The Expendables (2010) [Extended Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

January 9, 2012Posted in2000s, 2010, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain, Thriller

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke
written and directed by Sylvester Stallone

by Walter Chaw After the remarkably tough and uncompromising Rambo and the almost-unbearably poignant and transparent Rocky Balboa, it’d be fair to nurse a healthy anticipation for Sylvester Stallone’s paean to the ’80s blockbuster, The Expendables. Alas, what’s on display owes more to Stallone’s Rhinestone than to his venerable Rocky series. A redux of Wild Hogs as embarrassing, boring, and ineptly- shot and edited as the original, The Expendables even ends the same way, with geezers riding off into the sunset on the backs of their four-fifths-life-crisis choppers. Tattoos and plunging v-neck Ts the rule of the day, it’s more Rogaine commercial than action movie, making fun of itself in the way that old guys who are genuinely insecure about their age make fun of themselves. It’s awkward. It’s also, in addition to being almost entirely free of excitement or a single line of dialogue that isn’t some syncopated mix of grunting and tough-guy cliché, maybe a no-shit adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano”. That’s the only way to explain how it is that a film tits-deep in dialogue could have not one exchange that makes any sense whatsoever. The way the movie’s put together, too, is a model of the Theatre of the Absurd’s occasional dabbling in non-sequiturs–something The Expendables seems to address at one point when the horsey-looking, freshly-waterboarded damsel (Giselle Itié) wonders how Stallone’s Barney has magically appeared as her saviour in a Caribbean (?) dictator’s dungeon. “I just am!” mumbles Barney. Who am I to argue with that?

Carnage (2011)

December 23, 2011Posted 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.

Anonymous (2011)

October 28, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Germany, Shakespeare, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, Derek Jacobi
screenplay by John Orloff
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Angelo Muredda Anonymous comes out swinging against the Shakespeare industry with all the force of a midsummer night’s fart in the wind. If director Roland Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff–a match forged in Mordor–had their way, the film would upend university curriculums, supplementing every Shakespeare syllabus with an elliptical “…but what if…” written in invisible ink on the last page. To that end, they’ve taken their baby on a tour of college campuses, and scheduled Facebook-webcast debates in which they’ve stunned Shakespeareans like James Shapiro with wise nuggets comparable to Adam Sandler’s astonishingly incoherent address at the end of Billy Madison. It hasn’t been clear sailing all the way, mind: popular historian Stephen Marche recently took to the NEW YORK TIMES to debunk such “prophets of truthiness”–Emmerich and Orloff are but a new, high-profile strain of Oxfordians, a group who name nobleman Edward de Vere as the true author of Shakespeare’s texts, even the ones dated after his death–for advancing a lunatic conspiracy theory based on little more than class snobbery. Shakespeare scholar Holger Syme was even less charitable, proposing in a blog entry that has since become an Oxfordian recruitment camp fronted by Orloff himself that the film’s chief sin is not historical inaccuracy but its filmmakers’ posture as courageous iconoclasts, railing against established wisdom. Anonymous, then, has had a fairly storied pre-release career.

TIFF ’11: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (ds. Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky) + Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life (d. Werner Herzog)

September 24, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF, TIFF 11, UK

On August 19 of this year, the West Memphis Three–the no-longer-young men railroaded in a triple homicide that left a humble Arkansas town mobbishly seeking justice–were finally released from prison, making Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which premiered at the TIFF on September 11, instantly obsolete. (The film reveals their parole in a postscript that feels laughably abrupt after 100 minutes of handwringing.) Where 1996’s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills dealt with the role of religious paranoia in the scapegoating of the West Memphis Three (who were accused of killing a trio of boys as part of a Satanic ritual) and its 1999 sequel, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, was profoundly if not explicitly about the ineffectuality of the original as an agent of change, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory is mostly a lot of housekeeping, a refresher course for viewers of the first two films and a lint trap for details about the case that have emerged in the media over the past decade. More a glorified DVD supplement than a documentary, the picture’s at its best when it shows how easy it is to work up a head of righteous anger for dead kids by framing one of the fathers of the victims, Mark Byers, as the killer with “evidence” no less flimsily circumstantial than that which was used to condemn the West Memphis Three. (He had priors, his son’s death didn’t curb his criminal lifestyle–he must have done it!) In fact, Byers is compelled by his moment on the other side of the torch-wielding villagers to write a letter of apology to Damien Echols, the only one of the West Memphis Three on Death Row, whose head he called for back in ’93. But by the end of the piece, another of the fathers, Terry Hobbs, has implicated himself in the killings by virtue of suing the Dixie Chicks‘ Natalie Maines for slander, and Byers hastily commits to this new version of events, drafting a giant pros-and-cons list that seals Hobbs’s guilt in his eyes. Hobbs may well be the culprit (the DNA does not work in his favour), but the point is, eighteen years later, nobody has learned to let nature take its course–except the Zen-patient West Memphis Three.

