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.

The Descendants (2011)

November 30, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Beau Bridges, Judy Greer
screenplay by Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw George Clooney is great, Alexander Payne is great, it’s all very predictably great, and it’s all so very predictable. The Descendants, Payne’s fifth film, is an edgeless and anti-satirical adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings’s novel that has its moments, all of them involving Clooney’s Matt King shouting at his vegetable wife (Patricia Hastie, in the most thankless non-Michael Bay role of the year) in articulation of the mid-life emasculation opera in which Payne specializes. Armed with a voiceover to better seduce Oscar voters and awards-season audiences, The Descendants opens with Matt promising his comatose spouse that he’ll be a better man and commit to a normal life with her, and then it proceeds to be nothing much more than a sitcom about what happens when a confirmed bachelor is forced to become the primary caregiver to his two sassy daughters. Eldest is reform-school girl Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), who used to have a drug problem and currently has a stupid boyfriend, Sid (Nick Krause). Her younger sister is little Scottie (Amara Miller), who says things like “motherless whore” because it’s funny when a 10-year-old says things like that–even funnier when the matinee idol playing her bumfuddled dad does the dimwit surprise thing he did in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. That’s the theory, anyway.

Rushmore (1998) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 28, 2011Posted in1990s, 2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Olivia Williams, Mason Gamble
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Owen Wilson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Angelo Muredda It’s hard to talk about Wes Anderson these days without addressing the prevailing image of him among detractors as a precious aesthete who makes dioramas instead of movies. So let’s start there. As with most shorthand characterizations of idiosyncratic artists who carve out a niche for themselves instead of diversifying, there’s some truth to the charge: Mr. Fox didn’t accidentally wear the same corduroy blazer as his director, and surely Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman didn’t just frame themselves in the centre of the screen for the train-bound section of The Darjeeling Limited. Anderson, for his part, has owned up to his formal indulgences. On the audio commentary for Criterion’s excellent edition of Rushmore, he admits sheepishly that the film’s multi-ethnic, age-ranging rainbow coalition of players are basically clear types pulled from colour-coded storybooks–the sort of people you could get an easy sense of simply by drawing.

Attack the Block (2011) + Super 8 (2011)|Super 8 – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 21, 2011Posted in2011, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, France, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

ATTACK THE BLOCK
***/****
starring Jodie Whittaker, John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh
written and directed by Joe Cornish

SUPER 8
***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso
written and directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw Joe Cornish’s low-budget creature-feature Attack the Block is a charmer, a delight, the kind of rare film–like Jack Sholder’s The Hidden, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, or Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile–that devotees will latch onto, and for good reason, with the fervour afforded genuine cult classics. It has energy to burn, a strange affinity with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and a super-cool monster that looks like a cross between Ira from the “Moonshadow” comic and a grizzly bear. That most of it was carried off with practical effects is a shot in the arm for practical effects and a bearer of the nostalgia banner that seems to be popular lately, what with our dreams and memories fodder again for the celluloid couch. Better still, it introduces a new star into the future pantheon in John Boyega, who has charisma to burn as gang leader-cum-saviour Moses. The movie’s tale of a group of street toughs has drawn comparisons to The Warriors, but I think the better analogy is Spielberg’s E.T., not just in that alchemy between the fantastic and the absolutely mundane (South England’s Lambeth neighbourhood), but also in the crafting of a living youth subculture alive with its own language, ritual, and custom. It’s not too much to say that, at its best, Attack the Block makes you feel the way you did when the guys took things into their own hands to deliver the flying, omniscient, omnipotent E.T. to his landing site. It taps into the irrational cool. Which doesn’t happen very often.

Pulp Fiction (1994) + Jackie Brown (1997) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

November 10, 2011Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Palme d'Or Winner, Robert De Niro, Romance, Thriller

