Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 9, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Czech Republic, DVD, Espionage, India, Russia, Thriller, Tom Cruise, United Arab Emirates

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton
screenplay by Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec
directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Even though Brad Bird directed The Iron Giant (arguably the best film in a year, 1999, rife with great films), even though he’s responsible for the best Fantastic Four flick there ever will be (The Incredibles) as well as the best overall Pixar release (Ratatouille), I still had the chutzpah to be skeptical when I heard that his live-action debut would be the fourth entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise. I am contrite. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (hereafter Ghost Protocol) is the model of the modern action picture. It has exactly two quiet moments (I counted)–the rest is audacious, ostentatious, glorious action set against not only the expected fisticuffs but also a ferocious sandstorm in Dubai and the bombing and partial collapse of the Kremlin. It’s an honorary Bond movie better than any of them (only the Casino Royale redux enters the same conversation–well, maybe On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, too), filled to stuffed with clever gadgets (and their logical application), exotic locales, beautiful women, and fast cars. It’s sexy, sleek, knows better than to take its foot off the pedal, flirts with relevance without ever attempting depth it’s not equipped to deal with, and establishes J.J. Abrams as better than idol Spielberg in the producing-good-action-movies sweepstakes. Not content to scale just any building, it has returning hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) climb the Burj Khalifa; not content to stage a brawl in a parking garage, it finds one of those robotic ones to provide a third dimension to the scrambling in vintage, brilliant, 1980s Hong Kong style. In a series that boasts John Woo as director of its first sequel, Ghost Protocol has the big, giant, clanking ones to outdo Woo.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

March 19, 2012Posted in****/****, 2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt
screenplay by Bridget O’Connor & Peter Straughan, based on the novel by John le Carré
directed by Tomas Alfredson

by Walter Chaw The easy thing is to say that Tomas Alfredson has followed up his tremendous vampire flick Let the Right One In with another vampire flick, a story of Cold War British Intelligence as men in shadows, exhausted, living off the vibrancy of others. Yet Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the Swedish director’s adaptation of John le Carré’s seminal spy novel, is something a good deal more than a clever segue from one genre film to another. Less a companion piece to the latest Mission: Impossible than a bookend to Lars von Trier’s end-of-the-world Melancholia, it’s a character study, sure, but more accurately it’s an examination of a culture of gestures and intimations, where a flutter of an eyelid causes a hurricane in another part of a corrupt, insular world. Naturally, its timeliness has nothing to do with its literal milieu (all Russian bogeys and ’70s stylings)–nothing to do with recent world events that have an entire CIA cell blown up in Iran and Lebanon–and everything to do with its overpowering atmosphere of feckless power and utter resignation. It’s a spy thriller that Alfred Lord Tennyson would’ve written–the very filmic representation of acedia.

Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

March 12, 2012Posted in1970s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

Nude per l’assassino
***/****
DVD – Image A Sound C+ Extras C-
BD – Image C+ Sound B Extras C
starring Edwige Fenech, Nino Castlenuovo, Femi Benussi, Solvi Stubing
screenplay by Massimo Felisatti
directed by Andrea Bianchi

by Walter Chaw It’s easy to tag the prurient appeal of Andrea Bianchi’s Strip Nude for your Killer (if I’d discovered this film in my early teens, I never would’ve left the house), but without a lot of effort, its usefulness as a tool for dissecting its audience of voyeurs becomes clear as well. Indeed, it’s possible to see the picture as a hybrid of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (in the equation of scopophilia with rape and murder) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (in its protagonist’s profession (fashion photographer), its boundaries-testing raciness, and a central mystery that hinges on a photograph), with every scene of obvious leering exploitation balanced by a long look in a mirror, a humiliating photo shoot (something we see in both Peeping Tom and Blow-Up) reflected upside-down in a metal surface, and what seems like knowing interpositions of an idea of retributive guilt at the film’s bloodiest moments. Before every giallo set-piece murder, in fact, Bianchi inserts a flash of the woman killed during a pre-credit sequence back-alley abortion. It might not be simple morality, but it does speak to a variety of morality: a championing of demi-innocents undertaken by a heavy-breathing avatar in a motorcycle helmet and leather. Could there be a whiff of the pro-woman picture in the unlikeliest of places?

