The Newsroom: The Complete First Season (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, 2012, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Newsroom1

Image A Sound B+ Extras B
“We Just Decided To,” “News Night 2.0,” “The 112th Congress,” “I’ll Try To Fix You,” “Amen,” “Bullies,” “5/1,” “The Blackout, Part 1: Tragedy Porn,” “The Blackout, Part 2: Mock Debate,” “The Greater Fool”

by Jefferson Robbins The more I think about Aaron Sorkin’s chimerical HBO beast “The Newsroom”, the more I think it would work far, far better as a Broadway musical. That may be because Sorkin loads the ranks of his ensemble drama with accomplished theatre vets, or it may be because of the endless dialogue references to stage classics, beginning and ending with Man of La Mancha. But it’s also a matter of timing: The show offers strange eruptions of relationship palaver, set in the midst of world-altering sociopolitical changes and the daily churn of building a TV newshour around them. They arrive oddly, maddeningly, and frequently, just when the storylines involving real-world events are beginning to compel, and they feel almost uniformly dishonest and manufactured. What I’m saying is, they’d go down easier if they were sung.

The Attack (2013)

The Attack (2013)

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, Egypt, France, Lebanon, Qatar, Theatrical

L’attentat
***/****
starring Ali Suliman, Remonde Amsellem, Evgenia Dodina, Karim Saleh
screenplay by Joelle Touma and Ziad Doueiri, based on the novel by Yasmina Khadra
directed by Ziad Doueiri

by Walter Chaw Lebanese-born Ziad Doueiri, an assistant cameraman on Quentin Tarantino’s first three features, demonstrates as a director the kind of elliptical reserve more commonly associated with Terrence Malick. Indeed, the most powerful stretches of his sophomore effort, The Attack, recall the fragments of The Thin Red Line that elucidate Pvt. Bell’s wife’s betrayal through a series of voiceovers, remembered conversations, and gauzy/idealized images of a bucolic existence that may or may not have ever existed. An adaptation of a novel by Yasmina Khadra, The Attack details the discovery by an Arab emergency-room surgeon based in Israel, Amin (Ali Suliman), that his wife Siham (Reymond Amsalem, who has the quality and pitch of Illeana Douglas–a wonderful thing) is the suicide bomber responsible for an attack in Tel Aviv, the casualties of which we watch Amin try to save. Amin has been “accepted” by the Jews, we understand, though there’s tension throughout the early scenes as his friends and colleagues awkwardly navigate around him in a way that reads initially as condescending, then increasingly hostile as events unfold. Hannah Arendt would have something to say about this; so would Paula Deen and her legion of insensate followers. When Amin receives an award for his work, his acceptance speech includes the platitude that all Arabs have a little Jew in them and vice versa; by the picture’s last words, “Every time you go away, a little piece of me dies,” one wonders if he means the little piece that has empathy for the opposition’s point of view.

Rolling Thunder (1977) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2013, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

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***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B+
starring William Devane, Tommy Lee Jones, Linda Haynes, James Best
screenplay by Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould
directed by John Flynn

by Bryant Frazer Rolling Thunder‘s reputation was burnished considerably in the 1990s when Quentin Tarantino declared it one of his favourite films. It’s a good call; Tarantino owes his career to his long-standing love affair with the grindhouse, and Rolling Thunder is in many ways the quintessence of Hollywood exploitation. Director John Flynn, who made a name for himself with his 1973 adaptation of a Donald E. Westlake novel, The Outift, comes across as an efficient, focused storyteller who pares narrative to the bone. That style of filmmaking really allows (or requires) performance to come to the fore, and in the intense vigilante fantasy Rolling Thunder, both William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones deliver smart and scary interpretations of the soul-damaged protagonist and sidekick, respectively. Flynn certainly wasn’t a self-conscious stylist, and he ended up toiling in the gulag of undistinguished action pictures like the 1989 Stallone-in-prison flick Lock Up and the Steven Seagal revenge thriller Out for Justice. He died in 2007, and Rolling Thunder is just remarkable enough that you want to bemoan his anonymity.

Byzantium (2013)

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Ireland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire

