Amadeus: Director’s Cut (1984/2002) – [Two-Disc Special Edition] DVD|[DigiBook] Blu-ray Disc

Amadeus: Director’s Cut (1984/2002) – [Two-Disc Special Edition] DVD|[DigiBook] Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, France, Music, Musical

Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus: Director’s Cut
***/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
BD – Image B Sound A Extras A
starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow
screenplay by Peter Shaffer, based on his play
directed by Milos Forman

by Walter Chaw Bringing the highbrow to the status-hungry middle in the same way as those “Bach’s Greatest Hits” collections and the awful faux-llies of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Milos Forman’s bawdy, jittery adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s fanciful play “Amadeus” is not so much about Mozart as it is about genius and its burden on the mediocre. Mozart (Tom Hulce) is an adolescent boor touched by the hand of God; Emperor Joseph’s (Jeffrey Jones) court composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) becomes obsessed and desperately jealous of Mozart’s gift, leading him to the madhouse and confessions of murder. Amadeus works because of Forman’s gift for the seedy (and portraying asylums–he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, after all) and because of Abraham’s deeply felt performance.

Hot Docs 2012: Summer of Giacomo (d. Alessandro Comodin)

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Italy

***/****

by Angelo Muredda Conceptually sandwiched somewhere between Maren Ade’s terrific Everyone Else and Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Alessandro Comodin’s Summer of Giacomo is a richly textured portrait of dumb love in the grass, times two. As the lengthy credits of electric blue font superimposed on black and scored to languid birdsong suggest, this is chiefly an aesthetic experience, and Comodin delivers a gorgeously lensed (on 16mm) account of twentyish Giacomo and Stefani’s wayward hike through the countryside in search of a river by which to set up camp for the afternoon. The press notes tell us that Stefani is a childhood friend, but that hardly matters: all that we gather and need to gather is that something might have happened at some point, but outside of this hike, it’s over. What we’re left with, then, apart from their pathfinding and inevitable squabble, is a dense sensory record of the seriously goofy and – this is nicely underplayed – deaf Giacomo’s experience. His cochlear implant is briefly glimpsed in the first over-the-shoulder shot of him clanging randomly at a drum set, and you could happily read the film as an experiment in attending to the sounds, both slight and explosive, that pass through the device en route to his dufus skull.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011)

Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Theatrical

Les neiges du Kilimandjaro
**½/****
starring Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Gérard Meylan, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet
screenplay by Jean-Louis Milesi and Robert Guédiguian
directed by Robert Guédiguian

by Angelo Muredda Committed leftist Robert Guédiguian’s newest film The Snows of Kilimanjaro opens with a lottery. The local Marseilles shipyard is set to lay off twenty workers, and faithful union leader Michel (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) has been entrusted with carrying out the draw, eventually calling out even his own name–entered voluntarily despite his privileged position. The titular snows refer not to the Hemingway short story of the same name but to a popular song recited at Michel’s premature retirement party, a paean to the middle-class luxuries of touring the world in one’s golden years and a good fit for the African vacation his friends have ordered for him and his wife, Marie-Claire (Ariana Ascaride, excellent). Alas, before the couple gets its due, Michel’s unionist chickens come home to roost in the form of a humiliating robbery of the travel fund later that evening, which could only have been committed by one of the party’s guests–likely one of the unfortunate nineteen other names he called out earlier that week.

A Man Escaped (1956)

Posted in****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, France, Theatrical

Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut
****/****
starring François Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, Maurice Beerblock, Roland Monod
written and directed by Robert Bresson

by Angelo Muredda “This is a true story. I’ve told it as it happened, unadorned. –Robert Bresson.” So begins A Man Escaped, with a handwritten statement of purpose that throws down a gauntlet to itself. Based on the memoirs of French Resistance member André Devigny (here rechristened Fontaine (François Letterier)), who escaped from Lyon’s Fort Montluc prison just hours prior to his execution, the film delivers on its ambitious promise. It stays faithful to this claim to tell the story unadorned except with the light garnish of Fontaine’s cool descriptions of the task before him–really an ever-unfolding expanse of smaller tasks like chipping away at a doorframe with a spoon over a month’s time. Its focus is almost strictly on matters technical, to the point where even its spiritual ruminations spring organically out of moments of real labour. When a fellow prisoner’s escape attempt is undone by his overeager hope for his next life to begin, he passes his knowledge of the precise spot he went wrong onto Fontaine with the solemnity of a wizened gamer delivering an annotated walkthrough to a novice. If these men are going to be reborn, we’re assured, it’ll only be by their own hands.

