Theatrical Release Archives - Page 27 of 68

Computer Chess (2013)

July 18, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Theatrical Release

****/****
starring Patrick Riester, Myles Page, James Curry, Robin Schwartz
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

by Walter Chaw Sneakily, the best science-fiction film of the summer is Andrew “Godfather of Mumblecore” Bujalski’s decidedly lo-fi Computer Chess, shot with a late-’60s, made-for-home-video Sony AVC-3260 analog tube video camera that approximates the very look and feel of something you’d find in a box in someone’s garage. It endeavours to tell the story of a weekend tech convention where proto-hackers engage in mortal combat over who will be the first to create a computer chess program that can defeat a human master (Gerald Peary (!)) and, incidentally, collect a $75k booty. The money, though, is incidental to the glory of scientific discovery, of being the first to push the limits of artificial intelligence to the point of…what? Aggression? Sentience, perhaps? It’s telling that Bujalski, at the forefront of a specific DIY subgenre of independent cinema reliant on largely improvised performances with no budget nor, theoretically, affectation (it’s like the American version of the Dogme95 movement), has produced the most affectless, genuine artifact of the dogme philosophy through his greatest feat of affectation: he’s created a time capsule of an era in a film about the eternity of the human instinct to create simulacra first and deal with issues of functional equivalence later. In its way, Computer Chess works like a sprung, found-footage diary of the birth of Skynet. It’s Mary Shelley, and Blade Runner, and it gets to being about what it’s about without being an asshole about it.

The Attack (2013)

July 11, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, Egypt, France, Lebanon, Qatar, Theatrical Release

L’attentat
***/****
starring Ali Suliman, Remonde Amsellem, Evgenia Dodina, Karim Saleh
screenplay by Joelle Touma and Ziad Doueiri, based on the novel by Yasmina Khadra
directed by Ziad Doueiri

by Walter Chaw Lebanese-born Ziad Doueiri, an assistant cameraman on Quentin Tarantino’s first three features, demonstrates as a director the kind of elliptical reserve more commonly associated with Terrence Malick. Indeed, the most powerful stretches of his sophomore effort, The Attack, recall the fragments of The Thin Red Line that elucidate Pvt. Bell’s wife’s betrayal through a series of voiceovers, remembered conversations, and gauzy/idealized images of a bucolic existence that may or may not have ever existed. An adaptation of a novel by Yasmina Khadra, The Attack details the discovery by an Arab emergency-room surgeon based in Israel, Amin (Ali Suliman), that his wife Siham (Reymond Amsalem, who has the quality and pitch of Illeana Douglas–a wonderful thing) is the suicide bomber responsible for an attack in Tel Aviv, the casualties of which we watch Amin try to save. Amin has been “accepted” by the Jews, we understand, though there’s tension throughout the early scenes as his friends and colleagues awkwardly navigate around him in a way that reads initially as condescending, then increasingly hostile as events unfold. Hannah Arendt would have something to say about this; so would Paula Deen and her legion of insensate followers. When Amin receives an award for his work, his acceptance speech includes the platitude that all Arabs have a little Jew in them and vice versa; by the picture’s last words, “Every time you go away, a little piece of me dies,” one wonders if he means the little piece that has empathy for the opposition’s point of view.

Pacific Rim (2013)

July 10, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical Release

**/****
starring Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day
screenplay by Travis Beacham & Guillermo del Toro
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I have this theory that the reason the United States started remaking Japanese movies (particularly the J-Horror stuff) almost immediately post-9/11 is that it was after that pivotal event that the country assumed a distinctly Japanese worldview. Suddenly, it was possible for something unthinkable to happen to civilians; the universe was callous and arbitrary in its measuring out of lives, and the idea of a “civilian target” or, more to the point, of “innocence,” was hopelessly quaint. It’s as good an explanation as any as to why there are so many evil children in Japanese horror–the same explanation, as it happens, for why there were so many evil children in late-’60s/early-’70s American horror–the difference being that there was usually an explanation for why the children were bad in the United States (the Devil, mostly). In Japan? Not so much. In America’s post-9/11 evil-kid flicks, even the ones not remaking Japanese films, the kids are generally just born that way. Even the rise of “torture porn” is more or less a not-as-graphic reproduction of Japan’s “Guinea Pig” cinema–seven pictures from the ’80s (including the indescribable Mermaid in a Manhole and Flower of Flesh & Blood, which caused a credulous Charlie Sheen to call the FBI), culminating now in the United States with a pretty rough update of Maniac starring everybody’s favourite probably-murderer, Elijah Wood.

