Turn Me On, Goddammit (2011)

May 17, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Norway, Romance, Teen

Turnmeondammitcap

Få meg på, for faen
(a.k.a. Turn Me On, Dammit!)
***/****
starring Helen Bergsholm, Malin Bjørhovde, Henriette Steenstrup, Beate Støfring
screenplay by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, based on the novel by Olaug Nilssen
directed by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen

by Angelo Muredda Turn Me On, Goddammit opens with a provocation worthy of its title. Our introduction to fifteen-year-old Alma (Helene Bergsholm) finds her on the kitchen floor, masturbating to a phone-sex line (she’s a preferred caller and sort-of friend to operator Stig (Per Kjerstad)) while her dog watches with interest. That’s some hook, but Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s first dramatic feature after a string of documentaries is at its best when it bypasses this kind of frontal assault and plays to Jacobsen’s strengths, namely her delicate touch with nonprofessional actors and sharp distillation of the gender politics of small-town life. While the film nicely delineates its washed-out setting of Skoddeheimen, a remote mountain village in Norway whose welcome sign kids unfailingly raise a middle-finger to on the bus ride home from school, Jacobsen’s real boon is to capture a spectrum of teens’ sexual attitudes within a hermetically-sealed but still fairly typical environment. While that might make Turn Me On, Goddammit sound like a dry sociological tome, Jacobsen and Bergsholm, in her debut, are adept at making Alma not a blank Norwegian Everygirl but someone who’s credibly starting to cultivate her sexual proclivities in a hostile space.

The Muppets (2011) [The Wocka Wocka Value Pack] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

May 6, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Muppets, Musical

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jason Segel, Amy Adams, Chris Cooper, Rashida Jones
screenplay by Jason Segel & Nicholas Stoller
directed by James Bobin

by Bryant Frazer I stopped paying attention to new Muppet movies after creator Jim Henson’s untimely death in 1990. I just didn’t have the heart for it. But I was aware that the Henson legacy continued with The Muppet Christmas Carol, Muppet Treasure Island, and, finally, Muppets from Space. (For Gen X-ers, 1999 was a very bad year: George Lucas told you that The Force was really tiny space critters living in your bloodstream, and Team Muppet expected you to believe that Gonzo was an extraterrestrial.) Muppets from Space was the last hurrah for Frank Oz, Jim Henson’s right-hand man for so many years, although the Muppets endured on a newly humble scale, reaching in 2005 what fans generally agree was the nadir of their existence, the made-for-TV The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz.

Bad Teacher (2011) – Unrated Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

April 23, 2012Posted in2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

*/**** Image A Sound B- Extras C-
starring Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, Lucy Punch, Jason Segel
screenplay by Gene Stupnitsky & Lee Eisenberg
directed by Jake Kasdan

by Jefferson Robbins It’s time for a teacher-centric dark comedy, I think. American public education, always beset, is under threat today by moralists, union-busters, profiteers, economic malaise, and taxpayers who simply refuse to vote for better school funding. We say that children are our future, yet we bus them off every day to institutions we no longer find trustworthy. Federal regulation collides with common sense, and all that matters in the end is filling in the bubbles on a Scantron sheet. Education needs its own The Hospital or Network–something like an update of Arthur Hiller’s 1984 Teachers, but with more focus, and better bite. What it doesn’t need, or at least doesn’t benefit from, is Bad Teacher.

Uncle Buck (1989) – Blu-ray Disc

April 21, 2012Posted in1980s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, John Hughes

***½/**** | Image B Sound B-
starring John Candy, Amy Madigan, Jean Louisa Kelly, Macaulay Culkin
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers It’s not John Hughes’s best film, but Uncle Buck could be his funniest, as well as his saddest. Saddest for many reasons, some of which are beyond the movie’s control. John Hughes is gone, John Candy’s gone, Macaulay Culkin’s innocence is gone; because of its place on the precipice of Hughes’s ’90s decline, revisiting Uncle Buck has long been a bittersweet prospect, but now that it’s definitively the last good John Hughes film, it’s taken on the funereal feeling of old home movies starring dead relatives. Still, the sadness isn’t entirely from without. There is in this movie a raging pathos that begins with the pariahdom of the title character and continues through a motif that finds some lost soul standing in long-shot beneath an archway (forming a makeshift picture frame), gazing uncomprehendingly at someone else, the very portrait of quiet suffering. Buck’s on the receiving end of one of these pitiful stares at least once, when the movie’s putative love interest, Chanice (Amy Madigan), walks in on him dancing with a neighbour lady (Laurie Metcalf). The song on the soundtrack is “Laugh Laugh,” The Beau Brummels‘ spiteful “I told you so” to a woman who chose the wrong man, and as Chanice’s heartbreak wafts through the air, lead singer Sal Valentino, sounding suddenly compassionate, croons, “Lonely… Oh, so lonely…”1

