Minority Report (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

April 19, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller, Tom Cruise

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, based on the short story by Philip K. Dick
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Despite a remarkable first hour, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report washes out as an overlong retread of tired thriller/mystery elements capped by the director's trademark propensity for moralizing epilogues. It suffers from mainstream cinema's squeamishness in regards to true ambiguity of character and character motivation, and for all its claims to a faithful reproduction of Philip K. Dick's dark dystopian future, the picture is ultimately about Spielberg's itch for restoration of order rather than Dick's entropic dissolution of it. Distracting and unforgivable plot holes yaw beneath the narrative, making it clear that Minority Report is just another failed attempt by Spielberg to tell an adult tale. Here is an attractively packaged summer bonbon with an essentially hollow, nutritionally empty centre.

Night Moves (1975) – DVD

April 14, 2010Posted in****/****, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Edward Binns, Susan Clark
screenplay by Alan Sharp
directed by Arthur Penn

Nightmovescapby Walter Chaw On the strength of his scripts for The Hired Hand, Ulzana’s Raid, and Night Moves, Scottish novelist Alan Sharp seems well at home with the better-known, more highly-regarded writers and directors of the New American Cinema. Sharp’s screenplays are marked by a narrative complexity and situations gravid with implication and doom.1 Take the moment in the Arthur Penn-helmed Night Moves where broken-down P.I. Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman, reuniting with Penn for the first time since Bonnie and Clyde), after discovering a body in a sunken wreck off the coast of Florida, watches as his two sleazeball hosts (John Crawford and Jennifer Warren)–who’ve previously exchanged an odd nod and a knowing glance in which something is silently decided about how to handle this new, inquisitive element dropped in their midst–break into a broken tango to a tune on the radio. Harry salutes them in a way that suggests he understands what the hell is going on and shuffles off to bed. It’s one of the most harrowing moments in a harrowing decade of film, and nothing much happens in it except for the look Hackman gives as a damned soul caught on the horns of an unknowable mystery. The seduction scene that immediately ensues reminds in cadence and pace of the dream sequence from Hackman’s earlier The Conversation: “Where were you when Kennedy died?” “Which Kennedy?” “I dunno, any Kennedy.” Hackman is anchored to this period because he so ably portrays the everyman who desires enlightenment against the pervasive belief that there’s no longer hope for anything like enlightenment in this post-Vietnam/post-Watergate dystopia–that the solution to everything that’s wrong in this world is, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The slow, looping circles the boat “Point of View” describes at the end of the picture constitute perhaps the most trenchant metaphor for all of the New American Cinema.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

April 1, 2010Posted in2000s, 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

Girlwithdragontattooby 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.

Lost: The Complete Third Season (2006-2007) – Blu-ray Disc

March 30, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
"A Tale of Two Cities," "The Glass Ballerina," "Further Instructions," "Every Man for Himself," "The Cost of Living," "I Do," "Not in Portland," "Flashes Before Your Eyes," "Stranger in a Strange Land," "Tricia Tanaka is Dead," "Enter 77," "Par Avion," "The Man from Tallahassee," "Exposé," "Left Behind," "One of Us," "Catch-22," "D.O.C.," "The Brig," "The Man Behind the Curtain," "Greatest Hits," "Through the Looking Glass"

