Cars 3 (2017)

June 20, 2017Posted in2017, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Sports, Theatrical

Cars3

**/****
screenplay by Kiel Murray and Bob Peterson and Mike Rich
directed by Brian Fee

by Walter Chaw I don’t understand very much about the Cars universe. I don’t understand its rules. Do the sentient cars feel pain? What part of them needs to “die” in order for them to die? The implication is that the voice actor needs to die, but even then the Paul Newman-voiced “Doc” is resurrected (along with Tom Magliozzi’s “Rusty”) in Cars 3 through the miracle of old voice outtakes and flashback sequences. It raises questions about sentience in a Blade Runner sort of way. It invites speculation that this is all a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which our “smart” cars have either outlasted, or outwitted, their primate creators. I wonder, too, about how they reproduce, as these films have always been clear that there are “children” in this universe. Or are they like child vampires: wizened monsters trapped in infant chassis? When I look at a sentient ambulance in this one’s central “Flesh Fair” demolition-derby sequence and how its patient bay is built for a human-sized customer and not a car, well…it raises questions. And let’s talk about the idea of a demolition derby in a film populated entirely by thinking, feeling cars. What would the human equivalent to this be? Thunderdome? It’s worth a conversation, though it’s not the conversation Cars 3 wants to have.

Rough Night (2017)

June 17, 2017Posted in2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Scarlett Johansson, ZERO STARS

Roughnight

ZERO STARS/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, Zoë Kravitz
screenplay by Lucia Aniello & Paul W. Downs
directed by Lucia Aniello

by Walter Chaw Going by the trailers, I thought Lucia Aniello’s Rough Night was going to be a distaff Very Bad Things–which in the grand calculus of things would’ve been a very good thing. Peter Berg’s masterpiece of bad behaviour and karmic vengeance is uncompromising, hilarious, vicious, and at least five or six years ahead of its time. (1998 was not kind to it.) The problem with this genre is essentially Judd Apatow, who, though fitfully funny, infects his pictures and their imitators–of which this is one–with a thick strain of conservative morality. His movies climax in marriage and monogamy and the very restoration of society. Very Bad Things ends with paralysis, death, and half-life; Rough Night ends by excusing everything, making sure everyone is friends and cool and shit, and explaining away why it is that the truly noxious character at the centre of it all is the way she is. Spoiler: it’s because her mother is dying of Alzheimer’s and she’s trying to give her a rosy picture of her…you know what, never mind. Above and beyond any ugliness embedded in the film’s premise and execution, the exploitation of this disease for some sort of moral reclamation is the ugliest. It’s completely unnecessary. It’s noxious.

Fist Fight (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 30, 2017Posted in2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

Fistfight1

½*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras D
starring Ice Cube, Charlie Day, Tracy Morgan, Jillian Bell
screenplay by Van Robichaux & Evan Susser
directed by Richie Keen

by Bill Chambers Dick joke, dick joke, vamp, vamp, dick joke, vamp, soapbox, gag reel. That’s the stalwart formula of modern comedies, because why wouldn’t it be? People love dicks–pics, jokes, presidents–and the rude jazz of improv and a message that turns junk food into a healthy smoothie. People love smoothies. And bloopers? Are you shitting me? Second only to sliced bread. I have this theory I’m workshopping about social media making everyone believe they’re a comedian and therefore threatened by anything that might be funnier than they are, turning studios into peddlers of junk comedy. This feels somewhat complementary to another pet theory of mine, which I’ve mentioned before in these parts, that digital filmmaking precipitated comedy’s decline the way that video ruined pornography: by making the genre more purely exploitative of the talent, at the obvious expense of artistic discipline. Why craft a punchline when the camera can run indefinitely while you look for one? Anyway, Fist Fight is shit.

