Marvel’s The Avengers (2012)

Posted in2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero

Avengers

The Avengers
**½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Joss Whedon
directed by Joss Whedon

by Walter Chaw Joss Whedon delivers his definitive artistic statement with the completely inoffensive, agreeably stupid Marvel’s The Avengers. It’s a giant, loud, sloppy kiss planted right on the forehead of a fanboy contingent that will somehow find jealous dork solidarity in the largest product excreted this year by a Hollywood machinery that’s the playground now of Whedons and Apatows and Farrellys, where it used to be the domain of John Fords and Sam Peckinpahs and Von Sternbergs. Not a full-grown man among them, they’re drunk on power and nerd cred, making references to their references and amazed that someone like Scarlett Johansson returns their calls (or that they could be married to someone like Leslie Mann in a world not gone mad). The Avengers is a brilliant balance of indecipherable against crowd-pleasing, with bouncy fight scenes, one-liners as character development, and the absolute confidence that everyone in the audience has on purpose seen each of the films designed as a prequel to this one. As the pendulum swings back to pleasuring 18-year-old boys vs. 16-year-old girls (despite Titanic in 3D‘s attempts at swinging it back), take heart that if, at the end, it only reminds of the loudest, most expensive team-up episode of “Shazam!”, it at least has the sense to deliver the best Hulk moments…ever.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012) + Lockout (2012)

Posted in2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS
*/****
starring Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz
screenplay by Joss Whedon & Drew Goddard
directed by Drew Goddard

LOCKOUT
**/****
starring Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace, Vincent Regan, Peter Stormare
screenplay by Stephen Saint Leger, James Mather & Luc Besson
directed by Saint & Mather

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Drew Goddard’s (and Joss Whedon’s, you won’t be able to forget) unfortunate giant middle finger The Cabin in the Woods takes a shit-eating high-concept only to do nothing interesting with it for about 80 of its 100 minutes. Because the high concept is the crux of the film and the elbow of the argument, as they say, stop right here if you want to stay a spoiler virgin. For me, I went in not knowing anything about the movie–didn’t even see the trailer–on the back of assurances from many respected friends and colleagues that this was, in fact, a must-see for the genre fan. What I should have asked was, “What genre?” The Cabin in the Woods is Scream for what Joe Bob Briggs used to call “Spam in a cabin” flicks, in which a group of nubile youngsters piles into an unreliable junker to spend a fateful weekend in some backwoods hick oasis where they’re picked off, one by one, by some combination of demons and Ted Nugent. The difference being that Scream was cold, nihilistic, scary as hell, and a lovely example of the thing it was simultaneously deconstructing. The reason The Cabin in the Woods is neither revolutionary nor “ground-breaking” is that everything it does has already been done, repeatedly and better, and that rather than serving as a sterling example of that which it is trying to pinion (thus establishing its credibility as satire, see?), it’s really just another instalment in the live-action Scooby-Doo franchise.

The Hunger Games (2012)

Posted in2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Gary Ross and Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray, based on the novel by Collins
directed by Gary Ross

by Walter Chaw Now that the United States has remade Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, it’s fair to wonder when it’ll tackle Ichi the Killer or Tetsuo, the Iron Man. It’s all part of a greater conversation around what it is that made the U.S. more sympathetic to Japan after 9/11, whereas before, films like Fukasaku’s grim little sociological masterpiece were seen as contraband in America. Marinating in social superiority only gets you so far, I guess, until the detonation of a WMD over a civilian population suddenly redraws the lines and changes your worldview. It’s no accident that Suzanne Collins’s series of tween dystopia books is wildly popular in this post-millennial zeitgeist–no accident, either, come to think of it, that the “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” books, featuring brutal rape and unforgivable fantasy vigilantism (and a fetching girl-hero, it bears mentioning), were the rage of blueblood, blue-haired reading circles: grandma in the Times Square grindhouse circa 1974. What’s genuinely frightening about the wide, middlebrow acceptance of such traditionally deviant fare is that it’s a glimpse into what happens when a country founded by Puritans suddenly has its apocalyptic paranoia and hardwired xenophobia briefly confirmed. If you’re a Republican with a moral barometer in these, our United States of America in 2012, take a good, hard look at what’s happened to your party and tell me that I’m wrong. It takes a hell of a lot of crazy to make Margaret Atwood seem prophetic–to make Mel Gibson trend towards the middle.

