ZERO STARS Archives - Page 2 of 11

Collateral Beauty (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

April 9, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras F
starring Will Smith, Edward Norton, Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren
written by Allan Loeb
directed by David Frankel

by Walter Chaw Collateral Beauty is the conversation you had that one time with the stupidest person you’ve ever met, in that it’s so stupid it poses an existential problem for you. It happened to me once when, as a bartender, one of the waitresses asked me with concern how she could transform the Coke float she’d ordered into the Sprite float the customer had ordered. I didn’t know. I still don’t. And not having the answer to a question posed by the stupidest person you’ve ever met is horrifying. It’s like you come home one day and your guinea pig greets you with a zen kōan. It’s Kafka’s great unwritten tale. It’s Collateral Beauty: a question with no answer posed by the stupidest movie ever made. Really, the only solution is to dump it out and start from scratch. Collateral Beauty is about grief, sort of, and gaslighting, and it’s shot like a visit to Whole Foods in the sense that it’s burnished with a classy patina and full of pretty people you’d like to be. Then you get to the checkout lane and it’s too much, but you’re too embarrassed to put anything back. Also, the food tastes like ass.

Point Break (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 26, 20162015, 2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Sports, Thriller, ZERO STARS

Pointbreak1

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras F
starring Édgar Ramírez, Luke Bracey, Teresa Palmer, Ray Winstone
screenplay by Kurt Wimmer
directed by Ericson Core

by Walter Chaw Not enough can be said about Kathryn Bigelow’s action sense. The honkytonk slaughter sequence in Near Dark, from the first moment (when the vampires crest the hill) to the last (when the lone survivor defenestrates), is a triumph of design, of score–including the high lonesome tones of a George Strait classic on the jukebox–and editing and execution. It’s that perfect economy of ideas-into-motion that indicates her cult classic Point Break, too–that, paired with absolutely perfect casting, from Keanu Reeves’s Everybody’s All-American football hero-turned-FBI dude Johnny Utah and Patrick Swayze’s blissed-out charismatic leader all the way down to Gary Busey and Lori Petty, the best supporting staff a film about a surf-zen cult-cum-bank-robbing crew could ask for. It’s a lovely marriage between ludicrous high-concept and the period immediately following the 1980s, which found the country in a reflective mood, perched there on the verge of upsetting the primacy of film for the coming digital age. Bigelow’s Point Break was a showcase for practical stuntwork and, philosophically, a nice metaphor for the excess of the “greed is good”/City on the Hill period drawing to a close. The bad guys rob banks to pay their way to enlightenment. Of course it all ends in tears.

The Secret Life of Pets (2016)

July 9, 20162016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
written by Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio and Brian Lynch
directed by Chris Renaud

by Walter Chaw Brutally bad, from the exhausted hip-comic improvisational patter to the endless slapstick pratfalls that comprise the entirety of the film, Chris Renaud and co-director Yarrow Cheney's abominable The Secret Life of Pets excretes into theatres for the express purpose of distracting your young ones for 90 minutes in an air-conditioned setting. It's not remotely witty, never for a second clever, and with a typecast Kevin Hart voicing a one-trick racial pastiche of a bunny, it underscores the cultural divide between those who think Minions and The Lorax are unwatchable dreck and those who are wrong. It's machine-tooled to make money, which it will after the manner of other things that make money at the expense of your children, but it's worth considering that the reason for most of the terrible things in this world is our agreement that critical thinking is a burden, while anti-intellectualism is a roadmap to our survival as first a civilization, then as a species. In our society, saying that something is "for kids" means that it's better, safer…unless it's entertainment. The greatest trick the devil played is convincing an entire culture that it's better not to waste time wondering if what you put in your child's head is productive and smart. So long as there's no sex in it, game on. If The Secret Life of Pets (hereafter Pets) were a chair, it would be made of broken glass and rusty nails. But hey, never mind, why criticize? It's just for kids.

