Inception (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Inception (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Christopher Nolan, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw I dunno, the wordiness of The Dark Knight didn’t bother me that much. I suppose it has something to do with it being a comic-book movie and plot-driving pronouncements seeming the order of the day. I find it impossible now to think of The Dark Knight without seeing it as a corollary to No Country For Old Men: the one composed of broad, garish strokes, the other of grace notes you hesitate to call delicate, but that’s just what they are. With Inception, Christopher Nolan’s correlative piece is Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, NY, and the comparison in this instance doesn’t prove mutually evocative so much as devastating to Nolan’s film, exposing his shtick as reams of deadening exposition interrupted by the occasional virtuoso set-piece. It is, in other words, aggressively nothing-special, save for a few astonishing zero-g sequences. As it happens, saying the best part of Inception is its weightlessness is a pretty pithy criticism of the whole damned enterprise. For a film about dreams, it’s distinctly light on possibility: Armed with the power to shape reality, our erstwhile dream-weavers fold a city in half in a dorm-room Escher shout-out but decline to, you know, fly and stuff. More, Inception doesn’t confront archetypes of any kind, instead retreating into some basic stuff about projections and the architecture of the unconscious being a freight elevator while relying overmuch on the built-in gravitas of father and dead-wife issues. And in case you miss any of that, Nolan crams it into the dialogue like one crams elephants into elevators. Rule of thumb: if a movie uses the word “deep” as much as this one does, it probably isn’t.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Hammer Horror – DVD

Posted in1950s, 1960s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Vampire

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

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

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

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

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

Mars Attacks! (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

Mars Attacks! (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Jack Nicholson, Satire, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A- Sound C
starring Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan
screenplay by Jonathan Gems
directed by Tim Burton

by Jefferson Robbins When Tim Burton calls in his Hollywood chips, it’s usually, to our benefit, to facilitate his darker impulses. 1989’s Batman gave him free rein to make Edward Scissorhands, for instance, and Warner Bros. incubated the bitter confection of Sweeney Todd after raking in more traditional bucks on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I daresay one of those Burton Unbound documents is his A-list romp Mars Attacks!, which today gives off strange vibrations that echo forward as well as back. It’s a ’50s UFO-invasion flick farce, of course, based on a 1962 trading card set illustrated by, among others, comics great Wally Wood. It’s anarchic, unexpected (“Wha? Trading cards?” we all said at the time), and darkly funny. It plays in the massive footprint of the same year’s Independence Day, and in its more biting moments, it somehow speaks to the great collapses of the subsequent decade.

The Return of the Living Dead (1985) – DVD (2002) + Collector’s Edition DVD|Blu-ray + DVD

Posted in1980s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Satire, Sci-Fi, Zombie

***/****
’02 DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A
’07 DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Clu Gulager, James Karen, Don Calfa, Thom Mathews
written and directed by Dan O’Bannon

by Walter Chaw Sort of a cross between Dawn of the Dead and Valley Girl, Dan O’Bannon’s hysterical The Return of the Living Dead most resembles in the final analysis O’Bannon’s own cult favourite Dark Star, directed by John Carpenter. Both pictures exist in an insular environment, both skewer genre and societal mores, and both, oddly enough, have something of a political conscience. Positing that Night of the Living Dead was based on a true story and that the remnants of that zombie conflagration have been stored in barrels accidentally shipped to the Uneeda Medical Supply Company (where goofy stock manager Frank (a fabulous James Karen) carelessly starts the horror cycle), The Return of the Living Dead turns a satirical eye on Reagan’s hawkish heart, the sprung logic of Italian zombie movies, and John Hughes’s brat-pack films.

Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009) [Blu-ray + DVD] + The Fourth Kind (2009)

Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical Release, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

DISNEY’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
directed by Robert Zemeckis

THE FOURTH KIND
ZERO STARS/****
starring Milla Jovovich, Will Patton, Corey Johnson, Elias Koteas
written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi

by Ian Pugh If Robert Zemeckis hasn’t quite left the Uncanny Valley behind, at the very least, the heart missing from his latest effort–what seems like the trillionth retelling of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and the billionth animated one–correlates directly to its absence of personality, rather than to an absence of humanity. A backhanded compliment, to be sure, but the character designs finally resemble something closer to artistic interpretation than to a failed attempt at replicating human beings exactly as they are, with Marley (Gary Oldman) and Scrooge (Jim Carrey), for example, rendered almost expressionistically to evoke rotten apples and hunched skeletons. From that standpoint, the actors’ sudden bursts of acrobatic grace, no longer so incongruous, capture some of computer-animated cinema’s wonder, the kind at which Zemeckis has grasped since The Polar Express–a true example of bringing the impossible to life. The only problem is that Zemeckis’s own script isn’t worth more than a shrug, and the film relies too much on its visuals to carry the extra weight.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) – Blu-ray + DVD

