Telluride ’14: Birdman

August 29, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

Birdman

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
*/****
starring Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough
screenplay Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. & Armando Bo
directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

by Walter Chaw A benighted, gangly thing midway between a mid-life crisis Black Swan and the Noises Off version of Brazil, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman is the lonesome yawp of a limited, one-trick-pony given now to defensiveness and self-consciousness. Assailing the tale of a washed-up former mega-star of superhero blockbusters, Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton, check), who's trying to gain a measure of self-respect on Broadway in a Raymond Carver adaptation he wrote, directed, and is starring in, the picture doesn't do anything it doesn't warn us about first and then apologize for after. It covers the three preview performances leading to opening night in one, digitally-unbroken take, making room along the way for Method asshole Michael Shiner (Method asshole Edward Norton)–who steals both the play Birdman is about and the play-within-a-play conceit of the movie by stealing the movie–and tons of narrative melodramatics, including a neurotic leading lady (Naomi Watts), Riggan's burnout daughter (Emma Stone), and his stressed-out lawyer/manager (Zach Galifianakis). The whole story roils with desperation and disappointment, and the film-as-object does the same–the transparency between those two things (cine-reality and sad-truth-of-it reality) cited repeatedly in the screenplay-by-committee in exhausting, self-abnegating fashion. Birdman is an incredible bore. The closest analogue in feel is Todd Solondz's unfortunate riposte to his detractors, Storytelling, but at least that one wasn't all tarted up in attention-grabbing technical pandering. Birdman is about as clever as that Blues Traveler song: the tedious offense of idiots calling you an idiot.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

August 8, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Teenagemutantninja

½*/****
starring Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, Johnny Knoxville
screenplay by Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec and Evan Daugherty
directed by Jonathan Liebesman

by Walter Chaw Jonathan Liebesman’s brutally awful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a Michael Bay co-production in conjunction with kid’s basic-cable network Nickelodeon, meaning it’s a PG-13 piece of shit aimed at preteens that packs a payload of sexual objectification, mild torture, and assorted grotesquerie. That’s really all there is to say about it. It implies bestiality in the constant come-ons aimed at Bay’s favourite target (Megan Fox) by a foul-looking monster, then makes a joke out of a human counterpart staring at her ass while she’s dangling out a car window. Best is the moment where one of the monsters declares Ms. Fox to be “so hot I can feel my shell tightening,” which comes just after she’s equated with a “sexy bird,” because birds are slim animals as opposed to fat animals like pigs and cows. Later, Whoopi Goldberg appears as that Cabbage Patch doll you didn’t get for Christmas because you’re going to a Michael Bay-produced movie advertised on a children’s cartoon channel, and one of the bad guys instructs his henchmen to “drain every last drop of blood” from our heroes, “even if it kills them.”

Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

July 31, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Magicinthemoonlight

**/****
starring Eileen Atkins, Colin Firth, Marcia Gay Harden, Hamish Linklater
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There’s a scene late in Woody Allen’s mostly forgotten You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger that briefly complicates its status as one of the prolific filmmaker’s lighter doodles. Swept away by her feelings for her boss (Antonio Banderas), Naomi Watts’s normally buttoned-up Sally takes a chance and confesses. In turn, she is swiftly rejected, and summarily dismissed as a partner, a colleague, and a person in one cruel wave of the arm. It’s a scene Allen has indulged in before: he’s always liked to see his onscreen women suffer a little, whether in Isaac’s callous it’s-not-me-it’s-you dumping of Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) in Manhattan or the unceremonious jilting of poor Cecilia (Mia Farrow) in The Purple Rose of Cairo. But it’s a sharp sting in a film as innocuous as Stranger, a reminder that for all the comforts of settling into his aesthetic of Windsor typeface and big-band music, Allen is not an especially warm filmmaker, not even in his comedies. Even with that in mind, his newest, Magic in the Moonlight, is an especially baffling thing–a dry, mean-spirited essay about that old romantic-comedy staple: the inevitability of death and decay.

