Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II (2011)

July 15, 2011Posted in2011, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Mystery, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

Harrypotter7bby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Not having read the final book in the Harry Potter series, I fear I spent the last hour-and-a-half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2 (hereafter Harry Potter 7.2) thinking that Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) was Harry's father. And there's the problem, really–not that it's so insular that only people who've read the books can understand it, but that it's so myopic in its insularity that it doesn't realize that what it's saying on the screen is pretty contrary to what's explained on the page. It's not that there wasn't time, either, over the course of these five hours, to address obvious misunderstandings and obscurities (why, for instance, doesn't everyone always cast the "kill" spell, since it seems pretty effective), as there was certainly enough time to pack in a horse-cart full of characters pointing to their chests and weepily declaring that their dead pals will "always be right here." Mostly, it reveals an author in J.K. Rowling–who was setting up a genuinely extraordinary ending to her dip in the archetype pool–engaged in a lot of self-pitying sobbing over grandiloquent gestures, group hugs, and an epilogue set 19 years hence that brazenly sucks, simply because she didn't have the muscle to pull the proverbial trigger. More egregiously, by failing to honour her own story with the proper ending, Rowling betrays real post-feminist icon Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), the "most gifted wizard of her generation" (and low-born to boot), squandered to tertiary status in this instalment before being dismissed into domesticity. An author who by the end was driven perhaps too much by her fans (she admits in an interview that she "didn't have the heart" to kill Arthur Weasley–one wonders if she ever considered killing Harry as she ought) is behind a handsome, crisp film that is, alas, ultimately for her fans only.

The Thing (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

July 14, 2011Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: John Carpenter, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi

John Carpenter's The Thing
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, T.K. Carter, David Clennon
screenplay by Bill Lancaster, based on the story "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, Jr.
directed by John Carpenter

Mustownby Walter Chaw I remember the sick fascination I felt staring at the cardboard standee for John Carpenter's The Thing (hereafter The Thing) in the lobby of the now-flattened two-house cinema where I had gone to see E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial that dewy summer of my ninth year. It was opening weekend for the Carpenter flick, but the line around the building was for the second week of Spielberg's very own My Friend Flicka, and I was one of the millions of children guilty of flocking away from a movie that promised to make you feel like shit in favour of one that promised to make you cry. I would be afraid to see The Thing and the same year's Blade Runner until at least five years down the road when, during a particularly bad flu, I asked my mom to rent them both from a local video store (also gone–the city of my mind is ever more populous now, year-on-year), figuring that in my fever haze I would be insulated from the horrors that had grown around them in my head. Besides, as a wizened vet of 14, I had survived The Fly, Aliens, RoboCop, and Hellbound: Hellraiser II at the Union Square 6 (also gone), so what horrors could these musty relics hold for me?

Plenty.

Viva Las Vegas (1964) – Blu-ray Disc

July 12, 2011Posted in1960s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Musical, Sports

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Elvis Presley, Ann-Margret, Cesare Danova, William Demarest
screenplay by Sally Benson
directed by George Sidney

Vivalasvegascap

by Bill Chambers First, a word about Richard Attenborough's awesome, heartbreaking Magic. In that 1978 film, Anthony Hopkins plays Corky, a rising star on the ventriloquism circuit–hey, it was the '70s–who beats a hasty retreat to the Catskills to avoid a psychiatric evaluation that would doom his chances of working at NBC. There, he looks up his high-school crush, Peggy Ann Snow (Corky used to recite this sadly desperate/desperately sad rhyme about her: "Peggy Ann Snow, Peggy Ann Snow/Please let me follow, wherever you go"), who really could've been played by any actress of the moment approaching middle age, from Ellen Burstyn to Jill Clayburgh to Marsha Mason to Faye Dunaway. But Attenborough, ingeniously, cast former sex kitten Ann-Margret, so that Corky's nostalgic affection for Peggy isn't an abstract concept. Thereafter, the actress made a cottage industry out of her fading torchdom that reached its inevitable apotheosis when she tackled Blanche Dubois, but in Magic, it provides a crucial point of identification with a main character who can be inscrutable and unlovable that we have a pretty good idea of what Peggy Ann Snow used to be like. We'd pine for her, too.

