Romance Archives - Page 9 of 46 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

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

June 4, 20132013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Romance, Teen, Zombie

**/**** 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, 2013****/****, 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

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, 20132013, 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

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, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Theatrical

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

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.

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

April 10, 20132000s, 2010, 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, 2010, 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 are 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

Postmanalways1

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

by Jefferson Robbins There’s a series of doublings in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Lana Turner’s best-known vehicle, that illuminates 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

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, France, Hong Kong, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Inthemood8

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

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 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

Singinintheraincap

****/**** 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

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.