Byzantium

****/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley, Caleb Landry Jones
screenplay by Moira Buffini, based on her play
directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw What is it about the Irish character, that particular quality of melancholy fatalism, that seems to inform the great works of native sons Beckett, Joyce, and maybe Yeats in particular? I like G.K. Chesterton’s description of Ireland as a place of “men that God made mad,/For all their wars are merry,/And all their songs are sad.” It infects the folklore, the story of the crags and the heather, the looming, low skies pregnant with what Michael Almereyda’s criminally underestimated (and long forgotten) The Eternal fashioned into a creation story involving unimaginable losses and the sweet, bitter tears they inspire. To that film, add John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish, Neal Jordan’s Ondine, and now Jordan’s rapturous Byzantium: a quartet of supernaturally-tinged pictures that together form a lush polyptych that captures the very sensation of walking through Dublin in the rain, or along the shores of Galway, or through the pages of Ulysses in the company of Leo and Nora. As for Byzantium, it’s beautiful, and sad, and has an eternity to it that’s reflected in its tale of a “soucriant,” a succubus of sorts with a Dominican history and favoured by Jean Rhys in novels that were themselves attempts to come to terms with the tragedies of her life as an outsider. Jordan, well-read and never shy about expressing that literariness in his pictures, is producing in his later work the very evocation of a city from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (a book he once told me he admires): Ersilia, an abandoned city built not of walls, but of strings the lost inhabitants used to mark connections with one another. Jordan weaves an intricate web with Byzantium, a film that, before even attacking the tensions within, provides tensions without in its title, most likely taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which is itself about tensions between the “artifice of eternity” and the temporariness of youth. Turns out, the film is about that, too.

Museum Hours (2013)

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, UK

Museumhours

****/****
starring Mary Margaret O’Hara, Bobby Sommer, Ela Piplits
directed by Jem Cohen

by Angelo Muredda The closing credits of Jem Cohen’s warm and wonderful Museum Hours give equal thanks to John Berger and Patti Smith, and it’s not hard to see why. Further to being Cohen’s friend and occasional collaborator, Smith occupies a rare place at the intersection of art stardom and punk history, while Berger might be the only figurehead total newcomers to art criticism can name, his TV series “Ways of Seeing” having turned innumerable undergraduates onto ideologically-inflected readings of popular images. Whatever their personal contributions to the film may have been, Berger’s knack for providing the novice critic with the armature to see intelligently and ethically is as instructive here as Smith’s mercurial punk ethos. Museum Hours–which, like Berger’s BBC miniseries and book, is destined to have a long afterlife in college art courses–is an absorbing and richly humanist synthesis of those seemingly contradictory impulses, a puckish walking tour through an art gallery that doubles as a manifesto for seeing deeply into the rubbish beyond the walls of the museum.

Band of Outsiders (1964) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, The Criterion Collection

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Bande à part
****/****
Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur, Danièle Girard
screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard (uncredited), based on the novel Fool’s Gold by Dolores Hitchens
directed by JeanLuc Cinéma Godard

by Bryant Frazer For the casual observer, Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (Bande à part) may as well be titled The Eyes of Anna Karina. The famously radical director’s follow-up to the hit film Contempt isn’t a favourite of American movie buffs for its politics or its thematic rigour. Instead, it’s a veritable spoof of film noir–at times a near-farce–involving a couple of small-time schemers who take their cues from Hollywood. Though Band of Outsiders is thought of as one of Godard’s most accessible works, it’s also one of his most dissonant. It’s a gritty crime drama wrapped around a light romance; a breezy comedy shot through with intimations of the geopolitical landscape of the 1960s; an homage to U.S. culture that incidentally imagines the decline of the American empire. In Godard’s body of work, Band of Outsiders–its story based on a novel by American mystery writer Dolores Hitchens–can be read as the connective tissue between the bones of Breathless, which is full of loving references to American cinema and pulp fiction, and the later Weekend and Tout va bien, which are explicitly critical of western culture in general and capitalism in particular.

White House Down (2013)

Posted in2013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Whitehousedown

**½/****
starring Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Maggie Gyllenhaal, James Woods
screenplay by James Vanderbilt
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Angelo Muredda Leading up to the release of Anonymous in late 2011, Roland Emmerich joined screenwriter and professional blowhard John Orloff in a series of quasi-academic debates about the supposed true origin of the works of William Shakespeare–which they attributed, as is the fashion among a school of cranks that includes Derek Jacobi and John Hurt, to the Earl of Oxford. Let us only say of that turgid, classist bore, the most distressing of his disaster movies, that petty conspiracy theorizing does not suit Emmerich, at heart a good old liberal pussycat who likes to blow things up, then shoot the shit about the horrors of global warming. Despite its vague interest in U.S. foreign policy (i.e., its firm belief that it sucks), White House Down is a more modest affair, and all the better for it. Stupid is easy but stupid fun is trickier to pull off, and more than anything Emmerich has made since Independence Day (a decent ham sandwich), this Die Hard clone, complete with Channing Tatum in a sleeveless shirt, at least delivers a pretty good time.

