Fantasy Archives - Page 5 of 15 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet Combo Pack

September 23, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor
screenplay by Darren Lemke and Christopher McQuarrie and Dan Studney
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw There's an interesting moment early on in
Bryan Singer's Jack the Giant Slayer, but don't get used to it. It's a
cross-cut sequence wherein peasant Jack (Nicholas Hoult) and princess Isabelle
(absolutely adorable Eleanor Tomlinson) reveal they're both products of neglect
and the devastation of a parent lost too young. This unites them in strife
and turmoil (in the way that wasn't properly addressed by the Mako/Raleigh
team-up in Pacific Rim) to (likewise) battle monsters of the theoretical
Id (Oedipus is the first guess, Electra the second), here literal giants
in a cloud-shrouded kingdom, accessed by a priapic growth sprouting in the dead
of night. It's the only time the film identifiably belongs to Bryan Singer, a maker of large films nonetheless invested
in personal, intimate deconstructions. People in my world are neatly divided
between the ones who didn't like Singer's Superman Returns and the ones who are
right. I want to believe that movie is the reason why Stanley Tucci, Ewan
McGregor, and Ian McShane said "yes" to Jack the Giant Slayer, and not because Tucci,
McGregor, and McShane are already just filthy impulses cashing paychecks à la
1980s Michael Caine.

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013)

August 6, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Jake Abel
screenplay by Marc Guggenheim, based on the novel by Rick Riordan
directed by Thor Freudenthal

by Walter Chaw Say this about Thor Freudenthal and Marc
Guggenheim’s Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (hereafter PJ2): you’re more than justified in questioning its existence, but at the
end of the day it’s impossible to make something this bad by accident. No, it
takes genuine inspiration to be this tone deaf, to create something that requires intimate knowledge of the source novel or the first film
in this benighted franchise yet will instantly piss off the teenies who love the
Rick Riordan books and the far fewer souls who liked that first
movie. For me, because I love my 9-year-old daughter with all my heart, I
endured PJ2 and only thought about walking out a half-dozen times
before resigning myself to the murky 3-D and even murkier execution. Yes, it’s awful,
that much is to be expected, but that it’s significantly worse than a
movie that was already terrible by nearly every objective standard is really some
kind of accomplishment. At the end of the day, when a 9-year-old articulates
that what’s wrong with the film is that they took out all the relationship
stuff, cherry-picked crap from other novels to contrive a half-assed
cliffhanger for a sequel that will likely never happen, and basically fumbled the promise of the title, well…at least PJ2 can claim the
distinction of awakening the critical facility in a child who, before this, thought every movie was pretty good.

Byzantium (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Ireland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire

****/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley, Caleb Landry Jones
screenplay by Moira Buffini, based on her play
directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw What is it about the Irish character, that particular quality of melancholy fatalism, that seems to inform the great works of native sons Beckett, Joyce, and maybe Yeats in particular? I like G.K. Chesterton’s description of Ireland as a place of “men that God made mad,/For all their wars are merry,/And all their songs are sad.” It infects the folklore, the story of the crags and the heather, the looming, low skies pregnant with what Michael Almereyda’s criminally underestimated (and long forgotten) The Eternal fashioned into a creation story involving unimaginable losses and the sweet, bitter tears they inspire. To that film, add John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish, Neal Jordan’s Ondine, and now Jordan’s rapturous Byzantium: a quartet of supernaturally-tinged pictures that together form a lush polyptych that captures the very sensation of walking through Dublin in the rain, or along the shores of Galway, or through the pages of Ulysses in the company of Leo and Nora. As for Byzantium, it’s beautiful, and sad, and has an eternity to it that’s reflected in its tale of a “soucriant,” a succubus of sorts with a Dominican history and favoured by Jean Rhys in novels that were themselves attempts to come to terms with the tragedies of her life as an outsider. Jordan, well-read and never shy about expressing that literariness in his pictures, is producing in his later work the very evocation of a city from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (a book he once told me he admires): Ersilia, an abandoned city built not of walls, but of strings the lost inhabitants used to mark connections with one another. Jordan weaves an intricate web with Byzantium, a film that, before even attacking the tensions within, provides tensions without in its title, most likely taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which is itself about tensions between the “artifice of eternity” and the temporariness of youth. Turns out, the film is about that, too.