Damsels in Distress (2012)

April 19, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Greta Gerwig, Adam Brody, Analeigh Tipton, Megan Echikunwoke
written and directed by Whit Stillman

by Angelo Muredda Damsels in Distress is a hard movie to sink your teeth into–a stick of gum soaked in brine. Whit Stillman’s first effort since 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, it’s a light-headed fantasia that’s committed to its gonzo vision, best expressed by a character who calls her favourite soap scent “very precise.” Very precise, indeed: Less wealthy than Metropolitan‘s socialites, Damsels‘ cadre of female sophomores breathe even more rarefied air. Though each actress works her peculiar cadence into these pronouncements to uncanny effect, they seem possessed by their creator even more than is typical for Stillman’s characters, genteelly handling accusations of hypocrisy with defenses like, “We are all flawed. Must that render us mute to the flaws of others?” Stillman’s rigorously formal dialogue is always a trial-by-fire for actors–easily passed in Last Days by Kate Beckinsale, for example, but stumbled over by Matt Keesler, who looks embarrassed to identify as a “loyal adherent to the disco movement”–but something’s different this time. Always accused of being hermetic but usually too enamoured with other people’s ephemera (e.g., collections of Scrooge McDuck memorabilia) for that to be true, this time he’s properly set up shop in the projection booth at the back of his mind.

Goon (2012)

April 17, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Sports, Theatrical

***/****
starring Seann William Scott, Jay Baruchel, Alison Pill, Liev Schreiber
screenplay by Jay Baruchel & Evan Goldberg
directed by Michael Dowse

by Walter Chaw The best hockey movie since Slap Shot and the most pleasant and well-meaning Canuck-sploitation flick since Strange Brew, Michael Dowse’s Goon is a prime example of how to make an insightful guy-movie without indulging in the cheap scatology of American Pie and its offspring. Not that there’s anything wrong with cheap scatology, mind, only that it seems played-out, and so it’s something of a revelation to find that franchise’s own secret weapon, Seann William “Stifler” Scott (who, let’s face it, is impossible not to like ever since he was brought to orgasm through manual stimulation of his prostate in that franchise), so quiet and unassuming in the title role as dim, sweet Doug Glatt. Doug’s a natural-born bouncer in an armpit dive, see, who, after laying out a local bruiser taking his beef into the stands, is offered a shot at becoming a full-time enforcer for a bus-and-motel league. He shows up at his first practice wobbly in figure skates, proceeds to give his teammates a sound beating for their hooted derision, and is promptly called up to the bigger minor-league team the Halifax Highlanders.

Footnote (2011)

April 17, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Israel, Theatrical

Hearat Shulayim
***/****
starring Shlomo Bar-Aba, Lior Ashkenazi
written and directed by Joseph Cedar

by Angelo Muredda Joseph Cedar’s Footnote (Hearat Shulayim) begins with what looks like a son’s loving tribute to his intellectual origins. Rising to accept his invitation to the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities, slick Talmud scholar Uriel Scholnik (Lior Ashkenazi) waxes reverent about the professional example set by his uncompromising father, Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-Aba), himself a Talmud scholar who spent the better part of his adult years toiling away on textual variants observed in microfiche while his son cut his teeth on high theory. We stay tight on Eliezer, his head bowed and his mouth locked in a grimace, as his son tells an anecdote about a survey he had to fill out as a primary student, identifying his father’s profession. “Say that I’m a teacher,” the younger Scholnik recalls Eliezer saying, portraying a man at once too modest to own up to his repute as a philologist and fixated on the pedagogical value of his work–an obsession Uriel claims to have happily inherited.

