Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011)

October 18, 2012Posted in****/****, 2011, 2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Japan, Martial Arts, UK

Harakiri

****/****
starring Ebizo Ichikawa, Eita, Hikari Mitsushima, Naoto Takenaka
screenplay by Kikumi Yamagashi, based on the novel by Yasuhiko Takiguchi
directed by Takashi Miike

by Walter Chaw Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 masterpiece Harakiri is the height of austere–almost Noh–Japanese filmmaking. It lands somewhere between Ozu’s pillow flicks and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, and, of course, as Kobayashi is the auteur behind the Human Condition trilogy, that martial austerity, that antiestablishment mien, is to be expected, if impossible to ever truly gird oneself against. It’s set in 1630, at the end of feudal Japan, when collapsing fiefdoms mean throngs of ronin overflowing into the countryside and, occasionally, asking for the right to commit ritual suicide in an “honourable” courtyard. Tsugumo is one such samurai, but before he’s granted the privilege of dragging a sword across his belly, House of Iyi counsellor Saito insists on telling him of a previous penitent, Chijiiwa, who claimed he wanted to kill himself but only really wanted a handout. Seeking to make an example of Chijiiwa and the effrontery he represents to the Bushido code, the Iyi clan decides to force the issue–even after it’s revealed that Chijiiwa has, somewhere along the way, pawned his iron for a bamboo stick with a hilt. It’s a kind of torture, and everyone watches. Kobayashi goes into flashback, unexpectedly, telling the story of the young samurai we, at first, are complicit in mocking. We participate in his torture. We believe he deserves it. By the end of the film, we don’t believe that anymore.

Wuthering Heights (2011)

October 18, 2012Posted in****/****, 2011, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, UK

Wutheringheights2012

****/****
starring Kaya Scodelario, James Howson, Solomon Glave, Nichola Burley
screenplay by Andrea Arnold, Olivia Hetreed, based on the novel by Emily Brontë
directed by Andrea Arnold

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The animalism, the absolute withering upheaval of the “feminized” Victorian-novel tradition, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has long been one of my favourite books. What’s never been properly captured in its myriad film adaptations is the earthiness that tethers its gothic, sometimes supernatural, trappings. Neither guilty pleasure nor bodice-ripper, it’s a wallow, a traipse through high heather that only hides the wet suck of the moors, and damned if it doesn’t, when all’s said and done, project something like a masculine gaze in its positioning of brooding, demonic Heathcliff at its centre. It’s a romance–a destructive, devouring romance constructed all of regrets and unconsummated desire; and Andrea Arnold’s wise, visceral take on it is the underbelly of Jane Campion’s brilliant Bright Star. Together, they would construct a poetic whole: the Romanticist yin of Bright Star to Wuthering Heights‘ roaring Victorian yang. Arnold’s film is so good, in fact, that it clarifies how it is that Romanticism, through Victorianism, eventually becomes Emerson’s Naturalism and then, ultimately, Modernism. It’s a continuum, isn’t it, and Wuthering Heights is the missing link in a very particular Darwin chart. The excitement of it for me is that it’s an example, pure and new, that film at its best is poetry.

Child’s Play (1988) [Chucky’s 20th Birthday Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray + DVD; Chucky: The Killer DVD Collection

October 1, 2012Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Romania, Satire, Thriller, UK

Childsplaycap

CHILD’S PLAY
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon, Alex Vincent, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Don Mancini and John Lafia and Tom Holland
directed by Tom Holland

CHILD’S PLAY 2 (1990)
**/**** Image C+ Sound A-
starring Alex Vincent, Jenny Agutter, Gerrit Graham, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Don Mancini
directed by John Lafia

CHILD’S PLAY 3 (1991)
*/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Justin Whalin, Perrey Reeves, Jeremy Sylvers, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Don Mancini
directed by Jack Bender

BRIDE OF CHUCKY (1998)
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jennifer Tilly, Brad Dourif, Katherine Heigl, Nick Stabile
screenplay by Don Mancini
directed by Ronny Yu

SEED OF CHUCKY (2004)
*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C-
starring Jennifer Tilly, Brad Dourif, Billy Boyd, Redman
written and directed by Don Mancini