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] – Even Dwarfs Started Small (1971)

July 29, 2014Posted in1970s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Werner Herzog, DVD, Esoterica, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

Evendwarfs2

Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen
***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Commentary A
BD – Image A- Sound B+ Commentary A
starring Helmut Döring, Gerd Gickel, Paul Glauer, Erna Gschwendtner
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Even Dwarfs Started Small opens with a disquieting montage featuring a young girl rending live birds with her teeth that also culminates in the image of a chicken eating another chicken (shades of Magritte’s 1927 painting “Pleasure”). Both actions speak to a sort of insensate savagery, the divorce between the Freudian Id and Ego so favoured by the surrealists–and in setting the film in a fictitious place populated entirely by the little people of the title, it touches on the surrealist belief that non-Western civilizations were closer to an undifferentiated nature. The story proper concerns the uprising of a “Prisoner”-like colony against an ineffectual, Kafkaesque godhead (Pepi Hermine) and the Institution he represents. Rebelling against the imprisonment of leader Pepe (Gerd Gickel, tied to a chair throughout), the rebels devolve from a semi-organized protest into bedlam, crucifying monkeys, organizing cockfights, and, in one of the most hopeless conclusions in film, watching as rebel leader Hombre (Helmut Döring) laughs until he chokes at the sight of a defecating camel.

22 Jump Street (2014)

June 11, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

22jumpstreet

½*/****
starring Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Peter Stormare, Ice Cube
screenplay by Michael Bacall and Oren Uziel and Rodney Rothman
directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

by Walter Chaw The smart parts are unbelievably stupid and the stupid parts are unendurable, making 22 Jump Street, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s follow-up to their well-regarded The Lego Movie, one of those things like Shrek that should do pretty well. Itself a sequel to a reboot of a cult television show about twenty-something cops pretending to be teenagers, the film finds buddy-cop heroes Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) going undercover in college, the better to bust some drug dealer. They have a tough-talking superior in Capt. Dickson (Ice Cube), who, this time out, gets a glass office someone refers to as a “cube of ice.” Get it? There’s much acknowledgment that sequels are often terrible, inflated things deficient in new ideas and reliant on amplification, and it’s delivered with this exhausted, arch air. At least that’s how I read it. I didn’t even crack a smile.

“Crocodile” Dundee (1986)|”Crocodile” Dundee II (1988) [Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

May 25, 2014Posted in1980s, 2014, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance

Crocdundee11

“CROCODILE” DUNDEE
***/**** Image B- Sound C-
starring Paul Hogan, Linda Kozlowski, Mark Blum, John Meillon
screenplay by Paul Hogan, Ken Shadie and John Cornell
directed by Peter Faiman

“CROCODILE” DUNDEE II
½*/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Paul Hogan, Linda Kozlowski, John Meillon, Hechter Ubarry
screenplay by Paul Hogan and Brett Hogan
directed by John Cornell

by Bill Chambers It’s possible that the monster success of “Crocodile” Dundee–a low-budget Australian import starring the international spokesman for Foster’s Lager and Australian tourism–seems like temporary mass hysteria these days. In America, the film was the second-biggest release of 1986 (after Top Gun), earning more than the combined grosses of eventual perennials Aliens and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Paul Hogan even won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical. (The screenplay, co-written by Hogan, was, yes, nominated for an Oscar; Hannah and Her Sisters claimed the prize.) But in the years since, the term “Crocodile Dundee” has become derogatory shorthand for the outdoorsy Australian, and the notoriously generous IMDb voters currently have the movie at a Grinchy 6.5/10. It’s a film that has been curiously immune to ’80s/childhood nostalgia, as the tardy, Razzie-nominated second sequel either confirmed or guaranteed.