Chronicle (2012)

Posted in2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Teen, Theatrical

***/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan, Michael Kelly
screenplay by Max Landis
directed by Josh Trank

by Walter Chaw Josh Trank and Max Landis’s Chronicle is so good for so many extended stretches that its flaws are all the more frustrating. It’s too smart for its own good, presenting a superhero origin story without allowing any of its characters to ever once even whisper the word (a lot like “The Walking Dead” making everyone look like assholes by avoiding the term “zombie”) and spending too much time letting its teen titans drop names like Schopenhauer before making it clear that the character who most embraces the philosopher’s theories of aesthetics and self-abnegation ultimately takes up the mantle of one of Schopenhauer’s offshoots, Nietzsche. Boring, I know. And not smart enough, as meta-introspection goes, to bridge the gaps in Chronicle, like a badly under-developed “hero” and an equally under-developed “villain,” their relationship to each other, and, at the end, an emotional coda that feels unearned and tacked-on. Compare Chronicle to what history is vetting out as the only good M. Night Shyamalan flick, Unbreakable: it’s missing that film’s sense of awe, sense of (what has come clear as exceedingly rare in Shyamalan’s pursuits) respect for what the hero mythology of comics means, and has always meant, to 98lb. weaklings indulging a fantasy of largesse and empowerment and thus primed to order the Charles Atlas Workout off the ads on the back page.

The Rocketeer (1991) [20th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

The Rocketeer (1991) [20th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Brazil, Canada, Disney, Espionage, Family, Sci-Fi, Superhero

***½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Bill Campbell, Alan Arkin, Jennifer Connelly, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Danny Bilson & Paul De Meo, based on the graphic novel by Dave Stevens
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw Joe Johnston’s rousing Art Deco audition for Captain America, The Rocketeer is, twenty years on, as crisp and clean as laundry-line linen. It has a beautiful hero, his beautiful girl, and Alan Arkin as the crotchety old Q/Whistler/Lucius Fox to guarantee that no matter what our hero does to his gadgets, there’ll always be more and better ones to take their place. The villain is modelled on Errol Flynn and works for the Nazis, and you don’t have to squint very hard to figure out that a good portion of the picture’s stickiness and cult accretion has to do with the idea that its 1938 setting allows for a measure of movie-history geekery. A sequence on a film set as bad guy Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton, chewing scenery like a champ) shoots a period swashbuckler is subversive not only for the way that it reflects the vehicle in which it finds itself but also for suggesting that the Golden Age of Hollywood was, as we suspected all along, rife with miscreants and foreign agents. It allows for a greater connection to our working-class heroes, as well as the comparison the movie makes now again of The Rocketeer to Chuck Yeager. And at its best, it allows The Rocketeer to feel exactly like the best kind of aw-shucks patriotism: spic-and-span and “you got a stick of Beeman’s?” and based on a love of our ideals instead of a hatred of an Other.

Justice League: Doom (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Justice League: Doom (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2012, Action, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
screenplay by Dwayne McDuffie, based on “Justice League: Tower of Babel” by Mark Waid
directed by Lauren Montgomery

by Jefferson Robbins I’ve figured out what Warner Premiere’s DC Universe features need: music-only audio tracks. At least, as long as Christopher Drake stays on as in-house composer. His scores, from All-Star Superman to Batman: Year One to the new Justice League: Doom, are varied, adventurous, and attuned to character in a way that puts, say, Michael Giacchino to shame. His music has the same evocative power as the fables from which it springs, and at times it outclasses the direct-to-video animation it adorns. I’m not sure Drake could do “sprightly and happy,” but as long as he’s scoring the DCU projects, he won’t get the chance. The non-sequential movies, overseen by long-time producer Bruce Timm, take their cues from DC Comics’ big-screen live-action entries like Superman Returns and The Dark Knight. Punch, mope, punch some more, mope, punch really hard… Both the aforementioned theatrical fare and the DCU cartoons are firmly in PG to PG-13 territory, because why would any little kid want to watch a Batman movie, right? Right, guys…?

