Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2011, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, France, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto P. Quintaville, Aldo Valletti
screenplay by Pupi Avati (uncredited) and Pier Paolo Pasolini
directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

by Bryant Frazer There’s a tradition among purveyors of BDSM pornography to append a coda to their project in which the participants in various potentially alarming scenarios are finally glimpsed, all smiles, revelling in the afterglow of a clearly consensual exercise. I assume this custom has very practical benefits–for one thing, it might help stave off prosecution for obscenity or sex-trafficking. But it’s also a signal from the community making the videos to the community watching them that the performances are undertaken with high spirits, lest there be any misunderstanding about the actual circumstances of their making. Despite any apparent unpleasantness, dear viewer, all involved (top and bottom, dominant and submissive) are working towards the ultimate goal of pleasure, not pain.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011)

Posted in2011, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Billy Burke
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Appalling by pretty much every measure, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (hereafter Twilight 4.1) is the predictable end result of a film based on a book written by an illiterate Mormon housewife mistaking her profound ignorance for profundity. It’s about a really old guy who talks a really young girl into marrying him and enduring really, really painful childbirth as her portion of God’s judgment on her kind; and then it’s about another kind of pedophilia, wherein a 19-year-old badly in need of acting lessons gets turned on by a baby and decides he’s going to marry that infant once she’s old enough to breed. Still with me? So, yes, I knew it was going to be bad and, yes, I went anyway. And you know what? For as girded as I was to the raw incompetence of this franchise, Twilight 4.1 still managed to plumb a few new depths. See, Twilight 4.1 is an apologia for spousal abuse and a clumsy pro-life screed (what about this crap isn’t clumsy?) before turning into cartoon Grand Guignol horseshit meant to freak out an audience of pre-teens and lonely housewives who think that this object of their devotion is selling them anything except loneliness and delusion. It’s sledgehammer racist in its depiction of a native housekeeper cast as Maria Ouspenskaya, and it has a moment in which a circle of wolves “think-talk” to each other in some ineffable evocation of an Optimus Prime pep talk. It’s completely inexplicable, in other words, and irritating for it.

The Conversation (1974) – Blu-ray Disc

The Conversation (1974) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Palme d'Or Winner, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+
starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams
written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola

by Walter Chaw The moment I decided that movies were something to be respected, studied, opened layer-by-layer rather than merely enjoyed and cast aside was at a 16mm screening, in a college film course, of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterwork The Conversation. If we were speaking in different terms, film before it for me is the equivalent of the girls I dated until I met my wife. It taught me about what it is to respect the medium; it showed me the joys of complexity and investment, and it showed me what it was to be in love. It hit me like a freight train. And not only had I never seen The Conversation prior to that hot, close afternoon in the common room where that seminar took place, I had never so much as heard of it. I was humbled by my ignorance, and that helped. I was also at a personal crossroads in my life–that didn’t hurt, either. My sense memory of The Conversation is bifurcated between the feeling of my feet in socks walking along the carpeted hall of my dorm, down the concrete stairs, and into the screening area and sitting next to the girl I liked, who was wearing her sweats, no make-up–and the feeling, years and years later, of watching it on a shitty old laptop in bed with my wife while we waited for the first terrible contractions to happen during the first of our trio of miscarriages. Neither of us ever questioned the wisdom of putting it on, knowing that the toilet backflow scene was coming down the pike. We were naïve. We didn’t know why we wanted to watch it so desperately that night. When people ask me what my favourite movie is, I tell them it’s The Conversation. I don’t even have to think about it.

