The Book of Eli (2010)

January 15, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, Michael Gambon
screenplay by Gary Whitta
directed by The Hughes Brothers

by Ian Pugh Let’s start things off by lifting the veil of mystery surrounding the titular book and thus reveal the transparent secret upon which the film hangs its interminable first act. It’s the freakin’ Bible, all right? You’re going to realize it from the very moment the all-important book is introduced, but you’re expected to play along because The Book of Eli is deep, and everything about this film–including its simpering attempt to transcend genre–labours to play up that depth. It isn’t exciting, it isn’t transcendent, and it sure as hell ain’t deep. This little sucker is meant as a western, its post-apocalyptic setting serving as mere window dressing for dialogue about The Time Before and The Flash and The War and how humanity’s lust for excess got them into that mess. (George Miller was able to squeeze more eloquence from the idea by throwing a bunch of big rigs into a squabble over gasoline; he reserved all that pithy dialogue for his feral children.) Worse than that, however, is that the plot has been cobbled together from practically every western made prior to Unforgiven (it’s closest to Eastwood’s own cliché-ridden, quasi-spiritual Pale Rider, if you’re starved for a direct analogy), with knowledge and religion standing in for the encroaching railroad. If that doesn’t sound like the most bountiful wellspring of ideas, well, the script would appear to agree with you. “It’s not just a book, it’s a weapon,” the diabolical Carnegie (Gary Oldman) growls upon recognizing his long-sought-after prize. Alas, The Book of Eli spends the rest of its two hours trying to find new ways to reiterate this–and the more it repeats itself, the farther it strays from that point.

Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

January 14, 2010Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Music, Romance, Teen

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Miley Cyrus, Emily Osment, Jason Earles, Billy Ray Cyrus
screenplay by Dan Berendsen
directed by Peter Chelsom

by Bill Chambers Peter Chelsom may have sold his soul when he joined the ranks of Lasse Hallstrom and John Madden to become a house director for Miramax, but going to work at Disney–on a feature-film vehicle for one of the company’s biggest brands, no less–is a mercenary move, pure and simple. So it’s surprising, considering he probably could’ve treated the job as a paid vacation without incurring the wrath of “Hannah Montana” fans (who’ve been weaned on a particularly low-rent sitcom), to say nothing of the suits in charge (Disney favours foremen to filmmakers, after all), that Chelsom seems legitimately inspired by the material more often than not. The ‘Hannah Montana’ concept itself needs only gentle pushes to yield something resembling a story, but Chelsom doesn’t exactly coast on it; anyone who’s involuntarily endured the collected works of Kenny Ortega or Andy Fickman will notice a more idiosyncratic hand at the helm almost immediately. While I can’t say I’ve ever thought much of Chelsom’s films (they’re a bit twinkly for my tastes), he appears to have found his niche. As a work of Hollywood imperialism goes, it’s certainly preferable to his remake of Shall We Dance?.

Blue Valentine (2010); All Good Things (2010); Rabbit Hole (2010)

January 7, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

BLUE VALENTINE
***/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, John Doman, Faith Wladyka
screenplay by Derek Cianfrance, Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne
directed by Derek Cianfrance

ALL GOOD THINGS
*/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst, Frank Langella, Philip Baker Hall
screenplay by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling
directed by Andrew Jarecki

RABBIT HOLE
*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, Sandra Oh
screenplay by David Lindsay Abaire, based on his play
directed by John Cameron Mitchell

by Walter Chaw In the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf end-of-year awards-bait sweepstakes, the ingredients for prestige seem pretty clear: one part Ryan Gosling (or Ryan Gosling substitute), one part beautiful starlet going the Full Monty (it’s good to be Gosling), and one part sad arguing. Mix well and reap a bounty of critics raving about career performances of intensity and courage (translation: lots of crying, lots of naked if girl), introduce bored-but-not-admitting-it audiences to indie-rock darlings like Grizzly Bear, and present the awards-season cinephiles with rosters of once and future Sundance savants. Films like Blue Valentine, All Good Things, and Rabbit Hole generally impress festival audiences and people who can’t afford to go to festivals but wish they could–there’s a certain hunger for movies screened in rarefied air that proffer misery and Sandra Oh for the arthouse schadenfreude freakshow. A long time in the company of people we’re glad we don’t know, call it reality television for assholes who don’t admit they watch reality television. For my money, the gold standards for such remain Eye of God and Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist.