Attack the Block (2011) + Super 8 (2011)|Super 8 – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Attack the Block (2011) + Super 8 (2011)|Super 8 – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, France, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

ATTACK THE BLOCK
***/****
starring Jodie Whittaker, John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh
written and directed by Joe Cornish

SUPER 8
***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso
written and directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw Joe Cornish’s low-budget creature-feature Attack the Block is a charmer, a delight, the kind of rare film–like Jack Sholder’s The Hidden, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, or Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile–that devotees will latch onto, and for good reason, with the fervour afforded genuine cult classics. It has energy to burn, a strange affinity with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and a super-cool monster that looks like a cross between Ira from the “Moonshadow” comic and a grizzly bear. That most of it was carried off with practical effects is a shot in the arm for practical effects and a bearer of the nostalgia banner that seems to be popular lately, what with our dreams and memories fodder again for the celluloid couch. Better still, it introduces a new star into the future pantheon in John Boyega, who has charisma to burn as gang leader-cum-saviour Moses. The movie’s tale of a group of street toughs has drawn comparisons to The Warriors, but I think the better analogy is Spielberg’s E.T., not just in that alchemy between the fantastic and the absolutely mundane (South England’s Lambeth neighbourhood), but also in the crafting of a living youth subculture alive with its own language, ritual, and custom. It’s not too much to say that, at its best, Attack the Block makes you feel the way you did when the guys took things into their own hands to deliver the flying, omniscient, omnipotent E.T. to his landing site. It taps into the irrational cool. Which doesn’t happen very often.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Chris Evans, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw Given the opportunity to finally do the sequel to his The Rocketeer that I’ve sort of been hoping to see for the last twenty years, Joe Johnston comes through with flying colours. The absolutely, unapologetically cornpone Captain America: The First Avenger achieves exactly the right tone of Greatest Generation wartime propaganda without any winking post-modern irony to befoul the stew. It’s an earnest, genuine underdog story about a wimpy kid, Steve (Chris Evans, digitally reduced), who’s beaten up for defending the sanctity of the movie theatre before finally, on his sixth try, being accepted into the army under the kind auspices of mad scientist Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci). Erskine sees an essential goodness in Steve, a decency born from the Great War heroism of his long-gone parents, it’s suggested (in high-Fifties style), while crusty Col. Philips (Tommy Lee Jones) is persuaded by this twerp’s willingness to dive on a grenade to save a platoon made up of the type of men who spent their childhood tormenting guys like Steve. Asked if he wants to kill Nazis, Steve replies that he doesn’t want to kill anyone–he simply hates bullies. Steve, see, is an idealist. And any film that paints America’s bedrock idealism as heroic is not just the right kind of patriotic (the kind that doesn’t demean other cultures) and the right shade of nostalgia (i.e., in love with the essential purity of the hope behind the foundation of our country)–it’s more than okay by me, too.

The Bad Seed (1956) – DVD + Village of the Damned/Children of the Damned [Horror Double Feature] – DVD|The Bad Seed (1956) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1950s, 1960s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

THE BAD SEED
*½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image C+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Patty McCormack, Henry Jones, Eileen Heckart, Evelyn Varden
screenplay by John Lee Martin, based on the play by Maxwell Anderson and the novel by William March
directed by Mervyn LeRoy

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gwynn
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, George Barclay, based on The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
directed by Wolf Rilla

CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1963)
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Ian Hendry, Alan Badel, Barbara Ferris, Alfred Burke
screenplay by John Briley
directed by Anton M. Leader

by Walter Chaw It’s pretty common nowadays to look at the horror films of the 1950s as Cold War/McCarthy-era relics: allegories for a world torn between the antiseptic image of television’s Golden Age and the seething undertow of a society slipping into the madness of the JFK/Medgar Evers assassinations, the 16th Street Baptist Church, the Freedom Summer Killings, the transition from the Korean War to Vietnam, and on and on and on until any pretense of innocence, in art and society, became tainted by irony. It was thought that 9/11 was an event horrific enough to end our gilded age of snark, but ironically is almost the only way that we view tragedy and institutional corruption. Though paranoia might have been planted in the duck-and-cover drills of the Fifties, in the suspicion and fear of returning WWII vets confronting a different world and haunted by demons, it didn’t find full flower until the Rorschach coolness of the 1960s and the mean cinema of the 1970s.