Project X (2012)

April 17, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Thomas Mann, Oliver Cooper, Jonathan Daniel Brown, Dax Flame
screenplay by Matt Drake and Michael Bacall
directed by Nima Nourizadeh

by Angelo Muredda With Bridesmaids, Judd Apatow made the case for the producer as auteur–a spiritual godparent to screenwriters’ Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumulo’s every deferred comedic beat. It’s only taken one try–the perfunctorily- titled, written, and staged Project X–but Todd Philips can now claim the same, to everyone’s great detriment. Late in the game, protagonist Thomas’s dad surveys the wreckage of his vanilla son’s soiree and says, with something like pride, “I didn’t think you had it in you.” It’s a callback to the strained thematic machinations of The Hangover Part II, where straight-laced Stu (Ed Helms) recognizes he has a “demon” in him, and if that makes him a horrible spouse, then so be it. While Project X is suffused with the same deep misogyny and awe before Dionysian dickishness as its producer’s directorial work, it’s also a testament to Helms’s grounded performance as those films’ mild-mannered demon-in-wait–and proof of how unsustainable Philips’s poisonous alchemy is in the hands of the truly useless. That would be first-time director Nima Nourizadeh, who has no instinct for narrative, characterization, or composition and whose licentious camera unfailingly roves up the skirt of every 18-year-old extra lassoed in what the press notes eerily call a “nationwide talent search.” Woe and hilarious Taser gags to anyone who searches for talent here.

Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

April 4, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Horror

Tucker and Dale Vs Evil
*½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Tyler Labine, Alan Tudyk, Katrina Bowden, Jesse Moss
screenplay by Eli Craig & Morgan Jurgenson
directed by Eli Craig

by Walter Chaw Essentially the dimwit punchline to Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever (“My niggas!”) extended to feature-length, hyphenate Eli Craig’s debut is a polite send-up of kids-in-the-woods/Spam-in-a-cabin flicks that posits our titular rednecks as misunderstood sons of the earth while their yuppie “victims,” overfed on a steady diet of too many horror flicks, are the real maniacs. It raises the interesting question of where Craig’s allegiance truly lies, honestly, were one to dig into the premise, though the fact of it is that Tucker and Dale Vs Evil (hereafter Tucker and Dale)–no matter its whiplash homages to The Evil Dead, its re-enactment in part of the rape scene from Re-Animator, its obvious affection for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre–is a one-trick pony that runs out of steam about fifteen minutes in. Its earnestness allows it to play like other low-budget yuk-yuk slasher flicks like Severance and The Cottage: well-intended genre mash-notes that never entirely rise above slightly-informed spoof (in mild contrast to the uninformed-spoof Scary Movie franchise). But for the gore (and even with it, as the gore here is more cartoonish than gruesome), Tucker and Dale could be an SNL skit, interminable and bland.

Tom & Jerry: Golden Collection – Volume One (1940-1948) – Blu-ray Disc

March 12, 2012Posted in1940s, 2012, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Short Films

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
“Puss Gets the Boot,” “The Midnight Snack,” “The Night Before Christmas,” “Fraidy Cat,” “Dog Trouble,” “Puss N’ Toots,” “The Bowling Alley-Cat,” Fine Feathered Friend,” “Sufferin’ Cats,” “The Lonesome Mouse,” “The Yankee Doodle Mouse,” “Baby Puss,” “The Zoot Cat,” “The Million Dollar Cat,” “The Bodyguard,” “Puttin’ On The Dog,” “Mouse Trouble,” “The Mouse Comes To Dinner,” “Flirty Birdy,” “Quiet Please!,” “Springtime For Thomas,” “The Milky Waif,” “Trap Happy,” “Solid Serenade,” “Cat Fishin’,” “Part Time Pal,” “The Cat Concerto,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse,” “Salt Water Tabby,” “A Mouse in the House,” “The Invisible Mouse,” “Kitty Foiled,” “The Truce Hurts,” “Old Rockin’ Chair Tom,” “Professor Tom”

by Jefferson Robbins They’re phenomenally enjoyable, but the conflict in Warner’s Roadrunner cartoons comes down to a lively protagonist pitting himself against something that’s not a character, nor even a “force of nature.” Nature, in fact, is suspended; Wile E. Coyote is struggling with a quantum impossibility. When he sets out after his prey, he finds laws of matter, energy, and motion suspended and reversed. (At times, the Roadrunner appears to move at lightspeed or beyond.) The Coyote applies Acme™ science to the chase, but discovers science doesn’t apply. The Roadrunner has no obvious inner life or larger goals, and seems to exist just to frustrate his pursuer. The Universe simply does not want the Coyote to catch this blankly-smiling creature with a void howling behind its eyes, and so he never will.

