Romance Archives - Page 13 of 46

The Town (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 20, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Ben Affleck, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Peter Craig and Ben Affleck & Aaron Stockard, based on the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan
directed by Ben Affleck

by Walter Chaw If I'm still not entirely sold on Ben Affleck as an actor of depth, I'm completely sold on him as a director of depth. A director good enough, as it happens, to identify and avoid the actor's own weaknesses and augment his strengths, and to guide Affleck the actor to his best performance in a picture, The Town, that would be something like a revelation were Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, not so exceptional. Absolutely filthy with its story of place, count The Town as a tough-love love letter to Boston suburb Charlestown, a place established in the film as a breeding ground for bank robbers. Affleck plays Doug MacCray, the head of one such crew that also includes childhood buddy Jimmy (Jeremy Renner, excellent again) in an echo of the macho/familial dynamic established in the Aussie bank robber drama Animal Kingdom. More about the ties that bind men to a place and an idea of manhood than about the crimes themselves, The Town compensates for what it lacks in originality with its patience and its bracing trust in its screenplay and cast. Monologues that could be didactic are laced with what feels like genuine yearning; a moment in which Doug tells new girlfriend Claire (Rebecca Hall) about his childhood could have (should have) been embarrassing, but comes off under Affleck's surprising wisdom as heartfelt, even resonant.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Hammer Horror – DVD

December 14, 20101950s, 1960s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Vampire

HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)
***/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Peter Cushing, Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling, Christopher Lee
screenplay by Jimmy Sangster
directed by Terence Fisher

DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Christopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson, Barry Andrews
screenplay by John Elder
directed by Freddie Francis

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)
***½/**** Image C- Sound B
starring Peter Cushing, Hazel Court, Robert Urquhart, Christopher Lee
screenplay by Jimmy Sangster
directed by Terence Fisher

FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969)
***/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones, Simon Ward
screenplay by Bert Batt
directed by Terence Fisher

by Jefferson Robbins As one of the twin stars of the original Hammer Films horror canon, the precise and skilful Peter Cushing had the task of portraying both villain (Dr. Frankenstein) and vanquisher (Dr. Van Helsing). His co-star Christopher Lee, on the other hand, seldom got to be the good guy: when he wasn’t baring plastic fangs or crusted over with dried-prune makeup, he usually embodied a more human evil. Lee’s unmasked performances were assertions of will–his Dracula, for instance, overwhelms with force of presence and a hungry smoulder in his eyes. Cushing could not disguise his native gentility and bladed intelligence, but he could turn those qualities towards sinister or humanitarian ends as needed.

The Tourist (2010)

December 10, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, France, Italy, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and Christopher McQuarrie and Julian Fellowes
directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

by Ian Pugh The loss of Bond 23 to MGM's umpteenth bankruptcy drama was just one of the many disappointments in the cinematic year that was–but an even bitterer pill arrived in the films that took 007's place. With neither Daniel Craig nor Matt Damon to keep a perpetually-ailing genre on its feet, 2010's triumvirate of identical spy thrillers (Knight and Day, Salt, now The Tourist) represents a return to the cozy arms of irrelevance. Sexpot secret agent Elise Ward ("Salt" herself, Angelina Jolie) leads her superiors on a wild goose chase through Venice in search of American math teacher Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), whom they believe to be her mysterious fugitive beau, Alexander Pearce. Unfortunately, this little game also garners the attention of a gangster (Steven Berkoff) to whom Pearce is rather severely indebted. The Tourist is not a daring picture by any means. The most unconventional thing about it, other than the casting of Depp, is the oddity of hiring Timothy Dalton to play a version of "M" when this is so clearly a Roger Moore movie: a romantic trip across Italy in a white tuxedo, peppered with stunts that border on slapstick.

