Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Moonrisekingdom

***½/****
starring Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola
directed by Wes Anderson

by Angelo Muredda In his post-mortem of the 65th Cannes Film Festival, over which he presided as jury president, Nanni Moretti complained that a number of Competition filmmakers seemed “more in love with their style than with their characters.” Whether Moretti had festival opener and Competition entry Moonrise Kingdom in mind is debatable, but this is the kind of criticism Wes Anderson has faced throughout his career. Moonrise Kingdom won’t win many holdouts over to Anderson’s corner: Those who think he’s spent the last 16 years building dollhouses may snicker from the first sequence, where the camera laterally tracks through an actual dollhouse of a set to find a mid-1960s family sequestered in tiny rooms, parsing their magazines and adventure novels. Those baffled by The Darjeeling Limited‘s juxtaposition of Kinks songs with snippets of Merchant-Ivory and Satyajit Ray scores may also scoff as the camera tracks past a battery-operated record player pushing out Benjamin Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” an educational piece narrated by a disembodied voice that neatly introduces “all the separate parts of the orchestra.” As if to facilitate a no-hard-feelings exit for the unenthused, Anderson telegraphs his aesthetic from the overture.

Turn Me On, Goddammit (2011)

Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Norway, Romance, Teen

Turnmeondammitcap

Få meg på, for faen
(a.k.a. Turn Me On, Dammit!)
***/****
starring Helen Bergsholm, Malin Bjørhovde, Henriette Steenstrup, Beate Støfring
screenplay by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, based on the novel by Olaug Nilssen
directed by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen

by Angelo Muredda Turn Me On, Goddammit opens with a provocation worthy of its title. Our introduction to fifteen-year-old Alma (Helene Bergsholm) finds her on the kitchen floor, masturbating to a phone-sex line (she’s a preferred caller and sort-of friend to operator Stig (Per Kjerstad)) while her dog watches with interest. That’s some hook, but Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s first dramatic feature after a string of documentaries is at its best when it bypasses this kind of frontal assault and plays to Jacobsen’s strengths, namely her delicate touch with nonprofessional actors and sharp distillation of the gender politics of small-town life. While the film nicely delineates its washed-out setting of Skoddeheimen, a remote mountain village in Norway whose welcome sign kids unfailingly raise a middle-finger to on the bus ride home from school, Jacobsen’s real boon is to capture a spectrum of teens’ sexual attitudes within a hermetically-sealed but still fairly typical environment. While that might make Turn Me On, Goddammit sound like a dry sociological tome, Jacobsen and Bergsholm, in her debut, are adept at making Alma not a blank Norwegian Everygirl but someone who’s credibly starting to cultivate her sexual proclivities in a hostile space.

Vertigo (1958) – Universal Legacy Series DVD

Vertigo (1958) – Universal Legacy Series DVD

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

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

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

The Bodyguard (1992) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

The Bodyguard (1992) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music, Romance, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras C
BLU-RAY – Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Kevin Costner, Whitney Houston, Gary Kemp, Bill Cobbs
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Mick Jackson

by Walter Chaw Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston have a conversation about Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (whose title means “The Bodyguard”) in the middle of Mick Jackson’s hilarious camp artifact The Bodyguard, the one where Costner plays a barely-vocal lunk and Houston plays a singer-turned-actress with severe personality flaws. And that little chat, occupying a minute-and-a-half or so of screentime, encapsulates everything that’s priceless about this flick: It’s stupid, embarrassing, and watered-down, but it’s also surreal, queer, and hermetically sealed in a rhinestone-studded mason jar. Have no fear, though, as that revelatory discussion of one of the great films in world cinema segues in record time into a heartfelt rumination on the lyrics of a Dolly Parton song and then into a courtship ritual involving a big samurai sword and a piece of silk. Is Kevin going to sheathe his blue steel in Whitney’s purple scarf? Ah, the decadent ribaldry! What could it all mean?

