The Spirit (2008)

December 25, 2008Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Gabriel Macht, Eva Mendes, Sarah Paulson, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Frank Miller

Thespiritby Walter Chaw Frank Miller is something like a god in the modern comics era–at least he is to me. The guy who invented the graphic-novel form for most non-true-believers with his The Dark Knight Returns, he's recently been in the conversation because of the film made from his Sparta book (300) and Robert Rodriguez's excellent, Miller-driven Sin City, and he's the one who introduced to me the idea that comic books were a medium and not a genre. So when Miller reveals that he's taking the reins of a big-budget comic-book adaptation, there's reason for excitement that something from his extensive backlog could see the light of day under its creator's hand. (I have the same hope for that asshole Alan Moore, as well as Grant Morrison–and, hell, Sergio Aragones.) Astonishing, then, that he would first choose to adapt Will Eisner's seminal, 1940s comic inset "The Spirit", then to adapt it as an acid, unfunny ape on the kinds of films Miller himself has helped to popularize. It tastes like a bitter pill, like sour grapes masquerading as satire without a real clear indication of what Miller so dislikes about the recent hits based on his work. A waste of time to say that The Spirit is dreadful (and an understatement besides: The Spirit makes dreadful look like Van Gogh); and it's hardly more fruitful to poke holes in the whys and wherefores of its failure when those are obvious from the first five minutes of its benighted existence. Time is better spent, perhaps, trying to pull out of it some sort of insight into why no one called "shenanigans" on this abortion at any point. It's unbelievable, really. And far from dissuading me from the idea that Miller is a genius, I'd argue that it takes a special kind of genius to make something this full of bile, this incompetent, this unwatchable, this bad.

The Dark Knight (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

December 1, 2008Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Superhero, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

Mustownby Walter Chaw It's the best American film of the year so far and likely to remain that way. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is revelatory, visceral, grim stuff–a vision of the failure of our idealism before the inexorable tide of entropy, another masterpiece after last year's No Country for Old Men that as much as says that the only morality in the midst of chaos is chance. No coincidence that both films feature villains who let a coin-flip act as judge and jury. But what's adjudicated? What shape does the court take? The failure of reason is the great bogey of this modern day–and the inability to properly frame questions, much less ken answers, feeds this feeling of hopelessness. That widening gyre, it turns out, is a labyrinth, or an Escher print, illuminating a Sartrean paranoia of no hope for escape, no possibly of exit. Nolan's Gotham City is a beatification of Chicago: the city's glass and metal elevated into holy relic and presented in such grand, panoramic vistas that the little things done in spite of it or on its behalf seem like so many futile pittances–the dreamlife of mice in their sterile maze that is this sprawling microcosm of all of the miseries and suffering of the world.

Bolt (2008)

November 26, 2008Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Disney, Drama, Family, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Dan Fogelman, Chris Williams
directed by Byron Howard, Chris Williams

Boltby Walter Chaw What counts as a revolution for Disney animation nowadays is tellingly only a shadow of Pixar's gracefully loaded pictures. It demonstrates that any film completed under the supervision of John Lasseter can't be that bad, but also that all the things wrong with The Mouse over the last couple of decades won't clear up with just one picture. Bolt isn't a bad start, though, handling in its light, rote way a couple of nice moments with orphaned cat Mittens (voiced by Susie Essman) that remind of Jessie's heartache from Toy Story 2 and a few well-paced action sequences that recall a superhero highlight reel from The Incredibles (speaking of films that need a sequel). The point of greatest interest is that Bolt represents the second major movie this year after Tropic Thunder that has as its protagonist an actor who doesn't realize he's no longer on a soundstage. (Collective commentary on the end of our time in Oz or Kansas?) Even without a deeper interest in answering the questions that it asks (in sharp contrast to the introspective, almost silent WALL·E), it's still light years ahead of Disney's spate of racist, misanthropic entertainments and/or direct-to-video sequels that cynically transform their Vault™ into a McDonald's franchise.