TIFF ’11: A Dangerous Method (d. David Cronenberg)

September 9, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, TIFF, TIFF 11, UK

by Bill Chambers I wish David Cronenberg would direct a script of his own again. A Dangerous Method is recognizably Cronenbergian in its careful anthropology (DePalma-esque, too, in its frequent use of the split dioptre), but it’s also a hit-or-miss period talkfest, identifying it as a Christopher Hampton adaptation of a Christopher Hampton play through and through. Distilling all the expected body-horror in grotesque and painful-looking contortions of her jaw, first-billed Keira Knightley does fine if exhaustingly histrionic work as Sabina Spielrein, a patient of Carl Jung’s (the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender) who becomes his apprentice while in therapy. Jung corresponds with the more popular Sigmund Freud (Cronenberg muse Viggo Mortensen, ingeniously cast against type) over Sabina’s case as well as his own neuroses, and Freud eventually tosses another patient Jung’s way, protégé Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), whose maverick disregard for the ethics of transference and countertransference ultimately influences Jung’s decision to embark on an affair with the sexually repressed Sabina.

Conan the Barbarian (2011)

August 19, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bulgaria, Fantasy, Germany, India, Theatrical

*/****
starring Jason Momoa, Stephen Lang, Rachel Nichols, Ron Perlman
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and Sean Hood
directed by Marcus Nispel

by Walter Chaw It’s hard for me to hate on Marcus Nispel’s unwell Conan the Barbarian too much, mainly because its failings are more a matter of incompetence than of real malice. There are few pleasures as gratifying as Robert E. Howard’s testosterone-rich raving, and for a while there, the movie looks to have found the mad amplification that typified the Texan author’s best work. But when the wheels come off–and they come off right around the time that Conan’s dad, played by Ron Perlman (naturally), checks out–the whole mess goes careening off the proverbial cliff. If only the rest of the film were as mad as its opening, with a young Conan (Leo Howard) demonstrating his innate birthright to slay every single thing within arm’s reach by presenting two handfuls of severed-head to his thunderstruck village after a brutal scuffle in the forest. The level of lawlessness in its first half-hour is as legendary as the brilliant prologue to John Milius’s original, from Conan’s birth-by-unplanned-Caesarean on a raging battlefield to the presence of none other than Morgan Freeman, lured into a payday to provide solemn narration.

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

August 7, 2011Posted 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

June 26, 2011Posted 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.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) + I Am (2011)

April 29, 2011Posted in****/****, 2011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, France, Germany, Theatrical, UK

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS
****/****
directed by Werner Herzog

I AM
**/****
directed by Tom Shadyac

by Ian Pugh The introduction to Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams is unforgettably right. Ever the inquisitive narrator, Herzog tells us that, upon its rediscovery in the mid-’90s, France’s Chauvet Cave did not appear to be of unique significance, “other than being particularly beautiful.” But, say they hadn’t found the prehistoric cave paintings within (the oldest on record, with some dating back 32,000 years)–would that ‘particular beauty’ have been enough to inspire Herzog? What is it about this specific cave that made it, and makes it, such a hotbed for creativity? So begins anew our search for mankind’s place in the universe and, moreover, a human imprint on nature, even where one isn’t readily apparent. The skeletons contained in the cave (all animal bones, none human) beg further questions to that end. Was this an altar, perhaps? A refuge for ritual sacrifices?