Byzantium (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Neil Jordan, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Ireland, Theatrical Release, Thriller, UK, Vampire

****/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley, Caleb Landry Jones
screenplay by Moira Buffini, based on her play
directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw What is it about the Irish character, that particular quality of melancholy fatalism, that seems to inform the great works of native sons Beckett, Joyce, and maybe Yeats in particular? I like G.K. Chesterton’s description of Ireland as a place of “men that God made mad,/For all their wars are merry,/And all their songs are sad.” It infects the folklore, the story of the crags and the heather, the looming, low skies pregnant with what Michael Almereyda’s criminally underestimated (and long forgotten) The Eternal fashioned into a creation story involving unimaginable losses and the sweet, bitter tears they inspire. To that film, add John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish, Neal Jordan’s Ondine, and now Jordan’s rapturous Byzantium: a quartet of supernaturally-tinged pictures that together form a lush polyptych that captures the very sensation of walking through Dublin in the rain, or along the shores of Galway, or through the pages of Ulysses in the company of Leo and Nora. As for Byzantium, it’s beautiful, and sad, and has an eternity to it that’s reflected in its tale of a “soucriant,” a succubus of sorts with a Dominican history and favoured by Jean Rhys in novels that were themselves attempts to come to terms with the tragedies of her life as an outsider. Jordan, well-read and never shy about expressing that literariness in his pictures, is producing in his later work the very evocation of a city from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (a book he once told me he admires): Ersilia, an abandoned city built not of walls, but of strings the lost inhabitants used to mark connections with one another. Jordan weaves an intricate web with Byzantium, a film that, before even attacking the tensions within, provides tensions without in its title, most likely taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which is itself about tensions between the “artifice of eternity” and the temporariness of youth. Turns out, the film is about that, too.

Museum Hours (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical Release, UK

****/****
starring Mary Margaret O’Hara, Bobby Sommer, Ela Piplits
directed by Jem Cohen

by Angelo Muredda The closing credits of Jem Cohen’s warm and wonderful Museum Hours give equal thanks to John Berger and Patti Smith, and it’s not hard to see why. Further to being Cohen’s friend and occasional collaborator, Smith occupies a rare place at the intersection of art stardom and punk history, while Berger might be the only figurehead total newcomers to art criticism can name, his TV series “Ways of Seeing” having turned innumerable undergraduates onto ideologically-inflected readings of popular images. Whatever their personal contributions to the film may have been, Berger’s knack for providing the novice critic with the armature to see intelligently and ethically is as instructive here as Smith’s mercurial punk ethos. Museum Hours–which, like Berger’s BBC miniseries and book, is destined to have a long afterlife in college art courses–is an absorbing and richly humanist synthesis of those seemingly contradictory impulses, a puckish walking tour through an art gallery that doubles as a manifesto for seeing deeply into the rubbish beyond the walls of the museum.

The Lone Ranger (2013)

July 1, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Superhero, Theatrical Release, Western

***/****
starring Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Tom Wilkinson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Justin Haythe and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw What Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger has going for it, in addition to a genuinely ugly streak of nihilism and a surprisingly high body count, is that it doesn’t seek to “darken” its titular boy-scout hero so much as offer that his brand of do-gooderism seems naïve and ineffectual in the modern conversation. It’s the same tactic taken by Arthur Penn’s own picaresque western Little Big Man, the film it most resembles right down to the framing story: an aged narrator relating his sometimes fanciful tale to a modern chronicler, used to amusing effect when the plot gets out of hand, Princess Bride-style. It’s like a lot of movies, I guess (including two Simon Wincer westerns, Quigley Down Under and Lightning Jack), which doesn’t mean it’s derivative so much as it means that it plays like any number of satires of the kind of innocence that made the Lone Ranger character a favourite of impressionable young Americans for generations. It’s more the anachronism of The Brady Bunch Movie than the update of Man of Steel, in other words–and the better for it, even if its ultimate message appears to be that the crimson tide has overtaken us, once and for all, and there’s no real room left in the world for the idealism represented by a hero with a list of creeds, the first of which is that to have friends one must first be a friend.