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) – Blu-ray + DVD

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

FFC Must-Own****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by W.D. Richter, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
directed by Philip Kaufman

by Walter Chaw I’ve come to believe that Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not only better than Don Siegel’s honoured 1956 original but also one of the best films of the best era in filmmaking. Even in so deep a well as this New American Cinema of ours–one that has forgotten gems like Cockfighter, Fat City, Law and Disorder, Night Moves, and Electra Glide in Blue in there propping up films like Chinatown, The Godfather I/II, Apocalypse Now, Nashville, The Conversation, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and on and on, trailing into incandescent, brilliant eternity–this little work of absolute paranoid craftsmanship bears up under multiple viewings and close scrutiny and provides a succinct, prescient, terrifying précis of the decade before and the decade to come. What better analogy for the looming Reagan administration than pods stalking in lock-step, armed with arbitrary titles and senses of entitlement, steadfastly incapable of heeding the drumbeat of doom in the black jungles around us? It’s a film about the absolute horror of complete conformity and non-engagement, as well as a reintroduction to the McCarthy-ian ideal that the only thing to get terribly exercised about is the ferreting out and excoriation of differing values. Arriving as it does in 1978, at the tail end of the most creative period in American film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers offers up a warning against complacency in the immediate wake of Jaws and Star Wars, which sounded the death knell for the artistry of this period arm-in-arm with the dawning of some unknown, mass- consumed and marketed ethic.

Back to the Future: The Complete Trilogy – DVD|Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

Back to the Future: The Complete Trilogy – DVD|Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

Posted in****/****, 1980s, 1990s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Time Travel

FFC Must-OwnBACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)
****/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale
directed by Robert Zemeckis

BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II (1989)
**/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Thomas F. Wilson
screenplay by Bob Gale
directed by Robert Zemeckis

BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III (1990)
**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A- Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Mary Steenburgen, Thomas F. Wilson
screenplay by Bob Gale
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Bill Chambers GREAT SCOT! SPOILERS AHEAD! It’s finally here. As not only a mighty-big fan of Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future but also a completist (and therefore keen to collect Back to the Future‘s substandard sequels), I’ve anticipated the DVD release of Back to the Future: The Complete Trilogy (henceforth BTTF) since the format itself became a reality. Alas, the 3-disc set–from its unsexy blue-and-white cover layout to the cheap menus to a slipshod three-part documentary–is problematic. Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy as a clam that the films (remastered in effervescent 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfers–pan-and-scan sold separately–supervised by co-creator Bob Gale with Dolby Digital 5.1 remixes that beef up the re-entry effects especially) look and sound as good as they do and that, for the first time in home video’s history, each picture is now being seen as it appeared in theatres (more on that below). But as a BTTF enthusiast, almost every single piece of supplementary material had me arrogantly believing I could’ve done a better job.

THX 1138: The George Lucas Director’s Cut (1971/2004) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Don Pedro Colley, Maggie McOmie
screenplay by George Lucas and Walter Murch
directed by George Lucas

by Walter Chaw THX 1138 is the only film George Lucas ever wrote and directed that will and should be remembered as a mostly artistic triumph rather than a largely financial one (recalling that the best of his Star Wars films, The Empire Strikes Back, was neither written nor directed by Lucas). The fact that he’s now tampered with it in much the same manner as he’s tampered with his original Star Wars trilogy seems, then, an almost bigger crime against posterity, even if it makes a kind of ironic sense within the thematic framework of the film. THX 1138‘s preoccupations with dehumanization, an abhorrence of imperfection and humanity in favour of machine-tooled precision, and the corruption of human perception and emotions with mass-produced opiates find sympathy with this new stage of its own existence as a film that hasn’t been just restored, but enhanced, too, by CGI that serves the same basic function for the audience as the drugged milk does for the protagonists of A Clockwork Orange. When Lucas made THX 1138, he was the prole toiling (stealing from Aldous Huxley and N.I. Kostomorov is toil, yes?) in obscurity; when he retooled the thing and went to Telluride with a streaming digital feed of it thirty-three years later, he completed his transformation into the faceless machine-priest of the film, sanctifying his zombified acolytes as good pods and ladling upon them the questionable bounty of blessings by the state.