by Walter Chaw By now, "Lost" is resolving as an interminable adaptation of that old PC puzzle game "Myst": lush environments, episodic brain teasers of medium intensity, and a mystery revolving around the failed construction of a society that suffers from a paucity of real forward momentum. The rate at which new characters are introduced accelerates rapidly in Season Three as Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are taken by the Ben-led Others to a neighbouring island on which the Others have built a quiet little bedroom community complete with outdoor cages, a surgical theatre, and a book-club. (This month's selection? Of all things, Stephen King's Carrie.) It's all very "Days of Our Lives"–particularly that show's supernatural stint from a decade or so ago which saw purportedly massacred citizens of Salem actually spirited away to the secluded island of Melaswen. Is "Lost" the further adventures of our Melaswen castaways? Why not. It's ultimately not more preposterous than this framework set for returns from the dead, alternate timelines, and suggestions that that glimpse of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in the hatch in the middle of Season Two will finally bear middle-school fruit in the show's dedication to slack foreshadowing and Gen-X/pomo 101 pop-culture references piling up thicker than desiccated corpses on the main island. If it bugs you that the characters periodically take breaks from worrying about their continued, casual existence amid polar bears and carnosaurs to do shtick on "Skeletor" and Thundercats while hot-wiring a VW bus to play Three Dog Night in an episode that blows the dust off Cheech Marin for a cameo as Hurley's no-account daddy (why not have him light up a spliff and shove his arm elbow-deep up a horse, too?), phew, then you're not the right audience for "Lost", a series that now averages one slo-mo musical interlude per episode to match its pace of introducing new people and storylines.

Sherlock Holmes (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

March 28, 2010Posted in2000s, 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.

Lost: The Complete Second Season (2005-2006) – Blu-ray Disc

March 10, 2010Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A Sound A+ Extras B
“Man of Science, Man of Faith,” “Adrift,” “Orientation,” “Everybody Hates Hugo,” “…And Found,” “Abandoned,” “The Other 48 Days,” “Collision,” “What Kate Did,” “The 23rdPsalm,” “The Hunting Party,” “Fire + Water,” “The Long Con,” “One of Them,” “Maternity Leave,” “The Whole Truth,” “Lockdown,” “Dave,” “S.O.S.,” “Two for the Road,” “?,” “Three Minutes,” “Live Together, Die Alone”

by Walter Chaw The problem so far, as I see it, is that the first season’s episodes–with the possible exception of the two-part pilot and the three-part closer–were too, how to phrase this, episodic. Predictable rises and falls in action ending in either a cliffhanger or poignant musical montage or some mutant hybrid of the two do not a sustainable experience make. (Perhaps it’s easier to take when you’re not watching it in six-hour chunks.) I feel almost the same way about “Lost”–and many would count this as a positive comparison, though I would not–as I do about Dickens, and concede the same: that maybe it was different reading Great Expectations in bite-sized chunks separated by days and weeks. Anything designed for parcelling out and serialization dooms itself to a certain viewer-fatigue when consumed all at once. Still, I watched the first two seasons of “Deadwood” in the space of something like three days and didn’t feel anything close to the disdain and exhaustion I felt after just one season of “Lost”. It’s not that it’s tense so much as it’s generally bereft of imagination and, therefore, repetitive early and often. Its only consistency is this steadfast observance of its staid narrative ebb and flow; its only innovation is that it sometimes begins an episode with a flashback instead of going to flashback midstream.

The Crazies (2010)

March 5, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, United Arab Emirates

***½/****
starring Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker
screenplay by Scott Kosar and Ray Wright
directed by Breck Eisner

Crazies2010by Walter Chaw A military plane transporting a biological agent designed to destabilize civilian populations is headed for incineration when it crash-lands in tiny Ogden Marsh, IA, causing a few of the local yokels to start acting on all the urges that the veneer of civilization holds in check. A father kills his wife and son, a school principal dispatches a few of his students, a coroner begins stitching up the living, and Sheriff Dutton (Timothy Olyphant, good as sheriffs) is left to consider that for as naughty as these actions are, they're not so out of character for the people he protects. (It takes a while for him to deadpan that they might be in a little bit of trouble.) The Crazies plays with the thought that there's not only not much of a line separating acceptable behaviour from homicidal, there's also not much of a line between the infected townspeople and the military choppered in to contain them. In a good film's best moment, Dutton and his deputy capture a young soldier (Joe Reegan) and allow him a few minutes to be afraid and to enact a moment of grace that, if you think about it later, facilitates the complete destruction of another, larger urban population. A lot like the mordant epilogue of the also-fantastic 28 Weeks Later (another film that deals with the problem of occupation armies and the suppression of insurgencies), the ultimate source of trouble here is the heroic, quintessentially American desire to survive no matter the cost to the greater good.

