Black Death (2011)

March 16, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, John Lynch, Carice Van Houten
screenplay by Dario Poloni
directed by Christopher Smith

Blackdeathby Walter Chaw Christopher Smith follows up his listless slasher-farce Severance with the handsome-looking Black Plague/witch-hunting flick Black Death–a well-played, well-conceived piece that's ultimately distinguished by a few sticky after-images, even as it doesn't quite get to where you hope it's going. Set in a pleasingly grimy, disgusting Dark Ages, the picture finds our hero, monk Osmund (Eddie Redmayne), besotted with comely Averill (Kimberly Nixon) and beset on all sides by the inexorable tide of the bubonic plague. Enlisted by Bishop-appointed Holy Roller Ulric (Sean Bean) for his familiarity with the countryside to locate a strange, untouched-by-plague village, Osmond becomes, er, plagued by crises of faith. The problem, besides his wanting to nail Averill in a most unholy way, is that the village in question appears to be untouched by disease because it doesn't believe in God.

Red Riding Hood (2011)

March 11, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, Werewolf, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Gary Oldman, Billy Burke, Julie Christie
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

Redridinghoodby Walter Chaw That Catherine Hardwicke keeps getting jobs speaks to a deep, ugly dysfunction in the Hollywood dream factory. Not the thought that money talks, but the idea that people like Hardwicke and Adam Sandler and Michael Bay are handed the keys to the executive washroom because they understand what it is that certain critically-deficient demographics want and proceed to provide it in massive, deadly draughts. In other industries, there would be regulatory agencies–though it’s fair to consider that checking the poster for Red Riding Hood would give you all the nutritional information you probably need. Namely that Hardwicke is the main ingredient, and that had I remembered this before the screening, I never, ever would have gone, in exactly the same way I wouldn’t eat scrapple again. I’m sure a lot of people like that shit, but grey pig-mush is grey pig-mush. Red Riding Hood is easily the worst movie I’ve seen since probably all the way back to A Sound of Thunder, and in a lot of the same ways: horribly written; horribly performed (but they didn’t have a chance); directed by someone that cameras should file a restraining order against; and edited by a cast-iron moron (make that pair of morons: long-time Hardwicke accomplice Nancy Richardson and poor Julia Wong). At least there’s Gary Oldman along for the ride to order his Moorish henchmen to, at one point, “put him in the elephant!”

Battle: Los Angeles (2011)

March 11, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, War

½*/****
starring Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Ramon Rodriguez, Michael Peña
screenplay by Christopher Bertolini
directed by Jonathan Liebesman

Battlelosangelesby Ian Pugh The action sequences in Battle: Los Angeles operate on a clockwork schedule. A group of Marines traverses the title city in search of civilians and/or shelter. Suddenly, aliens! The camera shakes for five minutes. The Marines find a safehouse and plan their next move. Suddenly, aliens! Lather, rinse, repeat. But, you will ask, what happened while the camera was shaking? How did they escape? And, as one character inevitably puts it, “What is that thing?” Fair questions, all. I’m pretty sure I caught a glimpse of a rocket launcher built like that BigDog robot, though I can’t be 100% certain. There’s actually a specific moment where you give up trying to distinguish one thing from another. At the beginning of this adventure, we’re told that the Marines have a mere three hours to recover their civilians before the military blows up Santa Monica. Time finally runs out with some folks holed up in a random liquor store, and your first impulse is to question why the movie would leave its final countdown to an analog clock on the wall–but then you realize that you have no idea who these people are, how they got there, who died in the interim, or whether this is a liquor store at all. (Maybe it’s somebody’s wine cellar? I think I saw wine bottles.) It’s not an interpretation of wartime chaos, it’s just plain incomprehensible.