A Scanner Darkly (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

A Scanner Darkly (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2006, 2010, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder
screenplay by Richard Linklater, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick
directed by Richard Linklater

FFC Must-Ownby Walter Chaw Our reality has almost outstripped Philip K. Dick’s paranoid fantasies, and Richard Linklater’s grim A Scanner Darkly is the slipperiest take yet on the war between perception vs. reality in a year that knows United 93. Keanu Reeves, so often woefully miscast, is wonderfully imagined here as a guy in a “scramble suit”: his appearance constantly shifting in a kaleidoscope of mismatched parts–the uniform of future-narcs (seven years from now, announce the opening titles) sent undercover to ferret out the dopers and dealers of Substance D. It’s a hallucinogen that eventually causes a rift in the individual consciousness (the left hemisphere atrophies and the right tries to compensate) and Reeves’ Agent Fred is sent to find out where dealer Donna (Winona Ryder) is getting her shit. But the scramble suits seem mainly used to keep the vice squad’s identities from one another instead of their quarry, meaning that Fred goes underground as himself, Robert Arctor, in full grunge, inhabiting his once-cozy suburban nook with tweaked conspiracy theorists Ernie (Woody Harrelson) and Barris (Robert Downey Jr.). Meaning, too, that Fred is asked to spy on Arctor, and that Barris, in a pair of hilarious scenes, informs on Arctor to Arctor. It’s not the labyrinthine audacity of Dick’s delusions that so enthrals, but rather the mendacity of them. What’s complicated about A Scanner Darkly isn’t the compression of identity or the various plots to which its characters imagine themselves hero and victim, but the idea that reality conforms itself to belief–that because life has stopped making sense to you, life has stopped making sense, period.

TIFF 2010: Wrap It Up

Posted in2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Music, Mystery, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Superhero, Thriller, TIFF, TIFF 10, Time Travel

by Bill Chambers

  • The films are fading fast in the rearview for me (no reflection on them, necessarily), but before they become too vestigial I want to at least highlight the rest of what I saw at this year’s TIFF, starting with a movie called White Irish Drinkers (*/****). How I wound up catching this flick is fairly embarrassing: the director is “John Gray,” which I misread in my bleary, end-of-festival state as “James Gray.” I was severely late for the flick, so I don’t want to pummel it (or even officially rate it), but keen auteurist that I am, I figured out my mistake pretty quickly: James Gray just wouldn’t have a naked girl (the maddeningly familiar Leslie Murphy) run around a cemetery with “free spirit” music cued up on the soundtrack–he’s not a de facto film student anymore. Though it turns out that John Gray has an extensive TV-movie resume, having done everything from The Marla Hanson Story to the remake of Brian’s Song, this feels very much the work of a novice, not a little for its pretensions to be the next Mean Streets. Because Stephen Lang salvaged Public Enemies virtually single-handedly, I was hopeful when he turned up here, but his character may be even more one-note than the one he played in Avatar. As his put-upon wife, Karen Allen has seemingly recovered from the stupefying euphoria of getting to resurrect her iconic Marion in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Strangely, I missed said goofy grin, yet she makes the most of a thankless role that indirectly references her previous brush with this genre, Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers. The rest of the cast is made up of baby-faced thugs who have to be given black eyes at regular intervals in order to pass for tough. On a related note, I never could shake the feeling that this is exactly the sort of project Vinnie Chase would be hot for on “Entourage”.
Forbidden Planet (1956) [50th Anniversary Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Forbidden Planet (1956) [50th Anniversary Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1950s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller, ZERO STARS

FORBIDDEN PLANET
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens
screenplay by Cyril Hume
directed by Fred McLeod Wilcox

THE INVISIBLE BOY (1957)
ZERO STARS/****
Image B- Sound C+
starring Richard Eyer, Philip Abbott, Diane Brewster, Harold J. Stone
screenplay by Cyril Hume, based on the story by Edmund Cooper
directed by Herman Hoffman

by Walter Chaw Outrageously influential and utterly unlike its contemporaries, Fred Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet today suffers from prosaic pacing and long stretches where its groundbreaking special effects take centre-stage as the cast gapes in slack-jawed, dim-witted appreciation. I suppose it’s not altogether antithetical to the themes of the picture, one that finds its heroes pontificating on their primitiveness in the face of an awesome (and extinct) alien culture–but this open love of its own coolness ultimately represents Forbidden Planet‘s broadest, most negative impact. The worst of our mainstream spectaculars, after all, are buried under reaction shots as the characters who should be the least mesmerized by their surroundings are impelled to be audience surrogates. What still works about Forbidden Planet is its high-mindedness: those moments where mad scientist Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) declares that the knowledge gleaned from the new technologies he discovers by reverse-engineering a cache of alien artifacts will be jealously rationed by him alone. The dangerous idea that one entity would take on the moral and intellectual superiority to judge who should and should not be allowed to educate themselves was germane here in the middle of the Cold War and remains applicable to our current state of foreign affairs, where just the threat of knowledge acts simultaneously as a spur to aggression and as a deterrent for invasion. Considered by many to be the best of the ’50s science-fiction cycle, Forbidden Planet, at once Luddite and in love with the potential for technological expansion, is at least unique for its unabashed indulgence in its subtext–though mining subtext tends to have the obvious effect of leaving the subtext barren.

