The Artist (2011)

Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, Silent, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell
written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius

by Walter Chaw It’s tempting to dismiss Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist as fluff. It’s tempting to take the side of Kim Novak when she complains about this fluff using Bernard Hermann’s Vertigo score in vain, and a few critics and Internet memes have done exactly that. Yet The Artist is more than a passing fancy precisely because it uses the Vertigo theme correctly in a sentence. Indeed, it even has its way with film preservationists and other snobs (the kind who champion Hugo, for instance) by suggesting that obsessive movie love to the exclusion of all else is the same sort of illness, ultimately, as necrophilia. In the fluffy course of its runtime, in fact, The Artist manages to be as subversive and scabrous a Hollywood artifact as Sunset Blvd., finding its monkey funeral towards the end instead of at the beginning but presenting a close-up Mr. DeMille at its conclusion almost as ambiguous and doomed. It’s popular because it keeps its edges carefully sheathed…but they’re there. And I think people are offended once they realize–most of them long, long after the fact, and through other avenues–that Hazanavicius had the temerity to peanut-butter a little obsessive, consumptive, solipsistic love in there to gum up all the crevices. I’ll be honest: I think that if you don’t believe The Artist is correct in its use of Vertigo, you probably also thought that Vertigo was a love story.

Coriolanus (2011)

Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Shakespeare, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

***/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox
screenplay by John Logan, based on the play by Edward de Vere
directed by Ralph Fiennes

by Angelo Muredda Ralph Fiennes has been building up to Coriolanus for some time. Whether as a scarred or just nervous exile in The English Patient and The Constant Gardener, respectively, or as the noseless ghoul of the Harry Potter movies, he’s served as the embodiment of human refuse for a long stretch of his career–the English go-to for wanderers, burn victims, and miscellaneous banished men. It’s a treat, then, to watch him take relish in the part of the ultimate cast-off, a Roman general chewed up and spit out by the city for which he earned his war wounds. The actor’s hyphenate debut, Fiennes’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is a curio, to be sure: It isn’t so much directed as cobbled together from the source and fed through CNN-style reportage of armed fighting in the Balkans. But as a star vehicle, for both himself and the incomparable Vanessa Redgrave, it’s a powerful match between actor and character. While the general-turned-politician’s fine suit hangs awkwardly on the brute it houses, for Fiennes, Coriolanus is a good fit.

Batman: Year One (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, 2012, Action, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Superhero

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Tab Murphy, from the comics story by Frank Miller
directed by Sam Liu and Lauren Montgomery

by Jefferson Robbins Before he was a grouchy and politically nearsighted old man with enough clout to cast Scarlett Johansson in a $60M fetish video, Frank Miller truly did change the face of mainstream superhero comics. Doing so brought him fame as a visionary, a label that implies prophetic or pioneering concepts but–at least in comics art–is most commonly applied to artists fusing pre-existing styles into a successful hybrid, or distilling an old story to its barest elements. Miller did both. In fact, between 1986’s “The Dark Knight Returns” and the 1987 “Batman: Year One” arc, his reengineering of the Batman mythos wasn’t so much a thrusting of the character forward into the 1980s as a slingshotting back to the 1970s. The core fact of Batman, viewed in the light of Taxi Driver, is that he’s Travis Bickle with a cape and lots of money. What is Travis’s mohawk if not a costume to strike fear into the hearts of criminals? What is his trick pistol sling, fashioned from a typewriter carriage, but a blue-collar utility belt? And what is the hardboiled dialogue Miller puts in Bruce Wayne’s mouth–better read than spoken–but Bicklean self-justification? No coincidence that Batman’s first, badly-botched outing as a crimefighter in “Year One” involves the violent rescue of an underaged prostitute.