Man of Steel (2013)

June 13, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Russell Crowe
screenplay by David S. Goyer
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is 44 beautifully constructed trailers strung together in the world’s most expensive promo reel; at this point in his career, it’s fair to wonder who it is Snyder’s still trying to impress. Shapeless, structure-less, the movie aspires towards nostalgic, grandiloquent, patriotic pastiche but succeeds only in being disjointed, muted, and frustrating. Take the casting of Kevin Costner as Superman’s terrestrial dad, Jonathan Kent. Perfect, right? But he’s reduced to a fantastic scene where he reveals his adopted son’s alien origin that is fantastic solely because Costner is not only magnificent when he’s allowed to be in his wheelhouse (baseball player, cowboy, farmer), but also because there’s a certain weight in the wrinkles on Costner’s face and the grey at his temples. He’s the embodiment of a specific brand of nostalgia all by himself, and the potential for him to be the spiritual centre of a soulless film isn’t merely squandered, it’s aggressively squandered. The Superman mythos at its best is about fathers and sons–the hero (Henry Cavill, playing Supes as Wolverine) has, after all, lost two fathers, orphaned twice in a strange land and compared visually and thematically to Christ in every incarnation. (“The last son of Krypton,” n’est-ce pas?) It’s a powerful theme, one that explains the enduring popularity of the character when wags have correctly identified that there are no real, viable external threats to someone who’s essentially all-powerful. The Jesus story is meaningless if Jesus never thought of Himself as merely a man carrying a terrible burden. Consider the elevation of Watchmen‘s Dr. Manhattan to inscrutable WMD, or The Incredibles‘ Mr. Incredible’s near-ruin in the role of family man. No, Superman’s weakness is existential. I fear that Snyder–a director who seems to abhor difference and adore surfaces in his pictures–is exactly the wrong person to explore the irony of an immaculate conception tortured in the role of outsider.

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 10, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Sam Raimi, Disney, Fantasy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams
screenplay by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Based on L. Frank Baum’s little-known Pussyhound of Oz, Sam Raimi’s career nadir Oz the Great and Powerful (hereafter O-Gap) answers the question of who you would ask to anchor your $300M+ tentpole extravaganza: yes, James Franco, who’s now claimed the mantle of the worst actor in the United States from the quiescent Paul Walker. Franco is an avatar of the picture’s bad decisions, from the Zach Braff-voiced CGI monkey sidekick to the sassy CGI Hummel figurine to the tragic miscasting of Mila Kunis as Theodora, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West. Yes indeedy, fans of the MGM original, of Baum’s wondrous series of books, and of the shit-show “Wicked” will all hate it equally–almost as much as neophytes to the whole damned mess who will come for what Raimi’s proudly proclaimed “the ultimate Disney movie” and leave with a mouthful of exactly as promised. It’s blindingly obnoxious, tasteless in a meaningless way, and occasionally makes reference to Army of Darkness just because, I suspect, Raimi’s last-resort defensive posture is to fall back on what he knows. But it’s not nearly enough to save him here. The argument with weight is that the more expensive a movie becomes, the less likely it’s going to be good; the first clue that Raimi is creatively bankrupt is that while his buddy Bruce Campbell appears in this film, Campbell isn’t the star.

