Sports Archives - Page 2 of 7 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Draft Day (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 13, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Sports

click any image to enlarge

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Denis Leary, Chadwick Boseman
screenplay by Rajiv Joseph & Scott Rothman
directed by Ivan Reitman

WATCH IN iTUNES – USA|CANADA

by Walter Chaw The first Broncos game I remember watching was on the couch with my father. October 16, 1977. I was four. They were playing the Oakland Raiders–hated rivals, I'd come to understand–and featured players from my eternal morning like Craig Morton, Haven Moses (who I had the pleasure of sharing a couple pitchers and a few dozen hot wings with a decade ago), Riley Odoms, Louis Wright, and Otis Armstrong. I have all of their signatures on an old ball, gathering dust on a bookshelf in my office. I have all of their rookie cards in little plastic holders. Since that first game, I've seen every one in its entirety save four, most of them in real time. (I was in the hospital for some reason or other for three of those.) When the Broncos won their first Super Bowl against the Green Bay Packers in 1998, I cried like a baby and worried for hours afterwards that there had been some mistake–that the universe could take it all away.

Telluride ’14: Foxcatcher

September 1, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride, Telluride 2014, Thriller

***½/****
starring Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman
directed by Bennett Miller

by Walter Chaw Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher is timely because of its excoriation of the 1%–and timeless because of the care with which it handles relationships between men, and between men and their mothers. It has faith in its audience in a way that’s rare and always has been, leaving wide swaths of exposition buried in glances and gestures, making itself into something that’s very much like the amateur wrestling it ably recreates in the film. It’s a big movie composed of subtle movements; it’s reticent. It’s also grounded by unbelievable performances from Mark Ruffalo, an actor I really like who’s never been better; and Channing Tatum, who reduces himself to a pure distillation of his masculinity and will probably be underestimated as a result. An early moment with Ruffalo and Tatum–playing Olympic champion wrestlers and brothers Dave and Mark Schultz, respectively–as they train in a dingy little college gym, is grim and wordless, bloody and violent, and capped by Dave cuffing his little brother and asking for a hug as he drops him off. It’s brotherhood in its intimate complexity in just a few gestures.

Trouble with the Curve (2012) [Combo Pack] – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

December 16, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, Sports

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman
screenplay by Randy Brown
directed by Robert Lorenz

by Angelo Muredda Trouble with the Curve is an unfortunate title for a film beset with problems on every side. Helmed by longtime Clint Eastwood producer/assistant director/close friend Robert Lorenz, making his equally unfortunate feature debut, it isn’t directed so much as stiffly pushed in the direction of new events once every ten minutes or so. A father-daughter family drama, a sports movie, and a portrait of a career woman swimming with the sharks, first-timer Randy Brown’s screenplay is a mess beyond even an experienced director’s fixing.

TIFF ’12: The Paperboy + At Any Price

September 18, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sports, Thriller, TIFF

THE PAPERBOY
*/****
directed by Lee Daniels

AT ANY PRICE
*/****
directed by Ramin Bahrani

by Bill Chambers The great Pete Dexter writes tersely about criminal perversity in the southern United States; the problem in adapting him to the cinema is that without his hardboiled prose, which lends everything he writes the whiff of reportage (a newspaperman originally, he turned to novels after drug dealers beat him nearly to death over one of his columns), the psychosexual situations he describes threaten to collapse into camp. Because of this, Dexter and Precious/Shadowboxer auteur Lee Daniels sounded like a match made in Hell to me, but the blunt force of Daniels's shamelessness proves strangely compatible with Dexter's writing in The Paperboy, based on the latter's 1995 best-seller. If only he could direct! Daniels is like a less bourgeois Henry Jaglom, cutting between a panoply of indifferently-composed shots like a frog on a griddle with little feeling for either spatial or character dynamics.

Hot Docs 2012: Loose ends

May 5, 20122012, Australia, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

by Angelo Muredda

The Betrayal (d. Karen Winther): The director returns to her spotty history in this intermittently affecting but mostly flat exercise. Winther combs through old journals and interviews both her parents and former friends in her effort to get to the bottom of a colossally stupid and damaging decision, when she was a troubled 15-year-old, to volunteer her far-left friends’ whereabouts to a known neo-Nazi group. As a portrait of 1990s Oslo's political bifurcations, the film is fairly compelling, but Winther is maddeningly vague about her ideological inclination in any phase of her life, and her frequent voiceovers about uncovering why she did what she did grate more than they illuminate. In any case, it's the wrong question. **/**** (Special Presentations)

