Death Wish (1973) – Blu-ray Disc + Stone Cold (1991) – DVD

May 27, 2014Posted in1970s, 1990s, 2014, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Revenge, Thriller

Deathwish1click any image to enlarge

DEATH WISH
***½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Charles Bronson, Vincent Gardenia, William Redfield, Hope Lange
screenplay by Wendell Mayes, based on the novel by Brian Garfield
directed by Michael Winner

STONE COLD
**/**** Image C+ Sound B-
starring Brian Bosworth, Lance Henriksen, William Forsythe, Sam McMurray
screenplay by Walter Doniger
directed by Craig R. Baxley

by Jefferson Robbins The urban vigilante is one of cinema's most potent, enduring figures, and it's worth asking how he got there. Michael Winner's influential but derided Death Wish drafts an explicit genealogy for its cosmopolitan avenger, granting him claim to the mantle of the lone lawman of the Old West. Bereaved through violence, Manhattan architect Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) takes an assignment revising a valuable development plan near Tucson. There he pauses to watch a cowboy shootout re-enacted for tourists, the bad guys toppling until the besieged sheriff is the sole, righteous survivor. It's a cheap, thrilling, thoroughly Hollywood portrayal of frontier justice, and it represents an ethos Paul's host Jainchill (Stuart Margolin) urges him to carry in his heart back to New York, where unlicensed firearm possession has been illegal since 1911. This tension isn't original to Wendell Mayes's relatively terse screenplay–it originates in Brian Garfield's 1972 source novel, published after the author spent a decade cranking out pulp western yarns. But Death Wish uses this element to make its own statement, grafting the mediated concept of frontier self-justification onto an urban morality play. The western may be dead, and it may have been a lie to begin with (and it may be the cinema of the '70s that killed it), but Death Wish is among the genre's inheritors. Don't all children eventually hope to supersede their parents?

Ms. 45 (1981)

January 17, 2014Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Revenge, Theatrical

Ms45

Ms. .45
***½/****
starring Zoë Tamerlis, Bogey, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto
screenplay N. G. St. John
directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I first saw Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 the way I suspect most men my age saw it: furtively, in my bedroom, on VHS. It had about it that aura of skeeviness I spent a good portion of my time hunting for at the local video store. My nose for such things had been rewarded with likes of I Spit on Your Grave and The Last House on the Left, films that never failed to be prurient in their rape sequences, no matter their nods to subsequently avenging our fair, fairly defiled, maidens. What Ferrara presents with this, arguably his second-most notorious film (The Addiction is unbelievable, and still only available on VHS), is a rape-revenge tale that does nothing to de-feminize its heroine–rather correctly, powerfully, identifying that the loci of a woman’s power is indeed her sexuality, even as that sexuality draws the objectifying, dehumanizing gaze. It’s why, after all, so many fertility goddesses are also destroyers, isn’t it? There’s a moment in the third Terminator where the female Terminator, played by the already-intimidating Kristanna Loken, makes a decision to enlarge her breasts prior to confronting a male victim. If only the rest of that film were so wise.

A Touch of Sin (2013)

October 18, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, China, Drama, Revenge, Theatrical

Touchofsin

***/****
starring Jiang Wu, Zhao Tao, Wang Baoqiang, Luo Lanshan
written and directed by Jia Zhangke

by Angelo Muredda The blood doesn't flow so much as it
spurts in A Touch
of Sin, Jia Zhangke's invigorated if uneven
return to straight fiction following an extended sojourn in hybridized
documentaries about modern Chinese cities. More than the formal homecoming,
however, it's the nature of the storytelling that surprises in his newest–the
leap from the elegiac tone of films like 24 City
into the more primal stuff of pulp. A wuxia
anthology with revenge-thriller overtones, A Touch of Sin is an unusually direct genre exercise for a master
filmmaker, in the sense that, unlike Steven Spielberg's Munich and other comparably shame-faced prestige films that
dip a single toe in the waters of genre, it doesn't condescend to the populist
trappings of the material. Jia isn't slumming so much as tapping into the
righteous indignation of a popular tradition of stories about wronged knights
and ruined innocents, sincerely transposed here to the working-class fringe of
a nation state in the throes of late capitalism. If Jia's violence comes fast
and leaves a mess, then, it's a testament to his willingness to get his hands
dirty where others might have kept a safer distance.