Lost in Translation (2003) – Blu-ray Disc + Anything Else (2003) – DVD

December 6, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, UK, ZERO STARS

LOST IN TRANSLATION
***½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

ANYTHING ELSE
ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Jason Biggs, Christina Ricci, Danny DeVito
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Walter Chaw It feels a lot like life is an endless succession of heartsickness and anticipation of heartsickness. After a while, taking a line from Tender Mercies, it's hard to trust happiness anymore when happiness feels so ephemeral compared to the weight of grief. Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation is about the wear of time and the unbearable burden of experience–it's about how even what's new and fresh is darkened by the ghosts of regret and time. When Bill Murray's fading star Bob Harris arrives in Tokyo to lend his image to a top-shelf whiskey, he is suffused with so much of the sadness of living that the surprise of life has become something to be viewed with suspicion. Newness fades and that familiar malaise, weary and grey, inevitably takes its place, sometimes even before the exhilaration of newness can reinvigorate. Bob meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in the hotel bar; she's in town with her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi), and together Bob and Charlotte paint the town blue.

The Kids Are All Right (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

November 23, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, France, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, Josh Hutcherson
screenplay by Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg
directed by Lisa Cholodenko

by Bill Chambers Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and her younger brother Laser (Josh Hutcherson) are the offspring of lesbian couple Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) and an anonymous sperm donor named Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Nic and Jules shared the burden of pregnancy, and though The Kids Are All Right never comes right out and says who gave birth to whom, the dispositional echoes, subtle shows of favouritism, and even just the kids’ names suggest that gynecologist Nic had the overachieving Joni and hippie-dippy Jules bore impressionable, impetuous Laser. But the movie’s more intriguing when the dots are harder to connect. Nic, for instance, gets off on watching a tape of two guys fornicating as Jules pleasures her. And Laser has to guilt goodie-goodie Joni into contacting their biological father, yet it’s Joni who takes an immediate shine to the man, while Laser sniffs, “I think he’s a little into himself”–directly mirroring Nic’s subsequent assessment of Paul as “self-satisfied.” A critical callback, it shows that Nic and Jules aren’t two single mothers sharing a roof à la “Kate & Allie”, but parents whose dynamic jointly influences their children. It’s also more convincing evidence of their togetherness than their bedtime nicknames for each other (“chicken” and “pony”), which the actresses can barely utter without giving away the blooper reel.

The Player (1992) – Blu-ray Disc

November 8, 20101990s, 2010, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Robert Altman, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg
screenplay by Michael Tolkin, based on his novel
directed by Robert Altman

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In the opening scene of Robert Altman’s The Player–an uninterrupted tracking shot lasting 7 minutes and 45 seconds–chief of studio security Walter Stuckel (Fred Ward) discusses long tracking shots with mailboy Jimmy (Paul Hewitt). Stuckel talks at length about Rope and Touch of Evil and says directors back then knew how to shoot a film. Jimmy mentions Bernardo Bertolucci’s then-recent The Sheltering Sky and Julien Temple’s Absolute Beginners as having terrific long shots, but Stuckel shrugs and mumbles that he hasn’t seen them. It appears that Altman and screenwriter Michael Tolkin (adapting his novel of the same name) are illustrating a point about the insularity of the studio system and how the studios have no reference point outside their own past. Today, a complaint like that seems positively churlish. I honestly would not expect any of the newer executives to know or appreciate Rope or Touch of Evil, much less any current chiefs of security! In my view, anybody familiar with American cinema to that extent is already distinguished from your typical capitalist.

Greenberg (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

October 5, 2010****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

FFC Must-Own by Walter Chaw The ideal follow-up to his Dorothy Parker-cum-Rohmer shrine Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg is a deepening of the filmmaker’s examinations of the peculiar voids over which we stretch the niceties of interaction betwixt the miserable intellectual elite. It’s the Algonquin Roundtable reconstituted as wits without an audience: all outrage without an outlet, there’s even this sense of panic attached to Greenberg’s little whorls of nervous intellectualism, as if Jonathan Edwards’s penitents were literati at risk of being cast into the hell of everyone else. Just as ignorance is bliss, the opposite is most assuredly also true, and it’s the product of that deep, consuming contemplation of the navel that is the foundation for Baumbach’s films, from his post-grad Kicking and Screaming through to his portraits of agonizing relational disintegrations The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding. The anxiety that drives his work is the fear that the armour equipped to defend against the perception of ordinariness doesn’t fit well, and that the discovery of the idiot driving the sage is not merely likely but inevitable. His are films, then, of a certain deep discomfort with the projection of the self–and Greenberg, ironically, is an examination of all of Baumbach’s issues carried off with what seems like absolute confidence. If Baumbach suffers from the same self-doubt as his characters, he’s no longer showing it in his films.

