The Bad Seed (1956) – DVD + Village of the Damned/Children of the Damned [Horror Double Feature] – DVD|The Bad Seed (1956) – Blu-ray Disc

October 21, 2011Posted in1950s, 1960s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

THE BAD SEED
*½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image C+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Patty McCormack, Henry Jones, Eileen Heckart, Evelyn Varden
screenplay by John Lee Martin, based on the play by Maxwell Anderson and the novel by William March
directed by Mervyn LeRoy

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gwynn
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, George Barclay, based on The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
directed by Wolf Rilla

CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1963)
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Ian Hendry, Alan Badel, Barbara Ferris, Alfred Burke
screenplay by John Briley
directed by Anton M. Leader

by Walter Chaw It’s pretty common nowadays to look at the horror films of the 1950s as Cold War/McCarthy-era relics: allegories for a world torn between the antiseptic image of television’s Golden Age and the seething undertow of a society slipping into the madness of the JFK/Medgar Evers assassinations, the 16th Street Baptist Church, the Freedom Summer Killings, the transition from the Korean War to Vietnam, and on and on and on until any pretense of innocence, in art and society, became tainted by irony. It was thought that 9/11 was an event horrific enough to end our gilded age of snark, but ironically is almost the only way that we view tragedy and institutional corruption. Though paranoia might have been planted in the duck-and-cover drills of the Fifties, in the suspicion and fear of returning WWII vets confronting a different world and haunted by demons, it didn’t find full flower until the Rorschach coolness of the 1960s and the mean cinema of the 1970s.

The Thing (2011)

October 13, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Ulrich Thomsen
screenplay by Eric Heisserer
directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.

Thingquelby Walter Chaw Just talking time, I've been waiting for this prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing almost twice as long as I waited for Episode I, and if the disappointment seems inversely proportional to the duration of the anticipation, chalk it up to me probably being too old to be duped like that again. (There's also the thought that Episode I killed anticipation for my entire generation.) To be fair, this Thing prequel (hereafter The Thing-quel), which imagines the happenings at the Norwegian camp prior to the titular alien finding Wilford Brimley and Kurt Russell's beard, isn't nearly as boring and/or offensive as a senate debate, a naval blockade enacted by space-Japs, and a hike in the desert surrounded by evil Jews and Arabs in the company of a Jamaican Stepin Fetchit. No, the only thing Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s (son of Matthijs van Heijningen, the IMDb helpfully informs) The Thing-quel does is mill around tepidly while demonstrating that Rob Bottin's seriously fucked-up creature effects from the original lose their soul when squeezed through the mainframe of a giant computer. What truly depressed me, though, were the sheer number of people at the public screening I attended with no awareness of the 1982 film, who were thus breathless with anticipation that the closing credits–which set up the opening of the Carpenter flick–were setting up some kind of remake-cum-sequel. As experiences go, it's somewhere south of getting kicked square in the sack.

Scre4m (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

October 12, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Satire, Wes Craven

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Emma Roberts
screenplay by Kevin Williamson
directed by Wes Craven

by Walter Chaw It seemed like a neat idea, didn't it, to offer a riff on horror movies while making a horror movie? To prove smarter than the genre while producing an effective genre product just the same–something Wes Craven couldn't quite pull off with his New Nightmare (though it was a good try). He did pretty well with the first Scream film, however, which not only gave faint, and ultimately false, hope that Craven was back, but also launched Kevin Williamson as a geek flavour of the month in the Joss Whedon mold. But looking back, Scream is the proverbial slippery slope, pulling off a neat trick at the cost of a couple of sequels (the underestimated first, the godawful second) that require that this deconstructionist urge be carried through to its only logical end: the destruction of the subject. What made Craven interesting initially, with stuff like Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, wasn't the lo-fi, kitchen sink aspect of his films (the lousiness of them, truth be told), but that they understood essential horror. Fear for your children, mainly–the thing that really moves A Nightmare on Elm Street, and powerful enough that even Craven's shitty sense of humour and timing (remember the banjo music in Last House?) couldn't undermine it. The problem with the long-postponed fourth instalment of the Scream franchise, Scre4m, is that it doesn't have anything essential about it. Built on a specious concept and the backs of films that actually have something at their centres, it's a smug, arch, irritating thing that hates its audience, hates genre films, and, curiously, hates itself most of all.

