Maleficent (2014)

May 29, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Revenge, Romance, Theatrical

Maleficent

***/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Sharlto Copley, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley
screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Robert Stromberg

by Walter Chaw A gyno-centric reimagining of Disney's own Sleeping Beauty, visual-effects guy Robert Stromberg's directorial debut Maleficent (from a script by never-good Disney house-overwriter Linda Woolverton) takes all the ingredients for a horrible disaster and somehow wrestles a fitfully fascinating film from them. It hates men, that much is certain. Paints them as alternately servile and monstrous. Good men follow orders and are easily intimidated; bad men are sexually dangerous and violent. Good men know their place, led about on a tether and bullied into situations by women in groups or singly; and the rest, well…sufficed to say that Sharlto Copley, the most Ellis-from-Die-Hard human, is cast as chief BigBad, the good king Stefan. The film even goes so far as to suggest that romantic, heterosexual love is a sham, a dangerous one at that–something it tries to soften with a couple of doe-eyed exchanges during the epilogue, though I'm not buying it. In fact, had Maleficent truly committed to its themes of feminine empowerment and rage, had it linked them together hand-in-hand without entire agonizing stretches of Disney-fication, it could have entered into the same conversation as Tarantino's Kill Bills. Here's another film with a kick-ass female protagonist who finds strength in motherhood. Alas, for as often as it's great, it's limited by what its masters will allow.

“Crocodile” Dundee (1986)|”Crocodile” Dundee II (1988) [Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

May 25, 2014Posted in1980s, 2014, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance

Crocdundee11click any image to enlarge

"CROCODILE" DUNDEE
***/**** Image B- Sound C-
starring Paul Hogan, Linda Kozlowski, Mark Blum, John Meillon
screenplay by Paul Hogan, Ken Shadie and John Cornell
directed by Peter Faiman

"CROCODILE" DUNDEE II
½*/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Paul Hogan, Linda Kozlowski, John Meillon, Hechter Ubarry
screenplay by Paul Hogan and Brett Hogan
directed by John Cornell

by Bill Chambers It's possible that the monster success of "Crocodile" Dundee–a low-budget Australian import starring the international spokesman for Foster's Lager and Australian tourism–seems like temporary mass hysteria these days. In America, the film was the second-biggest release of 1986 (after Top Gun), earning more than the combined grosses of eventual perennials Aliens and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Paul Hogan even won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical. (The screenplay, co-written by Hogan, was, yes, nominated for an Oscar; Hannah and Her Sisters claimed the prize.) But in the years since, the term "Crocodile Dundee" has become derogatory shorthand for the outdoorsy Australian, and the notoriously generous IMDb voters currently have the movie at a Grinchy 6.5/10. It's a film that has been curiously immune to '80s/childhood nostalgia, as the tardy, Razzie-nominated second sequel either confirmed or guaranteed.

Her (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 12, 2014Posted in****/****, 2013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi

Her1click any image to enlarge

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Scarlett Johansson
written and directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw Two moments early on in Spike Jonze’s Her. The first when our hero, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), initiates his new operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and is asked to characterize his relationship with his mother; the second when, in flashback, Theodore and his ex, Catherine (Rooney Mara), pretend to choke each other. They’re waypoints Jonze establishes for his piece: in one direction, there’s Blade Runner and its questions of proximate humanity; in the other, there’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and its mad love. Jonze establishes, too, that this will be a work of science-fiction owing its parentage to the best sources, that its premise will be fantastic but grounded in characters and their place in the world. Of all the compliments I can think to pay this film, the best is that Her is at least the equal of its waypoints. More, when its solution recalls the metaphysical coda to the great The Incredible Shrinking Man, it’s the equal of that as well.