Sex and the City 2 (2010) + Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

October 3, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

SEX AND THE CITY 2
ZERO STARS/****
starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, Kim Cattrall
written and directed by Michael Patrick King

PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ben Kingsley, Gemma Arterton, Alfred Molina
screenplay by Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard
directed by Mike Newell

by Walter Chaw One may be a misguided liberal screed and the other a misguided conservative screed, but Sex and the City 2 and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (hereafter Prince of Persia) are very much alike in that they’re what a Tea Party meeting would look like with a budget. They’re politically-confused hodgepodges of bad ideas and misplaced, incoherent outrage–most of it gleaned from the one or two times some idiot accidentally read the A-section of a newspaper, the rest gathered from Dummies primers on how to be cursorily informed in the Information Age. They’re similarly infused with healthy doses of arrogance and cultural empiricism that speak directly to the reasons the United States is the target of fundamentalist whackos convinced we’re all just like the randy quartet of aging bitches on a hedonism bender in the Middle East in Sex and the City 2. Hateful, vile, both films are also indicated by a distinct lack of artistry, representing a world post-Michael Bay in which a goodly portion of movies are dependent on not only other cultural touchstones (a TV series, a videogame) for the entirety of their alleged appeal, but on some of the most vapid cultural touchstones in the brief history of our popular culture, period.

Practical Magic/The Witches of Eastwick [Comedy Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

September 29, 20101980s, 1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, Horror, Jack Nicholson, Romance

PRACTICAL MAGIC (1998)
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest, Aidan Quinn
screenplay by Robin Swicord and Akiva Goldsman and Adam Brooks, based on the novel by Alice Hoffman
directed by Griffin Dunne

THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (1987)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B-
starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer
screenplay by Michael Cristofer, based on the novel by John Updike
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw Some would say, and be correct in saying, that Griffin Dunne’s “women’s picture” Practical Magic is the perfect distillation of both George Cukor’s tradition of gynecological melodramas and Alice Hoffman’s assembly-line ladies’ relationship novels. Edgeless, in love with its own whimsy, shot through with the sort of autumnal glow more at home in instant-coffee commercials, it could, as sophomore directorial efforts go, be worse–credit for that going mostly to an amiably under-achieving cast of superstars and ace character actors. It’s the very model of the classic Studio picture in that sense: a quiet, contract-satisfying flick based on a safe property, set in a picaresque locale with vaguely populist supernatural undertones in which no one’s particularly invested. Call it The Bishop’s Wife for 1998–one of the oddest years in movies of the last twenty, among which crop this film maintains a comfortable medium-buoyancy. It’s possible to try to pull something like a feminist read out of its obsessive focus on women and their sexuality–what else is witchcraft about, after all, than a fear of the Other made manifest as girl parts? But not only is the picture too stupid to bear up under such scrutiny, such a read is also hopelessly complicated by an adaptation courtesy a triumvirate composed of snag Adam Brooks and genuine blights Akiva Goldsman and (not quite worse but somehow close) Robin Swicord. A bad sign when the only female in the creative process is Swicord, who, by working as a Mata Hari, as it were, as the woman behind The Jane Austen Book Club and Memoirs of a Geisha, has arguably done more harm to her gender than Michael Bay.

American Beauty (1999) [The Awards Edition] + Forrest Gump [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVDs + American Beauty [Sapphire Series] – Blu-ray Disc

September 20, 20101990s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Drama, DVD, Romance

AMERICAN BEAUTY
**/****
DVD – Image C+ Sound B- Extras C-
BD – B Sound A- Extras C
starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Alan Ball
directed by Sam Mendes

FORREST GUMP
*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Sally Field
screenplay by Eric Roth, based on the novel by Winston Groom
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Walter Chaw People who say the Oscars suck aren’t entirely wrong, but saying this tends to obscure the fact that most Best Picture honourees aren’t terrible so much as dedicatedly mediocre. They’re masterpieces of toeing the centreline, and in so doing they manage to offend neither side of the divide overly: The great American strive, Hollywood-style, isn’t to rewire the mousetrap, as it were, any more than it is to produce a pile of crap on purpose. No, the goal is to achieve medium buoyancy. Too bloated to float, too fat to sink; if you don’t reach too ambitiously, you won’t get slapped down–and a career constructed around formula-prestige, 140-minute pictures is suddenly within your grasp, Ron Howard-like. The trick is to appeal as broadly as possible without appearing to do so–to recast convention in vague middlebrow hot-button terms and neither speak above the heads of your audience nor be obvious in your condescension.

