Savages (2012)

Posted in2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Savages

*/****
starring Blake Lively, Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson, John Travolta
screenplay by Shane Salerno & Don Winslow & Oliver Stone, based on the novel by Winslow
directed by Oliver Stone 

by Walter Chaw Another disgusting piece of crap that Oliver Stone makes watchable and even fitfully interesting, Savages sees Stone returning to ground he already plowed in Salvador, his screenplay for Scarface, and arguably his best film in hindsight, the filthy U-Turn. One possible excuse for its foulness, in an ocean of possible excuses, is a cast headlined by Taylor Kitsch, the new Paul Walker; Aaron Johnson, the new Skeet Ulrich; and Blake Lively, the new…I don’t know, Bridget Fonda? Another possible explanation is a godawful script by Don Winslow (author of the novel upon which the film is based), Shane Salerno, and Stone hissownself that opens with a ridiculously bad voiceover tease and ends with same, sandwiching in between a tale of blissed-out California marijuana kingpins Chon (Kitsch) and Ben (Johnson) vs. the Mexican cartel, led by Lado (the always amazing Benicio Del Toro) and Elena (Salma Hayek). Sound awful? It’s awful. And it would have been even without an embarrassing John Travolta, wheedling and whinging through an entire performance as a corrupt DEA agent. With him, however, Savages at least has the benefit of occasionally elevating from entirely-useless to sometimes-whimsical camp artifact.

Deliverance (1972) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD/(DigiBook) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Thriller

****/****
DVD – Image B Sound C Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox
screenplay by James Dickey, based on his novel
directed by John Boorman

by Walter Chaw Deliverance is mesmerizing. Emerging fully formed from the rich, black loam of the best period of filmmaking definitely in the United States and possibly in the history of cinema, it pistons its roots unerringly into the darkest corners of our species’ memory. In the second-most memorable moment of the film (the one where kind-hearted city-slicker Drew (Ronny Cox) eases into a guitar/banjo duel with a local kid (Billy Redden)), Boorman dangles the possibility that there could be civility between the spoilers and the spoiled before retracting it for the remainder of the picture’s running time. If Boorman is our pre-eminent keeper of the Arthurian legend, it’s useful to wonder in this particular quest undertaken what are the dark spirits of the wood, and what is the grail? The final image of the piece, after all, suggests a corruption of the Excalibur iconography offered from some fathomless underneath. The essential Western phallus is perverted in Deliverance into the promise that the primal will never be repressed for long.

The Woman in the Fifth (2012)

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Mystery, Poland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Womaninthefifth

La femme du Vème
*½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Kristin Scott Thomas, Joanna Kulig, Samir Guesmi
screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski, based on Douglas Kennedy’s novel
directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

by Angelo Muredda Midway through Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Woman in the Fifth, Romanian femme fatale Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas) tells glum American writer Tom (Ethan Hawke) not to worry about his writer’s block. “You have the makings of a serious work now,” she reassures him: “A broken life, down-and-out in Paris.” Intended as a key to the film, a hint that we aren’t watching real events at all but rather their translation into an American’s grim European masterwork, this exchange does nothing so much as outline the limits of Pawlikowski’s imagination. His first feature since 2004’s unsettling My Summer of Love, this is an odd misstep, the kind of bad movie that can only be made with the purest of intentions. I don’t doubt that Pawlikowski, working from a thriller by American writer Douglas Kennedy, believes in this idea that good novels are born of wretched experiences–that being a disgraced literature professor and stalled artist shaking down phantoms in run-down Paris gives you a direct line to authenticity. But it’s the sort of half-baked conceit that defines countless shallow genre texts shooting for arthouse credibility, the hallmark of a Secret Window knockoff that begs to be taken as seriously as a good Paul Auster novel.

The Grey (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD

Posted in2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, James Badge Dale
screenplay by Joe Carnahan & Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, based on Jeffers’s short story “Ghost Walker”
directed by Joe Carnahan

by Angelo Muredda The teaser for Joe Carnahan’s The Grey closes with Liam Neeson MacGyver-ing a wolf-punching power glove out of mini-liquor bottles. It’s a great hook, and easily the best trailer of the year. It’s also kind of a lie. To be fair, Carnahan’s latest–after the dreadful one-two (wolfless) punch of Smokin’ Aces and The A-Team–is a career-saving return to form, although Narc was hardly epic stuff. Adapted from a short story by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, The Grey ambitiously aspires to be a Jack London-esque exploration of ruffians fighting for their lives against an unmoved wilderness; tonally, it sits somewhere between the gritty naturalism of “To Build a Fire” and the bros-only philosophical seminar of The Sea-Wolf. Carnahan brings an admirable seriousness to this task and invests his band of rogues with some nice human touches, but there’s a dopiness to this material that doesn’t always pass muster. Watching The Grey‘s arctic powwows between protagonist Ottway (Neeson) and his sad burly men, I was most reminded not of endangered-man potboilers but of The Breakfast Club, which similarly gathers a group of rejects around the high-school equivalent of a makeshift fire for some prime bonding. Slogging through these men’s tales of woe isn’t exactly detention, but eventually, it does start to feel like homework.