World War Z (2013)

Posted in2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Zombie

Worldwarz

**/****
starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Max Brooks
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster’s World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks’s cause célèbre novel (think Stephen Ambrose on the zombie apocalypse) that had a production so troubled the real surprise is Terry Gilliam had nothing to do with it, lands as half an idea, handsomely mounted in a really expensive crater. With almost no relationship to the book beyond honouring its concept of a conflagration told in vignettes, it feels almost exactly like James L. Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything, which began life as a musical and ended up, after extensive reshoots and careening budget overages, song-free, yet whole somehow despite the trauma. That sense of a sudden change in direction, in genre, is all over World War Z–something in its almost apologetic reserve, something in its unmistakable indecision. Indeed, it serves as a fitting metaphor for a zombie as a corpse similarly brought to shambling half-life, but frankly, it could’ve been a lot worse. It works for what it is in the same way that Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion works, and with the same limitations, ambivalence, anticlimax, and handsome mounting. If, at the end, its Damon Lindelof-penned solution* (the twelfth-hour salvation of a freight train jumped its tracks) is as stupid as you would expect something Lindelof to pen, at least the journey there is interesting, even occasionally (if only very occasionally) arresting. A shame that Forster hasn’t gotten any better at directing action since Quantum of Solace.

Not Fade Away (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2012, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music, Romance

Notfadeaway3

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring John Magaro, Jack Huston, Bella Heathcote, James Gandolfini
written and directed by David Chase

by Bryant Frazer Not Fade Away doesn’t have an opening scene–it has an overture. You could almost call it a mash-up. After a brief snippet of TV footage showing New Jersey boys Joey Dee and the Starliters performing their 1962 hit “Peppermint Twist,” the image is replaced by an old RCA “Indian Head” test pattern superimposed with the words “Please Stand By” as a voice announces a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. After the familiar emergency-alert tone starts buzzing away for a couple of bars, it’s co-opted as part of  the beat behind the guitar riff that opens “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The sense of time and place thus conjured is strong: it’s 1965, and America is on the verge of a rock-and-roll emergency.

Before Midnight (2013)

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Beforemidnight

****/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
screenplay by Richard Linklater & Ethan Hawke & Julie Delpy
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Before Midnight opens with a bit of misdirection, a tracking shot of two pairs of shoes ambling towards the camera that we instinctively ascribe to Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) before the second pair is shown to belong instead to Jesse’s teenaged son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), about to board a flight back to the States. Somewhere in the slow pan up to the actors’ faces, and in the deferral of series MVP Celine, is a playful acknowledgement that Richard Linklater’s Before movies have grown into a franchise with a coherent visual language that’s dependable enough to riff on. Much has changed since Jesse and Celine’s inaugural philosophical walking tour through Vienna 18 years ago, and the prologue is an economical demonstration of how arbitrary our encounters with the couple to date have been, shaped by our inability to listen in after Nina Simone drowns out the end of Before Sunset. But the presence of Jesse’s son (from the unseen wife alluded to throughout the previous film) in place of Celine, who’s finally revealed in another tracking shot in the next scene, also alerts us to something new: a conflict that runs deeper than the pair’s usual anxious negotiations with a ticking clock.

Cabaret (1972) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Music, Musical, Romance

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****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Marisa Berenson, Joel Grey
screenplay Jay Allen, based on the play by John Van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood
directed by Bob Fosse

by Walter Chaw Bob Fosse’s Cabaret is an astonishment. It’s a milestone for musical adaptations, a scabrous mission statement early on for the best period in American film (in film anywhere, really), and, taken with her turn in The Sterile Cuckoo (and arguably as Lucille 2 on “Arrested Development”), everything you need to know about Liza Minnelli as a very down, very particular American icon. Daughter of one Judy Garland, whose 1969 death from an abuse of drugs and alcohol was no longer considered spectacular in the shadow of poor, martyred Marilyn Monroe, she represents the broken legacy of Old Hollywood. Ray Bolger said at Garland’s funeral that she had just worn out. Poignant. Poignant especially because it happens the same year her daughter has a breakdown from a broken heart in The Sterile Cuckoo, and just three years before Minnelli’s Sally Bowles composes herself a split second before the curtains part and she, snap, justlikethat, puts on a happy face for a Weimar audience fiddling as the Republic burns. As endings go, it’s as horrifying as the editing error at the close of John Frankenheimer’s 1966 Seconds–the film that, for my money, is the real beginning of the New American Cinema, appearing less than a year before the “official” starting gun of Bonnie & Clyde. Cabaret is a quintessential ’70s picture, a devastating experience and an exhilarating one, too.

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

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

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****/**** 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

Posted in1990s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Brian De Palma, Drama, Satire

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*/**** 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)

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Teen, Theatrical

Weandthei

**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

Posted in1940s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Chaplin, Comedy, Directors: Charles Chaplin, Drama, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Verdoux1

***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)

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Greatgatsby13

*/****
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

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

Remote_Area_Medical_4

***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

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

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***/****
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

Posted in1970s, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, France, Spain

Tristana1

***/**** 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

Posted in****/****, 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.