Caddyshack (1980) + Funny Farm (1988)/Spies Like Us (1985) [Comedy Double Feature] – Blu-ray Discs

July 18, 2010Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Espionage, Sports

CADDYSHACK
½*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight, Bill Murray
screenplay by Brian Doyle-Murray & Harold Ramis & Doug Kenney
directed by Harold Ramis

SPIES LIKE US
*/**** Image D+ Sound C+
starring Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Steve Forrest, Donna Dixon
screenplay by Dan Aykroyd and Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel
directed by John Landis

FUNNY FARM
**½/**** Image C+ Sound C+
starring Chevy Chase, Madolyn Smith, Joseph Maher, Jack Gilpin
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, based on the book by Jay Cronley
directed by George Roy Hill

by Walter Chaw Mean-spirited and essentially ugly, the inexplicably revered Caddyshack can be handily summarized by two moments with Chevy Chase’s Ty Webb–the first when he waggles his tongue lasciviously at a random woman walking by, the next when he says to town pump Lacey Underall (Cindy Morgan), “I’ve got an idea, let’s pretend we’re real human beings.” One identifies the general tenor of the piece as angry and cynical, the other as comedy dependant almost entirely–when it’s not angry and cynical–on arrogance and smugness. (The epitome of the latter might be Bill Murray’s mush-mouthed Carl the groundskeeper staring right at Harold Ramis’s bland camera in the midst of a torrential rainstorm.) Largely, proudly improvised by a gang of hedonistic assholes at the peak of their insufferability, it’s the fallout of “Saturday Night Live”‘s drug-fuelled, experimental-verging-on-hallucinogenic early years, which had felt like the last bastion of the counterculture.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) [Special Edition] + Deathdream (1972) – DVDs + Uncle Sam (1997) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

July 7, 2010Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Canada, Comedy, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, DVD, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Zombie

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury
screenplay by George Axelrod, based on the novel by Richard Condon
directed by John Frankenheimer

Dead of Night
***½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
starring John Marley, Lynn Carlin, Richard Backus, Henderson Forsythe
screenplay by Alan Ormsby
directed by Bob Clark

UNCLE SAM
**½/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
BD – Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Isaac Hayes, Bo Hopkins, Timothy Bottoms, Robert Forster
screenplay by Larry Cohen
directed by William Lustig

Mustown

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As the zeitgeist is one of those things we tend to discuss in the past tense, you have to wonder whether it's a vacuum or a barometer. In other words, the point at which culturemongers finally lunge at a craze is usually once it's begun shrieking its death rattle, and yet a post-mortem of said craze invariably divulges a complex tapestry of art and politics, the ascription of happenstance to which seems preposterous. Our own Walter Chaw brilliantly observes in recent omnibus reviews pairing Love Me If You Dare with Valentin and Dodgeball with Napoleon Dynamite that leitmotifs are emerging at the box office free of predetermination, and I myself got a faint chill when I became cognizant of having consecutively watched the upcoming DVDs of John Frankenheimer's 1962 The Manchurian Candidate, Bob Clark's 1972 Dead of Night (a.k.a. Deathdream), and William Lustig's 1997 Uncle Sam. The Manchurian Candidate is getting reissued because MGM wants to piggyback the P&A for this summer's star-studded remake, Dead of Night because it's a perennial cult fave, and Uncle Sam because Lustig owns the company; three separate objectives, then, for putting out three different pictures all concerning shell-shocked war veterans bringing the violence home with them. Considering the length of time it must have taken to prepare these beautifully mastered, supplement-rich discs, that they coincide with not only each other but also the cooling of patriotic fervour (coupled with the spontaneous theatrical release of Michael Moore's anti-Dubya Fahrenheit 9/11) is like getting the rare privilege to see the forest for the trees.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