Dirty Grandpa (2016)

January 23, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Road Movie, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Aubrey Plaza, Dermot Mulroney
written by John M. Phillips
directed by Dan Mazer

by Walter Chaw It’s one of those boilerplates about an uptight guy on the eve of marrying a harridan taking a road trip with a free spirit to discover that maybe he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life (or the few years until he secures a divorce–the subtext of these things is always curiously traditional) selling out to The Man. Jason (Zac Efron) is that potential sell-out. You can tell because he dresses like the villain from an Eighties college sex comedy, is a corporate lawyer, and is engaged to a materialistic bimbo (Julianne Hough) who will justify his unconscionable hedonism by being a secret slut herself in his absence. The best of these films is its prototype, obviously (Capra’s It Happened One Night), but the one I return to most often is Bronwen Hughes’s curiously sticky–if only to me–Forces of Nature. The high concept this time around is that De Niro is the free-spirit road-tripper in a role that asks him to, literally at one point, be rapping grandmother Ellen Dow from The Wedding Singer. The imposition of this masterplot is really the only thing separating the film from “Jackass” spin-off Bad Grandpa, just as one word is the only thing separating the two concepts. De Niro’s Dick (and you do indeed get to see his dick–though admittedly, it’s probably a stunt dick) is a former Green Beret, by the way, which explains/doesn’t explain why he gets a Presidio fight sequence against a bunch of black hoods who’ve been taunting a gay black guy Dick has also recently been taunting.

Joy (2015)

December 25, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Edgar Ramirez, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by David O. Russell
directed by David O. Russell

by Walter Chaw After demonstrating with his last few movies that he’s not Martin Scorsese, David O. Russell has decided to kill two birds with one stone by demonstrating that he is neither Wes nor P.T. Anderson, either. In Joy, he proves that marrying Wes Anderson’s whimsical solipsism with P.T. Anderson’s Pynchon-esque biographical sketches is an amazingly stupid thing to do–one of those science experiments in ’50s B-movies that everyone knows is a bad idea except for the idiot doing the splicing. Yes, Joy is that bad. When it’s not being unbearably twee, it’s perving on Jennifer Lawrence like von Sternberg on Dietrich. But Joy ain’t no Blue Angel, and while I like Lawrence fine, I guess, Russell is sure as hell no von Sternberg. What I’m saying is that Russell is a terrible, glitchy director with a thing for Lawrence that he manifests by shooting her walking towards the camera with sunglasses, without sunglasses, with a wig and without a wig, in slow-motion or at normal speed, in daytime, nighttime; he lights her with the sun, with spots, with discretes, from below, and especially from behind–all in a kind of PENTHOUSE glamour. The only part of Joy that isn’t unwatchable is a sequence shot precisely like identical sequences in P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia, where an obviously tense Bradley Cooper, playing QVC programming director Neil Walker, shows the titular domestic goddess Joy (Lawrence) around the studio. I take it back, those were pretty bad, too. The only thing preventing Joy from being the worst movie of the year is that Pixels happened.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Short Films

October 16, 2015****/****, 2015, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan, Romance, Satire, Sci-Fi, Short Films, Sweden, ZERO STARS

by Walter Chaw

The Babysitter Murders ****/**** (d. Ryan Spindell) For certain artists working in the short-film format, I don't have any idea how or why it is they haven't been called up to the big leagues yet. This speaks as much to my prejudice, obviously: there's nothing wrong with the short form. In literature, many of my favourite writers are best in the short form. In film, though, there's so little real opportunity for distribution that it seems a particular shame when guys like Ryan Spindell have only produced shorts. I'm not complaining (his work is excellent), merely hoping he has the means to continue. Spindell's latest, The Babysitter Murders, is so expertly composited that it would be kind of a shame to dissect it at all. Sufficed to say that it unearths a new place to take Wes Craven's Scream meta funhouse, and does it without a hint of smugness or show-off-y insecurity. It's beautifully paced, conceived, and executed. Look at a cooking scene early on, set to "Fast & Sweet" by Mondo Boys feat. Kestrin Pantera–the way it's shot and edited, the way Elie Smolkin's camera stalks and Eric Ekman cuts it all together. The movie's premise–a babysitter alone on a stormy night when a psycho escapes from an asylum–is as rote as they come, but Spindell, as he did with The Root of the Problem and dentists, finds something new to say. The performances are to a one pitch-perfect and the gore is appropriately horrifying; it's a film balanced in that space between hilarity for its excess and hilarity for its brilliance. I'm out of superlatives. Spindell is one of the finest voices working in genre right now, carving out a niche that's neither self-serious nor self-abnegating. He's full of joy, this one, and his movies are treasures.