Coriolanus (2011)

January 20, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Shakespeare, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

***/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox
screenplay by John Logan, based on the play by Edward de Vere
directed by Ralph Fiennes

by Angelo Muredda Ralph Fiennes has been building up to Coriolanus for some time. Whether as a scarred or just nervous exile in The English Patient and The Constant Gardener, respectively, or as the noseless ghoul of the Harry Potter movies, he’s served as the embodiment of human refuse for a long stretch of his career–the English go-to for wanderers, burn victims, and miscellaneous banished men. It’s a treat, then, to watch him take relish in the part of the ultimate cast-off, a Roman general chewed up and spit out by the city for which he earned his war wounds. The actor’s hyphenate debut, Fiennes’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is a curio, to be sure: It isn’t so much directed as cobbled together from the source and fed through CNN-style reportage of armed fighting in the Balkans. But as a star vehicle, for both himself and the incomparable Vanessa Redgrave, it’s a powerful match between actor and character. While the general-turned-politician’s fine suit hangs awkwardly on the brute it houses, for Fiennes, Coriolanus is a good fit.

Contagion (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

January 12, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Thriller, United Arab Emirates

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law
screenplay by Scott Z. Burns
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Less smug (if only be a few degrees) than Steven Soderbergh’s other starfucker balls, Contagion surprises with its consistent serious-mindedness, even as it finally disappoints by contenting itself to be a cautionary tale rather than, in a year of world-busters, an end-of-times tale. Even Fail Safe and the inch of dust settled on it has Hank Fonda levelling NYC–all Contagion does is kill Gwyneth Paltrow ugly, which, in the grand scheme of things, is only what every sentient human being in the United States has contemplated already. (I confess I amused myself during the scene in which Paltrow’s afflicted adulteress has her brain scooped out of her head by muttering “Goop, indeed.” Sue me.) Still, it earns pith points for making Paltrow, typecast as a woman of privilege and longueurs, the Typhoid Mary of the new millennium, and more points still for being resolutely unafraid to characterize all of Asia as a giant petri dish ready to make a mass grave out of the rest of the world. Essentially, Contagion, as it goes about what it’s about with absolute professionalism and class, earns its keep by being right, more or less, about everything it bothers to talk about.

The Expendables (2010) [Extended Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

January 9, 2012Posted in2000s, 2010, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain, Thriller

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke
written and directed by Sylvester Stallone

by Walter Chaw After the remarkably tough and uncompromising Rambo and the almost-unbearably poignant and transparent Rocky Balboa, it’d be fair to nurse a healthy anticipation for Sylvester Stallone’s paean to the ’80s blockbuster, The Expendables. Alas, what’s on display owes more to Stallone’s Rhinestone than to his venerable Rocky series. A redux of Wild Hogs as embarrassing, boring, and ineptly- shot and edited as the original, The Expendables even ends the same way, with geezers riding off into the sunset on the backs of their four-fifths-life-crisis choppers. Tattoos and plunging v-neck Ts the rule of the day, it’s more Rogaine commercial than action movie, making fun of itself in the way that old guys who are genuinely insecure about their age make fun of themselves. It’s awkward. It’s also, in addition to being almost entirely free of excitement or a single line of dialogue that isn’t some syncopated mix of grunting and tough-guy cliché, maybe a no-shit adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano”. That’s the only way to explain how it is that a film tits-deep in dialogue could have not one exchange that makes any sense whatsoever. The way the movie’s put together, too, is a model of the Theatre of the Absurd’s occasional dabbling in non-sequiturs–something The Expendables seems to address at one point when the horsey-looking, freshly-waterboarded damsel (Giselle Itié) wonders how Stallone’s Barney has magically appeared as her saviour in a Caribbean (?) dictator’s dungeon. “I just am!” mumbles Barney. Who am I to argue with that?

Final Destination 5 (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet Digital Copy

December 31, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller

Finaldestination5caprev

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Nicholas D’Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher, David Koechner
screenplay by Eric Heisserer
directed by Steven Quale

by Angelo Muredda “Five! Five different systems had to fail for this to happen.” So shouts a slumming Courtney B. Vance as a suspicious cop on the scene of only the second or third most elaborate death in the cynically titled Final Destination 5. Who can blame him? Five, after all, is an improbably large number. Here we are, though–as many entries into a series that’s sure to rival even Final Fantasy‘s swollen ranks once the last lighter fluid-doused fan blade hits the last neck.