The Terminal (2004) – Blu-ray Disc

May 6, 2014Posted in2000s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Spielberg

Terminal1click any image to enlarge

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Chi McBride
screenplay by Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Early in the latest Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks collaboration The Terminal, Russian splinter exile Viktor Navorski (Hanks) runs up a staircase, throwing his suitcase onto the "up" escalator as he goes so that his baggage, in essence, is left to finish its journey on its own. It's a lovely, complicated visual metaphor for abandonment or freedom, for Spielberg the scenarist's twin obsessions with the idea of little boys lost and of little boys escaping and for Spielberg the director's inability to take responsibility for his subtext so that he might finally make that mature film he's so desperately wanted to since The Color Purple. But The Terminal is film-festival offensive, encouraging its audience to coo over the adorable antics of its madcap cast of society's blue-collar "invisibles" (playing in this respect like the slick, imminently forgettable version of Stephen Frears's working class morality play Dirty Pretty Things) in a way that isn't sympathetic so much as paternalistic. Foreigners and minorities are resourceful children, operating eternally at the mercy of the dominant majority, and Neverland is the big cities of the United States, where grown-ups have families and problems.

Tess (1979) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

March 30, 2014Posted in1970s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, France, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Tess1

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Nastassia Kinski, Peter Firth, Leigh Lawson, John Collin
screenplay by Gerard Brach, Roman Polanski, John Brownjohn, based on the novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
directed by Roman Polanski

by Bryant Frazer In the annals of feel-bad literature, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a corker, pitting natural beauty and goodness against a battery of opposing forces–the church, the aristocracy, modern technology, human avarice–and finding beauty debased. It was a loaded area of study for Roman Polanski, who adapted it as a Hollywood artist in exile, working in France rather than nearer the book’s setting of Wessex, England, for fear of his deportation to the U.S. on rape charges. Just as Polanski’s bloody Macbeth has been interpreted as a howl of pain following the murder of his beloved wife, Sharon Tate, his Tess can be read as an act of penance, if not a bid for rehabilitation.

A Star is Born (1954) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

March 5, 2014Posted in1950s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Musical, Romance

Starisborn54

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Judy Garland, James Mason, Jack Carson, Tom Noonan
screenplay by Moss Hart, based on the screenplay by Dorothy Parker & Alan Campbell & Robert Carson
directed by George Cukor

by Walter Chaw A big, giant mess of a movie, big, giant mess of a director George Cukor’s A Star is Born–a remake of the 1937 Janet Gaynor vehicle as well as Cukor’s own 1932 What Price Hollywood?–finds big, giant mess of a gay icon Judy Garland quivering gallantly on the razor’s edge of total mental collapse for 176 famously-restored minutes. A miracle of single-mindedness and dedication to the film-preservation cause? No doubt. A movie that could easily withstand 90 minutes of liberal pruning? Indeed. And unlike that question posed rhetorically of Joseph II in Amadeus, it’s all too obvious which bits need trimming. Start with the 20-minute (might as well be 20-hour) “Born in a Trunk” number, inserted by Jack Warner unbeknownst to Cukor and intended to showcase Garland’s then-healthy stage act. A “showstopper” in every sense of the word, it’s unbelievably bad and, more than bad, it betrays everything that’s worked about A Star is Born up to that point. A film-within-a-film-within-a-film, it has Judy vamping her way through a series of surreal set-pieces, telling her origin story while doing a medley of standards from the Warner catalogue. It’s painful for all the wrong reasons.

The Wind Rises (2013) + Frozen (2013)

February 25, 2014Posted in****/****, 2013, 2014, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Japan, Musical, Romance, War

Frozen

THE WIND RISES
****/****
written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki

FROZEN
**½/****
screenplay by Jennifer Lee, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen"
directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee

Editor's Note: This review pertains to the original Japanese-language version of The Wind Rises.

by Walter Chaw Hayao Miyazaki's alleged swan song The Wind Rises is mature, romantic, grand storytelling that just happens to be something like a romanticized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer behind the design of the Mitsubishi A5M, which led, ultimately, to the Zero. Indeed, for a Western audience, watching Jiro's dreams of squadrons of Zeros buzzing over fields of green is chilling, and advance critics seemed unable to distinguish the Japanese war machine from the film's focus on a life lived in pursuit of dreams. In truth, separating these two aspects of the picture–the proximate and the historical–is self-defeating. (Dismissing the movie out of hand is equally blinkered.) One without the other, The Wind Rises loses anything like substance, resonance, importance. It would fall on the one side into gauzy bullshit, on the other into Triumph of the Will. As is, it's something more akin to Studio Ghibli's own Grave of the Fireflies in its humanizing of a man whose dreams were corrupted into something terrible. Einstein would be one of the West's potential Horikoshi corollaries–and if Miyazaki had done Albert's biography, I'd expect to see mushroom clouds illustrating his fantasies of relativity. For Horikoshi, Miyazaki provides upheavals and disasters as highlight to each of his life events: He first meets his wife in a train crash; in a lilting epilogue, when Jiro bids farewell to his dead wife, Miyazaki offers fields of devastation and a village in flames. Throughout, Miyazaki presents earthquakes, rainstorms, sudden bursts of wind as reminders of…what? The inevitability of change? The portents of war? The cycles of life and death? All of that; but what compels is the idea of helplessness in the face of larger forces–that although we chase our dreams, we're never really in control of our destinies.

