Revolutionary Road (2008) + Doubt (2008) – Blu-ray Discs

Revolutionary Road (2008) + Doubt (2008) – Blu-ray Discs

June 1, 2009Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Mystery, Romance, UK

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon, Kathy Bates
screenplay by Justin Haythe, based on the novel by Richard Yates
directed by Sam Mendes

DOUBT
**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis
written and directed by John Patrick Shanley

by Walter Chaw Impeccably acted and playing out what seems to be a collective cultural fascination with the pre-Flower Power ’60s (not quite Ward and June, not quite Jimi and Janis), Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road and John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt help 2008 meet its quota of prestige-y Actors Studio pieces. Both are based on well-regarded (renowned, in the case of the first) literary sources, both sport high-octane casts in the pursuit of that delicate balance in adaptations between literal and spiritual faithfulness, and both, ultimately, have considerably less to say than the surrounding hullabaloo would suggest. Revolutionary Road plots another point on the graph of Mendes’s steeply declining returns–he’s a stage director whose greatest weakness is his desire for little epiphanies that play like Everest off the boards, and he’s guilty of too much intoxication with the medium besides. Mendes spends so much time fiddling around with his camera to a noodling Thomas Newman score that you feel like giving him some privacy.

Yes Man (2008) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Yes Man (2008) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

May 21, 2009Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance, UK

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D
starring Jim Carrey, Zooey Deschanel, Bradley Cooper, Terence Stamp
screenplay by Nicholas Stoller and Jarrad Paul & Andrew Mogel, based on the novel by Danny Wallace
directed by Peyton Reed

by Walter Chaw I look at Jim Carrey nowadays with a little bit of bittersweetness, in that his attempts to go “legit” in movies like Man on the Moon and especially Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were essentially swatted aside, dismissed as brief indulgences between talking-asshole gigs. I believe that Carrey is a serious guy, possibly a melancholy guy, certainly a smart guy–and I believe the closest anyone’s come to finding the right vehicle for his elasticity is Charlie Kaufman. Maybe they’ll work together again. Until then, Carrey’s fate is to shoehorn into endlessly reducible slapstick romcoms like Peyton Reed’s Yes Man–easy cash-grabs with an ephemeral shelf-life doomed to be referenced for its one or two scenes that make any impact before becoming ancient history. The formula for this shit is etched in tintype by now: the Lovesick Dork Protag is Carl (Carrey), the High Concept is that he pathologically rejects everything, and the object of his l’amour fou is avant-garde punk band frontwoman Allison (Zooey Deschanel™). Can this button-up, white-collar stiff (Carl’s a loan officer) learn to embrace spontaneity and break free of the workaday while setting up his own quirky business and saving the world in the process? Yes, man.

Seattle International Film Festival ’09: In the Loop

May 13, 2009Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Film Festivals, Satire, UK
***/****starring Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Gina McKee, James Gandolfiniscreenplay by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Rochedirected by Armando Iannucci by Jefferson Robbins It's the Downing Street Memo actualized as comedy. Spun off from director Armando Iannucci's own 2005 BBC series "The Thick Of It", In the Loop broadens its scope from the backroom foibles of clueless, self-interested British MPs to encompass the American policy vultures, partisan hacks, and PTSD generals who devise, or are victimized by, war policy. Ported over wholesale from "The Thick Of It" is Peter Capaldi's bloodthirsty Malcolm Tucker, chief enforcer for the Prime Minister and…
Never Say Never Again (1983) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Never Say Never Again (1983) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

May 12, 2009Posted in1980s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Bahamas, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, France, James Bond, Thriller, UK, West Germany

*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Sean Connery, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Max Von Sydow, Edward Fox
screenplay by Lorenzo Semple, Jr.
directed by Irvin Kershner

by Ian Pugh After decades of legal wrangling, producer Kevin McClory had finally won the right to make an autonomous James Bond flick out of Ian Fleming’s Thunderball, and 1983 seemed like the perfect time to capitalize on it, what with resident Bond Roger Moore’s age catching up with him and the original series running out of steam as a consequence. A household name, the character of Bond has enough cultural heft and influence that he warrants interpretations from independent sources besides, and given that Sean Connery was lured out of a twelve-year retirement from the character–hence the title, Never Say Never Again–as well as the room for improvement left by the original Thunderball, the film had the potential to be more than just a cynical cash-in.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