La Femme Nikita (1990) + Killing Zoe (1994) – DVDs|La Femme Nikita – Blu-ray Disc

November 17, 2008Posted in1990s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, France, Italy, Thriller

Nikita
***/****
BD – Image A- Sound B+
DVD – Image B Sound A- (English)/B (French)
starring Anne Parillaud, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Tcheky Karyo, Jeanne Moreau
written and directed by Luc Besson

KILLING ZOE
***/**** Image A Sound B
starring Eric Stoltz, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Julie Delpy, Gary Kemp
written and directed by Roger Avary

by Bill Chambers When DVD screeners of La Femme Nikita and Killing Zoe arrived concurrently in my mailbox, I thought I had an angle for a piece: actor Jean-Hugues Anglade, a co-star in both films. I began taking notes, asking myself how they fit into his oeuvre and whether, viewed in tandem, these actioners represent career progression. That’s when I realized: What I know about the work of Jean-Hugues Anglade you could fit on the head of a pin; I’ve only seen him in one other performance, as Zorg in Betty Blue (a.k.a. 37°2 le matin), a movie with obvious but ultimately superficial parallels to La Femme Nikita. So howzabout this for a thematic compromise? Nikita (its native title) and Killing Zoe each take place in France–that’s as good a link between them as Anglade.

From Russia with Love (1963) – Blu-ray Disc

November 13, 2008Posted in****/****, 1960s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, James Bond, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A-
starring Sean Connery, Daniela Bianchi, Pedro Armendáriz, Lotte Lenya
screenplay by Richard Maibaum, based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Terence Young

Mustownby Ian Pugh The first indelible image of From Russia with Love finds steely-eyed, platinum-blond killer Red Grant (Robert Shaw) taking a garrotte to James Bond (Sean Connery), slowly choking the life out of him without witty repartee or a single hope of close-shave escape. The victim turns out to be an impostor, live-target practice for Grant's escapades later in the film–but that momentary shock establishes right from the start that the rules have changed since last we saw 007. Here's a point in time when we weren't completely conditioned to accept Bond as undefeatable, when it wasn't unreasonable to believe that these globetrotting adventures could come to an unfortunate end at any moment. In fact, I wonder if it's reasonable to regard the unpolished Dr. No as mere prologue to From Russia with Love1, with the breezy, romantic life of a Cold War secret agent violently exposed as a lie.

Stuck (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

October 26, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Crime, Drama, Germany, Horror, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Mena Suvari, Stephen Rea, Russell Hornsby, Rukiya Bernard
screenplay by John Strysik
directed by Stuart Gordon

by Walter Chaw Stuart Gordon, the man who gave us the Lovecraftian splatter film, has, lately, gone in for non-supernatural frights: first with the snake-infested well of man's self-interest in the irresistibly pulpy King of the Ants; then with his superb Mamet adaptation Edmund; and now with his inspired-by-a-true-story drive-in high-concept flick Stuck. The transition from Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos to the mendacity of mere humanity is less a leap in that Gordon to me has always been best when dealing with how the mundane is often just the thin candy shell over the boiling mess of our fetid Id–whether that Id manifests as the cellar of elder gods or, just as unspeakable, the lizard brain for which Lovecraft's bogeys are the metaphor, anyway. Stuck takes as its inspiration the story of 25-year-old nurse's aid Chante Mallard, who, one night flying high on alcohol and X, embedded one Gregory Biggs in her windshield and left him to die there over the course of two days. Gordon's film wonders what would've happened should Biggs have survived and, over the course of those same two days, gathered enough wits and strength to exact some measure of justice on his torturer. A delicious conceit, free of irony and post-modern self-awareness, it's funny without being snarky about it, delighting in the solipsistic desire of his Mallard, nursing home aide Brandi (Mena Suvari, dirtying up better here than in Spun), to not jeopardize a pending job promotion by reporting that guy stuck in her windshield. The guy, Tom (Stephen Rea), has fallen on hard times himself; if anything, Stuck is a diary of the modern malady of what happens when people can't make a living doing honest work and so find themselves stripped of dignity (sometimes literally) and exiled from civilization.

