Thriller Archives - Page 23 of 67

TIFF ’13: Enemy

September 16, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Film Festivals, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

***/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon, Isabella Rossellini
screenplay by Javier Gullón, based on the novel The Double by José Saramago
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Angelo Muredda If the interviews floating around online in the wake of his appearance at TIFF are any indication, Denis Villeneuve spent much of his time with press managing expectations about Enemy. Though it’s technically his English-language debut, as well as the first of two collaborations with Jake Gyllenhaal in a year’s time, Enemy isn’t slated to come out until sometime next spring, long after its bigger-budgeted, higher-pedigreed younger sibling, Prisoners. Judging from its deferred release and Villeneuve’s own comments that the film is an experimental project, a one-off to help him transition from the high-toned tragedy of Incendies to more classical Hollywood filmmaking, you’d think it was a dog, but in truth it’s probably the best thing he’s ever made–a modest little psycho-thriller based on José Saramago’s novel The Double, set in a jaundiced Toronto no one would want to hold a festival in.

TIFF ’13: Prisoners

September 9, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

**½/****
starring starring Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, Paul Dano
screenplay by Aaron Guzikowski
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Angelo Muredda Denis Villeneuve comes to America with Prisoners, an alternately strange and gripping but finally self-immolating crime picture that earns the right to its austere silver Warner Bros. logo before it devolves into a Scooby-Doo mystery for sadists. Last seen beckoned to the heavens by a pre-Oscar-anointed Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman plunges right back into the shit here as Keller Dover, a suburban dad and mild-mannered carpenter who goes berserk when his daughter and her friend (the child of perennially underused Viola Davis and Terrence Howard) vanish after Thanksgiving dinner. The first suspect is Alex (Paul Dano), a creepy, developmentally delayed young man who roams through the neighbourhood in his RV. Though he’s arrested by crack detective Loki (nicely played by Jake Gyllenhaal, despite his character’s name and distressingly shoddy police work) and released when the investigators find nothing to pin him on, Alex is promptly recaptured by a raging Dover, who turns out to have his own torture venue for this very occasion, complete with room enough for a black box whose construction will put Dover’s woodworking skills to good use.

TIFF ’13: All Cheerleaders Die

September 7, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, TIFF

*½/**** written and directed by Lucky McKee & Chris Sivertson by Bill Chambers I suppose they've both been campy at times, but I think Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson might be too grim for something like All Cheerleaders Die (or as the closing title card ominously puts it, "All Cheerleaders Die, Part One")--a title that at the least augurs fun schlock tinged with the alarmism of '50s hygiene cinema. After capturing the dubious--but funny--death of the head cheerleader on tape, standoffish Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) remodels herself as a Heather and earns a spot on the squad, much to the dismay…

Riddick (2013)

September 5, 20132013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Vin Diesel, Jordi Mollà, Matt Nable, Katee Sackhoff
written and directed by David Twohy

by Walter Chaw Maybe it was the anticipation, maybe it’s because it’s too much like the first film, Pitch Black, but David Twohy’s Riddick is merely fine for what it is, lacking the kind of loopy, operatic invention of the franchise’s middle course and contenting itself with being a bug hunt in the James Cameron sense of the word instead of exploring more of this universe. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that, but I wanted to love this movie with all my heart, having declared to everyone’s exhaustion that of all the prestige movies prepping down the pike, this was the one I was waiting for. Turns out, the best science-fiction film of the last quarter of this year is Jonathan Glazer’s unbelievably good Under the Skin–not Gravity and, alas, not Riddick, either. To be fair, of the three, Glazer’s is the only one to deal with science-fiction as existentialism rather than as background and circus. More’s the pity, because Chronicles of Riddick, with its elementals and fringe religions, its funky spiritualism and its sense of fairy-tale hyperbole, is one of the genuinely great cult films of the last decade. If not for an ending to Riddick that promises Twohy’s ready for another swing at the plate if another ball is lobbed at him, I wouldn’t be in a very good mood at all.