Snatched (2017)

May 14, 2017Posted in2017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

Snatched

ZERO STARS/****
starring Amy Schumer, Goldie Hawn, Joan Cusack, Ike Barinholtz
written by Katie Dippold
directed by Jonathan Levine

by Walter Chaw Snatched is an unbearable piece of shit about an unbearable piece of shit (Amy Schumer) and her mother (Goldie Hawn), who get kidnapped for ransom in Ecuador and eventually escape into Colombia. Being an unbearable piece of shit is, of course, Amy Schumer’s shtick, and she plays it to the hilt here as Emily, a self-absorbed, selfie-obsessed piece of shit who gets dumped by her boyfriend (Randall Park, describing their respective career trajectories in his only bit of dialogue) after losing her job. Said boyfriend is a rocker about to go big and be inundated with “hundreds of pussies,” breaking the ice on the vagina jokes that begin with the title, sort of, and continue more or less unabated for ninety interminable minutes. Fans of Schumer will be reminded that her vagina smells like soup. It occurs to me that the only way this film could have been good would be if Tom Green were starring in it and it was twenty years ago. Tom Green was brave. Amy Schumer is not brave.

Wishmaster Collection: 4-Film Set [Vestron Video Collector’s Series] – Blu-ray Disc

March 31, 2017Posted in1990s, 2000s, 2017, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror

Wishmaster14

WISHMASTER (1997)
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Tammy Lauren, Andrew Divoff, Chris Lemmon, Robert Englund
written by Peter Atkins
directed by Robert Kurtzman

WISHMASTER 2: EVIL NEVER DIES (1999)
*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Andrew Divoff, Paul Johannson, Holly Fields, Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister, Jr.
written and directed by Jack Sholder

WISHMASTER 3: BEYOND THE GATES OF HELL (2001)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jason Connery, A.J. Cook, Tobias Mehler, John Novak
screenplay by Alexander Wright
directed by Chris Angel

WISHMASTER: THE PROPHECY FULFILLED (2002)
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Michael Trucco, Tara Spencer-Nairn, Jason Thompson, John Novak
screenplay by John Benjamin Martin
directed by Chris Angel

by Sydney Wegner The Wishmaster saga begins with a quick infodump about angels and demons from narrator Angus Scrimm, the folklore giving way to a lush array of reds and purples and sandy earth tones as a sorcerer forges a magic red gemstone over the opening credits. In 1127 Persia, something is wreaking havoc on a crowded square; a skeleton rips its way out of a man’s skin and walks around to join several other horrifying atrocities. The sorcerer (Ari Barak) pushes his way through the screaming crowd to the King (Richard Assad), who’s being advised by a Djinn (a.k.a. the Wishmaster, played by a ferociously campy Andrew Divoff) that he must make a third wish to stop the violence. But the sorcerer manages to trap him in the gemstone, stopping the King before his third wish can grant the Djinn the power to rip through dimensions and unleash his Djinn brethren onto the earth. This prologue sets up a world of magic and fantasy and folklore the series never quite re-establishes. While the ancient imagery is vaguely referenced hereafter, the world of Wishmaster won’t feel this sensual or mystical again.

20th Century Women (2016) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

March 27, 2017Posted in****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, FFC Must-Own

20thcenturywomen2

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup
written and directed by Mike Mills

by Walter Chaw Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women is beautiful for the way that it listens. It hears how people talk, and it lets them. It watches the way people interact and allows that to speak volumes for them. It’s a film, like so many lately, about communication. There’s a moment, late, where a young man–a boy, really–says to his mother that he’s an individual: “I’m not all men, I’m just me.” And she says, “Well… yes and no.” It’s a beautiful exchange, performed exquisitely, timed perfectly. It’s sublime, not the least for being smart and dead-on. Kind and pointed and impossibly eloquent about certain uncomfortable truths, 20th Century Women is an invitation to have ultimate conversations about how we ruin our children with our best intentions and how that has always been so and will always be so. In multiple interludes, Mills speeds up the film, blurring the action with lighting effects and throwing in archival images while including narration like “the world is very big.” It is. The picture holds to the idea that the world is incomprehensible and that we’re acted on by forces we cannot control–and at the end of it, after we’re gone, it goes on without having known we were there. There’s a certain piquancy to that that needs to be earned, and is earned.