Hot Docs 2012: The Frog Princes (ds. Omar Majeed and Ryan Mullins)

May 3, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

by Angelo Muredda The Frog Princes is so big-hearted you wish it had more to say than “way to go.” Copping its framing device from Rushmore, the film shadows a theatre troupe over a few months as it prepares for its debut performance of The Frog and the Princess. The hook is that the performers all have developmental disabilities, and are part of an initiative headed by Stephen Snow, a psychotherapist who teaches drama therapy at Concordia. “Steve” to his players, Snow comes across as an amiable guy whose high standards inspire self-confidence and a good work ethic in people from whom society shamefully expects little. There’s joy in seeing actors like cutely named Ray-Man, a young man with Down Syndrome, channel their untapped self-confidence into something tangible. Ray-Man makes a sharp contrast with Tanya, a clinically depressed woman with Prader-Willi Syndrome, whose nastiness and frequent minor meltdowns give the film a welcome edge whenever she’s onscreen.

Hot Docs 2012: Legend of a Warrior (d. Corey Lee)

April 29, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Martial Arts, Sports

by Angelo Muredda Director Corey Lee stages a moving reunion with his infamous but distant father in Legend of a Warrior. As a martial arts grandmaster and lauded trainer famed for ushering former pupil Billy Chau to a kickboxing world championship, Frank Lee spent his son’s formative years in gyms, training surrogate children while Corey went largely unattended. Now his son is trying to reconnect, relocating to the elder Lee’s Edmonton gym for a rigorous five-month training program that will submerge him in his charismatic father’s world while taking him away from his own young children. What follows is both an observational record of that process and a subtle father-son melodrama, punctuated by animated interludes that turn Frank’s early days in Canada and youth in Hong Kong into a comic-strip biography.

Hot Docs 2012: The Boxing Girls of Kabul (d. Ariel Nasr)

April 28, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

by Angelo Muredda Ariel Nasr’s The Boxing Girls of Kabulopens with clandestine footage of an execution in Kabul’s Olympic Stadium, where members of the Taliban force a woman to crawl before shooting her at close-range. That image haunts the alternately uplifting and sobering narrative that follows, which shadows the faltering Olympic hopes of a trio of young female boxers in a country where patriarchal attitudes toward women, particularly athletes, range from mild acceptance to violent hostility. This is a vibrant film, coloured by the verve of its protagonists, Shahla and siblings Sadaf and Shabnam, who speak candidly about their progressive values and their anxieties about the precariousness of their position amidst threats of assault and kidnapping. They’re presented as jocks, so it’s especially jarring when their future turns out to depend less on their athleticism than on the volatile political conditions of their country and its stance on the rights of women.

Hot Docs 2012: Bones Brigade: An Autobiography (d. Stacy Peralta)

April 25, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

Stacy Peralta returns to skateboarding culture with mixed results in Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. A sort of sequel to Dogtown and Z-Boys, which focused on his mates in early 1970s crew Zephyr, Peralta’s new film turns to the titular group of talented young misfits that he and business partner George Powell recruited in 1978, who went on to dominate the sport for the next decade. Like Dogtown, this is a likeable memory box of a movie, which briskly mixes up talking head interviews with scratchy archival footage and snapshots visibly manipulated by the director’s own hand. Peralta has a knack for converting alternative social history into this strangely effective hybrid of MTV and family album aesthetics. His firsthand experience and easy conversance with his subjects – who sometimes boyishly narrate his past actions to him with the kind of reverence guys usually reserve for dads and deities – makes for a good hook, and certainly there are worse tour guides through skater culture than a scrappy Jeff Daniels doppelgänger. Still, for an autobiography, this enthusiastic campfire reunion can feel cursory, especially at a bloated two-hour running time.

Goon (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Sports, Theatrical

***/****
starring Seann William Scott, Jay Baruchel, Alison Pill, Liev Schreiber
screenplay by Jay Baruchel & Evan Goldberg
directed by Michael Dowse

by Walter Chaw The best hockey movie since Slap Shot and the most pleasant and well-meaning Canuck-sploitation flick since Strange Brew, Michael Dowse's Goon is a prime example of how to make an insightful guy-movie without indulging in the cheap scatology of American Pie and its offspring. Not that there's anything wrong with cheap scatology, mind, only that it seems played-out, and so it's something of a revelation to find that franchise's own secret weapon, Seann William "Stifler" Scott (who, let's face it, is impossible not to like ever since he was brought to orgasm through manual stimulation of his prostate in that franchise), so quiet and unassuming in the title role as dim, sweet Doug Glatt. Doug's a natural-born bouncer in an armpit dive, see, who, after laying out a local bruiser taking his beef into the stands, is offered a shot at becoming a full-time enforcer for a bus-and-motel league. He shows up at his first practice wobbly in figure skates, proceeds to give his teammates a sound beating for their hooted derision, and is promptly called up to the bigger minor-league team the Halifax Highlanders.