Argento’s Dracula 3-D (2012) – Blu-ray 3D & Blu-ray

February 5, 2014Posted in2012, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy, Romance, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS

Dracula2click any image to enlarge

Dario Argento's Dracula
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Thomas Kretschmann, Maria Gastini, Asia Argento, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Dario Argento, Antonio Tentori, Stefano Piani, based on the novel by Bram Stoker
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw I used to love Dario Argento. Heck, who didn't? But at a certain point, it became clear that the quality of Argento's work is directly proportional (or it was for a while) to the quality of work he's riffing on. A shame that lately he appears to be mostly riffing on himself–the elderly version of a vital artist doing his best to recapture something he's lost. It was Hitchcock as muse, of course, initially, joining Argento at the hip for a while with Brian DePalma, who was doing kind of the same thing at the same time with about the same audacity in the United States. There was genius there in the Deep Reds and Suspirias, certainly in the logic-bumfuddling submerged ballroom the heroine must enter to retrieve a key in Inferno. Argento didn't really start to make bad movies until after Tenebre. Since, with notable half-exceptions like Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome, he's made almost nothing but. It all comes to a head–or a tail, as it were–with Dario Argento's Dracula: the worst entry in a filmography that includes stuff like Sleepless and Giallo, and frankly belonging somewhere in the conversation of the worst films of all-time. Until you've endured it, I can't quantify it. Coming from someone once revered for his innovative camera, for his groundbreaking work with music and production design–coming from the guy involved at some level with the conception/production of Once Upon a Time in the West and Dawn of the Dead, fer chrissakes (who, indeed, counted Leone and Bertolucci and George A. Romero as friends and collaborators), it's a fucking tragedy.

Her (2013)

December 18, 2013Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Her

****/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Scarlett Johansson
written and directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw Two moments early on in Spike Jonze's Her. The first when our hero, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), initiates his new operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and is asked to characterize his relationship with his mother; the second when, in flashback, Theodore and his ex, Catherine (Rooney Mara), pretend to choke each other. They're waypoints Jonze establishes for his piece: in one direction, there's Blade Runner and its questions of proximate humanity; in the other, there's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and its mad love. Jonze establishes, too, that this will be a work of science-fiction owing its parentage to the best sources, that its premise will be fantastic but grounded in characters and their place in the world. Of all the compliments I can think to pay this film, the best is that Her is at least the equal of its waypoints. More, when its solution recalls the metaphysical coda to the great The Incredible Shrinking Man, it's the equal of that as well.

SDFF ’13: The Broken Circle Breakdown

November 7, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Romance

Brokencirclebreakdown

***/****
starring Johan Heldenbergh, Veerle Baetens, Nell Cattrysse, Geert Van Rampelberg
screenplay by Carl Joos & Felix Van Groeningen, based on the play by Johan Heldenbergh & Mieke Dobbels
directed by Felix Van Groeningen

by Walter Chaw Felix Van Groeningen's The Broken Circle Breakdown eventually loses impetus and becomes political theatre, but until it does it's exceptional melodrama, raw and emotional. It walks the fine line for a while, staying just this side of exploitation in its alinear tale of a little girl who gets cancer and her parents–how they met, the aftermath, and then the far aftermath. The film's central event, then, isn't the child's fate, but rather the meet-cute of the parents, with squarish Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) asking about Elise's (Veerle Baetens) tattoos in the parlour where she works. A bit shocked, and maybe titillated, that each has a story of a different man attached to it, he invites her to, essentially, come see him perform with his bluegrass band in a tiny club down the way. Van Groeningen, working from an original idea and stage play by Heldenbergh, adroitly alternates the events of the film with Didier's band's songs; in other words, The Broken Circle Breakdown owes a greater kinship to Cabaret than to Once–even though, at its best, its intent leans more towards the personal than the political. This means, of course, that once it becomes more political than personal, it also loses its rudder and balance. Already, effortlessly, about so much, it stumbles badly when it tries to be.

