from little Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) is actually free now (an idea itself exorcised by the extended version’s ending)–that the solution presented in the book of Luke is as empty as its herd of pigs driven into the sea. For The Exorcist to make the money it did says a lot about what was in the water in the American ’70s: partly the mainstream audience’s desire to feel shitty when a movie was over that didn’t reappear until The Dark Knight made a billion dollars, but mostly this idea, gaining currency in the cinema of the time (and again in ours), that individuals, confronted with a crossroads, are entirely incapable of affecting meaningful change. It’s why author William Peter Blatty’s choice of original ending–spliced onto the end of the 2000 re-release–is so cognitively dissonant. There’s hope in The Exorcist, and it has nothing to do with the almost jovial reassurance that there’s a better place after we die. Concluding this deeply spiritual film with a Christian platitude is, frankly, moronic, although the temptation to offer up succour is at least part of the picture’s allure.

What’s Up, Doc? (1972) – Blu-ray Disc

February 9, 20111970s, 2011, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, Kenneth Mars, Madeline Kahn
screenplay by Buck Henry and David Newman & Robert Benton
directed by Peter Bogdanovich

by Bryant Frazer Barely more than 45 minutes in, What’s Up, Doc?, a romantic farce directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand, reaches a madcap climax set in a San Francisco hotel room–it features an especially hapless O’Neal, an increasingly angry Madeline Kahn, an exploding television set, an insistently ringing telephone, and la Streisand, wrapped in an oversized bath towel, dangling from the window ledge outside–that makes you wonder whatever the hell else the film could have up its sleeve. It’s not simply that the scene is an appropriately hilarious culmination of plot threads involving mistaken identity, musicology, and pre-marital strife, but also that it demonstrates an astonishing commitment on the part of the filmmakers to physical comedy on a grand scale. It’s this sequence that transforms What’s Up, Doc? from a tastefully sophisticated contemporary take on the screwball comedy into a thing of real mayhem. Arriving, as it does, just halfway into the film, it’s a promise of even more flamboyantly orchestrated chaos to come.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 4, 2011****/****, 1980s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Gangster, Italy, Robert De Niro

****/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
FFC Must-Own BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Tuesday Weld
screenplay by Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, Sergio Leone & Stuart Kaminsky, based on the novel The Hoods by Howard Grey
directed by Sergio Leone

by Bill Chambers Such is the level of cinematic sophistication in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America that all of the miserable things that happen in the picture make you giddy, filling you with the joy that is basking in an artist’s command of a medium. At first, the powers-that-be didn’t get it: Warner Bros. took Leone’s non-linear vision and straightened it out, and the result was a picture that, though chronologically told, made no sense. This was a fascinating lesson in syntax–films are composed of “meanwhile”s, not “and then”s, perhaps none more so than Once Upon a Time in America, which is about the co-existence of past, present, and future tenses. (It’s like an extrapolation of the riddle of the Sphinx: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?) Luckily, the studio saw the error of its ways and reissued Once Upon a Time in America a year after its butchered American release in its longer, knottier international form, and to illustrate the dramatic disparity between the 139-minute domestic and 229-minute global versions, critic Sheila Benson labelled the former the worst movie of 1984 and the latter the best movie of the 1980s. Pauline Kael wrote, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a worse case of mutilation.”

Easy A (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

February 2, 20112000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Teen

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Hayden Church
screenplay by Bert V. Royal
directed by Will Gluck

by Jefferson Robbins What do I have to do these days to see a teen sex comedy where teen characters get to have sex? Filmmakers have gotten so good at larding chastity tracts with suggestiveness that you come out of the theatre believing, for fifteen minutes or so, that you actually witnessed youth in debauch. So far, the 21^st century in teenage fare is like the Hays Code era all over again, only not well-written. Terrified at being accused of portraying high-schoolers doing what millions of high-schoolers do, studios have turned sexual misdirection into the best special effect since the lightsaber.

