Mystery Archives - Page 15 of 30

Angels & Demons (2009)

May 14, 20092000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, Italy, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Armin Mueller-Stahl
screenplay by David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Dan Brown
directed by Ron Howard

by Ian Pugh The preferiti are the cardinals most likely to be elected Pope following the death of the previous one. So I learned from Ron Howard’s Angels & Demons–twice. It’s a point that is adequately explained in a news report serving as the film’s prologue, then superfluously explained in one of hero-cum-tour guide Robert Langdon’s information-dense lines of dialogue. From there, it appears as if Angels & Demons will take a willing leap off the same cliff The Da Vinci Code did, annotating each excruciating historical detail for no other reason than to play WIKIPEDIA while spelling everything out in the most condescending way possible. Yet a strange thing happens around the movie’s halfway mark: everyone stops defining and redefining the arcana–indeed, exposition practically ceases altogether as the characters are dragged between libraries and churches, spirited from one set-piece to the next, arriving just in the nick of time to face off against the killers or help save some poor bastard from getting burned alive. The shift in tone is sudden and dramatic–you could probably draw a fat line through the middle of Angels & Demons to delineate where the hand-holding lectures end and the linear procession of action sequences begins. How did that happen? As Opie will always be his unsubtle middlebrow self and co-screenwriter Akiva Goldsman will always be the guy who wrote Batman & Robin, I have no choice but to assume that the responsibility for this schism lies with the man whose name appears for the first time on this franchise: David Koepp.

Sin City (2005) [Theatrical & Recut/Extended/Unrated Versions] – Blu-ray Disc

May 5, 2009****/****, 2000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Thriller

Frank Miller’s Sin City
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Jessica Alba, Benicio Del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Clive Owen
screenplay by Robert Rodriguez, based on the graphic novels by Frank Miller
directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw Until Frank Miller’s Sin City (hereafter Sin City), maverick Mexican director Robert Rodriguez frustrated the hell out of me: here’s this guy with all the talent in the world–an eye, an ear, an internal metronome as unerring as a clock tick–making incoherent movies literally without finished screenplays. Falling off high wires without nets and trying to look cool doing it–it ain’t smooth, man, it’s arrogance and it’s misplaced. I thought he’d spent himself on flotsam like the last two Spy Kids flicks, thought he’d really screwed the pooch on a fiasco like Once Upon a Time In Mexico, on which he mistook Sergio Leone’s formalist genre Diaspora for a mess of ideas trailing camera flourishes. But here, right before he unleashes some 3-D thing about a shark boy, Rodriguez slides in a movie for which he resigned from the Directors’ Guild of America just so he could credit comic book legend Frank Miller as his co-director. Here, in Sin City, is what Robert Rodriguez can do with brutal, draconian structure (what’s harsher than the cell of a comic-book panel?); here, finally, is productive fruit from his reputation as a rebel without a crew. Here’s Sin City down low, on the QT, and very, hush hush: the most anti-Hollywood Hollywood picture since Kill Bill, and a film that, likewise, feels like some kind of miracle it was ever produced, much less released.

The Uninvited (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

April 27, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Drama, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Emily Browning, Elizabeth Banks, Arielle Kebbel, David Strathairn
screenplay by Craig Rosenberg and Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard, based on the motion picture Janghwa, Hongryeon written by Ji-woon Kim
directed by The Guard Brothers

by Ian Pugh The title The Uninvited doesn’t refer to the diabolical nanny/usurper driving the plot or to the undead spirits that torture our heroine, but rather to the damning intrusiveness of memory: inadequate, incomplete, and weighting down its victims with the guilt of bad decisions and lives ill-spent. It begins with a dream, as unassuming teenager Anna (Emily Browning) expresses her concern that she can’t remember the night her bedridden mother died in a freak explosion. “Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to forget,” a well-meaning psychologist tells her, and from this innocent bit of wisdom springs all the misery and death that follows. Not exactly a tale of two sisters, the picture demonstrates how the black holes of misanthropy and insanity come not from our harrowing experiences, but from the fact that we try so hard to bottle them up.