June 30, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire

**/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by David Slade

Twilighteclipseby Walter Chaw The first and greatest surprise of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (hereafter Eclipse) is that it's not awful; it's actually almost good for its first forty-five minutes or so, until the burden of Stephenie Meyer's genuinely, legendarily poor source material catches up to it. Until such time, there's some interest blossoming despite itself in the love triangle between mopey Bella (Kristen Stewart), fruity Edward (Robert Pattinson), and swarthy Jacob (Taylor Lautner): a hint of racial discomfort, a soupçon of class struggle, a glimmer of insight given over to the difficulties of teen relationships at a moment in life when Nancy Drew plays like Richard Wagner. Never mind that of the three leads, only Pattinson delivers a (surprisingly, too) good performance–and then only fitfully; never mind that Meyer has taken a giant, steaming dump on centuries of folklore and tradition to construct thin cardboard monsters that serve as bad metaphors for Mormon libido (as told by Judy Blume's less talented soul sister); never mind that the picture's entire last two-thirds devolves into constant repetition of the will she/won't she theme punctuated by its stupid mythology. Really, the way that new director David Slade's flat-to-the-point-of-garish camera brings out the faintest suggestion of corruption beneath the pancake makeup and baggy eyes of the film's immortal underwear models–who are, literally, ancient beasts–lends the series the dread that was buried in the first two films under volumes of camp and dreary incompetence. Not to say that Eclipse doesn't ultimately end as the same old bullshit, but for the first time, if only briefly, the clouds part for a brief, tantalizing twinkle of what it was that all this could have been.

Golden Age Romance on DVD

June 28, 2010Posted in****/****, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Billy Wilder, Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

RomanceomnititleROMAN HOLIDAY (1953)
[CENTENNIAL COLLECTION]
***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert, Hartley Power
screenplay by Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton
directed by William Wyler

SABRINA (1954)
[CENTENNIAL COLLECTION]
**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, William Holden, Walter Hampden
screenplay by Billy Wilder, Samuel Taylor and Ernest Lehman, based on Taylor’s play
directed by Billy Wilder

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1957)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
½*/**** Image C Sound B
starring Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, Maurice Chevalier, John McGiver
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, based on a novel by Claude Anet
directed by Billy Wilder

NOW, VOYAGER (1942)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D
starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper
screenplay by Casey Robinson, based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty
directed by Irving Rapper

MOGAMBO (1953)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
*/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Clark Gable, Ava Gardiner, Grace Kelly, Donald Sinden
screenplay by John Lee Mahin, based on a play by Wilson Collison
directed by John Ford

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Natalie Wood, Pat Hingle, Audrey Christie, Warren Beatty
screenplay by William Inge
directed by Elia Kazan

Loveintheaftcap2

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s one of those seminal moments that movies provide the culture with now and again, like the swoop up a little rise to an impossibly fresh John Wayne in Stagecoach, or the intervention of a fortuitous steam vent in The Seven Year Itch, this introduction we have to Audrey Hepburn as she’s whirled around in a barber chair in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday to reveal the pixie-cut heard ’round the world. That she’s adorable is a given–the real issue is whether she’s an actress or just a bundle of inexplicable charisma, a ganglion of celluloid starlight that evaporates under the slightest critical scrutiny. I love Roman Holiday, but I vacillate between indifference and actual dislike of the rest of Hepburn’s films. I don’t find her winsome in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, am irritated by her in Charade, think she’s appallingly twee in Love in the Afternoon. She doesn’t hold her own against Sean Connery in Robin and Marian and gets blown off the screen by Albert Finney, Alan Arkin, and Rex Harrison in Two for the Road, Wait Until Dark, and My Fair Lady, respectively. If you ask me, Audrey isn’t an actress so much as someone you would like to have known and maybe had the opportunity to cuddle, which makes her mega-stardom in the Fifties and Sixties all the more testament to her ineffable appeal. Happening right when Method was rendering personalities like Hepburn déclassé, she was making a career of being terminally anachronistic. It’s Ozzie’s Harriet, sashaying while Rome burns. Instant nostalgia; even when she was introduced for the first time, it must have seemed like ages ago.

The White Ribbon (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

June 28, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Germany, Horror, Palme d'Or Winner

Whiteribboncap

Das weisse Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Christian Friedel, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bryant Frazer The origins of evil–an alluring subject for writers and filmmakers, perhaps even more so than for psychologists and historians, who are limited by the facts of any given case. They become psychological archeologists, looking for the broken artifacts of a damaged mind that indicate why this person or that chose to inflict great pain and suffering by picking up a knife, a gun, or the blunt force of an entire nation’s army. Artists who imagine or investigate evil deeds, on the other hand, have the refuge of the poet. They may root in the filth of amorality and sociopathy, seeking dark messages there, but what they eventually create is the product of humanism–an effort to understand and shed light on tragedies in motion, on the present-day injustices that can lead to future wickedness and despair.

