Comedy Archives - Page 14 of 76 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Zoolander No. 2 (2016) [The Magnum Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 30, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

Zoolander 2
**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Penélope Cruz
written by Justin Theroux and John Hamburg & Ben Stiller and Nicholas Stoller
directed by Ben Stiller

by Bill Chambers It opens with Justin Bieber taking more bullets than Sonny Corleone. So far, so good. Bieber commemorates his death with an Instagram selfie, which makes me want to purse my lips against my fingertips and blow a kiss to the chef–mwah! News of Bieber’s assassination raises alarms at Fashion Interpol, where his death selfie is compared against those of several other musicians, all of whom died making the same pouty face as Bieber. (Madonna being among them strikes me as more of a production designer’s idea of a joke.) Struggling to decipher the meaning of the pose, Agent Valentina Valencia (Penélope Cruz) finally surrenders to the idea that there’s only one person who might have the insight she needs: Austin Powers! No, wait–Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller)!

Love & Friendship (2016)

May 27, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Kate Beckinsale, Xavier Samuel, Emma Greenweil, Chloë Sevigny
based on the novella Lady Susan by Jane Austen
written & directed by Whit Stillman

by Angelo Muredda When Whit Stillman emerged from his thirteen-year sojourn in the wilderness after The Last Days of Disco, it was with the pastel-washed curio Damsels in Distress, practically a radio transmission from a planet of the auteur’s own construction. Where his Metropolitan and Barcelona dropped anchor in immaculately-observed social environs (Manhattan’s waning debutante scene and the European refuge of loquacious Americans, respectively), Stillman’s modestly-budgeted return to filmmaking holed up in a dreamlike and not especially convincing college setting, where Gatsby-esque self-inventors sought to transform their ugly little world through good soap and new dance crazes. A deeply hermetic work even by Stillman’s standards, Damsels in Distress feels in retrospect like a minor but necessary stepping stone back to the better realized but still heightened reality of Love & Friendship, a signature work that is nevertheless Stillman’s most accessible to the uninitiated. Despite marking his first adaptation–of Lady Susan, a short, posthumously-published epistolary novel by Jane Austen, whom he has long worshipped–the film is as pure an expression of the Stillman style and worldview as any despite its largely English cast and the sincerity of its period trappings as a 1790s costume comedy about the machinations of the rich, the formerly rich, and the rich-adjacent.

The Nice Guys (2016)

May 22, 20162016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Matt Bomer, Kim Basinger
written by Shane Black & Anthony Bagarozzi
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw Shane Black’s The Nice Guys is a delightful fusion of John D. MacDonald and Gregory McDonald; if it had a cover, it’d be painted by Robert McGinnis. It’s California noir, no doubt, the love child of The Long Goodbye and Inherent Vice, but with the flip social commentary and occasional bouts of ultra-violence found in Carl Hiaasen’s Florida noirs. Sufficed to say that Black, who’s often spoken of his love for crime fiction, has distilled pulp here and with his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang into breezy, post-modern concoctions. The Nice Guys is as smart as it is inconsequential, as brutal and exploitive as it is a commentary on brutality and exploitation. More than anything else, it’s a very fine critical pastiche of the kinds of books you read in an afternoon because they’re thrilling, socially irresponsible, and afire with misogyny, nihilism, and Byronic macho bullshit Romanticism. But cool, baby, and stylish.

The Stuff (1985) – Blu-ray Disc

May 16, 20161980s, 2016, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Michael Moriarty, Andrea Marcovicci, Garrett Morris, Patrick O’Neal
written and directed by Larry Cohen

