TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Sci-Fi Adventures – DVD

April 19, 2010Posted in1950s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK

THEM! (1954)
***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness
screenplay by Ted Sherdeman
directed by Gordon Douglas

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, Kenneth Tobey
screenplay by Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger, suggested by the story "The Fog Horn" by Ray Bradbury
directed by Eugène Lourié

WORLD WITHOUT END (1956)
**½/**** Image A Sound B-
starring Hugh Marlowe, Nancy Gates, Rod Taylor
written and directed by Edwards Bernds

SATELLITE IN THE SKY (1956)
*/**** Image C Sound B
starring Kieron Moore, Lois Maxwell, Donald Wolfit
screenplay by John Mather, J.T. McIntosh and Edith Dell
directed by Paul Dickson

by Jefferson Robbins We're all mutants now. Those of us who weren't literally irradiated by the Atomic Age still carry its glowing cultural DNA. As we've built better ways to destroy ourselves, we've also spurred the creators of our science-fiction to imagine life in newer Waste Lands. Their work assumes that no matter how we survive each new apocalypse, our circumstances will be quite changed. The upshot of our atom-splitting folly would be not sloughed skin or violent cancer, but marvels and wonders, which would then seek our destruction on their own terms.

The Lord of the Rings (1978) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

April 15, 2010Posted in1970s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, Musical, Spain, UK

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
**½/****
DVD – Image C Sound C-
BD – Image C+ Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle, based on The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Ralph Bakshi

by Walter Chaw An adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Rings" books that began with The Fellowship of the Ring and ended when the money ran out in the middle of The Two Towers, Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated feature The Lord of the Rings is unintentionally disturbing, occasionally brilliant, and fatally uneven. The film is faithful to the main movements of Tolkien's novels but told in the kind of narrative shorthand that favours truncation over summary. Its rotoscoping of actors combines uneasily with traditional modes of animation: they mix into an abstract soup of contradictory images that destroys our suspension of disbelief.

Night Moves (1975) – DVD

April 14, 2010Posted in****/****, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Edward Binns, Susan Clark
screenplay by Alan Sharp
directed by Arthur Penn

Nightmovescapby Walter Chaw On the strength of his scripts for The Hired Hand, Ulzana’s Raid, and Night Moves, Scottish novelist Alan Sharp seems well at home with the better-known, more highly-regarded writers and directors of the New American Cinema. Sharp’s screenplays are marked by a narrative complexity and situations gravid with implication and doom.1 Take the moment in the Arthur Penn-helmed Night Moves where broken-down P.I. Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman, reuniting with Penn for the first time since Bonnie and Clyde), after discovering a body in a sunken wreck off the coast of Florida, watches as his two sleazeball hosts (John Crawford and Jennifer Warren)–who’ve previously exchanged an odd nod and a knowing glance in which something is silently decided about how to handle this new, inquisitive element dropped in their midst–break into a broken tango to a tune on the radio. Harry salutes them in a way that suggests he understands what the hell is going on and shuffles off to bed. It’s one of the most harrowing moments in a harrowing decade of film, and nothing much happens in it except for the look Hackman gives as a damned soul caught on the horns of an unknowable mystery. The seduction scene that immediately ensues reminds in cadence and pace of the dream sequence from Hackman’s earlier The Conversation: “Where were you when Kennedy died?” “Which Kennedy?” “I dunno, any Kennedy.” Hackman is anchored to this period because he so ably portrays the everyman who desires enlightenment against the pervasive belief that there’s no longer hope for anything like enlightenment in this post-Vietnam/post-Watergate dystopia–that the solution to everything that’s wrong in this world is, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The slow, looping circles the boat “Point of View” describes at the end of the picture constitute perhaps the most trenchant metaphor for all of the New American Cinema.

Big Love: The Complete Second Season (2007) – DVD

April 7, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A Extras C+
"Damage Control," "The Writing on the Wall," "Reunion," "Rock and a Hard Place," "Vision Thing," "Dating Game," "Good Guys and Bad Guys," "Kingdom Come," "Circle the Wagons," "The Happiest Girl," "Take Me As I Am," "Oh, Pioneers"

by Alex Jackson There's definitely something cheeky and slyly subversive at the core of HBO's "Big Love". The show is the brainchild of Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, an openly-gay couple who've been together since the early-'90s. That single fact opens up some interesting connections when it comes to polygamy. The standard argument religious groups have against homosexuality is that it's unnatural: Two men or two women cannot naturally procreate and therefore it's deviant, godless behaviour. By contrast, polygamy is possibly more natural than monogamy–you could argue that males are hardwired to spread their seed with as many females as possible and it is not cost efficient, evolutionarily speaking, to restrict yourself to one woman. And if the ability to procreate is what makes heterosexuality more moral than homosexuality, then we have to admit that polygamists are able to procreate "better" than monogamists and so polygamy should be embraced as the morally superior lifestyle.