State of Play (2009)

April 16, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray, based on the BBC television series created by Paul Abbott
directed by Kevin Macdonald

by Ian Pugh If it were smart, Kevin Macdonald’s State of Play would stick to lamenting the ignominious death of newsprint at the hands of Internet sensationalism and all that that implies. As a veteran reporter and a U.S. Congressman–college roommates once known as rabblerousing muckrakers in their respective fields–turn to each other when their worlds collapse, you’d think that maybe the film had in mind a meditation on the dissolution of the Old Boys’ clubs. Done in by our demystifying familiarity with the subjects under scrutiny (cops and politicians) and an unwillingness to inject new blood into their veins, right? Hell, even Watergate is brought up as an incidental location, as Macdonald sends a sweeping camera across the notorious hotel. You can’t tell me there isn’t something to be said here about how a reliance on outmoded tactics and an obsession with decades-old victories has only sped up their obsolescence.

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)

March 26, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Virginia Madsen, Kyle Gallner, Martin Donovan, Elias Koteas
screenplay by Adam Simon & Tim Metcalfe
directed by Peter Cornwell

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Never mind all of this “true story” malarkey–what really makes The Haunting in Connecticut stand out from the pack is the sociopathic obnoxiousness with which it’s been marketed to moviegoers. The dark and depressing trailers are bad enough, but who can forget the giant ad that invaded YouTube‘s front page last week that showed a young boy ejecting a gravity-defying stream of vomit before inviting the user to “click to watch two dead boys”? Though “dead boys” is actually a reference to the famous folk poem (as in “back to back they faced each other”), it’s still not exactly the smartest way to promote your wares outside the hopefully-miniscule sadist demographic–especially when the final product ends up being cookie-cutter ADD bullshit like The Haunting in Connecticut.

I’ve Loved You So Long (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

March 24, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, France, Germany, Mystery

Il y a longtemps que je t’aime
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Serge Hazanavicius, Laurent Grevill
written and directed by Philippe Claudel

by Bryant Frazer There are a number of reasons why Kristin Scott Thomas’s performance, which is at the centre of I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime), stands out. Yes, it’s because she’s a terrific screen presence. Yes, it’s because it’s invariably refreshing to see a 48-year-old Englishwoman sinking her teeth into a three-dimensional role, not just emoting with great adeptness but deploying her fluent French. But there’s another reason: In a film that basically amounts to an extremely well-executed Lifetime Movie Channel special, Thomas is by far the most nuanced aspect of the production. In the sleepiness of her eyes and the weariness of her glances, you can read her acid dismissal of the world around her. In the parallel lines of tiny wrinkles around her lips–you can see them in close-up–are mapped out the quiet ravages that would be visited upon any of us by too many years in splendid isolation. Thomas is an unself-conscious beauty for sure, but an aging one. And it’s that full-fledged adulthood, that great density of experience and heartbreak that she embodies, that adds weight to what could be, as scripted, an off-puttingly generic moodiness. Her presence is a beacon amongst stock characters and coy screenwriters’ tricks, a canticle amidst the clichés that threaten to swamp her story.

Quantum of Solace (2008)

March 23, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Espionage, Italy, James Bond, Mystery, Thriller, UK

½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C
starring Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench
screenplay by Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Sex without foreplay, Marc Forster’s limp dick of a James Bond flick Quantum of Solace takes the kinetic, angry ugliness of Casino Royale and, together with Paul Haggis’s Dances with Wolves screenplay of affected naivety and wide-eyed, late-blooming outrage, fashions a most-unwelcome return to the hoary Bond franchise of old. As if aware that all that stuff about Bolivian peasants pining for water might be connected, and queasily, to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (a daring cargo-jet escape is similarly cribbed from that film), Quantum of Solace does its level best to strip entire set-pieces from the Bourne series (a knife fight, the close-quarters disarming of government agents, the roof-top flight), forgetting in the process to port over the coherence of Doug Liman or Paul Greengrass choreography. The picture’s idea of an action sequence consists of extreme close-ups of two vehicles involved in some kind of ill-defined skirmish intercut with extreme close-ups of Bond and some bad guy who looks just like him intercut with flashes and body parts, ending in Bond walking away with a wry grimace on his face. What a real director could have done with the prologue on a winding mountain road in Italy that has a truck nudged off it by the baddies almost pancake 007 on the way down. And what a real screenwriter could have done with the concept of Bond as the remorseless liquid terminator from T2. Instead we get admittedly only the logical offspring of this ill-begotten union between the guy who directed The Kite Runner and Finding Neverland and the asshole who wrote Crash and a few episodes of “The Facts of Life”. Whoever had the bright idea that this would be the magical, gritty duo to continue the resuscitation of Albert Broccoli’s dusty old wet-dream of a crusading GOP avatar desperately needs to be shown the door.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 23, 20091970s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Directors: Dario Argento, DVD, Horror, Mystery

