The Newsroom: The Complete First Season (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

July 18, 2013Posted in2011, 2012, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Newsroom1

Image A Sound B+ Extras B
“We Just Decided To,” “News Night 2.0,” “The 112th Congress,” “I’ll Try To Fix You,” “Amen,” “Bullies,” “5/1,” “The Blackout, Part 1: Tragedy Porn,” “The Blackout, Part 2: Mock Debate,” “The Greater Fool”

by Jefferson Robbins The more I think about Aaron Sorkin’s chimerical HBO beast “The Newsroom”, the more I think it would work far, far better as a Broadway musical. That may be because Sorkin loads the ranks of his ensemble drama with accomplished theatre vets, or it may be because of the endless dialogue references to stage classics, beginning and ending with Man of La Mancha. But it’s also a matter of timing: The show offers strange eruptions of relationship palaver, set in the midst of world-altering sociopolitical changes and the daily churn of building a TV newshour around them. They arrive oddly, maddeningly, and frequently, just when the storylines involving real-world events are beginning to compel, and they feel almost uniformly dishonest and manufactured. What I’m saying is, they’d go down easier if they were sung.

To Have and Have Not (1944) + The Big Sleep (1945/6) – DVDs

July 8, 2013Posted in****/****, 1940s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
****/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Dolores Moran
screenplay by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Howard Hawks

THE BIG SLEEP
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone
screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett & Jules Furthman, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler
directed by Howard Hawks

by Walter Chaw While biographer Todd McCarthy refers to the two versions of Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep as marking the delineation point separating linear (early) Hawks from non-linear (later) Hawks, I feel like you can mark the director’s affection for bonzo non-sequiturs throughout his sultry To Have and Have Not. The picture tells its tale of immigrants marooned off the islets of war and sexual sophistication–an island bell jar and pressure cooker envisioned as a sequel of sorts to Casablanca. But where Casablanca‘s sex was mature and companionate (the sizzle replaced by simmer) and tinged with regret, To Have and Have Not has a slick of bestial sweat to it that promises that the explosion of really naughty stuff is looming rather than in the rear-view. (There’s no sexier film in all the Forties.) The story of the corrupt Vichy government and the brave French underground unfolding behind the red-hot flirtation between diplomatically non-affiliated fishing boat captain Harry “Steve” Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) and lost American teen “Slim” (Lauren Bacall) is punctuated helter-skelter by husky lounge numbers courtesy Slim and Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael) and riff sessions with Steve and Slim that have the cadence and unpredictability of jazz improvisation. It’s not so much a narrative as a medley in a bouncy key, and Hawks is not so much a director as a bandleader. Much has been made of Hawks’s skill in casting (and it’s hard to argue otherwise when he sniffs out the alchemical enchantment between old man Bogie and new thing Bacall (and Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell; and Dean Martin and a bottle)), but looking at To Have and Have Not–the first of Bogie/Bacall’s four collaborations–is to glimpse something more than a good casting eye: it’s to witness the evolution of a true musical genius. The rhythms are subterranean, the verses in between the words; to watch this and The Big Sleep (Hawks’s other collaboration with Bogie/Bacall) back-to-back is as close to rapture as this experience gets.

Swimming to Cambodia (1987) – DVD

July 7, 2013Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Concert Doc, Directors: Jonathan Demme, DVD, Scream/Shout! Factory

Swimmingtocambodia1

****/**** Image C Sound C Extras B
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw I learned about memoir as art watching Spalding Gray in Jonathan Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia. Although I was a freshman in college when I first saw it, I’m not sure that I ever really knew what “memoir” was before, and, since, I’ve been hard pressed to find any examples that measure up to the bar it sets. Swimming to Cambodia also provides an impossible standard for direction, as Demme takes Gray’s “monolog” format (essentially him, alone, on a stage) and turns it into something like an expressionistic piece, something that is at once inside Gray’s mind and inside yours using thoughtful editing choices and clever sound and lighting design. In a year that saw the release of Predator, Full Metal Jacket, The Untouchables, Empire of the Sun, Raising Arizona, Near Dark, A Better Tomorrow II, Angel Heart, Evil Dead II, and RoboCop, it’s a little astonishing to realize the best-directed film is this one with a guy sitting at a table. For what it’s worth, as I was writing my own memoir of a very particular moment in my life, the only readership I really imagined for it consisted of my father and Gray–Gray, who killed himself over water in 2004, and my father, who died a year before that. If the one was the reason, the other was the way.