Jonah Hex (2010)

June 17, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Superhero, Thriller, Western

*/****
starring Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Shannon
screenplay by Neveldine & Taylor
directed by Jimmy Hayward

Jonahhexby Walter Chaw Distilling a fairly popular Weird West comic series down to a tight little 80-minute ball that plays like another adaptation of the Max Payne videogame, ex-Pixar animator Jimmy Hayward’s Jonah Hex is a whole lotta boom-boom executed in a borrowed, curiously flat style that has one pining for the days when Sam Raimi was making stuff like Darkman and The Quick and the Dead–those two films, incidentally, the ones Jonah Hex most wants to be. The eponymous Jonah (Josh Brolin) is a disfigured Confederate hero gifted–through hatred, a near-death experience, and healing from mysterious Injuns–with the ability to withstand point-blank shotgun blasts, briefly reanimate the dearly departed, and suffer Megan Fox’s typecast performance as a really popular whore. Her Lilah keeps weapons all over creation, natch, because she might be an oft-visited saloon girl but she ain’t nobody’s bitch. Well, except Jonah’s, I guess. But Jonah is too busy trying to kill evil Col. Quentin Trumbull (John Malkovich) to make an honest woman out of her. Jonah Hex may not know much, but he knows he’s no fucking magician.

Easy Rider (1969) [40th Anniversary] – Blu-ray Disc

June 15, 2010Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Jack Nicholson, Road Movie

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Luke Askew
screenplay by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern
directed by Dennis Hopper

WATCH IN iTUNES

Mustownby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's not easy to mark the beginning of the Sixties as an idea. Me, personally, as it's the way I'm wired, I like to use as the starting gun the trilogy of dysfunctional pictures–Psycho, Eyes Without a Face, Peeping Tom–that literally inaugurate the decade, but I'd also accept that 1962's Cuban Missile Crisis was enough for many of the nearly-disaffected to become completely what-the-fuck disaffected. And if you go with that, then what happens at the end of 1963 with the assassination of JFK is that Zapruder places film as the end-all of Truth. A lot changed with those 26.6 seconds of film–or, should we say, a lot changed back, to a period where the newsreel, no matter how doctored or fabricated, was the primary mass means of information-gathering before television began to encroach on it. A lot of ink's been spilled about the extent to which movies in the mid-to-late-Fifties tried to outdo the boob-tube with grand Technicolor visions; comparatively little has been written about Zapruder's 486 colour frames, which stole the thunder of television's hold on vérité–remember, in 1960, Hitch wanted to shoot Psycho in a televisual style for its implicit realism–as elegantly as a shell fired from a mail-order Carcano. TV achieves a stalemate by broadcasting Vietnam during the dinner hour, yet it doesn't win outright until the '90s when it embraces shakycam and film unveils itself once and for all as a magician's medium: smoke, mirrors, Forrest telling LBJ he needs to piss, and the Titanic going down again to the tune of a tween tearjerker.

Invictus (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

June 8, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Sports

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon, Tony Kgoroge, Patrick Mofokeng
screenplay by Anthony Peckham, based on the book Playing the Enemy by John Carlin
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw During an awards season seemingly devoted to surveying the racial divide, Clint Eastwood's Invictus lands a glancing blow as a Reconciliation sports melodrama that avoids the hysterical outburst even as it fails to hit one out of the park. Of the two, I think I'd rather the former. Expecting a (more) self-important Hoosiers, I was pleasantly surprised by Eastwood's leisurely, cocksure, tempered-by-age stroll through the first days post-Apartheid as Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman, finally playing Abraham Lincoln) is tasked with the near-impossible job of suturing a nation coming out from under a long Plantation nightmare without his administration becoming exactly what the minority Afrikaner fears. It locates sports as one quick avenue to the heart of the lowest common denominator (just as the existence of Invictus locates film as another), and it fires dual salvos at its audience by first being a sports underdog uplift flick without much sports or uplift, then in not deigning to explain the fundamentals of rugby to its American audience, instead launching a quick jab at America's reluctance to engage the worlds' pastimes (rugby and soccer, notably). What it really does for the race conversation is allow Eastwood the opportunity to at last feature Freeman in a movie designed around him as opposed to having him–as he did in Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven–function as a comparative component against which the white protagonist is memorialized and measured. Better late than never.