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

March 4, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Anthony Mackie, Terence Stamp
screenplay by George Nolfi, based on the story "Adjustment Team" by Philip K. Dick
directed by George Nolfi

Adjustmentbureauby Walter Chaw George Nolfi, writer of Ocean's Twelve, The Sentinel, The Bourne Ultimatum, and other movies I can't really remember if I've seen returns to his "Renaissance Fair: The Movie" (a.k.a. Timeline) roots with this howler of a hyphenate debut. Somehow mushing together the worst elements of bad films as disparate as The Box and Return to Me with an uncannily bad ear for dialogue and the instincts of a twelve-year-old Catechism student, The Adjustment Bureau jollily romps through Christian quandaries of predestination vs. free will by pitting fedora'd Wim Wenders angels against milquetoast Matt Damon and his badly-slumming object of desire Emily Blunt during their Satanic (I guess) quest to be married to each other. It doesn't take a stand one way or the other, having its host and eating it, too, all the way through to a genuinely stupid conclusion in which it's revealed that the almighty DIRECTOR is neither and both male and female and appears to all of us in His/Her own way. I suppose you could say that The Adjustment Bureau is a Wim Wenders movie if Wenders were a douchebag given to sackless pop-Christianity musings scored (by the up-and-down Thomas Newman) with what sounds like the music from Field of Dreams as performed by an orchestra of baby deer.

Gnomeo & Juliet (2011) + Cedar Rapids (2011)

February 11, 2011Posted in2011, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, Theatrical, UK

GNOMEO & JULIET
**/****
screenplay by Kelly Asbury & Mark Burton & Kevin Cecil & Emily Cook & Kathy Greenberg & Andy Riley & Steve Hamilton Shaw, based on an original screenplay by John R. Smith & Rob Sprackling
directed by Kelly Asbury

CEDAR RAPIDS
**½/****
starring Ed Helms, John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, Sigourney Weaver
screenplay by Phil Johnston
directed by Miguel Arteta

by Ian Pugh Gnomeo & Juliet is pretty much exactly the movie you’d expect from one of the directors of Shrek 2. On the bright side, it’s also a little bit more. In this latest iteration of Shakespeare’s timeless classic, Montague and Capulet are a couple of pensioners living on Verona Drive whose lawn gnomes spring to life every now and then to wage war on each other. The lad and lass of the title (voiced by James McAvoy and Emily Blunt) meet from opposite sides and fall in love, and so on and so forth. As you may have already guessed, Gnomeo & Juliet makes room for its cutesy puns and pop-culture references by robbing “Romeo & Juliet”‘s premise of all emotional heft: the warring tribes have no sense of familial bond, which renders the central romance completely weightless; and it’s all performed with an absolute minimum amount of bloodshed, culminating in, yes, a happy ending. It’s tempting to cry anti-intellectualism until one considers the film’s predominantly British cast–after all, hasn’t British culture earned the right to make self-deprecating jokes about Shakespeare’s influence? (It just feels right knowing that Michael Caine and Maggie Smith are leading the charge in this gnome war–though Jason Statham voicing an angry, Napoleonic Tybalt sounds more subversive than it actually plays.) In fact, the film’s generally cavalier attitude towards “unassailable” literature gives the impression that it was trying to piss someone off, what with most of the loathing and introspection replaced by the requisite noisy action sequences.

The Mechanic (2011)

January 28, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Jason Statham, Ben Foster, Tony Goldwyn, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Richard Wenk and Lewis John Carlino
directed by Simon West

Mechanicby Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT FOR BOTH THIS FILM AND THE ORIGINAL THE MECHANIC. Michael Winner’s The Mechanic (1972) is nominally an action film, but it gets its point across with moments of extraordinary discomfort. As its primary attraction, it features Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent as contract killers with literally nothing to do, bored to tears as they stand around waiting for people to die. It’s a weird and disturbing scenario, but with modern box-office expectations being what they are, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s been effortlessly transformed into an average Jason Statham vehicle. The particulars remain the same: Hitman Arthur Bishop (Statham) is forced to kill his mentor, Harry (Donald Sutherland), under a contract from his employer (Tony Goldwyn); perhaps feeling a pang of guilt, he takes Harry’s wayward son Steve (Ben Foster) under his wing to teach him about the rules and tools of his trade. But it’s all presented in a much sillier light. There’s no other way to put it. When one of our assassins is instructed to poison his quarry, the characters (and the movie) deem this plan much too boring, and the whole ordeal ends in a gory brawl in which both parties stab each other with whatever they can get their hands on. It’s ridiculously over-the-top, sure, and although that’s to its credit, there are still too many moments where the viewer is left wanting something more substantial.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) + Secretariat (2010) – Blu-ray Discs + Conviction (2010)

January 24, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Family, Romance, Spain, Sports, Switzerland, Theatrical, UK

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER
**/**** Image A Sound B
starring Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones
written and directed by Woody Allen