The Producers (1968) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray and DVD Combo Pack

June 30, 2013Posted in1960s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Music, Satire, Scream/Shout! Factory

Mel Brooks' The Producers
*½/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, Kenneth Mars
written and directed by Mel Brooks

Producers2click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw A seminal year for film, 1968: Once Upon a Time in the West, Rosemary's Baby, Planet of the Apes, Night of the Living Dead, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barbarella, If…, Targets, Faces, Danger: Diabolik…and, some would say, Mel Brooks's The Producers, a film back in the limelight thanks to the record-breaking, award-winning Broadway play on which it's based now coming out as an extraordinarily ill-advised feature film of its own. Unlike Brooks's other classics (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, even High Anxiety), The Producers has aged pretty poorly. It's played broad, which is to say that everyone acts like they're being defibrillated every five minutes, leading to a lot of high-decibel screeching and running around in circles. And I don't really understand what the film is about: Is it an attack on the theatre, or is it an attack on Nazis? If it's neither, if it's instead some kind of vaudevillian farce about the last days of Jewish entertainment hegemony, then perhaps that's as good an explanation as any for why its prehistoric rimshots, timing, and attitudes strike me as puzzling. Maybe it's a satire of being a Jewish comic.

Superman: Unbound (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

June 24, 2013Posted in2013, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Superhero

Supermanunbound3

***/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras C+
screenplay by Bob Goodman, based on the graphic novel Superman: Brainiac by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank
directed by James Tucker

by Jefferson Robbins With Superman: Unbound, DC Universe’s appropriation of anime elements for its superhero cartoons reaches its logical endpoint: tentacle rape. Our first glimpse of longstanding Superman nemesis Brainiac, a semi-organic humanoid computer, features his natural eye getting plucked out by a pincered appendage to be replaced with an upgraded model. Later, a bound and helpless Superman will have terabytes of deadly information pumped straight into his cortex by other such squidlike injectors. The last five years of direct-to-video DC Comics adaptations, many engineered by Korean production house MOI Animation, have all gone East for key sequences–the lonely drift of a Gotham cityscape, robot foes ripped from the comics to be redesigned as mechas. So I guess it was only a matter of time before weird snaky appendages tried to skull-fuck the Man of Steel.

True Blood: The Complete Fifth Season (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 17, 2013Posted in2012, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Romance, Television, Vampire

Truebloods5cap1

Image A- Sound A Extras B
“Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “Authority Always Wins,” “Whatever I Am, You Made Me,” “We’ll Meet Again,” “Let’s Boot and Rally,” “Hopeless,” “In the Beginning,” “Somebody That I Used to Know,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” “Gone, Gone, Gone,” “Sunset,” “Save Yourself”

by Bill Chambers In general, TV series aren’t built to last beyond four seasons. I think it has something to do with how the educational system teaches us that four-year cycles end in graduation. Showrunners consequently feel an obligation to symbolically reboot in season five–to send the high-schoolers off to college (“Dawson’s Creek”), to recast the leads (“The Dukes of Hazzard”), to have Fonzie waterski over Jaws (“Happy Days”). To be fair, redefining the status quo doesn’t always mean jumping the shark: for every Cousin Oliver, after all, there’s a Dawn Summers. Unfortunately, “True Blood” is not one of the exceptions to the rule, as it goes off the rails in its fifth season in a way that is different from those countless other times it seemed to be flying a kamikaze mission towards ratings oblivion. (This is a show that has elevated jumping the shark to an artform.) A good chunk of the season is devoted to vampires–creatures who can, in the “True Blood”-verse, run like The Flash, fly, and fuck like pornstars–sitting around a conference table debating politics and religion, and the other “super” groups don’t exactly pick up the slack, what with the werewolves holding auditions for a new pack leader and the faes throwing slumber parties with their new BFF, Sookie.