Splice (2010)

June 3, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Drama, France, Horror, Mexico, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***/****
starring Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chanéac, David Hewlett
screenplay by Vincenzo Natali & Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor
directed by Vincenzo Natali

Spliceby Ian Pugh Vincenzo Natali's Splice unavoidably lives in the shadow of countless sci-fi/horror properties that came before it–stories that have already taught us, as Splice teaches us, that tragedies occur when Man dabbles in God's domain. But dismiss the film as cliché at your own peril. While it provides numerous shocks to the system, the traumas themselves take a backseat to the horror of their implications and, moreover, what those tragedies say about the risks and ambitions of daily life. Indeed, while the movie consciously seeks to fashion a cautionary tale out of the stock phrase "What's the worst that could happen?," its ultimate goal is to tell that tale as a domestic drama.

Shutter Island (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

June 1, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw The first thirty minutes of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island left me breathless with delight. The rack-focus through mess-hall implements; swaying along a ceiling as we peer beyond the door to the head, where our hero, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), is losing his lunch; the way a ferry blows through a fog bank like Travis Bickle’s cab through the steam escaping a New York sewer cap. When it snows, it snows up like in the dream sequences from Bringing Out the Dead (there’s even a moment when the smoke from Teddy’s cigarette retreats into the butt)–and when a shadowy figure named Laeddis (Elias Koteas) finally materializes in the midst of Teddy’s fugue, he bears a striking resemblance to Travis Bickle. (It’s not until later that we understand the full extent of this self-reference.) Shutter Island is among the director’s handsomest films, and moments of it suggest there’s a masterpiece here–as a WWII Holocaust drama, or a ghost story, or a period Red Menace piece, or a 1960s Manchurian Candidate manqué, or a 1940s Freud clinic, or a G-Man noir, or a straight procedural, or a modernist existential piece–if he wants it. But it’s less than the sum of its tantalizing parts, providing instead a hackneyed climax that proves just another votive lit in Dennis Lehane’s church of dead children.

Blackboard Jungle (1955) – DVD

May 17, 2010Posted in1950s, 2010, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD, Teen

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Glenn Ford, Anne Francis, Louis Calhern, Margaret Hayes
screenplay by Richard Brooks, based on the novel by Evan Hunter
directed by Richard Brooks

Blackboardjunglecapby Alex Jackson There are a few scenes in Richard Brooks’s Blackboard Jungle that hold up, legitimately, as a thoughtful and fruitfully provocative investigation of the “inspirational teacher” genre. And when the film isn’t working, it’s often valuable as a time capsule of the 1950s and can be appreciated in a detached, archaeological way. But there are also times when you just can’t help but condescend to it, and I’d hate for Blackboard Jungle to become a camp object. Blackboard Jungle may not be worthy of praise simply for dealing with issues of race and class, but the fact remains that some fifty years later, its subject matter continues to touch a raw nerve. By treating it ironically and laughing at it, we’re absolved of the responsibility to fully engage with the issues it raises.

Lost: The Complete Fourth Season (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

May 17, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
"The Beginning of the End," "Confirmed Dead," "The Economist," "Eggtown," "The Constant," "The Other Woman," "Ji Yeon," "Meet Kevin Johnson," "The Shape of Things to Come," "Something Nice Back Home," "Cabin Fever," "There's No Place Like Home: Part 1," "There's No Place Like Home: Part 2"

by Walter Chaw Four years into its run, "Lost" appears to have hit something of a stride–at least it does until it falls completely off the rails, maybe for good. Blame the most recent Writer's Strike, which happened in the middle of this truncated season, or better yet, blame the fact that the series can't seem to leave well enough alone. It has a chance to be transcendent, see, and resigns itself to being ordinary. The best episode of the run so far happens early in the season with episode 4.5, "The Constant." A clear homage to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, it replaces Billy Pilgrim with our Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), who becomes "unstuck" in time and struggles during the course of things to find a "constant" with which to anchor his consciousness in one fixed timeline. Ingeniously executed and manufacturing the first real suspense "Lost" has managed since possibly the first episode of the first season (or since the first hatch was opened), "The Constant" suggests that there are separate Oceanic Flight 815s, that reality is slippery, and that there might be a struggle somewhere, between some things, for control over a dominant reality. "The Constant" marks the moment I became a "Lost" fan. And then, in the very next episode, "The Other Woman," everything goes to shit: "Lost" scrambles to demystify all these philosophies in favour of a vast conspiracy masterminded by an evil billionaire who, apparently, has filled a fake plane with exhumed corpses and planted it in the ocean so as to prevent his daughter Penelope–named for Odysseus's wife, right?–from reuniting with a boy of whom he doesn't approve. The problem is mainly that after three-and-a-half years of this garbage, anything the creators could come up with in terms of an Answer would not be equal to the investment the show's loyal viewers have already made in it.

