Fantastic Fest ’14: Man from Reno

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Mystery, Thriller

Manfromreno

**/****
directed by Dave Boyle

by Walter Chaw Dave Boyle’s Man from Reno is agreeably mediocre. It doesn’t do anything particularly badly, doesn’t do anything particularly wonderfully, overstays its welcome a little, and appears to not know whether to be a Father Dowling mystery or a Patricia Highsmith novel before settling on being a bit of both. It starts with the permanent vacation of popular/reclusive Japanese mystery author Aki (Ayako Fujitani), who travels to visit friends in San Francisco, where she finds herself involved with a handsome stranger (Kazuki Kitamura) and shady dealings. Meanwhile, grizzled small-town sheriff Paul Del Moral (Pepe Serna) investigates an abandoned car and a hit-and-run, only to cross paths with plucky Aki. An unlikely buddy comedy? You bet, though one that only flowers for a moment when Aki interrogates a woman as erstwhile interpreter but actual prime-investigator while poor Sheriff Del Moral stands by, asking questions never properly translated. It’s charming. All of Man of Reno is charming. So terribly, terribly charming.

Winter’s Tale (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Mystery, Romance, Will Smith

Winterstale1

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras D+
starring Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Jennifer Connelly, Russell Crowe
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Mark Helprin
directed by Akiva Goldsman

by Walter Chaw Cloud Atlas for the early buffet crowd, Akiva Goldsman’s unsurprisingly dreadful Winter’s Tale hits every single number in the legendary shipwreck lotto, vacillating wildly between unwatchable dreck and oddly-compelling unwatchable dreck. That it’s badly-written is no shocker, given that it’s Goldsman; the treat this time is that the awful script is matched by a horrific first-time director (Goldsman, too) whose dream it was to adapt an essentially unadaptable magic-realist novel by Mark Helprin that offers the again not-shocking glad-handing Carlos Castenada philosophy of healing light and Manifest Destiny. Just like Cloud Atlas, it’s killed most any desire I may have held to read the source material (which I’m sure is a pity), but unlike Cloud Atlas it resists employing yellowface to make its point. That’s an improvement. Not an improvement is casting Will Smith as a monologue-delivering Lucifer–yes, that Lucifer; Eva Marie Saint as a 110-year-old woman; and young Jessica Brown Findlay, a casualty of “Downton Abbey”, who boasts the sucking void of the vacuous and the genuinely uncharismatic. To be fair, she doesn’t get a lot to work with.

True Detective (2014) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

Posted in2014, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Television

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Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
“The Long Bright Dark,” “Seeing Things,” “The Locked Room,” “Who Goes There,” The Secret Fate of All Life,” “Haunted Houses,” “After You’ve Gone,” “Form and Void”

by Jefferson Robbins SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. On the original 2003 recording of The Handsome Family‘s “Far from Any Road,” husband-and-wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks intertwine their voices sinuously, trading the song’s lonesome-death verses on equal footing. Her part pared down for the mesmeric opening credits of HBO’s “True Detective”, Rennie’s whisper becomes a sudden intrusion, jarring both the lyrical and visual narrative. It’s a hint of what’s to come in the eight-episode series itself. When a woman character exerts an active pull upon the story of tormented Louisiana State Police detectives Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), it’s an interruption, a vitriolic hiccup. Prompted by Marty’s stalking and volcanic abuse, his much younger mistress Lisa (Alexandra Daddario) reveals his serial infidelity to his wife Maggie (Michelle Monaghan). To poison Marty for his adulteries, Maggie seduces a drunken Cohle. The two cops have no female peers, only suspects, victims, bereaved mothers, hookers, and strippers to be interrogated, rescued, or ignored.

True Blood: The Complete Sixth Season (2013) – Blu-ray with Digital Copy

Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Television, Thriller, Vampire, Werewolf

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Image A- Sound A Extras B-
“Who Are You, Really?,” “The Sun,” “You’re No Good,” “At Last,” “**** the Pain Away,” “Don’t You Feel Me,” “In the Evening,” “Dead Meat,” “Life Matters,” “Radioactive”

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The penultimate season of “True Blood” was fraught with behind-the-scenes turmoil. Creator-showrunner Alan Ball had departed the series and his replacement, Ball’s old “Cybill” cohort Mark Hudis, was himself replaced partway through the season by long-time “True Blood” scribe Brian Buckner. (Ball has a history of tapping out after five seasons and being notoriously difficult to replace–“Six Feet Under” ended when it did because he couldn’t convince anyone to take over.) Whether this directly contributed to an abrupt plot development that effectively cleaves the season in two, the truth is that “True Blood” weathers these personnel changes invisibly enough as to affirm it is either on autopilot by now or, to be less generous, was already something of a runaway train that had only ornamental use for a conductor. Whatever the case, the show’s sixth year represents a marginal rebound–though at this point in my “True Blood” journey, I’m just a masochist ranking the instruments of torture.