The Debt (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

December 5, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Hungary, Israel, Thriller, UK

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington, Jessica Chastain, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Matthew Vaughn & Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan, based on the Israeli film Ha-Hov
directed by John Madden

by Walter Chaw End-of-year prestige porn so poor in its conception that it was released at the ass-end of summer, former Miramax darling John Madden’s The Debt enters into the Holocaust Remembrance sweepstakes and, in the process, demonstrates that probably nothing could slow Jessica Chastain’s rising star. Sure enough, she’s all that’s remotely worthwhile (well, her and Jesper Christensen as the best Nazi doctor since Olivier) in a film that also parades people like Tom Wilkinson and Dame Helen Mirren in embarrassing, compromised aspects. Despsite a couple of elderly “twists,” the only thing really surprising about this tale of a Mossad operation gone pear-shaped is that Mirren’s hack husband Taylor Hackford didn’t direct it–knowing that if he had, at least the action scenes in it, for what they’re worth, would’ve been a good deal tighter. Oh, what a state we’re in when we find ourselves wishing that Taylor Hackford had directed something instead of someone else.

The Devil’s Double (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

December 5, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Netherlands, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Dominic Cooper, Ludivine Sagnier, Philip Quast, Raad Rawi
screenplay by Michael Thomas
directed by Lee Tamahori

by Angelo Muredda The Devil’s Double might be the first bad movie about which you can non-figuratively say, “That looked like piss.” Director Lee Tamahori, who started off decently with 1994’s Once Were Warriors but has since become a dependable franchise killer (Along Came A Spider, Die Another Day, xXx: State of the Union) and a Hollywood hack behind the occasional Nicolas Cage abortion (Next), bathes every shot in garish yellow lights that transform white leather couches into urine-stained gilded bars. If you’re willing to excuse this aesthetic for the first few seconds of every shot as an uncomfortable and weirdly xenophobic bit of formalism–what better way to depict Iraq than to give it a nice golden shower?–good luck with the rest. When characters reposition themselves in the frame, they often seem to block the light source and thrust their companions into the dark for no good reason. DP Sam McCurdy surely considers this a clever trick, as he executes it over and over again, yet Tamahori’s film, a hollow adaptation of Latif Yahia’s unconfirmed autobiographical account of serving for many years as Uday Hussein’s political decoy, is such a bore that the effect is one of watching someone throw buckets of neon paint on a blank canvas.

Elite Squad – The Enemy Within (2010)

November 25, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Brazil, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Tropa de Elite 2 – O Inimigo Agora É Outro
***/****
starring Wagner Moura, Irandhir Santos, Andre Ramiro, Milhelm Cortaz
screenplay by Bráulio Mantovani & José Padilha
directed by José Padilha

by Angelo Muredda Early in Elite Squad – The Enemy Within (hereafter The Enemy Within) José Padilha’s blustery follow-up to his 2007 hit Elite Squad, deluxe cop Lt. Colonel Nascimento (Wagner Moura, Brazil’s answer to Mark Ruffalo) promises to give us a history of Rio that happens to coincide with his life story. It’s a tall order, but Padilha and co-screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani are ambitious and foolish enough to undertake it, returning to the favelas they brought to boot-stomping life in the first Elite Squad while shifting focus this time from drug lords to corrupt cops. No one would call their work subtle, but they strike a surprisingly watchable balance between Goodfellas-type insider confessional and incendiary political exposé, ditching the tight timeframe and local scope of the original and going for a more sprawling survey of Rio as Hell on Earth. Yet as much as The Enemy Within deserves solemn back-pats for its anaesthetized, everybody’s-guilty project, it really takes off in brutally violent set-pieces that forgo neutrality. Cut loose from his earnest ambitions to tell an ambivalent political fable that clucks its tongue equally at anti-poverty activists and conservative law-and-order types, Padilha shows his directorial hand in testosterone-charged gunfights where either all the right people get shot or all the good ones go down as martyrs, and it’s the hand of a vigilante sympathizer drawn to the romance of man-to-man violence. Fascist? No doubt. But as ideologically suspect apologies for rogue justice go, this one’s pretty well-executed, and at times just plain more fun than the hemming and hawing of The Dark Knight.

