Romance Archives - Page 9 of 46 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

True Blood: The Complete Second Season (2009) + True Blood: The Complete Third Season (2010) – Blu-ray Discs

April 10, 20132000s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Television, Thriller, Vampire, Werewolf

Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
S2: "Nothing But the Blood," "Keep This Party Going," "Scratches," "Shake and Fingerpop," "Never Let Me Go," "Hard-Hearted Hannah," "Release Me," "Timebomb," "I Will Rise Up," "New World in My View," "Frenzy," "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'"

S3: "Bad Blood," "Beautifully Broken," "It Hurts Me Too," "9 Crimes," "Trouble," "I Got a Right to Sing the Blues," "Hitting the Ground," "Night on the Sun," "Everything Is Broken," "I Smell a Rat," "Fresh Blood," "Evil Is Going On"

by Walter Chaw "True Blood" is pulp crap. Yet as Bryant and Bill have already so eloquently pointed out, it's highly-addictive pulp crap–the sort of shallow, handsomely-mounted titillation that fosters the craze that sprung up around prime-time soaps like "Dynasty" and "Falcon Crest". White-collar smut that traffics in the currency of the age: once upon a time it was the super-rich, now it's the supernatural. Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme. It's certainly soapier than showrunner/creator Alan Ball's previous pay-cable drama, "Six Feet Under", but to its credit what "True Blood" does in returning sexuality–and gore, and (southern) Gothic trappings–to the vampire mythos, it does well. The shame of it is that it seems to be ashamed of itself and so continually strives for relevance in aligning the plight of its vampire underclass to gay rights. Bill said it first, but is the appropriate supernatural analogue to gays really vampires? Is it wise to suggest that gays present that same kind of sexual allure? The same kind of blood contagion? Doesn't that play into the Conservative storyline a bit too neatly? At least it's not "The Walking Dead".

Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 11, 2013****/****, 1930s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins, Edward Everett Horton
screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the play by Noel Coward
directed by Ernst Lubitsch

by Walter Chaw The impulse to call the work of Ernst Lubitsch “frothy” and “bubbly” and otherwise insubstantial (a practice excoriated, rightfully so, by film scholar William Paul on Criterion’s Blu-ray release of Design for Living) obscures the fact that none of Lubitsch’s romantic masterpieces would carry any kind of resonance without an essential heart of darkness and decay. The oft-invoked “Lubitsch Touch”–that well-circulated anecdote that Billy Wilder hung the words “What Would Lubitsch Do” above his office door–suggests to me the wellspring of the asshole element in Wilder’s works: the idea that Wilder was just Hitchcock undercover, with Lubitsch influencing both directors in ways obvious and not so and not in terms of a “light” touch so much as a decidedly bitter one. Take my favourite Lubitsch film, Trouble in Paradise, which begins with a trash barge in the middle of the night in a Venice we don’t see again until Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. The picture proceeds to document the love affair between two professional thieves and the innocent woman who falls victim to them. In that, there’s a direct reference to hated President Hoover’s deep-in-the-Depression platitude that “prosperity is right around the corner,” offered in piercing irony for a cash-strapped audience for whom the theatre had most likely just lowered their admission to a dime. The “Lubitsch Touch,” indeed: edged and between the ribs before you know it’s being brandished.

The Vampire Diaries: The Complete First Season (2009-2010) – Blu-ray Disc

February 7, 20132000s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Romance, Teen, Television, Vampire

Image C+ Sound B- Extras C-
“Pilot,”
“The Night of
the Comet,” “Friday Night Bites,””Family Ties,”
“You’re Undead to Me,” “Lost Girls,” “Haunted,” “162
Candles,” “History Repeating,” “The Turning Point,” “Bloodlines,”
“Unpleasantville,” “Children of the Damned,” “Fool Me Once,” “A Few
Good Men,” “There Goes the Neighborhood,” “Let the Right One In,”
“Under Control,” “Miss Mystic Falls,” “Blood Brothers,” “Isobel,”
“Founder’s Day”