Dark Skies (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

May 27, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-

starring Keri Russell, Josh Hamilton, Dakota Goyo, J.K. Simmons

written and directed by Scott Stewart


Darkskies3click any image to enlarge

by Bill Chambers Dark Skies takes place in
the days leading up to the Fourth of July.
The movie thus promises fireworks–and it delivers, albeit on a modest
scale
befitting its humble suburban milieu. Like Signs,
it's such an insular
take on the alien-visitation genre it could almost be performed on the
stage;
unlike Signs, it's not pious to a fault
(surprisingly, given that
writer-director Scott Stewart previously made Legion
and Priest),
and its lapses in logic aren't as maddening because they're built into
the film's
very ethos, with a Whitley Streiber type (lent unexpected pathos by
a Hunter S. Thompson-dressed J.K. Simmons) opining late in the
proceedings that
aliens are unfathomable to us in the same way that humans are
unfathomable to
lab rats. There are a lot of superficial similarities to Signs,
actually, such as the way the picture uses asthma and walkie-talkie
devices as narrative
keystones and its climactic transformation of the family home into a
fortress.
For that matter, Poltergeist, Paranormal
Activity, and Close
Encounters of the Third Kind are liberally paraphrased as
well; over three
films, Stewart has shown himself to be nothing if not a magpie artist.
The good
news, which would normally be upsetting news, is that the producers of Dark
Skies are Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who seem to rein in
Stewart's other bad
habits, like snail's pacing and a tendency towards arcane mythology.
Third
time's the charm.

Mama (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + Ultraviolet

May 13, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, DVD, Horror, Spain

Mama1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Megan Charpentier, Isabelle Nélisse
screenplay by Neil Cross and Andy Muschietti & Barbara Muschietti
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Bill Chambers Mama is about a woman who doesn’t want kids being forced into motherhood by her pigheaded boyfriend. Yes, it’s a horror movie, but that’s ostensibly not the scary part–that would be the titular ghost who challenges our heroine to a mom-off for the souls of two little girls. Mama has watched over them since their crazed father Jeffrey (the suddenly omnipresent Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), still smarting from a bad day on Wall Street that saw him going postal, tried to execute them in a remote cabin in the woods. Five years later, Jeffrey’s brother Lucas (Coster-Waldau again) finally hits pay dirt in his obsessive search for his nieces when a routine check turns up the cabin with the girls inside, now feral and living on cherries.1 Not that I’m asking for a prequel, but I’d love to–and would perhaps rather–see those lost years, the gradual breakdown of these kids’ language, hygiene, decorum. Alas, the Western cinema is preoccupied with domestication, which is where this sincerely well-made movie gets into trouble.

Django Unchained (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 14, 2013Posted in****/****, 2012, 2013, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Revenge, Theatrical, Western

Djangounch2

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw If Inglourious Basterds was an ambiguous, brilliant indictment of “Jewish vengeance” wrapped in this impossibly canny exploration of violence through screenwriting, performance, and love of film, think of Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up, Django Unchained, as a glorious continuation of what has become a singular artist’s evolving theme. It demonstrates an absolute command of the medium, of what film can do when tasked to do more than usual, and it does it by being some of the finest film criticism of the year. If the Coens are our best literary critics, then Tarantino is our best film critic cum sociologist, and his topics, again, are how we understand history through specific prisms and how violence can be both catharsis and atrocity–often in the same breath and almost always in the same ways. Consider that this difficult film’s most difficult moment comes, as it does in Inglourious Basterds, at the very end, in an unbearably ugly act of violence perpetrated against not the expected slave-owner antagonist, Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), but his manservant Stephen/Stepin (Samuel L. Jackson). Consider, too, the idea that vengeance–particularly in our post-9/11 environment–is the proverbial tiger we’ve caught by the tail: our cultural legacy that we try to justify through any means, given that our ends are so very righteous.

