Thriller Archives - Page 15 of 67

Scarecrows (1988) – Blu-ray Disc

October 17, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Zombie

*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A+
starring Ted Vernon, Michael Simms, Victoria Christian, Richard Vidan
written by Richard Jefferies and William Wesley
directed by William Wesley

by Walter Chaw Terrible in that plucky way that earnest shoestring products can be terrible, William Wesley’s Scarecrows has a few memorable gore moments and a lot of bad dialogue, execrable performances, and senseless exposition. I saw this movie on VHS in high school as part of my weekend ritual of renting a shelf and staying up all night shotgunning the dregs. This led to a few remarkable discoveries, of course–and it led to discoveries like this as well. The hook of Scarecrows is a strong one, taking the somehow underutilized image of the scarecrow in the horror genre and making a grand bogey of it, but the result is essentially a zombie-cum-spam-in-a-cabin flick featuring a paramilitary group fresh off a heist engaged in a supernatural backcountry rigmarole. Still, the film’s greatest crime isn’t a bad premise but that it’s boring. Really boring. Mainly it’s boring because every character acts like an idiot at all times, making it hard to muster much in the way of stakes. That’s also why Scarecrows isn’t scary or tense, and because I think it wasn’t long enough and they ran out of money, there are tons of filler close-ups of scarecrows just sort of, you know, hanging there. Kuleshov or something.

Fantastic Fest ’16: Short Films

October 15, 20162016, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '16, Film Festivals, Horror, Mexico, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

Givertaker **½/**** (d. Paul Gandersman)
A nice, compact cautionary tale featuring a novice witch who takes vengeance on her buddies only to find there are Shadowmen living under other people's beds. I wish the lore were better developed, but it's paced beautifully and the young cast is game and lively. I wanted more, and I don't often feel that way.

TIFF ’16: The Bad Batch; Colossal; Jackie

October 13, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Canada, Chile, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Romance, Sci-Fi, Spain, Thriller, TIFF

THE BAD BATCH
**½/****
starring Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Giovanni Ribisi, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

COLOSSAL
**/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis, Dan Stevens, Tim Blake Nelson
written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo

JACKIE
***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, John Hurt
screenplay by Noah Oppenheim
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Bill Chambers Three very different #TIFF16 films–a postapocalyptic cannibal western (The Bad Batch), a modestly-scaled kaiju eiga (Colossal), and a period docudrama (Jackie)–form a trilogy in my mind thematically linked by crestfallen female protagonists who discover reserves of strength in dire situations. The Bad Batch is the only one of these movies directed by a woman, though, and dare I say you can tell, not only in how the camera softly caresses Jason Momoa’s Olympian contours, but also in the way the framing and blocking of the heroine imply the constant peril of being a woman. Working through the neophyte filmmaker’s genre playbook, director Ana Lily Amirpour follows up her vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night with this dystopian flick most reminiscent of the Australian strain in terms of vibe/aesthetics, what with its shantytown sets, symbolic names, and obligatory feral child. (The only thing missing is a car fetish.) Winsome Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is exiled to the other side of some Trumpian fence in Texas with only the clothes on her back and a tattoo that identifies her as an undesirable (or bad batch). Almost immediately she’s dragged away to a cannibal camp, where they chop off her right arm. Missing a leg, too, by the time she escapes, she finds refuge–and prosthetic limbs–in the village of Comfort, whose denizens mostly give her space. Time and body-image issues stoke her desire for revenge, however, putting her on a collision course with Momoa’s Miami Man, a brilliant sketch artist who’s also a fearsome, unsympathetic consumer of human flesh.

The Neon Demon (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

October 5, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Elle Fanning, Karl Glusman, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by Nicolas Winding Refn and Mary Laws & Polly Stenham
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

by Walter Chaw There’s a quote from The Right Stuff I love that I thought about constantly during Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon: “There was a demon that lived in the air.” I found in it something of an explanation for, or at least a corollary to, the picture’s title, in that the demon in The Right Stuff refers to the sound barrier while the demon in Refn’s film refers to, perhaps, soft obstructions of other kinds. Artificially lit. Poisonous. The quote continues with “whoever challenged [the demon] would die…where the air could no longer get out of the way.” The first film I saw by Refn was Valhalla Rising, an expressionistic telling of the Odin myth–the part where he spent time on Earth (went missing, basically) before returning–that touches on the scourge of Christianity and how that relates to feeling lost, or losing what you believe in. Valhalla Rising led me to Bronson and to Pusher and then I followed Refn through Drive, which talks about the difficulties of being male, and Only God Forgives, which talks about the difficulties of being a son. Now there’s The Neon Demon, completing a trilogy of sorts by talking about the difficulties of being a girl becoming a woman and an object for men, eviscerated in certain tabernacles where women are worshiped as ideals and sacrificed to the same. It’s astonishing.