Woochi: The Demon Slayer (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

May 26, 20132000s, 2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory, South Korea

Woochi
**/****
Image B+
Sound B+
Extras B-
starring
Kang Dong-won, Kim Yoon-seok, Im Soo-jung, Yoo Hae-jin
written
and directed by Choi Dong-hoon

click any image to
enlarge

by
Bryant Frazer With directors like
Park
Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, and Bong Joon-ho doing their level best to
reinvent
genres like the revenge thriller, the lurid melodrama, and even the
monster
movie, recent Korean cinema has been a wellspring of intrigue for movie buffs. You won't get that kind of ambition from Woochi,
a
middle-of-the-road adventure yarn constructed out of bits of Korean
mythology,
formulaic action beats, and Hollywood-style VFX work. It's
featherweight
through and through, adventurous only inasmuch as it switches gears
partway in,
moving from the generic conventions of a period martial-arts film to
those of
an urban fantasy opus set in modern South Korea, where centuries-old
wizards
are vying to retrieve an ancient relic. If you listen carefully enough
during
the quiet bits, you can almost hear the popcorn being chewed.

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

March 18, 20132012, 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

click 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".

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

February 4, 20131950s, 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

click 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 19^th-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:

Les visiteurs du soir (1942) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 17, 20121940s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, France, Romance, The Criterion Collection

a.k.a. The Devil’s Envoys
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Alain Cuny, Arletty, Marie Déa, Jules Berry
screenplay by Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche
directed by Marcel Carné

by Jefferson Robbins Fairytale is the oldest way we know to exorcise trauma or repurpose it to didactic ends. The moving image, probably the newest. So Marcel Carné’s Les visiteurs du soir (literally, The Night Visitors, though its international title is The Devil’s Envoys), created in France during a period of repression equalled only by the Terror, pulls both tricks. It’s a film, therefore it’s not reality, but it’s also shaped as a magical courtly romance and set in a distant past where romances were both entertainment and cultural transgression. Gilles (Alain Cuny) and Dominique (Arletty) are figures out of a medieval fresco or some monk’s illuminated pages, from Gilles’s suggestively forked mullet to Dominique’s graceful, benedictory poses. The two are minstrels on horseback in 1485–when troubadours carried news, gossip, and forbidden literature from one feudal estate to the next, singing songs of organic, passionate love for nobles trapped in arranged marriages. A long way from Vichy France, under the Nazi occupation, yet either world offered death as punishment for dissent, and both found succour in art that trespassed boundaries.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) [20th Anniversary – It’s Not Easy Being Scrooge Special Edition] – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

November 19, 20121990s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Muppets, Musical, UK

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, The Great Gonzo, Michael Caine
screenplay by Jerry Juhl, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
directed by Brian Henson

by Bill Chambers It's all but inevitable that the Muppets would take on Charles Dickens's venerable plug-and-play app A Christmas Carol at some point. More surprisingly, Michael Caine had not only not played Ebenezer Scrooge prior to The Muppet Christmas Carol (the role is like Hamlet for English actors who've plateaued), he had never before shared a stage with the Muppets, either. This despite his being, in the '70s and '80s, the exact calibre of star the Muppets pursued for cameos, and ubiquitous besides. He is, to my taste, not a harsh-enough Scrooge–there's an irrepressible compassion there when Bob Cratchit (Kermit the Frog) asks him for Christmas Day off. And The Muppet Christmas Carol frankly surrenders too much of the spotlight to this human character: If this were my first Muppet movie, I'd've felt especially double-crossed during his song number with the also-flesh-and-blood Meredith Braun, which was restored for the VHS and TV versions of the film kids have grown up with but is absent again on the new Blu-ray. (Former FFC contributor Ian Pugh tells me he "always, always, ALWAYS" used to fast-forward this part as a child.) It's almost cheating, to finally do the Muppet version of this tale and put an interloper in the lead, when the whole point of adapting it to a pre-existing framework is to match up the archetypes and balance that against audience expectations. It is, effectively, like getting to use characters as actors by casting them as different characters. This is also why Bill Murray works so well in Scrooged, because Scrooge pings off Murray's crabby, misanthropic '80s persona.