by Bryant Frazer “Enough is never enough.” So goes a key advertising tagline featured in The Stuff, a bracingly contemptuous critique of consumer culture from Larry Cohen–a man who knows a thing or two about exploiting mainstream tastes. Well regarded among B-movie buffs as a master of high-concept screenwriting coupled with low-budget execution, Cohen was, in his 1970s and 1980s heyday, what auteurists call a smuggler: a writer-director who embeds subversive social commentary in otherwise innocuous genre storylines. The Stuff‘s science-fiction scenario offered some bare-bones corporate intrigue along with a few opportunities for the special make-up effects team, but it also lampooned the businessmen who hawk goods of dubious quality and the haplessly credulous populace that lines up to buy them. The film’s eponymous grocery product is a mysterious but plentiful and apparently tasty substance that burbles up, unbidden, from beneath the earth’s surface. Capitalism being what it is, the distinctive white gloop is quickly productized and monetized by a corporation that doesn’t realize (or doesn’t care) that The Stuff seems to move with a mind of its own.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) [The Gruesome Edition] – DVD + The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

April 18, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
***/****
BD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A
DVD – Image B+ Sound B- Extras B
starring Dennis Hopper, Caroline Williams, Jim Siedow, Bill Moseley
screenplay by L.M. Kit Carson
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw If the first film is about living with malevolent ghosts–the sins of the father made flesh and leather, if you will–then the second is a cunning piece about the Reagan ’80s: the fantasia, the nostalgia, the delusions of grandeur, the inflationary monomania, and, finally, the decay of actual values in a society believing itself to be the illusory City on the Hill. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is also a highly sexualized film, the American Psycho of its day, mixing sex with money until the two are indistinguishable from the great gouts of blood, bluster, and designer suits used in their acquisition. The picture’s smart enough to be a commentary on its time while its time is still unspooling. Undeniably, there’s something bankrupt about the morality of this story told in this context–the rise of corporations in the McDecade skewered as the monster Sawyer clan of the original launches a successful man-meat chilli business with affable, no-longer-reluctant Cook (Jim Siedow) as its clown pitchman. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 can be read as every bit the product of its era as the following year’s Wall Street and Predator–a science-fiction of regression and animalism that is not entirely unlike its star Dennis Hopper’s Blue Velvet, also from 1986. It feels like the twelve years separating source and sequel (just like the ten that separate the first two George Romero “Dead” movies) mark director Tobe Hooper as a sharp sociologist when painting with this very specific brush, evolving the tumor of the Vietnam War manifested as a pair of lumpen bogeys on a young girl’s back into this florid bloodbath erected on those conservative tent poles of mass media, mass consumerism, and misguided phallic projection. No accident, either, one supposes, that its central avenging angel is a dim-witted, swaggering cowboy figure, ambling in from the 1950s to win fights we’ve already lost.

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

April 1, 20162016, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Directors: Richard Linklater, Theatrical

**/****
starring Will Brittain, Zoey Deutch, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda It’s easy to underestimate Richard Linklater, America’s nice-guy filmmaker par excellence. If his chill aura more or less kept him out of the prestige-film sweepstakes until Boyhood, it also made the formal dice rolls of Waking Life and the Before trilogy land more impressively–and contrary to expectations–than they might have coming from a more bullish director. But Linklater’s genial Texas cool proves a liability in Everybody Wants Some!!, a calculated, unambitious return to the rhythms of Dazed and Confused that picks up with a new crew in the next decade. Riding a wave of good vibes from cinephiles clamouring for another shaggy-dog hangout movie, Everybody Wants Some!! never quite earns either its Van Halen-cribbed exclamation or its status as a presumptive critical and audience favourite, settling for aw-shucks likeability and shopworn familiarity where Linklater’s best work sneaks anthropology in through the backdoor.

Living in Oblivion (1995) – DVD|[20th Anniversary] – Blu-ray Disc

March 17, 20161990s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Satire, Scream/Shout! Factory

***/****
DVD – Image B Sound B Extras B-
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, Danielle Von Zernick
written and directed by Tom DiCillo

by Walter Chaw A film carefully structured in three parts, Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion demands tired adjectives like “offbeat” and “quirky” while dancing dangerously close to hyperbole along the lines of “brilliant” and “incisive.” What it is, though, is its own beast–a meta-structure of dream sequences (the first two segments “are,” the third is “about”) concerning six takes of scene six–the devil’s number applied to the trials of filmmaking, including technical accidents, the egos of the stars, and behind-the-scenes relationships that threaten professionalism. With those plates spinning, DiCillo layers in elements of fantasy bleeding into reality (the second section ends with the oft-repeated scene sloughing into “reality,” then into dream), the final segment integrating spoof symbols (an apple, a little person) with a real symbol (the mother).