Real Steel (2011)

October 7, 20112011, 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.

Moneyball (2011)

September 23, 20112011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Sports, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright
screenplay by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, based on the book by Michael Lewis
directed by Bennett Miller

by Angelo Muredda Moneyball arrives after years in development hell with nearly as much baggage as the Oakland A's. A Steven Soderbergh project scrapped at the eleventh hour of pre-production and inherited by a high-pedigree team composed of Capote director Bennett Miller and scribes Steven Zaillian (the lone holdover) and Aaron Sorkin, it's as much a reinvention of the discarded film–apparently pitched as a data-saturated docudrama–as it is an adaptation of Michael Lewis's best-selling non-fiction book of the same name. No matter: Soderbergh successfully redirected his energy into Contagion, a snappy procedural lobbed to the same stats fetishists who might've warmed to his Moneyball, while Miller has delivered an affecting and deceptively conventional baseball movie that works on its own terms. Oscar-bait it might be, but Moneyball is surprisingly fresh, especially in how it shifts focus from the unexpected winners that most sports stories fawn over to a few perpetual losers who live off the wistful fumes of second-place finishes.

Seven Days in Utopia (2011)

September 7, 20112011, Drama, Family, Sports, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Robert Duvall, Lucas Black, Melissa Leo, Kathy Baker
screenplay by David L. Cook & Rob Levine & Matthew Dean Russell & Sandra Thrift, based on Cook's novel Golf's Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia
directed by Matthew Dean Russell

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bursting at the seams with God/daddy issues but evincing no desire to confront (or even acknowledge) them, Matthew Dean Russell's Seven Days in Utopia is something like a hyper-wholesome, hyper-mainstream response to The Tree of Life. And what do you know? It's awful. After suffering a major breakdown during an important game, disgraced young golfer Luke Chisholm (Lucas Black) retreats to the small town of Utopia, Texas, where he meets an old landowner named Johnnie (Robert Duvall), who just happens to be a former golf champion. Johnnie is willing to teach Luke the ropes and maybe remind him of what's important, i.e., living for yourself and all of that good sports-movie stuff. Putting your faith in the Almighty figures in there somewhere, too, but while the film was made with an unavoidable Christian slant, the problem with Seven Days in Utopia is hardly a matter of ideology. Look past the squeaky-clean landscape promised by its G rating and you'll find it has no ideology at all.

The Big Lebowski (1998) – [Limited Edition] Blu-ray Disc

September 1, 2011****/****, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Sports

****/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras B
starring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi
screenplay by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
directed by Joel Coen

by Walter Chaw I think that once the book closes on the Coen Brothers, they'll be seen as the premier interpreters of our time: the best literary critics; the Mark Twains. I used to believe they were simply genre tourists on this mission to do one for every genre, but it becomes apparent with each new No Country for Old Men and True Grit unlocking each vintage Miller's Crossing and The Hudsucker Proxy that they were interpreting genres long before they took on specific pieces as a whole. Coming full-circle from the wry noir of Blood Simple and Fargo and presenting itself eventually as of a piece with a later Coen noir, The Man Who Wasn't There (just as A Serious Man is a companion piece to Barton Fink), The Big Lebowski serves as the transition point in that process while also moving the brothers from broad genre takedowns to a very specific kind of literary adaptation. That they would follow it up with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, their take on The Odyssey, speaks to a mission statement of sorts: like it, The Big Lebowski is a distillation of a classic piece of literature (Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep) that completely understands its simultaneous responsibility to its own medium and to its source material. It's not as easy as it sounds.