Bastards (2013)

October 11, 2013Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, France, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller

Bastards

Les salauds
****/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille, Lola Creton
screenplay by Jean-Pol Fargeau and Claire Denis
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda A Claire Denis film through and through, Bastards is nevertheless a brilliant departure for one of the most distinctive artists in world cinema–an indignant revenge thriller with, of all things, a straightforward plot. Of course, the plot is scrambled, doled out in the runic fragments that have become Denis’s stock-in-trade. We open, for instance, in the rain, as a throbbing Tindersticks track underscores a series of beautiful but inscrutable nocturnal images: glimpses of a man forlornly staring out his window, languorous tracking shots of a nude young woman in heels roaming through a deserted street, and finally a tableau of a dead man’s body splayed out beneath a fire escape, surrounded by paramedics in the background as a woman, probably his wife, is draped in a tinfoil blanket in the fore. Although films like L’Intrus have primed us to accept such shards as part of an impressionistic array of visual information, adding up to a textured view of nighttime Paris as a hopelessly lonely place, in Bastards the pieces fit together in a precise way we’re simply not allowed to know until we’ve arrived through the movie’s own idiosyncratic channel, and at its own deliberate pace. That makes it one of the most elegantly constructed of Denis’s eleven features–a grim noir story broken into its component parts, then reassembled into a haunted funhouse image of itself.

The Burning (1981) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

August 21, 2013Posted in1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory

Burning1

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Brian Matthews, Leah Ayres, Brian Backer, Lou David
screenplay by Peter Lawrence and Bob Weinstein
directed by Tony Maylam

by Walter Chaw The pleasures of Tony Maylam’s The Burning, such as they are, arise when one engages it in an extra-textual conversation about why at the end of the American ’70s there suddenly bloomed an exploitation slasher subgenre to provide a nihilistic gateway into the Reagan ’80s. Really, when you look at the wonderland of ’80s blockbuster cinema, there is throughout an undercurrent of Friday the 13ths and Elm Street flicks, of course, but also stuff like Slumber Party Massacre, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, Maniac, Camps Cheerleader and Sleepaway, Mother’s Day (which Roger Ebert referred to as a “geek” show–the kind that bit heads off chickens, not the kind that founded Apple)…all the lurid VHS covers that made browsing the neighbourhood rental joint such delicious taboo delight. It’s that thrill that The Burning captures and evokes still–that feeling adolescent boys of a certain age got, pre-Internet, by renting something they shouldn’t rent with the suspicion, nay, promise, it would provoke the same erotic tingle as hardcore porn would in a couple years’ time. It’s a movie very much like Tolkien’s writing: if you don’t discover it in junior high, you’ll never appreciate it the way it was meant to be appreciated again.

Rolling Thunder (1977) – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 2013Posted in1970s, 2013, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Rollingthunder1click any image to enlarge

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B+
starring William Devane, Tommy Lee Jones, Linda Haynes, James Best
screenplay by Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould
directed by John Flynn

by Bryant Frazer Rolling Thunder‘s reputation was burnished considerably in the 1990s when Quentin Tarantino declared it one of his favourite films. It’s a good call; Tarantino owes his career to his long-standing love affair with the grindhouse, and Rolling Thunder is in many ways the quintessence of Hollywood exploitation. Director John Flynn, who made a name for himself with his 1973 adaptation of a Donald E. Westlake novel, The Outift, comes across as an efficient, focused storyteller who pares narrative to the bone. That style of filmmaking really allows (or requires) performance to come to the fore, and in the intense vigilante fantasy Rolling Thunder, both William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones deliver smart and scary interpretations of the soul-damaged protagonist and sidekick, respectively. Flynn certainly wasn’t a self-conscious stylist, and he ended up toiling in the gulag of undistinguished action pictures like the 1989 Stallone-in-prison flick Lock Up and the Steven Seagal revenge thriller Out for Justice. He died in 2007, and Rolling Thunder is just remarkable enough that you want to bemoan his anonymity.

