Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 43 of 48

Ghosts of Mars (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

March 16, 20092000s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars
*/****
DVD – Image B Sound B Extras C-
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras C-
starring Ice Cube, Natasha Henstridge, Jason Statham, Clea DuVall
screenplay by Larry Sulkis & John Carpenter
directed by John Carpenter

by Walter Chaw An uneasy, hippified version of a cowboys and Indians shoot-’em-up, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars is an exhausted shade of the once-hip director’s oeuvre, baldly stealing from his Assault on Precinct 13 before partially resurrecting later works The Fog, Escape from N.Y./L.A., The Thing, and even They Live in the focus on an interracial pair hooking up to kick alien ass. It sounds like an agreeable enough concoction, especially when one considers the presence of the lovely Natasha Henstridge in a tight sweater perspiring alongside cult personalities Pam Grier, Ice Cube, and Snatch‘s Jason Statham, but Ghosts of Mars is a rudderless enterprise that doesn’t know what it’s doing and bores while doing it. The most disturbing thing about this aggressively tame production is the suspicion that the John Carpenter who used to make interesting socio-political genre films has been taken over by one of his own mindless zombie Martians.

Cadillac Records (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

March 10, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright, Gabrielle Union, Beyoncé Knowles
written and directed by Darnell Martin

by Bryant Frazer Curiously underdistributed on its release last December, when it opened on fewer than 700 screens across the U.S. despite a reasonably big-name cast, Cadillac Records is a labour of love that has problems but is hard to dislike. Writer-director Darnell Martin is probably too ambitious for her own good, struggling to mount not just a Muddy Waters biopic and/or the Chess Records story, but also a conflicted look at the business acumen and chicanery that attended the rapid evolution of rock-and-roll in the 1950s. While the film suffers from kitchen-sink syndrome, at its best it’s an engaging piece of advocacy for the bluesmen who transformed American music.

The French Connection (1971) [Five Star Collection] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

March 10, 20091970s, 2009, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A+
BD – Image D+ Sound B- Extras A+
starring Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey, Roy Scheider, Tony Lo Bianco
screenplay by Ernest Tidyman
directed by William Friedkin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s no denying the skill that went into The French Connection. It’s the runner-up exciting film about people doing almost nothing, second only to All the President’s Men–and I’m only half-joking when I say that. It takes a director with vision to make a couple of guys tailing a couple of other guys interesting, and William Friedkin definitely has the vision: he single-handedly creates the meaning that holds the sketchy script together and keeps us caring about whether our heroic flatfoots get their dubious man. That meaning, however, ought to give us pause, as it makes that same year’s hit Dirty Harry look like Easy Rider by comparison.

Pretty Woman (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

March 2, 20091990s, 2009, 2016, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

***½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, Ralph Bellamy, Hector Elizondo
screenplay by J.F. Lawton
directed by Garry Marshall

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Well, I’m willing to admit this much: Pretty Woman has a ridiculous premise. Corporate raider Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) buys up struggling companies and liquidates their assets. While in Los Angeles planning the purchase of ship manufacturer Morse Industries, he gets lost on the way back to his Beverly Hills hotel and stops on Hollywood Blvd. to ask for directions. This is where he meets Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts), a hooker desperate to pay off a few debts. She subsequently drives him to his hotel; as Edward recently broke up with his girlfriend in New York and feels bad about making Vivian take the bus home, he invites her to spend the night. They bargain over her price, arrive at the figure of $300, and sleep together. In the morning, Edward has a phone conversation with his lawyer, Philip Stuckey (Jason Alexander), who suggests he have dinner with James Morse, the owner and founder of Morse Industries, and that he bring a date to keep things social. Still on the phone, Edward walks in on Vivian singing along to Prince in the bathtub and offers to pay her for the entire week to be at his “beck and call.”