Her (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 12, 2014Posted in****/****, 2013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi

Her1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Scarlett Johansson
written and directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw Two moments early on in Spike Jonze’s Her. The first when our hero, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), initiates his new operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and is asked to characterize his relationship with his mother; the second when, in flashback, Theodore and his ex, Catherine (Rooney Mara), pretend to choke each other. They’re waypoints Jonze establishes for his piece: in one direction, there’s Blade Runner and its questions of proximate humanity; in the other, there’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and its mad love. Jonze establishes, too, that this will be a work of science-fiction owing its parentage to the best sources, that its premise will be fantastic but grounded in characters and their place in the world. Of all the compliments I can think to pay this film, the best is that Her is at least the equal of its waypoints. More, when its solution recalls the metaphysical coda to the great The Incredible Shrinking Man, it’s the equal of that as well.

The Terminal (2004) – Blu-ray Disc

May 6, 2014Posted in2000s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Spielberg

Terminal1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Chi McBride
screenplay by Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Early in the latest Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks collaboration The Terminal, Russian splinter exile Viktor Navorski (Hanks) runs up a staircase, throwing his suitcase onto the “up” escalator as he goes so that his baggage, in essence, is left to finish its journey on its own. It’s a lovely, complicated visual metaphor for abandonment or freedom, for Spielberg the scenarist’s twin obsessions with the idea of little boys lost and of little boys escaping and for Spielberg the director’s inability to take responsibility for his subtext so that he might finally make that mature film he’s so desperately wanted to since The Color Purple. But The Terminal is film-festival offensive, encouraging its audience to coo over the adorable antics of its madcap cast of society’s blue-collar “invisibles” (playing in this respect like the slick, imminently forgettable version of Stephen Frears’s working class morality play Dirty Pretty Things) in a way that isn’t sympathetic so much as paternalistic. Foreigners and minorities are resourceful children, operating eternally at the mercy of the dominant majority, and Neverland is the big cities of the United States, where grown-ups have families and problems.

Ernest & Celestine (2012) + Jodorowsky’s Dune (2014)

April 10, 2014Posted in2012, 2014, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Family, France, Luxembourg, Theatrical

Ernest et Célestine
**½/****
screenplay by Daniel Pennac, based on books by Gabrielle Vincent
directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner

JODOROWSKY’S DUNE
**½/****
directed by Frank Pavich

by Walter Chaw Broad, earnest, unassuming animation from France, Ernest & Celestine is the tale of a little girl mouse, Celestine (voice of Pauline Brunner), and gruff bear Ernest (Lambert Wilson), who overcome their cultural prejudices to become fast friends. Celestine is outcast because she’d like to be an artist instead of a dentist; Ernest is outcast because he’s a busker struggling to eke out a subsistence living. Over a series of misadventures, the two end up doing the Badlands in Ernest’s ramshackle hideaway, awaiting their fate and trying to enjoy their borrowed time. It’s all leading to a grim ending, but it’s not that kind of movie.

Le Week-End (2013)

March 20, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, UK

Leweekend

***½/****
starring Jim Broadbent, Lindsay Duncan, Jeff Goldblum, Olly Alexander
screenplay by Hanif Kureishi
directed by Roger Michell

by Walter Chaw Nick (Jim Broadbent) has been fired from his professorship, and, not to celebrate but maybe to memorialize it, he and wife Meg (Lindsay Duncan) take a romantic trip to the City of Light. Well, a trip, anyway. After two awful films (Morning Glory and Hyde Park on the Hudson), Roger Michell returns to form (and to screenwriter/playwright Hanif Kureishi) with this bitter little pill, Le Week-End, whose title, read the way I think it was intended to be read, just drips with acerbic disdain. It reminds me of an exchange about midway through where a desperate Nick tells Meg that he loves her and Meg hisses, in a way that only a British actress at the absolute peak of her powers could hiss, “Love… DIES.” Yet Meg doesn’t hate Nick and Nick, for his part, isn’t quite the milquetoast he presents himself as in moments like these, when he falls on the street and injures his knee to the ringing, castrating laughter of his mate, or when he infers that Meg wants to leave him and starts to whimper like a child. Also at about the halfway mark, the couple encounters an old colleague of Nick’s, Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), who promptly invites them to a dinner party in honour of Morgan’s latest literary success (“It could happen to anybody,” he says; “It didn’t happen to me,” Nick responds), and suddenly Michell and Kureishi have the meat of professional and personal jealousy to worry off the bone, too.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