The Spider Woman|The Voice of Terror [Sherlock Holmes Double Feature] – DVD

February 24, 2010Posted in1940s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)
***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Evelyn Ankers, Reginald Denny
screenplay by Lynn Riggs & John Bright, based upon the story "His Last Bow" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
directed by John Rawlins

THE SPIDER WOMAN (1944)
**/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Gale Sondergaard, Dennis Hoey
screenplay by Bertram Millhauser, based on a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
directed by Roy William Neill

by Ian Pugh My introduction to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes came courtesy of MPI's recent double-feature DVD, and as introductions go, one could certainly do worse. Plucking the detective from Fox's Victorian backdrop and throwing him unceremoniously into World War II, Universal's take on the Holmes series comes across as hell-bent on forging its own continuity and, moreover, its own sense of context. The first entry in this new cycle, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, begins with a title card explaining why the film makes such a dramatic departure from the previous two:

Whiteout (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

February 16, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Crime, France, Mystery, Thriller, Turkey

½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Kate Beckinsale, Gabriel Macht, Columbus Short, Tom Skerritt
screenplay by Jon Hoeber & Eric Hoeber and Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes
directed by Dominic Sena

by Walter Chaw The first thing you notice about Whiteout is that it looks like shit. Though it was shot on location in Manitoba (subbing for Antarctica), they could've saved everyone the trouble and shot it in a green warehouse for all that anything in the film resembles anywhere outside. Not unreal, merely artificial. Take the moment, for example, when unbelievably-hot U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale) and cohort Dr. John Fury (Tom Skerritt, well into the Kris Kristofferson portion of his career) discover the body that will be the centre of their stupid investigation into the film's stupid mystery. The middle of an ice canyon, it looks more like something out of a Quatermass flick, sixty years old on a shoestring, and it only gets worse when we come to sepia-toned flashbacks trying to explain why Stetko is damaged goods and, therefore, hiding from herself at the bottom of the world. Everything seems to have been manufactured in a mainframe–even the performances. It's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and, brother, that ain't good for something trying hard at edgy realism.

Lost: The Complete First Season (2004-2005) – Blu-ray Disc

February 11, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
"Pilot," "Tabula Rasa," "Walkabout," "White Rabbit," "House of the Rising Sun," "The Moth," "Confidence Man," "Solitary," "Raised by Another," "All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues," "Whatever the Case May Be," "Hearts and Minds," "Special," "Homecoming," "Outlaws," "…In Translation," "Numbers," "Deus Ex Machina," "Do No Harm," "The Greater Good," "Born to Run," "Exodus"

by Walter Chaw From the two-part pilot, I gotta tell you, I don't trust it. I like the gore, I like the United Colors of Benetton centrefold models as castaway chic, I love Terry O'Quinn and invisible dinosaurs… What I don't like so much is this sinking feeling that "Lost" is a throw-it-all-at-the-wall creation cashing in on post-9/11 discomfort and zeitgeist Ludditism that was genuinely surprised to be asked to hang around for six years. Meaning I have my doubts that any of this cool-ass shit has been remotely plotted out to provide for a commensurately cool-ass resolution–especially since it's not on HBO and therefore not privy to HBO's seemingly bottomless roster of brilliant short-form, long-term dramatists.

Mystic River (2003) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 10, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Dennis Lahane
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Opening like a Stephen King story of a group of friends falling from innocence into experience, Clint Eastwood's latest elegy for the myth of man strains at the edge of hysterical, offering up a testosterone-rich soup of In the Bedroom parental melodrama that compels for its pervasive doom, but disappoints for its didactic simplicity. Still, there's something to the tribal primitivism of the picture, the idea that man at his essence is composed of balanced portions of nobility and violence and that our society, perhaps, is no different: the past the muddy headwaters of the titular mystic river. The picture is a rhyme of Eastwood's A Perfect World, complete with spiralling shots of the sky through branches–the evocation of a Naturalism at war with any illusion of moral spirituality or humanism, with its heroes criminals shaded equally by the instinct to violence and the instinct to nurture.