Albert Nobbs (2011)

Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Ireland, Theatrical, UK

½*/****
starring Glenn Close, Mia Wasikowska, Aaron Johnson, Janet McTeer
screenplay by Gabriella Prekop, John Banville & Glenn Close, based on the short story by George Moore
directed by Rodrigo Garcia

by Walter Chaw On the one hand, Rodrigo Garcia’s Albert Nobbs is a patently ridiculous science-fiction tale set in a Victorian England run amuck with drag-king transvestites just looking for an opportunity to scrape out the same hardscrabble Dickensian existence as their male counterparts. On the other, it’s a star-in-her-dotage’s suffocating vanity piece excruciatingly bloated from a more comfortable one-act scale into full-blown awards-baiting period-piece virulence. If you discount Glenn Close-as-Bicentennial Man’s freakish appearance, it’s still impossible to believe that all of her/his co-workers have afforded him/her the same courtesy. It’s an issue not ameliorated by the appearance of house painter Hubert (Janet McTeer), who, in one of the more terrifying scenes of nudity in the history of cinema, reveals that he is also a she, and married, I guess, to the oddest-looking one from The Commitments (Bronagh Gallagher). It’s that moment of horrific, aggressive, obscene (?) sexuality (stoked by her pairing with another oddity) that briefly clarifies what Albert Nobbs should have spent the rest of its time being–the one moment that hints at what David Cronenberg would have done with this material. Alas, the horror of the body is relegated to just this moment and later only ancillary to a breakout of typhus, while a flat, useless subplot involving a young handyman (Aaron Johnson) and the grasping maid Helen (Mia Wasikowska) he’s banging takes centre court. Albert wants Helen for his own, you see, because he’d like to open a tobacco shop.

Belle de jour (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Italy, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page
screenplay by Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel
directed by Luis Buñuel

by Jefferson Robbins It’s fitting that a film about a woman agonizingly balanced between sexual repression and sexual freedom depicts an inner life balanced between two different periods in history. The opening moments of Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour lead us to believe it will be a period piece. In a static wide shot, a black horse-drawn coach on a country lane leisurely approaches. Two bystanders appear to root in the hedges along the path, too distant to be clearly made out: Are they peasants? Estate groundskeepers? Our eyes are programmed now to expect something Edwardian, or, more applicable to the subject matter, Victorian. Only when an automobile makes a turn in the distance do we realize the setting is contemporary. The modernity comes as a jolt, but from this sequence we will return to some kind of imagined past again and again as the heroine–a very modern woman, one whose frightened explorations map the sexual realms of our own later decades–slips between the cracks in her own mind.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in****/****, 2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt
screenplay by Bridget O’Connor & Peter Straughan, based on the novel by John le Carré
directed by Tomas Alfredson

by Walter Chaw The easy thing is to say that Tomas Alfredson has followed up his tremendous vampire flick Let the Right One In with another vampire flick, a story of Cold War British Intelligence as men in shadows, exhausted, living off the vibrancy of others. Yet Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the Swedish director’s adaptation of John le Carré’s seminal spy novel, is something a good deal more than a clever segue from one genre film to another. Less a companion piece to the latest Mission: Impossible than a bookend to Lars von Trier’s end-of-the-world Melancholia, it’s a character study, sure, but more accurately it’s an examination of a culture of gestures and intimations, where a flutter of an eyelid causes a hurricane in another part of a corrupt, insular world. Naturally, its timeliness has nothing to do with its literal milieu (all Russian bogeys and ’70s stylings)–nothing to do with recent world events that have an entire CIA cell blown up in Iran and Lebanon–and everything to do with its overpowering atmosphere of feckless power and utter resignation. It’s a spy thriller that Alfred Lord Tennyson would’ve written–the very filmic representation of acedia.

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

Posted in2011, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Family, Fantasy, France, Mystery, UK

Hugocapcap

*/**** 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.