Mysteries of Lisbon (2010)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Mystery, Portugal, Romance, Theatrical

Mistérios de Lisboa
****/****
starring Adriano Luz, Maria João Bastos, Ricardo Pereira
screenplay by Carlos Saboga, based on the novel by Camilo Castelo Branco
directed by Raúl Ruiz

by Angelo Muredda “It would be long and tedious to explain,” Adriano Luz’s mysterious man of the cloth Father Dinis offers shortly before the intermission point of prolific Chilean director Raúl Ruiz’s staggering Mysteries of Lisbon, the fleetest four-hour-plus spectacle you’ll see this year. It’s not the first time characters promise to explain things later (nor is it the last), their second favourite activity after explaining things now. As promised in an unattributed statement in the title credits, what follows is an amiably digressive “diary of suffering” stuffed with such deferrals and explanations. And a beautiful diary it is. Ruiz, who passed away earlier this year, is perhaps best-known stateside for his lyrical Proust adaptation Time Regained–a nice warm-up, in retrospect, for this even more sprawling and melancholy saga of childhood and loss, an adaptation of Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco’s 1854 novel of the same name. The fruit of his labours this time is astonishing: an adaptation that’s at once deeply reverent towards conventions of nineteenth-century fiction and attuned to their radical possibilities. Ruiz, in other words, finds nothing tedious about these stories, and sees in their mysterious doublings, crude disguises, generational secrets, and grand unmaskings an opportunity to dwell on the nature of storytelling, both its revelatory potential and its artifice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rum Diary (2011)

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

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

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

Anonymous (2011)

Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Germany, Shakespeare, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, Derek Jacobi
screenplay by John Orloff
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Angelo Muredda Anonymous comes out swinging against the Shakespeare industry with all the force of a midsummer night’s fart in the wind. If director Roland Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff–a match forged in Mordor–had their way, the film would upend university curriculums, supplementing every Shakespeare syllabus with an elliptical “…but what if…” written in invisible ink on the last page. To that end, they’ve taken their baby on a tour of college campuses, and scheduled Facebook-webcast debates in which they’ve stunned Shakespeareans like James Shapiro with wise nuggets comparable to Adam Sandler’s astonishingly incoherent address at the end of Billy Madison. It hasn’t been clear sailing all the way, mind: popular historian Stephen Marche recently took to the NEW YORK TIMES to debunk such “prophets of truthiness”–Emmerich and Orloff are but a new, high-profile strain of Oxfordians, a group who name nobleman Edward de Vere as the true author of Shakespeare’s texts, even the ones dated after his death–for advancing a lunatic conspiracy theory based on little more than class snobbery. Shakespeare scholar Holger Syme was even less charitable, proposing in a blog entry that has since become an Oxfordian recruitment camp fronted by Orloff himself that the film’s chief sin is not historical inaccuracy but its filmmakers’ posture as courageous iconoclasts, railing against established wisdom. Anonymous, then, has had a fairly storied pre-release career.

The Bad Seed (1956) – DVD + Village of the Damned/Children of the Damned [Horror Double Feature] – DVD|The Bad Seed (1956) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1950s, 1960s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

THE BAD SEED
*½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image C+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Patty McCormack, Henry Jones, Eileen Heckart, Evelyn Varden
screenplay by John Lee Martin, based on the play by Maxwell Anderson and the novel by William March
directed by Mervyn LeRoy

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gwynn
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, George Barclay, based on The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
directed by Wolf Rilla

CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1963)
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Ian Hendry, Alan Badel, Barbara Ferris, Alfred Burke
screenplay by John Briley
directed by Anton M. Leader

by Walter Chaw It’s pretty common nowadays to look at the horror films of the 1950s as Cold War/McCarthy-era relics: allegories for a world torn between the antiseptic image of television’s Golden Age and the seething undertow of a society slipping into the madness of the JFK/Medgar Evers assassinations, the 16th Street Baptist Church, the Freedom Summer Killings, the transition from the Korean War to Vietnam, and on and on and on until any pretense of innocence, in art and society, became tainted by irony. It was thought that 9/11 was an event horrific enough to end our gilded age of snark, but ironically is almost the only way that we view tragedy and institutional corruption. Though paranoia might have been planted in the duck-and-cover drills of the Fifties, in the suspicion and fear of returning WWII vets confronting a different world and haunted by demons, it didn’t find full flower until the Rorschach coolness of the 1960s and the mean cinema of the 1970s.

