Mystery Archives - Page 9 of 29 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Hot Docs ’13: Shooting Bigfoot

May 2, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Mystery, UK

***/****
directed by Morgan Matthews

by Angelo Muredda There's a Weakerthans song called "Bigfoot!" about a Manitoba ferry operator who was harassed by local media for disclosing his alleged encounter with the furry legend. It's an oddly affecting little thing, especially around the chorus, where the man insists–likely just to himself–that he won't go through it all again "when the visions that I've seen will believe me." If nothing else, Morgan Matthews's genre-crossing Shooting Bigfoot confirms that the loneliness and hermeticism of the poor Manitoban's life after Bigfoot–defined by a vision he can't possibly share, for obvious reasons–is pretty standard stuff in the cult of sightings. Mixing Werner Herzog's eccentric profiles with both Christopher Guest's institutional satire and an unexpected but not unwelcome helping of The Blair Witch Project, the film starts as an arm's-length survey of Bigfoot culture before fully immersing itself in its manic compilation of signs and wonders.

True Blood: The Complete Second Season (2009) + True Blood: The Complete Third Season (2010) – Blu-ray Discs

April 10, 20132000s, 2010, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Television, Thriller, Vampire, Werewolf

Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
S2: “Nothing But the Blood,” “Keep This Party Going,” “Scratches,” “Shake and Fingerpop,” “Never Let Me Go,” “Hard-Hearted Hannah,” “Release Me,” “Timebomb,” “I Will Rise Up,” “New World in My View,” “Frenzy,” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin'”

S3: “Bad Blood,” “Beautifully Broken,” “It Hurts Me Too,” “9 Crimes,” “Trouble,” “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” “Hitting the Ground,” “Night on the Sun,” “Everything Is Broken,” “I Smell a Rat,” “Fresh Blood,” “Evil Is Going On”

by Walter Chaw “True Blood” is pulp crap. Yet as Bryant and Bill have already so eloquently pointed out, it’s highly-addictive pulp crap–the sort of shallow, handsomely-mounted titillation that fosters the craze that sprung up around prime-time soaps like “Dynasty” and “Falcon Crest”. White-collar smut that traffics in the currency of the age: once upon a time, it was the super-rich; now, it’s the supernatural. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme. It’s certainly soapier than showrunner/creator Alan Ball’s previous pay-cable drama, “Six Feet Under”, but to its credit what “True Blood” does in returning sexuality–and gore, and (southern) Gothic trappings–to the vampire mythos, it does well. The shame of it is that it seems to be ashamed of itself and so continually strives for relevance in aligning the plight of its vampire underclass to gay rights. Bill said it first, but is the appropriate supernatural analogue to gays really vampires? Is it wise to suggest that gays present that same kind of sexual allure? The same kind of blood contagion? Doesn’t that play into the Conservative storyline a bit too neatly? At least it’s not “The Walking Dead”.

Krivina (2013)

January 24, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical

***/****
starring Goran Slavković, Jasmin Geljo
written and directed by Igor Drljaca

by Angelo Muredda 2012 was an unusually rich year for Canadian cinema, from the strangely fruitful pairing of David Cronenberg and Don DeLillo in Cosmopolis–though it comes from DeLillo, is there a more Cronenbergian line about deformity than the doctor’s insistence that Robert Pattinson let his mole “express itself”?–to the near perfect genre vehicle of Michael Dowse’s Goon. Both films are legibly Canadian in terms of content, despite Cosmopolis‘s faux-Manhattan setting, but one of the most heartening developments in last year’s crop was a turn to formalism that might confound expectations about what our movies are supposed to look and sound like. Weird Sex and Snowshoes, both Katherine Monk’s book and Jill Sharpe’s documentary adaptation of it, sketched a history of Canadian cinema through its dourness of tone and harsh thematic machinations–necrophilia, the malevolent north, and so on–so successfully as to canonize that image. Yet films like Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond the Black Rainbow and now Igor Drljaca’s Krivina (which debuted at last year’s TIFF) are a nice reminder that there’s also a sharp formalist strain, à la Michael Snow, for which such thematic surveys can’t quite account.