The Rules of the Game (1939) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1930s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Jean Renoir, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, Satire, The Criterion Collection

Rulesofthegame

La règle du jeu
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Nora Grégor, Marcel Dalio, Mila Parély, Roland Toutain
screenplay by Jean Renoir and Carl Koch
directed by Jean Renoir

by Jefferson Robbins One political cue most firmly plants Jean Renoir’s masterwork in pre-World War II France, and it doesn’t come amidst the posturing of the elegant rich at La Colinière country manor. Rather, it’s in the kitchen, where the domestic staff breaks bread and gossips about the master of the house, the Marquis Robert De La Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), outed by the help as a “yid” whose family made good with money and a title. The gossipers turn for confirmation to the huntsman who’s just materialized on the stairs, and the combination of words is chilling: “Isn’t that right, Schumacher?” The italics are mine, and despite the fierce Teutonic consonants of his name, the Marquis’s game warden (Gaston Modot) is Alsatian. He remains metaphorically sticky, though, since his home state was variously French or German for 200 years, and his dress and cap bespeak armed authority. He’s rough and field-hardened, arguably ignorant, and looked down upon by his fellow servants, who see him as a thing apart from their world. Cuckolded and exiled from his wife, the housemaid Lisette (Paulette Dubost), he’s also the most prone to physical violence as he seeks to control her and eliminate all rivalry. On the matter of La Chesnaye’s Jewishness, Schumacher demurs: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But the point is made, the knife already twisted.

The Artist (2011)

Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, Silent, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell
written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius

by Walter Chaw It’s tempting to dismiss Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist as fluff. It’s tempting to take the side of Kim Novak when she complains about this fluff using Bernard Hermann’s Vertigo score in vain, and a few critics and Internet memes have done exactly that. Yet The Artist is more than a passing fancy precisely because it uses the Vertigo theme correctly in a sentence. Indeed, it even has its way with film preservationists and other snobs (the kind who champion Hugo, for instance) by suggesting that obsessive movie love to the exclusion of all else is the same sort of illness, ultimately, as necrophilia. In the fluffy course of its runtime, in fact, The Artist manages to be as subversive and scabrous a Hollywood artifact as Sunset Blvd., finding its monkey funeral towards the end instead of at the beginning but presenting a close-up Mr. DeMille at its conclusion almost as ambiguous and doomed. It’s popular because it keeps its edges carefully sheathed…but they’re there. And I think people are offended once they realize–most of them long, long after the fact, and through other avenues–that Hazanavicius had the temerity to peanut-butter a little obsessive, consumptive, solipsistic love in there to gum up all the crevices. I’ll be honest: I think that if you don’t believe The Artist is correct in its use of Vertigo, you probably also thought that Vertigo was a love story.

A Separation (2011)

Posted in2011, 2012, Australia, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Iran, Theatrical

Jodaeiye Nader az Simin
***½/****
starring Peyman Maadi, Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat, Shahab Hosseini, Sarina Farhadi
written and directed by Asghar Farhadi

by Angelo Muredda In Armond White’s latest “Better-Than” list, the champion of surreal juxtaposition pits Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation against Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block and finds the former wanting. “Action vs. Talk,” he summarizes, in the poetry of tinyurl. Apart from the arbitrary matchup he stages between two very good films about getting to know your neighbours under the harshest of circumstances, White isn’t completely off the mark. I won’t defend his trite claim about A Separation‘s alleged “Iranian didacticism,” but the film certainly is voluble. Farhadi wears his dramaturgy on his sleeve, opening with a carefully trained two-shot of middle-class couple Nader (Peyman Maadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) at divorce court, parked in adjacent chairs as if settling in for a parent-teacher interview. They face us directly as they make their respective cases to a bored, unseen auditor: Simin wants to emigrate to the West; Nader refuses to leave his dementia-suffering father behind or grant his wife permission to leave with their eleven-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director’s own daughter)–more an effort to stall their separation, it seems, than an arbitrary flexing of his patriarchal muscle. Voluble, as I said, but not verbose. It’s a provocative and deceptively straightforward setup, promising naturalism via Maadi’s and Hatami’s easy rapport while undercutting it with the artifice of their situation. Though the judge is unmoved by either side in this rhetorical showdown–“My finding,” he tells Simin, “is that your problem is a small problem”–the stakes of this “small” quagmire, which is also a national and a gendered one, are made painfully clear to us by the couple’s impassioned performances.