The Lovely Bones (2009) + The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009)

December 25, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, Fantasy, France, Mystery, New Zealand, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE LOVELY BONES
½*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by Alice Sebold
directed by Peter Jackson

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS
½*/****
starring Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Verne Troyer, Tom Waits
screenplay by Terry Gilliam & Charles McKeown
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Walter Chaw It’s all a little too Puff, the Magic Dragon, isn’t it. The Lovely Bones finds Peter Jackson regressing into his worst instincts and a newfound squeamishness in a film about, ick, a fourteen-year-old girl’s rape and murder, leaving the most unsavoury details of Alice Sebold’s revered source novel to the golden-lit imagination. (Give this to Precious: it’s exploitation with the decency to titillate.) This isn’t to say the book is worth much of a shit, but to say that it at least has the courage to talk about a rape and a murder where the film only has the mustard to romanticize loss and suggest that 1973 was so long ago the freak next door didn’t raise any flags. It’s also to say that what began its existence as a study of the bonds that hold a family together through the caprice of living has been reduced in its film adaptation to a murder mystery without a mystery, and a supernatural thriller that at every turn reminds of how much better Jackson’s The Frighteners is in dealing with almost the exact same set of themes.

The Sopranos: The Complete First Season (1999) – Blu-ray Disc

December 23, 2009Posted in1990s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Gangster, Television

Image B- Sound A- Extras B-
“Pilot,” “46 Long,” “Denial, Anger, Acceptance,” “Meadowlands,” “College,” “Pax Soprana,” “Down Neck,” “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti,” “Boca,” “A Hit Is a Hit,” “Nobody Knows Anything,” “Isabella,” “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano”

by Bryant Frazer By the end of its run in 2007, HBO’s mob drama “The Sopranos” had become a cultural institution. Critics essayed strenuously on the series’ thematic concerns, genuflecting and kissing the ring of Don David Chase, the creator and showrunner whose fingerprints are all over every scene of every episode. The show’s run started in the days before DVRs splintered the television audience temporally, so viewers cleared their Sunday night schedules to take in “The Sopranos” even as they broke off into factions.

The Gary Cooper Collection: Along Came Jones; Man of the West; The Pride of the Yankees; The Westerner – DVD

December 16, 2009Posted in****/****, 1940s, 1950s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports, Western

ALONG CAME JONES (1945)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound C+
starring Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, William Demarest, Dan Duryea
screenplay by Nunnally Johnson
directed by Stuart Heisler

MAN OF THE WEST (1958)
****/**** Image A- Sound B-
starring Gary Cooper, Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur O'Connell
screenplay by Reginald Rose
directed by Anthony Mann

THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES (1942)
**/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras C
starring Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Walter Brennan, Dan Duryea
screenplay by Jo Swerling and Herman J. Mankiewicz
directed by Sam Wood

THE WESTERNER (1940)
**½/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Doris Davenport, Fred Stone
screenplay by Jo Swerling and Niven Busch
directed by William Wyler

by Jefferson Robbins I thought Gary Cooper was broader. The way he carried Hollywood on his shoulders from the silents through the talkies to the threshold of the New Wave, you'd expect him to be broader. Instead, he was the definition of lanky. Where his centre of gravity lay was in his Rushmore of a face: in close-up, he's an impossible granite monument, like that ever-unfinished Crazy Horse memorial in South Dakota; in full shot, in his prime years, he's a broomstick supporting a boulder.