PULP FICTION
****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

JACKIE BROWN
****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, based on the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard
directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Seventeen years on, Pulp Fiction still works like a motherfucker. It might, indeed, benefit from the shock of its gleeful use of “nigger,” the surprise of its sodomy and ultra-violence, and the sheer pleasure of hearing Sam Jackson say those lines and John Travolta dance again in a movie having faded. What’s left is this appreciation of a film that is delighted with cinema and experimental without being a jerk about it (very much like Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa, specifically in a black-and-white rear-process cab ride with none of that feeling that Tarantino’s trying to make a point as opposed to recognizing something that looks cool and feels right)–a film that is Tarantino in all his gawky, hyperactive, movie-geeking, idioglossic splendour, fully-formed and trying only a bit too hard. Beginning life as a proposed portmanteau to be helmed by a trio of directors (à la Tarantino’s later, disastrously-received foray into the anthology format, Four Rooms), the picture retains elements of its three-headed inception by intertwining a trilogy of hard-boiled crime stories in a way superior, it’s clear now, to Frank Miller’s career-long attempts at the same. Tarantino’s purer. The stakes for him are simpler. Pulp Fiction is evidence not of someone with something to prove but of an artist entirely, and genuinely, in love with his medium. He loves film enough to push it to be everything. And Pulp Fiction almost gets there.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 7, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon
screenplay by Dan Fogelman
directed by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

by Angelo Muredda There’s a pretty good movie inside Crazy, Stupid, Love., but no one involved seems to put much trust in it. Lightly melancholic and affecting when it finds its cast at their manic lows, the film at first cavalierly launches its ensemble like discrete pinballs, to great comic effect, only to collapse in a fit of contrived set-pieces torn from the Paul Haggis playbook. It’s a shame. If the third act’s everyone-at-the-garden-party resolution is economical, it’s also distressingly uncrazy: a geometrically tidy solution to a film that’s begging for something gawkier.

The Rum Diary (2011)

October 28, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Johnny Depp, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Rispoli, Giovanni Ribisi
screenplay by Bruce Robinson, based on the novel by Hunter S. Thompson
directed by Bruce Robinson

by Walter Chaw Sad, solipsistic hagiography of a hero painted by a child, Johnny Depp’s passion project The Rum Diary reveals the actor to be not only dedicated now to delivering selfish shtick in place of interesting characters, but also apparently completely in the dark as to what it is that was dangerous about his idol. This adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s long-shelved first novel–written in 1960 during a quintessential fit of hubris in which Thompson jetted to Puerto Rico to become Ernest Hemingway and published in 1998 after being discovered as paper booty in a trunk by Jack Sparrow–has at its misbegotten helm Withnail & I auteur Bruce Robinson, jerked out of retirement to reimagine a piece-of-shit novel as a piece-of-shit movie. So, mission accomplished.

The Wes Craven Horror Collection – DVD

October 26, 2011Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Satire, Thriller, Wes Craven

THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW (1988)
**½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Bill Pullman, Cathy Tyson, Zakes Mokae, Paul Winfield
screenplay by Richard Maxwell and A.R. Simoun, based on the book by Wade Davis
directed by Wes Craven

SHOCKER (1989)
**/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Michael Murphy, Peter Berg, Cami Cooper, Mitch Pileggi
written and directed by Wes Craven

THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS (1991)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Brandon Adams, Everett McGill, Wendy Robie, A.J. Langer
written and directed by Wes Craven

by Jefferson Robbins The three late-’80s/early-’90s films gathered in Universal’s DVD set “The Wes Craven Horror Collection” are far from the director’s best, but they show him gathering his powers for the satirical play of the Scream franchise. It’s as if Craven careened into the ditch a few times trying to talk about Big Topics before finally deciding that what he was best suited to talk about was slasher movies. That’s not to say these pre-emptive excursions have no value, it’s just that he had to scout the territory thoroughly before drawing a definitive map. He had to shed some dependencies, too–most notably, given his legacy from A Nightmare on Elm Street, his fondness for dreams as an interface with horror.

My Life as a Dog (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 18, 2011Posted in1980s, 2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Sweden, The Criterion Collection

Mitt liv som hund
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Anton Glanzelius, Tomas von Brömssen, Anki Lidén, Melinda Kinnaman
screenplay by Lasse Hallström & Reidar Jönsson & Brasse Brännström & Per Berglund, based on the novel by Reidar Jönsson
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Angelo Muredda Before Oscar powerbrokers Scott Rudin and Harvey Weinstein entrusted their yearly contenders to can’t-fail Stephen Daldry, there was Lasse Hallström. A three-time Academy award nominee whose Chocolat is still roundly (and somewhat unfairly, given the company of trash like Crash) dismissed as one of the most undeserving Best Picture nominees of recent years, Hallström best encapsulates the notion, popular in Oscar-watching circles, of the “fifth nominee”: the uncelebrated contender who presumably just made the cut. Consecutive star-studded nonstarters like The Shipping News and An Unfinished Life–which, lest we forget, quasi-romantically paired a maimed Morgan Freeman with the existentially-troubled bear who gored him–have dimmed his reputation considerably since then, but Hallström has nevertheless assured himself a strange place in American filmmaking (not least because he is Swedish) as simultaneously one of the most-awarded and least-loved directors of the Miramax era of upmarket indies.