The Thing (2011)

Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Ulrich Thomsen
screenplay by Eric Heisserer
directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.

by Walter Chaw Just talking time, I’ve been waiting for this prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing almost twice as long as I waited for Episode I, and if the disappointment seems inversely proportional to the duration of the anticipation, chalk it up to me probably being too old to be duped like that again. (There’s also the thought that Episode I killed anticipation for my entire generation.) To be fair, this Thing prequel (hereafter The Thing-quel), which imagines the happenings at the Norwegian camp prior to the titular alien finding Wilford Brimley and Kurt Russell’s beard, isn’t nearly as boring and/or offensive as a senate debate, a naval blockade enacted by space-Japs, and a hike in the desert surrounded by evil Jews and Arabs in the company of a Jamaican Stepin Fetchit. No, the only thing Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s (son of Matthijs van Heijningen, the IMDb helpfully informs) The Thing-quel does is mill around tepidly while demonstrating that Rob Bottin’s seriously fucked-up creature effects from the original lose their soul when squeezed through the mainframe of a giant computer. What truly depressed me, though, were the sheer number of people at the public screening I attended with no awareness of the 1982 film, who were thus breathless with anticipation that the closing credits–which set up the opening of the Carpenter flick–were setting up some kind of remake-cum-sequel. As experiences go, it’s somewhere south of getting kicked square in the sack.

Real Steel (2011)

Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, India, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Sports, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo, Evangeline Lilly, Anthony Mackie
screenplay by John Gatins
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw There’s really no excuse for Real Steel, a Frankenstein contraption made up of spare parts from middle-American fairytales like Field of Dreams and underdog sports intrigues starting with Rocky, I guess, and building all the way through to junk like The Rookie and any number of films just like it that appear with what seems like annual reliability. Set a few years from now, in a world where for some reason people have decided they love to watch giant robots fight each other in place of good ol’ primate bloodsport, it has going for it the most bucolic vision of the future since “The Jetsons”. Indeed, there are so many gorgeous shots of waving wheat and bilious white clouds that it’s fair to wonder if Ridley Scott directed it. Alas, Shawn Levy, the genius behind Night at the Museum, The Pink Panther, and Cheaper by the Dozen directed this cynical piece of bathetic crap and his sticky, syrup-coated paws are all over it, from the movie’s flat, unimaginative staging to its absolute inability to be non-didactic in its presentation. (The biggest surprise? That there isn’t a flatulent dog around for cheap reaction shots.) Already legendary for how quickly its trailers revealed it to be possibly the worst idea since Buck Henry pitched “The Graduate, Part 2” at the beginning of The Player, Real Steel–the condescension starts with the quasi-inspirational dual-meaning of its title–swiftly becomes legendary in its own right for somehow being exactly as bad as you thought it was going to be.

Green Lantern: Emerald Knights (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
Emerald Knights
screenplay by Alan Burnett and Todd Casey
directed by Lauren Montgomery
The First Lantern
screenplay by Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim
directed by Christopher Berkeley
Kilowog
screenplay by Peter J. Tomasi, based on “New Blood” by Peter J. Tomasi and Chris Samnee
directed by Lauren Montgomery
Mogo Doesn’t Socialize
screenplay by Dave Gibbons, based on the story by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
directed by Jay Oliva
Laira
screenplay by Eddie Berganza, based on “What Price Honor?” by Ruben Diaz and Travis Charest
directed by Jay Oliva
Abin Sur
screenplay by Geoff Johns, based on “Tyger” by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
directed by Christopher Berkeley

by Jefferson Robbins The DC Universe direct-to-video animation series continues to earn its reputation, for good or ill, as a by-fans/for-fans endeavour. Producer Bruce Timm and company pump out Green Lantern: Emerald Knights as a kind of B-side to Martin Campbell’s disappointing Green Lantern feature film–a supporting document, the sort of thing valued mostly by collectors and fetishists. DC Comics fanboys will thrill to a flashback glimpse of planetary invasions carried out by back-issue bad-guy species the Dominators; casual viewers will likely just think it’s cool how the guys with the rings blow shit up with giant green energy swords in outer space.

Mars Needs Moms (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD

Mars Needs Moms (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD

Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Simon Wells & Wendy Wells, based on the book by Berkeley Breathed
directed by Simon Wells

by Angelo Muredda It’s hard to say who Mars Needs Moms was made for. An expensive but passionless special-effects exercise from yeoman director and co-screenwriter Simon Wells (The Time Machine) and producer Robert Zemeckis, who’s put all his creative eggs since The Polar Express in the motion-capture basket, Mars Needs Moms sits uneasily with compatriots like The Pagemaster in the no man’s land of children’s films too dreary for most children to sit through. If it’s too taxing a journey for kids, though, it’s largely a bore for anyone else–a flat 80 minutes of animated bodies tumbling through metallic space chutes and neon hallways ripped from Tron: Legacy, scarcely made watchable by some of its impressive technological feats and by its surprisingly subdued tone, which at times borders on the elegiac.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring James Franco, Freida Pinto, John Lithgow, Andy Serkis
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver
directed by Rupert Wyatt