Robin Hood (2010)

May 14, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, William Hurt, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Brian Helgeland
directed by Ridley Scott

Robinhood2010by Walter Chaw Predictably, achingly, perfectly okay, Ridley Scott into his dotage has produced a string of absolutely unsurprising, overlong, uninspiring-if-occasionally-visually-striking films, of which Robin Hood is only the latest. An attempt to “reboot” the Robin Hood legend with a “prequel” that shows how a middle-aged Robin (Russell Crowe) meets his Merry Mystery, Alaska Men, woos freshly-widowed “maid” Marion (Cate Blanchett), sort of composes the “Declaration of Independence,” directly influences–it’s implied–the signing of the Magna Carta (in the completion of which the film’s real hero, William Marshal (William Hurt), was instrumental) not long after the events of the movie, and enters into a life of sylvan banditry at the prodding injustice of ineffectual King John (Oscar Isaac, doing his best Russell Brand). It also suggests that Marion is a Maid of Orléans figure who rides into battle alongside the menfolk to repulse an inexplicable French invasion shot in such a way as to suggest a Gallic D-Day landing (or an attack on Northern England by the New Orleans Saints)*–marking the second time Blanchett’s done this exact scene after the admittedly-worse Elizabeth: The Golden Age. All of which is portrayed in so exacting and expository a way in that inimitably stately Ridley Scott style that the picture’s bumfuddling 140-minute runtime feels like a couple of torturous days spent at a Renaissance Fair. Maybe it’s the complete lack of stakes that hamstrings the production–the surety that no compelling issues will be broached, despite all the posturing about Robin Hood being Thoreau over six centuries before Thoreau (or Thomas Jefferson five centuries before Jefferson) in a deeply stupid town-centre meeting that more closely resembles the Endor council in Return of the Jedi than it does the requisite stirring centrepiece monologue in this prestige epic lost without an awards season.

Edge of Darkness (2010) + When in Rome (2010)|Edge of Darkness – Blu-ray Disc

May 9, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

EDGE OF DARKNESS
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, Bojana Novakovic
screenplay by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell, based on the television series by Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by Martin Campbell

WHEN IN ROME
*/****
starring Kristen Bell, Josh Duhamel, Will Arnett, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by David Diamond & David Weissman
directed by Mark Steven Johnson

by Ian Pugh Allegedly a radical departure from the BBC miniseries upon which it's based, Martin Campbell's Edge of Darkness works because there's nothing typical about it. Boston PD detective Tom Craven (Mel Gibson) naturally blames himself when his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) is gunned down by a masked man with a shotgun, but his private inquiry into the matter reveals that Emma herself was the more likely target: it had something to do with her job at a nuclear R&D lab run by sadistic creepshow Jack Bennett (an almost-ridiculously slimy Danny Huston). The trick to Tom's subsequent trip down the rabbit hole is that he never stops blaming himself, even once his quest is validated by the trail of bodies left by both him and the mysterious conspirators pulling the strings. This is Gibson's first starring role in eight years following a lengthy trek through Crazytown, and he might be the only actor who could have pulled it off so flawlessly–simply because there's always been something slightly terrified about his specific brand of martyrdom, something that points to it all being painfully unnecessary.

The Yakuza (1975) – DVD

May 4, 2010Posted in1970s, 2010, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Crime, Drama, DVD, Japan, Romance, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras C
starring Robert Mitchum, Takakura Ken, Okada Eiji, Brian Keith
screenplay by Paul Schrader and Robert Towne
directed by Sydney Pollack

Yakuzacap

by Jefferson Robbins We'll never know what might have been had Paul and Leonard Schrader's original screenplay for The Yakuza gone unmolested by '70s script king Robert Towne, or had Martin Scorsese or Brian De Palma made good on threats to direct. Instead, the obvious gets overlaid on top of the mysterious, and at least one partner in this marriage of the American and Japanese gangster genres winds up shorted. Producer-director Sydney Pollack makes the mistake his best peers in the decade's American cinema dodged: he mistrusts the audience, believing we can't absorb backstory through performance and suggestion.