Toy Story (1995) [Special Edition] + Toy Story 2 (1999) [Special Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

March 23, 2010Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2010, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, FFC Must-Own, Pixar

TOY STORY
**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
screenplay by Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow
directed by John Lasseter

TOY STORY 2
****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A-
screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Rita Hsiao, Doug Chamberlin & Chris Webb
directed by John Lasseter

Toystory2cap

Mustown

TOY STORY 2

by Walter Chaw What time and memory seem to obscure about Pixar's Toy Story is that it is, for the most part, shrill and unpleasant, though it's easier to identify now that Pixar's technical facility is familiar. The picture's thick with bad behaviour, with everybody's favourite vintage cowboy doll Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) acting the spoiled, wounded, ultimately dangerous brat, jilted by his owner for a newer model, Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and determined to murder his rival until some moral compass asserts itself and Woody, grudgingly, comes to Jesus with his inevitable obsolescence. Toy Story plays a weird game with the idea of mortality in that its heroes are toys and, as such, doomed to a kind of infernal immortal half-life during which they can be tortured any number of ways–de-limbed, decapitated and reconstituted, melted, waterboarded we presume–in the name of a child's development. A memorable moment places our frenemies in a "bad" kid's bedroom where all the toys have been mutilated (our tiny Dr. Frankenstein provides the tension of the film's third act)–the message of the encounter retreating into that old kid's-flick saw that you can't judge a book by its cover.

Commando (1985) [Director’s Cut] – DVD

March 2, 2010Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Schwarzenegger

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rae Dawn Chong, Dan Hedaya, Vernon Wells
screenplay by Steven E. de Souza
directed by Mark L. Lester

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I first saw Mark L. Lester’s Commando as a young boy and even then I was rather surprised that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s eponymous hero, John Matrix, didn’t get together with his reluctant sidekick, Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong). She’s set up to be the love interest, but the filmmakers never pull the trigger. I was similarly baffled by the saccharine relationship between Matrix and his daughter, Jenny (Alyssa Milano). In my youthful naivety, I frankly thought this was too hokey for an R-rated movie, i.e., a movie intended for grown-ups. What audience of adults would buy into this? And I couldn’t believe that the film would be about her kidnapping and Matrix tracking down and rescuing her. It’s just the hero invading the castle and saving the damsel-in-distress? Hell, Star Wars wasn’t that basic. There had to be some socio-political nuance to the situation I simply wasn’t old enough to grasp.

The Spider Woman|The Voice of Terror [Sherlock Holmes Double Feature] – DVD

February 24, 2010Posted in1940s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)
***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Evelyn Ankers, Reginald Denny
screenplay by Lynn Riggs & John Bright, based upon the story "His Last Bow" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
directed by John Rawlins

THE SPIDER WOMAN (1944)
**/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Gale Sondergaard, Dennis Hoey
screenplay by Bertram Millhauser, based on a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
directed by Roy William Neill

by Ian Pugh My introduction to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes came courtesy of MPI's recent double-feature DVD, and as introductions go, one could certainly do worse. Plucking the detective from Fox's Victorian backdrop and throwing him unceremoniously into World War II, Universal's take on the Holmes series comes across as hell-bent on forging its own continuity and, moreover, its own sense of context. The first entry in this new cycle, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, begins with a title card explaining why the film makes such a dramatic departure from the previous two:

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) – DVD

February 23, 2010Posted in1960s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK

***/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones, Simon Ward
screenplay by Bert Batt
directed by Terence Fisher

by Jefferson Robbins I’ve wondered for a long time why I love the Hammer Film takes on the Universal monsters. I discovered them in my youth, so there’s the nostalgia thing; and they typically involve stuff a young man loves: disfigurement, cleavage, viscera, cleavage, death. But the communion is somehow deeper than that. Guillermo del Toro describes his youthful exposure to creature features in the language of a Catholic embracing Jesus: “At a certain age, I accepted monsters in my heart.” Yeah.