Rules Don’t Apply (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 2, 2017Posted in2016, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

Rulesdontapply3

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Matthew Broderick, Lily Collins
screenplay by Warren Beatty
directed by Warren Beatty

by Walter Chaw The title refers to Howard Hughes, I think, and becomes a song its ingénue sings a couple of times over the course of the film. Moreover, it refers to Warren Beatty at this point in an extraordinary career that began in the New American Cinema and that wave of Method actors filling in the spaces left behind by the Golden Age. He was impossibly beautiful, and played against it whenever he could. He was whip-smart. Unabashedly political. Unapologetically a legendary philanderer who made perhaps his greatest single impression on my generation with a surprise cameo in then-girlfriend Madonna’s documentary monument to herself, Truth or Dare. Any investigation, though, finds that Beatty is a definitive voice of a definitive moment in the cinematic history of the United States. It’s been fifteen years since his last film as an actor, twenty as a director. In the meantime: rumours and speculation about this long-gestating production–his dream project, the culmination of a storied career behind and in front of the camera. And now here it is, Rules Don’t Apply, and it’s exceedingly uncomfortable, a film that leaves Beatty, acting here as co-star, director, producer, and credited screenwriter, exceptionally vulnerable. As capstones go, it’s an interesting one.

The Exterminating Angel (1962) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 28, 2017Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2017, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

Exterminating1

El Ángel Exterminador
****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Silvia Pinal, Jacqueline Andere, José Baviera, Augusto Benedico
screenplay by Luis Buñuel, based on the story “Los Náufragos de la Calle de la Providencia” by Luis Alcoriza and Luis Buñuel
directed by Luis Buñuel

by Bryant Frazer The first scene of The Exterminating Angel takes place at the gate outside a stately mansion where the house’s butler, Julio (Claudio Brook), confronts Lucas (Ángel Merino), a servant trying to sneak off the grounds just as the staff is preparing a dinner party for twenty. The worker hesitates for a moment, then continues on his way, the butler calling angrily after him: “Never set foot in this house again.” It’s the beginning of a very long night for the steward, who is vexed as his waiters and kitchen staff, one by one or in pairs, desert their posts for the evening at the worst possible time. The servants know something’s wrong, and though they’re not sure what it is, none of them–save the unflappable Julio, who keeps the gears turning smoothly–are willing to stick around to find out. When Lucia (Lucy Gallardo), the frustrated lady of the house, barks her offense at this betrayal, Julio is there to reassure her. “Domestic help grows more impertinent by the day, madam,” he declares.

The Lego Batman Movie (2017)

February 12, 2017Posted in2017, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Superhero, Theatrical

Legobatman

*½/****
screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers and Jared Stern & John Whittington
directed by Chris McKay

by Walter Chaw Ugly, loud, twenty minutes too long, and half as clever as it thinks it is, Cartoon Network stalwart Chris McKay’s The Lego Batman Movie is saved from becoming something other than Shrek: Longform Commercial by a single scene that demonstrates a genuine emotional knowledge of the Batman character: Batman (a returning Will Arnett), after a long day of antic motion, stays up by himself in his immense, empty home, gazing at a picture of his dead parents and wishing they could have seen how he turned out. It happens early, though, and the rest of the picture’s content to make fun of DC lore (“It’s worth a Google!” says Joker (voiced by Zach Galifianakis), having listed a few of the stupider villains in Batman’s rogue’s gallery) while attempting occasional earnestness here and there along the long road to the standard kid-fare message of “family is where you find it.” The Lego Batman Movie is both fan-pleasing and self-loathing, placing it in the company of the wave of faux-nostalgia garbage millennials wear now like that tenth-generation McGinty claiming Irish heritage on St. Patrick’s Day. A low bar for inauthenticity, and by the third or fourth joke about how corny the old TV show is, you remember the old TV show had more meta intelligence in any ten minutes of a given episode than the whole of this exhausting exercise.

