Drama Archives - Page 36 of 120 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Sansho the Bailiff (1954) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 29, 2013****/****, 1950s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Japan, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
starring Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa, Masao Shimizu
screenplay by Fuji Yahiro, Yoshikata Yoda
directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

by Walter Chaw A little late to the party, I know, but Kenji Mizoguchi’s magisterial jidaigeki Sansho the Bailiff is the source material for Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Both are initiated by the filmmakers as fairytales, mythologies; and both are initiated within the text by a specific fatal flaw in parental figures. In Sansho, it’s hubris when the father, a principled public servant, stands up under an unjust edict and is exiled, leaving his family in peril. In Spirited Away, the parents engage in an endless banquet, indulging their gluttony until they’re transformed into literal swine despite the protests of their child. Both films are withering indictments of the cultures that produced them, and each is opened to a greater depth of interpretation by an appreciation of the other. Coming here from the Miyazaki, it’s fruitful to consider why it is the Mizoguchi is named after the villain, the cruel slave-owner who tortures the film’s heroes, while the Miyazaki is named for the innocents (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) and the loaded act/word “Kamikakushi,” which once referred to abduction by angry gods but has a contemporary implication of sex trafficking. Arguably, Mizoguchi sets up this read of the later text in his own canon, with many of his films addressing the problem of sexual exploitation among the lower class in Japanese history–a problem that persisted through the war years and, some would say, beyond. With its naming, it’s possible to infer that the source for the ills in Sansho the Bailiff is too strong a hold on the traditions of an antiquated past; in Spirited Away, it’s the frittering away of the future by a generation too solipsistic, too blinkered by its own sense of entitlement, to save itself from obsolescence. See the two films as bookends of a particularly Japanese introspection, equal parts humility and nihilism. (As one of the characters in Sansho the Bailiff sings, “Isn’t life a torture?”) And in the contemplation of the Mizoguchi, find also an undercurrent of warning–and doom–in the Miyazaki.

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

May 21, 20131990s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Brian De Palma, Drama, Satire

*/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Michael Cristofer, based on the novel by Tom Wolfe
directed by Brian De Palma

by Walter Chaw Based on Tom Wolfe’s instantly-legendary (and instantly-dated, truth be known) novel about the upper crust of Manhattan society in the ’80s, Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities is a disaster mitigated now and again by the odd extraordinary shot–exhibit A in what happens when too much money is spent in the creation of too sure a thing. The production was besieged by distraction and calamity, all of it captured in Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy in what, after watching the movie again for the first time since its release, seems too measured a hatchet job. After all, Salamon’s book is really just proof of what’s evidenced on screen and observed by contemporary audiences: Decisions were made to pander to the lowest common denominator, and say what you will about the lowest common denominator, but it often knows when it’s being condescended to. More, it confirms that Bruce Willis was outmatched by the demands of the material; that Tom Hanks was disengaged; that Melanie Griffith was badly miscast; and that Morgan Freeman was inserted as a sop to an African-American community that not only would have to endure multiple comic-effect uses of the word “nigger” during the course of the film, but would likely never go see it in the first place. The great irony of pandering to the lowest common denominator in an adaptation of an arch Tom Wolfe novel, is…well, you finish it. Frankly, when you can’t get Peter Travers to like it, you’re in seriously deep shit.

The We and the I (2013)

May 17, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Teen, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Michael Brodie, Teresa Lynn, Raymond Delgado, Jonathan Ortiz
screenplay by Michel Gondry, Paul Proch, Jeff Grimshaw
directed by Michel Gondry

by Angelo Muredda The We and the I opens with a throwback, an image that wouldn’t be out of place in Michel Gondry’s distinctive music videos from the late-1990s, which were themselves full of backward glances to the more rough-hewn early days of MTV and old-school hip hop. Over the credits, a boombox modified into a miniature bus rolls along the streets of the Bronx pulsing out Young MC’s “Bust A Move,” until it’s crushed by what’s ostensibly the real thing, a city bus packed with urban teens who make up Gondry’s boisterous, gossiping, and privately wounded nonprofessional cast. That’s an interesting start, insofar as it suggests that Gondry’s obsession with whimsical props tinged with nostalgia are about to be traded in for something more authentic, even as it implies a bit cheekily that the “real” bus, taking a bunch of high-schoolers home on the last day of school, is itself a roaming set on which to stage semi-scripted exchanges between proper teens doubling as actors and artistic partners.