O Lucky Man! (1973) [Two-Disc Special Edition] + Never Apologize: A Personal Visit with Lindsay Anderson (2008) – DVDs

October 17, 2011Posted in1970s, 2000s, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Concert Doc, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Music, UK

O LUCKY MAN!
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Malcolm McDowell, Ralph Richardson, Rachel Roberts, Arthur Lowe
screenplay by David Sherwin
directed by Lindsay Anderson

NEVER APOLOGIZE: A PERSONAL VISIT WITH LINDSAY ANDERSON
**½/**** Image C Sound B-
directed by Mike Kaplan

by Jefferson Robbins As magnetic an actor as he is, Malcolm McDowell is often the acted-upon. Alex DeLarge of A Clockwork Orange seeks to master his chosen domains by force, but once he finds himself in the larger circuitry of the world, he’s really just an implement of others’ power. Is Caligula the prime mover of his vulgar Roman Empire, or merely its best expression? And so on. It was only in his later career that lazy filmmakers and casting agents made McDowell a shorthand for sinister worldliness; today, he arrives onscreen and you know who he is. Time was, he was a squirrelly, intense audience surrogate, Everymannish but beautiful in a way that was at once fragile and sharp. Asked to identify McDowell’s essential quality as an actor, director Lindsay Anderson told him, “You’re rather dangerous.” For good or ill, the movie industry has looked no farther than that in the way it’s handled McDowell for the last thirty years.

Terri (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

October 17, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Teen

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Jacob Wysocki, Olivia Crocicchia, Creed Bratton, John C. Reilly
screenplay by Patrick deWitt
directed by Azazel Jacobs

by Angelo Muredda On paper, Terri looks insufferable. From its unfortunate trailer, which sells a uniform-outfitted protagonist and whimsical, quintessentially Sundance plot in which a young misfit bonds with a fortysomething man (John C. Reilly, naturally) and feels the first pangs of young love, you’d think it was assembled from the discarded organs of Wes Anderson movies past. What’s most surprising about Terri, though, is its skepticism towards the calculated quirkiness of botched American indies about social rejects. When people behave strangely in this film, it isn’t the result of a screenwriter groundlessly insisting on his creations’ idiosyncrasy (Natalie Portman is thankfully not on hand to make a series of unique sounds when dialogue dries up), but rather a token of what Reilly, in one of many lovely moments, affectionately calls the “unknowability” of people. That curiosity about the unusual and sometimes dark impulses that decent individuals wrestle with makes director Azazel Jacobs’s first feature since 2008’s Momma’s Man something special: a humane portrait of people who speak in fits and starts, throw inappropriate temper tantrums, and awkwardly test their sexual boundaries. Most importantly, it doesn’t presume to have its young protagonists figured out. The result is an affecting twist on the coming-of-age narrative, as well as a rare film about teenagers that’s in no hurry to turn the amorphousness of late adolescence into something solid and prescriptive.

TIFF ’11: Jeff, Who Lives at Home (ds. Mark & Jay Duplass)

September 18, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, TIFF 11

I’m no mumblecore slut and found the two previous Duplass Brothers films I’d seen–The Puffy Chair and Cyrus–to be an off-putting cross between Judd Apatow and Henry Jaglom, but Jeff, Who Lives at Home is lovely. Jeff (Jason Segel) is an unemployed, 30-year-old pothead living in the basement of his widowed mom, Sharon (a surprisingly tolerable Susan Sarandon). He’s obsessed with the movie Signs, but the filmmakers seem to accept, rather than ridicule, that it is simply the thing that helped him crystallize his fatalistic belief system, and that if his worldview were less limited by circumstances–namely, depression–he would perhaps have latched onto something more highbrow. When his mother calls him from work demanding that he go buy wood glue to fix a broken shutter, it’s the beginning of an adventure-filled day that brings him into orbit with older brother Pat (Ed Helms), a paint salesman whose fears that his marriage is disintegrating are confirmed when he spots wife Linda (Judy Greer, gorgeously lit) having lunch with another man. In a nice reversal of the reversal of expectations to which sitcoms have conditioned us, she really is contemplating an affair.

