Annie Hall (1977) + Manhattan (1979) – Blu-ray Discs

February 20, 2012Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance

Anniehallcap

ANNIE HALL
****/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane
screenplay by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman
directed by Woody Allen

MANHATTAN
****/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Mariel Hemingway
screenplay by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman
directed by Woody Allen

by Bryant Frazer I’ve fantasized for a good twenty years now about Anhedonia, the 140-minute workprint of what eventually became Annie Hall. The original title of the project–which seems in its reflexive analysis of Allen’s public persona to have been intended as something akin to an essay film–referred to an inability to experience pleasure. As unseen movies go, it has a lower pedigree than Tod Browning’s London After Midnight, Hitchcock’s The Mountain Eagle, or Orson Welles’s cut of The Magnificent Ambersons; the few who have seen it would agree that the released version was infinitely superior. But it’s tantalizing, because Woody Allen in 1976 and 1977 was such a formidable comic.

J. Edgar (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 6, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Watts, Armie Hammer, Judi Dench
screenplay by Dustin Lance Black
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda To say that latter-day Clint Eastwood is an acquired taste seems slightly inaccurate, in that it implies a certain consistency on both the filmmaker’s and the viewer’s part: while even Invictus and the “Touched by an Angel” outtake Hereafter have their fans, you don’t find many of them championing, say, the delirious Europop ballads that punctuate the former. (“And it’s not just a game/They can’t throw me away/I put all I had on the line,” sings a mysterious crooner whose song is played in toto as Mandela descends his helicopter and paces the rugby field.) So let’s propose instead that the master of sepia’s recent output has been rather like a series of inkblots, in which perfectly smart people have seen completely different things. Some, for instance, find much to admire in the simultaneously milquetoast and monstrous Million Dollar Baby, which I’ve always read as Eastwood’s last laugh at disability-rights activists for a failed lawsuit involving an inaccessible inn he ran years prior; others dismiss Gran Torino, his most watchable film since Unforgiven, as a rare spot of trash. All of this is to say, rather sheepishly, that I kind of liked fusty old J. Edgar, even as I recognized it as a train-wreck throughout. People have been very kind to Eastwood in this restless period, calling his choice of projects as disparate as Changeling and Letters from Iwo Jima “varied,” but it’s only with J. Edgar that I’ve understood their spirit of generosity: It’s such a chameleonic grab-bag of ideas, good and bad, that some of it can’t help but appeal, regardless of whether the entire thing works. (It doesn’t.)

The Artist (2011)

January 25, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, Silent, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell
written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius

by Walter Chaw It’s tempting to dismiss Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist as fluff. It’s tempting to take the side of Kim Novak when she complains about this fluff using Bernard Hermann’s Vertigo score in vain, and a few critics and Internet memes have done exactly that. Yet The Artist is more than a passing fancy precisely because it uses the Vertigo theme correctly in a sentence. Indeed, it even has its way with film preservationists and other snobs (the kind who champion Hugo, for instance) by suggesting that obsessive movie love to the exclusion of all else is the same sort of illness, ultimately, as necrophilia. In the fluffy course of its runtime, in fact, The Artist manages to be as subversive and scabrous a Hollywood artifact as Sunset Blvd., finding its monkey funeral towards the end instead of at the beginning but presenting a close-up Mr. DeMille at its conclusion almost as ambiguous and doomed. It’s popular because it keeps its edges carefully sheathed…but they’re there. And I think people are offended once they realize–most of them long, long after the fact, and through other avenues–that Hazanavicius had the temerity to peanut-butter a little obsessive, consumptive, solipsistic love in there to gum up all the crevices. I’ll be honest: I think that if you don’t believe The Artist is correct in its use of Vertigo, you probably also thought that Vertigo was a love story.