The Boss of It All: FFC Interviews Seth Gordon

July 9, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Ian Pugh

Sgordoninterviewtitle
Seth Gordon's playing with a lot more than quarters these days

July 10, 2011|I was grateful for the opportunity to moderate a Q&A with director Seth Gordon at a Boston-area screening of his latest film, Horrible Bosses, which has proven to be something of an oasis in an otherwise lousy summer for movies. Gordon's eclectic career made him a fascinating character to research: after studying architecture at Yale, he found himself at a teaching job in Kenya that ignited an interest in filmmaking. Our Q&A was a fairly animated twenty minutes; asked to lob trivia questions at the audience for a poster giveaway, his first was, "What was the name of Michael Knight's car?" In our one-on-one discussion at the Ritz-Carlton the following morning, he dialled it down a little, exuding an "aw shucks" modesty that seemed to reveal a greater desire to listen than to talk. He tells me outright that he owes the relatively smooth production of Horrible Bosses to the success of The Hangover (another Warner Bros. release), though as our discussion took a thematic turn, I sensed some reluctance to commiserate with my assertions about how his latest trumps the "other comedies" of its ilk.

Horrible Bosses (2011)

July 7, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Jamie Foxx
screenplay by Michael Markowitz and John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein
directed by Seth Gordon

Horriblebossesby Ian Pugh A straight-white-male fantasy of the most ridiculous order, Horrible Bosses begins with a trio of working shmoes who are, ironically, comfortable enough to go drinking every night and bemoan how their bosses are making their lives a living hell. Office jockey Nick (Jason Bateman, in his best performance in ages) has been passed up for a promotion by the sadistic Harken (Kevin Spacey); dental assistant Dale (Charlie Day) works under constant sexual harassment from Julia Harris, DDS (Jennifer Aniston, hilarious for a change); and chemical-plant employee Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) is suddenly thrust into the dominion of middle-aged frat boy Bobby Pellit (Colin Farrell, perfection). They can't just quit their jobs because the economy's in the toilet, so the only sane solution is for them to band together and kill their employers. The joke that propels the film is that their poorly-conceived plans amount to little more than one of those online "kill your boss" simulators, and Horrible Bosses occasionally seems to acknowledge its plot as a grossly oversimplified game. A recon mission yields no intel that would be useful to these would-be hitmen, while Kurt puts Pellit's toothbrush up his ass and Dale plays "Angry Birds" on his iPhone to work off an accidental coke binge.

She’s Out of My League (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

July 6, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Jon Thibault, Comedy, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve, T.J. Miller, Mike Vogel
screenplay by Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Jim Field Smith

by Jon Thibault

What happens when a beautiful, wealthy event planner meets a scrawny, socially maladroit, uneducated TSA security guard who's too uncoordinated to shave his own balls?

Love!

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

July 5, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Western

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Before he succumbed to bloat with his two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, Gore Verbinski struck me as a particularly bright light in American genre pictures. His remake of The Ring and the first Pirates of the Caribbean flick were a one-two step that seemed more indicative of his promise than the not-awful-in-retrospect The Mexican and the awful but not bloated Mousehunt. (Well, okay, it was a little bloated.) When he’s right, his stuff plays a lot like South Korea’s genre cinema: walking a tightrope between grotesquerie and lightness that happens so seldom outside of Seoul it’s fair to wonder if proximity to an entertaining dictator is prerequisite. With the CG-animated, Industrial Light & Magic-assisted Rango, Verbinski teams again with muse Johnny Depp to send up Depp’s muse Hunter S. Thompson in what functions as a kind of footnote to both Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Sergio Leone’s four-film Spaghetti Western cycle. Unfortunately, it also references Polanski’s Chinatown and Verbinski’s own concept of an antiseptic purgatory from his endless Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

Gross Anatomy (1989); Betsy’s Wedding (1990); The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag (1992) – Blu-ray Discs

June 29, 2011Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Japan, Mystery, Romance

GROSS ANATOMY
**½/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Matthew Modine, Daphne Zuniga, Christine Lahti, Todd Field
screenplay by Ron Nyswaner and Mark Spragg
directed by Thom Eberhardt