Lady and the Tramp (1955) – Diamond Edition Blu-ray + DVD

March 5, 2012Posted in1950s, 2012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance

Ladytramp1

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
animated; screenplay by Erdman Penner, Joe Rinaldi, Ralph Wright, Don Dagradi
directed by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson

by Bill Chambers Given that it may have the most famous scene in the Disney oeuvre, it’s odd that Lady and the Tramp doesn’t enjoy a better, or at least bigger, reputation. The first animated feature in CinemaScope, as well as the studio’s first original story1 and its first dog movie (various Pluto-starring shorts notwithstanding), the film, despite earning the highest grosses of any Disney production since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, seems to have been eclipsed in the public consciousness from a genre standpoint by 101 Dalmatians and from a cinematographic standpoint by Sleeping Beauty, each of which followed so closely on Lady and the Tramp‘s heels as to reduce history’s perception of it to a dry run. It’s a bit better than that, but, coveted “Diamond” status to the contrary, frankly not one of the greats.

It Happened at the World’s Fair (1961) – DVD

February 22, 2012Posted in1960s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Romance

Ithappenedworldscap

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Elvis Presley, Joan O’Brien, Gary Lockwood, Vicky Tiu
screenplay by Si Rose and Seaman Jacobs
directed by Norman Taurog

by Bill Chambers Over the main titles, Elvis sings the jaunty “Beyond the Bend” (“Breeze sing a happy song/This heart of mine is singing right along”) from the cockpit of a cropduster. He playfully re-enacts North by Northwest by swooping down to ogle a couple of cuties in a convertible, telling his co-pilot, Danny (Gary Lockwood), that he can have the one in the red dress, ’cause “her ankles are a little thick.” It’s around this point that Elvis vehicles started to develop a sociopathic streak; Viva Las Vegas‘s crass reduction of anyone Elvis doesn’t need to literal cannon fodder is perhaps in the embryonic stage in these opening moments of It Happened at the World’s Fair, or when Mike ducks out on his quasi-daughter and his best friend without saying goodbye, effectively cutting them from the show-stopping, Music Man-ish final number.

Annie Hall (1977) + Manhattan (1979) – Blu-ray Discs

February 20, 2012Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance

Anniehallcap

ANNIE HALL
****/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane
screenplay by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman
directed by Woody Allen

MANHATTAN
****/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Mariel Hemingway
screenplay by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman
directed by Woody Allen

by Bryant Frazer I’ve fantasized for a good twenty years now about Anhedonia, the 140-minute workprint of what eventually became Annie Hall. The original title of the project–which seems in its reflexive analysis of Allen’s public persona to have been intended as something akin to an essay film–referred to an inability to experience pleasure. As unseen movies go, it has a lower pedigree than Tod Browning’s London After Midnight, Hitchcock’s The Mountain Eagle, or Orson Welles’s cut of The Magnificent Ambersons; the few who have seen it would agree that the released version was infinitely superior. But it’s tantalizing, because Woody Allen in 1976 and 1977 was such a formidable comic.

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 6, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, DVD

Haroldandkumar3dxmascap1

**/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring John Cho, Kal Penn, Danny Trejo, Neil Patrick Harris
screenplay by Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg
directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson

by Angelo Muredda The funniest moment in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas lasts about three seconds and comes at the end of a barrage of trite digs at the Occupy Wall Street movement that could have been written by Herman Cain at the height of his powers of lucidity. Harold (John Cho), who over the course of these movies has graduated from restless investment banker to high-rolling trader, has just been given a 3D TV that’s promised to “make Avatar look Avatarded,” and he’s about to leave the office through a mass of protestors when Princeton pal-turned-assistant Ken (Bobby Lee) begs to take the bullet for him. The bullet turns out to be a bunch of eggs, launched at the screen at various speeds and from various angles in the first of at least a dozen meta-3D gags that are supposed to be hilarious because having things thrown at you in 3D sucks.  It’s a shock when the shot of the aftermath is actually pretty good: poor Ken lies traumatized (or dead?) in a pool of yolk as a Lisa Gerrard knockoff wails incomprehensibly on the soundtrack, à la Black Hawk Down.