Appaloosa (2008)

October 3, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Romance, Western

*/****
starring Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris, Renée Zellweger, Jeremy Irons
screenplay by Robert Knott & Ed Harris, based on the novel by Robert Parker
directed by Ed Harris

Appaloosaby Walter Chaw There's a great moment early on in Ed Harris's howler of a vanity piece Appaloosa where gunman-for-hire Virgil Cole (Harris) and his sidekick Everett (Viggo Mortensen) have a friendly conversation with evil Briton Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) about law and order in the Old West. The rest of it is garbage. Comparisons of this film to Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven have been floating around, but where that picture is about the complexities of the promises men make to women that they can't keep, Appaloosa is macho juvenilia that espouses the idea of "bros before hos" and, thus, renders all the men unflawed in their limited, brutal glory and all the women bimbos, sluts, or bimbo-sluts. Enter Renée Zellweger's repugnant turn as mattress-back Allison French, her predilection for spreading her legs for the highest-ranking stud viewed not so much as a moral failing as one of those things women do either with principle (see: saloon girl Katie (Ariadna Gil)), or without (Allison). From her bizarre appearance (she looks like a swollen Bill Mumy) to that pinched, kewpie-doll chipmunk chitter-chatter she uses in the mawkish belief that it's an endearing quality in someone past the age of six, Zellweger would appear to be an easy target of blame for the film's general inadequacy. (Likewise shitting in the flan is composer Jeff Beal, whose theme for Allison is one of the most invasive, repugnant bits of musical hate-crime not composed by James Horner; Beal only increases the picture's cartoon feel.) Closer to the mark, though, would be to identify that Appaloosa falls on its ass because its worldview is arrested and incurious, content to offer that women are mercurial trollops and men, good or evil, are the bedrock of civilization. When Appaloosa is described as "old-fashioned," hear spin on more accurate terms like "ossified" and "badly-dated" and "naïve."

The Fall Guy: The Complete First Season (1981-1982) + CHiPs: The Complete First Season (1977-1978) – DVDs

September 17, 2008Posted in1970s, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television

THE FALL GUY: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image B Sound B- Extras C-
“The Fall Guy Pilot,” “The Meek Shall Inherit Rhonda,” “The Rich Get Richer,” “That’s Right, We’re Bad,” “Colt’s Angels,” “The Human Torch,” “The Japanese Connection,” “No Way Out,” “License to Kill (Part 1),” “License to Kill (Part 2),” “Goin’ For It!,” “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harold,” “Soldiers of Misfortune,” “Ready, Aim… Die!,” “Ladies on the Ropes,” “The Snow Job,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Town,” “Child’s Play,” “Charlie,” “Three for the Road,” “The Silent Partner,” “Scavenger Hunt”

CHiPs: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image C Sound B Extras D
“Pilot,” “Undertow,” “Dog Gone,” “Moving Violation,” “Career Day,” “Baby Food,” “Taking Its Toll,” “Green Thumb Burglar,” “Hustle,” “Highway Robbery,” “Name Your Price,” “Aweigh We Go,” “One Two Many,” “Rustling,” “Surf’s Up,” “Vintage ’54,” “Hitch-Hiking Hitch,” “Cry Wolf,” “Crash Diet,” “Rainy Day,” “Crack-Up,” “Flashback!”

by Ian Pugh In giving a modern-day look-see to a television series that stars a late-’70s/early-’80s icon as a Hollywood stuntman who improbably moonlights as a charming, violent bounty hunter, it seems only natural to start the discussion by lobbing a few Death Proof jokes in its general direction. Take the time to really sit down and watch “The Fall Guy”, however, and you’ll find that the complete honesty of its quest to grab the viewer’s attention just melts away your desire to be snarky. Lee Majors is the show’s anchor as Colton Seavers, the eponymous stuntman who spends his free time on assignment for a bail bondsman (Jo Ann Pflug) searching for folks who’ve skipped town before their court date, bringing his overeducated cousin (Douglas Barr, dead weight) and a stuntwoman-in-training (Heather Thomas, attractive dead weight) along for the ride. Although that premise gets bogged down in guns, fistfights, and doing crazy shit with whatever vehicles are available, Majors’s earnest performance offers a sense of levity to the proceedings, particularly once the character finally overcomes the traits ascribed to him by “The Fall Guy”‘s whiny country+western theme song, which complains about the stuntman’s inability to hold onto fame, money, or women. Indeed, as the series progresses, it becomes more interested in presenting Seavers as a conceptual mirror for the man who plays him, making Colt more of an aggressive ladies’ man (Majors was, after all, married to the era’s goddess-avatar of teenage onanism) and perhaps even turning his tides of bad luck into a tidy metaphor for Majors’s unsuccessful foray into features on the heels of “The Six Million Dollar Man”.