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Twenty years and four sequels later, it’s obviously pointless to try to conceal that Child’s Play is about a serial killer (Brad Dourif) who transfers his soul into an innocuous doll, but watching it today–more than a decade after it thoroughly traumatized me as an impressionable preteen–I was surprised to learn that the film itself didn’t do much to hide that fact from the start. Oh, sure, when you first approach Child’s Play, you’re ostensibly supposed to wonder whether little Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent) is responsible for the murders peppered throughout, despite his loud protestations that Chucky did it. But no, it never really tries to pretend that these horrible acts are being committed by anyone other than that godawful doll. In taking that perspective, Child’s Play preys upon the irrational fears we all harbour–that sting of dread we get at the sight of an unintentionally unsettling toy, immediately wished away by safe, immutable reason: that’s impossible–a doll can’t hurt you.

TIFF ’12: Leviathan

September 15, 2012Posted in****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, TIFF, UK

****/****
directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

by Angelo Muredda What is there to say about Leviathan, a nearly-wordless maelstrom of ravenous seagulls, blood-red waves, and severed fish-heads piled to the horizon? Colleagues at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel take the sensory as seriously as the ethnography here, producing a truly singular documentary account of a commercial fishing vessel off the New Bedford coast that puts the so-called immersive quality of 3-D baubles like Avatar to shame. Their work more than lives up to the biblical title, delivering what might be described as a fish-eye view of the Apocalypse.

TIFF ’12: Everyday

September 14, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Christmas, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK

**½/****
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Angelo Muredda Michael Winterbottom makes projects more than he makes films, and happy are the rare few that bridge the gap. Everyday comes close at times, with no thanks to the unnecessarily tricked-out structure, which picks up with a young British family at holiday satellite points spread out over a five-year period and watches them cope with separation anxiety in between. In theory, this narrative-by-checkpoint strategy most resembles 2004’s dismal 9 Songs, where Winterbottom watched a dull relationship bloom and die in the span of nine dull concerts and miserable sex scenes, but the film can’t help but be improved by the material this time.

TIFF ’12: Argo

September 7, 2012Posted in2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF, UK

***½/****
directed by Ben Affleck

by Bill Chambers Ben Affleck’s films as a director are no longer surprisingly good–they’re expectedly good. The surprise of his latest, Argo, is twofold: first, put a beard on Affleck and suddenly he’s an actor of gravitas; second, that this directing detour his career took may have been born of not just self-preservation, but real movie love. You can see it in his hoarding of genre staples for one-scene (Adrienne Barbeau) and in some cases one-line (Michael Parks) roles, but more importantly, you can see it in the gentle Hollywood satire Argo briefly–perhaps too briefly–becomes. Set in 1979, the picture is suffused with a passion for filmmaking, if also a tinge of wistfulness for that bygone era in filmmaking. Though it may be period-authentic when Affleck shows the Hollywood sign in a state of disrepair, I think it’s meant as commentary on the present. Argo is the second Warner release this year to revert to the golden-age Saul Bass logo–it fits better here.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

August 28, 2012Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2012, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, FFC Must-Own, UK, War

Fullmetaljacket1

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D’Onofrio, Lee Ermey
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, based on Hasford’s novel The Short Timers
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson One of the most noticed Stanley Kubrick trademarks is a scene in a bathroom. I haven’t read too much about why there is always a scene in a bathroom, but rarer still are comments related to what goes on in the bathroom. Different activities have different meanings. Urination (A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut) is a sexually arrogant act. It’s the one bathroom activity in Kubrick’s films that is done with the door open. Bathing (Spartacus, Lolita, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange again, The Shining) is a hedonistic, bourgeois indulgence and an escape to a safe place. Kubrick is not beyond exploiting the bath’s mythological, symbolic connotations as the unexplored subconscious (the subversion of Aphrodite iconology in The Shining) or the womb (Star Child Alex in A Clockwork Orange); bathing is largely a private activity, you see. It is sometimes interrupted, but when that happens the invasion of privacy has significance. (James Mason’s interrupted bath in Lolita, for example, had purely narrative- and character-based implications. He regarded it as just another humiliation to add to the pile.) Defecation is even more private, so private that a Kubrick character has never interrupted it. To defecate (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey) is human, you see. Everybody has to take a shit, but to shit is shameful. The perfect human being would not shit, would indeed be beyond shitting. The HAL computer doesn’t shit, does it? Does the Star Child shit? I sincerely doubt it!

Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) [15th Anniversary Edition] + High Fidelity (2000) – Blu-ray Discs

August 26, 2012Posted in1990s, 2000s, 2012, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Music, Romance, Thriller, UK

Grossepointe2

GROSSE POINTE BLANK
***½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras D
starring John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Alan Arkin, Dan Aykroyd
screenplay by Tom Jankiewicz and D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & John Cusack
directed by George Armitage

HIGH FIDELITY
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring John Cusack, Jack Black, Lisa Bonet, Joelle Carter
screenplay by D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & John Cusack and Scott Rosenberg, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Stephen Frears

by Jefferson Robbins John Cusack spent much of the 1990s stubbornly trying to dodge his high-school reunion. Barely present in Sixteen Candles, he nevertheless may have suffered a bit of the curse that pursued John Hughes’s other players: We wouldn’t let them grow up for quite a while, and careers were hampered. Cusack navigated this impasse better than most, netting late-’80s leads both romantic (Say Anything…) and dramatic (The Grifters) that unpack and showcase his mature dimensions. Cusack has, if it’s not too oxymoronic, a vulnerable edge–his characters are deeply attuned to others, but only out of self-defense. Lloyd Dobler, Roy Dillon, and, in the two films under discussion, Martin Blank and Rob Gordon constantly assess input to learn how the prevailing emotional currents of a scene affect them, not others. “You think I’m a dick,” Lloyd determines when Diane (Ione Skye) gives him a Pen of Friendship as a parting gift. His feelings, dependent on hers, are paramount. Cusack’s heroes are sensitive but far from selfless, yet the actor somehow convinces us otherwise.

The Queen of Versailles (2012)

August 9, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Documentary, Netherlands, Theatrical, UK

***/****
directed by Lauren Greenfield

by Angelo Muredda Lauren Greenfield’s greatest boon with The Queen of Versailles, an absorbing and unfailingly intelligent documentary that rises Phoenix-like out of some spotty origins, might lie in how it makes the life of two wealthy Americans seem unliveable, stressed on the verge of system collapse. Starting in the heyday of time-share emperor and Westgate Resorts CEO David Siegel (who ambiguously claims to have gotten Bush 2.0 elected in 2000, but won’t explain how), the film starts off–and hints at its initial purpose–as a portrait of an industrious man building himself a monument, a house to contain his every desire. A smart but not tasteful man, he models the 90,000 square foot Orlando palace after Versailles; when asked why he needs to build it at all when his current home is already enormous (although, as he points out, “bursting at the seams”), he simply smiles and says, “Because I can.” But pride, as they say, goes before the fall, and the recession hits before Versailles can be completed, leaving each of David’s two hands on a very costly loose end: a massive unfinished home that’s impossible to sell in a collapsed housing market; and a resort industry that filled its coffers with the life-savings of the newly foreclosed, run on hypothetical money that has run out of currency.

Outland (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

August 6, 2012Posted in1980s, 2012, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Western

Outlandcap1

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Sean Connery, Peter Boyle, Frances Sternhagen, James B. Sikking
written and directed by Peter Hyams

by Jefferson Robbins Has anybody looked at Alan “Laddie” Ladd Jr. as an auteur of U.S. film’s late-’70s/early-’80s science-fiction renaissance? By definition, the auteur theory addresses directors, but producer-execs are inevitably part of a film’s genome–at their worst, barriers to a film’s artistic ambitions, at their best, enablers of daring visions, and often rescuers or champions of interesting failures. Ladd, of course, famously midwifed and defended Star Wars (later Star Wars: Episode IV- A New Hope) while he was president of Fox, and the studio went on to shepherd Alien to theatres during his tenure.1 His production firm, The Ladd Company, sent forth Blade Runner, the first film to put a Philip K. Dick concept on the screen in addition to being very much its own, deeply influential beast. Some unifiers among these films include introductory crawls or intertitles, situating the audience in a far future or faraway galaxy; grimy or rusty milieux, painting the SF frontier as a sumptuous scrap pile; deep attention to class, with starcraft piloted by hardworking space jockeys in trucker caps; and, as it was pointed out to me on Facebook the other day, a reliance on established fantasy/SF artists (H.R. Giger, Ron Cobb, Moebius) to carry out much of the production design. Building a world costs money, and Ladd signed the checks.2