White House Down (2013)

June 27, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical Release, Thriller

**½/****
starring Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Maggie Gyllenhaal, James Woods
screenplay by James Vanderbilt
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Angelo Muredda Leading up to the release of Anonymous in late 2011, Roland Emmerich joined screenwriter and professional blowhard John Orloff in a series of quasi-academic debates about the supposed true origin of the works of William Shakespeare–which they attributed, as is the fashion among a school of cranks that includes Derek Jacobi and John Hurt, to the Earl of Oxford. Let us only say of that turgid, classist bore, the most distressing of his disaster movies, that petty conspiracy theorizing does not suit Emmerich, at heart a good old liberal pussycat who likes to blow things up, then shoot the shit about the horrors of global warming. Despite its vague interest in U.S. foreign policy (i.e., its firm belief that it sucks), White House Down is a more modest affair, and all the better for it. Stupid is easy but stupid fun is trickier to pull off, and more than anything Emmerich has made since Independence Day (a decent ham sandwich), this Die Hard clone, complete with Channing Tatum in a sleeveless shirt, at least delivers a pretty good time.

World War Z (2013)

June 20, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical Release, Zombie

**/****
starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Max Brooks
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster’s World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks’s cause célèbre novel (think Stephen Ambrose on the zombie apocalypse) that had a production so troubled the real surprise is Terry Gilliam had nothing to do with it, lands as half an idea, handsomely mounted in a really expensive crater. With almost no relationship to the book beyond honouring its concept of a conflagration told in vignettes, it feels almost exactly like James L. Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything, which began life as a musical and ended up, after extensive reshoots and careening budget overages, song-free, yet whole somehow despite the trauma. That sense of a sudden change in direction, in genre, is all over World War Z–something in its almost apologetic reserve, something in its unmistakable indecision. Indeed, it serves as a fitting metaphor for a zombie as a corpse similarly brought to shambling half-life, but frankly, it could’ve been a lot worse. It works for what it is in the same way that Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion works, and with the same limitations, ambivalence, anticlimax, and handsome mounting. If, at the end, its Damon Lindelof-penned solution* (the twelfth-hour salvation of a freight train jumped its tracks) is as stupid as you would expect something Lindelof to pen, at least the journey there is interesting, even occasionally (if only very occasionally) arresting. A shame that Forster hasn’t gotten any better at directing action since Quantum of Solace.

Man of Steel (2013)

June 13, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical Release

**/****
starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Russell Crowe
screenplay by David S. Goyer
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is 44 beautifully constructed trailers strung together in the world’s most expensive promo reel; at this point in his career, it’s fair to wonder who it is Snyder’s still trying to impress. Shapeless, structure-less, the movie aspires towards nostalgic, grandiloquent, patriotic pastiche but succeeds only in being disjointed, muted, and frustrating. Take the casting of Kevin Costner as Superman’s terrestrial dad, Jonathan Kent. Perfect, right? But he’s reduced to a fantastic scene where he reveals his adopted son’s alien origin that is fantastic solely because Costner is not only magnificent when he’s allowed to be in his wheelhouse (baseball player, cowboy, farmer), but also because there’s a certain weight in the wrinkles on Costner’s face and the grey at his temples. He’s the embodiment of a specific brand of nostalgia all by himself, and the potential for him to be the spiritual centre of a soulless film isn’t merely squandered, it’s aggressively squandered. The Superman mythos at its best is about fathers and sons–the hero (Henry Cavill, playing Supes as Wolverine) has, after all, lost two fathers, orphaned twice in a strange land and compared visually and thematically to Christ in every incarnation. (“The last son of Krypton,” n’est-ce pas?) It’s a powerful theme, one that explains the enduring popularity of the character when wags have correctly identified that there are no real, viable external threats to someone who’s essentially all-powerful. The Jesus story is meaningless if Jesus never thought of Himself as merely a man carrying a terrible burden. Consider the elevation of Watchmen‘s Dr. Manhattan to inscrutable WMD, or The Incredibles‘ Mr. Incredible’s near-ruin in the role of family man. No, Superman’s weakness is existential. I fear that Snyder–a director who seems to abhor difference and adore surfaces in his pictures–is exactly the wrong person to explore the irony of an immaculate conception tortured in the role of outsider.