Dead-End Drive-In (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

October 2, 20161980s, 2016, Action, Arrow Video, Australia, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Prison, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Ned Manning, Natalie McCurry, Peter Whitford
screenplay by Peter Smalley, from a story by Peter Carey
directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith

by Bryant Frazer Australia’s signature entry in the cinematic encyclopedia of dystopian hellscapes will always be the Mad Max series, and rightly so. But if you dig just a little deeper into the corpus of down-and-dirty genre movies from Down Under, you’ll discover this B-grade entry from Aussie action impresario Brian Trenchard-Smith, which daydreams about confining rebellious youth culture to a dusty prison camp way out on the edge of town. Trenchard-Smith is best known abroad for 1983’s BMX Bandits, an early Nicole Kidman feature widely available for home viewing in the U.S., and his corpus comes with the Quentin Tarantino seal of approval. Dead-End Drive-In isn’t great cinema, but it has some well-executed stuntwork that bolsters a speculative premise just goofy enough to catch the imagination.

Fantastic Fest ’16: Salt and Fire

September 26, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Werner Herzog, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '16, Film Festivals, Thriller

½*/****
starring Veronica Ferres, Michael Shannon, Gael Garcia Bernal, Volker Zack Michalowski
written by Werner Herzog, based on the story “Aral” by Tom Bissell
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw There’s an early moment in Werner Herzog’s misbegotten Salt and Fire where three scientists wander through an abandoned terminal in a Bolivian airport, scored by a cacophonous, disturbing Ernst Reijseger composition, that finds Herzog on comfortable, familiar ground. His films are at their best when they combine this kind of displacing, disquieting music against scenes of the mundane. Later, as his DP Peter Zeitlinger pans across the flaking spines of an ancient book collection, and again when Zeitlinger takes in the staggering scope of Bolivia’s Uyuni Salt Flat, Herzog finds his rhythm as chronicler of unknowable mysteries and philosopher of intimations of immortality. The film would have been better without dialogue. A scene right around the mid-point where scientist Laura (Veronica Ferres) and mad industrialist Matt Riley (Michael Shannon) have a conversation about children in front of a crackling fire would have been transcendent silent. The planes of Shannon’s and Ferres’s faces, lit by flickers of orange, are suggestive of extraordinary depths and tensions. When they’re forced to say things like “the tragedy is when men are afraid of the light,” it tends to make it all gravid and unintentionally hilarious. When Michael Shannon is incapable of landing a weird line, imagine how the others fare.

Telluride ’16: Short Films

September 20, 20162016, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Disney, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Iran, Mystery, Short Films, Telluride, Telluride 2016, Thriller

by Walter Chaw

Dirt */**** (d. Darius Clark Monroe) One of those time-loop conceits that opens with a guy burying a body and ends with…no, not telling. Dirt has an issue with editing and looping, the fallout being that image overlaps noise, confusing function. It’s possible to do this meaningfully; it’s also possible to junk it up so completely that every transition begins with unnecessary obfuscation. That’s what’s happened here. Dirt isn’t promising, but it is brief.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection – Blu-ray Disc

September 18, 2016****/****, 1970s, 2016, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Japan, Prison, Thriller

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972)
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Meiko Kaji, Natsuyagi Isao, Rie Yokoyama, Fumio Watanabe
written by Fumio Kônami and Hirô Matsuda, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Shunya Itô

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972)
****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Meiko Kaji, Kayoko Shiraishi, Fumio Watanabe, Eiko Yanami
written by Shunya Itô, Fumio Kônami and Hirô Matsuda, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Shunya Itô

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (1973)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Meiko Kaji, Mikio Narita, Koji Nanbara, Yayoi Watanabe
written by Hirô Matsuda, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Shunya Itô

Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701’s Grudge Song (1973)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Meiko Kaji, Masakazu Tamura, Toshiyuki Hosokawa, Sanae Nakahara
written by Fumio Kônami, Hirô Matsuda and Yasuharu Hasebe, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Yasuharu Hasebe

by Bryant Frazer One of the most audacious debuts in cinematic history is rookie Shunya Itô’s expressionist rape-revenge saga, the Female Prisoner Scorpion trilogy. These three films, released in the 11-month period between August 1972 and July 1973, elevate Japanese studio Toei’s series of “pinky violence” sexploitation films with daring, theatrical visuals reminiscent of the bold work that got Seijun Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu and a subversive sensibility that could be described as genuinely feminist. Of course, Itô’s studio bosses didn’t have art in mind. Loosely adapted from a popular manga, the first Scorpion was conceived as a gender-swapped take on Teruo Ishii’s popular Abashiri Prison film series, on which Itô had worked as assistant director. Moving the story from a men’s prison to a women’s prison accommodated sensationalized images of nudity and sexual violence, which even major Japanese studios were relying on in the early 1970s as a way to compete with American imports. But Itô talked his screenwriters into throwing out their derivative original script and starting anew. He also convinced Meiko Kaji, a rising star thanks to her appearances in the popular Stray Cat Rock movies about Japanese youth street culture, to take on the title role. (Kaji arrived at Toei from Nikkatsu after the latter studio diverted its production resources to so-called “Roman porno” softcore in an attempt to compete with the popularity of television.) The results are singular. Itô’s flamboyant visuals created florid showcases for Kaji’s riveting screen presence, especially her oft-deployed 1,000-yard stare–a stone-cold, daggers-to-your-eyeballs glare of the type seen elsewhere in only the most unnerving of horror films. Itô and Kaji turned out to be an electrifying combination.

TIFF ’16: Elle

September 10, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Thriller, TIFF

***/****
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bill Chambers The first thing you hear in Elle, after Anne Dudley’s giallo-worthy (and, thus, slightly misleading) overture, are some violent sex noises, but the first thing you see is a cat, a good ol’ Russian blue, who is watching his owner get violated with daunting ambivalence. Meet the director. Migrating from his native Holland to France this time, Paul Verhoeven has made a movie fascinated with rape at either the best or worst cultural moment he could have chosen. Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) is depicted being raped several times over the course of the film by the same ski-masked stranger; my own reaction was a complicated gnarl of disgust and desensitization that led to more disgust. Eventually, I think, Michèle’s relationship with her attacker becomes S&M in all but name, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Michèle is a well-to-do Parisian with a videogame company that seems to specialize in hentai (meaning you also get to see tentacle rape, Verhoeven-style). Family members–including a mother (Judith Magre) who’s into much-younger men and a layabout son (Jonas Bloquet) who’s fallen under the spell of a pregnant gold digger (Alice Isaaz)–orbit in close proximity despite her abrasive candour, which at one point finds her telling her friends and puppyish ex-husband (Charles Berling) about her rape over cocktails after work. They worry, but because she’s the alpha dog, they probably don’t worry enough.

Telluride ’16: Arrival

September 6, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2016, Thriller

****/****
starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker
screenplay by Eric Heisserer, based on the story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw Based on a humdinger of a Ted Chiang short story called “Story of Your Life,” Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, while changing a detail here and there, distils the emotionality of the story, honours the science of it, and goes places the premise naturally indicates that it might. It clarifies without simplifying. It posits as its hero Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams, who has never been better), a brilliant linguistics professor enlisted by the military to try to communicate with the things in the giant spacecraft that have appeared in twelve different locations around the planet. Not all of them, mind–just the ones in Montana. The others are their problem. Arrival suggests that the first complication of this story of our lives is that there are pronouns other than “us” in matters of international import. It reminds of The Abyss in its tale of an alien arrival that requires human cooperation, but whose purpose doesn’t appear to be to coerce a response through a show of force. They just hang there, waiting for us to learn their language. That’s an important point. It’s something to think about.