Bridesmaids (2011) – [Unrated] DVD + Something Borrowed (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 1, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

BRIDESMAIDS
***½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras A
starring Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendon-Covey
screenplay by Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig
directed by Paul Feig

SOMETHING BORROWED
*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Kate Hudson, Ginnifer Goodwin, John Krasinski, Colin Egglesfield
screenplay by Jennie Snyder Urman, based on the novel by Emily Giffin
directed by Luke Greenfield

by Jefferson Robbins On release, everybody tried to make Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids about sex (gender and the act), when its bigger issue is class. Working from a script by Annie Mumolo and star Kristen Wiig, frosted liberally with improv in the manner producer Judd Apatow has made inescapable, the creators spin Wiig’s failed cake-maker Annie for an early midlife crisis rooted in bad relationships as well as economic hardship. It’s easy to get stuck on the sex angle, given the opening scene: Singleton Annie is stuck in a self-hating friends-with-benefits cycle with sometime-lover Ted (Jon Hamm), doing exactly what he wants in bed–at length, in several variations, and noisily. She gets only smiling, sociopathic dismissal in return as he kicks her out of his lush Milwaukee McMansion. She’s pinned some vague hope on a pretty package of a man who’s not only bad for her, but vastly wealthier, too. Note how Annie is forced to vault an automatic gate to escape Ted’s one-percenter compound. Bridesmaids is not just about relationships in the mush-minded romcom sense–it’s about power relationships: who has the most money and thus can bring the most social clout to bear, in the snowglobe economy created by a best friend’s nuptials. Goddamn, that’s timely.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011)

November 18, 2011Posted in2011, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Billy Burke
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Appalling by pretty much every measure, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (hereafter Twilight 4.1) is the predictable end result of a film based on a book written by an illiterate Mormon housewife mistaking her profound ignorance for profundity. It’s about a really old guy who talks a really young girl into marrying him and enduring really, really painful childbirth as her portion of God’s judgment on her kind; and then it’s about another kind of pedophilia, wherein a 19-year-old badly in need of acting lessons gets turned on by a baby and decides he’s going to marry that infant once she’s old enough to breed. Still with me? So, yes, I knew it was going to be bad and, yes, I went anyway. And you know what? For as girded as I was to the raw incompetence of this franchise, Twilight 4.1 still managed to plumb a few new depths. See, Twilight 4.1 is an apologia for spousal abuse and a clumsy pro-life screed (what about this crap isn’t clumsy?) before turning into cartoon Grand Guignol horseshit meant to freak out an audience of pre-teens and lonely housewives who think that this object of their devotion is selling them anything except loneliness and delusion. It’s sledgehammer racist in its depiction of a native housekeeper cast as Maria Ouspenskaya, and it has a moment in which a circle of wolves “think-talk” to each other in some ineffable evocation of an Optimus Prime pep talk. It’s completely inexplicable, in other words, and irritating for it.

Mysteries of Lisbon (2010)

November 11, 2011Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Mystery, Portugal, Romance, Theatrical

Mistérios de Lisboa
****/****
starring Adriano Luz, Maria João Bastos, Ricardo Pereira
screenplay by Carlos Saboga, based on the novel by Camilo Castelo Branco
directed by Raúl Ruiz

by Angelo Muredda “It would be long and tedious to explain,” Adriano Luz’s mysterious man of the cloth Father Dinis offers shortly before the intermission point of prolific Chilean director Raúl Ruiz’s staggering Mysteries of Lisbon, the fleetest four-hour-plus spectacle you’ll see this year. It’s not the first time characters promise to explain things later (nor is it the last), their second favourite activity after explaining things now. As promised in an unattributed statement in the title credits, what follows is an amiably digressive “diary of suffering” stuffed with such deferrals and explanations. And a beautiful diary it is. Ruiz, who passed away earlier this year, is perhaps best-known stateside for his lyrical Proust adaptation Time Regained–a nice warm-up, in retrospect, for this even more sprawling and melancholy saga of childhood and loss, an adaptation of Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco’s 1854 novel of the same name. The fruit of his labours this time is astonishing: an adaptation that’s at once deeply reverent towards conventions of nineteenth-century fiction and attuned to their radical possibilities. Ruiz, in other words, finds nothing tedious about these stories, and sees in their mysterious doublings, crude disguises, generational secrets, and grand unmaskings an opportunity to dwell on the nature of storytelling, both its revelatory potential and its artifice.