Viva Las Vegas (1964) – Blu-ray Disc

July 12, 20111960s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Musical, Sports

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Elvis Presley, Ann-Margret, Cesare Danova, William Demarest
screenplay by Sally Benson
directed by George Sidney

by Bill Chambers First, a word about Richard Attenborough's awesome, heartbreaking Magic. In that 1978 film, Anthony Hopkins plays Corky, a rising star on the ventriloquism circuit–hey, it was the '70s–who beats a hasty retreat to the Catskills to avoid a psychiatric evaluation that would doom his chances of working at NBC. There, he looks up his high-school crush, Peggy Ann Snow (Corky used to recite this sadly desperate/desperately sad rhyme about her: "Peggy Ann Snow, Peggy Ann Snow/Please let me follow, wherever you go"), who really could've been played by any actress of the moment approaching middle age, from Ellen Burstyn to Jill Clayburgh to Marsha Mason to Faye Dunaway. But Attenborough, ingeniously, cast former sex kitten Ann-Margret, so that Corky's nostalgic affection for Peggy isn't an abstract concept. Thereafter, the actress made a cottage industry out of her fading torchdom that reached its inevitable apotheosis when she tackled Blanche Dubois, but in Magic, it provides a crucial point of identification with a main character who can be inscrutable and unlovable that we have a pretty good idea of what Peggy Ann Snow used to be like. We'd pine for her, too.

Cars 2 (2011)

June 24, 20112011, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, 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.

Vroom! Vroom!: Grand Prix (1966); Le Mans (1971); Fast Company (1979) – Blu-ray Discs

June 14, 2011****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, Sports

GRAND PRIX
***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Yves Montand, Toshiro Mifune
screenplay by Robert Alan Arthur
directed by John Frankenheimer

LE MANS
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras D
starring Steve McQueen, Siegfried Rauch, Elga Andersen, Ronald Leigh-Hunt
screenplay by Harry Kleiner
directed by Lee H. Katzin

FAST COMPANY
**/**** Image A- Sound C+ Extras A+
starring William Smith, Claudia Jennings, John Saxon, Don Francks
screenplay by Phil Savath, Courtney Smith and David Cronenberg
directed by David Cronenberg

LE MANS

by Walter Chaw Of the major films produced during John Frankenheimer's fulsome period (that stretch between The Young Savages and Seconds that saw him as a giant among giants, tearing off masterpieces major (The Train, The Manchurian Candidate) and minor (The Birdman of Alcatraz, Seven Days in May)), Grand Prix has always stuck out for me as a swing-and-a-miss. There's no disputing either its technical innovation, which saw cameras mounted to Formula One cars for the first time, or Frankenheimer's fire, which seemed to single-handedly will the production to the finish line despite prickly subjects, competition from a Steve McQueen Formula One project in simultaneous development, and insurance companies pulling out when Frankenheimer insisted on his stars doing much of their own driving. But only upon my most recent revisit, occasioned by the picture's Blu-ray release, did it become clear to me the relationship that Grand Prix has with the same year's Seconds, far and away Frankenheimer's best film: an element of the biomechanical–of Frankenstein, sure, but Icarus¹, too, where man metastasizes himself with machines of his own creation to achieve the forbidden, whether it be beauty, or endurance, or speed…or immortality. It's therefore a film that may get at the heart of auto racing's allure for not only its participants but also its true believers. Elements of Harlan Ellison's "Ernest and the Machine God"–this idea that while anything's possible through technology, the debt of that ambition is paid out in blood.

The Hustler (1961) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

May 23, 2011****/****, 1960s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Sports

****/****
DVD – Image B Sound B Extras B-
BD – Image B- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Paul Newman, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, Jackie Gleason
screenplay by Sidney Carroll and Robert Rossen, based on the novel by Walter S. Tevis
directed by Robert Rossen

by Walter Chaw When one engages in hunting annis mirabilis, one would do well not to overlook 1961. The year after the cinema went insane (Ethan Mordden coins this wonderful phrase that before 1960, you listened to mother or you drove off a cliff–and after it, listen to mother and you're Psycho) is marked by a beloved film based on a Truman Capote novella about two hookers falling in love in New York (Breakfast at Tiffany's) and by Brando's first and only directorial effort, the marvellously murky anti-western One-Eyed Jacks. Billy Wilder guided Jimmy Cagney through his last rapid-fire explosion in a scabrous screed on the early days of globalism in One, Two, Three, while John Huston charted the last gasps of Old Hollywood and the West in The Misfits. In the sexual repression-drives-you-crazy sweepstakes, Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass makes time with William Wyler's lesbo-drama The Children's Hour (and there's Splendor's Warren Beatty again in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone). You want race? How about the new lyrics added to West Side Story's immigrant lament? Or Lancaster cutting a square swath through the Manhattan barrio in John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages? 1961 was a miraculous year for any number of reasons, but count among the big ones Paul Newman's emergence as the quintessential avatar for the entire decade–the scurrilous anti-hero (some point to Steve McQueen, but McQueen was never an asshole on purpose and never an actor at all) who represented the truthy eruption of everything the Eisenhower kids were holding back during those rocket-bra'd, tail-finned years spent basking in the post-nuclear sun of capitalism-as-panacea.