by Walter
Chaw You can
diagnose things like Kevin Williamson’s tween opera “The Vampire
Diaries” by
how much of the dialogue consists of peoples’ names. “Hey, Ben
is
with Carrie down in the tomb with Josie and Halley. Chris said he and
Caroline
would meet us there, but then Damon said that Stefan was going instead,
but
Stefan still has feelings for Elena…” OMFG, amiright?
Add
to
that a liberal use of music by the likes of Matt Kearney, The
Fray, and
Bat for Lashes, mix sloppily with
flavour-of-the-month genre fetish,
and, voilà!, the kind of thing everyone describes as a “guilty
pleasure”–which basically means they’re not telling you they
also enjoy “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo”. The
remainder of the dialogue is interested in secret parentage, secret
siblings, and this and that about lore to establish credibility
while simultaneously demonstrating that everyone involved in
this one has read more books
than Stephenie Meyer (a low bar) and is aware of Stephenie Meyer…and
Heath
Ledger…and Emily Brontë. Never mind, you wouldn’t understand.
Similarly
difficult
to understand are magic rings that allow vampires to walk around in
daylight,
ancient tombs sealed by Creole witches led by that bitch from “A
Different
World”, and a complex series of events that need to happen before one
of
this show’s vampires is able to turn one of this show’s hot little
nymphos into
a vampire. It’s a metaphor–not for abstinence, per se, but maybe for
embarrassing tumescence. That’s right, “The Vampire Diaries” is a
boner joke.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) + The Rains of Ranchipur (1955) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Discs

February 1, 20131940s, 1950s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Romance, Thriller

THE
POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
***/****
Image B+
Sound A
Extras A
starring Lana Turner, John
Garfield, Cecil Kellaway, Hume Cronyn
screenplay by Harry Ruskin
and Niven Busch, based on the novel by James M. Cain
directed by Tay Garnett

THE
RAINS OF RANCHIPUR
**½/****
Image A
Sound A
Extras B
starring Lana Turner,
Richard Burton, Fred MacMurray, Michael Rennie
screenplay by Merle Miller,
based on the novel by Louis Bromfield
directed by Jean Negulesco

click
any image to enlarge

by
Jefferson Robbins There's a series
of doublings in The
Postman Always Rings Twice, Lana Turner's best-known
vehicle, that
illuminate its obscure title. Disillusioned young wife Cora Smith
(Turner) and
drift-through handyman Frank Chambers (John Garfield) try twice to make
way for
their illicit love by eliminating her diner-impresario husband, Nick
(Cecil
Kellaway). There are two court cases steered by suspicious chief
prosecutor
Sackett (Leon Ames) and defended by wonderfully shifty lawyer Arthur
"I'm
Handling It" Keats (Hume Cronyn). There are two moonlight swims, each a
turning
point in the criminal couple's courtship. Twice the action bends when
ailing
female relatives, never seen, summon a main character to their
sickbeds. There
are even two roadside-diner femmes fatale: Cora,
and her
double Madge (Audrey Totter), who diverts Frank while he's on the outs
with the
woman he killed to obtain. Finally, the murder itself creates a literal
echo.
These aren't anvils falling from the heavens, but instead
the patterns
life presents only in retrospect: This moment, that
day, that was
when God was trying to get my attention. Like Frank, we're too
preoccupied to
ever hear the first ring.

Notorious (1946) – Blu-ray Disc

January 6, 2013****/****, 1940s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Espionage, Romance, Thriller

****/****
Image B Sound B- Extras C+
starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern
screenplay by Ben Hecht
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Other than Psycho, the most examined, most carefully raked-through picture in Hitchcock’s filmography might be the cold, meticulous, perfect Notorious. It serves as a model for technique, offered as the pinnacle of Hitchcock’s early American period and used as proof by some that Hitch was a misogynist. The Dark Side of Genius author Donald Spoto wrote a fitfully interesting (if ultimately useless) article about how the first half of the film is a mirror image of the second–rising to a midpoint before diminishing at the end to the same composition as the first shot. (I’d argue that you could say the same for Shadow of a Doubt–particularly during the movie’s character-/setting- establishing sequences.) Stories of how the FBI began a file on Hitch because of his prescient use of uranium as his MacGuffin in Notorious are among the most beloved Hitch arcana, and critics who favour Lacan as the prism through which to analyze the Master of Suspense have found in the picture compelling demonstrations of spectatorship and gender construction. For Freudians, it has its Oedipal elements, its Madonna/Whore complexities–it’s a very fine historical relic, one of maybe only two of the director’s films (the other being Shadow of a Doubt) that’s ever entered into a noir conversation. And at the end–among those in the know, at least–it’s the better version, in every way that matters, of Casablanca. Robin Wood writes a brilliant piece on it in his second Hitchcock book, taking on previous brilliant takes by Laura Mulvey, Raymond Bellour, and Michael Renov. I probably like Raymond Durgnat’s quick-hit the best, however, for his pegging of the picture’s iciness and of Hitch at this moment as midway between idealistic and cynical (though I’d go farther and say he’s pretty much all the way cynical by now). Notorious is possibly, neck-and-neck with Vertigo, the best film Hitchcock ever made, though it’s seldom identified–unless you’re Francois Truffaut–as anyone’s favourite (leave that for the bitterest (North by Northwest), the most nihilistic (Psycho), the least sick (Rear Window)), and when the dust settles, the prospect of writing about it is almost as intimidating as pretending that there’s anything new to say about it. But here goes.