Brothers (2009) + Everybody’s Fine (2009)

December 9, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, Road Movie, Robert De Niro, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, War

BROTHERS
***/****
starring Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Mare Winningham
screenplay by David Benioff, based on the motion picture Brødre by Susanne Bier
directed by Jim Sheridan

EVERYBODY'S FINE
*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell
screenplay by Kirk Jones, based on an earlier screenplay by Massimo De Rita & Tonio Guerra & Giuseppe Tornatore
directed by Kirk Jones

by Ian Pugh If you're feeling charitable towards Susanne Bier's Brødre, you'll probably consider Jim Sheridan's Brothers an extraordinarily faithful remake–one that follows the original recipe so closely it could be considered a step-by-step recreation. But a quick survey of what screenwriter David Benioff excised and expanded reveals that he wasn't merely a glorified script doctor, having squeezed some real pathos from a tactless source. It's still the story of a loving father, Sam (Tobey Maguire), who is forced to perform unspeakable acts as a POW in Afghanistan. Because Sam's presumed dead, his ex-con brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal, finding the perfect balance between guilt and innocence) straightens out his life and grows ever closer to Sam's wife (Natalie Portman) and children. Sam's sudden reappearance in their lives is further complicated by the onset of the soldier's post-traumatic stress, but gone are the heavy-handed lines about the nature of good, evil, and death from Bier's film. In their place, moments of shaky acceptance as new members are integrated into a family–followed by stares of betrayal as loved ones become interlopers in their own home.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947) – DVD

December 8, 2009Posted in1940s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Christmas, Drama, DVD, Family

***/**** Image F (colorized)/B+ (b&w) Sound B Extras C
starring Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn, Gene Lockhart
screenplay by George Seaton, based on the story by Valentine Davies
directed by George Seaton

by Alex Jackson George Seaton's Miracle on 34th Street isn't my Christmas movie of choice. My most potent movie memory of Christmas is actually watching the Star Wars trilogy when it was broadcast on the USA network however many years ago. Accordingly, I make it a point of marking the holiday by watching some kind of Star Wars-like "deep reality" science-fiction or fantasy film, such as The Lord of the Rings, or Blade Runner. A couple years back, I watched The Passion of the Christ. But I digress. Of all the major Christmas movie cults–including those surrounding A Christmas Story, It's a Wonderful Life, Elf, and 1951's A Christmas Carol–the Miracle on 34th Street cult is the one with which I'd most want to spend the holidays. The film manages to be irreverent without becoming sacrilegious and sentimental without becoming saccharine. It's a pretty silly film, but I guess you could say that it's serious about being silly. It values silliness for its restorative, therapeutic quality.

Falling Down (1993) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

December 8, 2009Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, France, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras C-
starring Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey, Tuesday Weld
screenplay by Ebbe Roe Smith
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw Atrociously written by actor Ebbe Roe Smith and atrociously directed (it goes without saying) by Joel Schumacher, it's also got a really terrible old-person performance by Robert Duvall, who would court Oscar with this exact hand-patting, repeating himself, huffy-giggly shtick at the end of the '90s with The Apostle. The whole thing is dreadful, rife with an unbearable self-satisfied rattle of social outrage that it's entirely unwilling to decipher to any useful end. Falling Down is a barely-literate rant, delivered at the top of the proverbial lungs, that suggests not-shockingly that L.A. is the epicentre of immigrant tension, gang violence, racial warfare, and class resentments. It postulates at the centre of this ever-swirling maelstrom crew-cut cipher Bill, known mainly by his vanity plate "D-FENS," who cracks one day in the middle of a Fellini homage and decides to abandon his car to the fates and walk to the house of his ex-wife (Barbara Hershey) and daughter. They've got a restraining order against him, of course, because he's a nutball. And because we're talking social satire here, Bill's been laid off for a month without telling anyone and, man, this recession sure is taking its toll, isn't it? Over the course of his Swiftian travels, Bill encounters a Korean grocer charging too much at his mini-mart; Hispanic gang-bangers who try to kill him in a drive-by; a white supremacist NRA nut (Frederic Forrest, who, like Duvall, used to be better than this) running an army surplus store; and a little black kid who knows how to use a bazooka.