Mystic River (2003) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 10, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Dennis Lahane
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Opening like a Stephen King story of a group of friends falling from innocence into experience, Clint Eastwood's latest elegy for the myth of man strains at the edge of hysterical, offering up a testosterone-rich soup of In the Bedroom parental melodrama that compels for its pervasive doom, but disappoints for its didactic simplicity. Still, there's something to the tribal primitivism of the picture, the idea that man at his essence is composed of balanced portions of nobility and violence and that our society, perhaps, is no different: the past the muddy headwaters of the titular mystic river. The picture is a rhyme of Eastwood's A Perfect World, complete with spiralling shots of the sky through branches–the evocation of a Naturalism at war with any illusion of moral spirituality or humanism, with its heroes criminals shaded equally by the instinct to violence and the instinct to nurture.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Western Adventures – DVD + Jeremiah Johnson (1972) – Blu-ray Disc

February 7, 2010Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 2010, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance, Western

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates
screenplay by Walon Green and Sam Peckinpah
directed by Sam Peckinpah

McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
****/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, William Devane
screenplay by Robert Altman and Brian McKay, based on the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton
directed by Robert Altman

THE TRAIN ROBBERS (1973)
1/2*/**** Image B- Sound C Extras F
starring John Wayne, Ann-Margret, Rod Taylor, Ricardo Montalban
written and directed by Burt Kennedy

JEREMIAH JOHNSON
*/****
DVD – Image D+ Sound C- Extras F
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Robert Redford, Will Geer, Allyn Ann McLerie, Delle Bolton
screenplay by John Milius and Edward Anhalt
directed by Sydney Pollack

by Walter Chaw From John Ford to Akira Kurosawa to Sergio Leone then back to the United States with Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, trace the odd, international lineage of the American western genre as the seeds of its completion are sown by Ford, only to be harvested a few decades down the line with a singular bloodbath south of the proverbial border. You could say that the western was already nearing its completion in the postwar films noir set in the sunshine and bluffs of the Old West: homegrown oaters by Anthony Mann and Fritz Lang; William Wellman’s Yellow Sky and Robert Wise’s Blood on the Moon; Budd Boetticher’s subversive Ranowns; Arthur Penn’s glass darkly Billy the Kid pic The Left Handed Gun; Brando’s filthy One-Eyed Jacks; and even Ford himself with terminal pieces like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers. But it’s through Kurosawa’s admiration and transfiguration of Ford’s themes–then Sergio Leone’s incandescent prism of dirt and blood that transfigured Kurosawa’s (and Ford’s) ideas about heroics and individualism into something poetically base–from which Peckinpah1 took his cues.

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?.

The Last Man on Earth (1964) – DVD

January 12, 2010Posted in1960s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Italy, Sci-Fi, Vampire, Zombie

***/**** Image B- Sound C Extras D
starring Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart
screenplay by Logan Swanson & William F. Leicster, based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
directed by Sidney Salkow

by Walter Chaw If the execution of The Last Man on Earth, Sidney Salkow's adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, is sometimes clunky, the ideas contained therein seem prescient at least, profound at best. Disowned by Matheson and oft-derided as slow-moving, it's actually an exceptional film in an exceptional year for film, a beautiful, occasionally stunning piece about loneliness and alienation. I wouldn't call it a metaphor, but as a bleak emotional landscape–Eliot's "The Wasteland" committed to genre schlock–it boasts of an intimidating gravity. Take the scene where titular plague survivor Dr. Morgan (Vincent Price) refuses to turn over his freshly-dead wife (Emma Danieli) to an army crematorium crew, endeavouring instead to bury her in the woods. His act of love is rewarded that night with her undead corpse paying him a visit. Yes, the pacing is off, leaving the shock of a shambling loved one to be milked properly in four years' time by George Romero and his Night of the Living Dead, yet the duration of the attack by itself underscores the horror and revulsion of the dearly-departed now up and walking. Veteran television director Salkow isn't very good, it's true, but DP Franco Delli Colli (Strip Nude For Your Killer), on one of his first films, provides beautiful, empty tableaux littered with car husks and burning pits fed with the corpses of the baddies Morgan stakes in the daytime.