Non-Stop (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

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½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Scoot McNairy, Anson Mount
screenplay by John W. Richardson & Chris Roach and Ryan Engle
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Furthering the all-signs-point-to-yes idea that the greatest threat to national security is an ill-informed white guy with a grudge of some kind, Jaume Collet-Serra’s execrable Non-Stop is the latest stop on the Liam Neeson winsome-badass tour. In this one, he plays alcoholic air marshal Bill Marks, grieving the death of his daughter and about to get one last chance to make right with the universe. At this point, it’s fair to ask if Neeson is exploiting the tragic loss of wife Natasha Richardson for added gravitas in shit like this or genuinely drawn to these roles from an insensate expression of pain. Whatever the case, as this is not much different in feel and quality from his soon-to-be-completed Taken trilogy, it might be time for him to find a different agent. Lucky for Bill, sharing the fateful flight essayed in the film is an adorable moppet he can pretend is a version of his daughter and save from death, as well as a middle-aged but exactly-attractive-enough woman, Jen (Julianne Moore), he can pretend is the mother of his dead kid and quasi fall in love with. It’s all so gratifyingly tidy.

Nymph()maniac (2013)

Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical Release

Nymphomaniac

Nymph()maniac: Vol. I
Nymph()maniac: Vol. II
***½/****
starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf
written and directed by Lars von Trier

by Angelo Muredda Partway through the second volume of Lars von Trier’s surprisingly nimble Nymph()maniac, wounded storyteller Joe (three-time Trier MVP Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells her rapt listener Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) about the time she went to a support group for her sex addiction. When the group’s straight-edge policy proved more than she could bear, Joe bowed out, but not before quipping that her fellow sufferers are nothing but “society’s morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the earth so that the bourgeoisie won’t feel sick.” At last, one thinks, von Trier has found his ideal authorial surrogate in Gainsbourg, whose weird Brechtian delivery is halfway between earnest declaration and stiff high-school rendition of The Crucible. Von Trier has been a professional troll, masking his underlying seriousness with outré gestures, since long before he started sporting T-shirts emblazoned with “PERSONA NON GRATA,” in tribute to Cannes’ goofy decision to brand him uncouth for joking that his Wagner fixation owed to a latent penchant for Nazism. (All joshing aside, it obviously stung him.) But he’s never shown himself to be as sophisticated at joking through tears (or crying through nasty punchlines) as he is in Nymph()maniac. Clocking in at over four hours in two rich parts, at least in the edited version debuting this weekend at Toronto’s Lightbox, it’s a landmark of seriocomic storytelling that is simultaneously a satire of biographical tall-tales, a depressive’s bildungsroman, and an alternately tender and lacerating self-portrait, defending all the Joes and Larses of the world for their obscenity without sparing them the lash.

Arrow: The Complete First Season (2012-2013) + Supernatural: The Complete Eighth Season (2012-2013) – Blu-ray Discs

Posted in2012, 2013, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Television, Werewolf

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ARROW: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image A Sound B Extras B-
“Pilot,” “Honor Thy Father,” “Lone Gunmen,” “An Innocent Man,” “Damaged,” “Legacies,” “Muse of Fire,” “Vendetta,” “Year’s End,” “Burned,” “Trust but Verify,” “Vertigo,” “Betrayal,” “The Odyssey,” “Dodger,” “Dead to Rights,” “The Huntress Returns,” “Salvation,” “Unfinished Business,” “Home Invasion,” “The Undertaking,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “Sacrifice”

SUPERNATURAL: THE COMPLETE EIGHTH SEASON
Image A Sound B+ Extras B
“We Need to Talk About Kevin,” “What’s Up, Tiger Mommy?,” “Heartache,” “Bitten,” “Blood Brother,” “Southern Comfort,” “A Little Slice of Kevin,” “Hunteri Heroici,” “Citizen Fang,” “Torn and Frayed,” “LARP and the Real Girl,” “As Time Goes By,” “Everybody Hates Hitler,” “Trial and Error,” “Man’s Best Friend with Benefits,” “Remember the Titans,” “Goodbye Stranger,” “Freaks and Geeks,” “Taxi Driver,” “Pac-Man Fever,” “The Great Escapist,” “Clip Show,” “Sacrifice”