Midnight’s Children (2012)

November 1, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Fantasy, India, Theatrical

**/****
starring Satya Bhabha, Shahana Goswami, Rajat Kapoor, Darsheel Safary
screenplay by Salman Rushdie, based on his novel
directed by Deepa Mehta

by Angelo Muredda It's a nice bit of synergy, good for at least one heavily-latexed Tom
Hanks reincarnation, that Deepa Mehta's adaptation of Midnight's Children should come out so soon after the Wachowskis'
and Tom Tykwer's ill-fated stab at Cloud
Atlas, perhaps the only contemporary novel more labyrinthine than Salman
Rushdie's magic-realist opus. So earnest are both efforts that one is tempted
to ignore their fundamental failures as either cinema or adaptation and bow to
the good intentions of the faithful stewards. Yet one wonders about the value
of such graceful gestures when, combined, the two films take up a staggering
five hours–indefensible, given the limpid mysticism they have to show for
themselves at their muted conclusions. Read together, they're proof that in the
absence of a real necessity for adaptation, big novels make for small movies.

Barbarella (1968) – Blu-ray Disc

August 5, 20121960s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, France, Italy, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Marcel Marceau, Ugo Tognazzi
screenplay by Terry Southern and Roger Vadim, based on the comic by Jean Claude Forest and Claude Brulé
directed by Roger Vadim

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer Barbarella begins in the fur-lined cockpit of a space-faring starcraft, fabulously appointed with a statue of a moon goddess and, inexplicably, what looks to be a full-sized replica of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte. Despite the high-flown frivolity of its conception and the infectiously groovy theme song, this tableau does not represent the most quintessentially with-it of all possible sci-fi worlds. That changes when the astronaut who has floated into view starts pulling off the different panels of her moon-suit to reveal, underneath the shapeless layers of scuba-like gear, a naked strawberry-blonde with slender, delicate fingers and legs that don't quit.

Priest (2011) [Unrated] – Blu-ray Disc

August 1, 20122011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Vampire

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Paul Bettany, Karl Urban, Cam Gigandet, Christopher Plummer
screenplay by Cory Goodman, based on the graphic novel series by Min-Woo Hyung
directed by Scott Stewart

by Walter Chaw I'm completely unfamiliar with the Min-Woo Hyong graphic novels on which visual-effects guy Scott Stewart's Priest is based, and the biggest surprise of the picture isn't that the guy who did the abominable Legion managed to make something so watchable, but that Priest made me want to track down Hyong's work. Before seeing this movie, I just sort of assumed that the comic was another weird west thing along the lines of Vertigo's Preacher; after, I'm led to believe that it's a canny little mélange of cyberpunk, weird west, and horror comics, with some solid Ghost in the Shell manga tossed into the mix. There's not a minute of the film, mind, that's without a clear antecedent–not one second that passes without a namecheck of not only stuff like Blade Runner (on the "Final Cut" of which Stewart served as an uncredited techie during his time at ILM) and, most obviously, Alien/Aliens, but also The Searchers as tortured, titular Priest (Paul Bettany) declares that if his vamp-abducted niece Lucy (Lily Collins) becomes infected, it would be his pleasure (?) to dispatch her.

Bell, Book, and Candle (1958) – Blu-ray Disc

July 15, 20121950s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Fantasy, Romance

