The Apartment (1960) – Blu-ray Disc

January 2, 2013Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Billy Wilder, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

by Walter Chaw The older I get, the better I understand Billy Wilder. And the better I understand Billy Wilder, his weariness and acerbic sense of humour, the more I feel comfortable saying, with that complicated mix of affection and fair warning that I think indicates his work as well, that his movies are assholes and mean it. Billy Wilder, the ten-cents-a-dance Austrian gigolo, the roommate of Peter Lorre who learned English by listening to Dodgers games on the radio, the admirer of Ernst Lubistch. The guy who demanded he be allowed to direct his own screenplays and so made a legendary hyphenate debut with Double Indemnity. The writing partner of both Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond, the man who made whores of Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe and Shirley MacLaine, because nothing could ever be as simple, as innocent, as it appeared at first glance. The guy who lost family in Nazi concentration camps, who came up with the best closing line in movie history, which was “nobody’s perfect.” Maybe the last line of The Apartment–“Shut up and deal”–is a close second. Narrative context tells us the line refers to a card game; the Wilder context suggests a certain way of looking at the world: coping, acceptance, fatalism. Would you believe The Apartment is actually one of Wilder’s optimistic films? Optimistic because the way it views the world is through a scrim of absolute cynicism–and despite it, despite all the towers falling down, there’s the possibility of love, sweet and simple, between Ms. Kubelik and Mr. Baxter.

This is 40 (2012)

December 20, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Thisi40

***/****
starring Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, John Lithgow, Albert Brooks
written and directed by Judd Apatow

by Walter Chaw It’s scattershot, and sloppy, but any movie about fortysomethings dealing with familial, financial, sexual, and physical issues that ends with Ryan Adams performing “Lucky One” in a little club is a movie I will like. And I do: Judd Apatow’s This is 40 isn’t good, exactly, but it listens and it has a sense of humour, as well as a certain optimism about it. I bristle at Apatow’s desire in his other films to impose a traditionally moral conclusion on all the atrocity that’s preceded it, but in a “spin-off” of Knocked Up, about people exactly my age in roughly my situation discovering they’re the grown-ups for some reason and through no fault of their own, that desire for a hopeful conclusion is extremely compelling. This Is 40 is one of those works that gets you at the right time, I think. I’ve often wondered if the reason I’ve never liked Tolkien is that I didn’t read him when I was 12. I wish I had. For what it’s worth, I’m glad I saw This is 40 in these last six months before my own fortieth birthday. It’s my Twilight. I know it’s terrible–flabby, obviously tinkered with ’til the last minute (the commercials for the film are about 90% cut footage), and packed with digressions that distract rather than edify (a bit with Charlyne Yi is a particular lowlight), but it speaks to me, and when Apatow’s right, I realize, he’s spot on.

New Year’s Eve (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 9, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Robert De Niro, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound C+ Extras C-
starring Halle Berry, Jessica Biel, Jon Bon Jovi, Abigail Breslin
screenplay by Katherine Fugate
directed by Garry Marshall

Newyearseve1click any image to enlarge

by Jefferson Robbins Refining the Hollywood gravity well–the kind of cinematic drain-spiral that A-listers and aspirants can't not be in–he first manufactured with Valentine's Day, Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve hinges for me on the thought that Robert De Niro got paid at least seven figures to literally lie in bed. The movie feints at the larger symbolism of the holiday: A progression forward in light of what's come before, the passages between immaturity and adulthood and life and death. But this is a romcom from the godfather of the modern romcom, albeit a too-long one that's neither very funny nor very romantic, and it ultimately takes its importance from the infantile imperative to kiss somebody, almost anybody, at midnight when the year turns. If you don't, you're worth nothing.

ParaNorman (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 30, 2012Posted in2012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Horror, Zombie

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Chris Butler & Sam Fell
directed by Chris Butler


Paranorman3click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) can see and speak with ghosts, which, if you squint a little, is only a metaphor for the kind of sensitivity that, in a boy, will invariably lead to about a decade of being brutalized by his disconnected male peer group. (Everything will change once he invents Microsoft or Pixar.) Norman's chief tormentor is barely-verbal Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, already past his sell-by date); his shallow and image-obsessed teenaged sister with a heart of gold™ is Courtney (the awesome Anna Kendrick), who has the hots for the captain of the football team, pre-verbal Mitch (Casey Affleck); and Norman's best friend, whether he likes it or not, is Mitch's weird, fat little brother, Neil (Tucker Albrizzi). The first problem of ParaNorman is that, in its rush to be sensitive to intelligent outcasts like Norman and Neil, it dehumanizes and mocks its tormentors, robbing them of the depth and complexity that would have resulted in a better film than this beautifully-wrought, entirely predictable package. (It's like a jack-in-the-box made by Faberge.) The only moment in which one of these "inside" characters is given any kind of depth (it's Mitch) is used as a sort of sitcom punchline that doesn't lend the moment gravity so much as it continues the road of taking sloppy aim at an easy target.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) [20th Anniversary – It’s Not Easy Being Scrooge Special Edition] – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