The Young Victoria (2009) + Antichrist (2009)

December 4, 2009Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Horror, Italy, Poland, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE YOUNG VICTORIA
**/****
starring Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend, Paul Bettany, Miranda Richardson
screenplay by Julian Fellowes
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

ANTICHRIST
****/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg
written and directed by Lars von Trier

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As the beginning of an emotional history for Queen Victoria, Jean-Marc Vallée's The Young Victoria makes for an interesting bookend to John Madden's Mrs. Brown. A lavish, romantic depiction of the monarch's courtship with future husband Prince Albert (Rupert Friend), it's the very definition of a quotidian costume drama, skirting over the major issues of the early years of Victoria's reign to speak in broader terms about her idealism, the problems presented to her by her youth, and the manipulation of her affections by courtly politics. It's something like the older sister to Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette: less hip, but still in love with its naivety, its evergreen youth. It says something to me that in 2009, there's a film about Queen Victoria that's less interested in the stuffiness for which the Monarch is probably most popularly known than in her liberalism, her progressive attitude towards the humanism inspired by first the Colonies, then the French Revolution, then Britain's own Reform Act, enacted just five years before her coronation. An early film churned up in the wake of the optimism engendered by an Obama presidency? It's tempting to read it as such, not simply because you do hope this administration is better than the last, but also because, as the decade of the aughts draws a curtain on nine years of increasing outer and inner dark, there's at least the faint hope for some cloudbusting in the cinema, too.

The Blind Side (2009)

December 2, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron, Kathy Bates
screenplay by John Lee Hancock, based on the book by Michael Lewis
directed by John Lee Hancock

Blindsideby Walter Chaw Just in time for Christmas, professional schmaltz peddler John Lee Hancock updates Richard Pryor's The Toy by giving another privileged white brat a black man he can fuck with, call his victories his own, and keep in the guest room. This Michael Oher–as played sub-vocally by gentle, Lenny-ian giant Quinton Aaron–is not only the Super Duper Magic Negro who heals a household of rich shitkickers ("Shoot! We done gots a Black Man living with us 'fore we ever even MET a Democrat! Hoot!"–forgetting that wealthy southern landowners have a long tradition of keeping black people on their grounds without commensurately progressive attitudes), but is the passive, mute object around which every single person who likes The Blind Side convinces themselves they aren't racist for the liking of it. If this movie doesn't piss you off, if it doesn't make you nauseated with its dangerous smugness, you're part of the problem.

Terminator: Salvation (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 29, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Germany, Italy, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Bryce Dallas Howard, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris
directed by McG

by Walter Chaw The movie pretends that it's about discovering that which separates humans from machines–an idea of "functional equivalence," if you will, that Duncan Jones does a much better job with in his zero-budget Moon than McG does with in his small-country-GDP-budget Terminator Salvation. But what it's really about is blowing shit up real good for two hours. A tanker blows, a gas station blows, a field of satellite towers blows, a hole blows, and, accordingly, the movie blows. The real secret for success that the human freedom fighters of 2018, led by saviour guy John Connor (Christian Bale), should search for is the one that allows the evil Skynet robots to distinguish manmade fires in the desert that it should examine from those it should leave alone. What they discover instead is a "kill code" they can play on their futuristic boom boxes that "turns off" the machines hunting the people remaining after a nuclear holocaust has left the planet completely habitable for the hundreds of huddled masses tuning their transistor radios to fireside chats with Connor. (But not the types of fires the robots are interested in–see, the robots are only drawn to fires that humans set as ambush traps (and Guns N' Roses (you wouldn't understand)).)

The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans (2009); Planet 51 (2009); Me and Orson Welles (2009)

November 26, 2009Posted in****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Richard Linklater, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, Family, Nicolas Cage, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

THE BAD LIEUTENANT – PORT OF CALL: NEW ORLEANS
****/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner
screenplay by William Finkelstein, based on the film by Abel Ferrara
directed by Werner Herzog

PLANET 51
*/****
screenplay by Joe Stillman
directed by Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad & Marcos Martinez