BETSY'S WEDDING
***/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Alan Alda, Joey Bishop, Madeline Kahn, Molly Ringwald
written and directed by Alan Alda

THE GUN IN BETTY LOU'S HANDBAG
**/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Penelope Ann Miller, Eric Thal, William Forsythe, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Grace Cary Bickley
directed by Allan Moyle

by Jefferson Robbins To sample three Blu-ray editions fresh out from discount distributor Mill Creek Entertainment, you'd think film comedy in the late 1980s and early '90s was at a tipping point. Or, at least, you'd think this of Touchstone, the Disney sub-studio behind Gross Anatomy, Betsy's Wedding, and The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag. All three films seem swamped by the decade shift, caught between John Hughes's early-'80s youth revolution and the hardening of romcom formulas that would come to pass after 1990's Pretty Woman (also a Touchstone product). One of the three films, in fact, barely qualifies as a comedy, although it was surely marketed as such. The sense one gets watching them today is of opportunities missed, of storytelling approaches gently meshed together when they should've been gleefully mashed, and of an aversion to risk above all.

House Party (1990) – DVD

June 29, 2011Posted in1990s, Authors: Jon Thibault, Comedy, DVD

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Kid 'N Play, Full Force, Martin Lawrence, Robin Harris
written and directed by Reginald Hudlin

by Jon Thibault Any movie starring people with names like Kid 'N Play, Bowlegged Lou, B-Fine, and Martin Lawrence is destined to suck. Add mediocre-at-best writer–director Reginald Hudlin, and you're staring down the barrel of a 12-gauge crap rifle. Yet House Party spawned two sequels and became an early-'90s cross-over phenomenon: a purportedly comedic take on the popular urban genre of the time, like Boyz n the Hood and Do the Right Thing, only with funny violence and racism. Now, decades later, it sports a 95% "fresh" rating on ROTTEN TOMATOES, which proves once again that white guilt (more specifically, white liberals' fear of appearing racially insensitive) almost always trumps professional integrity–an attitude that's patronizing to black filmmakers and loathsome in its self-congratulatory mendacity.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

June 29, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Michael Bay, Spielberg, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Sir Michael Bay

Transformers3by Walter Chaw It starts, maybe, with the moment Frances McDormand, as an NSA bigwig, declares that evil alien robot Decepticons should pass through customs. No–earlier, when noble alien robot Autobots infiltrate some nameless Arab state to murder Arabs. It might begin when fucking asshole Michael Bay does a long tracking shot following–in 3-D!–the toned, tanned ass of impossible-looking Carly (Victoria's Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) as she climbs a flight of stairs to straddle her ugly mutt boyfriend Sam (Shia LaBeouf)–a pairing that at least in part explains the decades-long appeal of Ron Jeremy as a porn icon. Or maybe it's the extended profanity ("dick, asshole, clusterfuck, bitch, shit" in a long-playing loop), the wholesale and semi-graphic murder of innocents by both sides, the way the robots bleed in crimson arterial sprays in this PG-13 movie, that instigates the realization that Transformers: Dark of the Moon (hereafter Transformers: Asshole) is a new low watermark for Bay and this naughty-little-boy franchise that highlights Bay's misogyny, puerility, and imbecility for all the world to see. Better, it works as a fine illustration of how this industry of ours that I spend a lot of time defending is in bed completely with the Michael Bays of the world, who represent, I think, the money-making potential of any industry that consents to peddle vice and venality to children. Think of the cash a live-action hardcore porno based on the Barbie license would bring in. Let's get on that, Bay and Zack Snyder, and give out heroin with the purchase of a ticket while we're at it. The first one's free, little girl.

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

June 27, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Thriller

½*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sean Patrick Flannery, Norman Reedus, Clifton Collins Jr., Billy Connolly
written and directed by Troy Duffy

by Alex Jackson The first thing I did when I got a FACEBOOK account was look up Travis, my best friend from gradeschool, whom I hadn't seen or heard from in the last twenty years. Looking at his profile, I saw that he listed "extensive" under music and "way too many to list here" for books, but under movies he had just one title: The Boondock Saints. The bands and books he loves are too numerous to mention, but there is a film that, in his mind, towers above all others. There is only one film that bears mentioning. And that film is Troy Duffy's The Boondock Saints. Is it petty of me to not put in that "friend" request? This seems to be all the update I need. Twenty years is a long time. The only things we really had in common were that we both went to the same school and both liked Nintendo and The Monster Squad. That's hardly enough to inoculate a friendship against The Boondock Saints.