High School Musical (2007) [Remix] – Blu-ray + DVD; High School Musical 2 (2008) [Extended Edition] – Blu-ray Disc; High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2009) [Deluxe Extended Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 25, 20092000s, 2007, 2008, 2009, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Music, Musical, Romance, Teen, Television

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL
**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel
written by Peter Barsocchini
directed by Kenny Ortega

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 2
½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel
written by Peter Barsocchini
directed by Kenny Ortega

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3: SENIOR YEAR
*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel
screenplay by Peter Barsocchini
directed by Kenny Ortega

by Ian Pugh Not exactly the cultural apocalypse its Disney Channel roots and preteen popularity would have you believe, High School Musical is no worse, really, than any other cookie-cutter musical in recent memory. A by-product of pandering to a young, young audience, its biggest sin is that it alleges a greater basis in reality than its more “adult” contemporaries: The movie endeavours to give credence to the familiar tropes of storybook romance and rags-to-riches by applying them to the politicized zoo known as high school. Troy (Zac Efron) is captain of the basketball team and Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) is a brainiac, but all it takes is one happenstance karaoke duet for them to discover they both enjoy singing a whole lot, and their pursuit of that mutual interest throws the entire clique-driven society of East High into disarray. Although it’s bolstered by a few genuine chuckles, the premise can’t hide the fact that the high-school backdrop actively highlights how inconsequential the whole blasted thing truly is.

Nights in Rodanthe (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

February 24, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Romance

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Scott Glenn, Christopher Meloni
screenplay by Ann Peacock and John Romano, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks
directed by George C. Wolfe

by Walter Chaw I will say this about Nights in Rodanthe: spoken Nicholas Sparks is preferable to written Nicholas Sparks, because when people speak, complete sentences and thoughts that go somewhere aren’t necessarily at a premium. If there was ever an artist ill-suited for his chosen medium, it’s Sparks; and if there was ever proof (as if proof were needed after the success of Robert James Waller, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and Dean Koontz) that cuddling ignorance was a growth industry, well, there’s Sparks again. And here, as further cause for divorce from the great nation of culturally-retarded people who have always comprised our metaphorical heartland, is the fourth adaptation of a bound stable of Sparks’s saccharine logorrhoea (Gertrude Stein in practice in the unlikeliest of places), Nights in Rodanthe, which, in the great tradition of pieces of shit, is exactly like every other piece of shit in every other genre. (Be thankful, at least, that the picture, in a futile attempt to separate itself from The Notebook, jettisons the novel’s framing device, that great staple of books by people like Sparks and Mitch Albom–in so doing depriving some dusty, geriatric, beloved television star one last paycheck.) Helpless before the towering majesty of the formula god it worships, the picture plays out like a slasher pic for girls, where the only sport is trying to figure out which of the heroes is going to die, how, when, and by what grievous hand. I’d argue that the catharsis parceled out by garbage like this is identical to the “happy ending” whored out by lower-aspiring slasher cinema: the curiosity about the hows is delicious–and perverse. If you think I’ve dropped a spoiler, by the way, you haven’t seen Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, or The Notebook, and–more than likely–you’re not going to see Nights in Rodanthe, either.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 23, 20091970s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Directors: Dario Argento, DVD, Horror, Mystery

L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo
***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Tony Musante, Suzy Kendall, Eva Renzi, Enrico Maria Salerno
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Dario Argento’s uncredited adaptation of Fredric Brown’s The Screaming Mimi (brought to the screen once before in 1958 by Gerd Oswald), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage marks the “Italian Hitchcock”‘s directorial debut as well as the moment at which the Italian giallo genre gained international currency. Though the genre’s invention (named after the yellow/giallo covers of Italian penny dreadfuls) is credited to compatriot Mario Bava (see, especially, his astonishing Blood and Black Lace), Argento’s scary polish and cunning for film language bridged the cultural, mainstream/arthouse gap with agility and audacity. He’s not just borrowing from Hitchcock, he’s filtering the Master’s work through his own sensibilities. Argento did for the slasher genre with his “supernatural” pictures like Suspiria and Inferno what Sergio Leone did for the Western, making them dirtier, sexier, rhythmic, and more acceptable to the literati; and he does here for the police procedural/neo-noir a similar kind of post-modern hipster reinvention. But it’s not merely an intellectual exercise (in fact, the obscurity of the clues (its title at once revealing the identity of the killer and referring obliquely to the red herring of The Maltese Falcon) makes deciphering the procedural improbable at best)–rather, it’s the visceral nature of the exercise that delights. It’s Argento’s revelry in one part in the unrelieved nihilism and delicious confusion that would characterize the best of the ’70s’ paranoia cinema–and in the other part, in the joy of great genre filmmaking.