TIFF ’13: Don Jon

September 6, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

Donjon

**½/****
written and directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt

by Bill Chambers Formerly Don Jon's Addiction, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's feature writing and directing debut is a cheerier, lower-stakes Saturday Night Fever. Simultaneously lampooning and humanizing The Situation in the title role, Gordon-Levitt plays a Jersey boy who has no trouble getting laid but never finds the real thing as satisfying as jerking off to Internet porn. (In a very funny opening voiceover, he admits to getting insta-wood, Pavlov-style, at the startup sound of his laptop.) When he begins dating Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson, having a good year), he hears the swoony music of '50s romances–but old habits die hard, and Barbara has decidedly little tolerance for porn. (She acts like it's a moral stand, but it's clear that her titanic ego can't take the competition.) What separates Don Jon from, say, Steve McQueen's Shame, and what made dropping "addiction" from the title a wise idea, is that other than Jon's masturbation frequency going up, his porn habit doesn't really escalate–this isn't the kind of movie that makes a point about desensitization, until he's fapping it to horses. No, Jon's problem is rather more conventional: he just hasn't experienced love yet and, ergo, has been deprived of good sex. Yawn. It's somewhat hypocritical that the movie has it in for romcoms, then (Gordon-Levitt calls in some big favours to spoof the genre), but what are you gonna do? What's good is a moment where Jon, in a heated argument, suggests that romcoms are also porn, which they totally are, and I liked Johansson's character revealing their true incompatibility when she berates Jon for trying to buy Swiffer refills in front of her, embarrassed that a man would even consider cleaning up after himself, let alone take a sort of pride in housework. Though such attitudes may be unfashionable, they seem culturally specific and part and parcel of confident filmmaking that anchors itself with motifs (road rage, church confessions) that deepen as the movie wears on. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Tony Danza's electric, if boxed-in, performance as Jon's profane, sleazy father.

Oblivion (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

August 6, 2013Posted in2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Romance, Sci-Fi, Tom Cruise

Oblivion-1

*/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurlylenko, Melissa Leo
screenplay by Joseph Kosinski and Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt
directed by Joseph Kosinski

by Walter Chaw If you’re going to see Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, you should see it in IMAX. Oh, who’m I kidding? There’s no good way to see Kosinski’s sci-fi-lite follow-up to Tron: Legacy, starring Emperor Thetan Tom Cruise as a future-Jiffy Lube mechanic jetting around post-bellum Earth circa 2077, fixing automated drones programmed to kill alien “Scavs” that have taken over the empty planet. Following? It doesn’t matter. Via soulful voiceover, Cruise’s Jack Harper informs us that a war has decimated Earth and that all the surviving humans have fled to Titan (that’s a moon around Saturn, Jack explains), leaving behind only Jack and his lady-pal Vika (Andrea Riseborough) to tend to giant sea-water fusion engines that provide energy to our ragtag, fugitive fleet. No, it already doesn’t make much sense, except that it’s sort of like something L. Ron Hubbard would have written–but that’s gotta be a coincidence, right? Anyway, seems that Jack has built a special cabin in the woods despite Earth being uninhabitable due to the nuclear holocaust we unleashed to free ourselves of alien enslavement…or is it? Irradiated, that is. Earth, I mean. And what of these strange memories of the Empire State Building that memory-wiped Jack keeps having, where he and supermodel Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko exchange doe-eyes and sweet nothings? If you’ve seen any science-fiction film worth a crap in the last twenty years, you’ve already seen a better version of Oblivion, I promise you.