Alice in Wonderland [The Masterpiece Edition] (1951) + The Lion King 1½ (2004) – DVDs|Alice in Wonderland – Blu-ray + DVD

February 1, 20111950s, 2000s, 2011, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, Musical

ALICE IN WONDERLAND
**/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
story by Winston Hibler, Ted Sears, Bill Peet, Erdman Penner, Joe Rinaldi, Milt Banta, Bill Cottrell, Dick Kelsey, Joe Grant, Dick Huemer, Del Connell, Tom Oreb, John Walbridge, based on Lewis Carroll’s The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass
directed by Clyde Geronimi & Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske

THE LION KING 1½
The Lion King 3: Hakuna Matata
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by Tom Rogers, Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi and Bill Steinkeller and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Bill Chambers It’s not like Alice in Wonderland is necessary and The Lion King 1½ isn’t–they’re both unnecessary. The two latest animated Disney films to hit DVD, they have little in common formally save that they’re jointly inessential; and yet, because of their proximate release windows, parents are likely to pick them up as a pair, and kids are likely to associate them as such. Bright, sophisticated children may arrive at the hypothesis that this is the day that animation died.

The Killer/Hard-Boiled [Blu-ray Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 2011****/****, 1980s, 1990s, 2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: John Woo, Drama, Hong Kong, Romance, Thriller

THE KILLER (1989)
****/**** Image C- Sound C Extras B
starring Chow Yun-Fat, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh, Chu Kong
written and directed by John Woo

HARD-BOILED (1992)
***/**** Image C Sound B Extras A+
starring Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung, Teresa Mo, Philip Chan
screenplay by Barry Wong
directed by John Woo

by Walter Chaw It’s possible to try to detail the history of John Woo at the beginning of the Heroic Bloodshed movement in Hong Kong–how, with the first two A Better Tomorrows (the second of which features a genuinely astonishing amount of violence and the infamous subtitled malapropism “don’t fuck on my family!”), he created in buddy Chow Yun-Fat a fashion/role model in the James Dean mold, and how he eventually left for Hollywood’s golden shore at the service of Jean-Claude Van Damme and John Travolta (twice) and Nicolas Cage (twice). It’s possible–but Planet Hong Kong, City on Fire, Hong Kong Babylon, and on and on have done a pretty fair job of it already. Better to say that Woo’s group of films from this period–the A Better Tomorrow pictures, his acknowledged masterpiece The Killer, his flawed but undeniably bombastic Hard-Boiled, and his ambitious, deeply felt Bullet in the Head–meant the world to me as a Chinese kid growing up in a predominantly white area in predominantly white Colorado. I saw a devastated 35mm print of The Killer at a midnight show in CU Boulder’s Chem 140 auditorium in the early ’90s. It was dubbed (a mess), the screening was packed, and I, for maybe the first time in my life (and still one of the only times in my life), felt a genuine kinship with my countrymen and a certain pride in being Chinese. Here, after all, was the best action film I’d ever seen, and it wasn’t John McTiernan’s or Robert Zemeckis’s or Steven Spielberg’s name above the title, but someone called John Woo. And he was directing not Bruce Willis nor Arnie nor Sly nor any of the tools he would eventually work with in the United States, but a handsomer version of me with the same last name. As existential epiphanies go, it wasn’t bad.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010); Secretariat (2010); Conviction (2010)|You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger – Blu-ray Disc + Secretariat – Blu-ray + DVD

January 24, 20112000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Family, Romance, Spain, Sports, Switzerland, Theatrical, UK

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER
**/**** Image A Sound B
starring Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones
written and directed by Woody Allen

SECRETARIAT
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Diane Lane, John Malkovich, Dylan Walsh, Scott Glenn
screenplay by Mike Rich, suggested by the book Secretariat: The Making of a Champion by William Nack
directed by Randall Wallace