November 19, 2012Posted in1990s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Muppets, Musical, UK

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, The Great Gonzo, Michael Caine
screenplay by Jerry Juhl, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
directed by Brian Henson

Muppetxmas4

by Bill Chambers It's all but inevitable that the Muppets would take on Charles Dickens's venerable plug-and-play app A Christmas Carol at some point. More surprisingly, Michael Caine had not only not played Ebenezer Scrooge prior to The Muppet Christmas Carol (the role is like Hamlet for English actors who've plateaued), he had never before shared a stage with the Muppets, either. This despite his being, in the '70s and '80s, the exact calibre of star the Muppets pursued for cameos, and ubiquitous besides. He is, to my taste, not a harsh-enough Scrooge–there's an irrepressible compassion there when Bob Cratchit (Kermit the Frog) asks him for Christmas Day off. And The Muppet Christmas Carol frankly surrenders too much of the spotlight to this human character: If this were my first Muppet movie, I'd've felt especially double-crossed during his song number with the also-flesh-and-blood Meredith Braun, which was restored for the VHS and TV versions of the film kids have grown up with but is absent again on the new Blu-ray. (Former FFC contributor Ian Pugh tells me he "always, always, ALWAYS" used to fast-forward this part as a child.) It's almost cheating, to finally do the Muppet version of this tale and put an interloper in the lead, when the whole point of adapting it to a pre-existing framework is to match up the archetypes and balance that against audience expectations. It is, effectively, like getting to use characters as actors by casting them as different characters. This is also why Bill Murray works so well in Scrooged, because Scrooge pings off Murray's crabby, misanthropic '80s persona.

Take This Waltz (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

November 12, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance

Takethiswaltz1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby, Sarah Silverman
written and directed by Sarah Polley

by Angelo Muredda As both literary adaptations and first features go, Sarah Polley’s Away from Her was an astonishing exercise in restraint. Working from Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” about a seventysomething married couple whose longstanding private games turn into something else when Fiona (Julie Christie) is diagnosed with dementia, Polley forewent the ostentatious route of many first-time directors by telling the story straight. It’s become customary, in speaking of that film, to chalk up this directness to the source material–Munro is, after all, known for her frankness, and apart from the expansion of Olympia Dukakis’s character and a Hockey Night in Canada gag, Polley ported her narrative beats over more or less wholesale. But Munro has a certain nastiness, not least in her omniscient narrators’ cutting observations, that’s largely absent from Polley’s adaptation, which has particular sympathy for Gordon Pinsent’s reformed husband, who’s more of a forgetful cad in the short story. It’s a standard line to say that Munro reserves judgment, particularly towards her adulterers, but what of the ghoulishness of her characterization, in Lives of Girls and Women, of small-town scolds who say things like, “The law-yer, didn’t he think he was somebody?” Polley doesn’t get sufficient credit for translating what she can of that prickliness–which also runs through “Bear”–and molding the rest into something unabashedly romantic.

Your Sister’s Sister (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

November 5, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mark Duplass, Mike Birbiglia
written and directed by Lynn Shelton


Yoursistersister1

by Angelo Muredda Lynn Shelton tends to swim in the deep end of the mumblecore pool. More improvisatory than the scripted films of the Duplass brothers (despite their overlap in casting), her work, in an odd sort of way, is probably closer in spirit to Joe Swanberg's. Swanberg's shabbier DIY aesthetic masks the heady nature of his projects, which explore the same three or four ideas about modern relationships in forms as disparate as the anthology film (Autoerotic) and the meta-slasher (Silver Bullets). In Humpday, Shelton nicely marries her own high concept–to make a movie about hetero male insecurity writ large–with a pair of naturalistic performances that elude Swanberg's scratchier efforts. Her M.O. appears to be to let her actors fumble through a convoluted situation that, on the strength of their characterizations, never feels as unnatural as it probably should.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) – Blu-ray Disc