Carnage (2011)

Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Theatrical

***/****
starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, John C. Reilly
screenplay by Yasmina Reza and Roman Polanski, based on Reza’s play “God of Carnage”
directed by Roman Polanski

by Angelo Muredda It’s tempting to read Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s celebrated play God of Carnage as a doodle, the cinematic equivalent of one character’s pet name for his wife. Unlike, say, Chinatown, nothing much is at stake, and unlike last year’s The Ghost Writer, there are no doe-eyed innocents for us to coddle. (“He can’t drown two ghost writers, for God’s sake; you’re not kittens!” might go down as the sweetest line in Polanski’s tart career.) Yet Carnage, set in an antiseptic Brooklyn residence that’s decked in coffee-table books begging to be sprayed with vomit, is vintage if minor Polanski, from its claustrophobic environment and precise compositions to its droll flirtation with nihilism.

Tomboy (2011)

Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Theatrical

***/****
starring Zoé Héran, Jeanne Disson, Malonn Lévana, Sophie Cattani, Mathieu Demy
written and directed by Céline Sciamma

by Angelo Muredda “It suits you.” So Lisa (Jeanne Disson) tells her new crush, Mikael (Zoé Héran), after she’s given him a lipstick-and-rouge makeover. What Lisa doesn’t know is that Mikael is nominally Laure, a 10-year-old girl who’s just moved into the neighbourhood and is more interested in donning baggy pants and stretched shirts to play soccer with the local ruffians than in wearing the feminine outfits her mother (Sophie Cattani) hangs in her closet. Tomboy, director and screenwriter Céline Sciamma’s poignant and sharply observed follow-up to 2007’s more acerbic Water Lilies, smartly downplays the precarious position Laure is in: trying on a new identity in this foreign environment could be disastrous today, it suggests, but there’s always tomorrow. Sciamma mostly steers clear of the prescriptive aphorisms about girlhood that Catherine Breillat’s recent output trades in. Instead, she gravitates towards the more mundane ambiguity of moments when adolescents, already in a highly transitional state, grow wise to the arbitrary way their identity gets decided for them by accidents of birth and other people’s coercive gestures. You get the sense that Laure is all too conscious of how innocent gifts of dresses–or, for that matter, lipstick–might actually be gender-normative roadmaps, but until an unfortunate last-act revelation, the film doesn’t reach for the polemic; any revelations come only through cinematographer Crystel Fournier’s tight hold on our protagonist.

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2011, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, France, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto P. Quintaville, Aldo Valletti
screenplay by Pupi Avati (uncredited) and Pier Paolo Pasolini
directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

by Bryant Frazer There’s a tradition among purveyors of BDSM pornography to append a coda to their project in which the participants in various potentially alarming scenarios are finally glimpsed, all smiles, revelling in the afterglow of a clearly consensual exercise. I assume this custom has very practical benefits–for one thing, it might help stave off prosecution for obscenity or sex-trafficking. But it’s also a signal from the community making the videos to the community watching them that the performances are undertaken with high spirits, lest there be any misunderstanding about the actual circumstances of their making. Despite any apparent unpleasantness, dear viewer, all involved (top and bottom, dominant and submissive) are working towards the ultimate goal of pleasure, not pain.

Attack the Block (2011) + Super 8 (2011)|Super 8 – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Attack the Block (2011) + Super 8 (2011)|Super 8 – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, France, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

ATTACK THE BLOCK
***/****
starring Jodie Whittaker, John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh
written and directed by Joe Cornish

SUPER 8
***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso
written and directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw Joe Cornish’s low-budget creature-feature Attack the Block is a charmer, a delight, the kind of rare film–like Jack Sholder’s The Hidden, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, or Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile–that devotees will latch onto, and for good reason, with the fervour afforded genuine cult classics. It has energy to burn, a strange affinity with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and a super-cool monster that looks like a cross between Ira from the “Moonshadow” comic and a grizzly bear. That most of it was carried off with practical effects is a shot in the arm for practical effects and a bearer of the nostalgia banner that seems to be popular lately, what with our dreams and memories fodder again for the celluloid couch. Better still, it introduces a new star into the future pantheon in John Boyega, who has charisma to burn as gang leader-cum-saviour Moses. The movie’s tale of a group of street toughs has drawn comparisons to The Warriors, but I think the better analogy is Spielberg’s E.T., not just in that alchemy between the fantastic and the absolutely mundane (South England’s Lambeth neighbourhood), but also in the crafting of a living youth subculture alive with its own language, ritual, and custom. It’s not too much to say that, at its best, Attack the Block makes you feel the way you did when the guys took things into their own hands to deliver the flying, omniscient, omnipotent E.T. to his landing site. It taps into the irrational cool. Which doesn’t happen very often.