Max Payne (2008) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 19, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image N/A Sound B Extras C
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Olga Kurylenko
screenplay by Beau Thorne
directed by John Moore

by Walter Chaw Valkyries: a staple of Norse mythology, right? Picking sides in fights, flying the fallen to Valhalla, and becoming winged waitstaff in that eternal beer hall in the sky. (Or fat women in Wagner.) First thing that comes to mind isn’t a mind-blowing, Timothy Leary-esque freak out–unless you’re John Moore’s ridiculous Max Payne. That isn’t the worst thing about Max Payne, but it’s one of them. And while there’s no crime in appropriating concepts you don’t entirely understand, there probably should be. This is not a smart movie, and it doesn’t know whether it should be a faithful adaptation of its video game source material or a post-modern take on films noir, though it should be said that it looks beautiful anyway, a successful iteration of the Sin City aesthetic. The only thing really missing from its retinue of noir tropes is a stoic anti-hero at its centre; Max Payne badly miscalculates not in casting professional lump of meat Mark (Talks to Animals) Wahlberg, but in subsequently allowing him to attempt a fully fleshed-out performance when his usual monotone would’ve fit the pomo/homage portion of this film perfectly.

Quarantine (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

February 18, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Spain

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Jennifer Carpenter, Jay Hernandez, Columbus Short, Jonathon Schaech
screenplay by John Erick Dowdle & Drew Dowdle, based on the motion picture [REC] by Jamie Balageuro & Luis A. Berdejo & Paco Plaza
directed by John Erick Dowdle

by Bryant Frazer Blood and saliva flow freely in this faux-documentary mash-up of the 2004 Dawn of the Dead and The Blair Witch Project as a group of humans–residents, cops, firefighters, and TV journalists–are locked inside a quarantined L.A. apartment building where a strange, virulent infection is passing from person to person, turning them into powerful, frothing killing machines who’d just as soon take a bite out of your neck as look at you. The film begins as spunky soft-news reporter Angela (Jennifer Carpenter, best-known from Showtime’s “Dexter”) is shadowing a group of firefighters on the overnight shift. The first fifteen minutes or so comprise a getting-to-know-you collection of playful firehouse moments between Angela and two of the more handsome devils on duty (Jay Hernandez and Johnathon Schaech) before the movie segues smoothly into an extended, single-location horror show characterized by very long takes and an elaborate, almost theatrical blocking that makes Quarantine feel somewhat akin to a filmed stage play. It’s the sort of premise John Carpenter could have nailed in the 1980s.

Mirrors (2008) [Unrated] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 16, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, France, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Romania

ZERO STARS/****
DVD – Image N/A Sound A Extras D+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Cameron Boyce, Erica Gluck
screenplay by Alexandre Aja & Grégory Levasseur
directed by Alexandre Aja

by Ian Pugh You have to hand it to Alexandre Aja: Although he applies his marginal talent to different ends from within his genre of choice, he remains fairly consistent in his psychotic bursts of rage and complete obliviousness to the same. Whether he’s making awful, sadistic horror flicks that pretend to be about nothing (his anti-lesbian screed High Tension) or–somehow worse–awful, sadistic horror flicks that pretend to be about something (his remake of The Hills Have Eyes and now Mirrors), his targets are clear. In his eyes, women and rural folk are by turns cowardly, evil, and idiotic, deserving of nothing but a horrific death. How anyone could lump his brand of bloodthirsty hatred in with Tarantino or Argento–both real artists who have grappled with their own desires and talents in the context of fiction and reality–is, frankly, beyond me. Hell, even Eli Roth, for all his puerile masturbation and inexplicable worship of the nasty Cannibal Holocaust, has questioned his own methods on occasion. When Aja rips off Amy Smart’s mandible just seconds after she steps into a bathtub in Mirrors, there’s no thrill, no shock, no sense of accountability–only the niggling, terrifying conjecture that this man would go out and hurt someone given half the chance.