Countess Dracula (1971)/The Vampire Lovers (1970) [Midnite Movies Double Feature] – DVD|The Vampire Lovers (1970) – Blu-ray Disc

March 24, 2013Posted in1970s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, UK, Vampire

COUNTESS DRACULA
*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras A
starring Ingrid Pitt, Nigel Green, Sandor Eles, Maurice Denham
screenplay by Jeremy Paul
directed by Peter Sasdy

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS
***/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Ingrid Pitt, George Cole, Kate O’Mara, Peter Cushing
screenplay by Tudor Gates, based on the story “Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu
directed by Roy Ward Baker

by Walter Chaw Britain’s Hammer Studios all but defined the period horror film from the late-Fifties on, making matinee idols of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and erstwhile vampire hunter Van Helsing. But musty is what most Hammer productions remain (with notable exceptions like Quatermass and the Pit), and as the drive-in exploitation ethic of Herschell Gordon Lewis began to redefine the limits of what could be shown with regards to gore and nudity in the United States (arguably, the European films that found currency in the Sixties with a more sophisticated audience had as much or more to do with the “opening” of America’s notorious piety), the studio found itself distressingly out of touch–Merchant/Ivory doing The Matrix.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) – Combo Pack: Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

March 18, 2013Posted in2012, 2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Andy Serkis
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo Del Toro, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson


Hobbit1click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Shot at a vaunted 48 frames-per-second to
better approximate the television soap opera its mammoth length suggests, Peter
Jackson's vainglorious trainwreck The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
(hereafter "Hobbit 1") looks for all intents and purposes like
its own porn knock-off. A technological "advancement" that is to the
naked eye identical to any episode of reality television or live sporting event
you've been watching in your living room for years, the 48fps "breakthrough"
was for Jackson a way of making the increasingly unpopular new-gen 3-D a little
bit less crappy. It's like putting a dress on a pig. Understand, complaints
about "HFR" are not akin to the bellyaching about colour film or
CinemaScope, since those innovations didn't actively cheapen the moviegoing experience. The irony of all that being, of course, that while the
image indeed doesn't stutter or blur as much in 3-D, what we're forced to
look at is overlit, obviously artificial, and reminded me more than once of
the jarringly amateurish "Star Wars Holiday Special".

Zero Dark Thirty (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

March 17, 2013Posted in2012, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Thriller, War

Zerodarkthirty2

***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Ehle, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler
screenplay by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Angelo Muredda As of this writing, the latest wannabe tastemaker to thumb his nose at Zero Dark Thirty is novelist and professional blowhard Bret Easton Ellis, who tweeted that critics lauding the film “need to admit that they’re admiring a morally indefensible movie.” With that, Ellis joins an army of self-deputized film writers who’ve taken issue on moral grounds with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s treatment of the CIA’s decade-spanning manhunt for Osama bin Laden. While Ellis’s tasteless tweets about Bigelow’s appearance a few weeks back make his word suspect, it’s harder to dismiss Glenn Greenwald, the liberal firebrand whose initial survey of early praise for the film (then unseen by him) slammed Bigelow and Boal for glorifying torture. Incensed by the suggestion that crowd-sourcing knowledge about Zero Dark Thirty‘s representation of torture from the likes of David Edelstein constituted poor form, Greenwald soon saw the picture for himself and insisted that the viewing only confirmed his initial impressions: “[T]o depict X as valuable in enabling the killing of bin Laden is – by definition – to glorify X,” he observed, where X meant torture; woe to the “huge numbers of American viewers” about to be “led” down the filmmakers’ dim alleyways.

Schindler’s List (1993) [Collector’s Gift Set] – DVD|[20th Anniversary Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

March 12, 2013Posted in1990s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Spielberg

***/****
DVD – Image
B+ Sound
A
Extras A
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras B-

starring Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes,
Caroline Goodall
screenplay by Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Thomas Keneally
directed by Steven Spielberg


Schindlers1click
any image to enlarge

by Bill
Chambers It's not the "I could've done more" speech that
rankles, but rather the scene directly preceding it, in which Herr
Direktor Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) shames a gaggle of SS
guards into leaving the 1100 Jews they've been ordered to kill unharmed
in a manner not far removed from one of paterfamilias
Mike's guilt-trips on "The Brady Bunch". ("You don't really want to
shoot these nice people, do you?" he asks (I'm hardly
paraphrasing)–and one-by-one they skulk off.) I realized during my
first viewing of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List
in almost a decade that I'm too much the representationalist to treat
any text as sacred just because its subject matter is. Ergo, I allowed
myself to cringe whenever I perceived Spielberg to be leaning on the
crutch of suburban ethics, which he does often in the film's "for he's
a jolly good fellow" denouement.*