Monsieur Verdoux (1947) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 12, 20131940s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Chaplin, Comedy, Directors: Charles Chaplin, Drama, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Charles Chaplin, Martha Raye, Marilyn Nash, Isobel Elsom
screenplay by Charles Chaplin, based on an idea by Orson Welles
directed by Charles Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer Charles Chaplin augmented his trademark mix of physical comedy, sweetness, and lefty politics with a dose of suspense (borrowed, probably, from Hitchcock) and a sardonic worldview (informed, maybe, by film noir) in the playful, funny, but ultimately downbeat Monsieur Verdoux. In a scenario that originated with Orson Welles, who receives an “idea” credit, Henri Verdoux is a serial killer based on Henri Landru, a French Bluebeard who seduced, married, and then murdered a string of Parisian women in order to liberate their assets. Chaplin plays Verdoux as a charming fiend whose demeanour incorporates the barest echo of the Little Tramp, but whose murderous M.O. recalled the director’s own reputation as a womanizer.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

May 8, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald
directed by Baz Luhrmann

by Walter Chaw The great irony of Baz Luhrmann’s unwatchable farrago The Great Gatsby is that it’s not so much an interpretation of its titular hero’s self-aggrandizing fandangos as a literalization of one. It’s all surface, all façade, and not coincidentally, the most successful thing about it is Luhrmann’s shooting of Gatsby’s legendary parties as infernal bacchanalia. But that bit of useful critique is clearly a fluke, an accident of Luhrmann’s one-trick pony kicking over the single element in Fitzgerald’s book that is remotely compatible with Luhrmann’s style. The marriage of Baz with Fitzgerald, in fact, is a little like asking Michael Bay to adapt The Brothers Karamazov–it’s Timur Bekmambetov’s A Farewell to Arms. It’s showing off in the loudest, most obnoxious way possible, without any kind of critical, nay, useful, rationale for all the bread and circus–an asshole at play with Welles’s “best train set a boy could ever want,” with the casualty only what’s possibly the best American novel ever written. It’s an effrontery to taste, the sole consolation being that as Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is something of a motherless child, there’s no one who will love it. No one could.

Hot Docs ’13: Remote Area Medical

May 3, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***½/****
directed by Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman

by Angelo Muredda When he was seriously injured in the jungle thirty years ago, broadcaster and philanthropist Stan Brock tells an interviewer in Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman's powerful Remote Area Medical, the nearest doctor was over 26 days' worth of travel away–23 more than if he'd been on the moon, as an astronaut once told him. You can tell that Brock has massaged that anecdote into a homily with repetition, but rather than seeming slick, his pitch for greater medical care for those stuck in remote areas and extreme conditions has an air of earned righteousness about it, the sound of human decency filtered through experience. That same spirit of professionalism and earnestness pervades Reichert and Zaman's film, which profiles not the volunteer pop-up clinics Brock initially founded in faraway parts of the world but one right in his adoptive home of Tennessee, where hundreds of uninsured working-poor citizens line up days in advance for a fighting shot at care.

Hot Docs ’13: NCR: Not Criminally Responsible

May 2, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by John Kastner

by Angelo Muredda The ending of Taxi Driver could well be the start of John Kastner's NCR: Not Criminally Responsible. Where Scorsese's paranoiac dream closes with Travis Bickle returning to his cab after his bloodbath as either an undeserving hero or a delusional phantom, Kastner's film opens with an admirably complex consideration of what it means–for everyone from victim to convict to society at large–to reintegrate into Canadian culture a violent criminal who's been found not culpable for his actions. Kastner begins with the conditional release of Sean Clifton, a previously undiagnosed and ostensibly nonviolent Cornwall man who one day stabbed a young woman in a Walmart parking lot. Despite their spiritual belief in the power of rehabilitation and the doctors' assurances that Clifton is now medicated, the victim's family is understandably vexed. And, despite our own best liberal intentions, so are we.