K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

May 3, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller, UK, War

*½/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson, Sam Spruell, Peter Stebbins
screenplay by Christopher Kyle
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw The film opens with a false alarm because drills are how all cookie-cutter closed-vehicle thrillers begin. Screenwriters free of the limiting bonds of imagination call it "foreshadowing"; critics forced to watch at least one film that begins this way per year prefer "tedious." K-19: The Widowmaker (hereafter K-19) has a tedious narrative married to vein-swelling performances presented in that frank gracelessness indicative of director Kathryn Bigelow's sledgehammer-chic since long about Point Break, brought together under the steady hand of a legendary editor (Walter Murch) that only just guides this behemoth of conflicting ideas and wet (and drunken) Russian submariners into the dry dock of coherence.

The Karate Kid Collection – DVD|The Karate Kid I & II [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

May 3, 2010Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Family, Martial Arts, Romance, Sports

THE KARATE KID (1984)
***½/****
DVD – Image C+ Sound C+ Extras A
BD – Image A- Sound B+ Extras A
starring Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, Elisabeth Shue, Martin Kove
screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen
directed by John G. Avildsen

THE KARATE KID PART II (1986)
**/****
DVD – Image B- Sound C+ Extras D
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras D
starring Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, Yuji Okumoto, Tamlyn Tomita
screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen
directed by John G. Avildsen

THE KARATE KID PART III (1989)
*/**** Image C Sound C+
starring Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, Robyn Lively, Thomas Ian Griffith
screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen
directed by John G. Avildsen

THE NEXT KARATE KID (1994)
½*/**** Image B+ Sound C+
starring Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, Hilary Swank, Michael Ironside, Constance Towers
screenplay by Mark Lee
directed by Christopher Cain

by Walter Chaw Movies from the magic hour of my moviegoing experience cover that brief period of time between my being able to go to the cinema unattended (dropped at the theatre with a quarter to call the folks afterwards) and my being able to decide that there are actually films I'd rather not see for any price. You never love movies as much or in the same way as you do during this tiny porthole, and when my family first got a VCR (we were the last ones on the block), I pirated Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, and The Karate Kid onto one tape that I watched until you could see through the ribbon. Each seminal films of the fabulist '80s in their own way, all three spawned multiple sequels–though, at least until Indiana Jones struggles back to the screen with a walker and oxygen tank, The Karate Kid holds the record with four instalments in total. (And one that launched the career of a two-time Oscar winner, to boot.) Credit a lot of things for that: Bill Conti's classic score; John G. Avildsen's intuitive direction; and Pat Morita's and Ralph Macchio's superlative performances. But credit most of all the enduring power of a familiar tale told with conviction and skill. Take the intimidating volume of formulaic exercises that fall by the wayside (including The Karate Kid's own sequels) as testament to the difficulty of capturing a tiger by its tail.

The Losers (2010) + The Back-up Plan (2010)

April 22, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

THE LOSERS
*½/****
starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoë Saldana, Chris Evans, Jason Patric
screenplay by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt, based on the comic book series by Andy Diggle and Jock
directed by Sylvain White

THE BACK-UP PLAN
½*/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Alex O’Loughlin, Eric Christian Olsen, Linda Lavin
screenplay by Kate Angelo
directed by Alan Poul

by Ian Pugh We’ve got a long summer ahead of us, full of remakes and spoofs straight out of the ’80s, and The Losers celebrates its imminent arrival by taking a dump on the action flicks of the era. Blinkered hostility is as much a mood-killer as uncritical nostalgia, and The Losers never misses an opportunity to remind you that its characters have one-note personalities defined by terse nicknames. The film begins, as it must, in the Bolivian jungle, where the titular team of U.S. soldiers (led by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is forced to go underground after an errant missile–intended for them–kills twenty-five Bolivian children they’d just saved from an evil drug lord. At first glance, that opening raid points to a toned-down Predator reference, but it’s really just a paint-by-numbers scenario meant to demonstrate how pretty much everything from that decade is stilted, corny, and hopelessly dated. So it goes for the rest of the film–how else to explain a brief chase sequence set to “Don’t Stop Believin'”? It’s not merely junk; it’s self-conscious, wilfully misinterpretive junk.