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

July 8, 2013Posted in****/****, 1940s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

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

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

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

Not Fade Away (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

June 18, 2013Posted in2012, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music, Romance

Notfadeaway3

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring John Magaro, Jack Huston, Bella Heathcote, James Gandolfini
written and directed by David Chase

by Bryant Frazer Not Fade Away doesn’t have an opening scene–it has an overture. You could almost call it a mash-up. After a brief snippet of TV footage showing New Jersey boys Joey Dee and the Starliters performing their 1962 hit “Peppermint Twist,” the image is replaced by an old RCA “Indian Head” test pattern superimposed with the words “Please Stand By” as a voice announces a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. After the familiar emergency-alert tone starts buzzing away for a couple of bars, it’s co-opted as part of  the beat behind the guitar riff that opens “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The sense of time and place thus conjured is strong: it’s 1965, and America is on the verge of a rock-and-roll emergency.

True Blood: The Complete Fifth Season (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 17, 2013Posted in2012, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Romance, Television, Vampire

Truebloods5cap1

Image A- Sound A Extras B
“Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “Authority Always Wins,” “Whatever I Am, You Made Me,” “We’ll Meet Again,” “Let’s Boot and Rally,” “Hopeless,” “In the Beginning,” “Somebody That I Used to Know,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” “Gone, Gone, Gone,” “Sunset,” “Save Yourself”

by Bill Chambers In general, TV series aren’t built to last beyond four seasons. I think it has something to do with how the educational system teaches us that four-year cycles end in graduation. Showrunners consequently feel an obligation to symbolically reboot in season five–to send the high-schoolers off to college (“Dawson’s Creek”), to recast the leads (“The Dukes of Hazzard”), to have Fonzie waterski over Jaws (“Happy Days”). To be fair, redefining the status quo doesn’t always mean jumping the shark: for every Cousin Oliver, after all, there’s a Dawn Summers. Unfortunately, “True Blood” is not one of the exceptions to the rule, as it goes off the rails in its fifth season in a way that is different from those countless other times it seemed to be flying a kamikaze mission towards ratings oblivion. (This is a show that has elevated jumping the shark to an artform.) A good chunk of the season is devoted to vampires–creatures who can, in the “True Blood”-verse, run like The Flash, fly, and fuck like pornstars–sitting around a conference table debating politics and religion, and the other “super” groups don’t exactly pick up the slack, what with the werewolves holding auditions for a new pack leader and the faes throwing slumber parties with their new BFF, Sookie.

Before Midnight (2013)

June 7, 2013Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Beforemidnight

****/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
screenplay by Richard Linklater & Ethan Hawke & Julie Delpy
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Before Midnight opens with a bit of misdirection, a tracking shot of two pairs of shoes ambling towards the camera that we instinctively ascribe to Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) before the second pair is shown to belong instead to Jesse’s teenaged son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), about to board a flight back to the States. Somewhere in the slow pan up to the actors’ faces, and in the deferral of series MVP Celine, is a playful acknowledgement that Richard Linklater’s Before movies have grown into a franchise with a coherent visual language that’s dependable enough to riff on. Much has changed since Jesse and Celine’s inaugural philosophical walking tour through Vienna 18 years ago, and the prologue is an economical demonstration of how arbitrary our encounters with the couple to date have been, shaped by our inability to listen in after Nina Simone drowns out the end of Before Sunset. But the presence of Jesse’s son (from the unseen wife alluded to throughout the previous film) in place of Celine, who’s finally revealed in another tracking shot in the next scene, also alerts us to something new: a conflict that runs deeper than the pair’s usual anxious negotiations with a ticking clock.

Warm Bodies (2013) – Blu-ray + Digital Copy + Ultraviolet

June 4, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Romance, Teen, Zombie

Warmbodies3

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Rob Corddry, John Malkovich
screenplay by Jonathan Levine, based on the novel by Isaac Marion
directed by Jonathan Levine

by Bryant Frazer The American zombie movie was born in October 1968 with the release of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and it’s a measure of how subversive that film and its sequels truly were that zombies only became palatable to the major studios in 2004, when a kid named Zack Snyder stripped Dawn of the Dead of its original class-conscious, anti-consumerist premise–inverted it, even, by making a zombie movie that pandered to the shopping-mall multiplex crowd rather than ripping into it. Given its success, it’s hard to believe it has taken almost another ten years for the sub-genre to be completely transformed by a Hollywood establishment that’s turned so timid and equivocal in its thrill-seeking ways that it begrudges even the zombies their killing sport. Yes, somebody somewhere decided that what zombies really need, more than forty years on, is a redemption story. Director Jonathan Levine doesn’t put a stake through the heart of the sub-genre, quite, but he does something that might be worse. With Warm Bodies, he’s made the first middle-aged zombie film.