A Separation (2011)

Posted in2011, 2012, Australia, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Iran, Theatrical

Jodaeiye Nader az Simin
***½/****
starring Peyman Maadi, Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat, Shahab Hosseini, Sarina Farhadi
written and directed by Asghar Farhadi

by Angelo Muredda In Armond White’s latest “Better-Than” list, the champion of surreal juxtaposition pits Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation against Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block and finds the former wanting. “Action vs. Talk,” he summarizes, in the poetry of tinyurl. Apart from the arbitrary matchup he stages between two very good films about getting to know your neighbours under the harshest of circumstances, White isn’t completely off the mark. I won’t defend his trite claim about A Separation‘s alleged “Iranian didacticism,” but the film certainly is voluble. Farhadi wears his dramaturgy on his sleeve, opening with a carefully trained two-shot of middle-class couple Nader (Peyman Maadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) at divorce court, parked in adjacent chairs as if settling in for a parent-teacher interview. They face us directly as they make their respective cases to a bored, unseen auditor: Simin wants to emigrate to the West; Nader refuses to leave his dementia-suffering father behind or grant his wife permission to leave with their eleven-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director’s own daughter)–more an effort to stall their separation, it seems, than an arbitrary flexing of his patriarchal muscle. Voluble, as I said, but not verbose. It’s a provocative and deceptively straightforward setup, promising naturalism via Maadi’s and Hatami’s easy rapport while undercutting it with the artifice of their situation. Though the judge is unmoved by either side in this rhetorical showdown–“My finding,” he tells Simin, “is that your problem is a small problem”–the stakes of this “small” quagmire, which is also a national and a gendered one, are made painfully clear to us by the couple’s impassioned performances.

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

Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Thriller, United Arab Emirates

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law
screenplay by Scott Z. Burns
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Less smug (if only be a few degrees) than Steven Soderbergh’s other starfucker balls, Contagion surprises with its consistent serious-mindedness, even as it finally disappoints by contenting itself to be a cautionary tale rather than, in a year of world-busters, an end-of-times tale. Even Fail Safe and the inch of dust settled on it has Hank Fonda levelling NYC–all Contagion does is kill Gwyneth Paltrow ugly, which, in the grand scheme of things, is only what every sentient human being in the United States has contemplated already. (I confess I amused myself during the scene in which Paltrow’s afflicted adulteress has her brain scooped out of her head by muttering “Goop, indeed.” Sue me.) Still, it earns pith points for making Paltrow, typecast as a woman of privilege and longueurs, the Typhoid Mary of the new millennium, and more points still for being resolutely unafraid to characterize all of Asia as a giant petri dish ready to make a mass grave out of the rest of the world. Essentially, Contagion, as it goes about what it’s about with absolute professionalism and class, earns its keep by being right, more or less, about everything it bothers to talk about.

The Expendables (2010) [Extended Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

Posted in2000s, 2010, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain, Thriller

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke
written and directed by Sylvester Stallone

by Walter Chaw After the remarkably tough and uncompromising Rambo and the almost-unbearably poignant and transparent Rocky Balboa, it’d be fair to nurse a healthy anticipation for Sylvester Stallone’s paean to the ’80s blockbuster, The Expendables. Alas, what’s on display owes more to Stallone’s Rhinestone than to his venerable Rocky series. A redux of Wild Hogs as embarrassing, boring, and ineptly- shot and edited as the original, The Expendables even ends the same way, with geezers riding off into the sunset on the backs of their four-fifths-life-crisis choppers. Tattoos and plunging v-neck Ts the rule of the day, it’s more Rogaine commercial than action movie, making fun of itself in the way that old guys who are genuinely insecure about their age make fun of themselves. It’s awkward. It’s also, in addition to being almost entirely free of excitement or a single line of dialogue that isn’t some syncopated mix of grunting and tough-guy cliché, maybe a no-shit adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano”. That’s the only way to explain how it is that a film tits-deep in dialogue could have not one exchange that makes any sense whatsoever. The way the movie’s put together, too, is a model of the Theatre of the Absurd’s occasional dabbling in non-sequiturs–something The Expendables seems to address at one point when the horsey-looking, freshly-waterboarded damsel (Giselle Itié) wonders how Stallone’s Barney has magically appeared as her saviour in a Caribbean (?) dictator’s dungeon. “I just am!” mumbles Barney. Who am I to argue with that?