by Walter Chaw Perverse, terrifying, hilarious in exactly the right way; smart enough, emotional enough, and at the end uniquely satisfying in any number of hard-to-quantify ways, Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes (hereafter Rise) overcomes even James Franco–here miscast as a human–to produce something of a minor masterpiece. A prequel to the classic series’ prequels-as-sequels, it follows the ascendancy of chimp Caesar (Andy Serkis, typecast in motion capture) as he’s genetically engineered to be intelligent through an accident of birth, only to grow progressively more so in time with the devolution of adoptive human grandfather Charles (John Lithgow), who’s ravaged by the Alzheimer’s disease that the drug that makes Caesar smart was meant to cure. So while there’s a decided “Flowers for Algernon” effect of the stuff on humans, in ape-kind it just sort of escalates geometrically, thus presenting Rise as kindred in spirit to J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek reboot: problem-solving at the same pace it’s delivering exceptional character moments and well-timed action sequences. Like Star Trek, too, incidentally, it’s a wonderful surprise.

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, India, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

½*/****
starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell
screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw Let’s be clear: if there were a Hippocratic oath for movies, and there should be, it would be “first, do not suck.” It’s not about any desire for depth in something called Cowboys & Aliens, but rather the hope that the movie achieves some kind of baseline competence without, along the way, tripping off issues it doesn’t have the muscle to address and therefore shouldn’t also try to ride to an illusion of depth. It’s the difference between Brett Ratner using the Holocaust as a plot point in X-Men: The Last Stand and Matthew Vaughn doing the same in X-Men: First Class; I mean, talk about it or not, but if you bring it up, have something to say. So when Cowboys & Aliens director Jon Favreau casts Adam Beach as the adopted–and hated–black-headed stepchild of racist cattle baron Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford, gruffing it up in a role named after the serial killer in Red Dragon), he needs to do better than offer up a noble Redskin who, with his last martyred breath, all but invites his would-be dad to go be white with his real boy, Dolarhyde’s psychotic son Percy (Paul Dano). It’s the message of the film, sort of, where no message was necessary or even welcome–this transformation of Dolarhyde from a rawhide-chewing bastard into a dewy-eyed, dyed-in-the-wool liberal who lowers himself to rescue the chief savage (Raoul Trujillo) after taking a second to complain about the disconnectedness of Yankee leadership in the Union army. It’s enough to root for the South to rise again.

The Thing (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: John Carpenter, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi

John Carpenter’s The Thing
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, T.K. Carter, David Clennon
screenplay by Bill Lancaster, based on the story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr.
directed by John Carpenter

FFC Must-Ownby Walter Chaw I remember the sick fascination I felt staring at the cardboard standee for John Carpenter’s The Thing (hereafter The Thing) in the lobby of the now-flattened two-house cinema where I had gone to see E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial that dewy summer of my ninth year. It was opening weekend for the Carpenter flick, but the line around the building was for the second week of Spielberg’s very own My Friend Flicka, and I was one of the millions of children guilty of flocking away from a movie that promised to make you feel like shit in favour of one that promised to make you cry. I would be afraid to see The Thing and the same year’s Blade Runner until at least five years down the road when, during a particularly bad flu, I asked my mom to rent them both from a local video store (also gone–the city of my mind is ever more populous now, year-on-year), figuring that in my fever haze I would be insulated from the horrors that had grown around them in my head. Besides, as a wizened vet of 14, I had survived The Fly, Aliens, RoboCop, and Hellbound: Hellraiser II at the Union Square 6 (also gone), so what horrors could these musty relics hold for me?

Plenty.

Cars 2 (2011)

Posted in2011, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Disney, Family, Japan, Pixar, Sci-Fi, Sports, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Ben Queen
directed by John Lasseter

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Trading the ’50s Americana of the original for ’60s British adventure, Cars 2 seems, for a moment there, like it might actually work. The inhumanity that Walter Chaw correctly attributed to Cars scores a few subversive points in this sequel, filled as it is with complicated stunts that are, amusingly, impossible for automobiles to perform. (Even sillier: all of the anthropomorphic spy cars are retrofitted with Gatling guns and assault rifles.) But all is lost as tow-truck hick Mater (voice of Larry the Cable Guy) takes centre-stage in a convoluted espionage scheme, meaning that Cars 2 stoops to the same mistaken-identity spy parody that children’s movies have beaten into the ground since 1966’s The Man Called Flintstone. The subversion runs completely dry after the pre-title sequence, as our resident Connery (?) Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) jumps and shoots his way across oil derricks, only to hand over the reins to the blander heroes of the previous film. So the same old car jokes prevail as Pixar keeps shovelling coal onto a dead fire. Find one more extraneous character in Finn’s liaison Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer), whose primary function is to prove that Bondian double entendres don’t have much impact when everyone’s name is a double entendre.