Groundhog Day (1993) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 10, 20091990s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Time Travel

***½/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Chris Elliot, Stephen Tobolowsky
screenplay by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis
directed by Harold Ramis

by Bill Chambers I’ve heard the argument that Groundhog Day fails because it proposes the redemption of world-class crank Bill Murray–but, boy, does redemption fight an uphill battle against him. I suspect the criticism is misdirected at the prolific cinéma du redemption in general. Maybe the finest film yet directed by Harold Ramis (who’s unfortunately been stuck in a high-concept rut since–his own personal Groundhog Day), Groundhog Day turns the titular event, a hallowed celebration of Americana, into an existential abyss for Phil Connors (Murray), a self-centred weatherman for a TV station he considers a pit stop on the way to bigger and better things.

Ghost Town (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

February 3, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Ricky Gervais, Téa Leoni, Greg Kinnear, Billy Campbell
screenplay by David Koepp & John Kamps
directed by David Koepp

by Walter Chaw It’s appropriate that at the end of these cycles of films portraying New York as a convalescence ward (25^th Hour, In the Cut, Synecdoche, New York, Hellboy II), we have a movie like David Koepp’s Ghost Town that literalizes our wounded Metropolis as a graveyard. The picture joins Hancock among the year’s more pleasant surprises, both loaded as they are with small payloads packed with little, unexpected explosions of pathos and intimate observation. Koepp’s hyphenate stints (Stir of Echoes, Secret Window) have tended towards the supernatural by way of private dislocations, his spooks the manifestation of things left too long in the underneath. No less so Ghost Town, wherein asshole dentist Pincus (Ricky Gervais) survives a near-death colonoscopy only to find himself capable of conversing with the dearly departed–at least, those still tied to loved ones incapable of letting them go. Groundwork for a clumsy bit of pretentious tripe, no question, but Koepp lightens his avowed affection for overreaching by striving no farther than romantic-comedy rewards, balancing them with an admirable amount of leash turned over to Gervais’s acerbic improvisations. It’s interesting that the traditionally charming characters are cast as irritants or cads, their social facility viewed as defense mechanisms. Suddenly, the dental X-rays that unspool beneath the opening credits make perfect sense; Ghost Town is partly about a suspicion of surfaces.

Blue Streak (1999) – Blu-ray Disc

January 28, 20091990s, 2009, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Germany, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Martin Lawrence, Luke Wilson, Dave Chappelle, William Forsythe
screenplay by Michael Berry & John Blumenthal and Steve Carpenter
directed by Les Mayfield

by Bryant Frazer Very early on in Blue Streak, as Miles Logan, the character portrayed by a fast-talking Martin Lawrence, co-opts Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech to describe his own civil rights movement upon getting released from the joint after serving time for his role in a botched jewel heist, it’s clear the film is aiming for giddy irreverence. But slavish conformance to most conventions of the late-1990s PG-13 action farce keeps it from scaling the kind of heights that Lawrence’s confident and wholly unpretentious comic presence occasionally suggests.

Zodiac (2007) [2-Disc Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 20092000s, 2007, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards
screenplay by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw The best film of its kind since All the President’s Men, David Fincher’s Zodiac is another very fine telephone procedural drawn from another landmark bit of investigative journalism–though more fascinatingly, it’s another time capsule of a very specific era, flash-frozen and suspended in Fincher’s trademark amber. Still, by the very nature of its subject matter, Zodiac deals in millennial anxieties: the un-‘catchable’ foe; the unknowable cipher; the futility of the best efforts of good and smart men; and the disintegration of the nuclear family smashed to pudding in a diving bell collapsed under the pressure of the sinking outside. The film is as remarkable as it is because it’s about something as simple and enchanted as the human animal–not just bedraggled San Francisco detective Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), but also Zodiac’s two female victims and, in a strange echo, two almost-invisible wives: Toschi’s (June Raphael) and that of newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). Easy to say that actresses Raphael and Chloë Sevigny are wasted by being given nary anything to work with outside a terrified moment and a single speech, respectively; better to say that they assume the only function they can in a picture revolving around male cooperation and survival in a world that has reduced itself to the barbarous niceties of macho religions and arcane rituals. No accident that the Zodiac Killer’s partiality to a medieval code is central to a key revelation.