The Roommate (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

June 27, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Leighton Meester, Minka Kelly, Cam Gigandet, Billy Zane
screenplay by Sonny Mallhi
directed by Christian E. Christiansen

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Sony division Screen Gems, which went from being safe harbour for offbeat studio fare to an opponent of original thought with a remake-heavy slate*, cynically CW-izes another exploitable but ew, old! title with their Single White Female clone The Roommate. It might be genius compared to Single White Female 2: The Psycho, but know that The Roommate is ultimately about as sensitive as that dtv sequel sounds. Playing the most conspicuously mature college freshman since Thornton Melon, “Friday Night Lights”‘ Minka Kelly is Sara Matthews, a small-town transplant studying fashion design at ULA, whose campus appears to consist of one courtyard, one coffee shop, a random frathouse, and a couple of dorms. (Maybe the letter “C” got custody of everything else in the divorce.) Young Sara gets a roommate in Rebecca (“Gossip Girl”‘s Leighton Meester), an art student who announces herself as a humourless prig by refusing to let Sara’s similarly geriatric buddy Tracy (“Hellcats”‘ Aly Michalka) shorten her name. Rebecca gets very clingy very quickly, and the filmmakers fail to provide any explanation for Sara’s tolerance and weird rationalizations (“She’s just overprotective”) beyond the Freudian catchall that she, Sara, is still grieving for her dearly-departed sister. Which in itself is a non-sensical, arbitrary inversion of Single White Female, wherein the Rebecca character is cast adrift after losing her identical twin, driving her to transform herself into another woman’s doppelgänger. (It was a facile yet efficient bit of pop psychology.) If the makers of The Roommate did Batman, the Joker would be a billionaire who lost his parents.

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

June 26, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras D
starring Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones, Frank Langella
screenplay by Oliver Butcher & Stephen Cornwell, based on the novel Out of My Head by Didier van Cauwelaert
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Ian Pugh Knight and Day, Salt, and The Tourist failed as '60s spy throwbacks because they constantly reassured you that everything would be all right; if there was something about their various intrigues we didn't quite understand (or weren't supposed to know before some big third-act twist), we could rest assured that someone was pulling the strings to keep the world from falling apart. Unknown finally removes that safety net, and from there it approaches the fear and uncertainty that so fascinated Alfred Hitchcock and Terence Young about the Cold War–this sinking feeling that whatever conspiracies may be driving the plot, there will never be a way to extricate yourself from their tangled webs. True, Unknown's primary attraction is the dissection of identity, and it's simply incapable of stunning you in the same way that the Bourne trilogy stunned you with its own methodical examinations of the self. (If the picture feels derivative of that series, that's because it is.) But at the end, you're left feeling uncomfortable, because you just know you haven't uncovered all its secrets yet.

Cars 2 (2011)

June 24, 2011Posted in2011, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Sports, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Ben Queen
directed by John Lasseter

Cars2by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Trading the ’50s Americana of the original for ’60s British adventure, Cars 2 seems, for a moment there, like it might actually work. The inhumanity that Walter Chaw correctly attributed to Cars scores a few subversive points in this sequel, filled as it is with complicated stunts that are, amusingly, impossible for automobiles to perform. (Even sillier: all of the anthropomorphic spy cars are retrofitted with Gatling guns and assault rifles.) But all is lost as tow-truck hick Mater (voice of Larry the Cable Guy) takes centre-stage in a convoluted espionage scheme, meaning that Cars 2 stoops to the same mistaken-identity spy parody that children’s movies have beaten into the ground since 1966’s The Man Called Flintstone. The subversion runs completely dry after the pre-title sequence, as our resident Connery (?) Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) jumps and shoots his way across oil derricks, only to hand over the reins to the blander heroes of the previous film. So the same old car jokes prevail as Pixar keeps shovelling coal onto a dead fire. Find one more extraneous character in Finn’s liaison Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer), whose primary function is to prove that Bondian double-entendres don’t have much impact when everyone’s name is a double-entendre.