by Jefferson Robbins Kindred shows in more ways than just their sharing a network, a Vancouver, B.C. shooting base, and a David Nutter-helmed pilot, The CW’s “Arrow” and “Supernatural” also share a gestalt. Post-“The X Files”, post-“Buffy”, they grapple with family legacies, duty versus desire, and bonds (specifically male) threatened by the intrusion of a) monsters and b) lovers. Watching the debut season of the former alongside the eighth season of the latter, it becomes clear that “Arrow”‘s showrunners, headed by Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and Andrew Kreisberg, are just as steeped in the modes and methods of this youth-oriented action programming as “Supernatural” creator Eric Kripke. Both series find young, handsome protagonists consumed with the bloody twilight work left undone by their dead fathers; and both–despite “Arrow”‘s roots as a second-tier DC Comics property straining for multimedia relevance–are better, and bloodier, and in some ways more relevant, than one has any right to expect.

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Electraglideinblue

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Robert Blake, Billy (Green) Bush, Jeannine Riley, Elisha Cook
screenplay by Robert Boris
directed by James William Guercio

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. By 1973 in the United States, film had already become chronicles of listless motion, failed ideologies, ironic Westward expansion, and rampant paranoia. American cinema was in the process of cannibalizing itself in great gulps of genre reconsideration, taking the lead of the movies-by-critics of the French New Wave and reassessing the western/film noir/thriller cycle of studio-era Hollywood through a new mirror darkly: The iconography of the hero mythology Americans hold most dear (cowboy, hardboiled detective, two-fisted man of action), forced now to be populated by incoherent psychopaths and, worse, effeminate ones–lawyers, journalists, ex-cons, ex-soldiers back from an unpopular war, unloved, disrespected, lost and still losing.

SDFF ’13: The Fifth Season

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Netherlands

Fifthseason

La cinquième saison
****/****
starring Aurelia Poirier, Django Schrevens, Sam Louwyck, Gill Vancompernolle
written and directed by Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth

by Walter Chaw It begins as a puzzle, the active-engagement kind where a film, maybe an art film not very good and certainly not lacking in pretension, wears all the hopes of its creators on its sleeve. But then, out of nowhere, Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth’s The Fifth Season (La cinquième saison) ties together all the pretty pictures into an entirely honourable updating of a few of the ideas from, but most importantly the atmosphere of, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. Truth be told, the pictures are more than just pretty: they’re stunning at times, and it’s easy to be mesmerized by them–by their surrealism and meticulous framing, and, at the end of it all, by their gorgeous absurdity. This is rapturous filmmaking that in its first minutes watches two teens kiss, tentatively, in the cold and the woods, their breath trembling the soft down on each other’s faces. We feel, with them, the discovery of something new. The Fifth Season is a film about textures, but rather than just be a film about textures, it does something that maybe Terrence Malick’s movies do, certainly Bela Tarr’s: it makes its form comment on its function.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

Posted in1970s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

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THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN
**½/**** BD – Image B+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine, Jimmy Clem, Dawn Wells
screenplay by Earl E. Smith
directed by Charles B. Pierce

THE EVICTORS (1979)
**½/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Vic Morrow, Michael Parks, Jessica Harper, Sue Ane Langdon
screenplay by Charles B. Pierce, Gary Rusoff, Paul Fisk
directed by Charles B. Pierce

by Jefferson Robbins Charles B. Pierce’s 1976 thriller The Town That Dreaded Sundown makes a fetish of breath. The bag-headed killer, ripped from the headlines of 1946 Texarkana, is a mouth-breather, his mask working like a bellows whether he’s exerting himself or not. He’s announced by his respiring, as when rural housewife Helen Reed (Dawn Wells) ceases brushing her rich black hair to listen for him outside her home. And his most artful, or perhaps comical, kill is executed with a bayonet trombone, stabbing with each exhalation. He’s the old stereotype of the heavy-breathing phone pervert writ deadly, shambling up to parked teenagers and taking his jollies as he may. Sexual assault is implicit in his approach but quickly disavowed, although he heavily bites his earliest female victim. An oral compulsion that is sexual but not; a murder that is penetrative rape but not… As scripted, the never-captured Phantom Killer of Texarkana would be a pretty interesting psychological study.