Zootopia (2016)

March 5, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Theatrical

***/****
screenplay by Jared Bush & Phil Johnston
directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush

by Walter Chaw Early on in Disney’s Zootopia, directed somehow by a triumvirate (Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush) from a screenplay by Bush and Phil Johnston, a baby fox declares that it would like to grow up to be an elephant. It even has an elephant hoodie; the creature idolizes, it appears, elephant culture. It gets a laugh. It’s worth the conversation to wonder what about this is funny. At its essence, the idea that something could grow to be something else is funny. It’s also funny because it knowingly, gently pokes fun at our culture of “you can be anything you want to be,” the source of more sometimes-murderous disappointment than any other child-rearing strategy endemic to the West. Astronaut? No problem. And Zootopia opens on a children’s pageant where a little animal solemnly declares that where in primordial times he would have been predator or prey, in civilized times, he has the choice to maybe be an astronaut, or an accountant. The third way this is funny is harsher, in that it begins to touch on the truism that there are certain traits you’re born with, and while that’s a no-brainer when it comes to the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s a tough thing for most proud Judeo-Christians to accept. We have hardwiring, see, and accepting that means there are a lot of other things we need to accept as well, almost none of them politically correct and all of them fraught with delicate dancing around the issue. Zootopia is complicated as hell.

The Good Dinosaur (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

February 23, 20162015, 2016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, Family, Pixar, Road Movie

Gooddino1

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He’s clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him “Spot” (he’s a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film’s final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space–as all great westerns are–between the old ways and the encroaching new. It’s far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 16, 2016****/****, 1940s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK, War

Colonelblimp3

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Anton Walbrook, Deborah Kerr, Roger Livesey, Roland Culver
written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

by Walter Chaw The prototype in many ways for Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, although lighthearted and easily mistaken for a romp, is an existential horror film that, for all the things it’s otherwise about, is most vitally about what it’s like to grow old. There’s a moment early on–when our hero, Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), realizes he’s let the love of his life marry his best friend–that clarifies exactly what the picture has on its mind. For the rest of the film, as the kingdom of his memories grows to a size that dwarfs modernity rushing past, Candy finds shades of the lost Edith (Deborah Kerr), his personal Lenore, resurfacing in the faces of young women the world over. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp understands that as one grows old, an entire village sprouts in the mind, full of beloved businesses and places that have long since disappeared, peopled by old flames and loved ones, dead or just vanished, but in any case never again to resume the form in which memory has frozen them. Though memorable for its technical brilliance, its Technicolor vibrancy, and its courageously sprung narrative structure, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp‘s ability to pinion the sadness, the loneliness, that experience carries with it is what makes the movie what it is. Life as a process of emotional attrition: Last man standing is cold comfort, indeed.

Deadpool (2016)

February 12, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, T.J. Miller, Gina Carano
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
directed by Tim Miller