Sleeping with Other People (2015)

September 30, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jason Sudeikis, Alison Brie, Adam Scott, Amanda Peet
written and directed by Leslye Headland

by Walter Chaw Massively over-written, smug, baselessly self-assured, and world-weary in the way that people who watch a lot of "Sex and the City" and "Girls" are world-weary, Leslye Headlund's rank, unwatchable Sleeping with Other People is like that date that Death goes on "Family Guy" with the girl who tells Him you can't hug your kids with nuclear arms. To say it's awful is unfair; better to say it's tedious as shit. It's a chronicle of insufferable, half-wit narcissists and, given the success of stuff like Obvious Child, hell, it's worth a try, right? Honestly, though…and no one's asking, but…wouldn't it be better to not have a career than be tied to great white albatrosses like this? Sleeping with Other People is like Diablo Cody on steroids, complete with an entire album's worth of soft-alt rock and Lilith Fair covers on the soundtrack. And much like Cody's script for Juno that has references to Soupy Sales flying from the mouths of babes, this gem has a college girl in 2002 warning a prospective beau not to reference The Graduate on learning that her name is "Elaine" when, you know, "Seinfeld". Jesus, c'mon.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Gridlocked

September 29, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Dominic Purcell, Stephen Lang, Trish Stratus, Danny Glover
screenplay by Rob Robol & Allan Ungar
directed by Allan Ungar

by Walter Chaw Danny Glover's been too old for this shit for over thirty years now, making it all the more tragic to find him in Allan Ungar's dipshit remake of The Hard Way that nobody wanted, Gridlocked, which magnifies its crimes by also being the second remake of Assault on Precinct 13 that nobody wanted. A desk jockey checking IDs at the police station, Glover's Sully advises about 45 minutes in that he is, yes, too old for this shit. The only thing missing is a wry saxophone riff when he says it. At least Gridlocked, as it's pissing on the corpse of the literally dozens of better movies it's ripping off, had the decency to let Michael Kamen rest in peace, if nobody else. It's uniquely awful.

Terminator Genisys (2015)

July 1, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Clarke, Emilia Clarke, Byung-hun Lee
screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis & Patrick Lussier
directed by Alan Taylor

by Walter Chaw Once you come to terms with the fact that there's no internal logic to it (that it's without external logic is a given), once you've accepted that the only way to enjoy something like Terminator Genisys (hereafter T5) is at a great distance, through multiple irony filters and possibly a coma, T5 is still largely unwatchable. Its screenplay is one of those rare disasters generally reserved for a Syfy Channel Original, and indeed, the whole thing plays like the fourth sequel to Sharknado rather than the fourth sequel to James Cameron's The Terminator, which for some reason it replicates shot-for-shot in a series of 1984-set sequences. The premise, see, is that this time around, a Terminator has been sent for Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), mother of future resistance leader John Connor (Jason Clarke) and somewhere-in-time consort of heroic soldier Kyle Reese (Jai-Zzzzzzzzzz). What this means is that when Kyle gets sent back into the Cameron film, Sarah is already a badass, has a pet Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) she calls "Pops," and has an adversary in a liquid T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun). I still don't understand how the T-1000 time travels because the rules in this universe are that nothing metal can go through the stargate without a flesh covering. Something else that doesn't make sense, T5 also has a call-out to Chris Marker's La Jetée.