The Big Lebowski (1998) – [Limited Edition] Blu-ray Disc

September 1, 2011Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Sports

****/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras B
starring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi
screenplay by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
directed by Joel Coen

by Walter Chaw I think that once the book closes on the Coen Brothers, they'll be seen as the premier interpreters of our time: the best literary critics; the Mark Twains. I used to believe they were simply genre tourists on this mission to do one for every genre, but it becomes apparent with each new No Country for Old Men and True Grit unlocking each vintage Miller's Crossing and The Hudsucker Proxy that they were interpreting genres long before they took on specific pieces as a whole. Coming full-circle from the wry noir of Blood Simple and Fargo and presenting itself eventually as of a piece with a later Coen noir, The Man Who Wasn't There (just as A Serious Man is a companion piece to Barton Fink), The Big Lebowski serves as the transition point in that process while also moving the brothers from broad genre takedowns to a very specific kind of literary adaptation. That they would follow it up with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, their take on The Odyssey, speaks to a mission statement of sorts: like it, The Big Lebowski is a distillation of a classic piece of literature (Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep) that completely understands its simultaneous responsibility to its own medium and to its source material. It's not as easy as it sounds.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II (2011)

July 15, 2011Posted in2011, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Mystery, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

Harrypotter7bby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Not having read the final book in the Harry Potter series, I fear I spent the last hour-and-a-half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2 (hereafter Harry Potter 7.2) thinking that Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) was Harry's father. And there's the problem, really–not that it's so insular that only people who've read the books can understand it, but that it's so myopic in its insularity that it doesn't realize that what it's saying on the screen is pretty contrary to what's explained on the page. It's not that there wasn't time, either, over the course of these five hours, to address obvious misunderstandings and obscurities (why, for instance, doesn't everyone always cast the "kill" spell, since it seems pretty effective), as there was certainly enough time to pack in a horse-cart full of characters pointing to their chests and weepily declaring that their dead pals will "always be right here." Mostly, it reveals an author in J.K. Rowling–who was setting up a genuinely extraordinary ending to her dip in the archetype pool–engaged in a lot of self-pitying sobbing over grandiloquent gestures, group hugs, and an epilogue set 19 years hence that brazenly sucks, simply because she didn't have the muscle to pull the proverbial trigger. More egregiously, by failing to honour her own story with the proper ending, Rowling betrays real post-feminist icon Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), the "most gifted wizard of her generation" (and low-born to boot), squandered to tertiary status in this instalment before being dismissed into domesticity. An author who by the end was driven perhaps too much by her fans (she admits in an interview that she "didn't have the heart" to kill Arthur Weasley–one wonders if she ever considered killing Harry as she ought) is behind a handsome, crisp film that is, alas, ultimately for her fans only.

The Thing (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

July 14, 2011Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: John Carpenter, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi

John Carpenter's The Thing
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, T.K. Carter, David Clennon
screenplay by Bill Lancaster, based on the story "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, Jr.
directed by John Carpenter

Mustownby Walter Chaw I remember the sick fascination I felt staring at the cardboard standee for John Carpenter's The Thing (hereafter The Thing) in the lobby of the now-flattened two-house cinema where I had gone to see E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial that dewy summer of my ninth year. It was opening weekend for the Carpenter flick, but the line around the building was for the second week of Spielberg's very own My Friend Flicka, and I was one of the millions of children guilty of flocking away from a movie that promised to make you feel like shit in favour of one that promised to make you cry. I would be afraid to see The Thing and the same year's Blade Runner until at least five years down the road when, during a particularly bad flu, I asked my mom to rent them both from a local video store (also gone–the city of my mind is ever more populous now, year-on-year), figuring that in my fever haze I would be insulated from the horrors that had grown around them in my head. Besides, as a wizened vet of 14, I had survived The Fly, Aliens, RoboCop, and Hellbound: Hellraiser II at the Union Square 6 (also gone), so what horrors could these musty relics hold for me?

Plenty.