Soylent Green (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

June 20, 2011Posted in1970s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D+
starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Edward G. Robinson
screenplay by Stanley R. Greenberg, based on the novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
directed by Richard Fleischer

by Walter Chaw I've spent a lot of time in my life dancing with Richard Fleischer's dystopian Soylent Green. Sometimes it leads, sometimes I do. For everything it does well, there are some things it does badly; and if the things it does well it does extremely well, the things it does badly it, likewise, does just awfully. No half measures here. Beginning with the good, here's Edward G. Robinson tapping his mortality (he succumbed to cancer less than two weeks after production wrapped), finding in his celluloid swan song a depth of despair he rarely touched in his career proper. It's up there with Montgomery Clift's devastated cameo in Judgment at Nuremberg–enough so that when he closes his eyes in appreciation of a leaf of lettuce his long-time companion Det. Thorn (Charlton Heston) has scavenged from the apartment of dead industrialist Simonson (Joseph Cotten, in his last role, too), it actually doesn't make you want to laugh. Not so the incongruities of this dystopian, post-apocalyptic future in a Manhattan (and world) destroyed by over-population, but not to the point where the streets don't empty in observance of a curfew. It presents a future in 2022 that seems unlikely not because we're not currently on the verge of some great ecological disaster, but because rough math suggests that the Heston character would've been born the year before the film's 1973 release and thus his declaration that he'd never seen a grapefruit (or grass, or cows) should worm its way into the audience consciousness as Soylent Green's statement that it's not serious, thoughtful science-fiction, but rather soapbox and screed timed to coincide with, in 1972, the first international conference on climate change.

Hall Pass (2011) [Enlarged Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

June 20, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C-
starring Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis, Jenna Fischer, Christina Applegate
screenplay by Pete Jones & Peter Farrelly and Kevin Barnett & Bobby Farrelly
directed by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Rick Mills (Owen Wilson) is in real estate and Fred Searing (Jason Sudeikis) sells life insurance–and yet these guys treat their own marriages, indeed their own lives, as an epic burden, so where do they get off trying to sell us peace-of-mind? Their leering obsession with sex has become all-consuming of late, prompting their wives (Maggie (Jenna Fischer) and Grace (Christina Applegate)) to grant them a hall pass: a "week off from marriage" in which they have the freedom to do whatever they want with the opposite sex without fear of recrimination. The Farrelly Brothers' Hall Pass tells a fairly conventional story about men and women who very slowly come to recognize just how much they love their significant others. But one thing it doesn't fully reconcile is this impulse that finds the movie's middle-aged male characters blinking madly at attractive women, taking "mental photographs for [their] spank bank"–because even once they've learned their lessons and shouted them from the rooftops, they're still taking those mental photographs. Beneath a thin veneer of sex jokes, the movie is about the denial and suppression of regret that occurs in the quest for long-term happiness.

Subjectivity: FFC Interviews Mike Mills

June 18, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Interviews

Mmillsinterviewtitle

Starting fresh with the director of BEGINNERS

June 19, 2011|All of Mike Mills's films–narratives, documentaries, and music videos alike–share a common theme of perspective: how the individual views others, how others view the individual, and the projections that exist on both sides. Although I was somewhat skeptical of its indie quirk, Mills's Beginners left me thinking about the people in my life, past and present; I was genuinely affected by its interpersonal dynamics. As it happens, a major fulcrum of Mills's work is that he creates a dialogue not only between the artist and the masses–he also strives to forge a bond with the individual. After several days of combing through his filmography in preparation for the interview below, I finally discovered that Mills had been keeping a video diary on the official website for Beginners chronicling the sights he's seen and the people he's met on the movie's press tour. It hardly came as a surprise.