***½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, Jack Lemmon, Elsa Lanchester
screenplay by Daniel Taradash, based on the play by John Van Druten
directed by Richard Quine

by Jefferson Robbins What a strange companion piece this makes for Vertigo, released the same year by Paramount. Columbia issued Bell, Book, and Candle as a Christmas confection, but it’s bitter chocolate–both for the extratextual residues carried over by Vertigo co-stars James Stewart and Kim Novak and for the conceit of a powerful woman who must rein herself in to become worthy of a clueless paramour. In each, Stewart is a bewitched man who throws away much of his dignity in pursuit of a sexual obsession and torments a beautiful apparition of a woman to tears. Re-examined now, despite its technical proficiency, its occasionally risqué dialogue, and its mindfulness of New York’s post-Beat subculture of the time, Bell, Book, and Candle is also a fantasy of limited vision. It posits a world of real magic but never contemplates the ramifications beyond its heroes’ immediate personal needs. This shortsightedness, unfortunately, is now engraved on the thirteenth chromosome of all romantic comedies; the exceptions that dare glance up at the wider world are mutations. Still, Bell, Book, and Candle carries off some covert gender reversals most contemporary comedies couldn’t muster, and it echoes in the “Harry Potter” franchise of novels and films in ways that make me think J.K. Rowling was a fan.

Camelot (1967) (DigiBook) – Blu-ray Disc

July 9, 20121960s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Musical, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero, David Hemmings
screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, based on his play and The Once and Future King by T.H. White
directed by Joshua Logan

by Jefferson Robbins Joshua Logan's Camelot sucker-punched audiences, I suspect, and did so in slow-motion. Maybe the source musical, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, did as well. Mention the legend of King Arthur and our first notions are of magic and righteous triumph; we forget the betrayal and Fall. The overall air of the film is stabs of paradise framed by battle and tears, with most of the misery encroaching from offstage. Yet when the King's dream finally dies, it dies viscerally. Find late in Camelot Arthur (Richard Harris) hiding from the collapse of his new social order in the wooded bower where he once studied with his vanished tutor Merlyn. He imagines soaring as a bird, as he did while Merlyn's pupil, but his spirit-animal is interrupted by a hunter. It's Mordred (David Hemmings), the fruit of Arthur's forgotten sins, and his entry with bow and arrow reasserts the brutality that will pull down the kingdom.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

June 20, 20122012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Horror, Russia, Superhero, Vampire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Benjamin Walker, Dominic Cooper, Anthony Mackie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith and Simon Kinberg, based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith
directed Timur Bekmambetov

by Walter Chaw That idiot Timur Bekmambetov continues his reign of terror with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, an adaptation of a Seth Grahame-Smith novel co-written by Grahame-Smith himself that tries to walk the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies line between reverence and camp but only manages to be ugly and stupid. Abe’s (Benjamin Walker) superpower is honesty, natch–and a silver-coated axe. One night, as a child, after witnessing a vampire kill his mother but somehow not turn her into a vampire (vampires don’t fear the sunlight in this one, either, or at least fear it only as much as Edgar Winter does), Abe embarks on a vengeance-crusade aided by vampire hunter-trainer Henry (Dominic Cooper). Henry has a secret! It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter inspires a sense of absolute despair and hopelessness in the viewer, as it’s not just bad, it’s misguided in every way a film can be misguided, from conception to execution. There’s a horse-stampede fight, a burning bridge and a train, grotesque misuse of slow-motion and CGI, and nary a naked Angelina Jolie anywhere to leaven the stew. I want to muster up some outrage at the portrayal of Confederate soldiers as bloodsucking legions of the damned, but that actually strikes me as the least offensive of the film’s myriad offenses.

Brave (2012)

June 20, 20122012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
screenplay by Mark Andrews and Steve Purcell and Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi
directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman

by Walter Chaw Brave…isn't. Not very. It's by far the most conventional Pixar film, and while it's better than either Cars, that's only because the Cars movies are simply awful. Brave has a plucky girl heroine who disobeys her mother, makes a hash of things, then solves everything at the end through the murder of the antagonist. It has an adorable animal sidekick (three of them, actually), treats an entire culture like a broad ethnic joke, and misses every single opportunity to be about something. Huzzah! When we say as a culture that something's for children, we mean that it's better–unless we're talking about media culture. Brave is for children, and its only connection to things like WALL·E, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, or Ratatouille is its company's pedigree, fading fast until Brad Bird or Andrew Stanton decides to strap 'em on and jump back in the ol' computer-animated saddle, riding to the rescue as the company founded on their beautiful complexities descends into absolute, uncontroversial, shallow mendacity.