The Apartment (1960) – Blu-ray Disc

January 2, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Billy Wilder, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

by Walter Chaw The older I get, the better I understand Billy Wilder. And the better I understand Billy Wilder, his weariness and acerbic sense of humour, the more I feel comfortable saying, with that complicated mix of affection and fair warning that I think indicates his work as well, that his movies are assholes and mean it. Billy Wilder, the ten-cents-a-dance Austrian gigolo, the roommate of Peter Lorre who learned English by listening to Dodgers games on the radio, the admirer of Ernst Lubistch. The guy who demanded he be allowed to direct his own screenplays and so made a legendary hyphenate debut with Double Indemnity. The writing partner of both Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond, the man who made whores of Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe and Shirley MacLaine, because nothing could ever be as simple, as innocent, as it appeared at first glance. The guy who lost family in Nazi concentration camps, who came up with the best closing line in movie history, which was “nobody’s perfect.” Maybe the last line of The Apartment–“Shut up and deal”–is a close second. Narrative context tells us the line refers to a card game; the Wilder context suggests a certain way of looking at the world: coping, acceptance, fatalism. Would you believe The Apartment is actually one of Wilder’s optimistic films? Optimistic because the way it views the world is through a scrim of absolute cynicism–and despite it, despite all the towers falling down, there’s the possibility of love, sweet and simple, between Ms. Kubelik and Mr. Baxter.

Les Misérables (2012)

December 24, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Musical, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Sacha Baron Cohen
screenplay by William Nicholson, Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg, Herbert Kretzmer, based on Boublil & Schönberg’s stage play and the novel by Victor Hugo
directed by Tom Hooper

by Walter Chaw The title refers to the audience; imagine director Tom Hooper as James Cagney in The Public Enemy, and you’re Mae Clarke getting the grapefruit shoved in your face. Yes, Hooper’s glacial, note-for-note screen adaptation of Schönberg & Boublil’s smash musical Les Misérables is 157 minutes of extreme close-up/wide-angle theatre threatening, at every moment, to slide completely off the screen, given the accidental-auteur’s propensity to ignore half the frame. It’s ugly in the way that only films driven by fanatical vision, unfettered by checks, and galvanized by awards and money can be ugly–so much time is spent horning in up Hugh Jackman’s nose that I spent the first day or so of it thinking I was watching a musical about spelunking. It’s a picture that doesn’t respect your personal space: I’ve never more wanted to mace a movie than this, the umpteenth adaptation of Victor Hugo’s epic but the first of the Broadway phenomenon that pretty much defined the best way to get into a high-school girl’s good graces in the 1980s. After this ordeal, I’d offer that still the best way this musical’s ever appeared on film was its iconic poster making a cameo on Patrick Bateman’s bathroom wall in American Psycho.