The Loneliest Planet (2012) – DVD

February 28, 2013Posted in****/****, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Hani Furstenberg, Bidzina Gujabidze
screenplay by Julia Loktev, based on the short story by Tom Bissell
directed by Julia Loktev


Loneliestplanetcap

by Walter Chaw Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet
is an existentially terrifying little film about life's essential loneliness,
the absolute mutability of interpersonal relationships, and the ways our
identities are formed not only by our perceptions of others, but by our
preconceptions of the roles we play and, in turn, cast others to
play, unbeknownst to them or to anyone. It gives the lie to the
possibility of an unconditional relationship, to the idea that we can ever
truly know ourselves or the people with whom we choose to share our lives. Most
uncomfortably of all, it posits that everything we believe, everything we hold
most dear about who we are and who we think we are, can change in an instant. It's
about love in that way, but love only in the context of the brutal, capricious,
arbitrary world–love in the sense that we invest everything in it in acts of
faith entirely unjustified by Nature and circumstance. There's a scene in The
Loneliest Planet where two pairs of feet play with each other on top of a
sleeping bag, followed fast, after something small but terrible happens, by the
owner of one pair of those feet watching the owner of the other walk away and
eventually disappear into the ugly, insensate terrain of Russian Georgia's
Caucasus mountains. I think it's no accident that the film takes place there,
where mythology places Titan Prometheus in his eternal torment: Prometheus the
bringer of fire, and life, and foresight (literally, in his name)–the father
of Man flayed bare and reintroduced to the carnal night.

Peter Pan (1953) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 4, 2013Posted in1950s, 2013, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Revenge

**/**** Image
B+ Sound
A Extras
B+
directed
by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson


Peterpan1click any image to enlarge

by
Bill Chambers Since the 1950s, mainstream audiences have
grown up
knowing Walt Disney’s Peter Pan as the definitive
adaptation of J.M.
Barrie’s play and its subsequent novelization (Peter and Wendy),
and
that’s a mixed blessing. For every thing the Disney does well, like the
swashbuckling, it does
something
horribly wrong, like compounding Barrie’s 19th-century
notions with
retrograde
values all the movie’s own. For instance, the English Barrie may have
regarded
Native Americans as exotic creatures by locating them in Never Land, but
it’s
Disney who immortalized them in literal red skin, then gave them a song
celebrating
their mono-syllabic cretinism:

The Apparition (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

January 27, 2013Posted in2012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror

*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras HILARIOUS
starring Ashley Greene, Sebastian Stan, Tom Felton, Julianna Guill
written and directed by Todd Lincoln


Apparition6click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw I think you enter into a handshake
agreement with The Apparition that it's never, not for a moment, going to be scary when in its prologue, we're introduced to Harry Potter
alum Tom "Draco" Felton as a grad student or something in a Doc Brown
helmet prattling on about "anomalistic psychology" in
that affected, pained way the Harry Potter alums (see: Emma
"Hermione" Watson in The Perks of Being a Wallflower) seem to have
adopted post-franchise. Or maybe it's the first scene between central pretties Kelly and Ben (Ashley Greene and Sebastian Stan), which, without fail,
sports extra, meaningless, unintentionally hysterical blank reaction
shots, thus announcing, in addition to hyphenate Todd Lincoln's inability to
cast, his inability to frame shots or hire an editor (or three, as the case may
be). To The Apparition's credit, though, milquetoast hero Ben is wearing the Bauhaus T-shirt I used to wear in high school when I wasn't trying to be hip, so…yay for being old enough to have a direct connection to a hipster reference. As for the
rest of it, it's kind of astonishing that this didn't land as a dtv relic
submitted for the immediate disapproval of the Netflix-streaming peanut
gallery.