October 30, 2012Posted in1980s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras A
starring Grant Cramer, Suzanne Snyder, John Allen Nelson, John Vernon
screenplay by Charles Chiodo & Stephen Chiodo
directed by Stephen Chiodo



Killerklowns1

by Walter Chaw Boy, you know, I
really like the Chiodo Brothers' Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I can't
help it. I like it more than Night of the Creeps, more than Matinee, more
than any other film that would see 1950s creature-features
resurrected, be it through homage or farce or satire. I like it because it's
unapologetic, and because its high concept is broad enough that there are sufficient gags to peanut-butter across the entire runtime. I like, too, that they don't end
a scene without a groaner, meaning they're unerringly true to their stated
mission of erecting a shrine to Irvin S. Yeaworth's The Blob (truer, even, than the contemporaneous remake of The Blob) and doing it
with a relentlessly light touch. It's never scary (unless you're a true
coulrophobe), but it is often uproarious–like when one of the titular alien Bozos squirts angry Officer Mooney (John Vernon, just fantastic) with gag
flowers, to which Mooney, out of proportion to the affront, responds, "I oughta
shoot you right now." I also appreciated the moment when head girl Debbie
(Suzanne Snyder) asks why they're being shot with popcorn and her
boyfriend Mike (Grant Cramer) replies, "Popcorn? Because they're clowns!"
Well, no shit, Debbie, try to pay attention.

Magic Mike (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

October 22, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD, Theatrical

Magicmike1

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, Cody Horn, Matthew McConaughey
screenplay by Reid Carolin
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Magic Mike opens with Saul Bass’s red-and-black Warner Bros. logo, retired in 1984. That gesture is meant, I think, to pitch what follows as a throwback to smarter studio fare along the lines of Hal Ashby’s Being There, but it also courts less flattering comparisons to the likes of the Police Academy movies. Steven Soderbergh’s latest pop exercise falls somewhere between those two poles–a little too close for comfort to the Guttenberg side. Conceived as a loose riff on star Channing Tatum’s time as a male stripper, it has a solid run as a cheerful smut delivery mechanism before hanging up its thong to become a rote ‘80s melodrama about good kids corrupted by bad drugs. If the howl of “Yes!” that greeted the first bared ass at my screening is any indication, that transformation won’t hurt the bottom line (a figure these strippers always seem to have on their minds), though it does make Magic Mike another promising yet half-baked Soderbergh project instead of a good movie, sans asterisks.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952) – Blu-ray Disc

October 9, 2012Posted in****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Romance

Singinintheraincap

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Cyd Charisse
screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
directed by Stanley Donen

by Bryant Frazer Not just the best Gene Kelly film, and not just the best movie musical ever made, Singin’ in the Rain is a genuine national treasure–a single text proving for posterity what a wondrous thing the Hollywood studio system could be when it was firing on all cylinders. It’s the quintessential studio picture and smart as hell about its own nature. Unpretentious and unabashedly entertaining, it’s a self-reflexive product of the same filmmaking process it simultaneously documents and lampoons.

Child’s Play (1988) [Chucky’s 20th Birthday Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc + Chucky: The Killer DVD Collection

October 1, 2012Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Romania, Satire, Thriller, UK

CHILD'S PLAY
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon, Alex Vincent, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Don Mancini and John Lafia and Tom Holland
directed by Tom Holland

CHILD'S PLAY 2 (1990)
**/**** Image C+ Sound A-
starring Alex Vincent, Jenny Agutter, Gerrit Graham, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Don Mancini
directed by John Lafia

CHILD'S PLAY 3 (1991)
*/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Justin Whalin, Perrey Reeves, Jeremy Sylvers, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Don Mancini
directed by Jack Bender

BRIDE OF CHUCKY (1998)
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jennifer Tilly, Brad Dourif, Katherine Heigl, Nick Stabile
screenplay by Don Mancini
directed by Ronny Yu

SEED OF CHUCKY (2004)
*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C-
starring Jennifer Tilly, Brad Dourif, Billy Boyd, Redman
written and directed by Don Mancini

Childsplaycap

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Twenty years and four sequels later, it's obviously pointless to try to conceal that Child's Play is about a serial killer (Brad Dourif) who transfers his soul into an innocuous doll, but watching it today–more than a decade after it thoroughly traumatized me as an impressionable preteen–I was surprised to learn that the film itself didn't do much to hide that fact from the start. Oh, sure, when you first approach Child's Play, you're ostensibly supposed to wonder whether little Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent) is responsible for the murders peppered throughout, despite his loud protestations that Chucky did it. But no, it never really tries to pretend that these horrible acts are being committed by anyone other than that godawful doll. In taking that perspective, Child's Play preys upon the irrational fears we all harbour–that sting of dread we get at the sight of an unintentionally unsettling toy, immediately wished away by safe, immutable reason: that's impossible–a doll can't hurt you.