Kill Bill, Volume 2 (2004) – Blu-ray Disc

September 7, 2008Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, FFC Must-Own, Martial Arts, Revenge, Road Movie, Thriller, Western

Kill Bill, Vol. 2
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

Mustownby Walter Chaw Genre poetry from B-movies' poet laureate, Quentin Tarantino's conclusion to Kill Bill is marked by the filmmaker's carefully-calibrated celluloid insanity, as well as a deceptive maturity that allows a few powerfully-struck grace notes for the cult of femininity and the sanctity of motherhood. Its first portion overwhelming for its craft before lodging in the craw with its ever-present but tantalizingly difficult-to-nail moral code, Tarantino's epic whole clarifies a dedication to a sort of low, Samuel Fuller/Nicholas Ray tabloid cosmology, grounding itself eventually in the bold, lovely, curiously old-fashioned declaration that the last best reward is to be true to the primal clay of an idea of innate gender roles. The Bride (Uma Thurman) is so named not merely for camp grandeur's sake, but also to highlight the power of cultural archetypes and their roots in biology.

Kill Bill, Volume 1 (2003) – Blu-ray Disc

September 1, 2008Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Revenge, Road Movie, Thriller

Kill Bill, Vol. 1
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, David Carradine
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

Mustownby Walter Chaw There is a palpable, undeniable perversity to Quentin Tarantino's fourth feature film, a taste for the extreme so gleeful and smart that its references are homage and its puerility virtue. I seem to find a reason between every Tarantino film to dislike him, to cast aspersions on my memories of his films, but I'm starting to think the source of my dislike is jealousy. Tarantino is the director Spielberg is too timid to be: a gifted visual craftsman unafraid of the contents of his psychic closet, and a film brat whose teachers happen to be blaxploitation, samurai epics, and Shaw Brothers chop-socky instead of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. And it isn't that I have aspirations of becoming a filmmaker, it's just that I want to be as good at something as Tarantino is at making movies.

Felon (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

August 11, 2008Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Prison, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Stephen Dorff, Harold Perrineau, Marisol Nichols, Val Kilmer
written and directed by Ric Roman Waugh

by Bryant Frazer If Jeffrey Lebowski had made a few wrong turns in life–if, let's say, he had brutally murdered some very bad men, as well as their families–he may have turned out not entirely unlike John Smith, the hulkingly mellow convict played by a moustachioed, goateed Val Kilmer in Felon. Judging from the wide berth the rest of the inmates give him, Smith is known as the silent-but-deadly type. Kilmer plays him from behind a whole bunch of prison tattoos with a steely glare, but also with a kind of openness that doesn't immediately compute. Although he's tagged as a sociopath, he's really just the opposite. He believes in justice, and he longs for the death sentence he feels his crimes deserve.

Once Upon a Zeitgeist: Blue City (1986); Top Gun (1986); The Lost Boys (1987); Bull Durham (1988)

August 5, 2008Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sports, Teen, Thriller, Tom Cruise, Vampire

80sdiscstitle

BLUE CITY – DVD
ZERO STARS/**** Image C- Sound C-
starring Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Paul Winfield, Scott Wilson
screenplay by Lukas Heller and Walter Hill, based on the novel by Ross MacDonald
directed by Michelle Manning

TOP GUN [Widescreen Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD + [Special Collector’s Edition] Blu-ray Disc
*/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+ Extras B
BD – Image B+ Sound A+ (DTS) A- (DD) Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards
screenplay by Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Tony Scott

THE LOST BOYS [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Corey Feldman, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
directed by Joel Schumacher