Source Code (2011) + Certified Copy (2010)

April 1, 2011Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

SOURCE CODE
****/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright
screenplay by Ben Ripley
directed by Duncan Jones

Copie conforme
****/****
starring Juliette Binoche, William Shimell
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

by Walter Chaw The one part of Source Code that isn’t duck-ass tight poses so many questions about the nature of our hero’s heroism and the aftermath of the film that it opens up what initially seems a hermetically-sealed conceit into something of real depth and fascination. Far from the solipsism of failures interesting (Timecrimes) and not (Primer), different from marginal successes like 12 Monkeys and Déjà Vu, Duncan Jones’s sophomore feature (after the similarly thorny Moon) plays most like a child of Last Year at Marienbad and a companion piece to Abbas Kiarostami’s contemporaneous Certified Copy. It speaks in terms of quantum physics and string theory, but without pretension, achieving the almost impossible by introducing difficult concepts at the same pace with which its characters–not a dummy among them–are able to understand them without gassing (or worse, falling well behind) the audience. That it presents itself as a mainstream, popular entertainment is more to its credit, giving lie to the notion that Hollywood is bankrupt of ideas. Rather, it’s the destination for gifted filmmakers–some of them smart enough, and resourceful enough, to hold fast to their idealism and intelligence for, if not an entire career, then at least long enough to set a bar.

Black Death (2011)

March 16, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, John Lynch, Carice Van Houten
screenplay by Dario Poloni
directed by Christopher Smith

by Walter Chaw Christopher Smith follows up his listless slasher-farce Severance with the handsome-looking Black Plague/witch-hunting flick Black Death–a well-played, well-conceived piece that’s ultimately distinguished by a few sticky after-images, even as it doesn’t quite get to where you hope it’s going. Set in a pleasingly grimy, disgusting Dark Ages, the picture finds our hero, monk Osmund (Eddie Redmayne), besotted with comely Averill (Kimberly Nixon) and beset on all sides by the inexorable tide of the bubonic plague. Enlisted by Bishop-appointed Holy Roller Ulric (Sean Bean) for his familiarity with the countryside to locate a strange, untouched-by-plague village, Osmond becomes, er, plagued by crises of faith. The problem, besides his wanting to nail Averill in a most unholy way, is that the village in question appears to be untouched by disease because it doesn’t believe in God.

The Mechanic (2011)

January 28, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Jason Statham, Ben Foster, Tony Goldwyn, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Richard Wenk and Lewis John Carlino
directed by Simon West

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT FOR BOTH THIS FILM AND THE ORIGINAL THE MECHANIC. Michael Winner’s The Mechanic (1972) is nominally an action film, but it gets its point across with moments of extraordinary discomfort. As its primary attraction, it features Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent as contract killers with literally nothing to do, bored to tears as they stand around waiting for people to die. It’s a weird and disturbing scenario, but with modern box-office expectations being what they are, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s been effortlessly transformed into an average Jason Statham vehicle. The particulars remain the same: Hitman Arthur Bishop (Statham) is forced to kill his mentor, Harry (Donald Sutherland), under a contract from his employer (Tony Goldwyn); perhaps feeling a pang of guilt, he takes Harry’s wayward son Steve (Ben Foster) under his wing to teach him about the rules and tools of his trade. But it’s all presented in a much sillier light. There’s no other way to put it. When one of our assassins is instructed to poison his quarry, the characters (and the movie) deem this plan much too boring, and the whole ordeal ends in a gory brawl in which both parties stab each other with whatever they can get their hands on. It’s ridiculously over-the-top, sure, and although that’s to its credit, there are still too many moments where the viewer is left wanting something more substantial.

TIFF 2010: On “Womb”

September 19, 2010Posted in2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hungary, Romance, Sci-Fi, TIFF, TIFF 10