Tristana (1970) – Blu-ray Disc

April 24, 20131970s, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, France, Spain

***/****
Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Catherine
Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Franco Nero, Lola Gaos
screenplay
by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Julio Alejandro, based on the novel
by Benito Pérez Galdós
directed
by Luis Buñuel

by
Angelo Muredda You might not think it from overdetermined
schlock like Simon
Birch, but disability is a tough trope to wrangle, an
errant bodily signifier that doesn't always play nice. Just think of
Million Dollar Baby,
which tries and fails to use Hilary Swank's
impairment as a
narrative shortcut for Clint Eastwood's transformation into a tender
father,
troubled Catholic, and euthanizer-turned-agent of transcendence all at
once.
Eastwood the director has to stumble over the mechanics of his scene
partner's
newly-maimed body and horizontal status, fudging the timeline so that
her
bedsores appear to sprout within minutes of her injury and puzzling over
how to
frame her, whether as a head poking out of a hospital bed in the
background or
a wheelchair-sporting cyborg parked in dead centre, staring out her
hospital
window like a forlorn puppy. That representational awkwardness is so
common that
in disability studies, it even has a name: Ato Quayson calls it
"aesthetic
nervousness," meaning a text's tendency to collapse in a fit of nerves
before the matter of how to represent a disabled body.

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

April 14, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Revenge, Theatrical, Western

Djangounch2

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw If Inglourious Basterds was an ambiguous, brilliant indictment of “Jewish vengeance” wrapped in this impossibly canny exploration of violence through screenwriting, performance, and love of film, think of Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up, Django Unchained, as a glorious continuation of what has become a singular artist’s evolving theme. It demonstrates an absolute command of the medium, of what film can do when tasked to do more than usual, and it does it by being some of the finest film criticism of the year. If the Coens are our best literary critics, then Tarantino is our best film critic cum sociologist, and his topics, again, are how we understand history through specific prisms and how violence can be both catharsis and atrocity–often in the same breath and almost always in the same ways. Consider that this difficult film’s most difficult moment comes, as it does in Inglourious Basterds, at the very end, in an unbearably ugly act of violence perpetrated against not the expected slave-owner antagonist, Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), but his manservant Stephen/Stepin (Samuel L. Jackson). Consider, too, the idea that vengeance–particularly in our post-9/11 environment–is the proverbial tiger we’ve caught by the tail: our cultural legacy that we try to justify through any means, given that our ends are so very righteous.

Like Someone in Love (2012)

April 12, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Rio Kase, Denden
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

by Angelo Muredda Few filmmakers know how to put you on your
guard from the first frame as effectively as Abbas Kiarostami. It's clear
enough that Like
Someone in Love opens in a bar in Tokyo, but it's
harder to say at first what we're looking at and why. The closest voice we hear
belongs to the off-camera Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young woman who's a little too preoccupied with lying her way out
of a hostile phone conversation to process the flat image of well-dressed young
revellers in front of her. Whether she's our lead takes a couple of false tries
to figure out. Our first candidate is a redhead around her age, sitting at a
table off to the side until she suddenly relocates to an empty seat in the
foreground, coaching Akiko through the rest of her call until she relinquishes
her spot moments later to a fortysomething man who speaks to both women with
first the familiarity of a parent, then the condescension of a high-end pimp
directing his employees. Somewhere in-between these encounters, we briefly lose track of who's even doing the looking. Akiko waltzes into our field of
vision on the way to the bathroom, the camera fixed at where her eyeline used
to be after she's vacated her seat, as if holding her place until she gets
back.

True Blood: The Complete Second Season (2009) + True Blood: The Complete Third Season (2010) – Blu-ray Discs

April 10, 20132000s, 2010, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Television, Thriller, Vampire, Werewolf

Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
S2: "Nothing But the Blood," "Keep This Party Going," "Scratches," "Shake and Fingerpop," "Never Let Me Go," "Hard-Hearted Hannah," "Release Me," "Timebomb," "I Will Rise Up," "New World in My View," "Frenzy," "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'"