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

February 3, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis, Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne
written and directed by The Wachowskis

by Walter Chaw “Call me Jupe!” pipes Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) in her breathy, little-girl Lauren Bacall voice, and the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending in the same moment announces itself as the siblings’ latest insufferable piece of shit about being born with a secret and embracing the real you. With mascara. Jupiter Jones is not the oldest of the Three Investigators, but she is the reincarnated Mina Murray, space queen of a clan of Atriedes/Harkonnen industrialists, and she has a special way with honeybees. That’s good, since there’s a scene where she visits a guy (Sean Bean) living in a house infested with honeybees. The guy has a daughter who is sick, which we know because she coughs a little before disappearing into the editing-bay ether with the rest of the connective tissue of a film too terrible to waste a summer slot on. Jupiter Ascending is kind of the Radio Shack of movies in that it’s too expensive to not open, though it desperately needs to close. Just the fact that this reference will be completely obsolete in six months or so says everything that could be said about this trainwreck. And yet I persist.

Into the Woods (2014)

December 24, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Johnny Depp
screenplay by James Lapine, based on the musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine
directed by Rob Marshall

by Walter Chaw Into the Woods looks exactly like what a legendary Sondheim production would look like were it adapted by that idiot who made Memoirs of a Geisha into a Vegas drag space-opera dragged through a scrim of horrific Occidental Orientalism. (Well, at least to the extent that Memoirs wasn’t that already.) It’s gaudy in every pejorative connotation of the word, packed to the rafters with distracting, stupid, show-offy clutter of the sort that people accumulate when they fear they don’t have substance without it. I rather liked Marshall’s adaptation of Chicago, strangely enough, which speaks more to the un-fuck-up-ability of Kander, Ebb, and Fosse than it does to any latent modesty in director Marshall. Call it beginner’s luck, perhaps, of the kind that has long since dissolved. Marshall has already exceeded all expectations for bloated suck by somehow making the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise more difficult to endure than it had been by the third film. I’d challenge that you could swap Into the Woods out for a print of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and no one would even frickin’ notice. It’s this year’s Les Misérables.

Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

June 26, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Michael Bay, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Nicola Peltz, robutts
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw Early on in Transformers: Age of Extinction (hereafter Trans4), director Michael Bay seems to be equating the unjust hunt for our noble robot allies the Autobots with the Tea Party's persecution of immigrants, and then it goes to shit. It's a meaningless, impossible-to-follow trainwreck in the patented Michael Bay style that, also in the Michael Bay style, is deeply hateful of women and difference. What's new this time out is that the central object of violation for our lascivious appreciation is 17-year-old Tessa (19-year-old Nicola Peltz), who, upon introduction, is leered at by an assortment of older gentlemen before Bay whips out a (no-kidding) legal justification for our statutory interest. It reminds of the Tony Danza vehicle She's Out of Control not only in that its father figure, Cade YEAGER-because-it's-America-fuck-yeah (Mark Wahlberg), is over-interested in his daughter's budding sexuality, but also in that Trans4 is awful. Awful in its misogyny, sure, and awful because, in what has become a tradition in Bay's Transformers franchise, the only African-American character is comic relief…and a slave. Never mind. Oh, and it hates the infirm and misses no opportunity to mock their infirmity. Again, never mind.

Argento’s Dracula 3-D (2012) – Blu-ray 3D & Blu-ray

February 5, 20142012, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy, Romance, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS

click any image to enlarge

Dario Argento's Dracula
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Thomas Kretschmann, Maria Gastini, Asia Argento, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Dario Argento, Antonio Tentori, Stefano Piani, based on the novel by Bram Stoker
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw I used to love Dario Argento. Heck, who didn't? But at a certain point, it became clear that the quality of Argento's work is directly proportional (or it was for a while) to the quality of work he's riffing on. A shame that lately he appears to be mostly riffing on himself–the elderly version of a vital artist doing his best to recapture something he's lost. It was Hitchcock as muse, of course, initially, joining Argento at the hip for a while with Brian DePalma, who was doing kind of the same thing at the same time with about the same audacity in the United States. There was genius there in the Deep Reds and Suspirias, certainly in the logic-bumfuddling submerged ballroom the heroine must enter to retrieve a key in Inferno. Argento didn't really start to make bad movies until after Tenebre. Since, with notable half-exceptions like Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome, he's made almost nothing but. It all comes to a head–or a tail, as it were–with Dario Argento's Dracula: the worst entry in a filmography that includes stuff like Sleepless and Giallo, and frankly belonging somewhere in the conversation of the worst films of all-time. Until you've endured it, I can't quantify it. Coming from someone once revered for his innovative camera, for his groundbreaking work with music and production design–coming from the guy involved at some level with the conception/production of Once Upon a Time in the West and Dawn of the Dead, fer chrissakes (who, indeed, counted Leone and Bertolucci and George A. Romero as friends and collaborators), it's a fucking tragedy.

Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

December 10, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Disney, Drama, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Paul Giamatti, Colin Farrell
screenplay by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith
directed by John Lee Hancock

by Walter Chaw Oh, I get it, haha, this is some kind of joke, right? Because no one in their right mind would remake Finding Neverland as this twee bullshit. …Wait, really? Okay. Because I'm assured that this happened, presented for your approval is (snicker) Saving Mr. Banks, directed by (haha) John Lee Hancock from a screenplay by a team one half of which (bwahaha) is currently writing the Fifty Shades of Grey adaptation. This is rich–are you serious? Okay, okay. So Saving Mr. Banks is based on the adorable true story of how everyone's favourite union-busting, HUAC finger-pointing anti-Semite Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) convinced brittle British bitch P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson, the "I'm so veddy cross" 'elevens' crease between her eyes upstaging her in nearly every scene) to sell him the rights to her creation, Mary Poppins. He all of practiced, televisual charm and she all of powder and crumpets; how will Walt ever batter down the barriers that Ms. Travers has erected from the hell of her Andrew Wyeth flashback childhood, complete with (snigger) Colin Farrell as her fatally-flawed (and handsomely alcoholic) da, Robert. Who gives a shit? More rhetorical questions: Who really likes–I mean really likes–garbage like this? Is there anyone at this point who thinks it a great idea to peanut-butter a shameless Thomas Newman score over every exposed nook in a movie aimed at cat ladies in Mickey Mouse sweatshirts? Saving Mr. Banks is dribble of the first order. What I wouldn't give to see Hanks play Disney's 1931 nervous breakdown, moreover to have our very own Jimmy Stewart choose the same late-career path as the actual Stewart and begin playing darker roles in less conventional films. Admittedly, Captain Phillips is mostly crap, but it's not drool, and Hanks is great in it.

TIFF ’13: Almost Human

September 19, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, TIFF, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
written and directed by Joe Begos

by Bill Chambers The picture's opening titles are in John Carpenter's familiar white-on-black Albertus font, and intercut with fragments of exposition like the intro to Prince of Darkness while some neo-Alan Howarth works the minor keys on a synthesizer. But as the makers of Almost Human have already given the game away in an endless, stilted prologue, what may sound like loving homage feels in context like a desperate play for credibility, a dog whistle meant to reassure the horror geeks they're in good hands. They're not. Set in the late-'80s, because nothing good's happened since then, the film is about an archetypal fat-guy/hot-girl couple (Josh Ethier and Vanessa Leigh) and third wheel Seth (Graham Skipper) getting torn asunder when the husband, Mark, is rudely abducted by aliens. Two years later, Seth remains shattered but Jen has settled down again with the poster boy for modern douchiness, one of those guys who shaves his beard into a thin strip along the jawline. So much for period detail; so much for Jen's taste in men improving. Anyway, Mark is returned to Earth, but not in the same placid condition–maybe the aliens broke him and this is nothing more than their version of tossing a toy out the window on a highway. As Mark begins a psychotic rampage that inches him ever closer to Jen, Seth's spidey sense starts tingling and he goes to warn her in one of many scenes that peg this for next-gen Ed Wood, because writer-director Joe Begos couldn't conceive of a more efficient, less torturous way to put Jen and Seth in a room together than to have him show up at her diner, politely ask the lady at the counter to retrieve her, then twiddle his thumbs (and ours) waiting for her to materialize. Some decent splatter–Mark uses a greatest-hits of horror implements against his victims–makes up the shortfall before going a bridge too far into tentacle rape and a recreation of the Irreversible head-bash but with a woman. I don't think the filmmakers are world-class misogynists or anything, I just think they're kind of stupid. Be sure to stay through the closing credits for a tag–not that it's worth it, but I was the only one at my screening who did, and misery loves company.