by Bill Chambers I found the imposed misery of Never Let Me Go a lot less provocative and haunting than the self-inflicted kind one encounters in Benedek Fliegauf’s Womb, whose one-word title seems to not-unduly affiliate the picture with Jonathan Glazer’s great Birth. I love this movie, but it took me a few days to digest it, and I’m not sure I’d have the patience to sit through it again. It’s challenging from the get-go, what with the quasi-kiddie porn of its opening sequences, in which a beautiful young boy and girl start sleeping together, and the girl caresses her skin, then the boy’s, as if trying to decipher some message between them written in Braille. (For pure eroticism, though, nothing trumps the pair watching a snail writhe across a kitchen table–and it’s here that I wish I possessed Walter Chaw’s vocabulary for discussing suggestively Romantic images such as these.) The girl, Rebecca, moves to Tokyo, and grows up to be played by Eva Green. She returns to the little beach community where she met the boy, Thomas (Matt “Doctor Who” Smith as an adult), and looks him up, having transparently spent the intervening years pining for him. When they meet again, he’s so thunderstruck that he dumps his current girlfriend on the spot, and the two impulsively begin a life together as eco-activist–an amateur entomologist, he breeds cockroaches, speaking to indelibility and infestation–and muse. Just as suddenly, Thomas is killed on the way to a protest, and Rebecca, feeling cosmically robbed, has and implements the lunatic idea to be artificially inseminated with Thomas’s clone and cultivate in the child an Oedipal complex, so that at some point in the future she will get to be with a facsimile of her lover, even if he is, technically, her son. What ensues is a distaff Lolita that makes up for in controversy (the incest angle) what it may lack in guts (all things considered, this is a fairly chaste film), though the Zen patience with which Rebecca courts Thomas II only affirmed the intelligence of the piece for me: you’re just not going to see a woman exhibit the immoral lust of Humbert Humbert with the same urgency.

Machete (2010)

September 2, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Germany, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Danny Trejo, Jeff Fahey, Michelle Rodriguez, Steven Seagal
screenplay by Robert Rodriguez & Alvaro Rodríguez
directed by Ethan Maniquis & Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw The only kind of movie Robert Rodriguez should be making as well as the kind of movie The Expendables should have been, the knowing, balls-out Machete is unforgivable, reprehensible, sleazy, disgusting fun, and somehow not entirely stupid. It gives props to the eternally quickly-dead character actor Danny Trejo as the titular ex-Federale, a grab-bag of Mexican stereotypes who in the course of his bloody rampage (for justice, of course) uses a weed-whacker and a pick-axe, among other day-labourer tools. Meanwhile, when he’s picked up as a patsy in a senator’s ploy, he more fears that he’s being tapped for a “septic job.” It’s unabashed in its politics, taking on the illegal immigration debate in the United States with a naïve brio and outrage. But it’s all the more winning, I think, for its complete lack of embarrassment about itself. The thought even occurs that the reason it works is the exact reason a few of the better drive-in/grindhouse/exploitation films of the Seventies worked: Born of low pretensions, it frees itself to explore its outrage with a simple-mindedness that rings with the earnest “geez!” of a Kevin Costner joint.

Get Low (2010)

July 30, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Poland, Theatrical

**/****
starring Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, Lucas Black
screenplay by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell
directed by Aaron Schneider

by Walter Chaw Affable, warm, kinda boring, and decidedly minor, Aaron Schneider’s Get Low doesn’t really do anything wrong so much as it presents as an edgeless, inconsequential, protracted encounter with someone you feel you should be interested in but mostly want to politely usher out the door. It’s a conversation killer: a movie about a performance, a particular kind of calling card bespeaking comfort with name actors who might be capable of delivering an awards-season prestige picture for a splinter company interested in a medium-return on a small investment. That’s it. At the least, for what it’s worth, Get Low operates with a great deal of compassion for its small-town denizens, resisting the easy shot at their provinciality in favour of something more along the lines of a Sling Blade. On that note, this South is neither as ugly nor as impoverished as Billy Bob’s.

The White Ribbon (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

June 28, 2010Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Germany, Horror, Palme d'Or Winner

Whiteribboncap

Das weisse Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Christian Friedel, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bryant Frazer The origins of evil–an alluring subject for writers and filmmakers, perhaps even more so than for psychologists and historians, who are limited by the facts of any given case. They become psychological archeologists, looking for the broken artifacts of a damaged mind that indicate why this person or that chose to inflict great pain and suffering by picking up a knife, a gun, or the blunt force of an entire nation’s army. Artists who imagine or investigate evil deeds, on the other hand, have the refuge of the poet. They may root in the filth of amorality and sociopathy, seeking dark messages there, but what they eventually create is the product of humanism–an effort to understand and shed light on tragedies in motion, on the present-day injustices that can lead to future wickedness and despair.