An Education (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

April 21, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Carey Mulligan
screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber
directed by Lone Scherfig

by Walter Chaw Director Lone Scherfig is perhaps notoriously the first woman to direct a Dogme95 picture (Italian for Beginners) and preserves her effortlessness with actors and light romantic imbroglios with An Education. Yet it shows little maturation, particularly after her scabrous, delicately balanced, Hal Ashby-esque Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, instead regressing into the ghetto of only-adequate BBC coming-of-age story. If An Education is remembered at all, it will be for raising the profile of the immensely appealing Carey Mulligan. She's Jenny, a sharp, sensitive sixteen-year-old schoolgirl with a promising future in letters and eyes on Oxford until she's distracted by the allure of a bohemian lifestyle with pretentious friends, who pretend at the civilization she would rightfully earn in time. Leader of said bohemians is creepy/suave David (Peter Sarsgaard), whose courtship of Jenny is a laudable contrast to Twilight in showing a worldly older man using all the benefits of his experience to impress, and eventually deflower, an easily-exploited high-schooler with stars in her eyes.

The Age of Unintended Consequences: FFC Interviews David Russo

April 20, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Interviews, Theatrical

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THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF LITTLE DIZZLE
*** (out of four)
starring Marshall Allman, Vince Vieluf, Natasha Lyonne, Tygh Runyan
written and directed by David Russo
The scion of a constipated generation, Seattle tech worker Dory (Marshall Allman) is sampling religions like grab-bag candy when a sealed bottle floats past during his lunch-hour Bible study. The message within could be either from God or from the famously polluted Puget Sound itself, but it sets Dory on a career-destroying spiral that ends with a new job on an office cleaning crew, scrubbing johns alongside renegade "artist" OC (Vince Vieluf). One of their clients is product lab Corsica Research, where a young exec (Natasha Lyonne, long missed but giving the least authentic performance here) decides the trash-scavenging janitors are perfect test subjects for an awful but addictive new cookie. The active ingredient impregnates men first with an altered consciousness (whole concepts break loose from language and float free in the air, in electrically beautiful F/X sequences), and finally with what can only be described as an incandescent blue lungfish. But it's not so much an Alien-esque affliction as an epiphany, with each man finding peace and even enlightenment in this scatological process of "childbirth." No longer adrift, they're vessels for a new life–the only kind that can survive, it's implied, in a world where Zoloft flows from the kitchen tap and breakfast just isn't a meal without Yellow Dye No. 5. Allman and Vieluf play perfectly off each other under Seattle writer-director David Russo, whose jitter-editing and hallucination segments recall Darren Aronofsky and whose screenplay references Philip K. Dick. Russo's deployment of soundtrack music skillfully twists the knife where it counts–witness the lo-fi but enchanting version of the Carpenters' "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" (by The Langley Schools Music Project, fascinating in itself) that closes the film, as Dory deposits a new message in the water and contemplates, as all new fathers must, a future for his children.–JR

April 21, 2010|The films of David Russo have a distinctly handmade feel, and often the hand becomes visible. A largely self-taught filmmaker and animator, he makes no pretense that he's not manipulating the action. When he sets his models into neon time-lapse against backdrops that strobe from sky to sea to blackness, he almost always winds up in the shot. In Russo's short creations and in his first feature film, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, bespoke art objects–or even just words–make long, looping journeys in search of some answer. But like most philosophical quests, the journey is more important than its endpoint.

While he developed his craft Russo carried on an eleven-year career as a janitor, a vocation that sharpened his sense of the things society values: what we keep, what we cast away, what we flush. His short art films Populi (2002) and Pan With Us (2003) (viewable here, along with most of the artist's other work) gave him his first wider exposure, competing at the Sundance Film Festival in consecutive years. More recently, his hand-wrought animation lent texture to the video for Thom Yorke's "Harrowdown Hill" (2006).

Dizzle's path from script to screen was fraught with financing issues and a slender production window. It wasn't bought for distribution after its Sundance debut in early 2009, and by the time it reached Russo's hometown Seattle International Film Festival the same year, its hopes for release were no better. Finally, Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film picked up Dizzle for a brief 2010 New York theatrical engagement and a video-on-demand run that starts today. Russo's renegade janitors, chemically enlightened and midwifing the birth of a new species, might manage to swim free of the sewers after all.