Woochi: The Demon Slayer (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

May 26, 2013Posted in2000s, 2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory, South Korea

Woochi
**/****
Image B+
Sound B+
Extras B-
starring
Kang Dong-won, Kim Yoon-seok, Im Soo-jung, Yoo Hae-jin
written
and directed by Choi Dong-hoon


Woochi3click any image to
enlarge

by
Bryant Frazer With directors like
Park
Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, and Bong Joon-ho doing their level best to
reinvent
genres like the revenge thriller, the lurid melodrama, and even the
monster
movie, recent Korean cinema has been a wellspring of intrigue for movie buffs. You won't get that kind of ambition from Woochi,
a
middle-of-the-road adventure yarn constructed out of bits of Korean
mythology,
formulaic action beats, and Hollywood-style VFX work. It's
featherweight
through and through, adventurous only inasmuch as it switches gears
partway in,
moving from the generic conventions of a period martial-arts film to
those of
an urban fantasy opus set in modern South Korea, where centuries-old
wizards
are vying to retrieve an ancient relic. If you listen carefully enough
during
the quiet bits, you can almost hear the popcorn being chewed.

Iron Man 3 (2013)

May 2, 2013Posted in2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Revenge, Superhero, Theatrical

Iron
Man Three
*½/****
starring
Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley
screenplay
by Drew Pearce & Shane Black
directed
by Shane Black


Ironman3

by
Walter Chaw I laughed once during Shane Black's Iron
Man 3–an unfortunate milestone for me and Black's
films, which I
have found, without exception, pretty amusing. That one moment is a
reference serial post-modernist and industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.)
makes to
Michael Crichton's 1973 cult fantasia Westworld.
The Tony Stark character is not just the cocksure pop-cultural embodiment of Roland Barthes's work on semiotics and myth: he'd be Barthes's greatest subject for analysis–the object that presumes a pop-cultural universal constant. The place where Black works, in other words, is that place where everyone's seen and read and heard everything they "should have" seen and read and heard. When Stark drops the Westworld bomb, then, we understand the implication that Stark is observing an evil henchman to not only appear to be robotic and indestructible, but maybe sexy and Yul Brynner-esque as well–maybe a female fantasy, maybe a "stupid sexy Flanders" homosexual fantasy. Certainly there's a recognition that dropping a reference like this is pleasurable in a way that structuralism would appreciate, but only for the nerd bourgeoisie. It's a moment meant to create a sense of exclusionary cloister in the midst of one of the most widely-dissembled entertainments in human history, and I liked that.

The Fury (1978) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Disc

April 18, 2013Posted in1970s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Brian De Palma, Espionage, Revenge, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller


Fury2

***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Carrie Snodgress, Charles Durning
screenplay by John Farris, based on his novel
directed by Brian DePalma

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. While Brian DePalma is nothing if not a leitmotif filmmaker, it’s curious that he chose to direct The Fury right after Carrie. Imagine Spielberg following up Jaws with Orca–it’s like De Palma was begging to be pigeonholed. And it’s not surprising that The Fury wasn’t as zeitgeisty: it lacks the classical simplicity and youth appeal of Carrie, with almost no one in the cast under 30 save for future softcore legend Andrew Stevens and Carrie holdover Amy Irving, a good actress who just doesn’t have that X factor. But The Fury‘s echo can still be heard, because its ending is indeed that impactful. Nearly every review mentions it, and the terms in which Pauline Kael and her acolytes described it gave it a kind of porny rep that’s since inspired generations of young film buffs to seek the movie out. (Armond White called it an “orgasm.”) It is a great ending, but a revisit makes clear that The Fury is worth reading for the articles.