20th Century Women (2016)

January 4, 2017Posted in****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

20thcenturywomen

****/****
starring Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup
written and directed by Mike Mills

by Walter Chaw Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women is beautiful for the way that it listens. It hears how people talk, and it lets them. It watches the way people interact and allows that to speak volumes for them. It’s a film, like so many lately, about communication. There’s a moment, late, where a young man–a boy, really–says to his mother that he’s an individual: “I’m not all men, I’m just me.” And she says, “Well… yes and no.” It’s a beautiful exchange, performed exquisitely, timed perfectly. It’s sublime, not the least for being smart and dead-on. Kind and pointed and impossibly eloquent about certain uncomfortable truths, 20th Century Women is an invitation to have ultimate conversations about how we ruin our children with our best intentions and how that has always been so and will always be so. In multiple interludes, Mills speeds up the film, blurring the action with lighting effects and throwing in archival images while including narration like “the world is very big.” It is. The picture holds to the idea that the world is incomprehensible and that we’re acted on by forces we cannot control–and at the end of it, after we’re gone, it goes on without having known we were there. There’s a certain piquancy to that that needs to be earned, and is earned.

Paterson (2016)

December 28, 2016Posted in****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

Paterson

****/****
starring Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Barry Shabaka Henley, Masatoshi Nagase
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Walter Chaw My Pocket Poets edition of William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell: Improvisations has the worn, faded, ineffably-dusty feeling of a paperback printed on low stock from a certain period. The back cover tells me there was once a day it could be had for $1.25. I’ve read it probably a hundred times, though I can’t say I ever read it sequentially. This was the first year, as it happens, that I read The Art of War sequentially. I regard both texts as reference books: for the winning, for the existing. The kind you open to a page and read carefully, and then you put the book down next to you and look at the world differently for a moment. I have favourite passages from each. This is one of them from the Williams:

War Dogs (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

November 28, 2016Posted in2016, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, War

Wardogs1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana De Armas, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by Stephen Chin and Todd Phillips & Jason Smilovic, based on the ROLLING STONE article “Arms and the Dudes” by Guy Lawson
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw Like The Big Short before it, Todd Phillips’s War Dogs is a breezy, loose, “for dummies” gloss on recent history that says for all the things you thought were going to hell in the world, you don’t know the fucking half of it, buddy. It details how W.’s administration, after being accused of cronyism in making Dick Cheney’s Haliburton wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of wealth with the gift of bid-free defense contracts, opened the floodgates by essentially giving every unscrupulous asshole on the planet the opportunity to bid on defense contracts. In that pursuit, our government set up an “eBay” list where major arms dealers could pick off the larger contracts, and dilettantes and arms “day-traders” could, from the comfort of their basements, sell the United States military a few thousand handguns. War Dogs adapts a magazine article about two assholes in particular, David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who made a fortune, then made a terrible mistake when they decided to traffic a hundred million rounds of defective Chinese AK-47 ammo by disguising it as Albanian stock. Actually, their mistake is that Efraim is a psychotic loser so pathological in his incompetence that even the U.S. government had no choice but to do something about it. It’s a level of obviousness matched by the film in moments like one in the middle of the game where Efraim screams, “Fuck the American taxpayer!” OK, yes, we get it.

Rules Don’t Apply (2016)

November 24, 2016Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Rulesdontapply

*/****
starring Warren Beatty, Lily Collins, Alden Ehrenreich, Annette Bening
screenplay by Warren Beatty
directed by Warren Beatty

by Walter Chaw The title refers to Howard Hughes, I think, and becomes a song its ingénue sings a couple of times over the course of the film. Moreover, it refers to Warren Beatty at this point in an extraordinary career that began in the New American Cinema and that wave of Method actors filling in the spaces left behind by the Golden Age. He was impossibly beautiful, and played against it whenever he could. He was whip-smart. Unabashedly political. Unapologetically a legendary philanderer who made perhaps his greatest single impression on my generation with a surprise cameo in then-girlfriend Madonna’s documentary monument to herself, Truth or Dare. Any investigation, though, finds that Beatty is a definitive voice of a definitive moment in the cinematic history of the United States. It’s been fifteen years since his last film as an actor, twenty as a director. In the meantime: rumours and speculation about this long-gestating production–his dream project, the culmination of a storied career behind and in front of the camera. And now here it is, Rules Don’t Apply, and it’s exceedingly uncomfortable, a film that leaves Beatty, acting here as co-star, director, producer, and credited screenwriter, exceptionally vulnerable. As capstones go, it’s an interesting one.