The Big Heat (1953) – Blu-ray Disc

December 6, 2012****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Gangster, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound C+ Extras B
starring Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando, Alexander Scourby
screenplay by Sydney Boehm, based on William P. McGivern’s SATURDAY EVENING POST serial
directed by Fritz Lang

by Walter Chaw The pinnacle of Fritz Lang’s American noir output, The Big Heat vacillates between hard-bitten and surprisingly tender. A movie of dualities, it positions Glenn Ford’s Det. Sgt. Bannion on the liminal borders between dialectic states: he presents a familiar hardboiled veneer on the one side, a broken, exhausted, eventually devastated family man on the other. The picture partitions noir bodily, forcefully into the margins of the gender divide, and it confronts, full-on, the popular conception of the ’50s nuclear family. It appears fully formed, an irritant to the hegemony of the American myth of nuclear/consumer nirvana, and it suggests that the cultural upheaval that would result in the helter-skelter ’60s started showing its fatigue early. The Big Heat is Rebel Without a Cause, except the mother is killed and the gay kid lives.

The Raven (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

October 24, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Horror, Hungary, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring John Cusack, Luke Evans, Alice Eve, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Ben Livingston & Hannah Shakespeare
directed by James McTeigue

by Walter Chaw I’m no nineteenth-century cop, but I personally would begin by interrogating the guillotine-pendulum maker. James McTeigue’s abominable The Raven posits legendary Marylander Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) as a crazed, alcoholic, frustrated-artist type who has a bar tab the length of his arm to go with a fiery temper and a quite-requited, it turns out, affair with toothy Emily (from Aardman Studios: Alice Eve), daughter of Captain Hamilton (Brendan Gleeson). Alack-alay, what should happen but a wax museum breaks out as a critics-hating serial killer (just like Theatre of Blood, which I should’ve revisited instead) enacts scenes from Poe’s stories whilst dressed in the hat and cape of McTeigue’s V for Vendetta protag. Good copper Det. Fields (Luke Evans) is hot on the miscreant’s trail, enlisting Poe as a Poe expert to try to get one step ahead of the well-read marauder. There is, alas, no ratiocination the equal of the mystery of Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare’s (no relation, I hope) bewilderingly bad screenplay. No one, no one, could deliver these lines–a mush of anachronistic phrases and “period” posh–with conviction, much less the miscast Cusack and a motley band of supporting players. The good news is that The Raven is funny. The bad news is that it’s so awful, it makes you the kind of person who watches a movie just to be superior to it.

Cloud Atlas (2012)

October 23, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Hong Kong, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Singapore, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski, based on the novel by David Mitchell
directed by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski

by Walter Chaw It speaks to the extraordinary hubris of the tripartite godhead behind Cloud Atlas (the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer) that in the middle of a 172-minute film composed of interminable exposition and multiple timelines, they would invoke long-winded Russian prisoner Solzhenitsyn without fear of ironic reprisal. More, it speaks to their hubris that they would make a film this sprawling and messianic about the Disney maxim that you’re never too puny to change the world, so don’t stop trying, tiger! If you’re at all offended by white people doing the “ah, so” thing in yellow-face, by the way: relax, because there’re also white people doing the evil Fu Manchu thing in yellow-face. What there isn’t is white people doing blackface, suggesting that if you’re about to make the argument that Cloud Atlas is about how we’re all the same under the skin to the extent that we could have been different races in past and future lives, then don’t bother. That doesn’t stop the movie, though, from talking about the evils of slavery with a super-duper, plantation-attitudes-changing Magic Negro, or from positing a future-Korea that clones wage-slaves before paying off never-accidental post-modern self-referents. If you were to take Cloud Atlas remotely seriously, in fact, you’d have to address it as an attempt to create a completely post-modern artifact in a world that didn’t already have “Beavis and Butt-Head”. Quick, look, the author of that manuscript the old editor in the 2012 timeline is reading was written by the kid from the 1973 timeline who had a crush on one of the black versions of Halle Berry (the one playing Pam Grier)! Did I mention that Berry has a timeline in whiteface? Or that Hugo Weaving and Ben Whishaw have ones in drag?