This is 40 (2012)

December 20, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

***/****
starring Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, John Lithgow, Albert Brooks
written and directed by Judd Apatow

by Walter Chaw It’s scattershot, and sloppy, but any movie about fortysomethings dealing with familial, financial, sexual, and physical issues that ends with Ryan Adams performing “Lucky One” in a little club is a movie I will like. And I do: Judd Apatow’s This is 40 isn’t good, exactly, but it listens and it has a sense of humour, as well as a certain optimism about it. I bristle at Apatow’s desire in his other films to impose a traditionally moral conclusion on all the atrocity that’s preceded it, but in a “spin-off” of Knocked Up, about people exactly my age in roughly my situation discovering they’re the grown-ups for some reason and through no fault of their own, that desire for a hopeful conclusion is extremely compelling. This Is 40 is one of those works that gets you at the right time, I think. I’ve often wondered if the reason I’ve never liked Tolkien is that I didn’t read him when I was 12. I wish I had. For what it’s worth, I’m glad I saw This is 40 in these last six months before my own fortieth birthday. It’s my Twilight. I know it’s terrible–flabby, obviously tinkered with ’til the last minute (the commercials for the film are about 90% cut footage), and packed with digressions that distract rather than edify (a bit with Charlyne Yi is a particular lowlight), but it speaks to me, and when Apatow’s right, I realize, he’s spot on.

Les visiteurs du soir (1942) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 17, 20121940s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, France, Romance, The Criterion Collection

a.k.a. The Devil’s Envoys
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Alain Cuny, Arletty, Marie Déa, Jules Berry
screenplay by Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche
directed by Marcel Carné

by Jefferson Robbins Fairytale is the oldest way we know to exorcise trauma or repurpose it to didactic ends. The moving image, probably the newest. So Marcel Carné’s Les visiteurs du soir (literally, The Night Visitors, though its international title is The Devil’s Envoys), created in France during a period of repression equalled only by the Terror, pulls both tricks. It’s a film, therefore it’s not reality, but it’s also shaped as a magical courtly romance and set in a distant past where romances were both entertainment and cultural transgression. Gilles (Alain Cuny) and Dominique (Arletty) are figures out of a medieval fresco or some monk’s illuminated pages, from Gilles’s suggestively forked mullet to Dominique’s graceful, benedictory poses. The two are minstrels on horseback in 1485–when troubadours carried news, gossip, and forbidden literature from one feudal estate to the next, singing songs of organic, passionate love for nobles trapped in arranged marriages. A long way from Vichy France, under the Nazi occupation, yet either world offered death as punishment for dissent, and both found succour in art that trespassed boundaries.

New Year’s Eve (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 9, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Robert De Niro, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound C+ Extras C-
starring Halle Berry, Jessica Biel, Jon Bon Jovi, Abigail Breslin
screenplay by Katherine Fugate
directed by Garry Marshall

click any image to enlarge

by Jefferson Robbins Refining the Hollywood gravity well–the kind of cinematic drain-spiral that A-listers and aspirants can't not be in–he first manufactured with Valentine's Day, Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve hinges for me on the thought that Robert De Niro got paid at least seven figures to literally lie in bed. The movie feints at the larger symbolism of the holiday: A progression forward in light of what's come before, the passages between immaturity and adulthood and life and death. But this is a romcom from the godfather of the modern romcom, albeit a too-long one that's neither very funny nor very romantic, and it ultimately takes its importance from the infantile imperative to kiss somebody, almost anybody, at midnight when the year turns. If you don't, you're worth nothing.

In the Mood for Love (2000) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 13, 2012****/****, 2000s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Hong Kong, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk
written and directed by Wong Kar-wai

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw The middle film in a loose trilogy by
Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar-wai (the others are Days of Being Wild and 2046), In the Mood for Love is a love-drunk ode to the confusion,
the intoxication, the magic, and the tragedy of being in love. It speaks in
terms proximate and eternal, presenting lovers cast in various roles across
years and alien geographies, placing some objects in the position of totem and
memento and others in historical dustbins to be abandoned, forgotten. It links
the act of watching a film to the act of seduction (Days of Being Wild
might be even better at this), and there's a
strong sense in In the Mood for Love that Wong is playing the artifactor of both sign and
signifier: He's doing the T.S. Eliot two-step of authoring Prufrock while simultaneously providing the distance to criticize it.