TIFF ’11: The Oranges (d. Julian Farino)

September 13, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF, TIFF 11

Except perhaps for Hugh Laurie, who tries valiantly but hopelessly to extricate the mannerisms of Dr. House from his American persona, The Oranges feels like it was cast by a computer–why are Alison Janney and Oliver Platt even still willing to read scripts that call for a sardonic homemaker and a schlubby hubby, respectively? Catherine Keener is Laurie’s ball-breaking wife, Adam Brody and Alia Shawkat are their ironic offspring, and Leighton Meester is Shawkat’s hotter frenemy; what happens is that rather than elevate the material, this archetypal, overqualified cast only exacerbates its familiarity.

TIFF ’11: Dark Horse (d. Todd Solondz)

September 11, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, TIFF, TIFF 11

For a while, at least, Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse does suggest something of a response/antidote to the oeuvres of Judd Apatow and Happy Madison in general and Apatow’s The 40 Year Old Virgin specifically. Jason Alexander-esque Jordan Gelber is Abe, a thirty-ish man who lives with his parents (an embalmed Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow) in his childhood bedroom and works for his father in a small office that does real estate business for strip malls. He drives a Hummer, listens to ’80s music, and bids on “Thundercats” memorabilia when he’s supposed to be filing reports. He abuses his status as the boss’s son to cut out early and go to the movies–in an astonishingly meta moment, Solondz lets a few of those pre-show trivia slides play out in close-up, which had the TIFF audience roaring–or Toys”R”Us, the logo of which is always cryptically blurred out. He pursues Miranda (Selma Blair), a pretty woman he met at a Jewish wedding, seemingly ill-prepared for his kamikaze bravado having any sort of positive effect on her.

Prom (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD

September 7, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, Drama, DVD, Teen

*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras C+
starring Aimee Teegarden, Thomas McDonnell, De’Vaughn Nixon, Danielle Campbell
screenplay by Katie Welch
directed by Joe Nussbaum

by Bill Chambers Prom–not inconsequently promoted as “Disney Prom“–is an ensemble piece I’d love to call Altman-esque, but its major influence appears to be episodic television, specifically the seriocomedies one finds on Disney- owned and operated ABC Family. Much like that weekly dose of “Greek” or “The Secret Life of the American Teenager”, Prom features multifold, compartmentalized storylines, a cast that meets the minimum requirements for forming a model U.N., an unyielding soundtrack geared towards dictating emotions and/or spurring iTunes downloads, and subject matter that alternates between light comedy and light controversy. Its ending even feels like that of a season finale–enough to tide viewers over during the summer, perhaps, but hardly the soaring stuff of Chuck Workman montages. Audiences seemed to sense that Prom was just going to place a big-screen surcharge on the type of thing they’d normally watch for free, and without any larger box-office incentives (3-D, a certified heartthrob, a pre-established character), the film barely recouped its paltry $10M budget.

The Big Lebowski (1998) – [Limited Edition] Blu-ray Disc

September 1, 2011Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Sports, UK

****/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras B
starring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi
screenplay by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
directed by Joel Coen

by Walter Chaw I think that once the book closes on the Coen Brothers, they’ll be seen as the premier interpreters of our time: the best literary critics; the Mark Twains. I used to believe they were simply genre tourists on this mission to do one for every genre, but it becomes apparent with each new No Country for Old Men and True Grit unlocking each vintage Miller’s Crossing and The Hudsucker Proxy that they were interpreting genres long before they took on specific pieces as a whole. Coming full circle from the wry noir of Blood Simple and Fargo and presenting itself eventually as of a piece with a later Coen noir, The Man Who Wasn’t There (just as A Serious Man is a companion piece to Barton Fink), The Big Lebowski serves as the transition point in that process while also moving the brothers from broad genre takedowns to a very specific kind of literary adaptation. That they would follow it up with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, their take on The Odyssey, speaks to a mission statement of sorts: like it, The Big Lebowski is a distillation of a classic piece of literature (Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep) that completely understands its simultaneous responsibility to its own medium and to its source material. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

The Fox and the Hound (1981) [25th Anniversary] + The Little Mermaid (1989) [Platinum Edition] – DVDs|The Fox and the Hound/The Fox and the Hound II (2006) [2 Movie Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 22, 2011Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2011, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance, ZERO STARS