SECRETARIAT
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Diane Lane, John Malkovich, Dylan Walsh, Scott Glenn
screenplay by Mike Rich, suggested by the book Secretariat: The Making of a Champion by William Nack
directed by Randall Wallace

CONVICTION
**/****
starring Hilary Swank, Sam Rockwell, Minnie Driver, Juliette Lewis
screenplay by Pamela Gray
directed by Tony Goldwyn

by Ian Pugh You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger represents the apotheosis of what shall now be called the New Woody Allen Average–those perfectly competent nothing movies that never rate more than two, two-and-a-half stars. I say that without a hint of sarcasm, and I say that as someone who considers Allen's work a primary influence–and as the guy who regularly defends Scoop. But I have to be honest: the New Woody Allen Average has become so predictably mediocre that I just can't take it anymore. The director's latest surrogate is another novelist, Roy (Josh Brolin), who's struggling to complete his latest book. It's putting a strain on his marriage to Sally (Naomi Watts), so he looks into the window of his pretty next-door neighbour (Freida Pinto) for romantic respite. Sally, an art curator, feels the same pressure, and casually drifts closer to her boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas). Sally's father Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) has left his wife for a prostitute (Lucy Punch), while his ex, Helena (Gemma Jones), retreats to spirituality, consulting a medium to find out where she stands in the great cosmic plan. It's a matter of "what you want" versus "what you take" in a race to see which floundering/philandering idiot can make the most tragic mistakes in the span of 90 minutes. Is it any different from Vicky Cristina Barcelona? When you break it down to its most basic components…no, not really.

Barney’s Version (2010) + No Strings Attached (2011)

January 21, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

BARNEY'S VERSION
***/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Rosamund Pike, Minnie Driver, Dustin Hoffman
screenplay by Michael Konyves, based on the novel by Mordecai Richler
directed by Richard J. Lewis

NO STRINGS ATTACHED
**/****
starring Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher, Cary Elwes, Kevin Kline
screenplay by Elizabeth Meriwether
directed by Ivan Reitman

by Ian Pugh It's easier to accept Barney's Version once you realize it doesn't have much to say. Little more than a series of vignettes, the film surveys in piecemeal fashion the life of one Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti), a Jewish artist who endured three tumultuous marriages (the wives are played by Rachel Lefevre, Minnie Driver, and Rosamund Pike) and the mysterious death of best friend Boogie (Scott Speedman, whom I initially mistook for Hugh Jackman) along the way to producing a popular soap opera. Giamatti doesn't do outstanding work here, but he's reliable in that familiar Giamatti way: perpetually locked in a state of concentration, trying to understand the subtext of whatever fortunes or misfortunes befall him. Seems like we're all trying to figure things out, doesn't it? The film doesn't know whether to focus on life as a comedy or as a drama, and for that reason alone, it feels incredibly disjointed. It should be. It's supposed to be.

The Green Hornet (2011)

January 14, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Superhero, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christoph Waltz, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
directed by Michel Gondry

Greenhornetby Walter Chaw Lenore Case (Cameron Diaz) asks chauffer Kato (Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou) out on a date in Michel Gondry's excrescent The Green Hornet, and then, once on that date, acts surprised when Kato makes a pass at her whilst tickling the ivories. It's the only thing of mild interest in a film that's otherwise the obvious front-runner for a few worst-of-2011 lists–a fate it'll probably avoid only because no one will remember the benighted thing an hour or two after screening it. Give The Green Hornet this, though: it's the first mainstream American film to even flirt with the idea of Yellow/White miscegenation since maybe the 18-year-old Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Rob Cohen's biopic about Chou's hero and the true antecedent to the Kato role. It's funny to me that men from one of the most populated places on the planet have, in the American cinema, been reduced to hilarious, impotent sidekicks or wise old men who know kung fu–or is there some kind of Little Richard image-castration going on here to protect delicate Caucasian egos from bedroom Yellow Peril? No, more likely the instinct that makes it funny to cast someone like Jackie Chan as Chris Tucker's bitch in the United States is the same one that fuels Chou's eventual rescue in this piece of shit by the titular lummox, played by Seth Rogen (make that rescues–the first coming when The Green Hornet tosses poor, dumb Kato a lobster-shaped inflatable to save his drowning ass). It's the same one that casts Mexicans as chulo drug-dealers hanging out on the East Side and poor Christoph Waltz, Oscar still warm, as an insecure crime lord given to monologues and bemoaning his mid-life crisis. The Green Hornet is bad stand-up, all improvisation and flop sweat you get to endure for over two full, agonizing, distended hours.