CONVICTION
**/****
starring Hilary Swank, Sam Rockwell, Minnie Driver, Juliette Lewis
screenplay by Pamela Gray
directed by Tony Goldwyn

by Ian Pugh You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger represents the apotheosis of what shall now be called the New Woody Allen Average–those perfectly competent nothing movies that never rate more than two, two-and-a-half stars. I say that without a hint of sarcasm, and I say that as someone who considers Allen’s work a primary influence–and as the guy who regularly defends Scoop. But I have to be honest: the New Woody Allen Average has become so predictably mediocre that I just can’t take it anymore. The director’s latest surrogate is another novelist, Roy (Josh Brolin), who’s struggling to complete his latest book. It’s putting a strain on his marriage to Sally (Naomi Watts), so he looks into the window of his pretty next-door neighbour (Freida Pinto) for romantic respite. Sally, an art curator, feels the same pressure, and casually drifts closer to her boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas). Sally’s father, Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), has left his wife for a prostitute (Lucy Punch), while his ex, Helena (Gemma Jones), retreats to spirituality, consulting a medium to find out where she stands in the great cosmic plan. It’s a matter of “what you want” versus “what you take” in a race to see which floundering/philandering idiot can make the most tragic mistakes in the span of 90 minutes. Is it any different from Vicky Cristina Barcelona? When you break it down to its most basic components…no, not really.

The Pacific (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

January 20, 20112000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Television, War

Image A Sound A+ Extras A-

by Jefferson Robbins The Greatest-Generation worship that Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks share is appreciable and understandable, but by the close of their latest collaborative HBO miniseries, “The Pacific”, you sort of hope they’ve got it out of their systems. That’s not to say the story encapsulated here didn’t warrant telling–the flash conceptualization today is of World War II as a European war, where “rules of combat” may still obtain. The fiercely bloody Pacific campaign–very much a gazing-into-the-abyss kind of conflict, making monsters of men–has become a near-afterthought. So a big-budget TV treatment, in line with the star producers’ 2001 “Band of Brothers”, seems natural.¹ But by remaining “true” to the experiences of the U.S. Marines who fought their way from Guadalcanal to the doorstep of Japan, the story comes across as a thing of half-reconciled parts, periscopic views of the larger picture. I mean, more than a miniseries usually does–like it’s two miniseries grafted onto one another.

Inception (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

January 19, 20112000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Christopher Nolan, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw I dunno, the wordiness of The Dark Knight didn’t bother me that much. I suppose it has something to do with it being a comic-book movie and plot-driving pronouncements seeming the order of the day. I find it impossible now to think of The Dark Knight without seeing it as a corollary to No Country For Old Men: the one composed of broad, garish strokes, the other of grace notes you hesitate to call delicate, but that’s just what they are. With Inception, Christopher Nolan’s correlative piece is Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, NY, and the comparison in this instance doesn’t prove mutually evocative so much as devastating to Nolan’s film, exposing his shtick as reams of deadening exposition interrupted by the occasional virtuoso set-piece. It is, in other words, aggressively nothing-special, save for a few astonishing zero-g sequences. As it happens, saying the best part of Inception is its weightlessness is a pretty pithy criticism of the whole damned enterprise. For a film about dreams, it’s distinctly light on possibility: Armed with the power to shape reality, our erstwhile dream-weavers fold a city in half in a dorm-room Escher shout-out but decline to, you know, fly and stuff. More, Inception doesn’t confront archetypes of any kind, instead retreating into some basic stuff about projections and the architecture of the unconscious being a freight elevator while relying overmuch on the built-in gravitas of father and dead-wife issues. And in case you miss any of that, Nolan crams it into the dialogue like one crams elephants into elevators. Rule of thumb: if a movie uses the word “deep” as much as this one does, it probably isn’t.