Dear John (2010)

February 5, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, War, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Channing Tatum, Amanda Seyfried, Henry Thomas, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Jamie Linden, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Ian Pugh Movies based on Nicholas Sparks novels–sentimental drivel, functionally identical–usually just bounce off my chest, but we all have our limits. Once more into the breach as Princess Prettygirl (Seyfried) falls head over heels for Johnny Bluecollar (Tatum) in a spectacularly awful Harlequin romance that juggles metaphors about coins and the size of the moon while boasting only the vaguest understanding of the English language. Dear John is little more than a rehash of The Notebook, a movie I found tedious but, again, ultimately innocuous. Yet there’s a mysterious “x” factor at work in this one that attacked some vital nerve and reduced my brain to petroleum jelly. Could be that Lasse Hallström finally found the perfect vessels for the source author: Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum–actors, both, whose deadwood talents fail to stretch past sheer bewilderment. (I kind of hate Ryan Gosling as an actor, but he undoubtedly elevated The Notebook.) There’s a point very early on where Seyfried remarks, “Wow, you made a fire,” as her future beau demonstrates his ability to jumpstart a little kindling–and the complete lack of sarcasm (or really any emotion) in her voice led me to wonder if Tatum was going to club her over the head and drag her back to his cave. It’s not an unreasonable conclusion: most of these movies forge conflict out of the idea that women are property, and Dear John is no different.

Sundance ’10: Winter’s Bone

February 3, 2010Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sundance
**/****starring Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahuntscreenplay by Debra Granik & Anne Rosellinidirected by Debra Granik by Alex Jackson Those who loved Courtney Hunt's Frozen River are welcome to a second helping with Winter's Bone. I fear it might signal the start of a new genre: grass-and-granola cinema nobly detailing the plight of the working poor crossed with pulpy film noir. (Granola noir, perhaps?) The problem with these movies is that grass-and-granola and film noir just do not mix. The "plight of the working poor" is grossly oversimplified when narratively expressed in noir terms. The gangsters in Winter's…

Blue Valentine (2010); All Good Things (2010); Rabbit Hole (2010)

January 7, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

BLUE VALENTINE
***/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, John Doman, Faith Wladyka
screenplay by Derek Cianfrance, Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne
directed by Derek Cianfrance

ALL GOOD THINGS
*/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst, Frank Langella, Philip Baker Hall
screenplay by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling
directed by Andrew Jarecki

RABBIT HOLE
*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, Sandra Oh
screenplay by David Lindsay Abaire, based on his play
directed by John Cameron Mitchell

by Walter Chaw In the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf end-of-year awards-bait sweepstakes, the ingredients for prestige seem pretty clear: one part Ryan Gosling (or Ryan Gosling substitute), one part beautiful starlet going the Full Monty (it's good to be Gosling), and one part sad arguing. Mix well and reap a bounty of critics raving about career performances of intensity and courage (translation: lots of crying, lots of naked if girl), introduce bored-but-not-admitting-it audiences to indie-rock darlings like Grizzly Bear, and present the awards-season cinephiles with rosters of once and future Sundance savants. Films like Blue Valentine, All Good Things, and Rabbit Hole generally impress festival audiences and people who can't afford to go to festivals but wish they could–there's a certain hunger for movies screened in rarefied air that proffer misery and Sandra Oh for the arthouse schadenfreude freakshow. A long time in the company of people we're glad we don't know, call it reality television for assholes who don't admit they watch reality television. For my money, the gold standards for such remain Eye of God and Lars Von Trier's Antichrist.