The Rules of the Game (1939) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 30, 2012Posted in****/****, 1930s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Jean Renoir, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, Satire, The Criterion Collection

Rulesofthegame

La règle du jeu
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Nora Grégor, Marcel Dalio, Mila Parély, Roland Toutain
screenplay by Jean Renoir and Carl Koch
directed by Jean Renoir

by Jefferson Robbins One political cue most firmly plants Jean Renoir’s masterwork in pre-World War II France, and it doesn’t come amidst the posturing of the elegant rich at La Colinière country manor. Rather, it’s in the kitchen, where the domestic staff breaks bread and gossips about the master of the house, the Marquis Robert De La Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), outed by the help as a “yid” whose family made good with money and a title. The gossipers turn for confirmation to the huntsman who’s just materialized on the stairs, and the combination of words is chilling: “Isn’t that right, Schumacher?” The italics are mine, and despite the fierce Teutonic consonants of his name, the Marquis’s game warden (Gaston Modot) is Alsatian. He remains metaphorically sticky, though, since his home state was variously French or German for 200 years, and his dress and cap bespeak armed authority. He’s rough and field-hardened, arguably ignorant, and looked down upon by his fellow servants, who see him as a thing apart from their world. Cuckolded and exiled from his wife, the housemaid Lisette (Paulette Dubost), he’s also the most prone to physical violence as he seeks to control her and eliminate all rivalry. On the matter of La Chesnaye’s Jewishness, Schumacher demurs: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But the point is made, the knife already twisted.

The Artist (2011)

January 25, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, Silent, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell
written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius

by Walter Chaw It’s tempting to dismiss Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist as fluff. It’s tempting to take the side of Kim Novak when she complains about this fluff using Bernard Hermann’s Vertigo score in vain, and a few critics and Internet memes have done exactly that. Yet The Artist is more than a passing fancy precisely because it uses the Vertigo theme correctly in a sentence. Indeed, it even has its way with film preservationists and other snobs (the kind who champion Hugo, for instance) by suggesting that obsessive movie love to the exclusion of all else is the same sort of illness, ultimately, as necrophilia. In the fluffy course of its runtime, in fact, The Artist manages to be as subversive and scabrous a Hollywood artifact as Sunset Blvd., finding its monkey funeral towards the end instead of at the beginning but presenting a close-up Mr. DeMille at its conclusion almost as ambiguous and doomed. It’s popular because it keeps its edges carefully sheathed…but they’re there. And I think people are offended once they realize–most of them long, long after the fact, and through other avenues–that Hazanavicius had the temerity to peanut-butter a little obsessive, consumptive, solipsistic love in there to gum up all the crevices. I’ll be honest: I think that if you don’t believe The Artist is correct in its use of Vertigo, you probably also thought that Vertigo was a love story.

Carnage (2011)

December 23, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Theatrical

***/****
starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, John C. Reilly
screenplay by Yasmina Reza and Roman Polanski, based on Reza’s play “God of Carnage”
directed by Roman Polanski

by Angelo Muredda It’s tempting to read Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s celebrated play God of Carnage as a doodle, the cinematic equivalent of one character’s pet name for his wife. Unlike, say, Chinatown, nothing much is at stake, and unlike last year’s The Ghost Writer, there are no doe-eyed innocents for us to coddle. (“He can’t drown two ghost writers, for God’s sake; you’re not kittens!” might go down as the sweetest line in Polanski’s tart career.) Yet Carnage, set in an antiseptic Brooklyn residence that’s decked in coffee-table books begging to be sprayed with vomit, is vintage if minor Polanski, from its claustrophobic environment and precise compositions to its droll flirtation with nihilism.