This Is the End (2013)

June 12, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Horror, Theatrical Release, Zombie

**½/****
starring James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel
written and directed by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg

by Angelo Muredda Whatever its dramatic hiccups, This is the End can at least boast that it’s one of the better full-length adaptations of a trailer. In 2007, Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel starred in a 90-second sizzle reel–co-scripted by Rogen and Superbad collaborator Evan Goldberg–about their efforts to stay alive amidst an unspecified global catastrophe. As scrappy comedy skits go, “Jay and Seth versus the Apocalypse” was pretty good, a charming riff on the actors’ schlubby personas as well as a pitch for more time and a bigger budget to drive home their unlikely survival story. The trouble with This Is the End, a funny but belaboured riff on that premise, is that it’s still trying to close the sale long after the project’s been greenlit, ingratiating itself to an audience already on board. In their joint directorial debut, Rogen and Goldberg show a knack for characterization but seem anxious about where to go from there, squandering a gifted ensemble in a procession of spotty “what if” scenarios that don’t resemble a movie so much as a glimpse into a celebrity edition of charades in Judd Apatow’s basement.

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 10, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Sam Raimi, Disney, Fantasy, Theatrical Release, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams
screenplay by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Based on L. Frank Baum’s little-known Pussyhound of Oz, Sam Raimi’s career nadir Oz the Great and Powerful (hereafter O-Gap) answers the question of who you would ask to anchor your $300M+ tentpole extravaganza: yes, James Franco, who’s now claimed the mantle of the worst actor in the United States from the quiescent Paul Walker. Franco is an avatar of the picture’s bad decisions, from the Zach Braff-voiced CGI monkey sidekick to the sassy CGI Hummel figurine to the tragic miscasting of Mila Kunis as Theodora, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West. Yes indeedy, fans of the MGM original, of Baum’s wondrous series of books, and of the shit-show “Wicked” will all hate it equally–almost as much as neophytes to the whole damned mess who will come for what Raimi’s proudly proclaimed “the ultimate Disney movie” and leave with a mouthful of exactly as promised. It’s blindingly obnoxious, tasteless in a meaningless way, and occasionally makes reference to Army of Darkness just because, I suspect, Raimi’s last-resort defensive posture is to fall back on what he knows. But it’s not nearly enough to save him here. The argument with weight is that the more expensive a movie becomes, the less likely it’s going to be good; the first clue that Raimi is creatively bankrupt is that while his buddy Bruce Campbell appears in this film, Campbell isn’t the star.

Before Midnight (2013)

June 7, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Romance, Theatrical Release

****/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
screenplay by Richard Linklater & Ethan Hawke & Julie Delpy
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Before Midnight opens with a bit of misdirection, a tracking shot of two pairs of shoes ambling towards the camera that we instinctively ascribe to Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) before the second pair is shown to belong instead to Jesse’s teenaged son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), about to board a flight back to the States. Somewhere in the slow pan up to the actors’ faces, and in the deferral of series MVP Celine, is a playful acknowledgement that Richard Linklater’s Before movies have grown into a franchise with a coherent visual language that’s dependable enough to riff on. Much has changed since Jesse and Celine’s inaugural philosophical walking tour through Vienna 18 years ago, and the prologue is an economical demonstration of how arbitrary our encounters with the couple to date have been, shaped by our inability to listen in after Nina Simone drowns out the end of Before Sunset. But the presence of Jesse’s son (from the unseen wife alluded to throughout the previous film) in place of Celine, who’s finally revealed in another tracking shot in the next scene, also alerts us to something new: a conflict that runs deeper than the pair’s usual anxious negotiations with a ticking clock.

After Earth (2013)

May 30, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical Release, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Will Smith, Jaden Smith, Sophie Okenedo, Zoë Kravitz
screenplay by Gary Whitia and M. Night Shyamalan
directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Angelo Muredda Give M. Night Shyamalan this much: he is not a timid filmmaker. Where some might have responded to the critical drubbing of The Village with a shrug, Shyamalan turned his follow-up, ostensibly a children’s story, into a vicious riposte. Lady in the Water isn’t just an off-kilter fairytale about an endangered waif who falls out of the sky and into Paul Giamatti’s swimming pool: it’s also a deranged manifesto for protecting the imaginative freedom of artists like Shyamalan–playing a writer who will one day be martyred for his ideas, collected in a volume modestly titled “The Cookbook”–against critics and nonbelievers, who meet deservedly bad ends. That would be a gutsy move if the artist had something to die for himself, yet the best you could say for Lady in the Water is that at least Bob Balaban’s beast-ravaged movie reviewer is spared the finale with a saviour eagle that Shyamalan has the gall to christen “Eaglet.” Though nominally a star vehicle for Will Smith and his son Jaden, After Earth covers much the same ground, down to its repetition of both the aquila ex machina trope and half-assed nomenclature. (A double-sided spear is a “cutlass” in the future, while walking stealthily is now “ghosting.” No word on what we call spoons or actual cutlasses.) Lady in the Water‘s world-building by crayon doodles can be explained away easily enough by its bedtime-story mechanics, but there’s no excuse for After Earth, a thinly-sketched, unbearably haughty survival story that cites Moby-Dick as it steals from Suzanne Collins.