Paranormal Activity (2009) [2-Disc Digital Copy Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 1, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery

*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Katie Featherston, Michah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs, Ashley Palmer
written and directed by Oren Peli

by Walter Chaw It's a good try from first-time hyphenate Oren Peli, but it's ultimately an exercise bereft of satisfying, thoughtful payoffs–a couple of generally effective sequences only that way because they cause one to anticipate that something will come of them. Nothing does. Comparisons to The Blair Witch Project aren't entirely off base, either, in that Paranormal Activity is about a decade past its sell-by date with a tale of irritating technophilia that would have felt more current in the Y2K Ludditism of 1999 than it did in the resigned technocracy of 2009–explanation in part for why it's already out of the conversation and never stirred much outrage or controversy when it was causing audiences of teens to collectively fake-shudder the way festival audiences collectively fake-cathect. The new conversation is the one introduced by George Romero's Diary of the Dead and Matt Reeves's Cloverfield, where the unnatural instinct isn't whipping out a digital camera or camera phone, but not. It's a communal experience if it's anything, and as far as such things go, there are still midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show floating around out there, aren't there? Its pleasures aren't replicable, in other words, and watching it at home reveals it to be little more than a one-trick pony with one brilliant moment that isn't enough to justify the rest of it.

The Lovely Bones (2009) + The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009)

December 25, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, Fantasy, France, Mystery, New Zealand, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE LOVELY BONES
½*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by Alice Sebold
directed by Peter Jackson

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS
½*/****
starring Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Verne Troyer, Tom Waits
screenplay by Terry Gilliam & Charles McKeown
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Walter Chaw It's all a little too Puff, the Magic Dragon, isn't it. The Lovely Bones finds Peter Jackson regressing into his worst instincts and a newfound squeamishness in a film about, ick, a fourteen-year-old girl's rape and murder, leaving the most unsavoury details of Alice Sebold's revered source novel to the golden-lit imagination. (Give this to Precious: it's exploitation with the decency to titillate.) This isn't to say the book is worth much of a shit, but to say that it at least has the courage to talk about a rape and a murder where the film only has the mustard to romanticize loss and suggest that 1973 was so long ago the freak next door didn't raise any flags. It's also to say that what began its existence as a study of the bonds that hold a family together through the caprice of living has been reduced in its film adaptation to a murder mystery without a mystery, and a supernatural thriller that at every turn reminds of how much better Jackson's The Frighteners is in dealing with almost the exact same set of themes.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

December 10, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, UK

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

by Walter Chaw It's easily worse than Mike Newell's go at The Goblet of Fire, and it's satisfying to note that it fails for many of the same reasons. For all the gorgeously-decayed gothic architecture, the German Expressionism, the bleached colour palette, etc., Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (hereafter Harry Potter 6) isn't the moody requiem before the bloody mass of parts 7 and 7a in the next couple of years, but instead this ungainly tween romcom with a sudden horde of amphibious zombies (not unlike the aquatic sequence in Harry Potter 4), inexplicable cameos from Ursa, Non, and Zod, and silly broomstick rugby. Dark undercurrents? No question. But they're allowed to wither as the film focuses its attention on three non-professional actors doing their best to transform ridiculous, sweet-sixteen romantic imbroglios into Chekhov and Shakespeare, with the combined might of what seems the entire pantheon of great modern British movie actors milling around behind them. The problem isn't that the film is character driven; the problem is that the characters' problems are insipid. Gone is the intense, sticky, stunningly emotional father issues tackled by Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban–the first real hint that this series could become the grown-up artifact the books never quite will given their much-publicized "meh" denouement. Gone is the continuation of that unsolvable Oedipal complexity that arose when the father figures were revealed as less than godlike in Yates's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the best film of the series by a nose–and one of the best American films of that year). In their place is a lot of insufferable slapstick carried off by actors no one would assume capable of screwball in environments better suited to Hammer. horrors: it's "Abbott & Costello Meet the Dementors."