BULL DURHAM [Collector’s Edition] – DVD
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Trey Wilson
written and directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw Released in 1986 and tonally identical to contemporary suck classics The Wraith and Wisdom, the Brat Pack travesty Blue City represents the nadir of a year that produced Blue Velvet, Down By Law, The Mosquito Coast, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Sid and Nancy, Aliens, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Fly, Big Trouble in Little China, Something Wild, Mona Lisa, and Night of the Creeps, for starters. It’s the quintessence of why people remember the 1980s as a terrible decade for film, poor in every single objective measure of quality. Consider a central set-piece where our hero Billy (Judd Nelson) and his buck-toothed cohort Joey (David Caruso) stage a weird re-enactment of the heist from The Killing at a dog track that includes not only such bon mots as “I’m new at this! Give me a break!” but also the dumbest diversionary tactic in the history of these things as Joey tosses a prime cut on the track in front of a frankly startled/quickly delighted pack of muzzled greyhounds. Then again, it’s not a bad metaphor for the Me Generation and its blockbuster mentality. After cracking wise a few times in a way that makes one wonder if he’s suddenly become a Republican, Billy blows on the barrel of his gun in his best John Ireland-meets-Montgomery Clift and professional bad editor Ross Albert (the whiz kid behind Bushwhacked, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Pest) cracks a little wise himself by cutting to a rack of hot dogs. Unfortunately, suggesting that Judd Nelson is gay as a French holiday is only mildly wittier than suggesting the same of clearly gay Tom Cruise. More on that when we get to Top Gun.

Encounters at the End of the World (2008) + Frozen River (2008)

August 1, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Drama, Theatrical

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
***½/****
directed by Werner Herzog

FROZEN RIVER
*½/****
starring Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott, Mark Boone Junior
written and directed by Courtney Hunt

by Walter Chaw It’s a source of endless delight for me that Werner Herzog–the man who refers to nature as “obscene”–has become known of late for delivering mordant, mildly condescending nature documentaries. His Grizzly Man is a modern classic of Bavarian madness–now find Herzog in Antarctica, declaring at regular intervals in Encounters at the End of the World that “something doesn’t seem right” with a perfectly-preserved hut used by Shackleton a hundred years ago, or with a demented penguin making its way to certain doom on an inexplicable march to the inland. With an opening that has Herzog immodestly laying out his mission statement as wishing to discover, in a roundabout way, why it is that men are obsessed with riding their metaphorical steeds into the wild unknowns, he illustrates the conundrum with a sideswipe at mankind, equating us with ants that hold other insect species as “slaves” and wondering why chimps, despite their intellectual sophistication, decline to domesticate goats to ride them on their own existential pursuits.

Untraceable (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

July 30, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mystery, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Diane Lane, Billy Burke, Colin Hanks, Joseph Cross
screenplay by Robert Fyvolent & Mark R. Brinker and Allison Burnett
directed by Gregory Hoblit

Untraceablecap

by Bryant Frazer Diane Lane is one of the few actresses in Hollywood who, in her 40s, manages to stay bankable while looking and acting her age. That she's beautiful doesn't hurt, but she brings a dignity and knowingness to a role that can pull the whole enterprise up a notch. So it's a little depressing to see Lane wasting her time legitimizing hackwork like Untraceable, directed with stone competence and not much else by Gregory Hoblit. The problem here isn't so much Hoblit's workmanlike style (after all, he directed Anthony Hopkins in a highly entertaining performance in last year's Fracture) as it is his apparent failure to question the cloddish sermonizing of a script that wallows in clichés lifted from The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, and the Saw movies without seeming to realize the ridiculous hypocrisy in which it engages.

Vantage Point (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

July 23, 2008Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mystery, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt
screenplay by Barry L. Levy
directed by Pete Travis

by Bryant Frazer If Vantage Point is an experiment, it can be pretty much considered a failure. The unconventional strategy here is to construct a narrative feature by taking multiple passes at the same 20 minutes or so in a very bad day for Secret Service agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid). Barnes took a bullet for the President of the United States a year ago and has been scheduled to return to duty by working the security detail for the PotUS's speech at an anti-terrorist summit in Salamanca, Spain. And before he can speak, President Ashton (William Hurt) is nailed by an assassin's bullet–or is he?