The Hangover Part III (2013)

May 23, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Road Movie, Theatrical Release

*½/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, John Goodman
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Craig Mazin
directed by Todd Phillips

by Angelo Muredda When Project X spilled forth from its amniotic septic tank last spring, I read it as a prime example of a producer-driven form of auteurism pioneered by Judd Apatow. That found-footage chronicle of a house party-turned-apocalypse, I suggested, was a monument to producer Todd Phillips’s equally noxious Hangover series, where the same Dionysian impulses and deep-seated hatred of the different–whether female, trans, queer, or disabled–were championed by a trio of middle-aged men. What a difference a year makes. If Project X was a brand consolidator and The Hangover Part II was a morbidly curious recalibration of its predecessor, displacing Phillips’s demonic impulses and scarcely controlled misogynist rage from Bradley Cooper’s Phil to Ed Helms’s Stu, Part III is an actors’ contract negotiation sputtered to life. Since the previous instalment, Cooper has become a respectable leading man and Oscar nominee and Helms has been savaged for the degeneration of his irritating Andy Bernard character on “The Office”, while co-star Ken Jeong’s fortunes have inexplicably risen. Consequently, gone now are the days of Phil’s “Paging Doctor Faggot,” along with Stu’s loveable dude-rage and the Wolfpack’s infinite jokes about Mr. Chow’s shrunken Asian manhood. In their place is a surprisingly neutered, if inarguably more ethical, product with very few laughs and no reason for being.

The We and the I (2013)

May 17, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Teen, Theatrical Release

**½/****
starring Michael Brodie, Teresa Lynn, Raymond Delgado, Jonathan Ortiz
screenplay by Michel Gondry, Paul Proch, Jeff Grimshaw
directed by Michel Gondry

by Angelo Muredda The We and the I opens with a throwback, an image that wouldn’t be out of place in Michel Gondry’s distinctive music videos from the late-1990s, which were themselves full of backward glances to the more rough-hewn early days of MTV and old-school hip hop. Over the credits, a boombox modified into a miniature bus rolls along the streets of the Bronx pulsing out Young MC’s “Bust A Move,” until it’s crushed by what’s ostensibly the real thing, a city bus packed with urban teens who make up Gondry’s boisterous, gossiping, and privately wounded nonprofessional cast. That’s an interesting start, insofar as it suggests that Gondry’s obsession with whimsical props tinged with nostalgia are about to be traded in for something more authentic, even as it implies a bit cheekily that the “real” bus, taking a bunch of high-schoolers home on the last day of school, is itself a roaming set on which to stage semi-scripted exchanges between proper teens doubling as actors and artistic partners.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

May 8, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical Release

*/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald
directed by Baz Luhrmann

by Walter Chaw The great irony of Baz Luhrmann’s unwatchable farrago The Great Gatsby is that it’s not so much an interpretation of its titular hero’s self-aggrandizing fandangos as a literalization of one. It’s all surface, all façade, and not coincidentally, the most successful thing about it is Luhrmann’s shooting of Gatsby’s legendary parties as infernal bacchanalia. But that bit of useful critique is clearly a fluke, an accident of Luhrmann’s one-trick pony kicking over the single element in Fitzgerald’s book that is remotely compatible with Luhrmann’s style. The marriage of Baz with Fitzgerald, in fact, is a little like asking Michael Bay to adapt The Brothers Karamazov–it’s Timur Bekmambetov’s A Farewell to Arms. It’s showing off in the loudest, most obnoxious way possible, without any kind of critical, nay, useful, rationale for all the bread and circus–an asshole at play with Welles’s “best train set a boy could ever want,” with the casualty only what’s possibly the best American novel ever written. It’s an effrontery to taste, the sole consolation being that as Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is something of a motherless child, there’s no one who will love it. No one could.