Total Recall (2012)

August 1, 2012Posted in2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Totalrecall2012

**/****
starring Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback, based on a screenplay by Ronald Shusett & Dan O’Bannon and the short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick
directed by Len Wiseman

by Walter Chaw For about forty minutes, maybe less, Len Wiseman’s ironically forgettable Total Recall redux demonstrates energy, inventiveness, and proper respect for Blade Runner‘s production design, at least, if not for its predecessor. By the end, it’s just a bigger-budget Lockout that not only doesn’t do anything with the Philip K. Dick source material, but is also wholly incapable of trumping the absolute, tripping-balls perversity of the Paul Verhoeven original. It’s a problem that not even resurrecting the three-titted hooker can solve, especially since her appearance in this Total Recall highlights not the mutagenic strangeness of Mars but the oddness of…Australia? It’s Colin Farrell this time around as everyman Douglas Quaid, stepping in for Ah-nuld of course and, in so doing, making the film’s one possible narrative reality that Quaid is actually a Bourne-like super-agent less a possibility. Farrell is in fact too good at being ordinary–the long introduction that establishes Quaid’s boring workaday existence is arguably the best thing about the whole thing. There’s real pain there when he doesn’t get a desired promotion, real desperation in his coming home to a sleeping wife before going out again to drink cheap beer with his assembly-line buddy. The result of Farrell’s being kind of a really great actor is that he (like Guy Pearce in Lockout) instantly reveals the vehicle and its execution to be not nearly good enough, its aspirations not nearly high enough. And whatever questions the picture asks in the pursuit of metafiction, well, Farrell is capable of conveying more.

Brave (2012)

June 20, 2012Posted in2012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical, UK

Brave

**½/****
screenplay by Mark Andrews and Steve Purcell and Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi
directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman

by Walter Chaw Brave…isn’t. Not very. It’s by far the most conventional Pixar film, and while it’s better than either Cars, that’s only because the Cars movies are simply awful. Brave has a plucky girl heroine who disobeys her mother, makes a hash of things, then solves everything at the end through the murder of the antagonist. It has an adorable animal sidekick (three of them, actually), treats an entire culture like a broad ethnic joke, and misses every single opportunity to be about something. Huzzah! When we say as a culture that something’s for children, we mean that it’s better–unless we’re talking about media culture. Brave is for children, and its only connection to things like WALL·E, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, or Ratatouille is its company’s pedigree, fading fast until Brad Bird or Andrew Stanton decides to strap ’em on and jump back in the ol’ computer-animated saddle, riding to the rescue as the company founded on their beautiful complexities descends into absolute, uncontroversial, shallow mendacity.

The Woman in the Fifth (2012)

June 13, 2012Posted 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.

Prometheus (2012)

June 6, 2012Posted in2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, UK

*/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Charlize Theron
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw It’s time, probably long past time, to admit that Ridley Scott is nothing more or less than Tim Burton: a visual stylist at the mercy of others to offer his hatful of pretty pictures something like depth. If either one of them ever made a great film (and I’d argue that both have), thank the accident of the right source material and/or editor, not these directors, whose allegiance is to their own visual auteurism rather than any desire for a unified product. For Scott, the conversation essentially begins and ends for me with Alien, Blade Runner, and Black Hawk Down (for most, it’s just the first two, with a political nod to Thelma & Louise)–genre films, all, and each about the complications of mendacity given over to lush, stylish excess: the gothic, biomechanical haunted house of Alien‘s Nostromo mining vehicle and its hapless band of blue-collar meatbags; the meticulously detailed Angelino diaspora of Blade Runner and its Raymond Chandler refugee; and Mark Bowden’s Mogadishu, transformed in Black Hawk Down into a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Again, there’s that utility. Without it, Scott’s films are impenetrable monuments to style, as smooth and affectless as a perfume advertisement–and the more you watch them, the less memorable that style becomes.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 3, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Mystery, UK