Stop-Loss (2008) + 21 (2008)|21 – Blu-ray Disc

July 20, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, War

STOP-LOSS
*½/****
starring Ryan Phillippe, Abbie Cornish, Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
screenplay by Mark Richard & Kimberly Peirce
directed by Kimberly Peirce

21
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, Laurence Fishburne, Kevin Spacey
screenplay by Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb
directed by Robert Luketic

by Walter Chaw The only thing really wrong with MTV–besides the fact that they don't show music videos anymore–is that its branding on some of the most vacuous, appalling celebrations of vanity, stupidity, and acting-out in the not-exactly-sterling history of the medium has spawned a rash of imitative programming. It's cheap to turn a few cameras on pretty idiots fucking each other figuratively and literally in resort locales, and so now there are Tiffany versions of this ("Survivor") on broadcast networks and sewer versions of this (those Flava Flav things, Anna Nicole's old show) on struggling basic-cable outlets. (Cartoon Network even has an animated send-up of "The Real World".) And if the genre momentarily appeared to be on the verge of extinction, it suddenly found new life with the recent writers' strike. Because a good many films nowadays are populated by pre-fabricated tween (and post-tween) stars, I have no idea who they are until they're shoved into my consciousness as "stars"; indeed, MTV's dread influence on popular culture has extended itself (hand-in-hand with Titanic's mammoth babysitter's-club popularity) into the multiplex. Too ephemeral for any nickname (no "brat pack" here, just a revolving door of fresh meat), the real legacy of MTV might be that it functions as a microcosm for the lost youth phenomenon in the United States: In every Britney Spears, I see a Virginia Tech. Promise the terminally untalented the moon and repay them with a goat's portion of disappointment, disillusionment, and frustration bound to simmer to a foul boil.

Lars and the Real Girl (2007); The Passion of Greg the Bunny: The Best of the Film Parodies Volume 2 (2006-2007); The Cottage (2008) [Unrated] – DVDs

July 6, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Horror, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, UK

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL
*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider, Kelli Garner
screenplay by Nancy Oliver
directed by Craig Gillespie

THE PASSION OF GREG THE BUNNY: THE BEST OF THE FILM PARODIES VOLUME 2
Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
"Fur on the Asphalt," "Wumpus the Monster," "Sockville," "Blue Velveteen," "Plush: Behind the Seams," "Wacky Wednesday," "The Passion of the Easter Bunny: A Fabricated American Movie"

THE COTTAGE
½*/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras D
starring Andy Serkis, Reece Shearsmith, Stephen O'Donnell, Jennifer Ellison
written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams

by Ian Pugh Beyond its pale stab at indie street cred and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay (which are almost one and the same these days), Lars and the Real Girl shares with Juno an invitation to partake in a never-ending stream of laughs over its premise until it basically flips a switch and instructs you to get emotional over it–the supposed target of discussion here being nothing less than that ever-popular subject of paternalistic revulsion, mental illness. Ryan Gosling turns his "twitchy zombie" knob up to eleven as Lars, a quiet loner living in his brother Gus's (Paul Schneider) backyard shed. After Gus's pregnant wife Karin (Emily Mortimer) expresses concern that her brother-in-law is spending too much time by himself, Lars orders a realistic sex doll named "Bianca" over the Internet and parades it around the neighbourhood as the girlfriend he never had, much to the consternation of Gus, Karin, and Lars's would-be love interest Margo (Kelli Garner), who can only respond with uncertain stares and a lot of hemming and hawing.

Dirty Harry [Ultimate Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

June 23, 2008Posted in****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Crime, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Revenge, Thriller

DirtyharrybdstitleDIRTY HARRY (1971)
****/**** IMAGE A- SOUND A- EXTRAS A
starring Clint Eastwood, Harry Guardino, Reni Santoni, Andy Robinson
screenplay by Julian Fink & R.M. Fink and Dean Riesner
directed by Don Siegel

MAGNUM FORCE (1973)
***/**** IMAGE A SOUND A- EXTRAS B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Hal Holbrook, Mitchell Ryan, David Soul
screenplay by John Milius and Michael Cimino
directed by Ted Post

THE ENFORCER (1976)
**/**** IMAGE A- SOUND A EXTRAS B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Tyne Daly, Harry Guardino, Bradford Dillman
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant and Dean Riesner
directed by James Fargo