Soylent Green (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D+
starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Edward G. Robinson
screenplay by Stanley R. Greenberg, based on the novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
directed by Richard Fleischer

by Walter Chaw I’ve spent a lot of time in my life dancing with Richard Fleischer’s dystopian Soylent Green. Sometimes it leads, sometimes I do. For everything it does well, there are some things it does badly; and if the things it does well it does extremely well, the things it does badly it, likewise, does just awfully. No half-measures here. Beginning with the good, here’s Edward G. Robinson tapping his mortality (he succumbed to cancer less than two weeks after production wrapped), finding in his celluloid swan song a depth of despair he rarely touched in his career proper. It’s up there with Montgomery Clift’s devastated cameo in Judgment at Nuremberg–enough so that when he closes his eyes in appreciation of a leaf of lettuce his long-time companion Det. Thorn (Charlton Heston) has scavenged from the apartment of dead industrialist Simonson (Joseph Cotten, in his last role, too), it actually doesn’t make you want to laugh. Not so the incongruities of this dystopian, post-apocalyptic future in a Manhattan (and world) destroyed by over-population, but not to the point where the streets don’t empty in observance of a curfew. It presents a future in 2022 that seems unlikely not because we’re not currently on the verge of some great ecological disaster, but because rough math suggests that the Heston character would’ve been born the year before the film’s 1973 release and thus his declaration that he’d never seen a grapefruit (or grass, or cows) should worm its way into the audience consciousness as Soylent Green‘s statement that it’s not serious, thoughtful science-fiction, but rather soapbox and screed timed to coincide with, in 1972, the first international conference on climate change.

Green Lantern (2011)

Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Greg Berlanti & Michael Green & Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg
directed by Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw Martin Campbell’s Green Lantern is just awful. It’s a mess, a boring mess, featuring boring Ryan Reynolds in a skin-tight green super suit (and not-boring Blake Lively, not) trying to “grow up” and accept the responsibility of becoming an intergalactic Dudley Do-Right–a titular “Green Lantern,” which in the DC UNIVERSE parlance apparently means that you say crap about will being stronger than fear and manifest a giant Matchbox race set as the best way to save a crashing helicopter. Cool? Cool if your concept of cool is The Last Starfighter as written by Tony Robbins. There’s just so much empowerment going on in this thing, and unresolved daddy issues that are raised without any clue as to how to parallel the dysfunction in the characters or honour what is fast turning out to be this year’s driving thematic force. It’s no wonder, really, that the bad guy in this one is a giant mess of cosmic goo called “Parallax”: the picture jumps around from one point-of-view to another with no sense to bridge the turbid gulfs between them. Worse, Green Lantern‘s threat to go the ambiguous, Dark Knight, fight-fear-with-fear route fails to materialize in the loudest possible way with an unintentionally-hilarious nonsense soliloquy delivered before a council of detached Kuato. I didn’t think I’d see a movie this bad before Transformers: Euphemism for Asshole docks next month.

Trollhunter (2010)

Posted in2010, 2011, Authors: Jon Thibault, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Norway, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Troll Hunter
Trolljegeren
*/****
starring Otto Jespersen, Glenn Erland, Johanna Mørck, Tomas Alf Larsen
written and directed by André Øvredal

by Jon Thibault According to WIKIPEDIA, the “found-footage” genre was invented with 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust, but it didn’t pick up steam until 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, which gained notoriety owing to its miniscule budget and profound, lasting creepiness. In the language of film, handheld, sloppy camerawork is associated with documentaries, making its use in horror particularly effective. Cannibal Holocaust is still considered a gore classic, and 2003’s direct-to-DVD August Underground’s Mordum is the most disturbing movie ever made, suspending the disbelief of the most sophisticated moviegoer with its potent coupling of brilliant special effects and the shittiest production values imaginable. But only Blair Witch‘s perfect storm of lo-res video, unscripted dialogue, and egregious camerawork won a massive audience, landing directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez on the cover of TIME and setting the standard to which everything remotely similar has been compared. It took almost ten years before audiences had forgotten enough about Blair Witch to be scared shitless by Paranormal Activity.