The Cove (2009) + Home (2009)

January 5, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Crime, Documentary, DVD, France

THE COVE
***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
directed by Louie Psihoyos

HOME
***/**** Image C+ Sound B-
directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Covecapby Jefferson Robbins Critically assessing the environmental documentary is often a hard road, because it forces you to bear the competing tensions of shame, anger, and self-righteousness. You know you're part of the problem as you sit there spinning a petrol-derived video disc, typing on a laptop with tantalum capacitors strip-mined from Africa, but, damnit, you didn't personally spit-roast those lemurs. The best you can hope for, usually, is some beautiful photography, a compelling story, and a degree of responsibility on the filmmakers' part–a commitment to balancing science and passion in respectful measure.

Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 4, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, DVD, Film Festivals, Sports

***/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image C- Sound A Extras B
directed by Stacy Peralta

by Walter Chaw Winner of the Audience and Director's awards at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, the kinetic social history document Dogtown and Z-Boys suggests that the amalgamation of art and sport created a unique brand of protest performance art centred around eight kids growing up in the "dead wonderland" of Venice Beach (and the surrounding urban wasteland referred to by the locals as Dogtown). Directed by Stacy Peralta, a member of the legendary Zephyr Skating Team that almost single-handedly defined the modern X-Game at the 1975 Del Mar Nationals Bahne-Cadillac Skateboard Championship, Dogtown and Z-Boys accomplishes several tasks at once, evoking the ethic that captured the imagination of American punks, portraying the dangers of stardom, and telling a rags-to-riches fable about how boys (and a girl) from the wrong side of the tracks sometimes make good on their own terms. The film is so intent on harnessing the off-the-cuff spirit that informed the Zephyr Team ("Z-Boys") that we hear narrator Sean Penn cough and clear his throat.

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.

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.

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.

Snatch (2000) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

November 23, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, UK

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image C Sound A Extras A
starring Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina, Brad Pitt, Rade Sherbedgia
written and directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw Guy Ritchie's sophomore effort Snatch opens with a hyperkinetic homage to the first violent robbery of Ringo Lam's City on Fire and continues by aping the slick mod-cool of the British gangster films of the late-'60s and early-'70s. It is a bizarre beast that borrows, steals, re-invents, and winks knowingly when its hand is caught in the imagistic cookie jar. Guy Ritchie laughs at your erudition. He's in it for the money shots–a new champion of the gangster drama as pornography: ultimately empty but undeniably efficient.

North by Northwest (1959) – DVD|North by Northwest (1959) [50th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 11, 2009Posted in****/****, 1950s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Mystery

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B Extras A
BD – Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is Alfred Hitchcock’s most mercurial anti-hero, the soup bone reduction of the Master’s wrong-man theme. An advertising executive so at ease with changing his identity at the fall of a hammer, he has, by film’s end, become/done all of the things he’s wrongfully accused of being/doing at the beginning of the film. Indeed, Hitchcock would never again mine the idea of the wrong man with this kind of heat–veering off as he did into a more metaphysical kind of guilt transference à la Vertigo with The Birds, Psycho, and Marnie. As North by Northwest opens, Thornhill gives his regards to a night porter’s wife (“We’re not talkin’!”), steals a cab from a Good Samaritan, and instructs his secretary to send a neglected lover a box of gold-wrapped candy because “she’ll think she’s eating money.” He’s a charmer–and he’s as oily, despicable, and fast-talking as almost every one of Grant’s romantic comedy heroes. Hitch undermines and exploits Grant for the fourth and final time here as a guy we love until we stop for a second to catch our breath and take stock of the myriad ways in which we’ve been bribed, glad-handed, misled, and led-on.

I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009) – DVD

November 10, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Romance, Teen

*½/**** Image N/A Sound N/A Extras C
starring Hayden Panettiere, Paul Rust, Jack T. Carpenter, Lauren London
screenplay by Larry Doyle, based on his novel
directed by Chris Columbus

by Jefferson Robbins I believe this is what it looks like when a veteran director throws in the towel. Morosely paced, edited with no ear for slapstick, perfectly mediocre in its staging, timing, scripting, and performances, I Love You, Beth Cooper (hereafter Beth Cooper) betrays benign neglect on the part of producer-director Chris Columbus. It's as if he tossed together all the ingredients for a thoughtful but teen-friendly confection–a recipe inherited from his late mentor John Hughes–and took it on faith that the cake would bake itself. There's even a weird invocation of the dead god of teen comedies: Columbus casts Alan Ruck, a.k.a. Cameron in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, as the hero's dad and supplies the sidekick with Cameron's absent, oppressive shadow of a father. That's not homage–that's the desperate rubbing of a talisman, a prayer to recapture lightning that leaked out of the bottle long ago.