Cabaret (1972) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

June 3, 2013Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Music, Musical, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Marisa Berenson, Joel Grey
screenplay Jay Allen, based on the play by John Van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood
directed by Bob Fosse

Cabaretcap

by Walter Chaw Bob Fosse's Cabaret is an astonishment. It's a milestone for musical adaptations, a scabrous mission statement early on for the best period in American film (in film anywhere, really), and, taken with her turn in The Sterile Cuckoo (and arguably as Lucille 2 on "Arrested Development"), everything you need to know about Liza Minnelli as a very down, very particular American icon. Daughter of one Judy Garland, whose 1969 death from an abuse of drugs and alcohol was no longer considered spectacular in the shadow of poor, martyred Marilyn Monroe, she represents the broken legacy of Old Hollywood. Ray Bolger said at Garland's funeral that she had just worn out. Poignant. Poignant especially because it happens the same year her daughter has a breakdown from a broken heart in The Sterile Cuckoo, and just three years before Minnelli's Sally Bowles composes herself a split second before the curtains part and she, snap, justlikethat, puts on a happy face for a Weimar audience fiddling as the Republic burns. As endings go, it's as horrifying as the editing error at the close of John Frankenheimer's 1966 Seconds–the film that, for my money, is the real beginning of the New American Cinema, appearing less than a year before the "official" starting gun of Bonnie & Clyde. Cabaret is a quintessential '70s picture, a devastating experience and an exhilarating one, too.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

May 8, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald
directed by Baz Luhrmann


Greatgatsby13

by Walter Chaw The great irony of Baz Luhrmann's
unwatchable farrago The Great Gatsby is that it's not so much an
interpretation of its titular hero's self-aggrandizing fandangos as a
literalization of one. It's all surface, all façade, and not coincidentally,
the most successful thing about it is Luhrmann's shooting of Gatsby's
legendary parties as infernal bacchanalia. But that bit of useful critique
is clearly a fluke, an accident of Luhrmann's one-trick pony kicking over the
single element in Fitzgerald's book that is remotely compatible with Luhrmann's
style. The marriage of Baz with Fitzgerald, in fact, is a little like asking
Michael Bay to adapt The Brothers Karamazov–it's Timur Bekmambetov's A Farewell
to Arms. It's showing off in the loudest, most obnoxious way possible,
without any kind of critical, nay, useful, rationale for all the bread and
circus–an asshole at play with Welles's "best train set a boy could ever
want," with the casualty only what's possibly the best American novel ever
written. It's an effrontery to taste, the sole consolation being that as
Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby is something of a motherless child,
there's no one who will love it. No one could.

Like Someone in Love (2012)

April 12, 2013Posted in2012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Rio Kase, Denden
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami


Likesomeoneinlove

by Angelo Muredda Few filmmakers know how to put you on your
guard from the first frame as effectively as Abbas Kiarostami. It's clear
enough that Like
Someone in Love opens in a bar in Tokyo, but it's
harder to say at first what we're looking at and why. The closest voice we hear
belongs to the off-camera Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young woman who's a little too preoccupied with lying her way out
of a hostile phone conversation to process the flat image of well-dressed young
revellers in front of her. Whether she's our lead takes a couple of false tries
to figure out. Our first candidate is a redhead around her age, sitting at a
table off to the side until she suddenly relocates to an empty seat in the
foreground, coaching Akiko through the rest of her call until she relinquishes
her spot moments later to a fortysomething man who speaks to both women with
first the familiarity of a parent, then the condescension of a high-end pimp
directing his employees. Somewhere in-between these encounters, we briefly lose track of who's even doing the looking. Akiko waltzes into our field of
vision on the way to the bathroom, the camera fixed at where her eyeline used
to be after she's vacated her seat, as if holding her place until she gets
back.