Orphan (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

November 27, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, France, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard, Isabelle Fuhrman, CCH Pounder
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra's Orphan is a cheap, schlocky, shameless kid-peril flick with an unlikely–cowardly, even–twist and standard resolution. But I'll be damned if it isn't, despite all that, almost worth it just for its nastiness. Alas, in the end, it's not nasty enough. Without a thought in its head, without much understanding of how to earn legitimate frights without maiming (or threatening to maim) adorable children, it joins this year's similarly lost zombie girl-baby flick Grace among end-of-a-cycle, misogynistic shots at the Bad Seed genre. It's the kind of film that's more interesting for the fact of its relationship to other bad-seed flicks post-9/11 (e.g., Japanese redux The Ring and little-seen creeper Soft For Digging) than for anything it does itself. Interesting, too, that it's a relatively big-budget, mainstream picture starring a couple of extremely appealing actors (Peter Sarsgaard as John and Vera Farmiga as his wife, erm, Kate) as the patsies who adopt the titular hellchild, a Russian immigrant named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), from one of those autumnal orphanages run by nuns like cuddly Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder). Unfortunately, it's loaded with–there's that word again–cheap jump scares that, at least half the time, are so self-aware as to be parodies of themselves. Post-modernism it ain't, though–post-modernism is smart.

Lie to Me: Season One (2009) – DVD

November 24, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image A Sound A- Extras C-
"Pilot," "Moral Waiver," "A Perfect Score," "Love Always," "Unchained," "Do No Harm," "The Best Policy," "Depraved Heart," "Life is Priceless," "The Better Half," "Undercover," "Blinded," "Sacrifice"

by Jefferson Robbins When did we collectively decide we want to be rescued by assholes? There's a definite arc to the modern police-procedural hero, be it the off-putting but tolerable Gil Grissom of the original "CSI", deep-sea humanoid Horatio Caine of "CSI: Miami", or the despicable Dr. Gregory House. (Yes, "House M.D." is a procedural–its perps just happen to be microbes, household cleansers, and anything else that qualifies as not-lupus.) These prodigies trend towards purer and purer strains of antisocial dickishness, and their techniques of inquiry grow ever more demeaning and emotionally brutal. They use their powers of detection to heal society but in the process get to sneer at its mores.

The Prisoner: The Complete Series (1967-1968) – Blu-ray Disc

November 17, 2009Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Prison, Sci-Fi, Television, UK

Image A Sound A- Extras B
"Arrival," "The Chimes of Big Ben," "A, B, and C," "Free for All," "The Schizoid Man," "The General," "Many Happy Returns," "Dance of the Dead," "Checkmate," "Hammer into Anvil," "It's Your Funeral," "A Change of Mind," "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling," "Living in Harmony," "The Girl Who Was Death," "Once Upon a Time," "Fall Out"

by Walter Chaw The closest television came to true surrealism until the inception of "Twin Peaks", Patrick McGoohan's remarkable, landmark brainchild "The Prisoner" is the headwaters for a dizzying array of modern genre confections. It's audacious in its ironclad refusal to provide the happy ending; in its determination to bugger expectation with every complex set-up and sadistic resolution, the show effectively honours the surrealist manifesto of defeating classification. The fact of it is the function of it–the delight of it being that the series functions as a tonal sequel to Antonioni's Blowup, using the disappearance of that film's photog protag as the launching point for its hero's imprisonment in his Welsh oubliette. Colourfully, quintessentially mod, it even looks the part, after all, acting in 1967 as prescient post-modern (po-Mod?) commentary on the elasticity of this genre model (Bond films in particular, the lead in said franchise McGoohan was offered, er, once upon a time) as allegory for the plastic-fantastic of a progressively absurd world. In its setting of a small town, isolated and beset by what seems a common psychosis, find a connection to Robin Hardy and Anthony Schaffer's claustrophobic The Wicker Man (1973), John Frankenheimer's similar-feeling Seconds (1966), and, yes, Godard's structuralist textbook Alphaville. Of all the ways to approach "The Prisoner", in fact, the most fulsome–if also potentially the most obscure–is that, like Alphaville, it establishes itself as a structuralist (as in Claude Levi-Strauss) exercise while predicting through its execution the post-structuralism/deconstructionism (and eventually surrealism) of, say, a Jacques Derrida.