TIFF 2010: On “Womb”

September 19, 20102010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hungary, Romance, Sci-Fi, TIFF, TIFF 10

by Bill Chambers I found the imposed misery of Never Let Me Go a lot less provocative and haunting than the self-inflicted kind one encounters in Benedek Fliegauf’s Womb, whose one-word title seems to not-unduly affiliate the picture with Jonathan Glazer’s great Birth. I love this movie, but it took me a few days to digest it, and I’m not sure I’d have the patience to sit through it again. It’s challenging from the get-go, what with the quasi-kiddie porn of its opening sequences, in which a beautiful young boy and girl start sleeping together, and the girl caresses her skin, then the boy’s, as if trying to decipher some message between them written in Braille. (For pure eroticism, though, nothing trumps the pair watching a snail writhe across a kitchen table–and it’s here that I wish I possessed Walter Chaw’s vocabulary for discussing suggestively Romantic images such as these.) The girl, Rebecca, moves to Tokyo, and grows up to be played by Eva Green. She returns to the little beach community where she met the boy, Thomas (Matt “Doctor Who” Smith as an adult), and looks him up, having transparently spent the intervening years pining for him. When they meet again, he’s so thunderstruck that he dumps his current girlfriend on the spot, and the two impulsively begin a life together as eco-activist–an amateur entomologist, he breeds cockroaches, speaking to indelibility and infestation–and muse. Just as suddenly, Thomas is killed on the way to a protest, and Rebecca, feeling cosmically robbed, has and implements the lunatic idea to be artificially inseminated with Thomas’s clone and cultivate in the child an Oedipal complex, so that at some point in the future she will get to be with a facsimile of her lover, even if he is, technically, her son. What ensues is a distaff Lolita that makes up for in controversy (the incest angle) what it may lack in guts (all things considered, this is a fairly chaste film), though the Zen patience with which Rebecca courts Thomas II only affirmed the intelligence of the piece for me: you’re just not going to see a woman exhibit the immoral lust of Humbert Humbert with the same urgency.

TIFF 2010 Day 2: Jack Goes Boating; Curling; Never Let Me Go

September 11, 20102010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, Sci-Fi, TIFF, TIFF 10, UK

by Bill Chambers Friday began with Jack Goes Boating, the directorial debut of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also stars as the title character. Jack is an airport limo driver who’s been the third wheel in the lives of his married friends Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Ruben-Vega) for so long that they’ve decided to intervene by setting him up with the mousy but receptive Connie (Amy Ryan). The movie, adapted–and, one suspects, significantly “opened up”–by Bob Glaudini from his own Off-Broadway play, casually parallels their burgeoning romance with the evaporation of Clyde and Lucy’s relationship. In a fall preview on his delightful blog, Nick Davis summed up his level of anticipation for Jack Goes Boating thusly: “Loved Synecdoche but can’t take much more schlub.” Truer words, etc. Jack isn’t just a schlub, he’s the ur-schlub, a maddeningly static individual who has to be nudged into action like a soccer ball, and Hoffman lights and poses himself to look as appetizing as Grimace from the Happy Meals. I much prefer another passion project of Hoffman’s, Love Liza: although it operates on the same demented frequency as Jack Goes Boating, there’s a whole slew of theatrical affectations to contend with this time around. (You can eventually set your watch to Jack’s nervous throat-clearing.) Ortiz is tremendously winning, though, in a bromantic role that reveals a lot more range, not to mention teeth, than Hollywood’s ever given him a chance to show. Jack Goes Boating reminded one woman I spoke to of Rocky; I can see it if I squint.