K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

May 3, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller, UK, War

*½/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson, Sam Spruell, Peter Stebbins
screenplay by Christopher Kyle
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw The film opens with a false alarm because drills are how all cookie-cutter closed-vehicle thrillers begin. Screenwriters free of the limiting bonds of imagination call it “foreshadowing”; critics forced to watch at least one film that begins this way per year prefer “tedious.” K-19: The Widowmaker (hereafter K-19) has a tedious narrative married to vein-swelling performances presented in that frank gracelessness indicative of director Kathryn Bigelow’s sledgehammer-chic since long about Point Break, brought together under the steady hand of a legendary editor (Walter Murch) that only just guides this behemoth of conflicting ideas and wet (and drunken) Russian submariners into the dry dock of coherence.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

Where the Wild Things Are (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

April 5, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2009, 2010, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Germany

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Max Records, Catherine Keener, Lauren Ambrose, Mark Ruffalo
screenplay by Spike Jonze & Dave Eggers, based on the book by Maurice Sendak
directed by Spike Jonze

FFC Must-Ownby Walter Chaw Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are is the product of an artist who may only be able to assimilate art and the creation of it through the filter of celluloid and the music that animates its flickers. More, there’s the suggestion in its depth of emotion that this may be the only way Jonze knows to communicate at all, and so he tasks it to capture the breadth of human experience. If the “film brats” of the New American Cinema were the first reared on a diet of the French New Wave and critical theory, this new post-modernism to which Jonze belongs consists of artists reared on the entire panoply of popular culture…and maybe nothing else. What other explanation is there for the elasticity and strangeness of films by people like Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino? They create works that strive towards the ineffable, seemingly unaware of film’s limitations and therefore undaunted by ideas of what’s possible.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

April 1, 2010Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Norway, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller

Män som hatar kvinnor
*/****
starring Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Peter Haber
screenplay by Nikolaj Arcel, Rasmus Heisterberg, based on a novel by Stieg Larsson
directed by Niels Arden Oplev

by Walter Chaw Slick and overproduced and poised for a David Fincher-helmed American redux, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor), Niels Arden Oplev’s adaptation of the first of the late Steig Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy,” falls off the exploitation tightrope. The titular flicka may be insane in the mainframe, but when she gets naked and straddles, cowgirl-style, an old guy while resisting even the notion of a committed relationship, it is only what it is. It doesn’t matter what her issues are, in other words, because she’s a hot twentysomething Goth-chick fantasy into computers and casual sex–and when I’m watching a representation of same, I’m not growing a conscience, I’m getting a hard-on. Imagine Elisha Cuthbert playing this role in the United States: on the one hand, it’s theoretically harrowing to see her tied up and raped; on the other hand, I’m not complaining about seeing a hot twentysomething actress tied to a bed, completely prone and naked, pretending to be raped. It’s the kind of playacting porn is discouraged from engaging in because it’s actually too illicit for porn–but it’s not too illicit for an arthouse import that’s allegedly trying to have a conversation about what happens to little girls who are sexually abused.

Sherlock Holmes (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

March 28, 2010Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Germany, Mystery, UK

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong
screenplay by Michael Robert Johnson and Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw On page 31 of the first book of Frank Miller’s seminal The Dark Knight Returns, there’s a sequence in which Batman takes a few seconds to assess the seven options he has to either kill, disarm, or cripple his quarry whilst crouched in a darkened stairwell. That last option, Miller informs his reader, hurts, and I thought of this–the moment as a kid I gave myself over to the hard noir of The Dark Knight Returns–during the opening of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes as the exact analog for our Holmes (a mesmerizing Robert Downey Jr.) calculating the damage he’s about to do to an antagonist. The film that follows is akin to Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, with the same weaknesses (pacing in a saggy middle) but the same considerable strengths as well as it rescues Holmes from the lovely yet stuffy Rathbone/Bruce serials and reintroduces the detective as the man capable of bending an iron poker with his bare hands (“The Adventure of the Speckled Band”)–the man with a cocaine (the familiar “seven percent solution” is a solution of Bolivian marching powder, of course) and intravenous morphine habit (“The Sign of the Four”*) he indulges to fend off bouts of depression, having suffered one (“The Adventure of the Reigate Squire”), possibly two (“The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”) nervous breakdowns. Holmes, in other words, is a fucking mess and a bit of a badass, and this doesn’t scratch the surface of his faithful sidekick Dr. Watson (Jude Law), a veteran of a brutal Afghan campaign that’s left him with shrapnel in his shoulder.