ME AND ORSON WELLES
**/****
starring Claire Danes, Zac Efron, Christian McKay, Zoë Kazan
screenplay by Holly Gent Palmo & Vincent Palmo, based on the book by Robert Kaplow
directed by Richard Linklater

by Ian Pugh Playing against his sadistic instincts, police sergeant Terrence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) saves a man from drowning in a flooded prison during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, earning him not only a promotion to lieutenant but also a debilitating spinal injury. A subsequent addiction to prescription painkillers inevitably leads McDonagh to harder drugs and casual abuses of his newfound power as he attempts to solve the murder of a Senegalese drug dealer and his family. Trading Abel Ferrara’s sulphuric New York for a no-less-hellish Louisiana noir, Werner Herzog’s in-name-only remake of Bad Lieutenant is a work of delirious madness. That should come as no surprise from the man who’s spent the last forty years cataloguing human obsession, but I don’t think I’d ever really understood the method behind it until The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans (hereafter Bad Lieutenant 2). Madness is about possibility, and what better complement to that philosophy than Nicolas Cage, an actor who–at his best, like Herzog–apparently regards the conventions and boundaries of his craft as simple suggestions that must be defied? A quick look at what they’re capable of accomplishing together and you’re a little surprised they haven’t teamed up before. As McDonagh, Cage projects the dangerous unpredictability of Kinski* and the sympathetic brutality of Bruno S.: you don’t fear him, exactly, but you’re afraid of what he might become; you don’t feel sorry for him, but you lament what he could have been. (“I’ll kill ‘im,” he says at one point, the frightening indifference in his voice leaving uncertain if–or how–he plans to act on that idle threat.) Halfway through the film, after the stakes in play are thoroughly established, Cage/McDonagh suddenly adopts a muted, cotton-mouthed accent. Why?

Lie to Me: Season One (2009) – DVD

November 24, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image A Sound A- Extras C-
"Pilot," "Moral Waiver," "A Perfect Score," "Love Always," "Unchained," "Do No Harm," "The Best Policy," "Depraved Heart," "Life is Priceless," "The Better Half," "Undercover," "Blinded," "Sacrifice"

by Jefferson Robbins When did we collectively decide we want to be rescued by assholes? There's a definite arc to the modern police-procedural hero, be it the off-putting but tolerable Gil Grissom of the original "CSI", deep-sea humanoid Horatio Caine of "CSI: Miami", or the despicable Dr. Gregory House. (Yes, "House M.D." is a procedural–its perps just happen to be microbes, household cleansers, and anything else that qualifies as not-lupus.) These prodigies trend towards purer and purer strains of antisocial dickishness, and their techniques of inquiry grow ever more demeaning and emotionally brutal. They use their powers of detection to heal society but in the process get to sneer at its mores.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

November 20, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, Vampire, Werewolf, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Chris Weitz

Newmoonby Walter Chaw Let's play a Mad Libs game with Chris Weitz's appalling The Twilight Saga: New Moon (hereafter New Moon) and, by so doing, avoid talking about how a new moon is actually the absence of a moon in the sky, or how moon cycles remind me of menstruation, which would be a terrible thing to happen to heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) around her boyfriend Ed (Robert Pattinson). Let's replace every time they say "do it"–and by that they mean "bite me and make me a member of the walking undead"–with "fuck" and see if this whole Twilight atrocity still appears the benign thing for your daughters to gobble up whole. When Bella implores Ed to fuck her after she graduates from high school, for instance, and Ed says that he won't fuck her until she turns twenty-one and they can get married…well, listen, this is a fairytale without any teeth, meaning it's a really, really dangerous fairytale. More, it's illiterate, invasive, moronic proselytizing from some Mormon housewife's blinkered belief system. Unconvinced? Consider that it's stated early on in this instalment of the saga that the reason Ed doesn't want to turn Bella into a vampire–oops, I mean, fuck her–is that he's afraid he'll damn her soul to eternal hellfire.

Up (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 19, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Pixar