March 13, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical

Grandbudapesthotel

**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Edward Norton, Tony Revolori
written and directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw I’d be hard-pressed to think of many sequences in the movies better than the two minutes from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums where Richie gets picked up at the Green Line Bus by his adopted sister Margot following a lengthy absence. It’s beautifully composed, emotionally weighted, and punctuated with the best use of Nico in a sentence, ever. There’s a rub there–my favourite Wes Anderson films are the ones that use music in this way; I ally him in my mind with artists like Sofia Coppola and, sure, Quentin Tarantino. I think the full potential of film is only really reached when all the elements that go into a movie–the seven arts, as it were–are used in concert. Wes Anderson, as he utilizes fewer and fewer pop songs in his films (his latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is his first without any), is losing emotional complexity as his hermetically-sealed, obsessive-compulsive dreamscapes become increasingly complex. Consider the moment from Django Unchained where our heroes ride into act two to Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name.” It’s iconic, transformative; the scene has a quarter of its power without the agency of that song. Tarantino truly gets it. When Anderson opens The Darjeeling Limited with The Kinks‘ “This Time Tomorrow,” letting the scene play in slow-motion as Adrien Brody’s character tries to outrun the ghost of his father, wow. I remember hearing about the introductory tracking shot of the research vessel in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, how Anderson was possibly planning on scoring it with a Radiohead song (“How to Disappear Completely,” if memory serves) and how that potential marriage gave me a shiver of anticipation. The farther Anderson falls into his navel, the clearer it is that he no longer gets what he used to get, swallowed whole by the grey beast solipsism.

The Wind Rises (2013) + Frozen (2013)

February 25, 2014Posted in****/****, 2013, 2014, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Japan, Musical, Romance, War

Frozen

THE WIND RISES
****/****
written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki

FROZEN
**½/****
screenplay by Jennifer Lee, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”
directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee

Editor’s Note: This review pertains to the original Japanese-language version of The Wind Rises.

by Walter Chaw Hayao Miyazaki’s alleged swan song The Wind Rises is mature, romantic, grand storytelling that just happens to be something like a romanticized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer behind the design of the Mitsubishi A5M, which led, ultimately, to the Zero. Indeed, for a Western audience, watching Jiro’s dreams of squadrons of Zeros buzzing over fields of green is chilling, and advance critics seemed unable to distinguish the Japanese war machine from the film’s focus on a life lived in pursuit of dreams. In truth, separating these two aspects of the picture–the proximate and the historical–is self-defeating. (Dismissing the movie out of hand is equally blinkered.) One without the other, The Wind Rises loses anything like substance, resonance, importance. It would fall on the one side into gauzy bullshit, on the other into Triumph of the Will. As is, it’s something more akin to Studio Ghibli’s own Grave of the Fireflies in its humanizing of a man whose dreams were corrupted into something terrible. Einstein would be one of the West’s potential Horikoshi corollaries–and if Miyazaki had done Albert’s biography, I’d expect to see mushroom clouds illustrating his fantasies of relativity. For Horikoshi, Miyazaki provides upheavals and disasters as highlight to each of his life events: He first meets his wife in a train crash; in a lilting epilogue, when Jiro bids farewell to his dead wife, Miyazaki offers fields of devastation and a village in flames. Throughout, Miyazaki presents earthquakes, rainstorms, sudden bursts of wind as reminders of…what? The inevitability of change? The portents of war? The cycles of life and death? All of that; but what compels is the idea of helplessness in the face of larger forces–that although we chase our dreams, we’re never really in control of our destinies.