Dead & Buried (1981) [Limited Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc + I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 22, 20091980s, 1990s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

DEAD & BURIED
***/****
DVD – Image B- Sound C+ (Remixes)/B (Mono) Extras A
BD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring James Farentino, Melody Anderson, Jack Albertson, Lisa Blount
screenplay by Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon
directed by Gary A. Sherman

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
**/****
DVD|BD – Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze, Jr.
screenplay by Kevin Williamson, based on the novel by Lois Duncan
directed by Jim Gillespie

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gary A. Sherman’s Dead & Buried and Jim Gillespie’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, released theatrically fourteen years apart, together demonstrate that the more the horror genre stays the same, the more it changes. Each of these B-movies resorts to similar cheap tricks (first and foremost a coastal setting (the atmospheric equivalent of a non-perishable in horror)) and traffics in pessimism, yet one is genuinely hopeless and the other is trendily nihilistic–karo syrup as late-Nineties fashion accessory. A great gulf stands between the sensibilities of the two pictures that’s unearthed by drawing other such subtle distinctions: one is cruel, the other callous; one is about death, the other about killing; one is sexy, the other exploitive; and so on and so forth. Virtually indescribable to modern audiences despite its familiar elements, Dead & Buried is a Darwinian fossil of the horror cinema, whose DNA has been perverted by the progressive commercialization of the culture and weakening of the intellectual position. Simplified: Current scare flicks still sometimes enjoy provocative subtext (like the recent Freddy Vs. Jason); more often, they die on the vine from WB-itis.

Swing Vote (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

January 15, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Kevin Costner, Paula Patton, Kelsey Grammer, Madeline Carroll
screenplay by Jason Richman & Joshua Michael Stern
directed by Joshua Michael Stern

by Walter Chaw Another simple-minded liberal screed that does more harm to the liberal cause than the whole of Fox News could possibly dream, this salvo from the left positions itself as a wagging finger to the non-voters of the United States–so long as those non-voters are earnest (literally: the hero of the piece is named Ernest) and have precocious, politically-savvy preteen daughters. Yes, it’s the Homer and Lisa Simpson dyad reproduced with Kevin Costner and Abigail Breslin 2.0 Madeline Carroll. This year’s Man of the Year, Swing Vote is the kind of lefty pinko wet blanket that can’t take a stand without providing narration for it, until finally it reveals itself as a public-service announcement for the sanctity of casting a vote that’s properly counted. Hooray, Constitution! This doesn’t preclude a few potshots at the press, natch–take that, stupid First Amendment! Every scene of the film is an exclamation point delivered from atop a worst-of-Capra soapbox; those bemoaning that they don’t make ’em like they used to, take a big, heaving bite of Swing Vote, compared to which the Pollyannaism of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington reads like P.J. O’Rourke snark. Maybe it’s better to see the picture as a scary-prescient prediction of what would happen if someone like Ernest were not only tasked with choosing the next President of the United States, but moreover tabbed as the vice-presidential nominee of a major candidate. Think of Swing Vote as the mother-loving Sarah Palin story, and suddenly the movie’s every bit the frightening satirical comedy it wasn’t upon initial release.

Revolver (2005) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 6, 20092000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Thriller, UK

*/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
BD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Vincent Pastore, Andre Benjamin
written and directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw Give Guy Ritchie a little credit for being ambitious and take a little away from him for being so relentlessly pussy-whipped that Revolver, his return to the neo-Mod gangster genre that made his name, is one part rumination on the mystical mumbo-jumbo of his then-wife’s Kabbalah, one part exploration of the self-actualized ego, and every part pretentious, pseudo-intellectual garbage. It’s so fascinated with itself that the yak-track on the film’s DVD and Blu-ray releases finds Ritchie periodically consulting his assistant as an augur of whether or not Ritchie has gotten too complicated for the audience of nitwits not put off enough by the movie to avoid watching it again with the commentary activated. He believes he’s created something of such vast, far-reaching, ungraspable, existential implication that this cheap, showy action pic is the ne plus ultra of modern experience, with Ritchie our schlock Zoroaster, guiding us through avatar Jake Green (Jason Statham) as he emerges from years of solitary confinement, during which he learned the parameters of the perfect con by intercepting the chess moves of the two prisoners on either side of him. Jake has claustrophobia, something Ritchie helpfully offers is a “metaphorical fear,” by which I think he means that it’s a metaphor for all fear; his clumsiness with the articulation of this single concept illustrates how it is that the rest of it is such a godawful mess. Consider Revolver‘s interesting only to the extent that Ritchie’s self-absorption is ironic when applied to a picture about the internal struggle between Freud’s personality strata–never mind that Jake’s Super-Ego is André Benjamin and his Id appears to be motherfucking Big Pussy. Jesus, this is a stupid movie.