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras N/A
screenplay by Bob Peterson
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw There's still something breathless about Up, but I wonder if the Pixar formula isn't starting to show its seams now in its second decade of producing masterpieces–if there's a lack of freshness here in its familiarly exhilarated, cozily excited spaces. None of that fatigue is in evidence in the film's miraculous, wordless prologue, however: destined to compete with the opening-credits sequence of Watchmen as the single best stretch in any film this year, it establishes character, motivation, story of place, and sense of time without leaving a dry eye in the house. Shame the picture also peaks in these first ten minutes. It reminds of the wordless bit describing Jessie's abandonment in Toy Story 2, or the entire first half of WALL·E, and it suggests that Pixar is unparalleled in exploiting the possibilities for visual storytelling in its cavernous digital medium. The comparison of WALL·E to Chaplin is on point: When Pixar trusts the expressiveness of its mainframe and the beautiful, liquid clarity of its animation techniques, I don't know that there's ever been a better "silent" filmmaking collective. In their roster, it's arguable that they've only really faltered twice: once with the tedious Seven Samurai redux A Bug's Life, and again with the noxious redneck-baiting Cars. And while Up is nowhere near that bottom, it finds itself somewhere in the middle thanks to the peculiar ceiling to its invention (an entire Lost World and all you got is a giant bird and a talking dog?) and sentimentality that edges from sweet to mawkish. There are one too many cutaways to a dead wife's portrait and one too many winsome sighs as a plan made in childhood looms tantalizingly near.

The Prisoner: The Complete Series (1967-1968) – Blu-ray Disc

November 17, 2009Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Prison, Sci-Fi, Television, UK

Image A Sound A- Extras B
"Arrival," "The Chimes of Big Ben," "A, B, and C," "Free for All," "The Schizoid Man," "The General," "Many Happy Returns," "Dance of the Dead," "Checkmate," "Hammer into Anvil," "It's Your Funeral," "A Change of Mind," "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling," "Living in Harmony," "The Girl Who Was Death," "Once Upon a Time," "Fall Out"

by Walter Chaw The closest television came to true surrealism until the inception of "Twin Peaks", Patrick McGoohan's remarkable, landmark brainchild "The Prisoner" is the headwaters for a dizzying array of modern genre confections. It's audacious in its ironclad refusal to provide the happy ending; in its determination to bugger expectation with every complex set-up and sadistic resolution, the show effectively honours the surrealist manifesto of defeating classification. The fact of it is the function of it–the delight of it being that the series functions as a tonal sequel to Antonioni's Blowup, using the disappearance of that film's photog protag as the launching point for its hero's imprisonment in his Welsh oubliette. Colourfully, quintessentially mod, it even looks the part, after all, acting in 1967 as prescient post-modern (po-Mod?) commentary on the elasticity of this genre model (Bond films in particular, the lead in said franchise McGoohan was offered, er, once upon a time) as allegory for the plastic-fantastic of a progressively absurd world. In its setting of a small town, isolated and beset by what seems a common psychosis, find a connection to Robin Hardy and Anthony Schaffer's claustrophobic The Wicker Man (1973), John Frankenheimer's similar-feeling Seconds (1966), and, yes, Godard's structuralist textbook Alphaville. Of all the ways to approach "The Prisoner", in fact, the most fulsome–if also potentially the most obscure–is that, like Alphaville, it establishes itself as a structuralist (as in Claude Levi-Strauss) exercise while predicting through its execution the post-structuralism/deconstructionism (and eventually surrealism) of, say, a Jacques Derrida.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) + The Road (2009)

November 13, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

FANTASTIC MR. FOX
**/****
animated; screenplay by Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Roald Dahl
directed by Wes Anderson

THE ROAD
*½/****
starring Viggo Mortensen, Guy Pearce, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron
screenplay by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
directed by John Hillcoat

by Walter Chaw There's nothing much going on in Wes Anderson's stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox–which is a terrible shock, because there's generally so much going on in Anderson's and Dahl's respective canons. With Anderson's every attempt to infuse this piffle with his brand of Salinger-esque autumnal, familial melancholy registering as ever-so-slightly desperate, it strikes particularly pale in such close proximity to Spike Jonze's magnificent Where the Wild Things Are. Missing is the vein of emotionality that runs rich in Anderson's best films, the idiosyncrasies of his misfit family groups somehow rendered ordinary transplanted into foxes and opossums. I wonder if it isn't something to do with the idea that "cute" animation as a genre and not a medium has "quirk" as its bread and butter. More to the point, it probably has something to do with the fact that for all those charges of "pretentious" Anderson has collected over the course of a career, when you pile all of his pathos into a film that seems mainly interested in being adorable, they're actually deserved.