by Walter Chaw I get it. Deadpool is post-modern. It's absolutely aware of itself. It's The Cabin in the Woods. The primogenitor of Deadpool is Dennis Miller's '90s standup: sneering, smarmy, arch, and peppered with pop-culture references running the gamut from Ferris Bueller to Limp Bizkit to the fact that there are two Professor X's in Fox's X-Men franchise. Carted off to stand before the beloved X-Man, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) asks, "McAvoy or Stewart?" And an audience of savvy comic-book/film fans cheers because they've been recognized. It's the button rock stars push when they say, "Hello (wherever they are)!" at the beginning of a set. It announces that they are aware of the space they occupy, and legions of concertgoers make the devil horns and light their lighters in appreciation: "Yeah, man, you're here. In that you are correct." Deadpool is about recognizing itself for what it is and recognizing its audience for recognizing where they are (which is there, recognizing that their hero recognizes where he is). When Deadpool's alter ego, being wheeled into the place where he's going to be turned into Deadpool, begs them not to give him an animated green suit, well, you knew that Reynolds was disastrously the hero in Green Lantern, right? It's only the second time it's referenced. He also calls a little bald girl Sinead O'Connor twice, because it's hard to write jokes. He could have called her "Blue Sunshine," except the only thing Deadpool can't afford to be is smarter than its audience. Relax–it never is.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) [The Signature Collection] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

February 10, 2016****/****, 1930s, 2016, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
story adaptation Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Richard, Earl Hurd, Merrill De Maris, Dorothy Ann Blank, Webb Smith
supervising director David Hand

by Bill Chambers Walt Disney was shooting for the moon with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, not just his first but the first animated feature. He of the Silly Symphony wanted it to have prestige, fostering an obsessive-compulsive streak within the studio that is curiously reflected in the film’s epic preoccupation with orderliness, cleanliness, and labour. It has the air of manifesto when one considers that of the eight songs on the soundtrack, two, “Whistle While You Work” and “Heigh-ho,” are about the satisfaction of work¹ while a third, “Bluddle-Uddle-Um-Dum,” is a set of bathing instructions subtitled “The Dwarfs’ Washing Song.” In her unrelenting fastidiousness, Snow White reeks of self-portraiture (armchair Freuds might speculate on Snow White’s other qualities, such as her being so perfect as to drive the competition mad, as they apply to Disney, already an Ozymandian figure armed with multiple Academy awards by the time of production), and it’s because of this that her predilection for housework doesn’t feel like the typical chauvinism abundant in the Disney canon. When she scolds two squirrels for sweeping dirt under the carpet, it’s difficult not to hear it as an ethos.

Hail, Caesar! (2015)

February 6, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Mystery, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical

Hail, Caesar!: A Tale of the Christ
****/****
starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes
written and directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Halfway through the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, studio head/fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin playing Jon Polito) stands against the opulent, grand entrance to his golden-age Hollywood movie studio and talks about the coming of the future. There’s a scene in a Chinese restaurant where someone pulls out a photograph of a mushroom cloud taken at a freshly-nuked Bikini Atoll and declares, solemnly, that it’s a picture of the future. There’s another scene where waves crash against a pair of rocks in a direct callback to Barton Fink, the Coens’ other golden-age Hollywood homage, outside the bachelor-pad mansion of Gene Kelly-type Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), who happens to be the head of an enclave of Communists (are there ten?) calling themselves “The Future.” The Coens at their best describe spiritual blight. They do it in a lot of ways, across multiple genres. Hail, Caesar! opens with Mannix, a real-life figure in Hollywood tangentially connected to George Reeves’s death (murder? Suicide? Who knows?), in a confessional just a day after his last confession and a day before his next. (“Really, it’s too much Eddie. You’re not that bad.”) Mannix–more fictional than actual, it should be noted, in exactly the same way that O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the most faithful adaptation of The Odyssey there ever was despite having almost no relationship to the literal text–indeed doesn’t seem all that bad when most of what he confesses is lying to his wife (Alison Pill) about quitting cigarettes. “It’s hard, Father.” And he cries. The movie is about spiritual blight, and the sin that Mannix is constantly trying to confess is that he doesn’t know what he believes. For me, the Coens are at their best when they tackle this spiritual blight through the prism of artists and their attempts to create. Every artist is a Frankenstein. Every work is a monster.