Gross Anatomy (1989); Betsy’s Wedding (1990); The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag (1992) – Blu-ray Discs

June 29, 2011Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Japan, Mystery, Romance

GROSS ANATOMY
**½/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Matthew Modine, Daphne Zuniga, Christine Lahti, Todd Field
screenplay by Ron Nyswaner and Mark Spragg
directed by Thom Eberhardt

BETSY'S WEDDING
***/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Alan Alda, Joey Bishop, Madeline Kahn, Molly Ringwald
written and directed by Alan Alda

THE GUN IN BETTY LOU'S HANDBAG
**/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Penelope Ann Miller, Eric Thal, William Forsythe, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Grace Cary Bickley
directed by Allan Moyle

by Jefferson Robbins To sample three Blu-ray editions fresh out from discount distributor Mill Creek Entertainment, you'd think film comedy in the late 1980s and early '90s was at a tipping point. Or, at least, you'd think this of Touchstone, the Disney sub-studio behind Gross Anatomy, Betsy's Wedding, and The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag. All three films seem swamped by the decade shift, caught between John Hughes's early-'80s youth revolution and the hardening of romcom formulas that would come to pass after 1990's Pretty Woman (also a Touchstone product). One of the three films, in fact, barely qualifies as a comedy, although it was surely marketed as such. The sense one gets watching them today is of opportunities missed, of storytelling approaches gently meshed together when they should've been gleefully mashed, and of an aversion to risk above all.

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.

Soylent Green (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

June 20, 2011Posted in1970s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D+
starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Edward G. Robinson
screenplay by Stanley R. Greenberg, based on the novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
directed by Richard Fleischer

by Walter Chaw I've spent a lot of time in my life dancing with Richard Fleischer's dystopian Soylent Green. Sometimes it leads, sometimes I do. For everything it does well, there are some things it does badly; and if the things it does well it does extremely well, the things it does badly it, likewise, does just awfully. No half measures here. Beginning with the good, here's Edward G. Robinson tapping his mortality (he succumbed to cancer less than two weeks after production wrapped), finding in his celluloid swan song a depth of despair he rarely touched in his career proper. It's up there with Montgomery Clift's devastated cameo in Judgment at Nuremberg–enough so that when he closes his eyes in appreciation of a leaf of lettuce his long-time companion Det. Thorn (Charlton Heston) has scavenged from the apartment of dead industrialist Simonson (Joseph Cotten, in his last role, too), it actually doesn't make you want to laugh. Not so the incongruities of this dystopian, post-apocalyptic future in a Manhattan (and world) destroyed by over-population, but not to the point where the streets don't empty in observance of a curfew. It presents a future in 2022 that seems unlikely not because we're not currently on the verge of some great ecological disaster, but because rough math suggests that the Heston character would've been born the year before the film's 1973 release and thus his declaration that he'd never seen a grapefruit (or grass, or cows) should worm its way into the audience consciousness as Soylent Green's statement that it's not serious, thoughtful science-fiction, but rather soapbox and screed timed to coincide with, in 1972, the first international conference on climate change.

Solaris (1972) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 8, 2011Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2011, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Soviet Union

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Jüri Järvet, Anatoli Solonitsyn
 screenplay by Fridrikh Gorenshtein & Andrei Tarkovsky, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

by Bryant Frazer Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Solaris, a novel by the Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, betrays the director’s general disinterest in conventional SF tropes. His film does honour the mind-blowing outlines of Lem’s concept, which deals with a manned mission to investigate a planet-sized extra-terrestrial consciousness. But where Lem speculated about the practical boundaries of human intellect in the shadow of the universe, Tarkovsky opts to explore human feelings of loss and insecurity in the face of mortality. For Lem, the failed Solaris mission is emblematic of the difficulties we humans would have comprehending and communicating with a radically different form of life. For Tarkovsky, the mission re-opens old psychic wounds, flooding us with regret that we weren’t better to the people we loved. “Shame [is] the feeling that will save mankind,” murmurs protagonist Kris Kelvin near the end of the film. In Tarkovsky’s Solaris, we have made contact with the aliens, and they want you to call your mom.

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

June 7, 2011Posted 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.