Casablanca (1943) [Two-Disc Special Edition] DVD|[Ultimate Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc + [70th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1940s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Romance, War

Casablanca1

***/****
DVD – Image A+ Sound A Extras A
BD (Ultimate Collector’s Edition) – Image A- Sound B+ Extras A
BD (70th Anniversary Edition) – Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains
screenplay by Julius J. Epstein & Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch, based on a play by Murray Burnett, Joan Alison
directed by Michael Curtiz

by Walter Chaw Whenever I watch Casablanca (and there’s a lot of pressure that comes with watching Casablanca (the chorus from Freaks rings in my head: “One of us, one of us, we accept you, one of us”)), I’m stricken by what the film would have been had Orson Welles or John Huston (or even Billy Wilder–Rick is, of course, the prototypical Wilder outsider) sat at the helm instead of the madly prolific Michael Curtiz. Schooled in German Expressionism, Curtiz, by the time of Casablanca, had lost much of anything like a distinctive visual style, and on this film, a troubled production from the start, there’s a lack of imagination to the direction that contributes, at least in part, to the way that Casablanca just sort of sits there for long stretches. For all of its magnificent performances (Claude Rains, best here or in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious; Peter Lorre, a personal favourite; and let’s not forget Sydney Greenstreet), Casablanca is curiously sterile: its politics are topical, but its love story is passionate by dint of history rather than proximate ardour. Ingrid Bergman arguably gave off more heat in Victor Fleming’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and inarguably did so in Gregory Ratoff’s Intermezzo. Casablanca is legendary, and that forgives a lot of its blemishes.

Belle de jour (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Italy, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page
screenplay by Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel
directed by Luis Buñuel

by Jefferson Robbins It’s fitting that a film about a woman agonizingly balanced between sexual repression and sexual freedom depicts an inner life balanced between two different periods in history. The opening moments of Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour lead us to believe it will be a period piece. In a static wide shot, a black horse-drawn coach on a country lane leisurely approaches. Two bystanders appear to root in the hedges along the path, too distant to be clearly made out: Are they peasants? Estate groundskeepers? Our eyes are programmed now to expect something Edwardian, or, more applicable to the subject matter, Victorian. Only when an automobile makes a turn in the distance do we realize the setting is contemporary. The modernity comes as a jolt, but from this sequence we will return to some kind of imagined past again and again as the heroine–a very modern woman, one whose frightened explorations map the sexual realms of our own later decades–slips between the cracks in her own mind.

Lady and the Tramp (1955) – Diamond Edition Blu-ray + DVD

Lady and the Tramp (1955) – Diamond Edition Blu-ray + DVD

Posted in1950s, 2012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
animated; screenplay by Erdman Penner, Joe Rinaldi, Ralph Wright, Don Dagradi
directed by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson

by Bill Chambers Given that it may have the most famous scene in the Disney oeuvre, it’s odd that Lady and the Tramp doesn’t enjoy a better, or at least bigger, reputation. The first animated feature in CinemaScope, as well as the studio’s first original story1 and its first dog movie (various Pluto-starring shorts notwithstanding), the film, despite earning the highest grosses of any Disney production since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, seems to have been eclipsed in the public consciousness from a genre standpoint by 101 Dalmatians and from a cinematographic standpoint by Sleeping Beauty, each of which followed so closely on Lady and the Tramp‘s heels as to reduce history’s perception of it to a dry run. It’s a bit better than that, but, coveted “Diamond” status to the contrary, frankly not one of the greats.

It Happened at the World’s Fair (1961) – DVD

Posted in1960s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Romance

Ithappenedworldscap

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Elvis Presley, Joan O’Brien, Gary Lockwood, Vicky Tiu
screenplay by Si Rose and Seaman Jacobs
directed by Norman Taurog

by Bill Chambers Over the main titles, Elvis sings the jaunty “Beyond the Bend” (“Breeze sing a happy song/This heart of mine is singing right along”) from the cockpit of a cropduster. He playfully re-enacts North by Northwest by swooping down to ogle a couple of cuties in a convertible, telling his co-pilot, Danny (Gary Lockwood), that he can have the one in the red dress, ’cause “her ankles are a little thick.” It’s around this point that Elvis vehicles started to develop a sociopathic streak; Viva Las Vegas‘s crass reduction of anyone Elvis doesn’t need to literal cannon fodder is perhaps in the embryonic stage in these opening moments of It Happened at the World’s Fair, or when Mike ducks out on his quasi-daughter and his best friend without saying goodbye, effectively cutting them from the show-stopping, Music Man-ish final number.

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

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

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

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

Posted 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)

Posted 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

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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

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

Posted 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

Posted 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)

Posted 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)

Posted 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

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

Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2006, 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)

Posted 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.