Torso (1973) + Maniac Cop (1988) – Blu-ray Discs

October 21, 20121970s, 1980s, 2012, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Crime, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Satire, Thriller

I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale
***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Suzy Kendall, Tina Aumont, Luc Merenda, John Richardson
screenplay by Ernesto Gastaldi and Sergio Martino
directed by Sergio Martino

MANIAC COP
**½/**** Image B Sound A Extras B
starring Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Laurene Larson, Sheree North
screenplay by Larry Cohen
directed by William Lustig

by Jefferson Robbins Slasher movies are concerned with not just murder, but with its root cause–not motive, really, but motivation. There has to be a detonator, or else stalker-horror is what its most strident critics accuse it of being: all body-count, no brains. The films have leeway to be less concerned with motive than, say, those Ustinov-as-Poirot adaptations, where the whole cast learns whodunit while seated for tea and cakes in the third act. (I sort of miss those; I wish “mystery” hadn’t been usurped by “thriller” in the moviemaking lexicon, and in part I blame Jonathan Lynn’s 1985 Clue.) But they have to successfully allude to a trigger point, some match to the killer’s keg of gasoline.

All the President’s Men (1976) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

October 7, 2012****/****, 1970s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Warden, Jason Robards
screenplay by William Goldman, based on the book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
directed by Alan J. Pakula

by Walter Chaw The final film in director Alan J. Pakula’s loose “paranoia trilogy,” All the President’s Men does the impossible by making heroes of newspaper reporters and a thriller out of telephone calls and follow-up interviews. Based on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s exposé of the Watergate Scandal and President Richard Nixon’s involvement in felonious dirty tricks, it’s more than just a cunningly-crafted docudrama–it’s a key film in the best era of the medium’s history. It’s a picture that highlights the period’s mistrust in our leadership while establishing highly unconventional heroes for whom the stakes couldn’t possibly be higher. And though we know how it all works out, it seems more poignant for our knowing how everything works out.

TIFF ’12: The Paperboy + At Any Price

September 18, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sports, Thriller, TIFF

THE PAPERBOY
*/****
directed by Lee Daniels

AT ANY PRICE
*/****
directed by Ramin Bahrani

by Bill Chambers The great Pete Dexter writes tersely about criminal perversity in the southern United States; the problem in adapting him to the cinema is that without his hardboiled prose, which lends everything he writes the whiff of reportage (a newspaperman originally, he turned to novels after drug dealers beat him nearly to death over one of his columns), the psychosexual situations he describes threaten to collapse into camp. Because of this, Dexter and Precious/Shadowboxer auteur Lee Daniels sounded like a match made in Hell to me, but the blunt force of Daniels’s shamelessness proves strangely compatible with Dexter’s writing in The Paperboy, based on the latter’s 1995 best-seller. If only he could direct! Daniels is like a less bourgeois Henry Jaglom, cutting between a panoply of indifferently-composed shots like a frog on a griddle with little feeling for either spatial or character dynamics.

TIFF ’12: The Iceman

September 12, 20122012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Gangster, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

*½/****
directed by Ariel Vroman

by Bill Chambers Although The Iceman proves that a movie cannot get by on Michael Shannon’s dark charisma alone, Shannon has reached that point in his career where his casting supplies the lion’s share of subtext. Hence, a line like “I dub cartoons for Disney”–uttered not two minutes into the film, before there’s enough context for it to be a joke or a lie–induces titters of recognition. Of course, most will know going in that Shannon’s playing real-life contract killer Richard Kuklinski, who’s thought to have dispatched over 100 people, professionally-speaking. In The Iceman, the film version of his life, smut-bootlegger Kuklinski starts a family with winsome Barbara (a baby-talky Winona Ryder) at the same time mobster Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta) makes him an enforcer. He keeps Barbara in the dark about his new profession (his old one, too), telling her he’s a stockbroker to explain the conspicuous infusions of cash; by the time their angelic daughters are in middle-school, he’s settled comfortably into the schizoid role of suburban-dad-slash-serial-killer. Eventually, he sub-contracts himself out to Pronge (Chris Evans, so skeevy I mistook him for Bradley Cooper), a free agent who operates out of a Mr. Softee truck and gives Kuklinski the idea to freeze his victims, and thus his eponymous nickname.

TIFF ’12: Antiviral

September 9, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Mystery, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller, TIFF

*½/****
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

by Bill Chambers Featuring more close-ups of needles piercing flesh than a booster-shot training video, Antiviral, the debut feature by Cronenberg offspring Brandon, takes place in a world evolutions ahead of TMZ, where fans pay to have themselves infected with viruses extracted from their celebrity crushes. (“Biological communion,” the film calls this process–a phrase that links father and son filmmakers as efficiently as a paternity test.) The slightly repulsive Caleb Landry Jones is Syd March, a rogue technician for The Lucas Clinic who breaks protocol by contaminating himself with the disease that is rapidly, unexpectedly killing superstar Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), making him a target of Hannah’s family–who figure he’ll be useful in their search for a cure–and fans, who want to watch him expire as a proxy for their beloved Hannah. Yes, it’s pretty silly.