L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo
***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Tony Musante, Suzy Kendall, Eva Renzi, Enrico Maria Salerno
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Dario Argento’s uncredited adaptation of Fredric Brown’s The Screaming Mimi (brought to the screen once before in 1958 by Gerd Oswald), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage marks the “Italian Hitchcock”‘s directorial debut as well as the moment at which the Italian giallo genre gained international currency. Though the genre’s invention (named after the yellow/giallo covers of Italian penny dreadfuls) is credited to compatriot Mario Bava (see, especially, his astonishing Blood and Black Lace), Argento’s scary polish and cunning for film language bridged the cultural, mainstream/arthouse gap with agility and audacity. He’s not just borrowing from Hitchcock, he’s filtering the Master’s work through his own sensibilities. Argento did for the slasher genre with his “supernatural” pictures like Suspiria and Inferno what Sergio Leone did for the Western, making them dirtier, sexier, rhythmic, and more acceptable to the literati; and he does here for the police procedural/neo-noir a similar kind of post-modern hipster reinvention. But it’s not merely an intellectual exercise (in fact, the obscurity of the clues (its title at once revealing the identity of the killer and referring obliquely to the red herring of The Maltese Falcon) makes deciphering the procedural improbable at best)–rather, it’s the visceral nature of the exercise that delights. It’s Argento’s revelry in one part in the unrelieved nihilism and delicious confusion that would characterize the best of the ’70s’ paranoia cinema–and in the other part, in the joy of great genre filmmaking.

Max Payne (2008) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 19, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image N/A Sound B Extras C
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Olga Kurylenko
screenplay by Beau Thorne
directed by John Moore

by Walter Chaw Valkyries: a staple of Norse mythology, right? Picking sides in fights, flying the fallen to Valhalla, and becoming winged waitstaff in that eternal beer hall in the sky. (Or fat women in Wagner.) First thing that comes to mind isn’t a mind-blowing, Timothy Leary-esque freak out–unless you’re John Moore’s ridiculous Max Payne. That isn’t the worst thing about Max Payne, but it’s one of them. And while there’s no crime in appropriating concepts you don’t entirely understand, there probably should be. This is not a smart movie, and it doesn’t know whether it should be a faithful adaptation of its video game source material or a post-modern take on films noir, though it should be said that it looks beautiful anyway, a successful iteration of the Sin City aesthetic. The only thing really missing from its retinue of noir tropes is a stoic anti-hero at its centre; Max Payne badly miscalculates not in casting professional lump of meat Mark (Talks to Animals) Wahlberg, but in subsequently allowing him to attempt a fully fleshed-out performance when his usual monotone would’ve fit the pomo/homage portion of this film perfectly.

The International (2009)

February 18, 20092000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Espionage, France, Germany, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brian F. O’Byrne
screenplay by Eric Warren Singer
directed by Tom Tykwer

by Walter Chaw There’s a shootout at the Guggenheim in the late-middle of The International that is the only real clue director Tom Tykwer had anything to do with the film. The rest of it, despite its title reminding of that Christopher Walken SNL skit about velvet smoking jackets and attempted rape, is just more of the same musty prestige-y Topical Picture™ that usually stars people like Sean Penn or Kevin Costner instead of, as The International does, Clive Owen and Naomi Watts. Bland and blander, as it turns out. A rumpled Owen is Salinger, some kind of ill-defined crusader for justice with a badge from Interpol and a dark past from Syd Field, while Watts, as ADA Elly, spends her first scene with a Boston/Newark accent and the rest with her standard-issue Yank. They’re tepid on the trail of a big giant bank that has a nefarious plan to control debt, which I confess is what I thought banks do. With the picture more interested in mashing its thumb against the “Relevant” button than in creating characters of interest, villains who frighten, and situations that involve, Tykwer, for his part, seems at a loss as to how to employ his agile camera and so trusts a premise that’s already feeling a little mothballed for the collapse and bailout of our banking system. It doesn’t matter that The International doesn’t know what to be from one minute to the next–what matters is that it’s an exact replica of The Interpreter in every way that counts and is, therefore, completely, immanently, blessedly forgettable.