Take This Waltz (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

November 12, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance

Takethiswaltz1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby, Sarah Silverman
written and directed by Sarah Polley

by Angelo Muredda As both literary adaptations and first features go, Sarah Polley’s Away from Her was an astonishing exercise in restraint. Working from Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” about a seventysomething married couple whose longstanding private games turn into something else when Fiona (Julie Christie) is diagnosed with dementia, Polley forewent the ostentatious route of many first-time directors by telling the story straight. It’s become customary, in speaking of that film, to chalk up this directness to the source material–Munro is, after all, known for her frankness, and apart from the expansion of Olympia Dukakis’s character and a Hockey Night in Canada gag, Polley ported her narrative beats over more or less wholesale. But Munro has a certain nastiness, not least in her omniscient narrators’ cutting observations, that’s largely absent from Polley’s adaptation, which has particular sympathy for Gordon Pinsent’s reformed husband, who’s more of a forgetful cad in the short story. It’s a standard line to say that Munro reserves judgment, particularly towards her adulterers, but what of the ghoulishness of her characterization, in Lives of Girls and Women, of small-town scolds who say things like, “The law-yer, didn’t he think he was somebody?” Polley doesn’t get sufficient credit for translating what she can of that prickliness–which also runs through “Bear”–and molding the rest into something unabashedly romantic.

Your Sister’s Sister (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

November 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mark Duplass, Mike Birbiglia
written and directed by Lynn Shelton

by Angelo Muredda Lynn Shelton tends to swim in the deep end of the mumblecore pool. More improvisatory than the scripted films of the Duplass brothers (despite their overlap in casting), her work, in an odd sort of way, is probably closer in spirit to Joe Swanberg's. Swanberg's shabbier DIY aesthetic masks the heady nature of his projects, which explore the same three or four ideas about modern relationships in forms as disparate as the anthology film (Autoerotic) and the meta-slasher (Silver Bullets). In Humpday, Shelton nicely marries her own high concept–to make a movie about hetero male insecurity writ large–with a pair of naturalistic performances that elude Swanberg's scratchier efforts. Her M.O. appears to be to let her actors fumble through a convoluted situation that, on the strength of their characterizations, never feels as unnatural as it probably should.

The Horse Whisperer (1998) – Blu-ray Disc

October 14, 2012****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, Scarlett Johansson

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D+
starring Robert Redford, Kristin Scott Thomas, Sam Neill, Scarlett Johansson
screenplay by Eric Roth and Richard LaGravenese, based on the novel by Nicholas Evans
directed by Robert Redford

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Revisiting Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer fourteen years after I last saw it, I am relieved to encounter a film that isn’t simply marking time until a climactic moment that was for me a cherished eureka at the movies. The picture begins with Grace (13-year-old Scarlett Johansson) rising at the crack of dawn to go horseback riding with her friend Judith (Kate Bosworth, billed as “Catherine”). Redford focuses on Johansson’s socked feet slinking past her parents’ bedroom door, and subsequently draws a lot of attention to legs and feet here–not in a fetish-y way, but as if they’re a person’s “tell.” I misremembered this scene, for what it’s worth, as Grace doing something wrong by sneaking out, but in fact her parents are not at all surprised to find her gone by the time they’re up and around. Mom (Kristin Scott Thomas) is basically Anna Wintour–her name’s even Annie–and Dad, Robert (Sam Neill), is, we infer, the kind of lawyer who does a lot of pro bono work.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952) – Blu-ray Disc

October 9, 2012****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Cyd Charisse
screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
directed by Stanley Donen

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer Not just the best Gene Kelly film, and not just the best movie musical
ever made, Singin' in the Rain is a genuine national treasure–a single
text proving for posterity what a wondrous thing the Hollywood studio system
could be when it was firing on all cylinders. It's the quintessential studio
picture and smart as hell about its own nature. Unpretentious and unabashedly
entertaining, it's a self-reflexive product of the same filmmaking process
it simultaneously documents and lampoons.

Cinderella (1950) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

October 2, 20121950s, 2012, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, Family, Romance

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

by Bill Chambers Despite its streamlining of the particulars, Walt Disney’s feature-length Cinderella ultimately takes fewer liberties with the source material (chiefly, Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella, or The Glass Slipper”) than almost any of his other animated fairytales. Consequently, there remains the problem of a heroine who’d still be sweeping the floors were it not for her Fairy Godmother, the deus ex machina to end deus ex machinas. The Cinderella myth, as Perrault interpreted it, is at best anachronistic–we learn that beauty is a virtue but that grace is a gift…whatever that means. Disney’s contemporization turns it into a karma fable of sorts, with martyrdom paying off like a jackpot and the comeuppance of Cinderella’s tormentors the real happily-ever-after of the piece. Cinderella’s a less-than-ideal role model for the millions exposed to the movie in childhood, really, because she accepts victimhood until external forces intervene on her behalf.

