Thriller Archives - Page 25 of 70

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, 2013, 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.

Monsieur Verdoux (1947) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 12, 20131940s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Chaplin, Comedy, Directors: Charles Chaplin, Drama, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Charles Chaplin, Martha Raye, Marilyn Nash, Isobel Elsom
screenplay by Charles Chaplin, based on an idea by Orson Welles
directed by Charles Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer Charles Chaplin augmented his trademark mix of physical comedy, sweetness, and lefty politics with a dose of suspense (borrowed, probably, from Hitchcock) and a sardonic worldview (informed, maybe, by film noir) in the playful, funny, but ultimately downbeat Monsieur Verdoux. In a scenario that originated with Orson Welles, who receives an “idea” credit, Henri Verdoux is a serial killer based on Henri Landru, a French Bluebeard who seduced, married, and then murdered a string of Parisian women in order to liberate their assets. Chaplin plays Verdoux as a charming fiend whose demeanour incorporates the barest echo of the Little Tramp, but whose murderous M.O. recalled the director’s own reputation as a womanizer.

Pain & Gain (2013)

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

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

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

The Fury (1978) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Disc

April 18, 20131970s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Brian De Palma, Espionage, Israel, Revenge, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller

***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Carrie Snodgress, Charles Durning
screenplay by John Farris, based on his novel
directed by Brian De Palma (as Brian DePalma)

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. While Brian De Palma is nothing if not a leitmotif filmmaker, it’s curious that he chose to direct The Fury right after Carrie. Imagine Spielberg following up Jaws with Orca–it’s like De Palma was begging to be pigeonholed. And it’s not surprising that The Fury wasn’t as zeitgeisty: it lacks the classical simplicity and youth appeal of Carrie, with almost no one in the cast under 30 save for future softcore legend Andrew Stevens and Carrie holdover Amy Irving, a good actress who just doesn’t have that X factor. But The Fury‘s echo can still be heard, because its ending is indeed that impactful. Nearly every review mentions it, and the terms in which Pauline Kael and her acolytes described it gave it a kind of porny rep that’s since inspired generations of young film buffs to seek the movie out. (Armond White called it an “orgasm.”) It is a great ending, but a revisit makes clear that The Fury is worth reading for the articles.

True Blood: The Complete Second Season (2009) + True Blood: The Complete Third Season (2010) – Blu-ray Discs

April 10, 20132000s, 2009, 2010, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Television, Thriller, Vampire, Werewolf

Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
S2: “Nothing But the Blood,” “Keep This Party Going,” “Scratches,” “Shake and Fingerpop,” “Never Let Me Go,” “Hard-Hearted Hannah,” “Release Me,” “Timebomb,” “I Will Rise Up,” “New World in My View,” “Frenzy,” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin'”

S3: “Bad Blood,” “Beautifully Broken,” “It Hurts Me Too,” “9 Crimes,” “Trouble,” “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” “Hitting the Ground,” “Night on the Sun,” “Everything Is Broken,” “I Smell a Rat,” “Fresh Blood,” “Evil Is Going On”

by Walter Chaw “True Blood” is pulp crap. Yet as Bryant and Bill have already so eloquently pointed out, it’s highly-addictive pulp crap–the sort of shallow, handsomely-mounted titillation that fosters the craze that sprung up around prime-time soaps like “Dynasty” and “Falcon Crest”. White-collar smut that traffics in the currency of the age: once upon a time, it was the super-rich; now, it’s the supernatural. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme. It’s certainly soapier than showrunner/creator Alan Ball’s previous pay-cable drama, “Six Feet Under”, but to its credit what “True Blood” does in returning sexuality–and gore, and (southern) Gothic trappings–to the vampire mythos, it does well. The shame of it is that it seems to be ashamed of itself and so continually strives for relevance in aligning the plight of its vampire underclass to gay rights. Bill said it first, but is the appropriate supernatural analogue to gays really vampires? Is it wise to suggest that gays present that same kind of sexual allure? The same kind of blood contagion? Doesn’t that play into the Conservative storyline a bit too neatly? At least it’s not “The Walking Dead”.