Mirrors (2008) [Unrated] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 16, 20092000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, France, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Romania

ZERO STARS/****
DVD – Image N/A Sound A Extras D+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Cameron Boyce, Erica Gluck
screenplay by Alexandre Aja & Grégory Levasseur
directed by Alexandre Aja

by Ian Pugh You have to hand it to Alexandre Aja: Although he applies his marginal talent to different ends from within his genre of choice, he remains fairly consistent in his psychotic bursts of rage and complete obliviousness to the same. Whether he’s making awful, sadistic horror flicks that pretend to be about nothing (his anti-lesbian screed High Tension) or–somehow worse–awful, sadistic horror flicks that pretend to be about something (his remake of The Hills Have Eyes and now Mirrors), his targets are clear. In his eyes, women and rural folk are by turns cowardly, evil, and idiotic, deserving of nothing but a horrific death. How anyone could lump his brand of bloodthirsty hatred in with Tarantino or Argento–both real artists who have grappled with their own desires and talents in the context of fiction and reality–is, frankly, beyond me. Hell, even Eli Roth, for all his puerile masturbation and inexplicable worship of the nasty Cannibal Holocaust, has questioned his own methods on occasion. When Aja rips off Amy Smart’s mandible just seconds after she steps into a bathtub in Mirrors, there’s no thrill, no shock, no sense of accountability–only the niggling, terrifying conjecture that this man would go out and hurt someone given half the chance.

Sundance ’09: Moon

February 2, 2009****/****, 2000s, 2009, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Sundance, UK

****/****starring Sam Rockwellscreenplay by Nathan Parkerdirected by Duncan Jones by Alex Jackson Lunar miner Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of a three-year contract with Lunar Industries when an accident lands him in his spaceship's sickbay. Upon regaining consciousness, he meets a facsimile of himself and begins to suspect that his employer and his robot companion Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) have been keeping something from him. While Moon has some kind of basic dramatic conflict and is centred around an actual story instead of impressive visuals (though Sam Rockwell playing table tennis with himself is a hella…

Zodiac (2007) [2-Disc Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 20092000s, 2007, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards
screenplay by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw The best film of its kind since All the President’s Men, David Fincher’s Zodiac is another very fine telephone procedural drawn from another landmark bit of investigative journalism–though more fascinatingly, it’s another time capsule of a very specific era, flash-frozen and suspended in Fincher’s trademark amber. Still, by the very nature of its subject matter, Zodiac deals in millennial anxieties: the un-‘catchable’ foe; the unknowable cipher; the futility of the best efforts of good and smart men; and the disintegration of the nuclear family smashed to pudding in a diving bell collapsed under the pressure of the sinking outside. The film is as remarkable as it is because it’s about something as simple and enchanted as the human animal–not just bedraggled San Francisco detective Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), but also Zodiac’s two female victims and, in a strange echo, two almost-invisible wives: Toschi’s (June Raphael) and that of newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). Easy to say that actresses Raphael and Chloë Sevigny are wasted by being given nary anything to work with outside a terrified moment and a single speech, respectively; better to say that they assume the only function they can in a picture revolving around male cooperation and survival in a world that has reduced itself to the barbarous niceties of macho religions and arcane rituals. No accident that the Zodiac Killer’s partiality to a medieval code is central to a key revelation.

Sundance ’09: The Killing Room

January 24, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Alex Jackson, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sundance, Thriller

**/****starring Chloë Sevigny, Peter Stormare, Clea DuVall, Timothy Huttonscreenplay by Gus Krieger, Ann Peacockdirected by Jonathan Liebesman by Alex Jackson Jonathan Liebesman's The Killing Room would still have been pretty hokey five years ago, but in 2009, with the election and inauguration of Barack Obama, it's looking nothing short of obsolete. Genre filmmakers are going to have to face the fact that the Bush years are over. One of our new president's very first acts while in office was to shut down Guantanamo Bay; if torture porn wants to survive into the next decade, it's going to have to reinvent…

Dead & Buried (1981) [Limited Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc + I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 22, 20091980s, 1990s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

DEAD & BURIED
***/****
DVD – Image B- Sound C+ (Remixes)/B (Mono) Extras A
BD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring James Farentino, Melody Anderson, Jack Albertson, Lisa Blount
screenplay by Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon
directed by Gary A. Sherman

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
**/****
DVD|BD – Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze, Jr.
screenplay by Kevin Williamson, based on the novel by Lois Duncan
directed by Jim Gillespie