The Silent House (2011) + Rubber (2010)

May 24, 2011Posted in2010, 2011, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, Uruguay

La casa muda
***½/****
starring Florencia Colucci, Abel Tripaldi, Gustavo Alonso, María Salazar
screenplay by Oscar Estévez
directed by Gustavo Hernández

RUBBER
½*/****
starring Stephen Spinella, Roxanne Mesquida, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser
written and directed by Quentin Dupieux

by Walter Chaw Billed as being filmed in a single shot (though the skeptical–and those taken in by the "unedited" long takes of Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men–should wonder why an editor is credited), Gustavo Hernández's zero-budget conceptual experiment The Silent House (La casa mudi) has found a way not only to suggest a gimmick successfully carried through, but also to weave that gimmick into a richer thematic tapestry. Here, the digital camera isn't carried by a protagonist, Blair Witch-like, but instead floats around the victim of the movie's horrors, one Laura (Florencia Colucci), who's endeavouring with father Wilson (Gustavo Alonso) to clean up an old abandoned house in preparation of its sale. The camera does take on the point-of-view of someone at some point, then jumps back to an objective place, then plays that trick Evil Dead II plays with perspective in the scene where Ash wakes up in a clearing and looks around in a panning 360-degree take, only for the audience to discover that the camera eye is both character and commentator, more physical in its way than a first-person point-of-view could ever be. In a genre dependent on cutting for its scares, in fact, The Silent House's accomplishments are all the more impressive. It's suffocating (I'd never considered how liberating edits were from a complete immersion into a film) and at times unbearably tense–and though some will point to the airlessness of Hitch's Rope or the fluid choreography of Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark, The Silent House is a different beast altogether.

The Verdict (1982) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

April 28, 2011Posted in1980s, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Directors: Sidney Lumet, Drama, DVD, Mystery

***½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B+
starring Paul Newman, Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden, James Mason
screenplay by David Mamet, based on the novel by Barry Reed
directed by Sidney Lumet

by Jefferson Robbins It's never clear if disgraced lawyer Frank Galvin (Paul Newman) is a practicing Catholic, as are so many of the souls around him in a grey, hopeless Boston–but there's a crucifix on his office wall, and he sure has the posture down. Note how many times in Sidney Lumet's legal drama Newman is caught posed in the final stage of genuflection, Roman brow in profile, knuckle touched to lips. He's skipped making the sign of the cross and gone straight to kissing a nonexistent rosary. His is a corroded soul, though in David Mamet's screenplay construction, at least he knows it's corroded. Chasing any lawsuit that will end in a payday, Galvin lies right to the faces of dozens of people. In this, he's no better than his opponents in court, save that they lie through the proxy instruments of forgery and coached testimony, keeping their hands clean. They sail through the system frictionlessly, while Galvin feels himself dying a little each time–unless it's in the service of something greater. In his wanderings, windowpanes and desk fans cast the impression of a cross over him.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 25, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, UK

***½/**** Image B- Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw David Yates's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I (hereafter Harry Potter 7a) is a coda for the end of a dark decade in film–a war journal, a diary of the apocalypse–and good enough to be this constant, niggling reminder that had J.K. Rowling the courage to do what it appears she intends to do at first, her Harry Potter series could have been nigh canonical instead of just pretty good. Alas, that's for the second part of this two-parter. For now, it's easy to see Harry sacrificed on the cross of his Chosen One eminence. With Yates back for his third go-round and Steve Kloves again adapting, it's a pair of newcomers to the franchise–DP Eduardo Serra and composer Alexandre Desplat (his work on Birth and Lust, Caution: tremendous)–who contribute most to the minimal, blasted feeling of Harry Potter 7a. It's empty, bleak, and stately for long stretches as our core triumvirate of Ron (Rupert Grint), Hermione (Emma Watson), and Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) search a Tennysonian wilderness for some essential part of themselves valuable enough to offer up for the sake of the world. When it opens with Hermione mournfully erasing the memory of her from her "muggle" parents, the film announces itself as a triumphant return to the broken wasteland promised by The Order of the Phoenix. This Harry Potter intends to do harm.