Django Unchained (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 14, 2013Posted in****/****, 2012, 2013, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Revenge, Theatrical, Western

Djangounch2

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw If Inglourious Basterds was an ambiguous, brilliant indictment of “Jewish vengeance” wrapped in this impossibly canny exploration of violence through screenwriting, performance, and love of film, think of Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up, Django Unchained, as a glorious continuation of what has become a singular artist’s evolving theme. It demonstrates an absolute command of the medium, of what film can do when tasked to do more than usual, and it does it by being some of the finest film criticism of the year. If the Coens are our best literary critics, then Tarantino is our best film critic cum sociologist, and his topics, again, are how we understand history through specific prisms and how violence can be both catharsis and atrocity–often in the same breath and almost always in the same ways. Consider that this difficult film’s most difficult moment comes, as it does in Inglourious Basterds, at the very end, in an unbearably ugly act of violence perpetrated against not the expected slave-owner antagonist, Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), but his manservant Stephen/Stepin (Samuel L. Jackson). Consider, too, the idea that vengeance–particularly in our post-9/11 environment–is the proverbial tiger we’ve caught by the tail: our cultural legacy that we try to justify through any means, given that our ends are so very righteous.

Peter Pan (1953) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 4, 2013Posted in1950s, 2013, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Revenge

**/**** Image
B+ Sound
A Extras
B+
directed
by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson


Peterpan1click any image to enlarge

by
Bill Chambers Since the 1950s, mainstream audiences have
grown up
knowing Walt Disney’s Peter Pan as the definitive
adaptation of J.M.
Barrie’s play and its subsequent novelization (Peter and Wendy),
and
that’s a mixed blessing. For every thing the Disney does well, like the
swashbuckling, it does
something
horribly wrong, like compounding Barrie’s 19th-century
notions with
retrograde
values all the movie’s own. For instance, the English Barrie may have
regarded
Native Americans as exotic creatures by locating them in Never Land, but
it’s
Disney who immortalized them in literal red skin, then gave them a song
celebrating
their mono-syllabic cretinism:

Friday the 13th: From Crystal Lake to Manhattan [Ultimate Edition DVD Collection] + Friday the 13th [Uncut]|Friday the 13th Part 2|Friday the 13th Part 3 3-D – Blu-ray Discs

September 22, 2012Posted in1980s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Revenge

FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980)
**½/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B-
BD – Image A Sound B Extras B+
starring Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram
screenplay by Victor Miller
directed by Sean S. Cunningham

F131capby Alex Jackson

“Do you think you can get through the summer?”

“I don’t think I can get through the week.”

One look at the teenagers in Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th and we can see they’re displaced, without religion or identity. Shallow, dim, they don’t have any past and they don’t have any future. Their existence is entirely ephemeral and half-developed. Their lives consist solely of pot, sex, and menial work. We know that they’re really talking about life in the above-quoted exchange–life as a biological process that will come to an abrupt stop for most of them by the end of the week, if not by the end of the summer. They think they’re just talking about work and boredom.

Night Train Murders (1975) – Blu-ray Disc

February 21, 2012Posted in1970s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, Italy, Revenge

L'ultimo treno della notte
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Flavio Bucci, Macha Méril, Gianfranco De Grassi, Enrico Maria Salerno
screenplay by Renato Izzo, Ettore Sanzò and Aldo Lado
directed by Aldo Lado

Nighttrainmurderscap

by Bryant Frazer It's feeding time for the monsters again in director Aldo Lado's 1974 quasi-giallo1 Night Train Murders, which sees the young and lovely Margaret and Lisa (Irene Miracle and Laura D'Angelo, respectively, making their film debuts) cross paths with violent criminals while travelling overnight by rail from Germany through Austria to Italy. The stage is set as Pacino-esque stickup man Blackie and his harmonica-blowing sidekick Curly (Flavio Bucci and Gianfranco De Grassi) mug an alcoholic sidewalk Santa Claus in Munich's Marienplatz. Menace! With that kind of element loose in the cities, why would two girls choose to ride some skeevy midnight train into Italy instead of opting for a sensible air flight? From one mother to another, via telephone: "Planes are never on time these days."