True Grit (2010)

December 22, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Spielberg, Theatrical, Western

****/****
starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Hailee Steinfeld
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Charles Portis
directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw In exactly the same way they distilled the essence of Cormac McCarthy into an overwhelming, oppressive, animal nihilism in No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen have distilled the folksy Americana of Charles Portis into their adaptation of his True Grit. That gift for translation is what made The Odyssey into their collection of regional songs and stories O Brother, Where Art Thou?, what made their Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink (the two films, along with O Brother, that True Grit most resembles) so sure in their genre approximations. More than mimics, the Coens’ genius is as interpreters and scholars, able to understand the thrust of not Preston Sturges, but of a Preston Sturges character–of not one book but, miraculously, a body of work. And though True Grit is as literal and faithful an adaptation of the novel as one could hope for, the brilliance of it is that it’s captured the immersive feeling of Portis’s prose. More than an adaptation, True Grit is an explanation of Portis’s work through the agency of an entirely different medium. It suggests that the Coens are like Tarantino’s monologue explaining Superman at the end of Kill Bill, Vol. 2: there is in their Fargos and Raising Arizonas sardonic commentary on genre and spectatorship. The big secret is that they are, in their own way, as detached and alien as cultural critics as Cronenberg is as an anthropologist.

Somewhere (2010)

December 22, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, Italy, Japan, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning, Chris Pontius, Michelle Monaghan
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere is another of her little tales of listlessness and the lost, of the beauty in the longueurs of existential crises. The summation of her riffs on loneliness and temporariness and the brief interludes of light that merely serve as punctuations for the dark, it’s her best film. Funny how one of the great, near-universally-accepted cinema fiascos could net a filmmaker damaged enough to make delicate, ambiguous pictures about the fear of growing up. It’s there at those crossroads that Coppola’s work locates itself with characters in situations larger than them, buffeted into ideological corners and forced to answer Prufrock-ian questions, cloistered in hotels and Versailles that substitute for chambers of the sea, indeed, among some talk of you and me. Somewhere feels deeply, intensely personal, though the only secrets it divulges are the obvious ones (the life of reluctant celebrity played out in anonymous rooms before invisible audiences), so that its intimacy is a product of a conversation between its impossible signs and the nostalgia for an experience of loss that we provide it. It’s gorgeous, and gorgeously broken–a movie about lifelines by a person who’s drowned.

The Fighter (2010)

December 17, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Sports, Theatrical

*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo
screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson
directed by David O. Russell

Fighterby Walter Chaw In this episode of Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals, former Funky-Bunch yogi and butt-model Wahlberg gets in the ring, but his real challenge comes in the upstaging Method skull-sharpening of Christian Bale and all the white-trash broads of Style Channel's Bostonburba-licious. Oscar-baiting is the least of the picture's myriad crimes, though–tune in to director David O. Russell's absolutely gassed The Fighter for a training montage, an inexplicable '80s soundtrack (pop quiz: Last time Whitesnake used in a film without irony? It's a trick question), and a Rocky trajectory to the Big Fight, this time with Hollywood ending intact. Through it all, centring it like a brick on a shit-blanket, is Wahlberg, his dim-bulb "Say hi to your mother for me, all right?" persona the immovable object stalemating the plot's unstoppable force. The only thing really surprising about The Fighter is that Ron Howard didn't direct it.

The Tourist (2010)

December 10, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, France, Italy, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and Christopher McQuarrie and Julian Fellowes
directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Touristby Ian Pugh The loss of Bond 23 to MGM's umpteenth bankruptcy drama was just one of the many disappointments in the cinematic year that was–but an even bitterer pill arrived in the films that took 007's place. With neither Daniel Craig nor Matt Damon to keep a perpetually-ailing genre on its feet, 2010's triumvirate of identical spy thrillers (Knight and Day, Salt, now The Tourist) represents a return to the cozy arms of irrelevance. Sexpot secret agent Elise Ward ("Salt" herself, Angelina Jolie) leads her superiors on a wild goose chase through Venice in search of American math teacher Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), whom they believe to be her mysterious fugitive beau, Alexander Pearce. Unfortunately, this little game also garners the attention of a gangster (Steven Berkoff) to whom Pearce is rather severely indebted. The Tourist is not a daring picture by any means. The most unconventional thing about it, other than the casting of Depp, is the oddity of hiring Timothy Dalton to play a version of "M" when this is so clearly a Roger Moore movie: a romantic trip across Italy in a white tuxedo, peppered with stunts that border on slapstick.