Final Destination 5 (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller

Finaldestination5caprev

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Nicholas D’Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher, David Koechner
screenplay by Eric Heisserer
directed by Steven Quale

by Angelo Muredda “Five! Five different systems had to fail for this to happen.” So shouts a slumming Courtney B. Vance as a suspicious cop on the scene of only the second or third most elaborate death in the cynically titled Final Destination 5. Who can blame him? Five, after all, is an improbably large number. Here we are, though–as many entries into a series that’s sure to rival even Final Fantasy‘s swollen ranks once the last lighter fluid-doused fan blade hits the last neck.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2011

Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

2011 was a turning point for me. Two films–Red Cliff and The Tree of Life–did it, the one returning to me a measure of my identity, the other giving me a sense that I’d avoided asking ultimate questions about my relationship with film from the start. My stances that there are right and wrong answers in the liberal arts and that people are only entitled to an educated opinion held steady–but I’d never asked why it was that the things I liked were the things I liked. Around this time, I read Jonathan Lethem’s monograph on John Carpenter’s They Live and was consequently inspired to write one of my own, on Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile. I chose that movie not because–perhaps I should say, not only because–of its relative obscurity, but because it was a movie I’ve been evangelical about since first seeing it in 1989. The process of writing that monograph consumed much of the last half of 2011. I skipped screenings because of it, and found myself incapable of reviewing the films I did see very well, if at all.

Carnage (2011)

Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Theatrical

***/****
starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, John C. Reilly
screenplay by Yasmina Reza and Roman Polanski, based on Reza’s play “God of Carnage”
directed by Roman Polanski

by Angelo Muredda It’s tempting to read Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s celebrated play God of Carnage as a doodle, the cinematic equivalent of one character’s pet name for his wife. Unlike, say, Chinatown, nothing much is at stake, and unlike last year’s The Ghost Writer, there are no doe-eyed innocents for us to coddle. (“He can’t drown two ghost writers, for God’s sake; you’re not kittens!” might go down as the sweetest line in Polanski’s tart career.) Yet Carnage, set in an antiseptic Brooklyn residence that’s decked in coffee-table books begging to be sprayed with vomit, is vintage if minor Polanski, from its claustrophobic environment and precise compositions to its droll flirtation with nihilism.

The Hangover Part II (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Craig Mazin & Scot Armstrong & Todd Phillips
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw I guess it says something about picking up speed at the bottom of that proverbial slippery slope that I thought The Hangover Part II was consistently funny and pleasantly vile throughout, and that the only time I felt genuinely offended was during the closing-credits snapshot montage, wherein Eddie Adams’s infamous VC execution photograph is re-enacted in a digital tableau mort. That’s the line, I guess, and kudos in a heartfelt way to director Todd Phillips and company for finding a lower place to draw it. Until then, The Hangover Part II is a vaguely linear instalment of Jackass, mapping the odd longitudes of male friendship set loose in fleshpot/den of iniquity Bangkok, the Asian equivalent of the first film’s Las Vegas; where the original tackles that Sodom’s sin-of-choice prostitution, this likewise spends some time with transvestitism and sex-trafficking. Ugly? Well, it’s not pretty–but it is pretty funny as it reunites pretty boy Phil (Bradley Cooper), sociopath Alan (Zach Galifianakis), non-descript every-guy Doug (Justin Bartha), and dentist Stu (Ed Helms), for whose wedding the boys have reconvened some ill-defined months after the events of the previous film. Along for the ride this time is adorable little-bro-of-the-bride Teddy (Mason “son of Ang” Lee), who has the de facto Dragon Daddy issues as a Stanford pre-med and concert cellist and who, of course, will go through a heart-warming transformation through the loving attention of unbridled hedonism, drug abuse, organized crime, and mutilation. Oh, and there’s a fellating, drug-dealing monkey in a denim Rolling Stones vest. Ah, Bangkok.