Dark Shadows (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

September 23, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, DVD, Horror, Vampire, Werewolf

Darkshadows3

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green
screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith, based on the television series “Dark Shadows” by Dan Curtis
directed by Tim Burton

by Angelo Muredda Like so many of his recent dioramas, Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows starts off looking suspiciously like a real movie. The director’s tendency to Burtonize cherished texts into gauche self-portraits is suppressed in an economical opening that tells with a straight face the dolorous tale of Barnabas Collins, once-imprisoned and newly-freed vampire star of Dan Curtis’s late-afternoon soap. The mood is sombre–a nice hat-tip to Curtis’s morose series, which, if you’ll pardon the wonky chronology, played out like a Smiths song drained of irony. Alas, before long Barnabas awakens in 1972 to meet his distant relatives and dissipated hangers-on, and the mere presence of pasty-white, pink-shaded, ginger-wigged Helena Bonham Carter as family psychiatrist Julia Hoffman is enough to break the spell. Carter’s mannered and carefully sculpted weirdness alerts us that this is yet another wax museum standing in for a film no one had the heart to finish.

TIFF ’12: Imogene

September 21, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

Imogenea.k.a. Girl Most Likely
**/****
directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini

by Bill Chambers The Wizard of Oz is the paradigm for Kristen Wiig's first starring vehicle since Bridesmaids–though for the sake of managing expectations, it's probably better to think of Imogene as Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's follow-up to their dire HBO flick Cinema Vérité. The movie opens with the title character as a child playing the lead in an unlikely school production of The Wizard of Oz and lodging the precocious complaint that Dorothy's desire to return to drab Kansas is irrational. Many years later, Imogene is an aspiring/failed playwright in the Laura Linney-in-The Savages mold reduced to staging a suicide tableau in a last-ditch effort to win back her ex-boyfriend (Brian Petsos). The frenemy (June Diane Raphael, who's in every goddamn movie like this) who finds her instead calls 9-1-1, and Imogene, thanks to the intervention of the Sitcom Fairy, is forced to serve out her mandatory psych stay at home–specifically, her childhood home in Atlantic City, where her man-child brother Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald) still lives with their gambling-addict mother (Annette Bening), mom's weird boyfriend (Matt Dillon), and Lee (Darren Criss), the young boarder who moved into Imogene's old room.

TIFF ’12: Silver Linings Playbook

September 18, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Robert De Niro, Romance, TIFF

Silverliningsplaybook***/****
directed by David O. Russell

by Angelo Muredda Awards season does strange things to American filmmakers in search of gold hardware. Last year, Alexander Payne delivered his James L. Brooks movie in The Descendants, toning down his tartness for a family drama both more palatable and significantly shoddier than usual. There's a comparable transformation in the cards this year for David O. Russell, who showed signs of mellowing with 2010's The Fighter but was still miles from the Cameron Crowe job he's now pulled off, to surprisingly strong effect, with Silver Linings Playbook, a Jerry Maguire for manic depressives.

Ed Wood (1994) – [Special Edition] DVD + Blu-ray Disc

September 16, 2012Posted in1990s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, DVD

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette
screenplay by Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski
directed by Tim Burton

Edwood1click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Raging Bull for starfuckers, Ed Wood is in a lot of ways the quintessential dissection of the allure of Hollywood, allying it more closely, perhaps, with a different Martin Scorsese film, The King of Comedy. (It's The King of Comedy recast with the stalked celebrity a willing participant in the stalker's obsessive lunacy.) Ed Wood diverges from most biopics in director Tim Burton's tactic of skewing the film towards the same sort of kitsch-surreal of Wood's own films, managing in so doing the trick that David Cronenberg performed with Naked Lunch: a hagiography that's as much critical analysis as hommage. It engages in a conversation about how Wood's films are seen at the same time that it endeavours to tell the highlights of Wood's life. The result is a picture that bridges the gap between cult and camp classic; the melancholic and the melodramatic; and the difference between a director of vision and a director with a vision that sucks.