Mysteries of Lisbon (2010)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Mystery, Portugal, Romance, Theatrical

Mistérios de Lisboa
****/****
starring Adriano Luz, Maria João Bastos, Ricardo Pereira
screenplay by Carlos Saboga, based on the novel by Camilo Castelo Branco
directed by Raúl Ruiz

by Angelo Muredda “It would be long and tedious to explain,” Adriano Luz’s mysterious man of the cloth Father Dinis offers shortly before the intermission point of prolific Chilean director Raúl Ruiz’s staggering Mysteries of Lisbon, the fleetest four-hour-plus spectacle you’ll see this year. It’s not the first time characters promise to explain things later (nor is it the last), their second favourite activity after explaining things now. As promised in an unattributed statement in the title credits, what follows is an amiably digressive “diary of suffering” stuffed with such deferrals and explanations. And a beautiful diary it is. Ruiz, who passed away earlier this year, is perhaps best-known stateside for his lyrical Proust adaptation Time Regained–a nice warm-up, in retrospect, for this even more sprawling and melancholy saga of childhood and loss, an adaptation of Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco’s 1854 novel of the same name. The fruit of his labours this time is astonishing: an adaptation that’s at once deeply reverent towards conventions of nineteenth-century fiction and attuned to their radical possibilities. Ruiz, in other words, finds nothing tedious about these stories, and sees in their mysterious doublings, crude disguises, generational secrets, and grand unmaskings an opportunity to dwell on the nature of storytelling, both its revelatory potential and its artifice.

The Future is Now: FFC Interviews Miranda July|The Future (2011)

Posted in2011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Interviews, Romance, Theatrical, UK

MjulyinterviewtitleMiranda July reflects on The Future

THE FUTURE
***/****
starring Hamish Linklater, Miranda July, David Warshofsky, Isabella Acres
written and directed by Miranda July
In The Future, writer/director/star Miranda July indulges in the same wayward malaise of her previous film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, but, somewhat ironically, the focus on the uncertainty of “what comes next” makes this one seem a lot less scattershot. Dance teacher Sophie (July) and tech-support guy Jason (Hamish Linklater) have rescued a sickly cat from the wild and sent him to an animal shelter, and they’ve got a month until they can reclaim him. However, the cat will require ’round-the-clock care from them to stay alive, so they conclude that this is their last “free” month before years-long responsibilities squander their potential, and they quit their jobs in a bid to become more “spontaneous.” Jason goes door-to-door selling trees for an environmental program and Sophie decides to film “thirty dances over thirty days” for a short-track to YouTube stardom. But neither one is prepared for the apathy and self-loathing that greets their cutesy little endeavours, and as they spin their wheels, they gravitate towards people who appear to “really have their shit together”: Sophie becomes attracted to a single father with a small business (David Warshofsky), while Jason regularly visits an old man (Joe Putterlik) who once sold him a used hairdryer. What’s important is that July quickly establishes that these behaviours are not a matter of self-improvement or jealousy–it’s just a hell of a lot easier to stare at the lives of others and marvel at how organized they look from the outside. In other words, Sophie and Jason take no real “action” of their own accord; everything they do is just another bit of slacktivism to avoid the responsibilities for which they’re supposedly preparing. Her self-esteem takes a hit as she views other women’s “dancing” videos, so she cancels her Internet and calls it a great opportunity to focus. July makes this sheltered worldview all the more fascinating by introducing an element of surrealism–soon, her characters’ paradoxical desires to move forward and stand still give them to power to bend the universe to their will, as an imminent break-up is stalled by the literal stoppage of time. (And yet, time still manages to march on.) The self-conscious obviousness of its metaphors gives The Future a strong grounding in reality, rendering even July’s silliest notions–such as a series of helium-inflected monologues from the cat himself (the only neglected “victim” in this scenario), waiting for his loving masters to return–deeply affecting.–IP