Telluride ’13: Gravity

September 4, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2013, Thriller

**½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

by Walter Chaw Alfonso Cuarón’s eagerly-anticipated, already-buzzy follow-up to the tremendous Children of Men is Gravity–a title that doesn’t reference the Ray Bradbury story “Kaleidoscope,” to which the film owes at least a little credit (in addition to the premise and theme, Gravity also lifts the character name “Stone”), or any real meat at the heart of the story. It’s not for lack of trying, as Cuarón and son/co-writer Jonás attempt, after the emotional tissue connecting the protags of Children of Men, to graft another lost-child drama onto a larger science-fiction conceit. What results is probably the most venue-dependant release of a year that includes Pacific Rim–if you can see it in IMAX 3D, you ought to: the biggest screen with the best sound. It’s possibly the first film since Avatar that actually works with the extra dimension, despite having been converted in post-production; at times while screening Gravity at the Werner Herzog Theater in Telluride, I felt a bit vertiginous. It’s an effect that no doubt had everything to do with the dual-projection and the custom-designed sound system by Meyers Sound. I talked to several techs from the company running around before the show, tweaking, testing, making sure that organs physically shifted during the presentation. My favourite story of the festival is how Cuarón, from the auditorium, instructed the booth to turn up the audio to just less than twice the “acceptable” volume.

TIFF ’13: Devil’s Knot

September 3, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Crime, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

**/****
directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda Something is off in Devil’s Knot, the third film about the West Memphis Three in as many years, and it isn’t just the Satanic panic that turned a bereaved community against three wrongfully accused teenagers. Although its Tennessee setting takes him far from his usual haunt of Toronto, this material seemed like a slam dunk for Atom Egoyan, who’s done his best work in films about parents dwelling in the endless hangover of their children’s premature deaths. It’s a shame, then, that his new film feels like a wheel-spinning exercise rather than a deepening of old themes. Egoyan’s approach to this tapped-out story hits the dramatic and formal beats you’d expect from his filmography: here we get a child’s cryptic, disembodied voiceover about what he’s seen; there, a videotaped testimony that conceals more than it discloses. Ambiguity is the name of the game, just like in The Sweet Hereafter, where everything turns on young Sarah Polley’s poker face as she ushers the adults around her into the topsy-turvy world of the title.

Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

August 26, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Q
***/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C
starring Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, Richard Roundtree
written and directed by Larry Cohen

by Bryant Frazer Writer-director Larry Cohen makes exploitation look easy. His iconic Black Caesar was basically a remake of Little Caesar with a black cast; his mutant-baby flick It’s Alive amplified the generational rift created in families by the social revolutions of the 1960s and early-1970s to horror-movie proportions. Cohen is so commercially savvy that his screenwriting career has continued, in earnest, into the 21^st century, placing projects like Phone Booth, Cellular, and Captivity at the Venn-diagram intersection between high-concept appeal and low-budget execution. He also has an instinct for character, and it never served him better than it did in Q, which is the story of a little criminal in a big city as much as it’s the story of a huge feathered serpent lording over Manhattan. Q was set up quickly (in two days, to hear Cohen tell it), after Cohen was fired from an adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury, and it features a terrific cast (Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree) improvising many of the scenes in a screenplay that was being written as the shoot progressed to take advantage of whatever New York locations Cohen was able to secure. The result isn’t quite a great monster movie, but it gets maybe 80 percent of the way there.

A Hijacking (2012)

August 16, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Kapringen
***/****
starring Søren Malling, Pilou Asbæk, Dar Salim, Roland Møller
written and directed by Tobias Lindholm

by Angelo Muredda Finely-tuned but incurious about most of what falls outside its blinkered gaze, A Hijacking is about as good as this sort of stripped-down procedural filmmaking gets–Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low reconfigured for a telephonic showdown between Somali pirates and Danish shareholders. Only the second feature from Tobias Lindholm (who proves much more capable as a director than as the author of The Hunt‘s lazy allegorical punts about the concern-trolling parents of small-town Denmark), the film feels like the work of a yeoman who’s in no hurry to be recognized as a visual stylist unless the material should merit such flourishes. Annoying as that no-frills approach can be in countless austere imitations of the Dardennes and Michael Haneke, it’s more than welcome here in a film whose title might otherwise have ended with a gaudy exclamation mark.

Europa Report (2013)

August 13, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Pseudo-Documentary, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Christian Camargo, Anamaria Marinca, Michael Nyqvyst, Sharlto Copley
screenplay by Philip Gelatt
directed by Sebastián Cordero

by Walter Chaw Sebastián Cordero’s found-footage sci-fi flick Europa Report tells the tale of the first manned trip to the titular moon of Jupiter in search of some kind of lifeform lurking there beneath a thick layer of ice. Never mind that this is a premise Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two already explored to similar consequence, nor that Europa Report is essentially an intergalactic The Blair Witch Project: best to focus on an unfortunate framing story that dumbs down the proceedings, emotionally and intellectually, at the exact moment the picture appears to be gaining momentum. It’s all the more puzzling, given the existence of something so pandering and condescending, that the group apparently most enamoured with this movie is the scientific community, who I would have guessed would have taken more offense at being talked down to. Maybe they’re so beaten into submission by the idiotic things Damon Lindelof passes off as “science” that they’re willing to forgive Europa Report its more minor trespasses.

