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.

Like Someone in Love (2012)

Posted in2012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Theatrical

Likesomeoneinlove

***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

Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Television, Thriller, Vampire, Werewolf

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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)

Posted in****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Romania, Theatrical

Evildead

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) [Hard Evidence Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

The Pelican Brief (1993); A Time to Kill (1996); Primal Fear (1996) [Hard Evidence Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

Posted in1990s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Joel Schumacher, 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

Posted in1950s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Japan, The Criterion Collection

Ballad3

***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)

Posted in1970s, 2013, Australia, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Thriller

Wakeinfright

***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

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

Master1

****/**** 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

Posted in2012, 2013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Thriller, War

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***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

Posted in1990s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Spielberg

Schindlers1

***/****
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

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.*

Neighbouring Sounds (2013)

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

Neighboringsounds

O som ao redor
***½/****
starring Gustavo Jahn, Maeve Jinkings, W.J. Solha, Irma Brown
written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho

by Angelo Muredda In his 1975 survey of trends in Canadian literature, Northrop Frye famously diagnosed the national character as paranoiac, fraught with nightmares about being invaded by the outside world. That so-called garrison mentality, Frye offered, meant early white Canadian settlers bonded together against both the malevolent nature past their forts and the more generalized outside threats it represented–shutting their doors to anyone who seemed the slightest bit unneighbourly. Although Frye had a very specific community in mind, it’s hard not to see it reflected in the gated neighbourhood of critic-turned-filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds, a conclave of middle-class northern Brazilian condo-dwellers who define themselves by the riffraff they discard, whether car-stereo thieves or sleeping doormen. Part-Hanekian surveillance thriller and part-Altmanesque ensemble of overlapping voices, it’s one of the most assured debut features to land in years, the sort of fully-formed high-concept work you expect after a couple of interesting misfires.

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

Posted in1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama

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*/**** 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

Posted in****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller

Loneliestplanetcap

****/**** 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.

Holy Motors (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica

Holymotors1

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue
written and directed by Leos Carax

by Angelo Muredda It’s no great shock that Holy Motors is innovative, coming from the same headspace as The Lovers on the Bridge and Mauvais Sang–movies that seemed fashioned out of whole cloth despite their indebtedness to names like David Bowie and Herman Melville. What’s most surprising is that beneath the formal variety and cheekiness, mainstays of Leos Carax’s freewheeling cinema, is a moving and altogether serious exploration of what it means to be an actor, in both a professional and a metaphysical sense. Carax’s films have been ranked among the boldest aesthetic manifestos since the 1980s for good reason, yet the ineffable quality that distinguishes them from the superficially similar grandstanding of nascent stylists like Xavier Dolan is their deep sincerity and unabashed adoration of the eccentric city-dwellers who cross paths on the loneliest roads in urban France. If Holy Motors is even wilder in presentation than its predecessors, then, it’s also perfectly legible within a body of work that’s always found a human streak in the avant-garde.

Ivan’s Childhood (1962) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Russia, The Criterion Collection, War

Ivanschildhood

Ivanovo detstvo
****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Nikolay Burlyaev, Valentin Zubkov, Yevgeni Zharikov, Stepan Krylov
screenplay by Vladimir Bogomolov and Mikhail Papava (uncredited: Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky)
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

by Bryant Frazer Ivan’s Childhood opens, unexpectedly enough, inside a dream. The film is impatient. Its dreaming actually begins before the Mosfilm logo has faded from the screen, as the call of a cuckoo echoes softly on the soundtrack. Young Ivan appears, surrounded by trees (their pine needles dripping with what must be cool morning dew), our view of his face criss-crossed by the lines of a spider’s web strung up between the branches. The shot is perfectly composed, with the tree’s slender trunk and one of its branches creating a secondary, off-centre frame around the boy’s face. Ivan pauses there for only a moment–he must be looking for the cuckoo–before turning abruptly out of frame, a move that sends the camera skyward, moving vertically up the body of the pine and revealing more of the landscape. When the camera finishes its ascent, Ivan is again visible, in the midground of the image. His scrawny body, now seen in apparent miniature, turns again towards the camera. Nature is large and beautiful; he is small and, while lovely in a way, still awkward in his skin.

Boardwalk Empire: The Complete First Season (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2010, 2013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Gangster, Television

Boardwalkempire

Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
“Boardwalk Empire,” “The Ivory Tower,” “Broadway Limited,” “Anastasia,” “Nights in Ballygran,” “Family Limitation,” “Home,” “Hold Me in Paradise,” “Belle Femme,” “The Emerald City,” “Paris Green,” “A Return to Normalcy”

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Two things right off the bat about HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”. First, the Martin Scorsese who directed the pilot would eat the tedious old guy who made Hugo for lunch. Second, for as good as the first season turns out to be, it’s based almost entirely on the strength of a cast minimizing the disappointment of opportunities lost. Even the actors, though, can be something of a liability, in that the mere presence of Michael Shannon cues us that straitlaced, proto-Untouchable Agent Nelson Van Alden is on his way to becoming a full-blown nutter. The premise is tired, too, as almost a century’s remove from the 1920s American gangster cycle has made the whole genre exhausted. There are no new delights in a midnight Tommy-gun execution in the woods, or an unhinged Guido unloading on a hapless shopkeeper. There’s not much joy, either, in trainspotting the parade of gangsters, the Lucky Lucianos (Vincent Piazza) and Al Capones (Stephen Graham, late of Public Enemies) and Meyer Lanskys (Anatol Yusef), partly because if you’re a student of gangland history, you’re immediately cued to their fates. Implanted spoilers, if you will. The real revelations of “Boardwalk Empire” are Jack Huston as a mutilated WWI doughboy and Gretchen Mol, who spent the first half of her career as Cameron Diaz’s haircut (see also: Malin Akerman) but emerges in this venue as an actress of complexity and intelligence. It’s enough to wonder what the series might have been were the casting not so otherwise on the nose–a strange liability, I know.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) + The Rains of Ranchipur (1955) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Discs

Posted in1940s, 1950s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Romance, Thriller

Postmanalways1

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Lana Turner, John Garfield, Cecil Kellaway, Hume Cronyn
screenplay by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch, based on the novel by James M. Cain
directed by Tay Garnett

THE RAINS OF RANCHIPUR
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Lana Turner, Richard Burton, Fred MacMurray, Michael Rennie
screenplay by Merle Miller, based on the novel by Louis Bromfield
directed by Jean Negulesco

by Jefferson Robbins There’s a series of doublings in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Lana Turner’s best-known vehicle, that illuminates its obscure title. Disillusioned young wife Cora Smith (Turner) and drift-through handyman Frank Chambers (John Garfield) try twice to make way for their illicit love by eliminating her diner-impresario husband, Nick (Cecil Kellaway). There are two court cases steered by suspicious chief prosecutor Sackett (Leon Ames) and defended by wonderfully shifty lawyer Arthur “I’m Handling It” Keats (Hume Cronyn). There are two moonlight swims, each a turning point in the criminal couple’s courtship. Twice, the action bends when ailing female relatives, never seen, summon a main character to their sickbeds. There are even two roadside-diner femmes fatale: Cora, and her double Madge (Audrey Totter), who diverts Frank while he’s on the outs with the woman he killed to obtain. Finally, the murder itself creates a literal echo. These aren’t anvils falling from the heavens, but instead the patterns life presents only in retrospect: This moment, that day, that was when God was trying to get my attention. Like Frank, we’re too preoccupied to ever hear the first ring.