Don’t Breathe (2016)

August 30, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Daniel Zovatto, Stephen Lang
written by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues
directed by Fede Alvarez

by Walter Chaw Fede Alvarez is the real deal. He made a short film in 2009 called Ataque de Panico! and from it scored a gig directing the fantastic Evil Dead reboot. He has a clean style and a respect for the cinema as a narrative vehicle. What he introduces he inevitably pays off (Chekhov would approve), and he has a way with the camera that's as witty as it is wise. Consider a moment in his new film, Don't Breathe, where he introduces a workshop with a playful, loping push-in on a giant hammer, then pulls back to find one of our heroes where he was, rooting around below. Odd to say about things as extreme as Evil Dead or as unbearably tense as Don't Breathe, but Alvarez's pictures are delightful. They trigger a giddy response. They are knowing, ingratiating in that way that a secret shared between connoisseurs can be ingratiating. It's that feeling you feel when you're watching a movie by someone you trust won't make a hash of it. In just two features, Alvarez has earned that trust and more.

I, Madman (1989) – Blu-ray Disc

August 28, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Imadman1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Jenny Wright, Clayton Rohner, Randall William Cook, Steven Memel
written by David Chaskin
directed by Tibor Takacs

by Walter Chaw I like just about everything about I, Madman. It’s a pastiche picture coming at the end of the slasher era that cobbles together bits of De Palma and “Tales from the Darkside”, tosses in some wonderfully cheap stop-motion effects, and stars the incomparable ’80s dreamgirl Jenny Wright. Truly, it has everything. Wright is Virginia, a used-bookstore cashier (even her job is a super-nerd’s idea of a dreamgirl’s job) addicted to lurid pulps (sigh!) who is, as the film begins, reading a nasty thing about a “Jackal Boy” monster created in the unwitting womb of an unfortunate victim. Virginia’s cop boyfriend Richard (Clayton Rohner) disapproves of her reading habits because of the states they send her into, but, Virginia being Virginia, she persists. She becomes obsessed with tracking down a volume called I, Madman, written by a certain Malcolm Brand (Randall William Cook). It’s about a nutter who gets dumped because of his displeasing features and so he cuts them off. Alas, slicer’s regret has Brand attacking women in an attempt to take back the missing pieces of his face. Turns out Brand isn’t writing fiction, but memoir, and Virginia’s interest in him has attracted him to her through the pages of his book.

The Nice Guys (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

August 22, 20162016, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Matt Bomer, Kim Basinger
written by Shane Black & Anthony Bagarozzi
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw Shane Black’s The Nice Guys is a delightful fusion of John D. MacDonald and Gregory McDonald; if it had a cover, it’d be painted by Robert McGinnis. It’s California noir, no doubt, the love child of The Long Goodbye and Inherent Vice, but with the flip social commentary and occasional bouts of ultra-violence found in Carl Hiaasen’s Florida noirs. Sufficed to say that Black, who’s often spoken of his love for crime fiction, has distilled pulp here and with his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang into breezy, post-modern concoctions. The Nice Guys is as smart as it is inconsequential, as brutal and exploitive as it is a commentary on brutality and exploitation. More than anything else, it’s a very fine critical pastiche of the kinds of books you read in an afternoon because they’re thrilling, socially irresponsible, and afire with misogyny, nihilism, and Byronic macho bullshit Romanticism. But cool, baby, and stylish.

Suicide Squad (2016)

August 3, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller, Will Smith

½*/****
starring Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie, Joel Kinnaman
written and directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw Ugly garbage that will make a lot of money, David Ayer’s Suicide Squad begins where Batman v Superman left off by positing that in a world without its big, mopey, solipsistic, Byronic Boy Scout, there will come a time when the good guys (i.e., us) will need to enlist the help of a bunch of psychopathic mutants and contract killers to protect our way of life. It’s a little bit like Escape from New York but not cool and not fun; and it’s a little bit like a satire, except that it’s more of a documentary. Marvel films are aspirational and DC films in this new cycle are diseased and beaten. Both are bloated beyond repair and slavish to a core fandom they daren’t betray, making them essentially unwatchable along their tentpole storylines–though you want less to kill yourself after the Marvel films. The bright light lately has been one-offs and side projects: Marvel’s television universe, for instance, has blossomed on Netflix and DC’s own TV series “The Flash” and “Supergirl” seem to hear the music. Then, of course, there’s Guardians of the Galaxy. The only thing worse than the kernel of an idea at the centre of Suicide Squad is its unlikely choice of writer-director to bring it to life, Ayer, perhaps the most vile, pessimistic filmmaker in the United States, whom Warner Bros. has given the task of appealing broadly somehow with this material: a little softening here, an extra scene/hero moment there after gauging the breakout star from the reaction to early teaser trailers. If you’re going to hire Ayer to do this, make it a hard-R and take out the yuk-yuk comedy. He’s not funny. He’s not for kids. The strain of pleasing dozens of masters shows. It shows in the select mix of fondly-remembered oldies à la Guardians of the Galaxy, and it shows in the flop-sweat of an entire production so badly compromised by its too-big star and its too-threatened masculinity.