May 1, 2009Posted in2000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Liev Schrieber, Danny Huston, Ryan Reynolds
screenplay by David Benioff and Skip Woods
directed by Gavin Hood

by Walter Chaw The action sequences are bad, the plot is bad… Hugh Jackman? He’s fine. Everything you might expect, in other words, from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, wherein that most popular of muties (although I always preferred Gambit, marking me as about 42% gay) receives his first official vehicle with shaky Gavin Hood at the wheel. Was it the deadening piece of shit Tsotsi or the gravid piece of shit Rendition that convinced them Hood was the right person for this gravid, deadening piece of shit? True to form, the movie is laden with misplaced gravitas, magic-hour tableaux, and awkward drivel that makes me think that of the film’s two credited writers, it’s Hitman/Swordfish scribe Skip Woods and not 25th Hour scribe David Benioff who took the final run at the screenplay. (“Now I know why the moon is lonely,” says our macho man of action Wolvie (Jackman) at one point–and the audience howls.) It has a Watchmen opening montage following Wolvie and brother Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) through history’s most picturesque battles (Trenches! Beaches! Paddies!) before they’re finally enlisted by mysterious government stooge Stryker (Danny Huston), who has a plan for these and other genetic misfits. Think of it as “X-Men: Episode One”, as dorks are encouraged to trainspot famous mutants in the background while the foreground gets cluttered with lots of bad dialogue, grammar-school sentimentality, and oodles of special effects.

The Soloist (2009)

April 23, 2009Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, France, Music, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Jaime Foxx, Robert Downey Jr., Catherine Keener, Tom Hollander
screenplay by Susannah Grant
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw Black, crazy, homeless, and a prodigy–it’s A Beautiful Mind and Searching for Bobby Fischer and The Fisher King and The Green Mile all wrapped up in a tight little Oscar ball. And The Soloist is a true story, of course, from LA TIMES columnist Steve Lopez’s affecting series on homeless guy Nathaniel Ayers, which he turned into a book that’s been adapted into a movie scripted by seasoned middlebrow emotional rapist Susannah Grant and directed by rapidly-developing first-class hired-hack Joe Wright. A problem, you’ll agree, that it was pushed by its own studio out of the catbird seat late last year to make room for, of all things, that non-starter Revolutionary Road. The issue–arguably the only issue–of exploitation is raised, and well, in the film’s most honest scene: at an awards banquet feting Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) for his profile of Nathaniel (Jaime Foxx), the former’s editor/ex-wife Mary (Catherine Keener) excoriates Lopez for his reluctance to fully engage what had at that point become his near-total responsibility. If that central issue of the picture lies fallow until an ill-fated recital (set up by ill-used, slapstick laughing-stock Christian cellist Graham Claydon (Tom Hollander)) ends with a few wild swings of a nail-studded bat, at least it’s introduced as an elephant in a room full of people in that darkened theatre clucking at how adorable and somehow inspirational it is that a hobo is a world-class cellist.

Event Horizon (1997) – Blu-ray Disc

Event Horizon (1997) – Blu-ray Disc

April 23, 2009Posted in1990s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson
screenplay by Philip Eisner
directed by Paul Anderson

by Walter Chaw Event Horizon approaches the science-fiction idea of a mysterium tremens, hints that it will be about the inscrutability of an alien intelligence–like Lem’s and Tarkovsky’s (and Soderbergh’s) variations on the theme of Solaris, for instance, or that monolith in 2001. But with lowbrow hack Paul W.S. Anderson (then simply Paul Anderson) at the helm, Event Horizon washes out as just another assembly-line jump-scare factory. A particular shame, as with this project Anderson attracted an unusually competent cast, only to ask the likes of Laurence Fishburne, Joely Richardson, Sam Neill, Jason Isaacs, and Kathleen Quinlan to respond to cats-by-any-other-name jumping through allegorical windows. It goes beyond wearisome to actually being insulting. The first hour is spent establishing the brave crew of the Lewis & Clark, setting off to somewhere near Neptune on the rescue and salvage of experimental ship Event Horizon, which disappeared a few months prior. Outfitted with a new “gravity drive” suspiciously like the fold-space/grasshopper spice drive from Dune, the Event Horizon has not only managed to travel beyond our Universe–it has also succeeded in theologically blowing our minds! Weird visions ensue (bad dreams and worse), and then there’s the captain’s log that our heroes spend the bulk of the film “filtering” before finally discovering that the warnings contained therein are in Latin for a reason. Doesn’t anyone in the future watch The Exorcist? Good thing medico D.J. (Isaacs) speaks Latin, or they’d never know what it wouldn’t help them to know.