Black Swan (2010)

December 3, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey
screenplay by Andres Heinz and Mark Heyman and John McLaughlin
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw She’s incapable of reaching climax throughout the first hour of Black Swan, but then the floodgates open in the most Keatsian work in Darren Aronofsky’s growing portfolio of Romanticist explorations. Call it a ballet of the consummation sublime, the idea that once achieved, the immediate disappointment and disgust for the act overwhelms the sexual release of the moment before–and watch Black Swan in a lovelorn double-feature with Jane Campion’s Bright Star for the full impact of Aronofsky’s achievement here. As a thriller, Black Swan doesn’t do much more than graft a few phantom frames onto the periphery of Jean Benoit-Levy’s Ballerina, Altman’s The Company, or Powell/Pressburger’s The Red Shoes–but note how the picture owes its creepy intensity to the sort of social satire-through-body horror popularized by David Cronenberg. (Though it’s Cronenberg as fever dream rather than as insectile chill.) Note, too, how Natalie Portman finally finds herself the actor she was always considered to be in a role that breaks her legs and feet, forces her to masturbate and self-mutilate, and in the end transforms her into the very effigy of the absolute, voracious, consumptive nature of creation. In its nasty sexual biology, it’s the evocation of the secret ending to Charlotte’s Web–the off-stage fucking, and cannibalism, and matricide, and all that hunger prettified into a phrase artfully turned.

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

November 9, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, 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.

Sex and the City 2 (2010) + Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

October 3, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

SEX AND THE CITY 2
ZERO STARS/****
starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, Kim Cattrall
written and directed by Michael Patrick King

PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ben Kingsley, Gemma Arterton, Alfred Molina
screenplay by Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard
directed by Mike Newell

Sexandpersiaby Walter Chaw One may be a misguided liberal screed and the other a misguided conservative screed, but Sex and the City 2 and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (hereafter Prince of Persia) are very much alike in that they're what a Tea Party meeting would look like with a budget. They're politically-confused hodgepodges of bad ideas and misplaced, incoherent outrage–most of it gleaned from the one or two times some idiot accidentally read the A-section of a newspaper, the rest gathered from Dummies primers on how to be cursorily informed in the Information Age. They're similarly infused with healthy doses of arrogance and cultural empiricism that speak directly to the reasons the United States is the target of fundamentalist whackos convinced we're all just like the randy quartet of aging bitches on a hedonism bender in the Middle East in Sex and the City 2. Hateful, vile, both films are also indicated by a distinct lack of artistry, representing a world post-Michael Bay in which a goodly portion of movies are dependent on not only other cultural touchstones (a TV series, a videogame) for the entirety of their alleged appeal, but on some of the most vapid cultural touchstones in the brief history of our popular culture, period.

Let Me In (2010)

October 1, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire

**/****
starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chloë Grace Moretz, Richard Jenkins, Elias Koteas
screenplay by Matt Reeves, based on the novel Låt den rätte komma in by John Ajvide Lindqvist
directed by Matt Reeves

Letmeinby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Matt Reeves’s redux of Swede Tomas Alfredson’s lovely, understated, doom-laden Let the Right One In finds magnification in the wrong places while betraying what seems to be its better nature in order to present something more “palatable” to a popular audience. Wrong to call it a “dumbing down”–better to say that elements left unspoken or at arm’s length in the original film are presented in Let Me In in as confrontational, uncontroversial a way as possible. More’s the pity, as the movie begins with Ronald Reagan quoting Alexis de Tocqueville in his “Evil Empire” speech (delivered to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983) on a television in a snowed-in New Mexico E.R.: “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America… America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” It’s a thread of Christian fervour that weaves through much of the first twenty minutes of the picture, through the introduction of our hero, Owen (a tremendous Kodi Smit-McPhee), suffering an extended Grace delivered by a faceless mother (Cara Buono) and, later, an admonition by an also-faceless father over the telephone that Owen’s mother is unbalanced and should stow her Christian shit a bit more tightly. The lack of the father as a physical presence in the film becomes a poignant elision in this respect: in a film about good and evil, the divorce between Father and Son, as it were, is a pithy one.