Pulp Fiction (1994) + Jackie Brown (1997) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

November 10, 2011Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Palme d'Or Winner, Robert De Niro, Romance, Thriller

PULP FICTION
****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

JACKIE BROWN
****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, based on the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard
directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Seventeen years on, Pulp Fiction still works like a motherfucker. It might, indeed, benefit from the shock of its gleeful use of “nigger,” the surprise of its sodomy and ultra-violence, and the sheer pleasure of hearing Sam Jackson say those lines and John Travolta dance again in a movie having faded. What’s left is this appreciation of a film that is delighted with cinema and experimental without being a jerk about it (very much like Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa, specifically in a black-and-white rear-process cab ride with none of that feeling that Tarantino’s trying to make a point as opposed to recognizing something that looks cool and feels right)–a film that is Tarantino in all his gawky, hyperactive, movie-geeking, idioglossic splendour, fully-formed and trying only a bit too hard. Beginning life as a proposed portmanteau to be helmed by a trio of directors (à la Tarantino’s later, disastrously-received foray into the anthology format, Four Rooms), the picture retains elements of its three-headed inception by intertwining a trilogy of hard-boiled crime stories in a way superior, it’s clear now, to Frank Miller’s career-long attempts at the same. Tarantino’s purer. The stakes for him are simpler. Pulp Fiction is evidence not of someone with something to prove but of an artist entirely, and genuinely, in love with his medium. He loves film enough to push it to be everything. And Pulp Fiction almost gets there.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 7, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon
screenplay by Dan Fogelman
directed by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

by Angelo Muredda There’s a pretty good movie inside Crazy, Stupid, Love., but no one involved seems to put much trust in it. Lightly melancholic and affecting when it finds its cast at their manic lows, the film at first cavalierly launches its ensemble like discrete pinballs, to great comic effect, only to collapse in a fit of contrived set-pieces torn from the Paul Haggis playbook. It’s a shame. If the third act’s everyone-at-the-garden-party resolution is economical, it’s also distressingly uncrazy: a geometrically tidy solution to a film that’s begging for something gawkier.

TIFF ’11: The Oranges (d. Julian Farino)

September 13, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF, TIFF 11

Except perhaps for Hugh Laurie, who tries valiantly but hopelessly to extricate the mannerisms of Dr. House from his American persona, The Oranges feels like it was cast by a computer–why are Alison Janney and Oliver Platt even still willing to read scripts that call for a sardonic homemaker and a schlubby hubby, respectively? Catherine Keener is Laurie’s ball-breaking wife, Adam Brody and Alia Shawkat are their ironic offspring, and Leighton Meester is Shawkat’s hotter frenemy; what happens is that rather than elevate the material, this archetypal, overqualified cast only exacerbates its familiarity.

TIFF ’11: A Dangerous Method (d. David Cronenberg)

September 9, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, TIFF, TIFF 11, UK

by Bill Chambers I wish David Cronenberg would direct a script of his own again. A Dangerous Method is recognizably Cronenbergian in its careful anthropology (DePalma-esque, too, in its frequent use of the split dioptre), but it’s also a hit-or-miss period talkfest, identifying it as a Christopher Hampton adaptation of a Christopher Hampton play through and through. Distilling all the expected body-horror in grotesque and painful-looking contortions of her jaw, first-billed Keira Knightley does fine if exhaustingly histrionic work as Sabina Spielrein, a patient of Carl Jung’s (the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender) who becomes his apprentice while in therapy. Jung corresponds with the more popular Sigmund Freud (Cronenberg muse Viggo Mortensen, ingeniously cast against type) over Sabina’s case as well as his own neuroses, and Freud eventually tosses another patient Jung’s way, protégé Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), whose maverick disregard for the ethics of transference and countertransference ultimately influences Jung’s decision to embark on an affair with the sexually repressed Sabina.