Zoolander (2001) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc (2016)

February 3, 20162000s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Satire

**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BLU-RAY – Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Christine Taylor
screenplay by Drake Sather & Ben Stiller and John Hamburg
directed by Ben Stiller

by Walter Chaw Ben Stiller has a very particular genius for satirical imitation. When he says that he based Derek Zoolander on “some cross between Jason Priestly and Luke Perry,” one can be sure that the offspring is an uncomfortably dead-on collection of insouciant pouts, long blank stares, and dim-witted pronouncements. We know that Stiller is good at destroying celebrity; the bigger question is can an extended sketch featuring one of his burlesques sustain interest and consistently inspire laughter? The answer is “fitfully,” so, yes and no.

The Intern (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 25, 20162015, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Robert De Niro

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Robert De Niro, Anne Hathaway, Rene Russo, Anders Holm
written and directed by Nancy Meyers

by Bill Chambers Back to back, literally, Robert De Niro made Mean Streets, The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, 1900, The Last Tycoon, New York, New York, The Deer Hunter, Raging Bull, True Confessions, The King of Comedy, and Once Upon a Time in America. Brazil, The Mission, Angel Heart, Midnight Run, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, This Boy’s Life, Casino, and Heat punctuate his next ten years as a working actor. So I’ve never really felt the urge to bash De Niro for his late-period career choices, which are mostly about maintaining a standard of living, funding entrepreneurial bids, and mellowing with age. (This is not a man who owes us anything.) And his persona–whatever it is, can we agree that his most volatile roles inform it?–has not been so debauched by decades of ham that there’s not a bit of a subversive kick to seeing him play Mary Poppins, complete with luggage though sans umbrella, in Nancy Meyers’s The Intern.

Dirty Grandpa (2016)

January 23, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Road Movie, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Aubrey Plaza, Dermot Mulroney
written by John M. Phillips
directed by Dan Mazer

by Walter Chaw It’s one of those boilerplates about an uptight guy on the eve of marrying a harridan taking a road trip with a free spirit to discover that maybe he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life (or the few years until he secures a divorce–the subtext of these things is always curiously traditional) selling out to The Man. Jason (Zac Efron) is that potential sell-out. You can tell because he dresses like the villain from an Eighties college sex comedy, is a corporate lawyer, and is engaged to a materialistic bimbo (Julianne Hough) who will justify his unconscionable hedonism by being a secret slut herself in his absence. The best of these films is its prototype, obviously (Capra’s It Happened One Night), but the one I return to most often is Bronwen Hughes’s curiously sticky–if only to me–Forces of Nature. The high concept this time around is that De Niro is the free-spirit road-tripper in a role that asks him to, literally at one point, be rapping grandmother Ellen Dow from The Wedding Singer. The imposition of this masterplot is really the only thing separating the film from “Jackass” spin-off Bad Grandpa, just as one word is the only thing separating the two concepts. De Niro’s Dick (and you do indeed get to see his dick–though admittedly, it’s probably a stunt dick) is a former Green Beret, by the way, which explains/doesn’t explain why he gets a Presidio fight sequence against a bunch of black hoods who’ve been taunting a gay black guy Dick has also recently been taunting.

Joy (2015)

December 25, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Edgar Ramirez, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by David O. Russell
directed by David O. Russell

by Walter Chaw After demonstrating with his last few movies that he’s not Martin Scorsese, David O. Russell has decided to kill two birds with one stone by demonstrating that he is neither Wes nor P.T. Anderson, either. In Joy, he proves that marrying Wes Anderson’s whimsical solipsism with P.T. Anderson’s Pynchon-esque biographical sketches is an amazingly stupid thing to do–one of those science experiments in ’50s B-movies that everyone knows is a bad idea except for the idiot doing the splicing. Yes, Joy is that bad. When it’s not being unbearably twee, it’s perving on Jennifer Lawrence like von Sternberg on Dietrich. But Joy ain’t no Blue Angel, and while I like Lawrence fine, I guess, Russell is sure as hell no von Sternberg. What I’m saying is that Russell is a terrible, glitchy director with a thing for Lawrence that he manifests by shooting her walking towards the camera with sunglasses, without sunglasses, with a wig and without a wig, in slow-motion or at normal speed, in daytime, nighttime; he lights her with the sun, with spots, with discretes, from below, and especially from behind–all in a kind of PENTHOUSE glamour. The only part of Joy that isn’t unwatchable is a sequence shot precisely like identical sequences in P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia, where an obviously tense Bradley Cooper, playing QVC programming director Neil Walker, shows the titular domestic goddess Joy (Lawrence) around the studio. I take it back, those were pretty bad, too. The only thing preventing Joy from being the worst movie of the year is that Pixels happened.