TIFF ’12: Imogene

September 21, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

a.k.a. Girl Most Likely
**/****
directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini

by Bill Chambers The Wizard of Oz is the paradigm for Kristen Wiig's first starring vehicle since Bridesmaids–though for the sake of managing expectations, it's probably better to think of Imogene as Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's follow-up to their dire HBO flick Cinema Vérité. The movie opens with the title character as a child playing the lead in an unlikely school production of The Wizard of Oz and lodging the precocious complaint that Dorothy's desire to return to drab Kansas is irrational. Many years later, Imogene is an aspiring/failed playwright in the Laura Linney-in-The Savages mold reduced to staging a suicide tableau in a last-ditch effort to win back her ex-boyfriend (Brian Petsos). The frenemy (June Diane Raphael, who's in every goddamn movie like this) who finds her instead calls 9-1-1, and Imogene, thanks to the intervention of the Sitcom Fairy, is forced to serve out her mandatory psych stay at home–specifically, her childhood home in Atlantic City, where her man-child brother Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald) still lives with their gambling-addict mother (Annette Bening), mom's weird boyfriend (Matt Dillon), and Lee (Darren Criss), the young boarder who moved into Imogene's old room.

TIFF ’12: Silver Linings Playbook

September 18, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Robert De Niro, Romance, TIFF

***/****
directed by David O. Russell

by Angelo Muredda Awards season does strange things to American filmmakers in search of gold hardware. Last year, Alexander Payne delivered his James L. Brooks movie in The Descendants, toning down his tartness for a family drama both more palatable and significantly shoddier than usual. There's a comparable transformation in the cards this year for David O. Russell, who showed signs of mellowing with 2010's The Fighter but was still miles from the Cameron Crowe job he's now pulled off, to surprisingly strong effect, with Silver Linings Playbook, a Jerry Maguire for manic depressives.

TIFF ’12: To the Wonder

September 12, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**/****
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Angelo Muredda For a long time, it seemed like Terrence Malick would vanish altogether before he made a serious misstep, but for better or worse, he's now delivered To the Wonder, the bum note that forces you to warily retrace a major artist's career. A muted greatest-hits compilation of Malick's oeuvre, To the Wonder borrows whole apostrophized lines to God from The Tree of Life, nicks The Thin Red Line's trick of meting out disembodied humanist voiceovers across the cast (including an underused Javier Bardem), and re-stages Pocahontas's carefree romp through the palace gardens in The New World via a young girl's joyous dance through the aisles of a supermarket. It's all here, in a manner of speaking, but as the little girl tells her mother at one point, "There's something missing."

Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) [15th Anniversary Edition] + High Fidelity (2000) – Blu-ray Discs

August 26, 20121990s, 2000s, 2012, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Music, Romance, Thriller, UK

Grossepointe2

GROSSE POINTE BLANK
***½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras D
starring John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Alan Arkin, Dan Aykroyd
screenplay by Tom Jankiewicz and D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & John Cusack
directed by George Armitage

HIGH FIDELITY
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring John Cusack, Jack Black, Lisa Bonet, Joelle Carter
screenplay by D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & John Cusack and Scott Rosenberg, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Stephen Frears

by Jefferson Robbins John Cusack spent much of the 1990s stubbornly trying to dodge his high-school reunion. Barely present in Sixteen Candles, he nevertheless may have suffered a bit of the curse that pursued John Hughes’s other players: We wouldn’t let them grow up for quite a while, and careers were hampered. Cusack navigated this impasse better than most, netting late-’80s leads both romantic (Say Anything…) and dramatic (The Grifters) that unpack and showcase his mature dimensions. Cusack has, if it’s not too oxymoronic, a vulnerable edge–his characters are deeply attuned to others, but only out of self-defense. Lloyd Dobler, Roy Dillon, and, in the two films under discussion, Martin Blank and Rob Gordon constantly assess input to learn how the prevailing emotional currents of a scene affect them, not others. “You think I’m a dick,” Lloyd determines when Diane (Ione Skye) gives him a Pen of Friendship as a parting gift. His feelings, dependent on hers, are paramount. Cusack’s heroes are sensitive but far from selfless, yet the actor somehow convinces us otherwise.