The Shawshank Redemption (1994) – Blu-ray Disc (Steelbook)

Posted in1990s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Prison, Stephen King

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Bob Gunton, William Sadler
screenplay by Frank Darabont, based on the novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King
directed by Frank Darabont

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There’s a moment in the middle of writer-director Frank Darabont’s commentary track for the tenth-anniversary DVD and now Blu-ray release of The Shawshank Redemption in which he marvels at how swiftly and completely that Christian fundamentalists embraced the film (thus allying it with other modern klatch classics like Christmas with the Kranks, The Passion of the Christ, and George W. Bush). He feared, he says, that because the demonic Warden Norton (Bob Gunton) is the film’s only overtly Christian character, the herd would flock to decry it. Apart from his shocking disingenuousness (if there’s a more blatant Christ parable than The Shawshank Redemption, I don’t know what it is), Darabont obviously doesn’t understand that for the reborn mind, the longer the climb, the better the proselytizing–hence the desertion, the nepotism, and the DUIs actually augmenting Dubya’s holiness instead of casting suspicion on it.

Kuroneko (1968) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1960s, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Japan, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Kichiemon Nakamura, Nobuko Otowa, Kiwako Taichi, Kei Sato
written and directed by Kaneto Shindo

by Walter Chaw A band of ronin alights on a clearing before a modest, thatched-roof hut and, like the dead before Odysseus’s offerings of a trough of blood, drinks deep from the stream running through it. They wipe their mouths. They are underfed. They enter the residence to find Yone (Nobuko Otowa) and Shige (Kiwaki Taichi) sharing a frugal repast the starving ronin wordlessly take from them and wolf down. We learn later that the entire Japanese feudal world is at war: “It’s a samurai’s world now… We eat our fill and take whatever we desire”–and so this band of rough men gang-rape, murder, and immolate the mother and her daughter-in-law before pressing on into the woods. The image of smoke billowing out of this little lodge is, for all the haunted moments to come, the one that lingers from Kaneto Shindo’s odd, savage Kuroneko. Yone and Shige emerge from the fire newly pasty-white and as formalized as Noh performers, making the intercession of a black cat*, in a scene borrowed directly by Tim Burton for Catwoman’s resurrection in Batman Returns (still Burton’s nakedest lunch), that much more glaring in its contrast.

Fright Night (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD

Posted in****/****, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Vampire

****/**** Image B- Sound A+ Extras C-
starring Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, Imogen Poots, David Tennant
screenplay by Marti Noxon, based on the screenplay by Tom Holland
directed by Craig Gillespie

by Walter Chaw After 28 Weeks Later, I wondered when Imogen Poots would become a star. It only took four years. As Amy in Craig Gillespie’s really frickin’ great Fright Night, she’s sexy without being vacuous and tough without being masculinized–her general kick-assness undoubtedly owing in part to screenwriter Marti Noxon, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”‘s showrunner from Season Six to completion. I’m spending time talking about Amy because she’s a wonderful character who manages to complete an arc or two in a mere supporting role. Consider a moment in which she mentions her boyfriend’s skin clearing up that locates her completely, and believably, in the film’s high-school environment–that’s a lot of expositional impact in a little package. A remake of Tom Holland’s cult classic that was itself one of my VHS favourites (worn to breaking during my formative decade with the movies), Fright Night is delightful because it’s absolutely certain of what it is and what it isn’t, delivers everything it promises it will (in spades), and genuinely has fun with the 3-D innovation that’s the bane of most other movies lately. Smart as hell and unapologetic about it, it presents character beats that matter and sports a performance from Colin Farrell as evil vampire-next-door Jerry that should, no shit, earn him Academy Award consideration. Between him and the chimp from Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it’d be a tough call.