Insidious (2011)

April 3, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Lin Shaye, Barbara Hershey
screenplay by Leigh Whannell
directed by James Wan

Insidiousby Walter Chaw A fairly well-done, old-fashioned child-imperilment/haunted-house movie until it falls completely off the rails and starts playing like Phantasm II (but not in a good way), James Wan's jump-scare-athon Insidious is chiefly influenced, for what it's worth, by Poltergeist, though it also references that "Twilight Zone" episode where a girl falls into a parallel universe. It sports a spirit medium and a crack team of ghost-hunters, naturally, as well as a little kid lost and a bombastic third act about braving the Other Side that deeply dishonours whatever minor pleasures there were to be had in the previous two. All of which would be more the pity if that dreary, extended set-up amounted to much more than the real dread of a child fallen mysteriously ill surrounded by the usual crap about doors creaking open, phantoms visiting the half-asleep (in the film and in the audience), and a baby crying for an hour before she disappears when the film no longer feels it can continue to exploit it without actually killing it. It's that unwillingness to present bigger stakes that hamstrings Insidious; a lot like the creeping morality underpinning Wan's Saw (and the DIY sequels it spawned), the picture reveals itself to be pretty safe in its worldview, therefore freeing it of dread in favour of non-stop startle that fades, quickly, into fatigue. If it's not going to go there, it's only ever going to be what it is.

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

Blackdeathby 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.

Red Riding Hood (2011)

March 11, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, Werewolf, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Gary Oldman, Billy Burke, Julie Christie
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

Redridinghoodby Walter Chaw That Catherine Hardwicke keeps getting jobs speaks to a deep, ugly dysfunction in the Hollywood dream factory. Not the thought that money talks, but the idea that people like Hardwicke and Adam Sandler and Michael Bay are handed the keys to the executive washroom because they understand what it is that certain critically-deficient demographics want and proceed to provide it in massive, deadly draughts. In other industries, there would be regulatory agencies–though it’s fair to consider that checking the poster for Red Riding Hood would give you all the nutritional information you probably need. Namely that Hardwicke is the main ingredient, and that had I remembered this before the screening, I never, ever would have gone, in exactly the same way I wouldn’t eat scrapple again. I’m sure a lot of people like that shit, but grey pig-mush is grey pig-mush. Red Riding Hood is easily the worst movie I’ve seen since probably all the way back to A Sound of Thunder, and in a lot of the same ways: horribly written; horribly performed (but they didn’t have a chance); directed by someone that cameras should file a restraining order against; and edited by a cast-iron moron (make that pair of morons: long-time Hardwicke accomplice Nancy Richardson and poor Julia Wong). At least there’s Gary Oldman along for the ride to order his Moorish henchmen to, at one point, “put him in the elephant!”

Sundance ’11: Incendies

January 30, 2011Posted in****/****, 2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Sundance
****/****starring Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girardscreenplay by Denis Villeneuve, in collaboration with Valérie Beaugrand-Champagnedirected by Denis Villeneuve by Alex Jackson There are two incredible images in Denis Villeneuve's Incendies. The first of these is during a preamble to the main story. A small Arabic boy is having his head shaved. We push in on his face as he stares contemptuously at us. Everything childlike has been gutted out of him and he's been filled back up with rage. I can't recall the last time I saw the aftermath of child abuse concentrated so concisely and with so…

Inception (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

January 19, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Christopher Nolan, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw I dunno, the wordiness of The Dark Knight didn't bother me that much. I suppose it has something to do with it being a comic-book movie and plot-driving pronouncements seeming the order of the day. I find it impossible now to think of The Dark Knight without seeing it as a corollary to No Country For Old Men: the one composed of broad, garish strokes, the other of grace notes you hesitate to call delicate, but that's just what they are. With Inception, Christopher Nolan's correlative piece is Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY, and the comparison in this instance doesn't prove mutually evocative so much as devastating to Nolan's film, exposing his shtick as reams of deadening exposition interrupted by the occasional virtuoso set-piece. It is, in other words, aggressively nothing-special, save for a few astonishing zero-g sequences. As it happens, saying the best part of Inception is its weightlessness is a pretty pithy criticism of the whole damned enterprise. For a film about dreams, it's distinctly light on possibility: Armed with the power to shape reality, our erstwhile dream-weavers fold a city in half in a dorm-room Escher shout-out but decline to, you know, fly and stuff. More, Inception doesn't confront archetypes of any kind, instead retreating into some basic stuff about projections and the architecture of the unconscious being a freight elevator while relying overmuch on the built-in gravitas of father and dead-wife issues. And in case you miss any of that, Nolan crams it into the dialogue like one crams elephants into elevators. Rule of thumb: if a movie uses the word "deep" as much as this one does, it probably isn't.