S3: "Bad Blood," "Beautifully Broken," "It Hurts Me Too," "9 Crimes," "Trouble," "I Got a Right to Sing the Blues," "Hitting the Ground," "Night on the Sun," "Everything Is Broken," "I Smell a Rat," "Fresh Blood," "Evil Is Going On"

by Walter Chaw "True Blood" is pulp crap. Yet as Bryant and Bill have already so eloquently pointed out, it's highly-addictive pulp crap–the sort of shallow, handsomely-mounted titillation that fosters the craze that sprung up around prime-time soaps like "Dynasty" and "Falcon Crest". White-collar smut that traffics in the currency of the age: once upon a time it was the super-rich, now it's the supernatural. Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme. It's certainly soapier than showrunner/creator Alan Ball's previous pay-cable drama, "Six Feet Under", but to its credit what "True Blood" does in returning sexuality–and gore, and (southern) Gothic trappings–to the vampire mythos, it does well. The shame of it is that it seems to be ashamed of itself and so continually strives for relevance in aligning the plight of its vampire underclass to gay rights. Bill said it first, but is the appropriate supernatural analogue to gays really vampires? Is it wise to suggest that gays present that same kind of sexual allure? The same kind of blood contagion? Doesn't that play into the Conservative storyline a bit too neatly? At least it's not "The Walking Dead".

Evil Dead (2013) + Beyond the Hills (2012)

April 4, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Romania, Theatrical

EVIL DEAD
***½/****
starring Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas
screenplay by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues, based on the screenplay by Sam Raimi
directed by Fede Alvarez

BEYOND THE HILLS
****/****
starring Cosmina Stratan, Cristina Flutur, Valeriu Andriuta, Dana Tapalaga
screenplay by Cristian Mungiu, inspired by the non-fiction novels of Tatiana Niculescu Bran
directed by Cristian Mungiu

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The greatest irony of Fede Alvarez’s otherwise laudably straightforward reboot of Sam Raimi’s Spam-in-a-cabin classic The Evil Dead is that the moments where it references its primogenitor are actually the movie’s weakest. I’m thinking, in particular, of handsome young hero David (Shiloh Fernandez) getting thrown around a wet cellar in high Raimi smash-zoom style, which only underscores how much the original films drew their tone from Bruce Campbell–and how much this new one misses him. The danger of casting a group of beautiful people and taking itself deadly seriously (and jettisoning the “The,” in a gesture that reads as hipster insouciance) is that Evil Dead might draw closer to the mainstream and farther from its grindhouse roots. The small miracle of it, then, is that in both its absolute glee in finding the line of how much gore to show and then crossing it (a pair of glasses stop a hypodermic needle…but only for a moment) and its surprising efforts at locating a deeper thread in a frayed brother/sister relationship and the impact of drug addiction, Alvarez’s film is a solid, even affecting genre piece that allows for an abundance of memorable money shots. Compare its intelligence and earnestness, its infernal energy, against the disrespectfulness and self-satisfaction of The Cabin in the Woods to see that Evil Dead is not just a taste of the old religion, it’s really pretty great.

The Pelican Brief (1993); A Time to Kill (1996); Primal Fear (1996) – Blu-ray Discs

April 2, 20131990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Thriller

THE PELICAN
BRIEF
½/**** Image C+ Sound C+
starring Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, Sam Shepard, John Heard

screenplay by Alan J. Pakula, based on the novel by John Grisham

directed by Alan J. Pakula

A TIME TO KILL
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Matthew McConaughey, Donald
Sutherland

screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by John Grisham

directed by Joel Schumacher

PRIMAL FEAR
***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, John Mahoney, Edward Norton