Tomboy (2011)

Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Theatrical

***/****
starring Zoé Héran, Jeanne Disson, Malonn Lévana, Sophie Cattani, Mathieu Demy
written and directed by Céline Sciamma

by Angelo Muredda “It suits you.” So Lisa (Jeanne Disson) tells her new crush, Mikael (Zoé Héran), after she’s given him a lipstick-and-rouge makeover. What Lisa doesn’t know is that Mikael is nominally Laure, a 10-year-old girl who’s just moved into the neighbourhood and is more interested in donning baggy pants and stretched shirts to play soccer with the local ruffians than in wearing the feminine outfits her mother (Sophie Cattani) hangs in her closet. Tomboy, director and screenwriter Céline Sciamma’s poignant and sharply observed follow-up to 2007’s more acerbic Water Lilies, smartly downplays the precarious position Laure is in: trying on a new identity in this foreign environment could be disastrous today, it suggests, but there’s always tomorrow. Sciamma mostly steers clear of the prescriptive aphorisms about girlhood that Catherine Breillat’s recent output trades in. Instead, she gravitates towards the more mundane ambiguity of moments when adolescents, already in a highly transitional state, grow wise to the arbitrary way their identity gets decided for them by accidents of birth and other people’s coercive gestures. You get the sense that Laure is all too conscious of how innocent gifts of dresses–or, for that matter, lipstick–might actually be gender-normative roadmaps, but until an unfortunate last-act revelation, the film doesn’t reach for the polemic; any revelations come only through cinematographer Crystel Fournier’s tight hold on our protagonist.

The Debt (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Hungary, Israel, Thriller, UK

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington, Jessica Chastain, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Matthew Vaughn & Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan, based on the Israeli film Ha-Hov
directed by John Madden

by Walter Chaw End-of-year prestige porn so poor in its conception that it was released at the ass-end of summer, former Miramax darling John Madden’s The Debt enters into the Holocaust Remembrance sweepstakes and, in the process, demonstrates that probably nothing could slow Jessica Chastain’s rising star. Sure enough, she’s all that’s remotely worthwhile (well, her and Jesper Christensen as the best Nazi doctor since Olivier) in a film that also parades people like Tom Wilkinson and Dame Helen Mirren in embarrassing, compromised aspects. Despsite a couple of elderly “twists,” the only thing really surprising about this tale of a Mossad operation gone pear-shaped is that Mirren’s hack husband Taylor Hackford didn’t direct it–knowing that if he had, at least the action scenes in it, for what they’re worth, would’ve been a good deal tighter. Oh, what a state we’re in when we find ourselves wishing that Taylor Hackford had directed something instead of someone else.

The Devil’s Double (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Netherlands, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Dominic Cooper, Ludivine Sagnier, Philip Quast, Raad Rawi
screenplay by Michael Thomas
directed by Lee Tamahori

by Angelo Muredda The Devil’s Double might be the first bad movie about which you can non-figuratively say, “That looked like piss.” Director Lee Tamahori, who started off decently with 1994’s Once Were Warriors but has since become a dependable franchise killer (Along Came A Spider, Die Another Day, xXx: State of the Union) and a Hollywood hack behind the occasional Nicolas Cage abortion (Next), bathes every shot in garish yellow lights that transform white leather couches into urine-stained gilded bars. If you’re willing to excuse this aesthetic for the first few seconds of every shot as an uncomfortable and weirdly xenophobic bit of formalism–what better way to depict Iraq than to give it a nice golden shower?–good luck with the rest. When characters reposition themselves in the frame, they often seem to block the light source and thrust their companions into the dark for no good reason. DP Sam McCurdy surely considers this a clever trick, as he executes it over and over again, yet Tamahori’s film, a hollow adaptation of Latif Yahia’s unconfirmed autobiographical account of serving for many years as Uday Hussein’s political decoy, is such a bore that the effect is one of watching someone throw buckets of neon paint on a blank canvas.