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gary A. Sherman’s Dead & Buried and Jim Gillespie’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, released theatrically fourteen years apart, together demonstrate that the more the horror genre stays the same, the more it changes. Each of these B-movies resorts to similar cheap tricks (first and foremost a coastal setting (the atmospheric equivalent of a non-perishable in horror)) and traffics in pessimism, yet one is genuinely hopeless and the other is trendily nihilistic–karo syrup as late-Nineties fashion accessory. A great gulf stands between the sensibilities of the two pictures that’s unearthed by drawing other such subtle distinctions: one is cruel, the other callous; one is about death, the other about killing; one is sexy, the other exploitive; and so on and so forth. Virtually indescribable to modern audiences despite its familiar elements, Dead & Buried is a Darwinian fossil of the horror cinema, whose DNA has been perverted by the progressive commercialization of the culture and weakening of the intellectual position. Simplified: Current scare flicks still sometimes enjoy provocative subtext (like the recent Freddy Vs. Jason); more often, they die on the vine from WB-itis.

Revolver (2005) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 6, 20092000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Thriller, UK

*/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
BD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Vincent Pastore, Andre Benjamin
written and directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw Give Guy Ritchie a little credit for being ambitious and take a little away from him for being so relentlessly pussy-whipped that Revolver, his return to the neo-Mod gangster genre that made his name, is one part rumination on the mystical mumbo-jumbo of his then-wife’s Kabbalah, one part exploration of the self-actualized ego, and every part pretentious, pseudo-intellectual garbage. It’s so fascinated with itself that the yak-track on the film’s DVD and Blu-ray releases finds Ritchie periodically consulting his assistant as an augur of whether or not Ritchie has gotten too complicated for the audience of nitwits not put off enough by the movie to avoid watching it again with the commentary activated. He believes he’s created something of such vast, far-reaching, ungraspable, existential implication that this cheap, showy action pic is the ne plus ultra of modern experience, with Ritchie our schlock Zoroaster, guiding us through avatar Jake Green (Jason Statham) as he emerges from years of solitary confinement, during which he learned the parameters of the perfect con by intercepting the chess moves of the two prisoners on either side of him. Jake has claustrophobia, something Ritchie helpfully offers is a “metaphorical fear,” by which I think he means that it’s a metaphor for all fear; his clumsiness with the articulation of this single concept illustrates how it is that the rest of it is such a godawful mess. Consider Revolver‘s interesting only to the extent that Ritchie’s self-absorption is ironic when applied to a picture about the internal struggle between Freud’s personality strata–never mind that Jake’s Super-Ego is André Benjamin and his Id appears to be motherfucking Big Pussy. Jesus, this is a stupid movie.

Timecrimes (2008) + Wendy and Lucy (2008)

December 12, 20082000s, 2008, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

Los Cronocrímenes
**/****
starring Karra Elejalde, Candela Fernández, Bárbara Goenaga, Nacho Vigalondo
written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo

WENDY AND LUCY
**/****
starring Michelle Williams, Wally Dalton, Will Patton, Larry Fessenden
screenplay by Jonathan Raymond & Kelly Reichardt
directed by Kelly Reichardt

by Walter Chaw Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes), Nacho Vigalondo’s zero-budget exercise in kitchen-sink quantum metaphysics, doesn’t fuck itself with an unearned sense of smug self-satisfaction like Shane Carruth’s Primer, but it does prove to be more tantalizing than satisfying. All garnish, no calories; take time travel and turn it into a series of unfortunate events that, although it plays with matter/anti-matter lore, doesn’t go much farther in developing either its philosophy or its narrative. The result isn’t pomo expressionism, but rather this taste of something, these suggestions of something other, that don’t amount to a hill of beans once the whole thing morphs into a breakneck thriller. It makes some sense, then, that the hero of the piece is a non-descript schlub of a man, soft, no shoulders, falling over the edge into middle-age–enough so that when he spies a naked woman in the hills behind his house through his binoculars, of course he doesn’t look away (who would, right?), and of course he doesn’t tell his wife.