Fame (1980) – Blu-ray Disc + Fame (2009) [Extended Dance Edition] – DVD

August 26, 20101980s, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Musical, Romance, Teen

FAME (1980)
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Irene Cara, Lee Curreri, Laura Dean, Antonia Franceschi
screenplay by Christopher Gore
directed by Alan Parker

FAME (2009)
*/**** Image N/A Sound C Extras D
starring Debbie Allen, Charles S. Dutton, Kelsey Grammer, Megan Mullaly
screenplay by Allison Burnett, based on the screenplay by Christopher Gore
directed by Kevin Tancharoen

by Walter Chaw Alan Parker seems to fancy himself a bit of a sociologist–a chronicler of Truth surveying man’s inhumanity to man and the injustices perpetrated in the United States especially, offering up pictures that seek to expose just exactly what’s wrong with his non-native land. When he makes a good movie, like Angel Heart, it’s good because he’s not proselytizing about corruption so much as he’s indulging in his suspicions about the Home of the Brave. (Filthy with evil, right?) The matinee of appreciation for Parker is not surprisingly around fifteen, when stuff like Mississippi Burning and Midnight Express has the weight of sagacity rather than the reek of puerile outrage and unbecoming grandstanding. He’s Stanley Kramer with a drug and counterculture fixation that marks him as a product less of Mod than of Free Love. Fame is the perfect Parker vehicle because it’s an anthology of Parker’s perception of inner-city woes, and as it appears at the end of the Seventies, the decade that was America’s crucible of self-reflection, the sort of prison-wallet Passion Play of which Parker’s most fond finds a more tolerable climate. It’s perfect, too, because Parker’s background in commercials often leads him to make films that are told in images impossible to misconstrue with concepts that aren’t necessarily substantial enough for a feature. (See: his big-screen adaptations of Pink Floyd‘s “The Wall” and Webber’s awful Evita.) Fame‘s structure is a sequence of vignettes and its characters a collection of types, so that the demand to sustain itself over the course of two hours is ameliorated by the fact that it’s basically an anthology piece.

Valentine’s Day (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

August 10, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by Katherine Fugate
directed by Garry Marshall

by Walter Chaw There are worse directors working today than Garry Marshall, but not many and then not much worse. I’ve vowed on a few occasions (like after Beaches, Pretty Woman, Exit to Eden, The Other Sister, Raising Helen, Georgia Rule) to never subject myself to another Marshall joint–certainly to never bother reviewing another one. What’s the point, really, of taking the piss out of this guy and his movies? They’re consistently, stridently tone deaf; unfailingly saccharine; morally suspect; visually uninteresting; casually racist/misogynist/classist/homophobic; and dangerously enervating to the point of meriting some kind of warning label. Marry Marshall’s adorable dog/kid reaction shots and wholesale white-rape of Motown standards to a bloated ensemble cast (everyone from Jamie Foxx to Kathy Bates–yes, it’s horrific) enacting a two-hour version of Marshall’s career-launching TV series “Love, American Style” and what you get is every bit the horror movie the title Valentine’s Day suggests.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) [Special Edition] + Deathdream (1972) + Uncle Sam (1997) – DVDs|Uncle Sam – Blu-ray Disc

July 7, 2010****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Canada, Comedy, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, DVD, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Zombie

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury
screenplay by George Axelrod, based on the novel by Richard Condon
directed by John Frankenheimer

Dead of Night
***½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
starring John Marley, Lynn Carlin, Richard Backus, Henderson Forsythe
screenplay by Alan Ormsby
directed by Bob Clark

UNCLE SAM
**½/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
BD – Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Isaac Hayes, Bo Hopkins, Timothy Bottoms, Robert Forster
screenplay by Larry Cohen
directed by William Lustig