Jason Bourne (2016)

July 30, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel
written by Paul Greengrass & Christopher Rouse
directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw There are two modes in Paul Greengrass’s Jason Bourne, his and star Matt Damon’s return to the franchise after almost a decade away from it: thudding tedium, and incomprehensible chaos. By this fifth instalment (which follows the Jeremy Renner-starring spin-off attempt, The Bourne Legacy), it all plays a little too much like self-parody. Every time there’s a conversation about THE TRUTH now, it feels like a bad SNL skit. I still love The Bourne Identity. Watching it in comparison with the Greengrass films (and with most any modern action movie) underscores exactly how superior is Doug Liman as an action director. Liman shoots an action scene like the dance sequences in Saturday Night Fever: with respect for geography and the skill and physicality of his stunt performers and cast. The car chase through Paris in the original begins with a careful consultation of a map, a few questions about the state of the car, and some light but crucial character development, then proceeds into a nice, clean set-piece that establishes stakes, spatial geometry, and destination in a way that is Friedkin-esque. It’s a textbook, as good as the L-train underpass pursuit in The French Connection and the wrong-way freeway chase in To Live and Die in LA.. The Bourne Identity is defiantly classical action filmmaking and that’s why it still seems fresh, even though it will be fifteen years old next year.

Point Break (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 26, 20162015, 2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Sports, Thriller, ZERO STARS

Pointbreak1

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras F
starring Édgar Ramírez, Luke Bracey, Teresa Palmer, Ray Winstone
screenplay by Kurt Wimmer
directed by Ericson Core

by Walter Chaw Not enough can be said about Kathryn Bigelow’s action sense. The honkytonk slaughter sequence in Near Dark, from the first moment (when the vampires crest the hill) to the last (when the lone survivor defenestrates), is a triumph of design, of score–including the high lonesome tones of a George Strait classic on the jukebox–and editing and execution. It’s that perfect economy of ideas-into-motion that indicates her cult classic Point Break, too–that, paired with absolutely perfect casting, from Keanu Reeves’s Everybody’s All-American football hero-turned-FBI dude Johnny Utah and Patrick Swayze’s blissed-out charismatic leader all the way down to Gary Busey and Lori Petty, the best supporting staff a film about a surf-zen cult-cum-bank-robbing crew could ask for. It’s a lovely marriage between ludicrous high-concept and the period immediately following the 1980s, which found the country in a reflective mood, perched there on the verge of upsetting the primacy of film for the coming digital age. Bigelow’s Point Break was a showcase for practical stuntwork and, philosophically, a nice metaphor for the excess of the “greed is good”/City on the Hill period drawing to a close. The bad guys rob banks to pay their way to enlightenment. Of course it all ends in tears.

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

July 21, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Idris Elba
screenplay by Simon Pegg & Doug Jung
directed by Justin Lin

by Walter Chaw The cultural watershed isn’t when it’s revealed that Sulu (John Cho) is gay, but rather a moment just before that, when an interracial couple–an Asian man and a white woman–are used as an example of a “good” relationship. I’m Chinese, my wife is a tall redhead. When my kids watch Star Trek Beyond, it’ll be the first time they see their parents reflected in a major American tentpole. There are a lot of things wrong with Star Trek Beyond, which at its best is great in the same way that David Twohy’s The Chronicles of Riddick is great–and at its worst is bad in the same way the last film in this reboot series is bad (that is, self-conscious and fan-pleasing, torturously so). But when Sulu is given the one, true, rousing hero moment in the piece, it speaks not just to the vision of a multicultural United States that Lin’s The Fast and the Furious movies proposed, but also, perhaps, to the real impact of an Asian-American director behind the camera. It makes sense that a Lin-directed Star Trek would make Sulu the hero; I just wasn’t expecting to be so affected by it.