Psycho (1960) [Special Edition – Universal Legacy Series] – DVD

December 1, 2008****/****, 1960s, 2008, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, John Gavin, Vera Miles
screenplay by Joseph Stefano, based on the book by Robert Bloch
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

FFC Must-Own by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I’d wager there aren’t any films that have been more analyzed than Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the expanse of scholarship spent on it a curious echo of its own curious psychobabble anti-climax. Find studies of this film as the wellspring for everything from feminist film theory to measured leaps into psychoanalytic theory, from technical dissertations to Citizen Kane-style forays into authorship pitting the contributions of Hitch against those of graphic designer Saul Bass. I’ve read pieces on composer Bernard Herrmann’s unparalleled work in the picture; on the artwork used in the Bates Motel; on the ways that Hitch’s own queasy obsessions–themselves on the verge of explosion with his collaborations with poor Tippi Hedren–bled into the production. I’ve read about how the film was shot with Hitch’s television crew on a minimal budget and about the controversy surrounding, of all things, the depiction of a toilet for the first time since the pre-Code silent era in the United States. I even recall writing something about how this film, along with the other miraculous releases of 1960 (Peeping Tom, Eyes Without a Face, Breathless, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Rocco and His Brothers, Shoot the Piano Player, The Stranglers of Bombay, and Nabuo Nakagawa’s miraculous Jigoku), announced that cinema after this very particular point would never be the same. I’ve heard Janet Leigh’s oft-repeated tale of how the flesh-coloured pasties on her breasts peeled away as they tried to get that shot of her hanging over the tub and how, damnit, she wasn’t going to move even if it meant the crew in the rafters getting a good look at those world-class goodies. I know my favourite quote regarding the Sixties in film belongs to Ethan Mordden’s indispensable Medium Cool, comparing the previous decade to the new day dawning like so: “Surrender to the Wild Ones yields a dissolution of society. Surrender to Mrs. Bates turns you psycho.” I’ve heard the apocryphal tales, the legends; I’ve listened to Truffaut interview Hitch about the shoot. Hell, I’ve taught the picture a few times in my own limited way to classrooms still surprised to learn there are more things left to discover in Psycho.

The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

November 24, 20081990s, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Directors: Dario Argento, DVD, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

La sindrome di Stendhal
**½/****
DVD – Image B Sound C+ Extras B
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Asia Argento, Thomas Kretschmann, Marco Leonardi
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw It’s hard for me to reconcile the Dario Argento of the Seventies through to 1982’s Tenebre with the Dario Argento ever after (at least until what I’ve heard is a remarkable comeback, the upcoming completion of his Three Mothers trilogy). The inventor, almost by himself, of two distinct genres of film in Italy (and just the concept of the arthouse slasher in the world), a co-writer of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, and a revolutionizer of horror-movie music became this guy who stopped aping Hitchcock and started aping…Jeunet? Himself? Even with Max Von Sydow in the fold (Non ho sonno), the pictures post-Tenebre are cheap auto-knockoffs devoid of innovation and lacking the amazingly imaginative gore that marked Argento’s early gialli, the archetypal resonance of his supernaturals, or the transcendent, sometimes sublime lawlessness of his hybrids (like Suspiria, for instance, still a towering achievement). They’re almost to a one these gaudy, derivative, exhausted pieces of shit.

Fox Horror Classics, Vol. 2 – DVD

October 17, 20081930s, 1940s, 2008, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

CHANDU THE MAGICIAN (1932)
***½/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A-
starring Edmund Lowe, Bela Lugosi, Irene Ware, Henry B. Walthall
directed by Marcel Varnel and William Cameron Menzies

DRAGONWYCK (1946)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Gene Tierney, Walter Huston, Vincent Price, Glenn Langan
screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on the novel by Anya Seton
directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

DR. RENAULT’S SECRET (1942)
*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring J. Carrol Naish, John Shepperd, Lynne Roberts, George Zucco
story by William Bruckner and Robert F. Metzler
directed by Harry Lachman

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I confess to feeling a little insecure while reading the entry for Chandu the Magician in Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide, wherein the learned film historian derides Chandu as “disappointing” and “not as good as most serials in this genre, and even sillier.” The suggestion is that he’s wholly sympathetic to the material and was actually hoping to see a good movie before being “disappointed.” Mr. Maltin may very well be in a better position than me to determine the relative merits of Chandu the Magician. Speaking as a layman, I found it to be sublime pulp fiction. Prototypical of George Lucas’s Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises, the film is remarkably shameless in its goofiness, never veering into self-deprecation or camp. It’s one of those rare pop entertainments that genuinely make you feel like a kid again.