Iron Man 3 (2013)

May 2, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Revenge, Superhero, Theatrical Release

Iron Man Three
*½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Drew Pearce & Shane Black
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw I laughed once during Shane Black’s Iron Man 3–an unfortunate milestone for me and Black’s films, which I have found, without exception, pretty amusing. That one moment is a reference serial post-modernist and industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) makes to Michael Crichton’s 1973 cult fantasia Westworld. The Tony Stark character is not just the cocksure pop-cultural embodiment of Roland Barthes’s work on semiotics and myth: he’d be Barthes’s greatest subject for analysis–the object that presumes a pop-cultural universal constant. The place where Black works, in other words, is that place where everyone’s seen and read and heard everything they “should have” seen and read and heard. When Stark drops the Westworld bomb, then, we understand the implication that Stark is observing an evil henchman to not only appear to be robotic and indestructible but maybe sexy and Yul Brynner-esque as well–maybe a female fantasy, maybe a “stupid sexy Flanders” homosexual fantasy. Certainly, there’s a recognition that dropping a reference like this is pleasurable in a way that structuralism would appreciate, but only for the nerd bourgeoisie. It’s a moment meant to create a sense of exclusionary cloister in the midst of one of the most widely-dissembled entertainments in human history, and I liked that.

Pain & Gain (2013)

April 25, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Michael Bay, Theatrical Release, Thriller

**/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Ed Harris
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, based on the articles by Pete Collins
directed by Michael Bay

by Angelo Muredda A man does a stomach crunch in mid-air, suspended off the armpit of a muscleman logo that’s spray-painted onto the side of a gym. Is there a more quintessential Michael Bay image than the opening shot of Pain & Gain? The only serious contender comes later on, in a slow-motion tableau of the same bro, Mark Wahlberg’s personal trainer-cum-murderer Danny Lugo, sailing over the windshield of an SUV, propelled by the debris from a flying fruit stand. When your story doesn’t have any Autobots, I guess you just have to improvise with your surroundings to get all your primary colours in. To say that the radioactive pop palette and abs-fetishism are familiar is an understatement, but it’s the thematic material and belaboured telling of it that makes Pain & Gain a perfect storm of Bay. Temporarily freed from the restraints of a battling-robot franchise, he’s allowed to make his most purely ideological statement yet in the form of a (fact-based) story about three idiots pursuing their warped vision of the Horatio Alger myth–which happily coincidences with Bay’s.

Django Unchained (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 14, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Revenge, Theatrical Release, Western

Djangounch2

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw If Inglourious Basterds was an ambiguous, brilliant indictment of “Jewish vengeance” wrapped in this impossibly canny exploration of violence through screenwriting, performance, and love of film, think of Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up, Django Unchained, as a glorious continuation of what has become a singular artist’s evolving theme. It demonstrates an absolute command of the medium, of what film can do when tasked to do more than usual, and it does it by being some of the finest film criticism of the year. If the Coens are our best literary critics, then Tarantino is our best film critic cum sociologist, and his topics, again, are how we understand history through specific prisms and how violence can be both catharsis and atrocity–often in the same breath and almost always in the same ways. Consider that this difficult film’s most difficult moment comes, as it does in Inglourious Basterds, at the very end, in an unbearably ugly act of violence perpetrated against not the expected slave-owner antagonist, Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), but his manservant Stephen/Stepin (Samuel L. Jackson). Consider, too, the idea that vengeance–particularly in our post-9/11 environment–is the proverbial tiger we’ve caught by the tail: our cultural legacy that we try to justify through any means, given that our ends are so very righteous.

Like Someone in Love (2012)

April 12, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Theatrical Release

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

by Angelo Muredda Few filmmakers know how to put you on your guard from the first frame as effectively as Abbas Kiarostami. It’s clear enough that Like Someone in Love opens in a bar in Tokyo, but it’s harder to say at first what we’re looking at and why. The closest voice we hear belongs to the off-camera Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young woman who’s a little too preoccupied with lying her way out of a hostile phone conversation to process the flat image of well-dressed young revellers in front of her. Whether she’s our lead takes a couple of false tries to figure out. Our first candidate is a redhead around her age, sitting at a table off to the side until she suddenly relocates to an empty seat in the foreground, coaching Akiko through the rest of her call until she relinquishes her spot moments later to a fortysomething man who speaks to both women with first the familiarity of a parent, then the condescension of a high-end pimp directing his employees. Somewhere in between these encounters, we briefly lose track of who’s even doing the looking. Akiko waltzes into our field of vision on the way to the bathroom, the camera fixed at where her eyeline used to be after she’s vacated her seat, as if holding her place until she gets back.