Attack the Block (2011) + Super 8 (2011)|Super 8 – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 21, 2011Posted in2011, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, France, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

ATTACK THE BLOCK
***/****
starring Jodie Whittaker, John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh
written and directed by Joe Cornish

SUPER 8
***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso
written and directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw Joe Cornish’s low-budget creature-feature Attack the Block is a charmer, a delight, the kind of rare film–like Jack Sholder’s The Hidden, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, or Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile–that devotees will latch onto, and for good reason, with the fervour afforded genuine cult classics. It has energy to burn, a strange affinity with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and a super-cool monster that looks like a cross between Ira from the “Moonshadow” comic and a grizzly bear. That most of it was carried off with practical effects is a shot in the arm for practical effects and a bearer of the nostalgia banner that seems to be popular lately, what with our dreams and memories fodder again for the celluloid couch. Better still, it introduces a new star into the future pantheon in John Boyega, who has charisma to burn as gang leader-cum-saviour Moses. The movie’s tale of a group of street toughs has drawn comparisons to The Warriors, but I think the better analogy is Spielberg’s E.T., not just in that alchemy between the fantastic and the absolutely mundane (South England’s Lambeth neighbourhood), but also in the crafting of a living youth subculture alive with its own language, ritual, and custom. It’s not too much to say that, at its best, Attack the Block makes you feel the way you did when the guys took things into their own hands to deliver the flying, omniscient, omnipotent E.T. to his landing site. It taps into the irrational cool. Which doesn’t happen very often.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011)

November 18, 2011Posted in2011, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Billy Burke
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Appalling by pretty much every measure, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (hereafter Twilight 4.1) is the predictable end result of a film based on a book written by an illiterate Mormon housewife mistaking her profound ignorance for profundity. It’s about a really old guy who talks a really young girl into marrying him and enduring really, really painful childbirth as her portion of God’s judgment on her kind; and then it’s about another kind of pedophilia, wherein a 19-year-old badly in need of acting lessons gets turned on by a baby and decides he’s going to marry that infant once she’s old enough to breed. Still with me? So, yes, I knew it was going to be bad and, yes, I went anyway. And you know what? For as girded as I was to the raw incompetence of this franchise, Twilight 4.1 still managed to plumb a few new depths. See, Twilight 4.1 is an apologia for spousal abuse and a clumsy pro-life screed (what about this crap isn’t clumsy?) before turning into cartoon Grand Guignol horseshit meant to freak out an audience of pre-teens and lonely housewives who think that this object of their devotion is selling them anything except loneliness and delusion. It’s sledgehammer racist in its depiction of a native housekeeper cast as Maria Ouspenskaya, and it has a moment in which a circle of wolves “think-talk” to each other in some ineffable evocation of an Optimus Prime pep talk. It’s completely inexplicable, in other words, and irritating for it.

The Conversation (1974) – Blu-ray Disc

November 16, 2011Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Palme d'Or Winner, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+
starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams
written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola

by Walter Chaw The moment I decided that movies were something to be respected, studied, opened layer-by-layer rather than merely enjoyed and cast aside was at a 16mm screening, in a college film course, of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterwork The Conversation. If we were speaking in different terms, film before it for me is the equivalent of the girls I dated until I met my wife. It taught me about what it is to respect the medium; it showed me the joys of complexity and investment, and it showed me what it was to be in love. It hit me like a freight train. And not only had I never seen The Conversation prior to that hot, close afternoon in the common room where that seminar took place, I had never so much as heard of it. I was humbled by my ignorance, and that helped. I was also at a personal crossroads in my life–that didn’t hurt, either. My sense memory of The Conversation is bifurcated between the feeling of my feet in socks walking along the carpeted hall of my dorm, down the concrete stairs, and into the screening area and sitting next to the girl I liked, who was wearing her sweats, no make-up–and the feeling, years and years later, of watching it on a shitty old laptop in bed with my wife while we waited for the first terrible contractions to happen during the first of our trio of miscarriages. Neither of us ever questioned the wisdom of putting it on, knowing that the toilet backflow scene was coming down the pike. We were naïve. We didn’t know why we wanted to watch it so desperately that night. When people ask me what my favourite movie is, I tell them it’s The Conversation. I don’t even have to think about it.