The Good Dinosaur (2015); The Revenant (2015); The Hateful Eight (2015)

December 25, 20152015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Disney, Drama, Family, Mystery, Pixar, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

THE GOOD DINOSAUR
***/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

THE REVENANT
***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, a bear, angry junketeers
screenplay by Mark L. Smith & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

THE HATEFUL EIGHT
**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

Krampus (2015)

December 7, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Horror, Theatrical

**/****
starring Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner, Krista Stadler
written by Todd Casey & Michael Dougherty & Zach Shields
directed by Michael Dougherty

by Walter Chaw I used to have a collection of short stories edited by Isaac Asimov, The Twelve Frights of Christmas. Ramsey Campbell’s “The Chimney” is anthologized therein, and though it’s not directly a Krampus story, it’s sort of a Krampus story and was, at least, the first time I’d been introduced to the concept of something like an anti-Santa. It’s a great story. Michael Dougherty’s Krampus is not great, but with all the lulls and jokes misfiring, it does give you plenty of time to think about other things. (I didn’t like his Trick ‘r Treat either.) What works about the film are its first twenty minutes or so, where Dougherty seems to be setting up an unpleasant, nasty little commentary on the commodification of Christmas. There’s trouble, though, when the parts of your movie that work are the parts that compare best to Jingle All the Way. I’ll say, too, that there’s genuine delight in the appearance of weird snowmen on the lawn during a blizzard blackout, stranding a shitty family alone with their thoughts while a German alpine demon lurks about outside–as well as hope, however self-deluding and fleet, that Dougherty’s going to pay off the early abduction of the second-most sympathetic child of six. Alas, it’s ultimately as compromised as Trick ‘r Treat. The last five minutes are a masterpiece of playing both sides against the middle and pandering to an intended middlebrow audience. Like its PG-13 rating, Krampus is a devil’s bargain between horror film and family film. It’s the kind of thing that only really worked when it was Gremlins.

Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (1995) [Collector’s Edition] + Tales from the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood (1996) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

November 30, 20151990s, 2015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Vampire

Demon Knight
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Billy Zane, William Sadler, Jada Pinkett, Brenda Bakke
written by Ethan Reiff & Cyrus Voris & Mark Bishop
directed by Ernest Dickerson

Bordello of Blood
*/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras A
starring Dennis Miller, Erika Eleniak, Angie Everhart, John Kassir
screenplay by A.L. Katz & Gilbert Adler
directed by Gilbert Adler

by Walter Chaw I didn’t have HBO as a kid. Didn’t even have cable. When I went over to friends’ houses, I would spend a lot of time wanting to watch MTV to try to catch up on all the popular culture I was missing. “Remote Control”, the first Jon Stewart show, “Dream On”, “The Kids in the Hall”–each of them represent gaping holes in my pop education. Lump in the Walter Hill-produced “Tales from the Crypt” anthology program with that group of things I knew about but only by title and reputation. My first exposure to the EC Comics-inspired/adapted-from show was through reprints of “Tales from the Crypt” and “Strange Tales” comics during the early-’90s industry boom. Then Ernest Dickerson’s fantastic Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (hereafter Demon Knight) satisfied every single expectation I had of something seeking to honour the ghoulish, sometimes puerile depravity of William Gaines’s seminal source material. It’s as gory as it is corny and smart as hell for recognizing that those were the only requirements. Doesn’t hurt that the practical-effects work is goopy and inventive. Oh, and the cast is exceptional.