SUDDEN IMPACT (1983)
*½/**** IMAGE C+ SOUND A- EXTRAS B
starring Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Pat Hingle, Bradford Dillman
screenplay by Joseph C. Stinson
directed by Clint Eastwood

THE DEAD POOL (1988)
***/**** IMAGE A+ SOUND A- EXTRAS B-
starring Clint Eastwood, Patricia Clarkson, Liam Neeson, Evan C. Kim
screenplay by Steve Sharon
directed by Buddy Van Horn

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The barrel of a sniper rifle seeps through a memorial-wall dedication to San Francisco’s finest, and Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry establishes right off the bat that the war on crime is just that: a war; the real question is how to properly fight it when the only real motivators are fear and anger. The film already has its ready-made villain in a fictionalized version of the Bay Area’s own Zodiac Killer, “Scorpio” (Andy Robinson, almost certainly the greatest madman in cinematic history), and the viewer encounters a terrifying golem personifying his frustrations with killers consistently eluding a seemingly-helpless police force and criminals who are caught and released back into society on mere technicalities. Dirty Harry only takes the next logical step by pandering to our basest desires with an equally frightening and chaotic icon: “Dirty Harry” Callahan (Clint Eastwood, at the top of his game), an inspector in the SFPD’s Homicide department who lost his wife to a drunk driver a while back and now takes it out on the rest of criminal society with his .44 Magnum, blasting a hole through any motherfucker unfortunate enough to disturb the peace in his presence. The French Connection‘s Popeye Doyle impressed with his dogged determination, but Harry is the genuine realization of a dick-raising fantasy of the quintessential modern man (notice that the numbers of his radio call sign, “Inspector 71,” reflect the film’s year of release) in that he gives us everything we want without burdening us with the trauma of actually having to become him.

National Treasure (2004) [Widescreen] + Gone in 60 Seconds (2000) [Director’s Cut – Unrated, New Extended Version] – DVDs|National Treasure [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

May 11, 2008Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Nicolas Cage, Thriller

NATIONAL TREASURE
½*/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras C+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Nicolas Cage, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, Diane Kruger
screenplay by Jim Kouf and Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley
directed by Jon Turteltaub

Nationaltreasurecapby Walter Chaw How's this for a barometer of the national cinematic weather? National Treasure is going to get more praise than condemnation from me because it isn't homophobic, misogynistic, or blatantly misanthropic. All it is, really, is astonishingly boring, terribly stupid, and, it bears repeating, boring. It's boring. (Also stupid.) Essentially the film is a Hardy Boys adventure where cryptic clues have our intrepid boy scouts traversing America's historic landmarks on a scavenger hunt for two hours and change. Where the hero is a misunderstood scholar, his sidekick is a computer nerd, and his girlfriend's hobby is history because history is cool. (The sequel will probably touch on spelling, maybe arithmetic–be still my beating heart.) And where inspiration runs out a little over half-an-hour into the runtime, causing National Treasure to resort to recycling the same rising and falling in action over and over into–and our film's history buffs will appreciate this–what seems an eternity.

The Devil’s Own (1997) – Blu-ray Disc

May 5, 2008Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Margaret Colin, Ruben Blades
screenplay by David Aaron Cohen & Vincent Patrick and Kevin Jarre
directed by Alan J. Pakula

by Bill Chambers One of the intriguing consequences of a new home-video medium is that, whether due to a paucity of selection or, in my case, professional obligation, you wind up revisiting some marginal titles you never thought you'd have cause to see again. Case in point: the final film from the mercurial Alan J. Pakula, 1997's The Devil's Own, which docks on Blu-ray as part of Sony's suddenly-aggressive catalogue rollout. The kind of topical widescreen melodrama Hollywood trotted out pretty regularly in the CinemaScope era, as well as the kind of glib commentary on another nation's failures you'd expect from Edward Zwick or Sydney Pollack before Pakula, the picture began life as a typically-contentious Kevin Jarre script about a vicious, coke-snorting IRA terrorist who crosses paths with a "hair-bag"–i.e., a cop still walking the beat long past his prime–while on the lam in New York.