The Val Lewton Horror Collection – DVD

October 22, 2009Posted in****/****, 1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller, Zombie

VlewtontitleCAT PEOPLE (1943)
****/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph
screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Jacques Tourneur

THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph, Ann Carter
screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Gunther V. Fritsch and Robert Wise

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)
****/**** Image C Sound B-
starring James Ellison, Frances Dee, Tom Conway
screenplay by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray
directed by Jacques Tourneur

THE LEOPARD MAN (1943)
***½/**** Image C- Sound B-
starring Dennis O’Keefe, Margo, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell
screenplay by Ardel Wray, based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich
directed by Jacques Tourneur

THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943)
****/**** Image C+ Sound C
starring Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell, Kim Hunter
screenplay by Charles O’Neal and DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Mark Robson

THE GHOST SHIP (1943)
***½/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Richard Dix, Russell Wade, Edith Barrett, Ben Bard
screenplay by Donald Henderson Clarke
directed by Mark Robson

THE BODY SNATCHER (1945)
***½/**** Image C- Sound C+
starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Daniell, Edith Atwater
screenplay by Phillip MacDonald and Carlos Keith
directed by Robert Wise

ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945)
*/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer
screenplay by Ardel Wray & Josef Mischel
directed by Mark Robson

BEDLAM (1946)
*½/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Boris Karloff, Anna Lee, Billy House, Richard Fraser
screenplay by Carlos Keith and Mark Robson
directed by Mark Robson

VAL LEWTON: THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS (2007)
**½/**** Image N/A Sound N/A
directed by Mark Robson

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNINGS IN EFFECT. It’s not too much to speak of Val Lewton as the American Jean Cocteau. An enigmatic figure with his hand, like Cocteau, in more than one media (a novelist, he often did uncredited work on the screenplays for his films), the movies produced under his RKO watch are a repository of dream sleep, enough so that an overview of his key pictures–something made possible by Warner’s rapturous DVD collection of his horror fare–uncovers a treasure trove of indelible nightmare images. Where Cocteau affected a studiedly casual mien and came to film in his sixties, however, Lewton (who died at 47) seems the product of financial expediency and, perhaps more impressively, stamped the products of his hand despite roadblocks placed in his way. Yet the similarities are striking: Above and beyond the dreamscapes affected, there’s a common fascination with masks and false identities; an obsession with budding sexuality turned subtly aberrant; and a cycle of seduction tied to corruption in the move from innocence to experience. I see in these recurrent themes a man fascinated by the blinds that men throw before them to deny the unknowable tides governing their emotions and actions. It’s that illusion of civilization that informs Lewton’s pictures; the horror of them is in the ripping away to expose the insect underneath.

Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

October 21, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Drama, Prison, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx, Bruce McGill, Colm Meaney
screenplay by Kurt Wimmer
directed by F. Gary Gray

Lawabidingcitizenby Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The most that can be said for Law Abiding Citizen is that it understands the dichotomy of Gerard Butler, the Scottish beefcake whose schizoid career has him playing a screaming grunt one month and a kindly, rough-around-the-edges dad/love interest the next. After murdering a notable percentage of Philadelphia’s legal system, Butler’s black-ops such-and-such Clyde Shelton warns that, if he is not immediately released with all charges against him dropped, he will “KILL. EVERYONE.” Coming from a character who is initially introduced to us as Joe Average, that priceless bit of leaden melodrama almost single-handedly consigns Law Abiding Citizen to the “camp” drawer–but, improbably, it’s also an uncomfortable moment that perfectly captures Butler’s nebulous, malleable status as a movie star. The dumb joke/terrifying conjecture being that, with 300 still lingering in the air, you have no idea how far he’ll go in “killing everyone.” Is it a coincidence that the film should give Clyde comic-book disguises with which to evade capture and lure his prey? Of course not, because Butler belongs in a comic book. It’s not just his cold stare or his steel jaw, it’s the fact that, at the mercy of practically any working writer, he can represent anything or anyone, villain or hero, with preposterous ease. This time, he’s concocting bloody, convoluted vengeance against the men who destroyed his family and the system that doled out questionable justice–and in so doing, he becomes an amalgam of the Joker, the Riddler, and the Abominable Dr. Phibes.