Green Room (2016) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

July 17, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Music, Thriller

Greenroom1

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras B
starring Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Patrick Stewart
written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw I wonder if Jeremy Saulnier has ever made something that wasn’t, in its dark heart of hearts, a comedy. I hadn’t considered this before a dear friend suggested it after a screening of Green Room, and it caused me to reassess Saulnier’s previous films, Murder Party and Blue Ruin. The labels “hardcore” and “brutal” don’t feel exactly right, though his work is certainly both at times. There’s a Mel Brooks quote I like that defines tragedy as you getting a paper-cut–it hurts, it’s awful, it’s terrible–and comedy as somebody else falling into a sewer and dying. Saulnier’s films are litanies of horrible, unimaginable calamities befalling generally well-meaning schlubs who are altogether unequipped to deal with them. Murder Party, his feature debut, set the template. Its protagonist is a lonely guy who answers a general invitation to attend a Halloween “Murder Party,” where he discovers that he’s the only guest and that all of the hosts have decided to murder him. It’s the most obviously comic of his pictures, and it ends with a moment of crystal-blue melancholy as it becomes clear that the audience has sutured not just to this guy’s guilelessness, but to the loneliness driving him as well. Blue Ruin is a masterpiece of the same sort of mechanics. It’s delightful: delightfully funny, delightfully smart, delightfully brutal. The hero of that piece, played by Macon Blair (who has a key role in Green Room), is another nebbish pulled from obscurity to be, briefly, the hero of his own life.

In a Lonely Place (1950) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 2016****/****, 1950s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Romance, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Inalonelyplace5

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid
screenplay by Andrew Solt, adaptation by Edmund H. North, based upon a story by Dorothy B. Hughes
directed by Nicholas Ray

by Walter Chaw In another time and place, they would’ve called Gloria Grahame “one sick twist,” and the brand would’ve stuck. There are stories, a few of them true. There’s the one about her stepson, and the thing where she keeps getting plastic surgery until her face is paralyzed, which was the alleged goal after Grahame became morbidly devoted to Kuleshov’s editing theories. There’s the weird book an ex-lover wrote about her last days, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, and indeed, her story has been told largely through the men who wanted her, the men who had her, and the men who ruined her. In many ways, she’s the quintessential femme fatale of the noir era, not just for the roles she took, but because the roles she took reflected the traps she was in. She’s the patron saint of the way we treat women first as objects of desire, then as objects of disgust. Her late moment as the girl who “cain’t” say no encapsulates the perversity of Rodgers & Hammerstein, sure, and the sad decline of a woman who confessed at the end of her life that she never quite figured out Hollywood–though it sure looks like Hollywood had her figured. She is one of the great tragic figures of the age, both microcosm and avatar of that wonderland of image-fixers and dream-crushers. For my money, the film that best captures Grahame in her complexity, in all her multifoliate relationships with the world and her millions of voyeurs, is Nicholas Ray’s scabrous In A Lonely Place. It’s a masculine confession and an apology. It’s hollow. Aren’t they all?

No Way Out (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

July 4, 20161980s, 2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Espionage, Mystery, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

***/**** Image B- Sound B Commentary C
starring Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Sean Young, Howard Duff
screenplay by Robert Garland, based on the book The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw I was lucky enough to be 14 in 1987, right at that age where my buddies and I were dropped off at the theatre by our parents for whatever we wanted to see. Because we were generally not well-supervised in such matters, we talked them into buying us tickets for stuff like Hellraiser, RoboCop, Lethal Weapon, Full Metal Jacket, and The Untouchables. My first R-rated theatrical experiences were, in other words, magical. They were gleefully violent, extravagantly so, and the sex… Jesus. The sex in mainstream movies in 1987 was combustible–enough so that it formed the backbone of my onanism for the next several years. I saw Angel Heart this way, and Fatal Attraction of course. Key in there is Roger Donaldson’s largely-forgotten but durable political-paranoia thriller No Way Out. Starring Kevin Costner, cementing a legendary winning streak that began a month or two earlier with his star-making turn in The Untouchables and continued with the dead sexy Bull Durham the following year and the legendarily-chaste Field of Dreams a year after that. Lost in conversations about Costner’s stardom during this period is his preternatural ability to be an Everyman sex symbol. Girls loved him, and guys didn’t mind because Costner isn’t really all that threatening. He sure is likable, though. When he introduced a note of menace into his nice-guy archetype in A Perfect World, he, in fact, discovered his perfect role. The problems came when he tried to be something more than that. Cowboy, baseball player, fish-man, all-around all-American? No problem. Attorney, doctor–now we got issues.