Psycho II (1983) [Collector’s Edition] + Psycho III (1986) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

Psycho II (1983) [Collector’s Edition] + Psycho III (1986) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

Posted in1980s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

PSYCHO II
***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, Robert Loggia, Meg Tilly
screenplay by Tom Holland
directed by Richard Franklin

PSYCHO III
**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Anthony Perkins, Diana Scarwid, Jeff Fahey, Roberta Maxwell
screenplay by Charles Edward Pogue
directed by Anthony Perkins

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For a fool’s errand, Psycho II–a decades-belated, colour follow-up to a seminal black-and-white horror by a filmmaker whose mythical stature had only grown since his death–is nothing short of a miracle. The story goes that in the early-Eighties, when sequels were the new Gold Rush, Universal–who’d seen healthy returns on Jaws 2 and Smokey and the Bandit II–realized it had a sequelizable property in Psycho but intended to hedge their bets with a telefilm for the burgeoning cable market. When Anthony Perkins got wind of the project, he expressed an unanticipated interest in reprising the role of Norman Bates, having done so one time before in a warmly received sketch on the first season of “Saturday Night Live”. Australian Richard Franklin, a USC graduate back in Hollywood to direct the picture, realized the studio could be shamed into releasing Psycho II theatrically were Perkins to star in it, and recruited The Beast Within screenwriter Tom Holland (who went on to give us Fright Night and Child’s Play) to craft a script the actor couldn’t resist. Once Perkins said “yes,” Universal begrudgingly bumped it up to a feature but still expected it to be made quickly and cheaply like the original–probably to the perverse delight of Hitchcock scholar Franklin, who prided himself on doing things the Master’s way all through production, going so far as to cameo in the film.

MHHFF ’13: Haunter

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Haunted

*/****
directed by Vincenzo Natali

by Walter Chaw A Paperhouse/Coraline kind of movie that mixes all that familiar guff into a paste with the can’t-leave-this-house crap from The Others and, oh, why not, Beetlejuice, too, Vincenzo Natali’s follow-up to his unfairly-maligned Splice is the genuinely bad Haunter, which plays every bit like a collection of “Resident Evil” cut-scenes. Abigail Breslin is Lisa, a period-’80s teenager in a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt who, in a real knee-slapper, deadpans that “meat is murder” to her mother’s offer of meatloaf, because The Smiths, get it? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that Haunter is a master of overstatement (it wouldn’t surprise me if this Lisa is an homage to the Staci Keanan Lisa), even taking a moment at the end to pay tribute to Carpenter’s Christine for really no other reason than that it can’t help being hyperbolic: the screaming is screamier, the whispering is whisperier, and it doesn’t rain, it pours. Lisa is trapped in the last day of her life with her family in a sort of Groundhog Day conceit, except that she’s a ghost who eventually figures out that the same evil ghost dude guy has been killing young girls just like her for decades, and that it’s up to her to break the cycle. This leads, of course, to a scene from the ending of Ghost–no, not that one, the one before it where the villain gets dragged to hell by bad special effects.

TIFF ’13: Enemy

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Film Festivals, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

Enemy_01

***/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon, Isabella Rossellini
screenplay by Javier Gullón, based on the novel The Double by José Saramago
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Angelo Muredda If the interviews floating around online in the wake of his appearance at TIFF are any indication, Denis Villeneuve spent much of his time with press managing expectations about Enemy. Though it’s technically his English-language debut, as well as the first of two collaborations with Jake Gyllenhaal in a year’s time, Enemy isn’t slated to come out until sometime next spring, long after its bigger-budgeted, higher-pedigreed younger sibling, Prisoners. Judging from its deferred release and Villeneuve’s own comments that the film is an experimental project, a one-off to help him transition from the high-toned tragedy of Incendies to more classical Hollywood filmmaking, you’d think it was a dog, but in truth it’s probably the best thing he’s ever made–a modest little psycho-thriller based on José Saramago’s novel The Double, set in a jaundiced Toronto no one would want to hold a festival in.

TIFF ’13: The Past

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, TIFF
**/**** directed by Asghar Farhadi by Angelo Muredda The Past is a heartbreaker, a badly misjudged project that retraces each major step of Asghar Farhadi's A Separation but arrives at the finish line with little to show for itself. Like Farhadi's previous film, we start with a divorce, this time between Parisian Marie (Bérénice Bejo, channelling Marion Cotillard's more hysterical performances, especially for Christopher Nolan) and the now Tehran-based Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), who flies back into town to sign the papers and see his ex off into her new relationship with Samir (Tahar Rahim). That Samir has his own troubled…

Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

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Q
***/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C
starring Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, Richard Roundtree
written and directed by Larry Cohen

by Bryant Frazer Writer-director Larry Cohen makes exploitation look easy. His iconic Black Caesar was basically a remake of Little Caesar with a black cast; his mutant-baby flick It’s Alive amplified the generational rift created in families by the social revolutions of the 1960s and early-1970s to horror-movie proportions. Cohen is so commercially savvy that his screenwriting career has continued, in earnest, into the 21st century, placing projects like Phone Booth, Cellular, and Captivity at the Venn-diagram intersection between high-concept appeal and low-budget execution. He also has an instinct for character, and it never served him better than it did in Q, which is the story of a little criminal in a big city as much as it’s the story of a huge feathered serpent lording over Manhattan. Q was set up quickly (in two days, to hear Cohen tell it), after Cohen was fired from an adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury, and it features a terrific cast (Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree) improvising many of the scenes in a screenplay that was being written as the shoot progressed to take advantage of whatever New York locations Cohen was able to secure. The result isn’t quite a great monster movie, but it gets maybe 80 percent of the way there.