One Swayze Summer: A DVD Tribute to Patrick Swayze

February 24, 2011****/****, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2011, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Japan, Romance, Sports, Thriller, Tom Cruise, UK

“Good-looking people turn me off. Myself included.”
–Patrick Wayne Swayze

RED DAWN (1984) [COLLECTOR’S EDITION] – DVD
**½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras N/A
starring Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Powers Boothe
screenplay by Kevin Reynolds and John Milius
directed by John Milius

THE OUTSIDERS (THE COMPLETE NOVEL) (1983) [TWO-DISC SPECIAL EDITION] – DVD
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A+
starring C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Leif Garrett
screenplay by Kathleen Knutsen Rowell, based on the novel by S.E. Hinton
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

YOUNGBLOOD (1986) [TOTALLY AWESOME 80s DOUBLE FEATURE] – DVD
ZERO STARS/**** Image D+ Sound C-
starring Rob Lowe, Cynthia Gibb, Ed Lauter, Patrick Swayze, Jim Youngs
written and directed by Peter Markle

POINT BREAK (1991) [PURE ADRENALINE EDITION] – DVD + [WARNER REISSUE] – BLU-RAY DISC
***/****
DVD – Image B- Sound A Extras C
BD – Image B- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Patrick Swayze, Keanu Reeves, Gary Busey, Lori Petty
screenplay by W. Peter Iliff, based on the novel by Rick King
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

DIRTY DANCING (1987) [TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY] – DVD
½*/**** Image B Sound A Extras B
starring Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey, Jerry Orbach, Steven Reuther
screenplay by Eleanor Bergstein
directed by Emile Ardolino

GHOST (1990) [SPECIAL COLLECTOR’S EDITION] – DVD + BLU-RAY DISC
*/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B Extras B
BD – Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, Tony Goldwyn
screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin
directed by Jerry Zucker

KEEPING MUM (2006) – DVD
½*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Rowan Atkinson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Patrick Swayze
screenplay by Richard Russo and Niall Johnson
directed by Niall Johnson

by Walter Chaw Early on in the stupidest/smartest movie of 1984, a band of high-schoolers, having just witnessed a few planeloads of Cuban paratroopers land in their football field and machine gun their history teacher (“Education this!”), stock up for a stay in forest exile by cleaning out a gas-n-sip. Sleeping bags, canned goods, and the last thing off the shelf? That’s right: a football. I spent the rest of Red Dawn trying to figure out if the football played some role in the eventual fighting prowess of our carbuncular guerrillas or if it was merely a big “fuck you” to the rest of the world that thinks “football” is soccer. The jury’s still out, because while there’s an awful lot of grenade-chucking in the last hour of the picture, none of it looks particularly football-like (or athletic come to think of it) despite the deadly accuracy of each toss aimed at the hapless commie combatants. (So clueless are they about modern-day conventional warfare that they’re repeatedly ambushed by this untrained makeshift militia; they’re the Washington Generals to our Harlem Globetrotters.) It’s just one puzzle in an altogether puzzling film–one that has Patrick Swayze playing Charlie Sheen’s older brother (and Jennifer Grey the sister of Lea Thompson in an even greater genetic stretch) and C. Thomas Howell as a remorseless, psychopathic nihilist who takes his dose of glory by Rambo’ing up against a Russian attack helicopter. Maybe his transformation from ’80s-wallpaper milquetoast to tough-guy killing machine had something to do with being forced by the brothers Swayze-Sheen to drink fresh deer blood from a tin cup.

Sundance ’11: Benavides Born

February 6, 20112011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Sundance

All She Can**/****starring Corina Calderon, Jeremy Ray Valdez, Joseph Julian Soria, Julia Verascreenplay by Daniel Meisel & Amy Wendeldirected by Amy Wendel by Alex Jackson Amy Wendel's Benavides Born is throwing me for a loop, and I'm getting a little frustrated about it. I understand that this film isn't trying to be Step Up 4 or the female weightlifter version of Rudy--but it's not really giving us a viable alternative to that kind of programming, either. On a very basic level, I don't know what this movie's about. The small town of Benavides, Texas has only three industries: fast food,…