Pineapple Express (2008) [Unrated Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 5, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Seth Rogen, James Franco, Gary Cole, Danny McBride
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw I’m willing to concede that I don’t completely get it, but I’m still game to think about it because Pineapple Express has a peculiar pedigree. It boasts David Gordon Green as its director, and his regular DP Tim Orr is in charge of shooting the gross-out gags and stone-faced stoner riffs. The union makes the most sense if we read the film as a throwback/homage to the Seventies cycle of grindhouse exploitation flicks (doobies and dismemberment), thus explaining the old-school wipes and funkadelic soundtrack, the mote-flecked cinematography, the cruel violence, and, if it’s even possible, the air of reality throughout. Otherwise, the picture feels like a cynical patchwork stitching together this new comedy genre with a sensibility specifically designed to mock it. When über-stoner Saul (James Franco, in his Spicoli/The Dude breakout) runs through the dark woods, the flash I get isn’t to Cheech & Chong but to the convulsive opening of Green’s Undertow. And during an ending in an abandoned government research facility-turned-subterranean pot greenhouse, I couldn’t shake Green’s odd relationship with Asian stereotyping (remember the Feng Shui character from All the Real Girls?) in a troupe of black-clad Asian assassins clearly established as objects of derision. In truth, however, I don’t know if the derision is levied at Asians or at the criticism levied against Green’s perceived derision of the same.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

December 29, 20082000s, 2008, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Star Wars

*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C+
screenplay by Henry Gilroy, Steven Melching, Scott Murphy
directed by Dave Filoni

by Bryant Frazer Anyone over the age of 12 will quickly detect the distinctly secondhand elements comprised by Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a journey into George Lucas’s ever-dorkier galaxy far, far away that panders relentlessly to the tween demographic so prized by the Lucasfilm empire. This is clearly a Star Wars movie, borrowing design elements, stylistic tropes, and even specific camera angles and editorial strategies from the live-action films. But the kid-friendly strategies sink it–there has to be some mileage in dramatizing the heretofore unchronicled adventures of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, but there’s a glibness to the execution that makes this cut-rate excursion among the least compelling hero’s journeys in the Star Wars canon. Even the “Knights of the Old Republic” video game is a more rewarding endeavour.

Into the Wild (2007) [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

December 29, 20082000s, 2007, 2008, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras C+
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Hal Holbrook
screenplay by Sean Penn, based on the novel by Jon Krakauer
directed by Sean Penn

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Young and full of piss, Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch, amazing) is an idealist brimming with the kinds of ideas that young men entertain fresh out of school: diploma in hand, bile in throat, knowing everything about the world that there could possibly be to know. His politics, stringently black-and-white, aren’t that different from the very politics against which he’d rail; for as bleeding heart as kids can be, they tend to subscribe to the foundational belief that the United States is responsible for the welfare (and travails) of the rest of the planet, which is the basis for our self-declared status as moral policemen. In defense of Chris, whose saga has been documented in print by Jon Krakauer and now on film by Sean Penn, he doesn’t presume to change the world, he only wishes to escape it–the idea of zero impact taken to its logical conclusion. But the ideal of rediscovering Eden is as illusory (naïve, retarded, you name it) as the idea that a young, educated man from a privileged background and a family who loves him could ever retreat to Walden Pond with nary a ripple to mark his submersion. Into the Wild sports as infuriating a cipher at its centre as Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, and it’s to Penn’s credit that he doesn’t shy away from presenting Chris as a first-class Pinko asshole living his dream with just enough hypocrisy to get him killed and not quite enough to get him saved. Prophet/fool. It’s a manifestation of the smug maxim “Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.”