screenplay by Steve Shagan and Ann Biderman, based on the novel by
William Diehl

directed by Gregory Hoblit

by Walter Chaw Hand-in-hand with the digital revolution of the 1990s is
this backlash against the same as technical paranoia pictures like The
Net and Hackers cohabit multiplexes with
an epidemic of John Grisham adaptations. Starting with The
Firm in 1993 and running through to The Client (1994),
The Pelican Brief (1995), A
Time to Kill and The Chamber (1996), The
Rainmaker (1997), and The Gingerbread Man
(1998), these pictures share a deep interest in not just the low-grade
hackery of Grisham's declarative-prose style, but also super-secret
societies in the halls of power. Thus was limply resurrected the
paranoid New American Cinema. It was different this time around because
the ways our realities were being manipulated by the popular culture
and mass media were no longer a product of a governmental conspiracy,
but of a perceptual mutation.^* It's not about not trusting the
government (nobody has trusted the government since 1972)–it's about
not trusting the medium of film itself. Not surprisingly, directors who
carved out their reputations in the Seventies–like Francis Ford
Coppola, Robert Altman, and Alan J. Pakula–jumped on board the Grisham
train, finding familiar ground in his gallery of paper-based heroes
(lawyers, judges, newspapermen) and perhaps thinking they'd bought a
ticket back to relevance when in fact they were working in an odd
parallel phenomenon that would fail almost entirely to have any kind of
relevance or longevity. Instead of producing classics, these legends
were excavating mines they'd already exhausted three administrations
ago.

The Ballad of Narayama (1958) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 1, 20131950s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Japan, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Kinuyo Tanaka, Teiji Takahashi, Yuko Mochizuki, Danko Ichikawa
screenplay by Keisuke Kinoshita from the novel by Shichiro Fukazawa
directed by Keisuke Kinoshita

by Bryant Frazer The Ballad of Narayama, a 1958 film by Keisuke Kinoshita, a Shochiku studio stablemate of Ozu and Mizoguchi, opens with an unconventional gambit for a Japanese melodrama from the 1950s. A masked M.C. knocking two blocks of wood together matter-of-factly announces the film’s title and offers a brief abstract of its content. The fabric behind him proves to be a curtain, drawn aside after the credits are displayed–Narayama is staged as theatre, filmed by a movie camera. The voiceover narration, accompanied by music plucked on a shamisen, draws on traditional Japanese styles of drama. The sets are lavishly dressed with flowers, trees, and even gently burbling brooks. And Kinoshita’s repeated strategy of changing sets in full view of the camera by pushing platforms to the side, casting a shadow across a character, or suddenly dropping a curtain or background to reveal a new scene behind, is borrowed from the kabuki tradition.

Wake in Fright (1971)

March 29, 20131970s, 2013, Australia, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Thriller

***½/****
starring Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Evan Jones, based on the novel by Kenneth Cook
directed by Ted Kotcheff

by Angelo Muredda As exploitation-movie titles go, Wake in Fright suggests a high-concept reversal of A Nightmare on Elm Street, where the only way to fall prey to bogeymen is to stay awake. It’s a bit of an odd sell, given the more abstract horror mined by Toronto-born filmmaker Ted Kotcheff, of both The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and First Blood fame. Far from Kravitz country in its Australian setting but still working in the same territory of young, ambling men who want to be somebody, Kotcheff’s earlier film–first screened in 1971 to both wild acclaim and great distaste from animal-rights activists, and somewhat forgotten until its resurrection in the “Ozploitation” documentary Not Quite Hollywood–is more interested in the terror of duration without purpose, of waking up when you have no good reason, than in anything so prosaic as a slasher. Elm Street it isn’t, then, but Kotcheff burrows into his haughty lead’s descent into himself–a stand-in for every thirtysomething man’s realization that his coming-of-age has already happened, to no discernible effect–with a nihilist precision that’s tough to shake off.

The Master (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

March 27, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw Of all the recognizable and memorable phrases that John Keats contributed to the English language, this ranks high:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet
breathing.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

March 17, 20132012, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Thriller, War

***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Ehle, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler
screenplay by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Angelo Muredda As of this writing, the latest wannabe tastemaker to thumb his nose at Zero Dark Thirty is novelist and professional blowhard Bret Easton Ellis, who tweeted that critics lauding the film “need to admit that they’re admiring a morally indefensible movie.” With that, Ellis joins an army of self-deputized film writers who’ve taken issue on moral grounds with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s treatment of the CIA’s decade-spanning manhunt for Osama bin Laden. While Ellis’s tasteless tweets about Bigelow’s appearance a few weeks back make his word suspect, it’s harder to dismiss Glenn Greenwald, the liberal firebrand whose initial survey of early praise for the film (then unseen by him) slammed Bigelow and Boal for glorifying torture. Incensed by the suggestion that crowd-sourcing knowledge about Zero Dark Thirty‘s representation of torture from the likes of David Edelstein constituted poor form, Greenwald soon saw the picture for himself and insisted that the viewing only confirmed his initial impressions: “[T]o depict X as valuable in enabling the killing of bin Laden is – by definition – to glorify X,” he observed, where X meant torture; woe to the “huge numbers of American viewers” about to be “led” down the filmmakers’ dim alleyways.