The Rite (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

August 1, 20122011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Hungary, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Anthony Hopkins, Colin O'Donoghue, Alice Braga, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Michael Petroni, suggested by the book by Matt Baglio
directed by Mikael Håfström

by Walter Chaw Though it's not particularly surprising that The Rite isn't scary or innovative, it is a bit of a surprise that The Rite doesn't completely suck. It's not good, but there's some ambition in its tale of a tortured seminarian. Michael (Colin O'Donoghue) is dealing with his odd childhood at the knee of his dad, a widower and overzealous mortician (Rutger Hauer), as well as a crisis of faith handily addressed by the traumatic, traffic-related death of an innocent whom God, the picture suggests, throws in front of a truck to get Michael to reconsider leaving the priesthood. In the same stroke, God cripples Michael's mentor, Father Matthew (Toby Jones), leading one to revisit Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star" for a dose of non-Scriptural skepticism and rage if one were so inclined. No matter, as Michael, because of his lack of squeamishness, is packed off to The Vatican to attend a modern exorcism school. Which is also something of a surprise, I guess–that said exorcism school really exists and is alive and well, well into the 21^st century. Although that surprise is ameliorated a little by the fact that Catholicism also still believes in a literal transubstantiation of the host. Small wonder that Catholicism is my favourite Christian sect.

Blood Work (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 20122000s, 2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
starring Clint Eastwood, Wanda De Jesús, Jeff Daniels, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Michael Connelly
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw You can figure out the pivotal clue in Blood Work if not by the title alone–which gives altogether too much away–then surely come the thirty-minute mark. You can deduce the identity of the murderer as soon as he saunters on screen, and you can predict the love story almost before it happens just by dint of the kind of movie that Blood Work is. The only thing you can’t figure out is why Clint Eastwood, who sometimes makes interesting movies like Bird, A Perfect World, White Hunter, Black Heart, and Unforgiven, almost as often makes boring, predictable, prosaic movies like The Rookie (1990), Absolute Power, True Crime, and now Blood Work.

Exotica (1994) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD

June 24, 2012****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery

Exoticacap

****/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Bruce Greenwood, Mia Kirshner, Don McKellar, Elias Koteas
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Bryant Frazer When Exotica debuted at Cannes in 1994, Atom Egoyan had already earned a reputation for curious, low-key explorations of memory and alienation. His Family Viewing, Speaking Parts, and The Adjuster leaned on video as a kind of metaphor showing how relationships become dependent on individual frames of reference that each move in only one direction–how one person’s blank tape is another’s cherished memory, or how one person’s pornographic display is another’s lifeline. Exotica represented Egoyan’s commercial breakthrough in part because he found an enticing venue for those observations. It’s one of the most fundamentally despairing movies that I know, and yet there is in the precision of its craft, the bravery of its conception, and the depth of its empathy something fundamentally uplifting.

The Woman in the Fifth (2012)

June 13, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Mystery, Poland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

La femme du Vème
*½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Kristin Scott Thomas, Joanna Kulig, Samir Guesmi
screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski, based on Douglas Kennedy’s novel
directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

by Angelo Muredda Midway through Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Woman in the Fifth, Romanian femme fatale Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas) tells glum American writer Tom (Ethan Hawke) not to worry about his writer’s block. “You have the makings of a serious work now,” she reassures him: “A broken life, down-and-out in Paris.” Intended as a key to the film, a hint that we aren’t watching real events at all but rather their translation into an American’s grim European masterwork, this exchange does nothing so much as outline the limits of Pawlikowski’s imagination. His first feature since 2004’s unsettling My Summer of Love, this is an odd misstep, the kind of bad movie that can only be made with the purest of intentions. I don’t doubt that Pawlikowski, working from a thriller by American writer Douglas Kennedy, believes in this idea that good novels are born of wretched experiences–that being a disgraced literature professor and stalled artist shaking down phantoms in run-down Paris gives you a direct line to authenticity. But it’s the sort of half-baked conceit that defines countless shallow genre texts shooting for arthouse credibility, the hallmark of a Secret Window knockoff that begs to be taken as seriously as a good Paul Auster novel.