The Lady Vanishes (1938) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1930s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Mystery, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

Ladyvanishescap3small

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood, Paul Lukas, Cecil Parkerscreenplay by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw There’s something ephemeral about Ms. Froy (Dame May Whitty), from her sudden appearance at a hotel desk to her first words obscured by ambient noise, to her initial exit facilitated by an invisible hand. She seems from the start a metaphor, the first of Hitchcock’s women-as-metaphor, leading up to his gaggle of Birds and an unlikely companion in that way to the seagulls-into-women who discover a body at the beginning of the previous year’s Young and Innocent. She occupies a space as well with the unnamed second Mrs. De Winter in Hitch’s American debut, Rebecca: a cipher, without an identity of her own, the MacGuffin made flesh and the embodiment, in The Lady Vanishes, of perhaps the director’s desire to pursue his career across the pond, with only a contractual obligation to Jamaica Inn standing in his way. (The Lady Vanishes starts in a way station, yes? Gateway to greater adventure.) Indeed, the picture cemented David O. Selznick’s interest in Hitchcock, the irony being that unlike the majority of his work before and after, The Lady Vanishes‘ production was already well underway before he hopped onto the saddle. On second thought, maybe it was the idea that Hitchcock could be a hired gun that attracted Selznick–a belief that holds countless ironies of its own.

Vertigo (1958) – Universal Legacy Series DVD

Vertigo (1958) – Universal Legacy Series DVD

Posted in****/****, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore
screenplay by Alec Coppel & Samuel Taylor, based on the novel D’Entre Les Morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
directed by Alfred Hitchcock 

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. What Vertigo lacks that others of Alfred Hitchcock’s undisputed late masterpieces do not, just in terms of sheer bulk volume, is scholarship. Weird, because the film is Hitchcock’s most complex, albeit in many ways also his most opaque. It’s as if it defies analysis by being at once too obvious and too obscure, enough so that critical reads of it are inevitably both naïve and pompous. It’s true that attempts at unlocking the film are akin to diagnosing a particularly disturbed patient’s dysfunction: that you’re fucked up is right there on the surface for everyone to see, but the reasons why are damnably difficult to beat from the grey bramble. Attempts to articulate what works about the picture invariably wind up describing the technical mechanism (the perspective distortion, the monumentalism, the voluminous and self-announcing rear projection) rather than the ineffable, perverse rapture that it provokes.

The Bodyguard (1992) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

The Bodyguard (1992) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music, Romance, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras C
BLU-RAY – Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Kevin Costner, Whitney Houston, Gary Kemp, Bill Cobbs
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Mick Jackson

by Walter Chaw Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston have a conversation about Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (whose title means “The Bodyguard”) in the middle of Mick Jackson’s hilarious camp artifact The Bodyguard, the one where Costner plays a barely-vocal lunk and Houston plays a singer-turned-actress with severe personality flaws. And that little chat, occupying a minute-and-a-half or so of screentime, encapsulates everything that’s priceless about this flick: It’s stupid, embarrassing, and watered-down, but it’s also surreal, queer, and hermetically sealed in a rhinestone-studded mason jar. Have no fear, though, as that revelatory discussion of one of the great films in world cinema segues in record time into a heartfelt rumination on the lyrics of a Dolly Parton song and then into a courtship ritual involving a big samurai sword and a piece of silk. Is Kevin going to sheathe his blue steel in Whitney’s purple scarf? Ah, the decadent ribaldry! What could it all mean?

The Woman in Black (2012) + The Innkeepers (2011)|The Innkeepers – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE WOMAN IN BLACK
*/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Ciarán Hinds, Janet McTeer, Liz White
screenplay by Jane Goldman
directed by James Watkins

THE INNKEEPERS
***½/**** | Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis, George Riddle
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw A beautifully outfitted, brilliantly designed Victorian jack-in-the-box, James Watkins’s The Woman in Black will likely be remembered, if it’s remembered at all, as Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter commencement (given that no one saw December Boys). Alas, it squanders a pretty nice, ‘Tim Burton Sleepy Hollow‘ set-up in bumfuck England for a solid hour of crap jumping out of shadows. Popping up from behind bushes is startling, but it isn’t art (it’s not even clever), and at the end of the day, it’s only really entertaining if you or your date is a sixteen-year-old girl. Carrying the Hammer imprint and boasting production design so good that long stretches of the film are devoted to looking at it, the piece only ever honours its legacy and appearance with the brutality with which it handles its dead children and a delirious dinner scene in which a grief-besotted lady (Janet McTeer) treats her little dogs like babies and carves something on her dinner table whilst possessed of a hilarious fit. The rest of it is garbage.

The Hunger Games (2012)

Posted in2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Gary Ross and Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray, based on the novel by Collins
directed by Gary Ross

by Walter Chaw Now that the United States has remade Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, it’s fair to wonder when it’ll tackle Ichi the Killer or Tetsuo, the Iron Man. It’s all part of a greater conversation around what it is that made the U.S. more sympathetic to Japan after 9/11, whereas before, films like Fukasaku’s grim little sociological masterpiece were seen as contraband in America. Marinating in social superiority only gets you so far, I guess, until the detonation of a WMD over a civilian population suddenly redraws the lines and changes your worldview. It’s no accident that Suzanne Collins’s series of tween dystopia books is wildly popular in this post-millennial zeitgeist–no accident, either, come to think of it, that the “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” books, featuring brutal rape and unforgivable fantasy vigilantism (and a fetching girl-hero, it bears mentioning), were the rage of blueblood, blue-haired reading circles: grandma in the Times Square grindhouse circa 1974. What’s genuinely frightening about the wide, middlebrow acceptance of such traditionally deviant fare is that it’s a glimpse into what happens when a country founded by Puritans suddenly has its apocalyptic paranoia and hardwired xenophobia briefly confirmed. If you’re a Republican with a moral barometer in these, our United States of America in 2012, take a good, hard look at what’s happened to your party and tell me that I’m wrong. It takes a hell of a lot of crazy to make Margaret Atwood seem prophetic–to make Mel Gibson trend towards the middle.

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

Posted 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

Posted 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

Posted 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)

Posted 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

Posted 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

Posted 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

Posted 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

Posted 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

Posted 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)

Posted 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

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

Posted 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.