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As the zeitgeist is one of those things we tend to discuss in the past tense, you have to wonder whether it’s a vacuum or a barometer. In other words, the point at which culture-mongers finally lunge at a craze is usually once it’s begun shrieking its death rattle, and yet a post-mortem of said craze invariably divulges a complex tapestry of art and politics, the ascription of happenstance to which seems preposterous. Our own Walter Chaw brilliantly observes in recent omnibus reviews pairing Love Me If You Dare with Valentin and Dodgeball with Napoleon Dynamite that leitmotifs are emerging at the box office free of predetermination, and I myself got a faint chill when I became cognizant of having consecutively watched the upcoming DVDs of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 The Manchurian Candidate, Bob Clark’s 1972 Dead of Night (a.k.a. Deathdream), and William Lustig’s 1997 Uncle Sam. The Manchurian Candidate is getting reissued because MGM wants to piggyback the P&A for this summer’s star-studded remake, Dead of Night because it’s a perennial cult fave, and Uncle Sam because Lustig owns the company; three separate objectives, then, for putting out three different pictures all concerning shell-shocked war veterans bringing the violence home with them. Considering the length of time it must have taken to prepare these beautifully mastered, supplement-rich discs, that they coincide with not only each other but also the cooling of patriotic fervour (coupled with the spontaneous theatrical release of Michael Moore’s anti-Dubya Fahrenheit 9/11) is like getting the rare privilege to see the forest for the trees.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

June 30, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire

**/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by David Slade

by Walter Chaw The first and greatest surprise of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (hereafter Eclipse) is that it’s not awful; it’s actually almost good for its first forty-five minutes or so, until the burden of Stephenie Meyer’s genuinely, legendarily poor source material catches up to it. Until such time, there’s some interest blossoming despite itself in the love triangle between mopey Bella (Kristen Stewart), fruity Edward (Robert Pattinson), and swarthy Jacob (Taylor Lautner): a hint of racial discomfort, a soupçon of class struggle, a glimmer of insight given over to the difficulties of teen relationships at a moment in life when Nancy Drew plays like Richard Wagner. Never mind that of the three leads, only Pattinson delivers a (surprisingly, too) good performance–and then only fitfully; never mind that Meyer has taken a giant, steaming dump on centuries of folklore and tradition to construct thin cardboard monsters that serve as bad metaphors for Mormon libido (as told by Judy Blume’s less talented soul sister); never mind that the picture’s entire last two-thirds devolves into constant repetition of the will she/won’t she theme punctuated by its stupid mythology. Really, the way that new director David Slade’s flat-to-the-point-of-garish camera brings out the faintest suggestion of corruption beneath the pancake makeup and baggy eyes of the film’s immortal underwear models–who are, literally, ancient beasts–lends the series the dread that was buried in the first two films under volumes of camp and dreary incompetence. Not to say that Eclipse doesn’t ultimately end as the same old bullshit, but for the first time, if only briefly, the clouds part for a brief, tantalizing twinkle of what it was that all this could have been.

Golden Age Romance on DVD

June 28, 2010****/****, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Billy Wilder, Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953)
[CENTENNIAL COLLECTION]
***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert, Hartley Power
screenplay by Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton
directed by William Wyler

SABRINA (1954)
[CENTENNIAL COLLECTION]
**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, William Holden, Walter Hampden
screenplay by Billy Wilder, Samuel Taylor and Ernest Lehman, based on Taylor’s play
directed by Billy Wilder

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1957)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
½*/**** Image C Sound B
starring Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, Maurice Chevalier, John McGiver
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, based on a novel by Claude Anet
directed by Billy Wilder

NOW, VOYAGER (1942)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D
starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper
screenplay by Casey Robinson, based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty
directed by Irving Rapper

MOGAMBO (1953)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
*/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Clark Gable, Ava Gardiner, Grace Kelly, Donald Sinden
screenplay by John Lee Mahin, based on a play by Wilson Collison
directed by John Ford

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961)
[TCM GREATEST CLASSIC FILMS COLLECTION: ROMANCE]
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Natalie Wood, Pat Hingle, Audrey Christie, Warren Beatty
screenplay by William Inge
directed by Elia Kazan

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s one of those seminal moments that movies provide the culture with now and again, like the swoop up a little rise to an impossibly fresh John Wayne in Stagecoach, or the intervention of a fortuitous steam vent in The Seven Year Itch, this introduction we have to Audrey Hepburn as she’s whirled around in a barber chair in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday to reveal the pixie-cut heard ’round the world. That she’s adorable is a given–the real issue is whether she’s an actress or just a bundle of inexplicable charisma, a ganglion of celluloid starlight that evaporates under the slightest critical scrutiny. I love Roman Holiday, but I vacillate between indifference and actual dislike of the rest of Hepburn’s films. I don’t find her winsome in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, am irritated by her in Charade, think she’s appallingly twee in Love in the Afternoon. She doesn’t hold her own against Sean Connery in Robin and Marian and gets blown off the screen by Albert Finney, Alan Arkin, and Rex Harrison in Two for the Road, Wait Until Dark, and My Fair Lady, respectively. If you ask me, Audrey isn’t an actress so much as someone you would like to have known and maybe had the opportunity to cuddle, which makes her mega-stardom in the Fifties and Sixties all the more testament to her ineffable appeal. Happening right when Method was rendering personalities like Hepburn déclassé, she was making a career of being terminally anachronistic. It’s Ozzie’s Harriet, sashaying while Rome burns. Instant nostalgia; even when she was introduced for the first time, it must have seemed like ages ago.