*½/**** Image C+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Noomi Rapace, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Michele Mulroney & Kieran Mulroney
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Angelo Muredda On my way out of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, I overheard a woman telling her friend that it was “the sort of thing you have to see a second time.” Presumably she meant the intricate scheme by which “Napoleon of Crime” Moriarty (Jared Harris, suitably menacing) seeks to deliver Europe into an early Great War, a mystery so trite that its solution hinges on whether Holmes (Robert Downey Jr., inching dangerously towards Johnny Depp levels of hackdom) can get a hold of his nemesis’s pocketbook. But showing us everything for a second time is very much Ritchie’s M.O. There are about twenty minutes of movie in A Game of Shadows, all told: the rest is instant replay, a shameless parade of alternate angles and slow-motion recaps of bullets firing out of barrels or getting jammed in the process. It’s as if in lieu of the finished product, Ritchie submitted home footage of his own work in the editing suite, dazzled by Final Cut Pro’s array of grey filters and motion blurs.

The Grey (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD

May 14, 2012Posted 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

May 9, 2012Posted 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.

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

April 26, 2012Posted in****/****, 2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, UK

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D+
starring Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale, Nicole Baharie
screenplay by Steve McQueen and Abi Morgan
directed by Steve McQueen

by Walter Chaw Brandon is a cipher from beginning to end, and while that’s usually a detriment, in Steve McQueen’s extraordinary, gruelling Shame, it’s key to why the whole thing works. Even better is that Brandon, a widely-presumed sex addict (to my mind, the film works better without a pop diagnosis), is played by Michael Fassbender, he of the matinee-idol looks and piercing green eyes. It’s interesting that what he plays best is ambiguity (next up: a robot in Prometheus), an unknowable quality that inspired McQueen’s previous installation piece, Hunger, making the lonesome protest of hunger-striker Bobby Sands into a holy mystery, a relic unknowable and his English bull tormentors Romans with spears knowing not what they do. No less ecclesiastical, Shame is a feature-length indulgence and scourging, making it fair to wonder if McQueen’s aim isn’t to assail each of the Deadly Sins in due course–his own septet on glowing, adjoined celluloid panels. It’s a great explanation of the title, and makes me wonder if the next one won’t be “Avarice.” Anyway, the film only works because Fassbender is beautiful. Ugly guys don’t get to be ashamed of sex.

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

April 23, 2012Posted 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 Deep Blue Sea (2011)

April 17, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale
screenplay by Terence Davies, based on the play by Terence Rattigan
directed by Terence Davies

by Angelo Muredda In Of Time and the City, Terence Davies’s self-described love song and eulogy for his native Liverpool, the director halts his psycho-geographic walking tour of old haunts at one point to pay backhanded tribute to the Merseybeat movement. With the meteoric rise of The Beatles, he pronounces in sulky baritone, the well-crafted love songs on which he was weaned became, overnight, as antiquated as curling tongs. Yet just as abruptly as pop turned beat, the young Davies went another way: “I discovered Mahler,” he drawls, “and responded completely to his every overwrought note.” Davies’s studiously unfashionable gravitation to the Romantic, largely for its affinities with the torch songs he so recently mourned, finds apt expression in his sixth feature, a beautifully overripe adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea. Like its source, the film chronicles the misfortunes of Hester (Rachel Weisz), a judge’s wife in postwar London who leaves her cerebral older spouse, William (Simon Russell Beale), for sexual fulfilment with wastrel Royal Air Force pilot Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), and subsequently finds herself unloved and in limbo. Only a recent convert to such reckless emotional indulgence, Hester, when we meet her, is very much the Mahler sort. Despite its apparent distance from more clearly autobiographical films like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, then, Davies is an ideal steward for this material–every bit as attentive to matters of exquisite sadness as his protagonist.