August 7, 2011|Miranda July is very much like the characters she plays, and they are very much like her: she stares at you with wide, intense eyes, and her responses trail off once she realizes that she’s revealed all she wants to about a given subject. She’s in town to promote her second feature film, The Future, for the Boston Independent Film Festival, and we both seem a little eager to discover if, indeed, this sophomore effort can be discussed at length. Over the course of our conversation, we shared a couple of awkward laughs–in mutual recognition, I think, of the inherent absurdity of this meeting; we had been tasked to interpret and explain an intentionally abstract piece dealing with moving on and growing older, about which the creator must refuse a “full” explanation. Still, though July insists on keeping some things secret, she comes across as utterly sincere–so much so that I felt a pang of remorse when I realized that I had unintentionally lied to her by not attending the festival’s screening of The Future like I said I would. Several days later, given another interview opportunity for a different film, I made it a point to ask her husband Mike Mills to apologize on my behalf.

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

Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras D
starring Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones, Frank Langella
screenplay by Oliver Butcher & Stephen Cornwell, based on the novel Out of My Head by Didier van Cauwelaert
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Ian Pugh Knight and Day, Salt, and The Tourist failed as ’60s spy throwbacks because they constantly reassured you that everything would be all right; if there was something about their various intrigues we didn’t quite understand (or weren’t supposed to know before some big third-act twist), we could rest assured that someone was pulling the strings to keep the world from falling apart. Unknown finally removes that safety net, and from there it approaches the fear and uncertainty that so fascinated Alfred Hitchcock and Terence Young about the Cold War–this sinking feeling that whatever conspiracies may be driving the plot, there will never be a way to extricate yourself from their tangled webs. True, Unknown‘s primary attraction is the dissection of identity, and it’s simply incapable of stunning you in the same way that the Bourne trilogy stunned you with its own methodical examinations of the self. (If the picture feels derivative of that series, that’s because it is.) But at the end, you’re left feeling uncomfortable, because you just know you haven’t uncovered all its secrets yet.

The Mission (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2011, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, France, Palme d'Or Winner, UK

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, Ray McAnally, Aidan Quinn
screenplay by Robert Bolt
directed by Roland Joffé

by Jefferson Robbins Career arcs fascinate and depress me. The Mission finds Roland Joffé at his early peak on just his second movie, making what amounts to a $25 million art film starring one of America’s best-known actors. Did Joffé change beyond this point, or did he refuse to change while the ecosystem altered around him? A bit of both, I suspect, after Fat Man and Little Boy and The Scarlet Letter. These epics went unembraced, and Oscars or no, the financiers weren’t always going to settle for contemplative examinations of people caught in the turning of historical tides. Yet that’s where Joffé was at his best–and maybe he couldn’t get beyond it. Spalding Gray had him pegged early on: “Leave it to a Brit to tell you your own history,” he advised in Swimming to Cambodia. Sure enough, as in The Killing Fields, Joffé’s The Mission examines pangs of conscience at a critical moment of political, religious, and cultural upheaval.

The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Directors: Dario Argento, DVD, France, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, West Germany

Il gatto a nove code
**½/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring James Franciscus, Karl Malden, Catherine Spaak, Pier Paolo Capponi 
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Nicknamed “The Italian Hitchcock,” Dario Argento is more aptly classified “The Italian DePalma”: a director with his own set of stylistic excesses who, especially early in his career, borrowed many tropes from the Master of Suspense en route to crafting his own distinctive thrillers. Again like DePalma, Argento of late has fallen on hard times, creating a series of clunkers that have blundered from the brilliant homage of his nascence to the tired and derivative garbage of his twilight. Indicated by somewhat straightforward mystery plots that elaborate death scenes and gory climaxes serve to punctuate, the giallo (so named for the colour of the covers–yellow–that enshrouded Italian penny dreadfuls) genre of thriller reached its stylistic apex with Argento’s 1975 Deep Red, just prior to the director experimenting in the “supernatural” sub-genre of Italian horror with his masterpiece, Suspiria. Argento’s first three films, the so-called “animal trilogy” (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o’ Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet) deepened the giallo as introduced to cinema by the late, great Mario Bava.