THE FOX AND THE HOUND
***½/**** Image C- Sound B Extras C
uncredited screenplay, based on the novel by Daniel P. Mannix
directed by Art Stevens, Ted Berman, Richard Rich

THE LITTLE MERMAID
*½/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A
written and directed by John Musker and Ron Clements

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. With The Fox and the Hound and The Little Mermaid bookending an especially turbulent decade for a studio mortally locked in a struggle to reconcile its animation pedigree with its crass commercial instincts, the former has come to be regarded in the Disney mythology as the Good Friday to the latter’s Easter Sunday. It’s therefore fitting that the two films they most emulate are 1942’s Bambi and 1950’s Cinderella, respectively, as the Forties marked the last time the Mouse House was on the brink of foreclosure. (The Fox and the Hound goes so far as to recycle cels from Bambi.) Much like The Little Mermaid represented a somewhat cynical reboot of the fairytale default, so, too, was Cinderella a glorified salvage operation following the money-/audience-hemorrhaging pro bono work Uncle Walt did on behalf of FDR’s Good Neighbor policy. Alas, the Good Friday and Easter Sunday analogy applies to not just Disney’s phoenix-like resurrection but also the tonal and moral disparity between the two pictures: one is the sad truth; the other is wishful thinking.

Mars Needs Moms (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD

August 11, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Simon Wells & Wendy Wells, based on the book by Berkeley Breathed
directed by Simon Wells

by Angelo Muredda It’s hard to say who Mars Needs Moms was made for. An expensive but passionless special-effects exercise from yeoman director and co-screenwriter Simon Wells (The Time Machine) and producer Robert Zemeckis, who’s put all his creative eggs since The Polar Express in the motion-capture basket, Mars Needs Moms sits uneasily with compatriots like The Pagemaster in the no man’s land of children’s films too dreary for most children to sit through. If it’s too taxing a journey for kids, though, it’s largely a bore for anyone else–a flat 80 minutes of animated bodies tumbling through metallic space chutes and neon hallways ripped from Tron: Legacy, scarcely made watchable by some of its impressive technological feats and by its surprisingly subdued tone, which at times borders on the elegiac.

The Final Destination in 3-D (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

August 9, 2011Posted in2000s, 2011, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror

The Final Destination
**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten, Nick Zano, Mykelti Williamson
screenplay by Eric Bess
directed by David R. Ellis

by Alex Jackson It’s the summer of 2009. I arrive at the movie theatre, a multiplex twenty miles from home (making it the closest one), to discover that while Rob Zombie’s Halloween II has already started, I’m just in time to catch The Final Destination in 3-D. Thinking that I didn’t really care which one I saw, that’s good enough for me, and so I buy a ticket for the fourth (and, we were led to believe, last) entry in the Final Destination franchise.

Bellflower (2011) + The Change-Up (2011)|Bellflower – Blu-ray Disc + DVD

August 4, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

BELLFLOWER
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Evan Glodell, Jessie Wiseman, Taylor Dawson, Rebekah Brandes
written and directed by Evan Glodell

THE CHANGE-UP
½*/****
starring Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde
screenplay by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore
directed by David Dobkin

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bellflower earns the right to its melodrama by asking what you have to live for and, more importantly, what you’re willing to do to keep your life uncomplicated. Woodrow (writer-director Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Taylor Dawson) don’t seem to have much of a life beyond hanging out with their friends and drinking too much–but their minds were suitably “warped” by a second-generation VHS tape of Mad Max. Now they spend their days constructing flamethrowers and muscle cars destined to fit right in with that film’s end-of-the-world milieu. Woodrow hooks up with a young woman named Milly (Jessie Wiseman), and as the relationship blossoms (and breaks down), Glodell takes the opportunity to explore the unfathomable guilt and anger that drove George Miller’s original road warrior–as well as what Glodell’s own heroes have failed to understand about his journey. When we first meet him, Woodrow doesn’t know too much about guilt or anger, so his coping mechanisms are extremely fractured. Confrontations with others are typically brief, sometimes without logical end, and the director intentionally tones down most of the violence so that his characters can wallow in passive-aggressive detachment. Sometimes the violent images are chopped out entirely, only to be saved for later in the movie, where they may or may not have been mentally re-edited by Woodrow to conform to a more favourable outcome. That’s the thing about the apocalypse: it never goes quite the way you want.