Elysium (2013)

August 5, 20132013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga
written and directed by Neill Blomkamp

by Walter Chaw Lost in the hue and cry for meaning in film is the truism that having a message does not necessarily denote meaning. Case in point, District 9 helmer Neill Blomkamp’s left-wing screed Elysium, which feels, unpleasantly, like having lunch with Sean Penn and all the filthy, proselytizing, self-martyring glory that implies. It’s also like that lunch Indy forces Willie Scott to eat in Temple of Doom: Mmmm, condescending! It’s unashamedly pushing an agenda, and while it does a better job of that than Star Trek Into Darkness, it’s arguably more frustrating because so much of it demonstrates a bracing nerd-topia of tech wonders and genre references. Indeed, Elysium is the closest we’ve come to seeing a big-screen adaptation of Ursula K. Leguin’s astonishing The Dispossessed. Which is to say, not very close at all, but there you have it. A pity, then, that armed with so able an action star as Matt Damon, the movie finds itself at the end more comfortable in a double-feature with Promised Land than with The Bourne Identity. Damon’s at his best as a hero in the act of discovering his own potential, see–and absolute bollocks as political philosopher and activist. Times like these, I think Team America: World Police was right about him all along.

6 Souls (2013) + Dead Souls (2012) – Blu-ray Discs

July 25, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Television, Thriller, Zombie

6 SOULS
Shelter
**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Julianne Moore, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Jeffreey DeMunn, Brooklyn Proulx
screenplay by Michael Cooney
directed by Marlind & Stein

DEAD SOULS
½*/**** Image C Sound B Extras C
starring Jesse James, Magda Apanowicz, Bill Moseley, Geraldine Hughes
screenplay by John Doolan
directed by Colin Theys

by Walter Chaw The best scene in the surprisingly-not-awful 6 Souls happens in a toothless hinterland, up yonder in them thar hills, ’round campfires and lean-tos and a wilderness of patchy facial hair, where forensic psychologist Cara (Julianne Moore) meets a Granny Holler Witch (Joyce Feurring), who is just indescribably awesome. She’s like a refugee from The Dark Crystal–the very incarnation of Aughra, blind but seeing through an albino familiar (Katiana Davis) as she performs psychic surgery, sucking up souls with her mouth and depositing them in a jar she calls “shelter.” Indeed, it’s such an awesome scene that it shows up how perfunctory the rest of Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein’s 6 Souls is; how the idea of a demon jumping bodies (like The Evil Dead, yes, but more like Fallen) can look very much like an early-’90s mid-prestige thriller and therefore not anything interesting or special. A shame, as the talent assembled for the piece is exceptional–Moore, certainly, along with the always-fabulous Jeffrey DeMunn as Cara’s dad Dr. Harding. It’s his fault that Cara gets involved with psych-patient Adam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who, in the process of manifesting multiple bad-accent theatre personalities, also seems to be manifesting their physical traits (like paralysis, say, and bad acting, too). Turns out it ain’t science afflicting our man Adam, but you knew that already.

Would You Rather (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

July 23, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Thriller

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Brittany Snow, Jeffrey Combs, Jonny Coyne, Lawrence Gilliard Jr.
screenplay by Steffen Schlachtenhaufen
directed by David Guy Levy

by Bill Chambers Iris (Brittany Snow) is a demure blonde vegetarian with a brother named Raleigh (Logan Miller) who’s dying of cancer. These traits, the only things we ever really learn about her, add up to a plucky determination that preordains Iris to be the Final Girl, though it means her character arc hinges on a reversal of expectations that haven’t been well established. In any case, mysterious philanthropist Lambrick (Jeffrey Combs, magically transformed into Stuart Wilson from Lethal Weapon 3) spots potential in her and invites her to join the eponymous high-stakes parlour game in David Guy Levy’s Would You Rather. Iris is poor as shit, and even if she did get that hostess job she’s interviewing for in the opening scene, the money it pays is hardly cancer money, ergo, she takes the bait: the promise of the best, most expensive medical care for her brother should she emerge victorious at Lambrick’s next gathering. What she doesn’t know is that the alternative to winning isn’t as easy as losing.