TIFF ’12: Argo

September 7, 2012Posted in2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

Argo***½/****
directed by Ben Affleck

by Bill Chambers Ben Affleck's films as a director are no longer surprisingly good–they're expectedly good. The surprise of his latest, Argo, is twofold: first, put a beard on Affleck and suddenly he's an actor of gravitas; second, that this directing detour his career took may have been born of not just self-preservation, but real movie love. You can see it in his hoarding of genre staples for one-scene (Adrienne Barbeau) and in some cases one-line (Michael Parks) roles, but more importantly, you can see it in the gentle Hollywood satire Argo briefly–perhaps too briefly–becomes. Set in 1979, the picture is suffused with a passion for filmmaking, if also a tinge of wistfulness for that bygone era in filmmaking. Though it may be period-authentic when Affleck shows the Hollywood sign in a state of disrepair, I think it's meant as commentary on the present. Argo is the second Warner release this year to revert to the golden-age Saul Bass logo–it fits better here.

TIFF ’12: Reality

September 3, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Film Festivals, Italy, Satire, TIFF

Reality***½/****
directed by Matteo Garrone

by Angelo Muredda Reality, Matteo Garrone's follow-up to the urban planner's nightmare of Gomorrah, is a nasty little thing, at once an indictment of the mass delusion of celebrity culture and a finely-wrought character study of Luciano, a fish merchant and small-town Neapolitan crook who dreams of being a contestant on "Big Brother". Luciano is played with wide-eyed wonder and deep sincerity by Aniello Arena, a mafia hitman currently serving a life sentence for a triple-homicide–unlike his modest fictional counterpart, who's involved in a baffling scheme to resell pastry-making robots on the black market. It's a terrific performance, somehow sweet and deranged in equal measure, and it's the reason Reality works as well as it does when it begins to assume his warped perspective.

TIFF ’12: Picture Day

August 31, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, Teen, TIFF

Pictureday***/****
written and directed by Kate Melville

by Bill Chambers 27 according to the IMDb but convincingly aged down, Tatiana Maslany gives a star-making performance in Picture Day as 18-year-old Claire, who's forced to repeat the twelfth grade after failing math and phys-ed. It seems obvious that she in fact chose not to be jettisoned from the womb of high school just yet, though she shows little interest in actually attending classes, to the consternation of the vice principal (Catherine Fitch). ("You can't stay in high school forever, Claire," the VP tells her. "You did," Claire snaps.) One day, she joins a kid who's deviated from his gym class to smoke up–are teenage potheads really this brazen now?–and discovers that he's Henry (Spencer Van Wyck), the timid boy she used to babysit, all grown up. A science wiz who turned down a private-school education (he sort of resents his intellect–plus, it was an all-boys academy), he even grows his own marijuana, in a closet that contains, among other things, a shrine to Claire filled with enough traces of her DNA–chewed gum, soiled tissues, hair bands–that one wonders if he intends to clone her.

Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) [15th Anniversary Edition] + High Fidelity (2000) – Blu-ray Discs

August 26, 2012Posted in1990s, 2000s, 2012, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Music, Romance, Thriller, UK

Grossepointe2

GROSSE POINTE BLANK
***½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras D
starring John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Alan Arkin, Dan Aykroyd
screenplay by Tom Jankiewicz and D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & John Cusack
directed by George Armitage

HIGH FIDELITY
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring John Cusack, Jack Black, Lisa Bonet, Joelle Carter
screenplay by D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & John Cusack and Scott Rosenberg, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Stephen Frears

by Jefferson Robbins John Cusack spent much of the 1990s stubbornly trying to dodge his high-school reunion. Barely present in Sixteen Candles, he nevertheless may have suffered a bit of the curse that pursued John Hughes’s other players: We wouldn’t let them grow up for quite a while, and careers were hampered. Cusack navigated this impasse better than most, netting late-’80s leads both romantic (Say Anything…) and dramatic (The Grifters) that unpack and showcase his mature dimensions. Cusack has, if it’s not too oxymoronic, a vulnerable edge–his characters are deeply attuned to others, but only out of self-defense. Lloyd Dobler, Roy Dillon, and, in the two films under discussion, Martin Blank and Rob Gordon constantly assess input to learn how the prevailing emotional currents of a scene affect them, not others. “You think I’m a dick,” Lloyd determines when Diane (Ione Skye) gives him a Pen of Friendship as a parting gift. His feelings, dependent on hers, are paramount. Cusack’s heroes are sensitive but far from selfless, yet the actor somehow convinces us otherwise.