Prometheus (2012)

June 6, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, UK

*/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Charlize Theron
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw It’s time, probably long past time, to admit that Ridley Scott is nothing more or less than Tim Burton: a visual stylist at the mercy of others to offer his hatful of pretty pictures something like depth. If either one of them ever made a great film (and I’d argue that both have), thank the accident of the right source material and/or editor, not these directors, whose allegiance is to their own visual auteurism rather than any desire for a unified product. For Scott, the conversation essentially begins and ends for me with Alien, Blade Runner, and Black Hawk Down (for most, it’s just the first two, with a political nod to Thelma & Louise)–genre films, all, and each about the complications of mendacity given over to lush, stylish excess: the gothic, biomechanical haunted house of Alien‘s Nostromo mining vehicle and its hapless band of blue-collar meatbags; the meticulously detailed Angelino diaspora of Blade Runner and its Raymond Chandler refugee; and Mark Bowden’s Mogadishu, transformed in Black Hawk Down into a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Again, there’s that utility. Without it, Scott’s films are impenetrable monuments to style, as smooth and affectless as a perfume advertisement–and the more you watch them, the less memorable that style becomes.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 3, 20122011, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Mystery, UK

*½/**** Image C+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Noomi Rapace, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Michele Mulroney & Kieran Mulroney
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Angelo Muredda On my way out of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, I overheard a woman telling her friend that it was “the sort of thing you have to see a second time.” Presumably she meant the intricate scheme by which “Napoleon of Crime” Moriarty (Jared Harris, suitably menacing) seeks to deliver Europe into an early Great War, a mystery so trite that its solution hinges on whether Holmes (Robert Downey Jr., inching dangerously towards Johnny Depp levels of hackdom) can get a hold of his nemesis’s pocketbook. But showing us everything for a second time is very much Ritchie’s M.O. There are about twenty minutes of movie in A Game of Shadows, all told: the rest is instant replay, a shameless parade of alternate angles and slow-motion recaps of bullets firing out of barrels or getting jammed in the process. It’s as if in lieu of the finished product, Ritchie submitted home footage of his own work in the editing suite, dazzled by Final Cut Pro’s array of grey filters and motion blurs.

The Lady Vanishes (1938) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 9, 20121930s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Mystery, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

Ladyvanishescap3small

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood, Paul Lukas, Cecil Parkerscreenplay by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw There’s something ephemeral about Ms. Froy (Dame May Whitty), from her sudden appearance at a hotel desk to her first words obscured by ambient noise, to her initial exit facilitated by an invisible hand. She seems from the start a metaphor, the first of Hitchcock’s women-as-metaphor, leading up to his gaggle of Birds and an unlikely companion in that way to the seagulls-into-women who discover a body at the beginning of the previous year’s Young and Innocent. She occupies a space as well with the unnamed second Mrs. De Winter in Hitch’s American debut, Rebecca: a cipher, without an identity of her own, the MacGuffin made flesh and the embodiment, in The Lady Vanishes, of perhaps the director’s desire to pursue his career across the pond, with only a contractual obligation to Jamaica Inn standing in his way. (The Lady Vanishes starts in a way station, yes? Gateway to greater adventure.) Indeed, the picture cemented David O. Selznick’s interest in Hitchcock, the irony being that unlike the majority of his work before and after, The Lady Vanishes‘ production was already well underway before he hopped onto the saddle. On second thought, maybe it was the idea that Hitchcock could be a hired gun that attracted Selznick–a belief that holds countless ironies of its own.

Vertigo (1958) – Universal Legacy Series DVD

May 7, 2012****/****, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore
screenplay by Alec Coppel & Samuel Taylor, based on the novel D’Entre Les Morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. What Vertigo lacks that others of Alfred Hitchcock’s undisputed late masterpieces do not, just in terms of sheer bulk volume, is scholarship. Weird, because the film is Hitchcock’s most complex, albeit in many ways also his most opaque. It’s as if it defies analysis by being at once too obvious and too obscure, enough so that critical reads of it are inevitably both naïve and pompous. It’s true that attempts at unlocking the film are akin to diagnosing a particularly-disturbed patient’s dysfunction: that you’re fucked up is right there on the surface for everyone to see, but the reasons why are damnably difficult to beat from the grey bramble. Attempts to articulate what works about the picture invariably wind up describing the technical mechanism (the perspective distortion, the monumentalism, the voluminous and self-announcing rear projection) rather than the ineffable, perverse rapture that it provokes.

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

March 19, 2012****/****, 2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller, UK

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

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