The Hangover Part II (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 19, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Craig Mazin & Scot Armstrong & Todd Phillips
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw I guess it says something about picking up speed at the bottom of that proverbial slippery slope that I thought The Hangover Part II was consistently funny and pleasantly vile throughout, and that the only time I felt genuinely offended was during the closing-credits snapshot montage, wherein Eddie Adams’s infamous VC execution photograph is re-enacted in a digital tableau mort. That’s the line, I guess, and kudos in a heartfelt way to director Todd Phillips and company for finding a lower place to draw it. Until then, The Hangover Part II is a vaguely linear instalment of Jackass, mapping the odd longitudes of male friendship set loose in fleshpot/den of iniquity Bangkok, the Asian equivalent of the first film’s Las Vegas; where the original tackles that Sodom’s sin-of-choice prostitution, this likewise spends some time with transvestitism and sex-trafficking. Ugly? Well, it’s not pretty–but it is pretty funny as it reunites pretty boy Phil (Bradley Cooper), sociopath Alan (Zach Galifianakis), non-descript every-guy Doug (Justin Bartha), and dentist Stu (Ed Helms), for whose wedding the boys have reconvened some ill-defined months after the events of the previous film. Along for the ride this time is adorable little-bro-of-the-bride Teddy (Mason “son of Ang” Lee), who has the de facto Dragon Daddy issues as a Stanford pre-med and concert cellist and who, of course, will go through a heart-warming transformation through the loving attention of unbridled hedonism, drug abuse, organized crime, and mutilation. Oh, and there’s a fellating, drug-dealing monkey in a denim Rolling Stones vest. Ah, Bangkok.

Fright Night (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD

December 12, 2011Posted in****/****, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Vampire

****/**** Image B- Sound A+ Extras C-
starring Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, Imogen Poots, David Tennant
screenplay by Marti Noxon, based on the screenplay by Tom Holland
directed by Craig Gillespie

by Walter Chaw After 28 Weeks Later, I wondered when Imogen Poots would become a star. It only took four years. As Amy in Craig Gillespie’s really frickin’ great Fright Night, she’s sexy without being vacuous and tough without being masculinized–her general kick-assness undoubtedly owing in part to screenwriter Marti Noxon, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”‘s showrunner from Season Six to completion. I’m spending time talking about Amy because she’s a wonderful character who manages to complete an arc or two in a mere supporting role. Consider a moment in which she mentions her boyfriend’s skin clearing up that locates her completely, and believably, in the film’s high-school environment–that’s a lot of expositional impact in a little package. A remake of Tom Holland’s cult classic that was itself one of my VHS favourites (worn to breaking during my formative decade with the movies), Fright Night is delightful because it’s absolutely certain of what it is and what it isn’t, delivers everything it promises it will (in spades), and genuinely has fun with the 3-D innovation that’s the bane of most other movies lately. Smart as hell and unapologetic about it, it presents character beats that matter and sports a performance from Colin Farrell as evil vampire-next-door Jerry that should, no shit, earn him Academy Award consideration. Between him and the chimp from Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it’d be a tough call.

Bridesmaids (2011) – [Unrated] DVD + Something Borrowed (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 1, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

BRIDESMAIDS
***½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras A
starring Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendon-Covey
screenplay by Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig
directed by Paul Feig

SOMETHING BORROWED
*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Kate Hudson, Ginnifer Goodwin, John Krasinski, Colin Egglesfield
screenplay by Jennie Snyder Urman, based on the novel by Emily Giffin
directed by Luke Greenfield

by Jefferson Robbins On release, everybody tried to make Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids about sex (gender and the act), when its bigger issue is class. Working from a script by Annie Mumolo and star Kristen Wiig, frosted liberally with improv in the manner producer Judd Apatow has made inescapable, the creators spin Wiig’s failed cake-maker Annie for an early midlife crisis rooted in bad relationships as well as economic hardship. It’s easy to get stuck on the sex angle, given the opening scene: Singleton Annie is stuck in a self-hating friends-with-benefits cycle with sometime-lover Ted (Jon Hamm), doing exactly what he wants in bed–at length, in several variations, and noisily. She gets only smiling, sociopathic dismissal in return as he kicks her out of his lush Milwaukee McMansion. She’s pinned some vague hope on a pretty package of a man who’s not only bad for her, but vastly wealthier, too. Note how Annie is forced to vault an automatic gate to escape Ted’s one-percenter compound. Bridesmaids is not just about relationships in the mush-minded romcom sense–it’s about power relationships: who has the most money and thus can bring the most social clout to bear, in the snowglobe economy created by a best friend’s nuptials. Goddamn, that’s timely.