The Fox and the Hound (1981) [25th Anniversary] + The Little Mermaid (1989) [Platinum Edition] – DVDs|The Fox and the Hound/The Fox and the Hound II (2006) [2 Movie Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 22, 2011Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2011, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance, ZERO STARS

THE FOX AND THE HOUND
***½/**** Image C- Sound B Extras C
uncredited screenplay, based on the novel by Daniel P. Mannix
directed by Art Stevens, Ted Berman, Richard Rich

THE LITTLE MERMAID
*½/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A
written and directed by John Musker and Ron Clements

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. With The Fox and the Hound and The Little Mermaid bookending an especially turbulent decade for a studio mortally locked in a struggle to reconcile its animation pedigree with its crass commercial instincts, the former has come to be regarded in the Disney mythology as the Good Friday to the latter’s Easter Sunday. It’s therefore fitting that the two films they most emulate are 1942’s Bambi and 1950’s Cinderella, respectively, as the Forties marked the last time the Mouse House was on the brink of foreclosure. (The Fox and the Hound goes so far as to recycle cels from Bambi.) Much like The Little Mermaid represented a somewhat cynical reboot of the fairytale default, so, too, was Cinderella a glorified salvage operation following the money-/audience-hemorrhaging pro bono work Uncle Walt did on behalf of FDR’s Good Neighbor policy. Alas, the Good Friday and Easter Sunday analogy applies to not just Disney’s phoenix-like resurrection but also the tonal and moral disparity between the two pictures: one is the sad truth; the other is wishful thinking.

The Future is Now: FFC Interviews Miranda July|The Future (2011)

August 7, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Interviews, Romance, Theatrical, UK

MjulyinterviewtitleMiranda July reflects on The Future

THE FUTURE
***/****
starring Hamish Linklater, Miranda July, David Warshofsky, Isabella Acres
written and directed by Miranda July
In The Future, writer/director/star Miranda July indulges in the same wayward malaise of her previous film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, but, somewhat ironically, the focus on the uncertainty of “what comes next” makes this one seem a lot less scattershot. Dance teacher Sophie (July) and tech-support guy Jason (Hamish Linklater) have rescued a sickly cat from the wild and sent him to an animal shelter, and they’ve got a month until they can reclaim him. However, the cat will require ’round-the-clock care from them to stay alive, so they conclude that this is their last “free” month before years-long responsibilities squander their potential, and they quit their jobs in a bid to become more “spontaneous.” Jason goes door-to-door selling trees for an environmental program and Sophie decides to film “thirty dances over thirty days” for a short-track to YouTube stardom. But neither one is prepared for the apathy and self-loathing that greets their cutesy little endeavours, and as they spin their wheels, they gravitate towards people who appear to “really have their shit together”: Sophie becomes attracted to a single father with a small business (David Warshofsky), while Jason regularly visits an old man (Joe Putterlik) who once sold him a used hairdryer. What’s important is that July quickly establishes that these behaviours are not a matter of self-improvement or jealousy–it’s just a hell of a lot easier to stare at the lives of others and marvel at how organized they look from the outside. In other words, Sophie and Jason take no real “action” of their own accord; everything they do is just another bit of slacktivism to avoid the responsibilities for which they’re supposedly preparing. Her self-esteem takes a hit as she views other women’s “dancing” videos, so she cancels her Internet and calls it a great opportunity to focus. July makes this sheltered worldview all the more fascinating by introducing an element of surrealism–soon, her characters’ paradoxical desires to move forward and stand still give them to power to bend the universe to their will, as an imminent break-up is stalled by the literal stoppage of time. (And yet, time still manages to march on.) The self-conscious obviousness of its metaphors gives The Future a strong grounding in reality, rendering even July’s silliest notions–such as a series of helium-inflected monologues from the cat himself (the only neglected “victim” in this scenario), waiting for his loving masters to return–deeply affecting.–IP

August 7, 2011|Miranda July is very much like the characters she plays, and they are very much like her: she stares at you with wide, intense eyes, and her responses trail off once she realizes that she’s revealed all she wants to about a given subject. She’s in town to promote her second feature film, The Future, for the Boston Independent Film Festival, and we both seem a little eager to discover if, indeed, this sophomore effort can be discussed at length. Over the course of our conversation, we shared a couple of awkward laughs–in mutual recognition, I think, of the inherent absurdity of this meeting; we had been tasked to interpret and explain an intentionally abstract piece dealing with moving on and growing older, about which the creator must refuse a “full” explanation. Still, though July insists on keeping some things secret, she comes across as utterly sincere–so much so that I felt a pang of remorse when I realized that I had unintentionally lied to her by not attending the festival’s screening of The Future like I said I would. Several days later, given another interview opportunity for a different film, I made it a point to ask her husband Mike Mills to apologize on my behalf.