6 Souls (2013) + Dead Souls (2012) – Blu-ray Discs

Posted in2012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Television, Thriller, Zombie

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6 SOULS
Shelter
**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Julianne Moore, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Jeffreey DeMunn, Brooklyn Proulx
screenplay by Michael Cooney
directed by Marlind & Stein

DEAD SOULS
½*/**** Image C Sound B Extras C
starring Jesse James, Magda Apanowicz, Bill Moseley, Geraldine Hughes
screenplay by John Doolan
directed by Colin Theys

by Walter Chaw The best scene in the surprisingly-not-awful 6 Souls happens in a toothless hinterland, up yonder in them thar hills, ’round campfires and lean-tos and a wilderness of patchy facial hair, where forensic psychologist Cara (Julianne Moore) meets a Granny Holler Witch (Joyce Feurring), who is just indescribably awesome. She’s like a refugee from The Dark Crystal–the very incarnation of Aughra, blind but seeing through an albino familiar (Katiana Davis) as she performs psychic surgery, sucking up souls with her mouth and depositing them in a jar she calls “shelter.” Indeed, it’s such an awesome scene that it shows up how perfunctory the rest of Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein’s 6 Souls is; how the idea of a demon jumping bodies (like The Evil Dead, yes, but more like Fallen) can look very much like an early-’90s mid-prestige thriller and therefore not anything interesting or special. A shame, as the talent assembled for the piece is exceptional–Moore, certainly, along with the always-fabulous Jeffrey DeMunn as Cara’s dad Dr. Harding. It’s his fault that Cara gets involved with psych-patient Adam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who, in the process of manifesting multiple bad-accent theatre personalities, also seems to be manifesting their physical traits (like paralysis, say, and bad acting, too). Turns out it ain’t science afflicting our man Adam, but you knew that already.

To Have and Have Not (1944) + The Big Sleep (1945/6) – DVDs

Posted in****/****, 1940s, 2013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
****/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Dolores Moran
screenplay by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Howard Hawks

THE BIG SLEEP
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone
screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett & Jules Furthman, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler
directed by Howard Hawks

by Walter Chaw While biographer Todd McCarthy refers to the two versions of Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep as marking the delineation point separating linear (early) Hawks from non-linear (later) Hawks, I feel like you can mark the director’s affection for bonzo non-sequiturs throughout his sultry To Have and Have Not. The picture tells its tale of immigrants marooned off the islets of war and sexual sophistication–an island bell jar and pressure cooker envisioned as a sequel of sorts to Casablanca. But where Casablanca‘s sex was mature and companionate (the sizzle replaced by simmer) and tinged with regret, To Have and Have Not has a slick of bestial sweat to it that promises that the explosion of really naughty stuff is looming rather than in the rear-view. (There’s no sexier film in all the Forties.) The story of the corrupt Vichy government and the brave French underground unfolding behind the red-hot flirtation between diplomatically non-affiliated fishing boat captain Harry “Steve” Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) and lost American teen “Slim” (Lauren Bacall) is punctuated helter-skelter by husky lounge numbers courtesy Slim and Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael) and riff sessions with Steve and Slim that have the cadence and unpredictability of jazz improvisation. It’s not so much a narrative as a medley in a bouncy key, and Hawks is not so much a director as a bandleader. Much has been made of Hawks’s skill in casting (and it’s hard to argue otherwise when he sniffs out the alchemical enchantment between old man Bogie and new thing Bacall (and Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell; and Dean Martin and a bottle)), but looking at To Have and Have Not–the first of Bogie/Bacall’s four collaborations–is to glimpse something more than a good casting eye: it’s to witness the evolution of a true musical genius. The rhythms are subterranean, the verses in between the words; to watch this and The Big Sleep (Hawks’s other collaboration with Bogie/Bacall) back-to-back is as close to rapture as this experience gets.

Hot Docs ’13: Shooting Bigfoot

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Mystery, UK

Shooting bigfoot trailer

***/****
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

Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Television, Thriller, Vampire, Werewolf

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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)

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical Release

Krivina

***/****
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.