Shrek Forever After (2010)

May 20, 20102000s, 2010, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
screenplay by Josh Klausner & Darren Lemke
directed by Mike Mitchell

by Ian Pugh Because Shrek the Third tied things up pretty conclusively, what they’re probably going to tell you is that Shrek Forever After (hereafter Shrek 4) is more of an epilogue than a sequel. What they won’t tell you is that this “epilogue,” co-written by the screenwriter of Date Night, is more of a toy than a feature film. But your money’s just as green as it ever was. Now settled into a monotonous family life, Shrek (voice of Mike Myers) strikes a deal with Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn) for the chance to live one more day as a bachelor/terrifying ogre. Unfortunately, said deal transports Shrek into an alternate reality in which he never rescued Fiona (Cameron Diaz) from the dragon’s lair, freeing Rumpelstiltskin to conquer the kingdom of Far Far Away. And despite much talk of being grateful for what you have, that’s all there is to it, really. Sure, it’s better than Shrek the Third, but lots of things are better than Shrek the Third–and even then, Shrek 4 is only an improvement in the sense that it isn’t obsessed with scatological humour…and that it doesn’t leave an especially terrible aftertaste. It doesn’t leave the slightest impression at all, in fact. It’s not merely a product, it wants you to see it as a product: It’s a Wonderful Life as told by Mr. Potter. Oh, and it’s in 3-D. I mean, of course it is.

Avatar (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD

May 17, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Sam Worthington, Zoë Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver
written and directed by James Cameron

by Walter Chaw A morally, historically, socially, and politically childish amalgam of Pocahontas and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, Avatar finds James Cameron–still the Cameron of Titanic (or the uncomfortably simpering T2, if we’re honest with ourselves) rather than the Cameron of Aliens and The Terminator–trying his hand at being Kevin Costner: powerful, dim, and only relevant for a tiny window of time he doesn’t realize has already closed. The more simple-minded liberal proselytizing he perpetrates like Avatar, the farther away he gets from the B-movie muscularity that indicated his early career. It’s a bad thing, believe me, that the first set of movies people think to compare your latest to is first George Lucas’s ridiculous prequel trilogy–then Dances with Wolves.

Edge of Darkness (2010) + When in Rome (2010)|Edge of Darkness – Blu-ray Disc

May 9, 20102000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

EDGE OF DARKNESS
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, Bojana Novakovic
screenplay by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell, based on the television series by Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by Martin Campbell

WHEN IN ROME
*/****
starring Kristen Bell, Josh Duhamel, Will Arnett, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by David Diamond & David Weissman
directed by Mark Steven Johnson

by Ian Pugh Allegedly a radical departure from the BBC miniseries upon which it’s based, Martin Campbell’s Edge of Darkness works because there’s nothing typical about it. Boston PD detective Tom Craven (Mel Gibson) naturally blames himself when his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) is gunned down by a masked man with a shotgun, but his private inquiry into the matter reveals that Emma herself was the more likely target: it had something to do with her job at a nuclear R&D lab run by sadistic creepshow Jack Bennett (an almost-ridiculously slimy Danny Huston). The trick to Tom’s subsequent trip down the rabbit hole is that he never stops blaming himself, even once his quest is validated by the trail of bodies left by both him and the mysterious conspirators pulling the strings. This is Gibson’s first starring role in eight years following a lengthy trek through Crazytown, and he might be the only actor who could have pulled it off so flawlessly–simply because there’s always been something slightly terrified about his specific brand of martyrdom, something that points to it all being painfully unnecessary.