The Pelican Brief (1993); A Time to Kill (1996); Primal Fear (1996) [Hard Evidence Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

April 2, 20131990s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Joel Schumacher, Drama, Thriller

THE PELICAN BRIEF
½/**** Image C+ Sound C+
starring Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, Sam Shepard, John Heard
screenplay by Alan J. Pakula, based on the novel by John Grisham
directed by Alan J. Pakula

A TIME TO KILL
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Matthew McConaughey, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by John Grisham
directed by Joel Schumacher

PRIMAL FEAR
***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, John Mahoney, Edward Norton
screenplay by Steve Shagan and Ann Biderman, based on the novel by William Diehl
directed by Gregory Hoblit

by Walter Chaw Hand-in-hand with the digital revolution of the 1990s is this backlash against the same as technical paranoia pictures like The Net and Hackers cohabit multiplexes with an epidemic of John Grisham adaptations. Starting with The Firm in 1993 and running through to The Client (1994), The Pelican Brief (1995), A Time to Kill and The Chamber (1996), The Rainmaker (1997), and The Gingerbread Man (1998), these pictures share a deep interest in not just the low-grade hackery of Grisham’s declarative-prose style, but also super-secret societies in the halls of power. Thus was limply resurrected the paranoid New American Cinema. It was different this time around because the ways our realities were being manipulated by the popular culture and mass media were no longer a product of a governmental conspiracy, but of a perceptual mutation.^* It’s not about not trusting the government (nobody has trusted the government since 1972)–it’s about not trusting the medium of film itself. Not surprisingly, directors who carved out their reputations in the Seventies–like Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, and Alan J. Pakula–jumped on board the Grisham train, finding familiar ground in his gallery of paper-based heroes (lawyers, judges, newspapermen) and perhaps thinking they’d bought a ticket back to relevance when in fact they were working in an odd parallel phenomenon that would fail almost entirely to have any kind of relevance or longevity. Instead of producing classics, these legends were excavating mines they’d already exhausted three administrations ago.

Wake in Fright (1971)

March 29, 20131970s, 2013, Australia, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Thriller

***½/****
starring Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Evan Jones, based on the novel by Kenneth Cook
directed by Ted Kotcheff

by Angelo Muredda As exploitation-movie titles go, Wake in Fright suggests a high-concept reversal of A Nightmare on Elm Street, where the only way to fall prey to bogeymen is to stay awake. It’s a bit of an odd sell, given the more abstract horror mined by Toronto-born filmmaker Ted Kotcheff, of both The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and First Blood fame. Far from Kravitz country in its Australian setting but still working in the same territory of young, ambling men who want to be somebody, Kotcheff’s earlier film–first screened in 1971 to both wild acclaim and great distaste from animal-rights activists, and somewhat forgotten until its resurrection in the “Ozploitation” documentary Not Quite Hollywood–is more interested in the terror of duration without purpose, of waking up when you have no good reason, than in anything so prosaic as a slasher. Elm Street it isn’t, then, but Kotcheff burrows into his haughty lead’s descent into himself–a stand-in for every thirtysomething man’s realization that his coming-of-age has already happened, to no discernible effect–with a nihilist precision that’s tough to shake off.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)

March 28, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Espionage, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring D.J. Cotrona, Byung-hun Lee, Adrianne Palicki, Dwayne Johnson
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
directed by Jon M. Chu

by Angelo Muredda While it’s easy to snicker at a title sequence that boasts of “Characters by Hasbro,” G.I. Joe: Retaliation (hereafter Retaliation) is the kind of movie you root for. After the banality of predecessor Stephen Sommers, John M. Chu is an inspired choice of director. This is a guy who’s made his name by bringing elegance and agility to his two attempts at the surprisingly bullet-proof Step Up franchise. There was reason enough, then, to hope his preference for long takes and earnest interest in bodies in motion would translate to a franchise inspired by a line of action figures. After all, such baubles are nothing if not fetish objects, their biceps studied by the faithful with a mad love usually reserved for dancers, matinee idols, and wrestlers. What better meeting of the three than a project steered by the director of dance films and anchored by Channing Tatum and Dwayne Johnson, née The Rock?