The Jungle Book (1967) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 23, 2014Posted in1960s, 2014, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical

Junglebook1

***/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras A
story by Larry Clemmons, Ralph Wright, Ken Anderson, Vance Gerry, inspired by the Rudyard Kipling “Mowgli” stories
directed by Wolfgang Reitherman

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Jungle Book receives only two passing mentions in Neal Gabler’s mammoth biography of Walt Disney, even though it has the distinction of being the last animated film Disney lived to produce and ended his career in a commercial triumph to bookend the early success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Gabler’s brevity on the subject suggests that The Jungle Book was of little consequence to Disney, but there are clues to the contrary between the lines, such as when Gabler writes tantalizingly about Walt’s opinion that early drafts of the script were too “sober.” Indeed, he was personally invested in the project to the point of choosing it over his relationship with long-time story man Bill Peet, who’d brought Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories to Disney’s attention in the first place. Peet’s adaptation was, as Walt saw it, beset by its fidelity to Kipling, and he solidified his vision for lighter-hearted fare by hiring radio icon Phil Harris, whose husky, hearty voice would become synonymous with Disney animation in those posthumous years. The energy and levity Harris brought to the minor character of Baloo the Bear led to a reconceiving of the narrative so that it pivoted, in Gabler’s words, on the Falstaff/Prince Hal dynamic between Baloo and child hero Mowgli.

Nebraska (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

February 17, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD

Nebraska1

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It’s easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.

Night of the Comet (1984) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

February 3, 2014Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Zombie

Nightofthecomet1

½*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B
starring Robert Beltran, Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Geoffrey Lewis
written and directed by Thom Eberhardt

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There’s a quote from the seventh season of “The Simpsons” that applies to the problem before us where Bart, happening on a “Schoolhouse Rock” thing and learning from Lisa that it’s one of “those campy ’70s throwbacks that appeals to Generation X-ers,” says, “We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little.” If there were, and if it had, we might’ve avoided the current rage for hipsterism–if the Joss Whedons of the world (and David Cranes and so forth) had found themselves casualties in some hostile jungle setting, then would this current youth generation have adopted, ironically, that last generation, and would people like me at my tender age of 40 be fuelling demand for hale distribution/archival companies like Shout! to produce exhaustively-supplemented HiDef releases of garbage like Thom Eberhardt’s excruciating Night of the Comet? Look, I’m not immune–I wrote an entire monograph (200+ pages, no kidding) on Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile that, in my defense, was more memoir than anything else (or is that more disclaimer than defense?). Still, I’ll proclaim to my grave that Miracle Mile has substance, while Night of the Comet has none. The first and greatest danger of nostalgia is that, having grown up with certain artifacts, we treat them like family and tend to love them unconditionally, as family does. This affection doesn’t mean that Junior isn’t a grinning idiot, however, because at least in this instance, he is. And I’m a strong believer that if one of your family members is a grinning idiot, it’s actually your job not to inflict him or her on other people.

Weekend (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 30, 2014Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Road Movie, Satire, The Criterion Collection

Weekend1

WEEK END
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Georges Staquet, Juliet Berto
written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

by Angelo Muredda “The horror of the bourgeois can only be overcome with more horror.” So says a militant cannibal as he stands over the remains of one such bourgeois husk late in Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s farewell to the alienated pop art and American genre gerrymandering of his early period. As the line about horrors piled upon horrors implies, Weekend is nasty, as valedictory addresses go–a scorched-earth attack on France under Charles de Gaulle that finds nearly all of its citizens massacred in car crashes of their own design and converted into consumable products, namely food. The humanism of minor tragedies like Vivre sa vie and the heedless joy of Frank Tashlin homages like Une femme est une femme has here curdled into a new, ugly form. Although its title suggests a world of leisure and free play, one doesn’t enjoy Weekend so much as one endures it.

We’re the Millers (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 23, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Road Movie
Werethemillers1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts, Ed Helms
screenplay by Bob Fisher & Steve Faber and Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber

by Walter Chaw Rawson Marshall Thurber’s return to the territory of the screwball gross-out comedy that put him on the map, the better-than-it-should-be Dodgeball, is the better-than-it-should-be (but not as good as Dodgeball) We’re The Millers, an essentially plotless road-trip intrigue that nonetheless glances off 2013’s concern with the decline of the middle class while providing a couple of chuckles along the way. It’s the lowbrow version of Albert Brooks’s Lost in America if looked at through a particularly sympathetic lens–a hint of a conversation about class, a whiff of something about how hard it is to make a living on streets getting meaner by the day. Ultimately, it’s probably just lucky that the cast assembled has an impressive improvisational pedigree (and that the director is open to making adjustments midstream), lending a stale comedy of mistaken identity a degree of perhaps-undeserved life. It probably doesn’t hurt that We’re the Millers never, at any point, tries to be something it’s not: rescued by a total lack of ambition.