Lifeforce (1985) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

July 22, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Vampire, Zombie

Lifeforce2

**/****Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May
screenplay by Dan O’Bannon & Don Jakoby, based on the novel The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Bryant Frazer The early 1980s must have been a weird time to be Tobe Hooper. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had made him one of the most notorious directors in the world, and Poltergeist vaulted him onto the A-list. He would have been on top of the world if not for an extended controversy over that film: Poltergeist was produced by Steven Spielberg, and there were widespread rumours that he actually directed it, too. Hooper denied it and Spielberg issued oddly-worded statements that permanently muddied the waters. Whatever the truth of their collaboration, the controversy was a blow to Hooper’s reputation. His Texas Chain Saw felt almost like outsider art–raw and twisted, it was the antithesis of the burnished Spielberg style. Poltergeist, on the other hand, was the very quintessence of a Steven Spielberg film, from its familiar suburban family in distress to its richly detailed mise en scène‎. If Hooper really did direct it, it doesn’t say much for his authorial voice that he left virtually no discernible fingerprints on the final product.

The Conjuring (2013)

July 19, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor
screenplay by Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw Based on a true story in the same way that a pineapple is an apple, James Wan’s latest exercise in jump-scare theatre is the workmanlike haunted house/demonic possession flick The Conjuring. In it, the paranormal investigation team of Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren, co-authors of several books and shown as the film begins lecturing a small auditorium of people on the finer points of ghost-hunting, confront their Greatest Challenge Ever when they’re called to the modest New England farmhouse of the Perron family. It seems this was the former home of a WITCH! Can you fucking believe the luck? An evil witch lived in this house. Fuck. A witch. Motherfucker, am I right? You buy a house and you think that…anyway, it really sucks that a witch lived there. It all starts out innocently enough with the largely indistinguishable Perron girls getting jerked out of bed by an invisible whatever, then evolves into a game of hide and clap (which sounds venereal but isn’t, unless you’re doing it really wrong) that leads to mommy Carolyn (Lili Taylor) getting thrown down a flight of stairs into a creepy, boarded-up cellar™. That’s when daddy Roger (Ron Livingston) calls the Warrens… Well, he doesn’t, because he’s away on a week-long business trip, and he’s a skeptic of the Warrens, we learn after the fact… Um… He’s not a well-developed character, seeing as how Wan seems distracted by all the loud noises and crap leaping out at the camera.

To Have and Have Not (1944) + The Big Sleep (1945/6) – DVDs

July 8, 2013****/****, 1940s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
****/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Dolores Moran
screenplay by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Howard Hawks

THE BIG SLEEP
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone
screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett & Jules Furthman, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler
directed by Howard Hawks

by Walter Chaw While biographer Todd McCarthy refers to the two versions of Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep as marking the delineation point separating linear (early) Hawks from non-linear (later) Hawks, I feel like you can mark the director’s affection for bonzo non-sequiturs throughout his sultry To Have and Have Not. The picture tells its tale of immigrants marooned off the islets of war and sexual sophistication–an island bell jar and pressure cooker envisioned as a sequel of sorts to Casablanca. But where Casablanca‘s sex was mature and companionate (the sizzle replaced by simmer) and tinged with regret, To Have and Have Not has a slick of bestial sweat to it that promises that the explosion of really naughty stuff is looming rather than in the rear-view. (There’s no sexier film in all the Forties.) The story of the corrupt Vichy government and the brave French underground unfolding behind the red-hot flirtation between diplomatically non-affiliated fishing boat captain Harry “Steve” Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) and lost American teen “Slim” (Lauren Bacall) is punctuated helter-skelter by husky lounge numbers courtesy Slim and Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael) and riff sessions with Steve and Slim that have the cadence and unpredictability of jazz improvisation. It’s not so much a narrative as a medley in a bouncy key, and Hawks is not so much a director as a bandleader. Much has been made of Hawks’s skill in casting (and it’s hard to argue otherwise when he sniffs out the alchemical enchantment between old man Bogie and new thing Bacall (and Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell; and Dean Martin and a bottle)), but looking at To Have and Have Not–the first of Bogie/Bacall’s four collaborations–is to glimpse something more than a good casting eye: it’s to witness the evolution of a true musical genius. The rhythms are subterranean, the verses in between the words; to watch this and The Big Sleep (Hawks’s other collaboration with Bogie/Bacall) back-to-back is as close to rapture as this experience gets.