The Color Purple (1985) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD | Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook) + Eve’s Bayou (1997) [Lions Gate Signature Series] – DVD

January 16, 20111980s, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Spielberg

THE COLOR PURPLE
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
BLU-RAY – Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, Adolph Caesar, Margaret Avery
screenplay by Menno Meyjes, based on the novel by Alice Walker
directed by Steven Spielberg

EVE’S BAYOU
**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, Vondie Curtis-Hall
written and directed by Kasi Lemmons

by Bill Chambers In the prologue to Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, black sisters Celie (Desreta Jackson) and Nettie (Akosua Busia) play patty-cake in a field of blue-pink flowers. Celie, the ugly duckling, is pregnant with her second illegitimate child, and when she has the baby, her father (Leonard Jackson) cruelly whisks it away to a new home, as he did her firstborn. Later, her father disposes of Celie, too, betrothing her to Albert, a.k.a. “Mister” (Danny Glover), a vicious stranger on horseback seeking Nettie’s hand in marriage. Concerned with more than just lonely Celie (Whoopi Goldberg as an adult) summoning the confidence to defy Albert (less through her own sexual awakening, as in The Color Purple‘s source material, than through a cultivated sisterhood with the women in her orbit), the picture examines a generation of emancipated African-American men who, poisoned by the slave mentality, treat their women like Cinderella in a misguided salvo to independence. Shit rolls downhill, in other words.

The Amityville Horror (2005) – Blu-ray Disc

January 11, 20112000s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras F
starring Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Jesse James, Jimmy Bennett
screenplay by Scott Kosar, based on the novel by Jay Anson and the screenplay by Sandy Stern
directed by Andrew Douglas

by Walter Chaw When filmmakers leave nothing to the imagination, you’re left with the product of their imaginations, which, almost without exception, is an arid thing born of equal parts imitation and an eye to the bottom line. Innovation is frowned upon when it comes to big-budget horror (terms that mix together uneasily at best), leaving whatever was subversive about the premise to get blunted by this need to rake in a lot of money from a timid public looking for a rollercoaster instead of sociology. So it is with the latest instalment in the worst horror franchise in history, a remake of The Amityville Horror directed by commercial hack Andrew Douglas (who at least seems self-aware in interviews) that professes to be “truer” to the “true”* source material–meaning, essentially, that no one is going to die and that it’s going to be poorly written. (I snuck a peak at the 1979 film when I was in the care of a horrible babysitter, only to experience one of my earliest instances of realizing that something sucked.) It tacks on some crap about the house in question being built on the site of an old Indian mental hospital/Abu Ghraib, replacing the innocuous little red room of the original film with a chamber of flash-edited horrors à la Thir13en Ghosts. In so doing, it introduces a little flaccid White Man’s Guilt subtext into this Wonder Bread wonderland that it studiously refuses to examine.

Eat Pray Love (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

January 4, 20112010, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Road Movie, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras D
starring Julia Roberts, James Franco, Richard Jenkins, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Ryan Murphy & Jennifer Salt, based on the book by Elizabeth Gilbert
directed by Ryan Murphy

by Walter Chaw It’s a little tempting to not take the piss out of this latest instalment of How Julia Got Her Tube Packed, but the sins of Ryan Murphy’s unwatchable Eat Pray Love are such that it’s nigh impossible for any sentient human to resist. More interesting might be to chart the route America’s sweetheart has taken to becoming one of the most irritating and hateful personas in the modern pantheon–how the once top-earning female star is lately this pinched, drawn, graceless thing trying her best and in vain to recapture the sociopathic sprightliness of her early successes. It could simply be the natural process of aging that makes it harder for her wronged-woman act to cull any sympathy: a 43-year-old woman making pouty lips and acting out is a much different animal than her 23-year-old self doing same. If she were to poison her husband or steal her best friend’s bridegroom now, it would play very differently. And play differently it does as she dumps her non-descript/non-character hubby (Billy Crudup, typecast), buys an Italian phrasebook (“Every word in Italian is like a truffle!” the moron says), and travels to Bali in search of wisdom at the feet of adorably helpful minorities who only exist in movies like this to help coddled, rich, white people be content with their unimaginable privilege. If On the Waterfront was Kazan’s apologia for singing like a canary, then Julia’s late career seems an apologia for buying someone else’s husband and getting away with it, for the most part, in the court of public opinion.