Pulp Fiction (1994) + Jackie Brown (1997) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

November 10, 2011Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Palme d'Or Winner, Robert De Niro, Romance, Thriller

PULP FICTION
****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

JACKIE BROWN
****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, based on the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard
directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Seventeen years on, Pulp Fiction still works like a motherfucker. It might, indeed, benefit from the shock of its gleeful use of “nigger,” the surprise of its sodomy and ultra-violence, and the sheer pleasure of hearing Sam Jackson say those lines and John Travolta dance again in a movie having faded. What’s left is this appreciation of a film that is delighted with cinema and experimental without being a jerk about it (very much like Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa, specifically in a black-and-white rear-process cab ride with none of that feeling that Tarantino’s trying to make a point as opposed to recognizing something that looks cool and feels right)–a film that is Tarantino in all his gawky, hyperactive, movie-geeking, idioglossic splendour, fully-formed and trying only a bit too hard. Beginning life as a proposed portmanteau to be helmed by a trio of directors (à la Tarantino’s later, disastrously-received foray into the anthology format, Four Rooms), the picture retains elements of its three-headed inception by intertwining a trilogy of hard-boiled crime stories in a way superior, it’s clear now, to Frank Miller’s career-long attempts at the same. Tarantino’s purer. The stakes for him are simpler. Pulp Fiction is evidence not of someone with something to prove but of an artist entirely, and genuinely, in love with his medium. He loves film enough to push it to be everything. And Pulp Fiction almost gets there.

Deep Red (1975) + Inferno (1980) – Blu-ray Discs

October 31, 2011Posted in****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Directors: Dario Argento, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

Profondo rosso
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Clara Calamai
screenplay by Dario Argento and Bernardino Zapponi
directed by Dario Argento

INFERNO
***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D
starring Eleonora Giorgi, Gabriele Lavia, Veronica Lazar, Leopoldo Mastelloni
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Deep Red is a transitional film from the middle of Dario Argento’s most creative period, one that sees the Italian Hitchcock (better: the Italian De Palma) building surreal temples on Hitchcock’s meticulous foundations before abandoning them–disastrously and without explanation–following the release of 1982’s Tenebrae. With little scholarship on Argento that’s current and/or comprehensive, and with the director himself seldom asked about his steep decline, what’s left is this notion that Argento wanted to escape the Hitchcock-derivative label (only to return to it after the spark had fled or, more likely, proved illusory all along), or that he wanted a psychic divorce from De Palma, whose career Argento’s paralleled for a while in theme and execution. Whatever happened eventually, Argento in 1975 seemed to be casting about for a new direction. He’d just completed his “animal” trilogy of gialli (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat O’ Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet) and nursed a belief that the genre had, if not run its course entirely, at least run its course for him. He dabbled in a failed period piece (Five Days in Milan), the function of which appears to be to demonstrate that Argento is no Sergio Leone (though to be fair, almost no one is Sergio Leone), and he contributed to a portmanteau for Italian television–a format to which he’d one day return with buddy George Romero and Two Evil Eyes.

Anonymous (2011)

October 28, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Germany, Shakespeare, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, Derek Jacobi
screenplay by John Orloff
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Angelo Muredda Anonymous comes out swinging against the Shakespeare industry with all the force of a midsummer night’s fart in the wind. If director Roland Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff–a match forged in Mordor–had their way, the film would upend university curriculums, supplementing every Shakespeare syllabus with an elliptical “…but what if…” written in invisible ink on the last page. To that end, they’ve taken their baby on a tour of college campuses, and scheduled Facebook-webcast debates in which they’ve stunned Shakespeareans like James Shapiro with wise nuggets comparable to Adam Sandler’s astonishingly incoherent address at the end of Billy Madison. It hasn’t been clear sailing all the way, mind: popular historian Stephen Marche recently took to the NEW YORK TIMES to debunk such “prophets of truthiness”–Emmerich and Orloff are but a new, high-profile strain of Oxfordians, a group who name nobleman Edward de Vere as the true author of Shakespeare’s texts, even the ones dated after his death–for advancing a lunatic conspiracy theory based on little more than class snobbery. Shakespeare scholar Holger Syme was even less charitable, proposing in a blog entry that has since become an Oxfordian recruitment camp fronted by Orloff himself that the film’s chief sin is not historical inaccuracy but its filmmakers’ posture as courageous iconoclasts, railing against established wisdom. Anonymous, then, has had a fairly storied pre-release career.