State of Play (2009)

April 16, 2009Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray, based on the BBC television series created by Paul Abbott
directed by Kevin Macdonald

by Ian Pugh If it were smart, Kevin Macdonald’s State of Play would stick to lamenting the ignominious death of newsprint at the hands of Internet sensationalism and all that that implies. As a veteran reporter and a U.S. Congressman–college roommates once known as rabblerousing muckrakers in their respective fields–turn to each other when their worlds collapse, you’d think that maybe the film had in mind a meditation on the dissolution of the Old Boys’ clubs. Done in by our demystifying familiarity with the subjects under scrutiny (cops and politicians) and an unwillingness to inject new blood into their veins, right? Hell, even Watergate is brought up as an incidental location, as Macdonald sends a sweeping camera across the notorious hotel. You can’t tell me there isn’t something to be said here about how a reliance on outmoded tactics and an obsession with decades-old victories has only sped up their obsolescence.

American Gangster (2007); I’m Not There (2007); No Country for Old Men (2007) + No Country for Old Men [’08 BD + 2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

American Gangster (2007); I’m Not There (2007); No Country for Old Men (2007) + No Country for Old Men [’08 BD + 2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

April 15, 2009Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Coen Brothers, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Gangster, Germany, Music, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

AMERICAN GANGSTER
***/****
starring Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cuba Gooding, Jr.
screenplay by Steven Zaillian
directed by Ridley Scott

I’M NOT THERE
***½/****
starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere
screenplay by Todd Haynes & Oren Moverman
directed by Todd Haynes

FFC Must-OwnNO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
****/****
’08 BD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
CE – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly Macdonald
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Consider the moment when an overly enthusiastic police search results in the demolition of a replica dresser commissioned by Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) for the Carolina plantation he’s bought to house his extended family. In one canny instant, there’s the suggestion that nothing ever changes: the things we lose in time we will always lose. The image Ridley Scott provides for us as he moves the Lucas clan into their new digs is loaded and dangerous, with a group of African-Americans walking up the lush green lawn of an antebellum plantation–usurpers of a corrupt American Dream that, American Gangster posits, is still corrupt and in essentially the same way. True, there’s a cartoon bogey in a New York cop (Josh Brolin) erected as the straw man for all of New York’s Finest who’s profiting off French Connection junk (gasp, he shoots a dog, and probably also smokes)–but the real villainy in the picture is the idea that the path to true status and achievement in the United States is on the backs of not just others, but entire groups of others.

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)

March 26, 2009Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Virginia Madsen, Kyle Gallner, Martin Donovan, Elias Koteas
screenplay by Adam Simon & Tim Metcalfe
directed by Peter Cornwell

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Never mind all of this “true story” malarkey–what really makes The Haunting in Connecticut stand out from the pack is the sociopathic obnoxiousness with which it’s been marketed to moviegoers. The dark and depressing trailers are bad enough, but who can forget the giant ad that invaded YouTube‘s front page last week that showed a young boy ejecting a gravity-defying stream of vomit before inviting the user to “click to watch two dead boys”? Though “dead boys” is actually a reference to the famous folk poem (as in “back to back they faced each other”), it’s still not exactly the smartest way to promote your wares outside the hopefully-miniscule sadist demographic–especially when the final product ends up being cookie-cutter ADD bullshit like The Haunting in Connecticut.