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

May 30, 20122012, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, Sam Claflin
screenplay by Evan Daugherty and John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw A handful of arresting images aside (and even those owe more than a passing debt to artist Bev Doolittle, or Terry Gilliam minus the tchotchkes–and here's Lily Cole again, post-Parnassus), Rupert Sanders's dreary Snow White and the Huntsman plods along without much sense on its way to producing not much with little impact and no purpose. Though beaten to it by Gary Oldman's legendary turn in the inexplicable Tiptoes, it has a gaggle of hale British actors playing dwarves, including a humiliated Bob Hoskins, tasked with being blind-guy exposition for little miss Joan of Arc. And it has a gorgeous Charlize Theron, demonstrating in full fetish-wear that she has no idea she's in a Twilight ripper by turning in a pretty good character performance as an evil step-witch who's spent way too much time reading The Beauty Myth. Indeed, the Big Bad Wolf in this fairytale is Naomi Wolf.

Conquest (1983); Contraband (1980); Zombie (1979) – DVDs|Zombie (1979) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

March 15, 20121970s, 1980s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Spain, Zombie

CONQUEST
½*/**** Image D+ Sound C
starring Fabio Testi, Marcel Bozzuffi, Ivana Monti, Guido Alberti
screenplay by Ettore Sanzo and Gianni de Chiara
directed by Lucio Fulci

Luca il contrabbandiere
**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Fabio Testi, Marcel Bozzuffi, Ivana Monti, Guido Alberti
screenplay by Ettore Sanzo and Gianni de Chiara
directed by Lucio Fulci

by Walter Chaw There's something decidedly uncinematic about the films of Lucio Fulci (excepting Don't Torture a Duckling and Four of the Apocalypse, which actually sort of rock). If not for his fascination with gore effects and his propensity for casting irritating children in irritating children parts, it'd be hard to find anything to separate his work from the grindhouse ghetto of, say, Jess Franco. As it is, the stilted claims at auteurism (he's known as the master of eye violence, mainly for a few juicy bits from The Beyond and Zombie) do more, perhaps, to relegate his work to a sort of camp gulag: the Siberia of legitimate cinema, where adolescent tools congregate for midnight showings armed with irony and a crippling baggage of disdain and contempt. I liked "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and believed that I liked it because I was sophisticated; in time, you realize that you like it because you're an officious prick who sort of gets off on mocking movies. I think a lot of people would argue that this is the role of the film critic, but I'd offer that a critic–a good one–loves film so much that he or she is offended when a movie is terrible. There's no real joy in defiling altars, particularly when they're your own.

Hugo (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 27, 20122011, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Family, Fantasy, France, Mystery, UK

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz
screenplay by John Logan, based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Channelling Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Robert Zemeckis to numbing effect, the once-vital Martin Scorsese follows his elderly Shutter Island with the honest-to-God borderline-demented Hugo, in which the titular French urchin helps Georges Méliès reclaim his cinematic legacy. It's a shrine to the birth of cinema, blah blah blah, the kind of thing someone as involved as Scorsese has been in film preservation was destined to make, I guess, at least at the exact moment that the ratio of working brain cells gave over the majority. It's heartbreaking to see someone as vital as Scorsese used to be end up in a place as sentimental and treacly as this, resorting to retelling the Pinocchio story with little Hugo (Asa Butterfield) as a clock-fixer (really) whose life's mission is to repair an automaton his dead dad (Jude Law) found in a museum attic–and who dreams one night that…wait for it…he himself is the hollow, broken automaton. I wish I didn't have to go on. Did I mention that it's in 3D? And that it's two-and-a-half hours long but feels like a slow seven or eight? Seriously, Shoah is a breezier watch.