The Skin I Live In (2011)

Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Horror, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

La piel que habito
**½/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet
screenplay by Pedro Almodóvar, based on the novel Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet
directed by Pedro Almodóvar

by Angelo Muredda “Don’t pay attention to the surfaces,” Antonio Banderas’s mad scientist cautions maid and unofficial secret-keeper Marisa Paredes as she approaches a cluttered countertop late–or is it early?–in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest genre- and gender-hopping melodrama, The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito). It’s a joke, of course: the film, whose literalized English title mangles the Spanish pun on habito as both living and occupying, say, an outfit, is obsessed with surfaces and the ambiguous plumbing that supposedly runs deep below the tissue. Trouble is, The Skin I Live In is almost all surface–a beautifully carved wooden doll without any innards. That the doll should proudly display its hollow centre, which the movie does in numerous winks at its own clever vapidity, is admirable enough. But Almodóvar, never one to shy away from an operatic climax or three, overdoes it even by his standards, turning the last act into a morality play about protecting your integrity–your true, unseen self–against the skin-deep scars inflicted by other people. It’s a nice conceit that might have rung true, or at least wrung tears, if the true self in question wasn’t a total blank.

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in1970s, 2000s, 2008, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Concert Doc, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Music, UK

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

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

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

Terri (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

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

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

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

Real Steel (2011)

Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, India, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Sports, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo, Evangeline Lilly, Anthony Mackie
screenplay by John Gatins
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw There’s really no excuse for Real Steel, a Frankenstein contraption made up of spare parts from middle-American fairytales like Field of Dreams and underdog sports intrigues starting with Rocky, I guess, and building all the way through to junk like The Rookie and any number of films just like it that appear with what seems like annual reliability. Set a few years from now, in a world where for some reason people have decided they love to watch giant robots fight each other in place of good ol’ primate bloodsport, it has going for it the most bucolic vision of the future since “The Jetsons”. Indeed, there are so many gorgeous shots of waving wheat and bilious white clouds that it’s fair to wonder if Ridley Scott directed it. Alas, Shawn Levy, the genius behind Night at the Museum, The Pink Panther, and Cheaper by the Dozen directed this cynical piece of bathetic crap and his sticky, syrup-coated paws are all over it, from the movie’s flat, unimaginative staging to its absolute inability to be non-didactic in its presentation. (The biggest surprise? That there isn’t a flatulent dog around for cheap reaction shots.) Already legendary for how quickly its trailers revealed it to be possibly the worst idea since Buck Henry pitched “The Graduate, Part 2” at the beginning of The Player, Real Steel–the condescension starts with the quasi-inspirational dual-meaning of its title–swiftly becomes legendary in its own right for somehow being exactly as bad as you thought it was going to be.

Rain Man (1988) – Blu-ray Disc

Rain Man (1988) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, Tom Cruise

****/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, Valeria Golino, Jerry Molen
screenplay by Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow
directed by Barry Levinson

by Alex Jackson From its opening shot of a Cadillac craned across the smoggy Los Angeles skyline as The Belle Stars‘ iconic cover of “Iko Iko” plays on the soundtrack, Barry Levinson’s Rain Man announces itself as one of the very best films of the 1980s. The ultimate high-concept movie, it has a fashionably icy Adrian Lynne/Michael Mann/Ridley Scott aesthetic that’s semi-parodied by way of an absurdist, non-sequitur twist. Pauline Kael called Rain Man “a piece of wet kitsch” while paradoxically impugning its “lifelessness.” In terms of content, it certainly sounds like sugary glurge, but as rendered in the emotionally-detached lexicon of ’80s advertising, all the irony, all the junkiness, has been bled out. The film equates Yuppie materialism with autism, and in a subtle, underhanded way, this humanizes the alien while undermining the film’s own pretension. Once we see this hip disengagement in terms of pathology, we’re no longer attracted and/or repulsed by it.