Quantum of Solace (2008)

Quantum of Solace (2008)

March 23, 2009Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Espionage, Italy, James Bond, Mystery, Thriller, UK

½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C
starring Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench
screenplay by Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Sex without foreplay, Marc Forster’s limp dick of a James Bond flick Quantum of Solace takes the kinetic, angry ugliness of Casino Royale and, together with Paul Haggis’s Dances with Wolves screenplay of affected naivety and wide-eyed, late-blooming outrage, fashions a most-unwelcome return to the hoary Bond franchise of old. As if aware that all that stuff about Bolivian peasants pining for water might be connected, and queasily, to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (a daring cargo-jet escape is similarly cribbed from that film), Quantum of Solace does its level best to strip entire set-pieces from the Bourne series (a knife fight, the close-quarters disarming of government agents, the roof-top flight), forgetting in the process to port over the coherence of Doug Liman or Paul Greengrass choreography. The picture’s idea of an action sequence consists of extreme close-ups of two vehicles involved in some kind of ill-defined skirmish intercut with extreme close-ups of Bond and some bad guy who looks just like him intercut with flashes and body parts, ending in Bond walking away with a wry grimace on his face. What a real director could have done with the prologue on a winding mountain road in Italy that has a truck nudged off it by the baddies almost pancake 007 on the way down. And what a real screenwriter could have done with the concept of Bond as the remorseless liquid terminator from T2. Instead we get admittedly only the logical offspring of this ill-begotten union between the guy who directed The Kite Runner and Finding Neverland and the asshole who wrote Crash and a few episodes of “The Facts of Life”. Whoever had the bright idea that this would be the magical, gritty duo to continue the resuscitation of Albert Broccoli’s dusty old wet-dream of a crusading GOP avatar desperately needs to be shown the door.

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2008) – DVD + Beverly Hills Chihuahua (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

March 23, 2009Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Mexico, Romance, UK

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE
**/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B+
starring Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Danny Huston, Jeff Bridges
screenplay by Peter Straughan, based on the book by Toby Young
directed by Robert Weide

BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA
½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Piper Perabo, Manolo Cardona, Jamie Lee Curtis, José María Yazpik
screenplay by Analisa LaBianco and Jeffrey Bushell
directed by Raja Gosnell

by Ian Pugh Tipping its hat to Godard through a poster on the wall of disillusioned magazine editor Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges), How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (hereafter How to Lose Friends) owes an enormous debt to the success of The Devil Wears Prada, but it may be more accurate to describe it as Contempt as told by Elizabethtown-era Cameron Crowe. Which is to say, it argues that the only way to beat the entertainment industry at its game of media manipulation is to play by the rules. The idealistic writer has to sell out, temporarily at least; and when he loses the girl to some asshole “in the know,” the audience can rest assured that they’ll be reunited soon enough. Simon Pegg ostensibly plays boorish journo Sidney Young, a British transplant in New York City come to shake the foundations of a thinly-veiled VANITY FAIR clone, only to endure several rude awakenings. Pegg really plays the part of the wacky Kirsten Dunst pixie from Elizabethtown, though, come from merry old England with a fistful of snark to teach strait-laced Kirsten Dunst (here essaying the Orlando Bloom role) about the fruitlessness of obsessing over ridiculous establishments beyond your control. Well, that and the joys of Con Air.

Gomorrah (2008) + Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

February 20, 2009Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Drama, France, Germany, India, Italy, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Gomorra
***½/****
starring Salvatore Abruzzese, Simone Sacchettino, Salvatore Ruocco, Vincenzo Fabricino
screenplay by Maurizio Braucci & Ugo Chiti & Gianni Di Gregorio & Matteo Garrone & Massimo Gaudioso & Roberto Saviano, based on the book by Saviano
directed by Matteo Garrone

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
*/****
starring Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal, Anil Kapoor
screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, based on the novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup
directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan

by Walter Chaw Dropping us in the middle of Italian slum Scampia, itself smack dab in the middle of nothing, Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (Gomorra) is the Hud of gangster flicks, all deglamourized, harsh, expressionist stripping-away of illusions and idealism to reveal the gasping, grasping emptiness underneath. Like Hud, the source of that idealism is years of cinema supporting a romanticized iconography: the American western in Martin Ritt’s film, the collected works of Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese in Garrone’s peek inside the ways of this thing of ours. Unlike Hud, there’s no intimation of a “happy” ending for the sociopaths of Gomorrah–no feeling that for whatever the cost to a normalized (idealized?) existence, the outcasts and opportunists living their lives in imitation of Tony Montana are doomed to their tough-guy surfaces and the anonymous deaths predicted for them during a brutal prologue. Non-narrative and populated by a non-professional cast of locals and unusual suspects, the picture, however steeped in naturalism, is finally a formalist piece about as free of structure as Sartre–and every bit as meticulous. This “No Exit” (and the French title of Sartre’s play fascinatingly translates, when applied to a discussion of a film, as “In Camera”) and its unlocked oubliette is Scampia: The players in organized crime are imprisoned there by choice, trapped by the validation they desire from one another.