Bellflower (2011) + The Change-Up (2011)|Bellflower – Blu-ray Disc + DVD

August 4, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

BELLFLOWER
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Evan Glodell, Jessie Wiseman, Taylor Dawson, Rebekah Brandes
written and directed by Evan Glodell

THE CHANGE-UP
½*/****
starring Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde
screenplay by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore
directed by David Dobkin

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bellflower earns the right to its melodrama by asking what you have to live for and, more importantly, what you’re willing to do to keep your life uncomplicated. Woodrow (writer-director Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Taylor Dawson) don’t seem to have much of a life beyond hanging out with their friends and drinking too much–but their minds were suitably “warped” by a second-generation VHS tape of Mad Max. Now they spend their days constructing flamethrowers and muscle cars destined to fit right in with that film’s end-of-the-world milieu. Woodrow hooks up with a young woman named Milly (Jessie Wiseman), and as the relationship blossoms (and breaks down), Glodell takes the opportunity to explore the unfathomable guilt and anger that drove George Miller’s original road warrior–as well as what Glodell’s own heroes have failed to understand about his journey. When we first meet him, Woodrow doesn’t know too much about guilt or anger, so his coping mechanisms are extremely fractured. Confrontations with others are typically brief, sometimes without logical end, and the director intentionally tones down most of the violence so that his characters can wallow in passive-aggressive detachment. Sometimes the violent images are chopped out entirely, only to be saved for later in the movie, where they may or may not have been mentally re-edited by Woodrow to conform to a more favourable outcome. That’s the thing about the apocalypse: it never goes quite the way you want.

How Do You Know (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

August 3, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Jack Nicholson, Romance

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A
starring Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, Jack Nicholson
written and directed by James L. Brooks

by Angelo Muredda “We’re all one small adjustment away from making our lives work,” Paul Rudd’s George chirps, a little too eagerly, in the interminable, banally titled, and curiously unpunctuated How Do You Know. It’s a strange thing for an indicted man on the verge of financial ruin to say, but then How Do You Know is a strange movie, less the tidy romantic comedy its trailer pitches than a monument to the incidental pleasures of narrative ungainliness and lax comic timing.

Arthur (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

July 25, 2011Posted in2000s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Romance

*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C-
starring Russell Brand, Helen Mirren, Greta Gerwig, Jennifer Garner
screenplay by Peter Baynham, based on the film Arthur written and directed by Steve Gordon
directed by Jason Winer

by Ian Pugh Boy, that Russell Brand sure does talk a lot, doesn’t he? Jason Winer’s modernization of Steve Gordon’s 1981 comedy Arthur serves as your latest reminder that Brand is turning his long-winded rambling into a full-blown comic empire–and it’s a good thing it makes that point perfectly clear, because otherwise I can’t think of any reason why this remake exists. Brand’s slurring motormouth is on full display here, and he’s such a suffocating presence that Arthur Bach’s now-famous inebriety hardly plays a role. Who needs booze when you’ve got an immature dude who just won’t shut up? Of course, the character is still nominally an alcoholic–and the film attempts to “fix” that problem in precisely the wrong way. Fearing it will be seen as an implicit endorsement of excessive drinking, Arthur launches into an overwritten screed about the attendant dangers of same, somehow assuming that Gordon’s original didn’t comprehend the seriousness of its own premise. Between that mistaken belief and its broad, bland humour, the picture might be more accurately considered a remake of the notorious Arthur 2: On the Rocks.

Lolita (1962) – Blu-ray Disc

July 20, 2011Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, Romance

****/**** Image A- Sound A
starring James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers, Sue Lyon
screenplay by Vladimir Nabokov, based on his novel
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson Who is Lolita? There seems to be no independent, cognizant life to the character. She exists purely to be desired or despised. Certainly, she is seen as neither a tragic figure nor a victim–Lolita is always in control. She always has a tight grasp on what her needs are and understands how she’s going to meet them. But simply being clever and conniving doesn’t make you a real person. Humanity could be defined as our ability to experience pain and Lolita lives a practically pain-free existence. Double entendre intended, if you prick Lolita, she isn’t going to bleed. In her eyes, sex doesn’t have many drawbacks. Men lust after her and this gives her power over them.