TIFF 2010: On “Womb”

Posted in2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hungary, Romance, Sci-Fi, TIFF, TIFF 10

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

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

Posted in2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, Sci-Fi, TIFF, TIFF 10, UK

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

Red Planet (2000) – Blu-ray Disc

Red Planet (2000) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras D
starring Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss, Tom Sizemore, Terence Stamp
screenplay by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin
directed by Antony Hoffman

by Walter Chaw Watching Val Kilmer pretend not to have enough oxygen is very much like watching Val Kilmer at any other time, but there’s something about him in a helmet that works for me. (Frankly, upon further consideration, the two states don’t seem all that unrelated.) South African director Antony Hoffman’s Red Planet, working from a clunky screenplay by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin, is, despite its obvious shortcomings, an interesting contribution to the end-of-the-millennium sweepstakes. Counting most specifically among its contemporaries films like The Matrix and Dark City (and the same year’s Pitch Black), it’s an eco-terror flick at heart, positing that in 2056, with the Earth polluted beyond salvation, the last chance for mankind’s survival is terraforming Mars using a biologically-engineered algae that for some reason hasn’t taken, necessitating an investigative mission by Capt. (not Dave) Bowman (Carrie-Anne Moss) and her small crew of scientists. It’s the set-up of course to everything from Aliens to Supernova, and originality isn’t the strong suit of what boils down to one of those emergency-beacon-is-really-a-trap movies. (At least until it suddenly becomes one of those walking-on-a-soundstage-I-mean-strange-planet-with-an-animal-sidekick movies.) What works about Red Planet–and works extremely well–is that it confronts its problems with a bracing, earnest, seemingly honest attempt at resolving those problems, even though the biggest one (“Hey, I thought you said there wasn’t life on this planet”) is resolved with, “Yeah, how ’bout that.”

Predators (2010)

Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical Release, Thriller

*/****
starring Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Laurence Fishburne
screenplay by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch
directed by Nimród Antal

by Walter Chaw It opens with a grab-bag of heavily-armed genre clichés–the world-weary man of action (Adrien Brody), the tough-talking Latina (Alice Braga), the mad-dog orange jump-suited killer (Walton Goggins), the Yakuza enforcer (Louis Ozawa Changchien), the Soviet (Oleg Taktarov), the savage (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), the nebbish (Topher Grace), and the wrong Mexican (Danny Trejo)–free-falling through a jungle canopy into bush that doesn’t make Cambodia look like Kansas so much as it makes Predators look like Avatar. They’re the game, see–the most dangerous game! And they’ve been dropped on an alien wildlife preserve for the express purpose of being hunted by a trio of the titular Predators. As if that weren’t enough, the film’s weak-ass script takes pains to establish that our “heroes” are also, vocationally, “predators.” Get it? It’s what passes for clever in a film that takes too long to get where we want it to go, diverting itself with one of those dumb nick-of-time animal-shooting sequences that didn’t thrill in Dances with Wolves and doesn’t thrill here (so they do it twice, why not), as well as an extended monologue delivered by a fish-eyed, paunchy Laurence Fishburne that, for all its kitsch pleasure, grinds the movie to a standstill. If it’s not going to be smart, it could at least have the decency to not also be boring.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 XVII – DVD

Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Television

Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B-
2.1 “The Crawling Eye” (1989), 5.15 “The Beatniks” (1992), 10.10 “The Final Sacrifice” (1998), 11.5 “Blood Waters of Dr. Z” (1999)

by Alex Jackson I know it’s loony, but I watched “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (or “MST3K”) mostly for the movies. Oh, I liked the jokes. There were some episodes I laughed so hard at I had to turn off the television because I couldn’t breathe. But I saw the riffing as a bonus, a way to make a good thing better. I didn’t really watch the show just because it was funny, and its ironic appreciation of “bad movies” didn’t strike me as all that different from the sincere appreciation I had for the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space as a child. In fact, I don’t think it’s all that different from the deeper appreciation I have for those movies today. Mocking them doesn’t necessarily detract from them. Their sensually visceral aspect always shines through. You can easily tell if something is any good, regardless of who is talking over it. Besides, there’s something amiably homey and relaxed about the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” approach. If you like a film, you should be able to enjoy it on your sofa. You should be able to converse about it in the moment. And you should even be able to laugh at it. If you can only love something with reverence, I’m not sure that’s love.