The International (2009)

February 18, 2009Posted in2000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Espionage, France, Germany, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brian F. O’Byrne
screenplay by Eric Warren Singer
directed by Tom Tykwer

by Walter Chaw There’s a shootout at the Guggenheim in the late-middle of The International that is the only real clue director Tom Tykwer had anything to do with the film. The rest of it, despite its title reminding of that Christopher Walken SNL skit about velvet smoking jackets and attempted rape, is just more of the same musty prestige-y Topical Picture™ that usually stars people like Sean Penn or Kevin Costner instead of, as The International does, Clive Owen and Naomi Watts. Bland and blander, as it turns out. A rumpled Owen is Salinger, some kind of ill-defined crusader for justice with a badge from Interpol and a dark past from Syd Field, while Watts, as ADA Elly, spends her first scene with a Boston/Newark accent and the rest with her standard-issue Yank. They’re tepid on the trail of a big giant bank that has a nefarious plan to control debt, which I confess is what I thought banks do. With the picture more interested in mashing its thumb against the “Relevant” button than in creating characters of interest, villains who frighten, and situations that involve, Tykwer, for his part, seems at a loss as to how to employ his agile camera and so trusts a premise that’s already feeling a little mothballed for the collapse and bailout of our banking system. It doesn’t matter that The International doesn’t know what to be from one minute to the next–what matters is that it’s an exact replica of The Interpreter in every way that counts and is, therefore, completely, immanently, blessedly forgettable.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) [2-Disc Deluxe Edition]; Wanted (2008) [2-Disc Special Edition]; Mamma Mia! [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVDs

February 17, 2009Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, China, Crime, DVD, Fantasy, Germany, Musical, Romance, Thriller, UK, War, ZERO STARS

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, Michelle Yeoh
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Rob Cohen

WANTED
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp, Angelina Jolie
screenplay by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas and Chris Morgan, based on the comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones
directed by Timur Bekmambetov

MAMMA MIA!
ZERO STARS Image B Sound A Extras C-
starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Stellan Skarsgård
screenplay by Catherine Johnson, based on the songs of ABBA
directed by Phyllida Lloyd

by Walter Chaw Fast becoming the post-Welles RKO without a commensurate Val Lewton to grease the transition from art to filthy lucre, today’s Universal Pictures finds itself a long, long way from Psycho with a bumper crop of genuinely bad movies reverse-engineered from past box-office champions. Each of them–The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Wanted, and Mamma Mia!–broke the golden 100-million dollar mark, since they were made with just the Benjamins in mind; sadly, only the criticism of flaccid attendance was likely to curb an endless march of identical pictures this year. For the simple-minded, the success of these films despite the near-universal condemnation of them by anyone with a working prefrontal lobe is proof positive that critics are out of touch with the common man. On the contrary, I’d offer that, asked whether he thought the atrocious The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (hereafter The Mummy 3) would be financially successful, the average critic would have said he’d be surprised if it didn’t do a hundred mil in its first three weeks of release. Out of touch is believing that something is good because it makes a lot of money.

Sundance ’09: Moon

February 2, 2009Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2009, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Sundance, UK
****/****starring Sam Rockwellscreenplay by Nathan Parkerdirected by Duncan Jones by Alex Jackson Lunar miner Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of a three-year contract with Lunar Industries when an accident lands him in his spaceship's sickbay. Upon regaining consciousness, he meets a facsimile of himself and begins to suspect that his employer and his robot companion Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) have been keeping something from him. While Moon has some kind of basic dramatic conflict and is centred around an actual story instead of impressive visuals (though Sam Rockwell playing table tennis with himself is a hella…

Revolver (2005) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 6, 2009Posted in2000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Thriller, UK