Vamp (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

November 23, 2016Posted in1980s, 2016, Arrow Video, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Vampire

Vamp1

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Chris Makepeace, Sandy Baron, Robert Rusler, Grace Jones
screenplay by Richard Wenk
directed by Richard Wenk

by Bryant Frazer In concept a little bit After Hours and a little bit An American Werewolf in London, Vamp attempts to transplant some New York cool into a story set in the L.A. underground, where a downtown strip club is staffed by lithesome vampires who prey on losers and outsiders yearning for companionship in the lonesome city. Vamp isn’t scary, though it’s fairly stylish, thanks in large part to Grace Jones, who flew into Hollywood with an entourage (including artists Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Richard Bernstein) to play Katrina, an exotic dancer with an appetite for flesh. While the film is pleasantly weird whenever she’s on screen, that’s not much of the time. The bulk of it is a laid-back assemblage of moderately clever ideas–a bunch of clockwork gears that never mesh into anything much.

Moana (2016)

November 21, 2016Posted in2016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Musical, Theatrical

Moana

**½/****
screenplay by Jared Bush
directed by Ron Clements & John Musker (co-directed by Don Hall & Chris Williams)

by Walter Chaw Arguably, the only place it really matters in terms of the diversity tango in Disney’s new animated musical Moana is in the songwriting and voice-acting, and so although there are only white people directing (four credited directors) and writing (eight credited scenarists), find Opetaia Foa’i and Lin-Manuel Miranda behind the music and Dwayne Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho behind the Pacific Islander characters. This is progress. Also progress is what seems, to this non-Polynesian, like a real effort to not appropriate a culture so much as represent its mythology, tied as it must be to a narrative about a young woman, Moana (Cravalho), a stout Disney heroine of that certain mold for whom adventure calls, declaring her independence from the patriarchy. We’ve seen her before, is what I’m saying, but she’s neither sexualized nor given an aspirational mate/therapeutic marriage. Progress. I’ll take it. There’s even a moment where demigod Maui (Johnson) makes a crack about Moana being in the Disney canon. Progress? Self-awareness, at least. I’ll take that, too. What’s unfortunate is that for everything that’s very good about the film, there’s something very familiar. The argument should probably be made that familiarity is the sugar that helps the medicine of its progressive elements go down. It worked for The Force Awakens.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|[The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 21, 2016Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Film Festivals, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Pdl1

****/****
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
DVD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw Indicated by spacious compositions and a bracing unpredictability, Paul Thomas Anderson’s romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love is a marriage, if you will, between Claire Denis’s audacious Trouble Every Day and Steven Shainberg’s sadomasochism fairytale Secretary. Here’s a trio of films that announce 2002 as a year perhaps best defined by its aggressively non-traditional, hopelessly romantic love stories (toss Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven, Cronenberg’s Spider, and Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction into that mix).

Finding Dory (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 15, 2016Posted in2016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Pixar

Findingdory1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Victoria Strouse
directed by Andrew Stanton (co-directed by Angus MacLane)

by Walter Chaw Credit is due Pixar and writer-director Andrew Stanton (co-directing here with Angus MacLane) for wanting to right what I don’t know anybody really perceived as a wrong. I remember thinking when I first saw Finding Nemo that Dory’s inability to retain short-term memories was a product of her species. In the new Finding Dory, it’s revealed to indeed be a mental disability, one that her parents (voiced by Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton) worry over a great deal in a series of flashbacks. They create coping mechanisms for their daughter. They devise a literal shell game so that when Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) inevitably gets lost, she can find her way back home. It’s an interesting tactic to take, this mild scolding that what was funny at first is, in fact, a debilitating, dangerous disorder. And a good portion of the film looks for ways to valorize Dory’s condition, to avoid making her the butt of jokes or an object of pity. For the most part, it does this by surrounding her with characters who also have a disability: Hank (Ed O’Neill), an octopus that’s lost an arm (“Septipus!” says Dory, “I can’t remember, but I can count!”); and Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a hopelessly myopic whale shark. Lest we forget, Nemo (Hayden Rolence, taking over from Alexander Gould) has a deformed fin, something he flaps at dad Marlin (Albert Brooks) after Marlin says something disparaging about Dory’s memory issue.