Despicable Me (2010)

Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Family, Sci-Fi, Theatrical Release

*½/****
screenplay by Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul
directed by Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud

by Ian Pugh It only takes a cursory glance at its cast of characters and the people embodying them to see the kind of trendy thinking that sank Despicable Me. The movie presents us with the headmistress of an orphanage clearly modeled after Edie McClurg–but rather than hire McClurg herself to voice the role, they got Kristen Wiig, who hits her one, monotonous note over and over again. The antagonist proper is a bespectacled, bowl-cut pervert in an orange jumpsuit–but rather than have Eddie Deezen play him in full-blown Mandark mode, they got Jason Segel to shout a couple of dick jokes to the rafters. Finally, in the centre ring is Steve Carell, performing with a bizarre accent lodged somewhere between Boris Badenov and Ivan Drago. While Carell does an admirable job for what he’s given, he’s a little too dry to be a successful voice actor–you can’t help but think that someone like Billy West or Tom Kenny would have done something truly great with the role.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Predator (1987) [Ultimate Hunter Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Predator (1987) [Ultimate Hunter Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mexico, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image C Sound A Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Bill Duke
screenplay by Jim Thomas & John Thomas
directed by John McTiernan

by Walter Chaw Appearing the same year as Stanley Kubrick’s great, enigmatic, dangerous Full Metal Jacket, the brilliant neo-noir of Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, John Hughes’s devastating Planes, Trains & Automobiles, and what many feel is the quintessential film of the 1980s, Wall Street, John McTiernan’s Predator is, in plain truth, one of the two real quintessential films of the decade, a distinction it shares with Back to the Future–pictures, both, that initially appear to toe the Reagan era’s line of worship at the altar of Eisenhower’s mythological Americana only to reveal that lost wars cannot, in fact, be re-fought and that the Good Old Days were always a little violent and randy. It’s a film, this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle all of oiled musculature and technological fetishism, of unusual kinetic power and intelligence, one that sets out to sate the popular audience’s hunger for such entertainments in the age of the modern blockbuster before leaving its hero battered, broken, frightened, alone. Its kinship is to movies from the period like Aliens and, yes, Rambo: First Blood Part II–films that understand that when Shane rode away at the end, he was probably just looking for a place to die.

Futuramarama

Futuramarama

Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Television, Time Travel

FUTURAMA: BENDER’S BIG SCORE (2007)
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
screenplay by Ken Keeler
directed by Dwayne Carey-Hill

FUTURAMA: THE BEAST WITH A BILLION BACKS (2008)
**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
screenplay by Eric Kaplan
directed by Peter Avanzino

FUTURAMA: BENDER’S GAME (2008)
*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
screenplay by Eric Horsted (parts one and two), Michael Rowe & Eric Kaplan (part three), David X. Cohen & Patric M. Verrone (part four)
directed by Dwayne Carey-Hill

FUTURAMA: INTO THE WILD GREEN YONDER (2009)
*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
screenplay by Ken Keeler
directed by Peter Avanzino

by Ian Pugh While Matt Groening with “The Simpsons” had an incalculable effect on how I perceived movies, television, and just about everything else in life, truth be told I probably love his “Futurama” more. What can I say other than that it came at the right time in my life–it was my “Star Trek”, my “Buffy”, my “Doctor Who”: the first sci-fi property to capture my heart, and the avatar into which I poured all my nerdy obsessions. I appreciated its ability to strike a perfect balance of comedy and characterization that legitimized its silliest scenarios. Who would have guessed that the search for a long-lost seven-leaf clover could turn into a touching tribute to brotherly love? Subplots often wore thin and jokes fell flat, but looking back, there isn’t a single half-hour in its initial 72-episode run that can be considered an outright failure. Unfortunately, the show never got a chance to shine, placed at a ridiculous timeslot on Fox–Sunday at 7 pm, where it was certain to be either pre-empted or overshadowed by Sunday Night Football (jocks vs. nerds!)–and thus doomed to an inevitably short life. The final episode of the fourth season promised that “Futurama” would “see you on some other channel,” but the initial salvation came from Fox’s home-entertainment division: The producers were offered the chance to do a direct-to-video movie, which was eventually negotiated up to four movies, made and released over a span of three years. Of course, the success of these paved the way for a sixth season due to air on Comedy Central beginning this week, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.