Fantasia (1941)/Fantasia 2000 (2000) [4-Disc Special Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

December 28, 20101940s, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD

FANTASIA
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
story direction by Joe Grant and Dick Huemer
directed by James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe, Norm Ferguson, Jim Handley, Thornton Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, and Paul Satterfield

FANTASIA 2000
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
directed by Pixote Hunt, Hendel Butoy, Eric Goldberg, James Algar, Francis Glebas, Gaetan Brizzi, Paul Brizzi, and Don Hahn

by Bryant Frazer More than twenty years ago, I sat in Stan Brakhage’s office at the University of Colorado, handling original frames of 65mm IMAX film stock that the avant-garde filmmaker had hand-painted with swirling layers of colour. He explained that IMAX had commissioned him to create an abstract film specifically for presentation on the huge screens of their theatres. It was a great idea, and I wondered when the film had screened. Never, Brakhage told me. The IMAX people eventually lost interest in the idea, and “Night Music” was shown instead in 16mm prints, drastically reduced from the large-gauge film stock. Although IMAX were bold enough to approach Brakhage in the first place, the company got cold feet when it came time to actually exhibit non-narrative cinema–even for only 30 seconds!–for a paying audience.

The Town (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 20, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Ben Affleck, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Peter Craig and Ben Affleck & Aaron Stockard, based on the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan
directed by Ben Affleck

by Walter Chaw If I’m still not entirely sold on Ben Affleck as an actor of depth, I’m completely sold on him as a director of depth. A director good enough, as it happens, to identify and avoid the actor’s own weaknesses and augment his strengths, and to guide Affleck the actor to his best performance in a picture, The Town, that would be something like a revelation were Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, not so exceptional. Absolutely filthy with its story of place, count The Town as a tough-love love letter to Boston suburb Charlestown, a place established in the film as a breeding ground for bank robbers. Affleck plays Doug MacCray, the head of one such crew that also includes childhood buddy Jimmy (Jeremy Renner, excellent again) in an echo of the macho/familial dynamic established in the Aussie bank robber drama Animal Kingdom. More about the ties that bind men to a place and an idea of manhood than about the crimes themselves, The Town compensates for what it lacks in originality with its patience and its bracing trust in its screenplay and cast. Monologues that could be didactic are laced with what feels like genuine yearning; a moment in which Doug tells new girlfriend Claire (Rebecca Hall) about his childhood could have (should have) been embarrassing, but comes off under Affleck’s surprising wisdom as heartfelt, even resonant.

The Other Guys (2010) [The Unrated Other Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

December 13, 2010****/****, 2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Dwayne Johnson
screenplay by Adam McKay & Chris Henchy
directed by Adam McKay

FFC Must-Own by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Think about what sort of film would place Will Ferrell’s schlubby physique and vacant grin against Mark Wahlberg’s sharp, furrowed brow. More than just comically mismatched, these two actors belong in different movies, different genres…on different planets, even. They share something resembling a love-hate “chemistry,” but from the get-go the pairing feels off–different. Eventually you figure out that The Other Guys is the kind of movie that thrives on bizarre contradictions–the kind of movie where gun-toting heroes are sent to end corporate malfeasance, where their vehicles of choice are a Prius and a Gran Torino that runs on “100% vegetable oil,” where they loudly defend not the awesomeness of Star Wars but its scientific accuracy.¹ A quintessentially American response to the quintessentially British Hot Fuzz, Adam McKay’s The Other Guys is the funniest, most delirious comedy I’ve seen in a long while, and it matches and exceeds the sharp cultural satire of McKay’s Talladega Nights in tackling not so much the conventions of the buddy-cop genre as the childish drama that attends them.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD + One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (’08 release + ’10 reissue) – Blu-ray Discs

December 7, 2010****/****, 1970s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Jack Nicholson

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras B+
FFC Must-Own ’08 BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
’10 BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
starring Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, William Redfield, Will Sampson
screenplay by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, based on the novel by Ken Kesey
directed by Milos Forman

by Bill Chambers Philosophically sound, motivational, inspirational, Czech director Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of a small number of Best Picture winners to actually deserve the statuette. Arriving at the crest of a European-influenced period of filmmaking, before “brats” Spielberg and Lucas hijacked Hollywood once and for good, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not popularly considered a seminal movie of its cinematically lauded decade, though it did change the tenor of Jack Nicholson’s career (he’d always played loose cannons, but of a squarer breed) and became the first film since 1934’s It Happened One Night to sweep the five major Oscar categories: Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, and Screenplay.