Drive (2011)

September 16, 2011Posted in****/****, 2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks
screenplay by Hossein Amini, based on the novel by James Sallis
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn 

Driveby Walter Chaw The pink, cursive font of the opening credits immediately calls to mind '80s classics like Smooth Talk while the obsessive interest in functionality and work (and Cliff Martinez's awesome Tangerine Dream soundtrack) recalls Michael Mann's Thief, but it's that certain quality of masculine stillness that marks Drive as another Nicolas Winding Refn masterpiece. Its story is boilerplate noir: loner (Ryan Gosling) falls for young mother (Carey Mulligan) and is forced by circumstance to protect her and her son (Kaden Leos) against all the bad men. Drive is, in other words, Taxi Driver if Mann had made it in the eighties, a meticulous character study done in long, drawn-out takes and extended silences punctuated now and again by extreme violence. It's a smart movie–a quintessentially L.A. one, too, in its self-awareness (the nameless hero is a stuntman, Richard Rush fans take note), and it has an extraordinary quality of stillness that paints in confident strokes what it feels like to be completely alone by luck you call choice. A late scene with "Driver" holding himself around the middle, then getting in his car as Refn splashes neon on him and The Chromatics play on the soundtrack is something like a perfect moment in a film indicated by them.

Maniac (1980) [30th Anniversary Edition] + Vigilante (1983) – Blu-ray Discs

April 13, 2011Posted in1980s, 2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, Horror, Revenge, Thriller

MANIAC
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A+
starring Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro
screenplay by C.A. Rosenberg and Joe Spinell
directed by William Lustig

VIGILANTE
*½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Robert Forster, Fred Williamson, Richard Bright, Woody Strode
screenplay by Richard Vetere
directed by William Lustig

by Walter Chaw William Lustig reduces exploitation cinema to the filthy stepchild of Sams Peckinpah and Fuller: one part animal logic, one part tabloid paranoia. He wallows in impulse, and his sensibility is 42nd Street grindhouse through and through, from kitchen-sink production values to disjointed vignette presentations to a generally lawless indulgence towards atrocity. If Lustig's pictures have achieved a kind of cult lustre, credit his ability to alternate action sequences with B-legends showcases. It would be a mistake to attribute more to Lustig's pictures than workmanlike efficiency as applied to formula prurience, though there's something to be said for knock-off garbage done with a lack of pretension–done, in fact, with a distinct, naïve childishness that doesn't quite get down there with Jess Franco or Herschell Gordon Lewis (nor up there with Mario Bava or Dario Argento), but manages a little interest despite itself now and again, probably by (who cares?) accident.

Rob Roy (1995) – Blu-ray Disc

March 24, 2011Posted in1990s, 2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Revenge, UK

***/**** Image B Sound B
starring Liam Neeson, Jessica Lange, John Hurt, Tim Roth
screenplay by Alan Sharp
directed by Michael Caton-Jones

by Jefferson Robbins Did they name a cocktail after William Wallace? I didn't think so. In this, the later Scots hero Robert Roy MacGregor has the advantage, as he does in the film drawn from his story. Rob Roy beat Mel Gibson's Braveheart into theatres by more than a month, and it's the superior product. But what challenge could Michael Caton-Jones's courtly, well-crafted tale of swash and buckle–his only film set in his home country–mount against the bludgeoning, ass-baring, gay-defenestrating fever dream of a megastar who yearned to be stretched on the rack in imitation of his Lord?

I Spit on Your Grave (1978) + I Spit On Your Grave (2010) – Blu-ray Discs

March 21, 2011Posted in1970s, 2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Revenge

Ispitonyourgrave78cap

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (a.k.a. Day of the Woman)
**/**** Image A Sound B Extras B+
starring Camille Keaton, Eron Tabor, Richard Pace, Anthony Nichols
written and directed by Meir Zarchi

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE
*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sarah Butler, Jeff Branson, Daniel Franzese, Andrew Howard
screenplay by Stuart Morse, based on a screenplay by Meir Zarchi
directed by Steven R. Monroe

by Bryant Frazer Rape-revenge is the basest of movie formulas. What amounts to a social contract exists with the audience: during the first half of the film, you will experience the sadistic, brutal, misogynistic sexual abuse of an innocent, probably naïve young woman at the hands of cavalier thugs. And during the second half of the film, you will see this broken woman–this survivor–pull herself together long enough to exact a terrible revenge on those who wronged her.