The Wes Craven Horror Collection – DVD

October 26, 2011Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Satire, Thriller, Wes Craven

THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW (1988)
**½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Bill Pullman, Cathy Tyson, Zakes Mokae, Paul Winfield
screenplay by Richard Maxwell and A.R. Simoun, based on the book by Wade Davis
directed by Wes Craven

SHOCKER (1989)
**/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Michael Murphy, Peter Berg, Cami Cooper, Mitch Pileggi
written and directed by Wes Craven

THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS (1991)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Brandon Adams, Everett McGill, Wendy Robie, A.J. Langer
written and directed by Wes Craven

by Jefferson Robbins The three late-’80s/early-’90s films gathered in Universal’s DVD set “The Wes Craven Horror Collection” are far from the director’s best, but they show him gathering his powers for the satirical play of the Scream franchise. It’s as if Craven careened into the ditch a few times trying to talk about Big Topics before finally deciding that what he was best suited to talk about was slasher movies. That’s not to say these pre-emptive excursions have no value, it’s just that he had to scout the territory thoroughly before drawing a definitive map. He had to shed some dependencies, too–most notably, given his legacy from A Nightmare on Elm Street, his fondness for dreams as an interface with horror.

The Bad Seed (1956) – DVD + Village of the Damned/Children of the Damned [Horror Double Feature] – DVD|The Bad Seed (1956) – Blu-ray Disc

October 21, 2011Posted in1950s, 1960s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

THE BAD SEED
*½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image C+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Patty McCormack, Henry Jones, Eileen Heckart, Evelyn Varden
screenplay by John Lee Martin, based on the play by Maxwell Anderson and the novel by William March
directed by Mervyn LeRoy

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gwynn
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, George Barclay, based on The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
directed by Wolf Rilla

CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1963)
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Ian Hendry, Alan Badel, Barbara Ferris, Alfred Burke
screenplay by John Briley
directed by Anton M. Leader

by Walter Chaw It’s pretty common nowadays to look at the horror films of the 1950s as Cold War/McCarthy-era relics: allegories for a world torn between the antiseptic image of television’s Golden Age and the seething undertow of a society slipping into the madness of the JFK/Medgar Evers assassinations, the 16th Street Baptist Church, the Freedom Summer Killings, the transition from the Korean War to Vietnam, and on and on and on until any pretense of innocence, in art and society, became tainted by irony. It was thought that 9/11 was an event horrific enough to end our gilded age of snark, but ironically is almost the only way that we view tragedy and institutional corruption. Though paranoia might have been planted in the duck-and-cover drills of the Fifties, in the suspicion and fear of returning WWII vets confronting a different world and haunted by demons, it didn’t find full flower until the Rorschach coolness of the 1960s and the mean cinema of the 1970s.

The Skin I Live In (2011)

October 21, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Horror, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

La piel que habito
**½/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet
screenplay by Pedro Almodóvar, based on the novel Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet
directed by Pedro Almodóvar

by Angelo Muredda “Don’t pay attention to the surfaces,” Antonio Banderas’s mad scientist cautions maid and unofficial secret-keeper Marisa Paredes as she approaches a cluttered countertop late–or is it early?–in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest genre- and gender-hopping melodrama, The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito). It’s a joke, of course: the film, whose literalized English title mangles the Spanish pun on habito as both living and occupying, say, an outfit, is obsessed with surfaces and the ambiguous plumbing that supposedly runs deep below the tissue. Trouble is, The Skin I Live In is almost all surface–a beautifully carved wooden doll without any innards. That the doll should proudly display its hollow centre, which the movie does in numerous winks at its own clever vapidity, is admirable enough. But Almodóvar, never one to shy away from an operatic climax or three, overdoes it even by his standards, turning the last act into a morality play about protecting your integrity–your true, unseen self–against the skin-deep scars inflicted by other people. It’s a nice conceit that might have rung true, or at least wrung tears, if the true self in question wasn’t a total blank.

“Odds” and Ends

September 28, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Canada, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, TIFF, TIFF 11
  • The first TIFF movie I saw this year, a Canadian teen-gambling thriller called The Odds (**/****, Canada First!), is unfortunately a tiny dot in the rearview now. What I remember of it is that writer-director Simon Davidson, shooting in ‘scope presumably to announce his transition to a bigger canvas (he’s a veteran of short films, all of which previously played at the TIFF), seemed to have a good eye but trouble maintaining momentum for the length of a feature. With its Psycho-esque shocker a half-hour into the film, in fact, The Odds comes to feel like a short with two more acts tacked on. And its distinctly “Degrassi”-esque vibe of kids playing dress-up affirms the wisdom of Rian Johnson’s Brick in stylizing its high-school setting to abstraction.