*/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
BD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Vincent Pastore, Andre Benjamin
written and directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw Give Guy Ritchie a little credit for being ambitious and take a little away from him for being so relentlessly pussy-whipped that Revolver, his return to the neo-Mod gangster genre that made his name, is one part rumination on the mystical mumbo-jumbo of his then-wife’s Kabbalah, one part exploration of the self-actualized ego, and every part pretentious, pseudo-intellectual garbage. It’s so fascinated with itself that the yak-track on the film’s DVD and Blu-ray releases finds Ritchie periodically consulting his assistant as an augur of whether or not Ritchie has gotten too complicated for the audience of nitwits not put off enough by the movie to avoid watching it again with the commentary activated. He believes he’s created something of such vast, far-reaching, ungraspable, existential implication that this cheap, showy action pic is the ne plus ultra of modern experience, with Ritchie our schlock Zoroaster, guiding us through avatar Jake Green (Jason Statham) as he emerges from years of solitary confinement, during which he learned the parameters of the perfect con by intercepting the chess moves of the two prisoners on either side of him. Jake has claustrophobia, something Ritchie helpfully offers is a “metaphorical fear,” by which I think he means that it’s a metaphor for all fear; his clumsiness with the articulation of this single concept illustrates how it is that the rest of it is such a godawful mess. Consider Revolver‘s interesting only to the extent that Ritchie’s self-absorption is ironic when applied to a picture about the internal struggle between Freud’s personality strata–never mind that Jake’s Super-Ego is André Benjamin and his Id appears to be motherfucking Big Pussy. Jesus, this is a stupid movie.

Die Another Day (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

December 11, 2008Posted in2000s, 2008, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, James Bond, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image B Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Toby Stephens, Rosamund Pike
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade
directed by Lee Tamahori

by Walter Chaw There's just no currency in deriding James Bond for being a clichéd, doddering, misogynistic boy's club that trundles into the new millennium with the same entendres, leering, and boom-boom the franchise has ridden for four decades now. It's a lack of currency made all the more glaring for a film, Lee Tamahori's Die Another Day, desperate to please Bond-philes (Republicans and children, literal and figurative) by being an overt rehash of every Bond entry preceding it rather than the usual unintentional rehash. As futile as it has become to criticize the next instalment in this never-ending series, it appears that the filmmakers have decided to stop pretending they haven't been plundering the same well of travel-worn ideas since Connery up and quit.

For Your Eyes Only (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

December 4, 2008Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, James Bond, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Roger Moore, Carole Bouquet, Topol, Julian Glover
screenplay by Richard Maibum and Michael G. Wilson
directed by John Glen

by Ian Pugh Already something of a dinosaur in a season that saw Indiana Jones explode onto the cinematic landscape, For Your Eyes Only was the first 007 film that found Roger Moore looking too old to be a roguish, oversexed secret agent. Having played Bond four times previously over the course of eight years, it was readily apparent that Moore aged well, better than most–which clearly accounted for his longevity in the role. I have to wonder, then, if his suddenly-elderly appearance here is a reflection of the fact that he's so clearly out of his element. He found his footing in the part once the powers-that-be realized he could succeed where Connery had failed: The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker were overblown and more than a little silly, but they were legitimized in part by their star's sly grin and complete comfort in tackling the largest, most preposterous schemes possible–something to which the admirably analog Connery could never entirely adjust. For Your Eyes Only was intended to bring the series back to its down-and-dirty roots, but it only managed to remind that Moore was a square peg unfit for the round hole his predecessor occupied.

The Dark Knight (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

December 1, 2008Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2008, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Superhero, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

Mustownby Walter Chaw It's the best American film of the year so far and likely to remain that way. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is revelatory, visceral, grim stuff–a vision of the failure of our idealism before the inexorable tide of entropy, another masterpiece after last year's No Country for Old Men that as much as says that the only morality in the midst of chaos is chance. No coincidence that both films feature villains who let a coin-flip act as judge and jury. But what's adjudicated? What shape does the court take? The failure of reason is the great bogey of this modern day–and the inability to properly frame questions, much less ken answers, feeds this feeling of hopelessness. That widening gyre, it turns out, is a labyrinth, or an Escher print, illuminating a Sartrean paranoia of no hope for escape, no possibly of exit. Nolan's Gotham City is a beatification of Chicago: the city's glass and metal elevated into holy relic and presented in such grand, panoramic vistas that the little things done in spite of it or on its behalf seem like so many futile pittances–the dreamlife of mice in their sterile maze that is this sprawling microcosm of all of the miseries and suffering of the world.