Body Bags (1993) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 13, 2014Posted in1990s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: John Carpenter, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Bodybags1

**½/**** Image A- Sound C- Extras B
starring Robert Carradine, Stacy Keach, Mark Hamill, Twiggy
written by Billy Brown & Dan Angel
directed by John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper

by Bryant Frazer In 1989, HBO debuted a horror anthology show, “Tales from the Crypt”, based on stories from the disreputable EC comic books of the early 1950s. Jump-started by a stable of Hollywood big shots like Richard Donner, Joel Silver, and Robert Zemeckis, the show was a hit, and the wisecracking “Crypt Keeper” who introduced each episode quickly became a pop-culture icon. HBO’s rival Showtime, known primarily for its softcore anthology “Red Shoe Diaries”, was presumably aiming to duplicate that success when it backed Body Bags, an anthology project led by co-executive producers John Carpenter and his wife, Sandy King. Despite that genre pedigree, the series never got off the ground, but a pilot was completed: three half-hour segments with a goofy framing story involving Carpenter himself doing a deadpan Betelgeuse impression among the stiffs in a city morgue. The finished omnibus aired on Showtime as a one-off in the summer of ’93.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

December 24, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Theatrical

Wolfofwallstreet

***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Jean Dujardin
screenplay by Terence Winter, based on the book by Jordan Belfort
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Angelo Muredda “For us, to live any other way was nuts,” Ray Liotta’s schnook turned gangster Henry Hill explains early on in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. With that, spoken over a montage of permed Italian men in tailored suits gorging themselves at an upscale restaurant, Hill at once launched a wave of lesser, faux-conflicted pictures about the swanky perks and ethical compromises of organized crime, and raised the fundamental moral question of Scorsese’s latest, The Wolf of Wall Street. An unashamedly indulgent, ribald, and formally troubled biopic of Jordan Belfort, this unofficial Goodfellas follow-up likewise revolves around the kind of work that makes living like a pig in shit possible. His kinship to Hill aside, Belfort has had an unusually clear-sailing trajectory to garner the interest of a filmmaker who tends to be drawn to Catholic tales of excess followed by redemptive suffering. Belfort is still a born stockbroker and swindler, despite his working-class origins and federal inquiries and stints in rehab; the fact that he debuted on Wall Street the day of the crash and remains in demand as a guru well after the financial crisis of 2008 seems to give Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter pause, as well the astonishing survival rate of cockroaches should. What better way to make a film about such a man, Scorsese and Winter appear to have concluded, than to structure his story as a Roman orgy?

American Hustle (2013)

December 19, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

Americanhustle

**/****
starring Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence
screenplay by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell
directed by David O. Russell

by Angelo Muredda “The world is extremely grey,” a con artist intones in American Hustle, which, for all its ineffectual stabs at ambivalence, is a curiously prescriptive heist movie, the kind that constantly updates its ledger about who deserves what in the end, in case someone should go unrewarded. It’s hard to say when David O. Russell–a formerly prickly sort so effectively housebroken in recent years that he’s now on the fast track to Academy Award nominations four through five–became so square as to depend on this sort of moral calculus for his dramatic fulfillment: Its equally big-picture pronouncements aside, I ♥ Huckabees seems an odd way station between the redemptive U2-scored montage that closes Three Kings and the brotherly hug of The Fighter, as well as a far more pugilistic film than the one about boxing. Whatever the genesis of his newfound softness (which Russell has insisted is the mark of his maturity as an artist), it’s never been as out of synch with either his manic sensibility or his aesthetic of distended, freewheeling set-pieces and outsized actorly emoting as it is here.