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013)

August 6, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Jake Abel
screenplay by Marc Guggenheim, based on the novel by Rick Riordan
directed by Thor Freudenthal

by Walter Chaw Say this about Thor Freudenthal and Marc
Guggenheim’s Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (hereafter PJ2): you’re more than justified in questioning its existence, but at the
end of the day it’s impossible to make something this bad by accident. No, it
takes genuine inspiration to be this tone deaf, to create something that requires intimate knowledge of the source novel or the first film
in this benighted franchise yet will instantly piss off the teenies who love the
Rick Riordan books and the far fewer souls who liked that first
movie. For me, because I love my 9-year-old daughter with all my heart, I
endured PJ2 and only thought about walking out a half-dozen times
before resigning myself to the murky 3-D and even murkier execution. Yes, it’s awful,
that much is to be expected, but that it’s significantly worse than a
movie that was already terrible by nearly every objective standard is really some
kind of accomplishment. At the end of the day, when a 9-year-old articulates
that what’s wrong with the film is that they took out all the relationship
stuff, cherry-picked crap from other novels to contrive a half-assed
cliffhanger for a sequel that will likely never happen, and basically fumbled the promise of the title, well…at least PJ2 can claim the
distinction of awakening the critical facility in a child who, before this, thought every movie was pretty good.

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 10, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Sam Raimi, Disney, Fantasy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams
screenplay by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Based on L. Frank Baum’s little-known Pussyhound of Oz, Sam Raimi’s career nadir Oz the Great and Powerful (hereafter O-Gap) answers the question of who you would ask to anchor your $300M+ tentpole extravaganza: yes, James Franco, who’s now claimed the mantle of the worst actor in the United States from the quiescent Paul Walker. Franco is an avatar of the picture’s bad decisions, from the Zach Braff-voiced CGI monkey sidekick to the sassy CGI Hummel figurine to the tragic miscasting of Mila Kunis as Theodora, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West. Yes indeedy, fans of the MGM original, of Baum’s wondrous series of books, and of the shit-show “Wicked” will all hate it equally–almost as much as neophytes to the whole damned mess who will come for what Raimi’s proudly proclaimed “the ultimate Disney movie” and leave with a mouthful of exactly as promised. It’s blindingly obnoxious, tasteless in a meaningless way, and occasionally makes reference to Army of Darkness just because, I suspect, Raimi’s last-resort defensive posture is to fall back on what he knows. But it’s not nearly enough to save him here. The argument with weight is that the more expensive a movie becomes, the less likely it’s going to be good; the first clue that Raimi is creatively bankrupt is that while his buddy Bruce Campbell appears in this film, Campbell isn’t the star.

After Earth (2013)

May 30, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Will Smith, Jaden Smith, Sophie Okenedo, Zoë Kravitz
screenplay by Gary Whitia and M. Night Shyamalan
directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Angelo Muredda Give M. Night Shyamalan this much: he is not a timid filmmaker. Where some might have responded to the critical drubbing of The Village with a shrug, Shyamalan turned his follow-up, ostensibly a children’s story, into a vicious riposte. Lady in the Water isn’t just an off-kilter fairytale about an endangered waif who falls out of the sky and into Paul Giamatti’s swimming pool: it’s also a deranged manifesto for protecting the imaginative freedom of artists like Shyamalan–playing a writer who will one day be martyred for his ideas, collected in a volume modestly titled “The Cookbook”–against critics and nonbelievers, who meet deservedly bad ends. That would be a gutsy move if the artist had something to die for himself, yet the best you could say for Lady in the Water is that at least Bob Balaban’s beast-ravaged movie reviewer is spared the finale with a saviour eagle that Shyamalan has the gall to christen “Eaglet.” Though nominally a star vehicle for Will Smith and his son Jaden, After Earth covers much the same ground, down to its repetition of both the aquila ex machina trope and half-assed nomenclature. (A double-sided spear is a “cutlass” in the future, while walking stealthily is now “ghosting.” No word on what we call spoons or actual cutlasses.) Lady in the Water‘s world-building by crayon doodles can be explained away easily enough by its bedtime-story mechanics, but there’s no excuse for After Earth, a thinly-sketched, unbearably haughty survival story that cites Moby-Dick as it steals from Suzanne Collins.