Schindler’s List (1993) [Collector’s Gift Set] – DVD|[20th Anniversary Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

March 12, 20131990s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Spielberg

***/****
DVD – Image
B+ Sound
A
Extras A
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras B-

starring Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes,
Caroline Goodall
screenplay by Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Thomas Keneally
directed by Steven Spielberg

click
any image to enlarge

by Bill
Chambers It's not the "I could've done more" speech that
rankles, but rather the scene directly preceding it, in which Herr
Direktor Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) shames a gaggle of SS
guards into leaving the 1100 Jews they've been ordered to kill unharmed
in a manner not far removed from one of paterfamilias
Mike's guilt-trips on "The Brady Bunch". ("You don't really want to
shoot these nice people, do you?" he asks (I'm hardly
paraphrasing)–and one-by-one they skulk off.) I realized during my
first viewing of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List
in almost a decade that I'm too much the representationalist to treat
any text as sacred just because its subject matter is. Ergo, I allowed
myself to cringe whenever I perceived Spielberg to be leaning on the
crutch of suburban ethics, which he does often in the film's "for he's
a jolly good fellow" denouement.*

Driving Miss Daisy (1989) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

March 3, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy, Dan Aykroyd, Patti Lupone
screenplay by Alfred Uhry, based on his play
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw The heart-warming story of how a bitter old Jewess learns to not be such a bitch to a patient Negro driver in an idyllic pre-integration South, Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy, released the same year as other such landmark films about race as Ferris Bueller’s Black Civil War Regiment and Do the Right Thing, discusses how forty-one years of forced companionship can overcome even the deepest-seated prejudices and resentments. Or, at least, dementia can. We meet Ms. Daisy (Jessica Tandy) as she crashes her car, and we meet Hoke (Morgan Freeman) when he begs Miss Daisy’s son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) for a job as her chauffeur–meaning they’re both prisoners of circumstance, see? Meaning this is an unlikely but no less racially naïve remake of Stanley Kramer’s embarrassing melodrama The Defiant Ones, scored by Hans Zimmer with outtakes from his synth-heavy, bullshit-rich Rain Man score, all teddy bears humping and building music boxes and shit. Meaning, essentially, that we are to believe there is no substantive difference between a wealthy white woman needing to hire a driver and a destitute black man looking for work in 1948 Atlanta. My favourite scene is either the one where Hoke asks Miss Daisy’s permission to make water, or the one where Hoke says something and Miss Daisy tells him to “be still.”

The Loneliest Planet (2012) – DVD

February 28, 2013****/****, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Hani Furstenberg, Bidzina Gujabidze
screenplay by Julia Loktev, based on the short story by Tom Bissell
directed by Julia Loktev

by Walter Chaw Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet
is an existentially terrifying little film about life's essential loneliness,
the absolute mutability of interpersonal relationships, and the ways our
identities are formed not only by our perceptions of others, but by our
preconceptions of the roles we play and, in turn, cast others to
play, unbeknownst to them or to anyone. It gives the lie to the
possibility of an unconditional relationship, to the idea that we can ever
truly know ourselves or the people with whom we choose to share our lives. Most
uncomfortably of all, it posits that everything we believe, everything we hold
most dear about who we are and who we think we are, can change in an instant. It's
about love in that way, but love only in the context of the brutal, capricious,
arbitrary world–love in the sense that we invest everything in it in acts of
faith entirely unjustified by Nature and circumstance. There's a scene in The
Loneliest Planet where two pairs of feet play with each other on top of a
sleeping bag, followed fast, after something small but terrible happens, by the
owner of one pair of those feet watching the owner of the other walk away and
eventually disappear into the ugly, insensate terrain of Russian Georgia's
Caucasus mountains. I think it's no accident that the film takes place there,
where mythology places Titan Prometheus in his eternal torment: Prometheus the
bringer of fire, and life, and foresight (literally, in his name)–the father
of Man flayed bare and reintroduced to the carnal night.