Lost in Translation (2003) – Blu-ray Disc + Anything Else (2003) – DVD

December 6, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, UK, ZERO STARS

LOST IN TRANSLATION
***½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

ANYTHING ELSE
ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Jason Biggs, Christina Ricci, Danny DeVito
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Walter Chaw It feels a lot like life is an endless succession of heartsickness and anticipation of heartsickness. After a while, taking a line from Tender Mercies, it’s hard to trust happiness anymore when happiness feels so ephemeral compared to the weight of grief. Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is about the wear of time and the unbearable burden of experience–it’s about how even what’s new and fresh is darkened by the ghosts of regret and time. When Bill Murray’s fading star Bob Harris arrives in Tokyo to lend his image to a top-shelf whiskey, he is suffused with so much of the sadness of living that the surprise of life has become something to be viewed with suspicion. Newness fades, and that familiar malaise, weary and grey, inevitably takes its place, sometimes even before the exhilaration of newness can reinvigorate. Bob meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in the hotel bar; she’s in town with her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi), and together Bob and Charlotte paint the town blue.

Mars Attacks! (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

November 29, 20101990s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Jack Nicholson, Satire, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A- Sound C
starring Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan
screenplay by Jonathan Gems
directed by Tim Burton

by Jefferson Robbins When Tim Burton calls in his Hollywood chips, it’s usually, to our benefit, to facilitate his darker impulses. 1989’s Batman gave him free rein to make Edward Scissorhands, for instance, and Warner Bros. incubated the bitter confection of Sweeney Todd after raking in more traditional bucks on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I daresay one of those Burton Unbound documents is his A-list romp Mars Attacks!, which today gives off strange vibrations that echo forward as well as back. It’s a ’50s UFO-invasion flick farce, of course, based on a 1962 trading card set illustrated by, among others, comics great Wally Wood. It’s anarchic, unexpected (“Wha? Trading cards?” we all said at the time), and darkly funny. It plays in the massive footprint of the same year’s Independence Day, and in its more biting moments, it somehow speaks to the great collapses of the subsequent decade.

Fight Club (1999) [10th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 29, 20101990s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Esoterica

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf Aday
screenplay by Jim Uhls, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. My on-again/off-again love affair with David Fincher began with a PREMIERE article I read about how much of an asshole he was on the set of Alien³, dumping a few-hundred baby crickets on a pretty surprised, pretty pissed, pretty skivvies-clad Sigourney Weaver. But I didn’t really prick up my ears until his urban/ecclesiastical serial killer masterpiece Se7en revealed to me a key to unlocking the Coens’ Barton Fink–being, as they were, thematic doppelgängers. Soaked in wet and Hemingway, Fincher declares the world a scam and appoints himself the snake-oil barker shilling from the proscenium on the wagon; Barton Fink, also stained sepia brown, also ostensibly engaged in the pursuit of a serial killer and the excoriation of deadly sins, is the spirit to Se7en‘s flesh. Even as he flounders at the heartbeat, Fincher finds the headlong of his carnal lather again in his adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, establishing his mission statement as subterranean explorations of masculine aggression and explaining to me my tendency to confuse Fincher’s films with those of Michael Mann. Focusing on the testosterone in Fincher’s pictures offers partial explanation of the movies in his oeuvre that don’t work (and, within those failures, the parts that do). Too, it’s explanation of why it is that Fight Club‘s ending is so jarringly unsatisfying–“You met me at kind of a strange time in my life” the nancy punchline to two-plus hours of quintessential asshole cinema.