The Lion King (1994) [Platinum Edition] – DVD|[Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2011, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical

**/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
screenplay by Irene Mecchi and Jonathan Roberts and Linda Woolverton
directed by Roger Allers & Rob Minkoff

by Bill Chambers The day The Lion King came out, during the summer of Gump, I bought a ticket for Wyatt Earp instead, convinced that I would be more satisfied by its three hours than by The Lion King‘s hour and change. Nobody remembers this now, but back then, the trades were counting on the reunion of Silverado collaborators Lawrence Kasdan and Kevin Costner to deliver the sleeper hit of the summer; although back then everybody involved in the production tried to pawn off the film’s failure on the growing cult of Tombstone, the fact is that Wyatt Earp is, if not the most boring movie ever made, perhaps the second-most. Still, even when a friend rolled up his sleeve for me a few weeks later to reveal four fingertip-sized bruises he sustained from watching The Lion King with his girlfriend (she white-knuckled her way through the wildebeest stampede ’til his arm went to sleep), I remained unconvinced that Disney’s latest blockbuster cartoon, which had grossed over $200M by that point, was worth the price of a ticket, having been taken for a ride by the prestige surrounding the dreadful Beauty and the Beast.

“Odds” and Ends

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Canada, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, TIFF, TIFF 11
  • The first TIFF movie I saw this year, a Canadian teen-gambling thriller called The Odds (**/****, Canada First!), is unfortunately a tiny dot in the rearview now. What I remember of it is that writer-director Simon Davidson, shooting in ‘scope presumably to announce his transition to a bigger canvas (he’s a veteran of short films, all of which previously played at the TIFF), seemed to have a good eye but trouble maintaining momentum for the length of a feature. With its Psycho-esque shocker a half-hour into the film, in fact, The Odds comes to feel like a short with two more acts tacked on. And its distinctly “Degrassi”-esque vibe of kids playing dress-up affirms the wisdom of Rian Johnson’s Brick in stylizing its high-school setting to abstraction.

Moneyball (2011)

Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Sports, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright
screenplay by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, based on the book by Michael Lewis
directed by Bennett Miller

by Angelo Muredda Moneyball arrives after years in development hell with nearly as much baggage as the Oakland A’s. A Steven Soderbergh project scrapped at the eleventh hour of pre-production and inherited by a high-pedigree team composed of Capote director Bennett Miller and scribes Steven Zaillian (the lone holdover) and Aaron Sorkin, it’s as much a reinvention of the discarded film–apparently pitched as a data-saturated docudrama–as it is an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s best-selling non-fiction book of the same name. No matter: Soderbergh successfully redirected his energy into Contagion, a snappy procedural lobbed to the same stats fetishists who might’ve warmed to his Moneyball, while Miller has delivered an affecting and deceptively conventional baseball movie that works on its own terms. Oscar-bait it might be, but Moneyball is surprisingly fresh, especially in how it shifts focus from the unexpected winners that most sports stories fawn over to a few perpetual losers who live off the wistful fumes of second-place finishes.

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

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

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

TIFF ’11: Countdown (d. Huh Jong-ho)

Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, South Korea, Thriller, TIFF, TIFF 11

Speaking to my new friend George after a screening of the stylish but gratuitously long South Korean export Countdown, I said, “It was a good yarn, at least. It reminded me of the kind of thing Hollywood used to do and do well.” “Yes, you can just see Bogie in it,” he replied. Then, almost in unison, we both added: “Only the Bogart version would’ve been over in 90 minutes.” Tae (Jung Jae-young) is a debt collector who receives a terminal diagnosis of liver cancer after passing out in traffic. Since his best hope is a transplant, he puts his skills to use tracking down the recipients of his dead son’s organs: knowing their blood type will match his own, he hopes to guilt one of them into a reciprocal donation. Finally, he locates Cha (Secret Sunshine‘s luminous Jeon Do-youn, surely bound to be poached by the American studios any day now), the con woman who got his son’s heart, and she agrees to give up a piece of her liver if he’ll provide in exchange the whereabouts of a criminal kingpin on whom she seeks revenge. Underestimating her slipperiness, the increasingly weary Tae spends a frantic couple of days pursuing and protecting Cha in equal measure.