Green Lantern (2011)

June 16, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Greg Berlanti & Michael Green & Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg
directed by Martin Campbell

Greenlanternby Walter Chaw Martin Campbell's Green Lantern is just awful. It's a mess, a boring mess, featuring boring Ryan Reynolds in a skin-tight green super suit (and not-boring Blake Lively, not) trying to "grow up" and accept the responsibility of becoming an intergalactic Dudley Do-Right–a titular "Green Lantern," which in the DC UNIVERSE parlance apparently means that you say crap about will being stronger than fear and manifest a giant Matchbox race set as the best way to save a crashing helicopter. Cool? Cool if your concept of cool is The Last Starfighter as written by Tony Robbins. There's just so much empowerment going on in this thing, and unresolved daddy issues that are raised without any clue as to how to parallel the dysfunction in the characters or honour what is fast turning out to be this year's driving thematic force. It's no wonder, really, that the bad guy in this one is a giant mess of cosmic goo called "Parallax": the picture jumps around from one point-of-view to another with no sense to bridge the turbid gulfs between them. Worse, Green Lantern's threat to go the ambiguous, Dark Knight, fight-fear-with-fear route fails to materialize in the loudest possible way with an unintentionally-hilarious nonsense soliloquy delivered before a council of detached Kuato. I didn't think I'd see a movie this bad before Transformers: Euphemism for Asshole docks next month.

Vroom! Vroom!: Grand Prix (1966); Le Mans (1971); Fast Company (1979) – Blu-ray Discs

June 14, 2011Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, Sports

Vroomvroom

GRAND PRIX 
***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Yves Montand, Toshiro Mifune
screenplay by Robert Alan Arthur
directed by John Frankenheimer 

LE MANS
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras D
starring Steve McQueen, Siegfried Rauch, Elga Andersen, Ronald Leigh-Hunt
screenplay by Harry Kleiner
directed by Lee H. Katzin

FAST COMPANY
**/**** Image A- Sound C+ Extras A+
starring William Smith, Claudia Jennings, John Saxon, Don Francks
screenplay by Phil Savath, Courtney Smith and David Cronenberg
directed by David Cronenberg

Mustown

LE MANS

by Walter Chaw Of the major films produced during John Frankenheimer's fulsome period (that stretch between The Young Savages and Seconds that saw him as a giant among giants, tearing off masterpieces major (The Train, The Manchurian Candidate) and minor (The Birdman of Alcatraz, Seven Days in May)), Grand Prix has always stuck out for me as a swing-and-a-miss. There's no disputing either its technical innovation, which saw cameras mounted to Formula One cars for the first time, or Frankenheimer's fire, which seemed to single-handedly will the production to the finish line despite prickly subjects, competition from a Steve McQueen Formula One project in simultaneous development, and insurance companies pulling out when Frankenheimer insisted on his stars doing much of their own driving. But only upon my most recent revisit, occasioned by the picture's Blu-ray release, did it become clear to me the relationship that Grand Prix has with the same year's Seconds, far and away Frankenheimer's best film: an element of the biomechanical–of Frankenstein, sure, but Icarus1, too, where man metastasizes himself with machines of his own creation to achieve the forbidden, whether it be beauty, or endurance, or speed…or immortality. It's therefore a film that may get at the heart of auto racing's allure for not only its participants but also its true believers. Elements of Harlan Ellison's "Ernest and the Machine God"–this idea that while anything's possible through technology, the debt of that ambition is paid out in blood.

The Mission (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

June 13, 2011Posted in1980s, 2011, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, France, Palme d'Or Winner, UK

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, Ray McAnally, Aidan Quinn
screenplay by Robert Bolt
directed by Roland Joffé

by Jefferson Robbins Career arcs fascinate and depress me. The Mission finds Roland Joffé at his early peak on just his second movie, making what amounts to a $25 million art film starring one of America’s best-known actors. Did Joffé change beyond this point, or did he refuse to change while the ecosystem altered around him? A bit of both, I suspect, after Fat Man and Little Boy and The Scarlet Letter. These epics went unembraced, and Oscars or no, the financiers weren’t always going to settle for contemplative examinations of people caught in the turning of historical tides. Yet that’s where Joffé was at his best–and maybe he couldn’t get beyond it. Spalding Gray had him pegged early on: “Leave it to a Brit to tell you your own history,” he advised in Swimming to Cambodia. Sure enough, as in The Killing Fields, Joffé’s The Mission examines pangs of conscience at a critical moment of political, religious, and cultural upheaval.