I’m Still Here (2010)

September 22, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Esoterica, Jack Nicholson, Music, Satire, Theatrical

****/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Antony Langdon, Casey Affleck, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs
screenplay by Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix
directed by Casey Affleck 

by Ian Pugh It’s far too easy to believe that Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here hinges on whether or not its subject has perpetrated a hoax. Joaquin Phoenix grows a lunatic’s beard, declares he’s quitting acting, and starts planning a hip-hop career? Surely, he can’t be serious. But here’s how it ends, kids: yes, I guess you could call it a “put-on” in the strictest sense of the word–yet at the same time, he is deadly serious. What needs to be understood about Phoenix, and this film, is that there was a kernel of truth to everything the man mumbled through that maniacal persona. I do believe that Phoenix is tired of acting (or, at least, tired of stardom), and, for his farewell performance, he’s blurred the line between actor and role so completely as to obliterate all our preconceived notions of who he is and what he is supposed to represent. The false Phoenix–the bedraggled, abusive prophet spouting non-sequiturs–is, for all intents and purposes, the “real” Phoenix, the iconic artist who pulls a disappearing act by forcing the art and the iconography to consume his entire being. You can’t call I’m Still Here a mockumentary, exactly, because, inside and outside of the “act,” that is precisely what happened. And what came out of it is a harrowing thought exercise about artistic failure and the baggage of celebrity.

The Social Network (2010)

September 22, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Theatrical

****/*****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer
screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich
directed by David Fincher

Socialnetworkby Walter Chaw An asshole movie about an asshole, David Fincher’s The Social Network is an exacting, brutal celluloid treatise on the theory that the only reason anything ever gets made in this world is because some smart guys don’t get laid enough. It’s the misandrous analogue to Camille Paglia’s once-inflammatory assertion in her Sexual Personae that if women were in charge of civilization, we’d still be living in grass huts. Freud at its mud-wallow base, The Social Network isn’t thoughtful–it’s not a conversation unto itself, not much more than pocket philosophizing easily turned into a weapon for either side. In the end, it’s just a series of loose, out-of-sequence vignettes chronicling the creation of a 25-billion dollar enterprise on the back of a painful break-up and a best friend getting into an exclusive campus club that said 25-billion dollar enterprise’s creator could not. But it’s good. Good because Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin have tapped into a vein of male anxiety in a way that feels like mainlining a particularly hot, particularly angry fix. It’s Fight Club again, but with an ending that’s more about the toothed pit at the middle of male loneliness and obsession–drawing that line between genius and psychosis instead of, as in Fight Club, pandering to some notion of a romantic solution capable of soothing eons of atavistic penis crises. It’s Fight Club without Marla.

Machete (2010)

September 2, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Danny Trejo, Jeff Fahey, Michelle Rodriguez, Steven Seagal
screenplay by Robert Rodriguez & Alvaro Rodríguez
directed by Ethan Maniquis & Robert Rodriguez

Macheteby Walter Chaw The only kind of movie Robert Rodriguez should be making as well as the kind of movie The Expendables should have been, the knowing, balls-out Machete is unforgivable, reprehensible, sleazy, disgusting fun, and somehow not entirely stupid. It gives props to the eternally quickly-dead character actor Danny Trejo as the titular ex-Federale, a grab-bag of Mexican stereotypes who in the course of his bloody rampage (for justice, of course) uses a weed-whacker and a pick-axe, among other day-labourer tools. Meanwhile, when he's picked up as a patsy in a senator's ploy, he more fears that he's being tapped for a "septic job." It's unabashed in its politics, taking on the illegal immigration debate in the United States with a naïve brio and outrage. But it's all the more winning, I think, for its complete lack of embarrassment about itself. The thought even occurs that the reason it works is the exact reason a few of the better drive-in/grindhouse/exploitation films of the Seventies worked: Born of low pretensions, it frees itself to explore its outrage with a simple-mindedness that rings with the earnest "geez!" of a Kevin Costner joint.