She’s Out of My League (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

July 6, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Jon Thibault, Comedy, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve, T.J. Miller, Mike Vogel
screenplay by Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Jim Field Smith

by Jon Thibault

What happens when a beautiful, wealthy event planner meets a scrawny, socially maladroit, uneducated TSA security guard who's too uncoordinated to shave his own balls?

Love!

Gross Anatomy (1989); Betsy’s Wedding (1990); The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag (1992) – Blu-ray Discs

June 29, 2011Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Japan, Mystery, Romance

GROSS ANATOMY
**½/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Matthew Modine, Daphne Zuniga, Christine Lahti, Todd Field
screenplay by Ron Nyswaner and Mark Spragg
directed by Thom Eberhardt

BETSY’S WEDDING
***/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Alan Alda, Joey Bishop, Madeline Kahn, Molly Ringwald
written and directed by Alan Alda

THE GUN IN BETTY LOU’S HANDBAG
**/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Penelope Ann Miller, Eric Thal, William Forsythe, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Grace Cary Bickley
directed by Allan Moyle

by Jefferson Robbins To sample three Blu-ray editions fresh out from discount distributor Mill Creek Entertainment, you’d think film comedy in the late 1980s and early ’90s was at a tipping point. Or, at least, you’d think this of Touchstone, the Disney sub-studio behind Gross Anatomy, Betsy’s Wedding, and The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag. All three films seem swamped by the decade shift, caught between John Hughes’s early-’80s youth revolution and the hardening of romcom formulas that would come to pass after 1990’s Pretty Woman (also a Touchstone product). One of the three films, in fact, barely qualifies as a comedy, although it was surely marketed as such. The sense one gets watching them today is of opportunities missed, of storytelling approaches gently meshed together when they should’ve been gleefully mashed, and of an aversion to risk above all.

Hall Pass (2011) [Enlarged Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 20, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C-
starring Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis, Jenna Fischer, Christina Applegate
screenplay by Pete Jones & Peter Farrelly and Kevin Barnett & Bobby Farrelly
directed by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Rick Mills (Owen Wilson) is in real estate, and Fred Searing (Jason Sudeikis) sells life insurance–and yet these guys treat their own marriages, indeed their own lives, as an epic burden, so where do they get off trying to sell us peace-of-mind? Their leering obsession with sex has become all-consuming of late, prompting their wives (Maggie (Jenna Fischer) and Grace (Christina Applegate)) to grant them a hall pass: a “week off from marriage” in which they have the freedom to do whatever they want with the opposite sex without fear of recrimination. The Farrelly Brothers’ Hall Pass tells a fairly conventional story about men and women who very slowly come to recognize just how much they love their significant others. But one thing it doesn’t fully reconcile is this impulse that finds the movie’s middle-aged male characters blinking madly at attractive women, taking “mental photographs for [their] spank bank”–because even once they’ve learned their lessons and shouted them from the rooftops, they’re still taking those mental photographs. Beneath a thin veneer of sex jokes, the movie is about the denial and suppression of regret that occurs in the quest for long-term happiness.

Barry Lyndon (1975) – Blu-ray Disc

May 30, 2011Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2011, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, War

****/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray
directed by Stanley Kubrick

FFC Must-Ownby Alex Jackson If The Shining has dated the most of Kubrick’s films, Barry Lyndon, which immediately preceded it, has dated the least. In 1976, Barry Lyndon was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award alongside Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, and Nashville. I have some reservations about a couple of those, but there’s no arguing that these are a few of the most revered American movies of the last four decades. And yet, they’re all inextricably linked to the year 1975. Certainly, they still work on their own terms, but today there’s an unspoken contract that we will acknowledge and accept them as something produced thirty-five years ago. We don’t have to make any such concessions with Barry Lyndon; there isn’t anything vintage about it.