The Raven (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

October 24, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Mystery, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring John Cusack, Luke Evans, Alice Eve, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Ben Livingston & Hannah Shakespeare
directed by James McTeigue

by Walter Chaw I'm
no nineteenth-century cop, but I personally would begin by interrogating the guillotine-pendulum maker. James McTeigue's abominable The Raven posits
legendary Marylander Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) as a crazed, alcoholic, frustrated-artist type who has a bar tab the length of his arm to go with a fiery temper
and a quite-requited, it turns out, affair with toothy Emily (from Aardman Studios: Alice Eve), daughter of Captain Hamilton (Brendan Gleeson).
Alack-alay, what should happen but a wax museum breaks out as a critics-hating
serial killer (just like Theatre of Blood, which I should've revisited instead) enacts scenes from Poe's stories whilst
dressed in the hat and cape of McTeigue's V for Vendetta protag. Good copper
Det. Fields (Luke Evans) is hot on the miscreant's trail, enlisting Poe as a
Poe expert to try to get one step ahead of the well-read marauder. There is,
alas, no ratiocination the equal of the mystery of Ben Livingston and Hannah
Shakespeare's (no relation, I hope) bewilderingly bad screenplay. No one, no
one, could deliver these lines–a mush of anachronistic phrases and
"period" posh–with conviction, much less the miscast Cusack and a motley
band of supporting players. The good news is that The Raven is funny. The bad news
is that it's so awful, it makes you the kind of person who watches a
movie just to be superior to it.

Romeo Must Die (2000) + Cradle 2 the Grave (2003) – Blu-ray Discs

September 2, 20122000s, 2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Martial Arts, ZERO STARS

ROMEO MUST DIE
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jet Li, Aaliyah, Isaiah Washington, Delroy Lindo
screenplay by Eric Bernt and John Jarrell
directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak

CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras D
starring Jet Li, DMX, Anthony Anderson, Gabrielle Union
screenplay by John O’Brien and Channing Gibson
directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak

by Walter Chaw There are a lot of interesting things about Jet Li’s sad run through Hollywood, among them the fairly simple question of why, in Romeo Must Die, this particular yellow Romeo must die. But then he doesn’t die, and he also doesn’t get to kiss the girl, who isn’t white but Aaliyah (black)–mitigating, I would have thought, the taboo against Asian men in American cinema having any kind of sexuality that isn’t ridiculous (see: Long Duk Dong) or that involves a white lady. In his next film, Kiss of the Dragon, Jet teams up with a white prostitute (Bridget Fonda) and, belying the sly Orientalist promise of the title, doesn’t get to kiss her, either–and she’s a fucking hooker. It’s a cultural ban so stringent that there’s a specific category of porn, deeply perverse, that is not only interracial, but specifically Asian man on white woman. Not long after 2003’s Cradle 2 the Grave, Li played an Asian man kept on a leash who, at a word, is made to perform martial arts for his white master’s favour. Danny the Dog (retitled Unleashed in the United States…why, again? Because of Hollywood’s sensitivity?) is probably the most poignant expression of the plight of the Asian action hero in the United States: castrated, humiliated, valued for the single trait of knowing kung fu–even if, as it was for Jackie Chan in the Karate Kid reboot, Chinese “kung fu” is reconfigured as Japanese “karate.” Chris Tucker’s favourite joke in the Rush Hour movies, after all, is to mistake the two cultures–a favour to neither and funny, probably, only to Tucker.