Rolling Thunder (1977) – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 20131970s, 2013, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Rollingthunder1

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B+
starring William Devane, Tommy Lee Jones, Linda Haynes, James Best
screenplay by Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould
directed by John Flynn

by Bryant Frazer Rolling Thunder‘s reputation was burnished considerably in the 1990s when Quentin Tarantino declared it one of his favourite films. It’s a good call; Tarantino owes his career to his long-standing love affair with the grindhouse, and Rolling Thunder is in many ways the quintessence of Hollywood exploitation. Director John Flynn, who made a name for himself with his 1973 adaptation of a Donald E. Westlake novel, The Outift, comes across as an efficient, focused storyteller who pares narrative to the bone. That style of filmmaking really allows (or requires) performance to come to the fore, and in the intense vigilante fantasy Rolling Thunder, both William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones deliver smart and scary interpretations of the soul-damaged protagonist and sidekick, respectively. Flynn certainly wasn’t a self-conscious stylist, and he ended up toiling in the gulag of undistinguished action pictures like the 1989 Stallone-in-prison flick Lock Up and the Steven Seagal revenge thriller Out for Justice. He died in 2007, and Rolling Thunder is just remarkable enough that you want to bemoan his anonymity.

Byzantium (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Ireland, Theatrical, 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.

White House Down (2013)

June 27, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, 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.

Dark Skies (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

May 27, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller

Darkskies3

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Keri Russell, Josh Hamilton, Dakota Goyo, J.K. Simmons
written and directed by Scott Stewart

by Bill Chambers Dark Skies takes place in the days leading up to the Fourth of July. The movie thus promises fireworks–and it delivers, albeit on a modest scale befitting its humble suburban milieu. Like Signs, it’s such an insular take on the alien-visitation genre it could almost be performed on the stage; unlike Signs, it’s not pious to a fault (surprisingly, given that writer-director Scott Stewart previously made Legion and Priest), and its lapses in logic aren’t as maddening because they’re built into the film’s very ethos, with a Whitley Streiber type (lent unexpected pathos by a Hunter S. Thompson-dressed J.K. Simmons) opining late in the proceedings that aliens are unfathomable to us in the same way that humans are unfathomable to lab rats. There are a lot of superficial similarities to Signs, actually, such as the way the picture uses asthma and walkie-talkie devices as narrative keystones and its climactic transformation of the family home into a fortress. For that matter, Poltergeist, Paranormal Activity, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are liberally paraphrased as well; over three films, Stewart has shown himself to be nothing if not a magpie artist. The good news, which would normally be upsetting news, is that the producers of Dark Skies are Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who seem to rein in Stewart’s other bad habits, like snail’s pacing and a tendency towards arcane mythology. Third time’s the charm.

The Last Stand (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

May 20, 20132013, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Schwarzenegger, South Korea, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Forest Whitaker, Johnny Knoxville, Rodrigo Santoro
screenplay by Andrew Knauer
directed by Kim Jee-woon

by Walter Chaw I think, and I don’t say this lightly, that South Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-woon is a genius. His landmark A Tale of Two Sisters is lush and at times unbearably frightening; his A Bittersweet Life is an elegiac crime saga with the best, most innovative knife-fight in a movie until the naked scuffle in Eastern Promises; his The Good, the Bad, the Weird (which his latest most resembles) is a dizzy, hilarious take on the Spaghetti Western; and his I Saw the Devil is the slickest, and stickiest, exploitation serial-killer/torture flick I’ve ever seen. He’s his country’s Takashi Miike, its Quentin Tarantino. And his American-made, English-language debut, unceremoniously dumped in the middle of the deadly first quarter of 2013, is, I guess you could say, at least better than John Woo’s Hollywood baptism, Hard Target. The tragedy of it all is that the picture will be more ballyhooed not for the arrival of Kim on our shores, but for the return to the action genre of one Arnold Schwarzenegger (Expendables cameos notwithstanding), here cast as a soft-around-the-middle aging lawman in the Stallone-in-Copland mold who stands up against a cabal of snarling baddies in defense of the AARP and the NRA in one fell, sometimes ironic, swoop. I’ve never not liked a Kim film, but he’s testing me. Ultimately, it’s impossible to completely hate a movie that references, in addition to all the pictures Schwarzenegger’s made, one–Paul Verhoeven’s forever-gestating Crusades epic–he never got to.