Blood Diner (1987) [Vestron Video Collector’s Series] – Blu-ray Disc

October 31, 2016Posted in1980s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror

Blooddiner1

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B+
starring Rick Burks, Carl Crew, Roger Dauer, LaNette La France
written by Michael Sonye
directed by Jackie Kong

by Bryant Frazer So bad it’s good? I wouldn’t go that far. But Blood Diner is definitely something–a no-frills pastiche of 1950s disembodied-brain sci-fi potboiler, 1960s Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter movie, 1970s cannibal-cuisine flick, and early-1980s buddy-cop movie. I’m tempted to say it stitches together a Frankenstein’s patchwork of genre movies because it has no vision of its own, but that’s too glib. If nothing else, 20-something Asian-American director Jackie Kong (Night Patrol) loves L.A.: she wrapped all of those genre influences around a love letter to the city’s underground music scene circa 1987, casting punk rockers and rockabilly singers as extras, bit players, and movie stars in a story about a pair of pretty-boy sibling serial killers who run a popular foodie destination on Hollywood Boulevard where the vegetarian dishes are, unbeknownst to patrons, boosted by the presence of human flesh in the recipe.

Chopping Mall (1986) [Vestron Video Collector’s Series] – Blu-ray Disc

October 25, 2016Posted in1980s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi

Choppingmall2

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Kelli Maroney, Tony O’Dell, John Terlesky, Dick Miller
written by Jim Wynorski & Steve Mitchell
directed by Jim Wynorski

by Bryant Frazer Chopping Mall is not the shopping-centre slasher movie its title suggests. Here’s what you really need to know: It includes a scene where a woman clad in light-blue Playboy panties runs screaming through the spacious halls of the Sherman Oaks Galleria in a hail of laser fire, chased by a killer robot resembling a cross between a Dalek from “Doctor Who” and Number Five from Short Circuit. The opening sequence features Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov in a cameo as their Paul and Mary Bland characters from the cult classic Eating Raoul. The always-game Barbara Crampton, who had just shot Re-Animator, takes her top off. And, like the maraschino cherry on top of a soft-serve strawberry sundae, the great character actor Dick Miller plays a crusty janitor who trash-talks one of the malevolent tin-can tyrants like a Jet giving the finger to Officer Krupke.

Swiss Army Man (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

October 24, 2016Posted in2016, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Musical, Romance, Zombie

Swissarmyman1

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
written and directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan

by Walter Chaw Bridging the gap between Charlie Kaufman movies, the Daniels’ Swiss Army Man is one high-concept conceit carried through to every possible ontological end. It veers, dizzily, between slapstick scatological comedy and poignant existential philosophy, doing so with the sort of invention generally credited to silent-film clowns. Open with Hank (Paul Dano), shipwrecked, about to hang himself when he notices the corpse of Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washed ashore. He looks for signs of life. There aren’t any, save the rapid decomposition that’s causing Manny to fart. A lot. Manny’s farts carry Hank back to civilization, in fact, in a trailer-spoiled motorboat sequence that would be indescribable were it not right there. Like so many things in the film, it’s not clear that this is “actually” happening or just a fantasy of Hank’s before dying. By the middle of the picture, it’s apparent that challenging the border between the cinema real and the cinema imagined is the point. If it destroys that conversation, it allows for a better one about the nature of friendship and honesty, whether it’s possible to ever truly be open with another human being and, if it is, whether it would be something welcomed or rejected. Unconditional acceptance is a charming romantic fantasy, but that’s all it is.