Sundance ’11: I Saw the Devil

January 26, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Revenge, South Korea, Sundance, Thriller
Ang-ma-reul bo-at-da***½/****starring Lee Byung-hun, Choi Min-sik, Jeon Gook-hwan, Jeon Ho-jinscreenplay by Park Hoon-jungdirected by Kim Ji-woon by Alex Jackson The rape scenes in Kim Ji-woon's I Saw the Devil are the most blatantly eroticized and sadistic I've seen since Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, but they're countered by the hilariously gory revenge scenes against the rapist (Choi Min-sik) by his victim's boyfriend (Lee Byung-hun). The film isn't trying to rationalize the rape with the revenge or the revenge with the rape. Rather, it regards women and the men who rape them as equally undeserving of our sympathy. One is tortured for…

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

June 24, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Michael Bay, Revenge, Spielberg, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro
screenplay by Ehren Kruger & Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw Transformers2The worst summer in recent memory continues as Michael Bay brings his slow push-ins and Lazy Susan dolly shots back to the cineplex with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (hereafter Transformers 2), the ugliest, most hateful, most simple-minded and incomprehensible assault on art and decency since the last Michael Bay movie. It’s bad (that goes without saying), and it’s possible that even its fans will have the brute sense to recognize that it’s bad–but it’s bad in such a way that defies easy description. It’s so bad, it’s exasperating. The action, as you’d expect, is impossible to follow, with long stretches cascading in on one another without the slightest notion of who’s winning, where, and to what end. But that’s not why it’s bad. It suggests that the evil robots have perfected Terminator technology in the manufacture of a gorgeous slut-bot (Isabel Lucas), who, before trying to kill the returning Sam (Shia LaBeouf) with her go-go-gadget tongue, is humiliated by having heroic Autobot Bumblebee money-shot robot semen all over her face. But that’s not why it’s bad, either. Ridiculously poor filmmaking and Bay’s wearying misogyny aren’t “bad,” per se, so much as they’re the tools of his auteur canon, of his absolute gold-standard grasp of what it is that prepubescent boys are into and his desire to, as fast as he can, create undercover hardcore porn to gratify those desires. What else to make of the weird girl issues–the entire co-ed Michael Bay U campus populated with hot bimbo chattel, Bay’s camera leering obligingly? It’s tough to make someone feel sorry for Megan Fox, yet the extent to which she’s objectified in this flick has you looking for track marks, smeared mascara, and other evidence of bus-stop porn-star exploitation.

Kill Bill, Volume 2 (2004) – Blu-ray Disc

September 7, 2008Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, FFC Must-Own, Martial Arts, Revenge, Road Movie, Thriller, Western

Kill Bill, Vol. 2
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

Mustownby Walter Chaw Genre poetry from B-movies' poet laureate, Quentin Tarantino's conclusion to Kill Bill is marked by the filmmaker's carefully-calibrated celluloid insanity, as well as a deceptive maturity that allows a few powerfully-struck grace notes for the cult of femininity and the sanctity of motherhood. Its first portion overwhelming for its craft before lodging in the craw with its ever-present but tantalizingly difficult-to-nail moral code, Tarantino's epic whole clarifies a dedication to a sort of low, Samuel Fuller/Nicholas Ray tabloid cosmology, grounding itself eventually in the bold, lovely, curiously old-fashioned declaration that the last best reward is to be true to the primal clay of an idea of innate gender roles. The Bride (Uma Thurman) is so named not merely for camp grandeur's sake, but also to highlight the power of cultural archetypes and their roots in biology.