Trouble with the Curve (2012) [Combo Pack] – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

December 16, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, Sports

Troublewiththecurve

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman
screenplay by Randy Brown
directed by Robert Lorenz

by Angelo Muredda Trouble with the Curve is an unfortunate title for a film beset with problems on every side. Helmed by longtime Clint Eastwood producer/assistant director/close friend Robert Lorenz, making his equally unfortunate feature debut, it isn’t directed so much as stiffly pushed in the direction of new events once every ten minutes or so. A father-daughter family drama, a sports movie, and a portrait of a career woman swimming with the sharks, first-timer Randy Brown’s screenplay is a mess beyond even an experienced director’s fixing.

The Bourne Legacy (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + Ultraviolet

December 11, 2012Posted in2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Espionage, Japan, Thriller

½*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Tony Gilroy & Dan Gilroy
directed by Tony Gilroy

Bournelegacy1
click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw By the end of Tony Gilroy's unbearably long and talky The Bourne Legacy, one is left feeling as though the film hasn't even started yet. Nothing happens in it, and the only thing it inspires is anticipation: it's all first act; all supplementary material; all self-importance and hot air. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) sits this one out while another similar soldier, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), occupies a space parallel to the first three films, climbing mountains, Grey-ing wolves, and saving hot virologist Dr. Marta (Rachel Weisz) from the clutches of our evil government so that she can infect him with a virus that makes him smart. This leads to a moment, inevitable, where Cross suggests that losing 12 points off his artificially-inflated IQ would result in some personal "Flowers for Algernon" apocalypse where 12 points would probably result in him forgetting his phone number at worst. It also leads to a series of incoherent flashbacks that fit in perfectly with Gilroy's impossible-to-follow action sequences; if you're just going to turn a camera on and throw it out a window, why bother trying to set it up? For those keeping score, there are more spinning Lazy Susan shots here than in Transformers: Asshole. You've been warned.

New Year’s Eve (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 9, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Robert De Niro, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound C+ Extras C-
starring Halle Berry, Jessica Biel, Jon Bon Jovi, Abigail Breslin
screenplay by Katherine Fugate
directed by Garry Marshall

Newyearseve1click any image to enlarge

by Jefferson Robbins Refining the Hollywood gravity well–the kind of cinematic drain-spiral that A-listers and aspirants can't not be in–he first manufactured with Valentine's Day, Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve hinges for me on the thought that Robert De Niro got paid at least seven figures to literally lie in bed. The movie feints at the larger symbolism of the holiday: A progression forward in light of what's come before, the passages between immaturity and adulthood and life and death. But this is a romcom from the godfather of the modern romcom, albeit a too-long one that's neither very funny nor very romantic, and it ultimately takes its importance from the infantile imperative to kiss somebody, almost anybody, at midnight when the year turns. If you don't, you're worth nothing.

ParaNorman (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 30, 2012Posted in2012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Horror, Zombie

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Chris Butler & Sam Fell
directed by Chris Butler


Paranorman3click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) can see and speak with ghosts, which, if you squint a little, is only a metaphor for the kind of sensitivity that, in a boy, will invariably lead to about a decade of being brutalized by his disconnected male peer group. (Everything will change once he invents Microsoft or Pixar.) Norman's chief tormentor is barely-verbal Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, already past his sell-by date); his shallow and image-obsessed teenaged sister with a heart of gold™ is Courtney (the awesome Anna Kendrick), who has the hots for the captain of the football team, pre-verbal Mitch (Casey Affleck); and Norman's best friend, whether he likes it or not, is Mitch's weird, fat little brother, Neil (Tucker Albrizzi). The first problem of ParaNorman is that, in its rush to be sensitive to intelligent outcasts like Norman and Neil, it dehumanizes and mocks its tormentors, robbing them of the depth and complexity that would have resulted in a better film than this beautifully-wrought, entirely predictable package. (It's like a jack-in-the-box made by Faberge.) The only moment in which one of these "inside" characters is given any kind of depth (it's Mitch) is used as a sort of sitcom punchline that doesn't lend the moment gravity so much as it continues the road of taking sloppy aim at an easy target.