Bridesmaids (2011) – [Unrated] DVD + Something Borrowed (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

BRIDESMAIDS
***½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras A
starring Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendon-Covey
screenplay by Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig
directed by Paul Feig

SOMETHING BORROWED
*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Kate Hudson, Ginnifer Goodwin, John Krasinski, Colin Egglesfield
screenplay by Jennie Snyder Urman, based on the novel by Emily Giffin
directed by Luke Greenfield

by Jefferson Robbins On release, everybody tried to make Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids about sex (gender and the act), when its bigger issue is class. Working from a script by Annie Mumolo and star Kristen Wiig, frosted liberally with improv in the manner producer Judd Apatow has made inescapable, the creators spin Wiig’s failed cake-maker Annie for an early midlife crisis rooted in bad relationships as well as economic hardship. It’s easy to get stuck on the sex angle, given the opening scene: Singleton Annie is stuck in a self-hating friends-with-benefits cycle with sometime-lover Ted (Jon Hamm), doing exactly what he wants in bed–at length, in several variations, and noisily. She gets only smiling, sociopathic dismissal in return as he kicks her out of his lush Milwaukee McMansion. She’s pinned some vague hope on a pretty package of a man who’s not only bad for her, but vastly wealthier, too. Note how Annie is forced to vault an automatic gate to escape Ted’s one-percenter compound. Bridesmaids is not just about relationships in the mush-minded romcom sense–it’s about power relationships: who has the most money and thus can bring the most social clout to bear, in the snowglobe economy created by a best friend’s nuptials. Goddamn, that’s timely.

The Descendants (2011)

Posted in2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Beau Bridges, Judy Greer
screenplay by Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw George Clooney is great, Alexander Payne is great, it’s all very predictably great, and it’s all so very predictable. The Descendants, Payne’s fifth film, is an edgeless and anti-satirical adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings’s novel that has its moments, all of them involving Clooney’s Matt King shouting at his vegetable wife (Patricia Hastie, in the most thankless non-Michael Bay role of the year) in articulation of the mid-life emasculation opera in which Payne specializes. Armed with a voiceover to better seduce Oscar voters and awards-season audiences, The Descendants opens with Matt promising his comatose spouse that he’ll be a better man and commit to a normal life with her, and then it proceeds to be nothing much more than a sitcom about what happens when a confirmed bachelor is forced to become the primary caregiver to his two sassy daughters. Eldest is reform-school girl Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), who used to have a drug problem and currently has a stupid boyfriend, Sid (Nick Krause). Her younger sister is little Scottie (Amara Miller), who says things like “motherless whore” because it’s funny when a 10-year-old says things like that–even funnier when the matinee idol playing her bumfuddled dad does the dimwit surprise thing he did in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. That’s the theory, anyway.

Rushmore (1998) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Rushmore (1998) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Olivia Williams, Mason Gamble
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Owen Wilson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Angelo Muredda It’s hard to talk about Wes Anderson these days without addressing the prevailing image of him among detractors as a precious aesthete who makes dioramas instead of movies. So let’s start there. As with most shorthand characterizations of idiosyncratic artists who carve out a niche for themselves instead of diversifying, there’s some truth to the charge: Mr. Fox didn’t accidentally wear the same corduroy blazer as his director, and surely Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman didn’t just frame themselves in the centre of the screen for the train-bound section of The Darjeeling Limited. Anderson, for his part, has owned up to his formal indulgences. On the audio commentary for Criterion’s excellent edition of Rushmore, he admits sheepishly that the film’s multi-ethnic, age-ranging rainbow coalition of players are basically clear types pulled from colour-coded storybooks–the sort of people you could get an easy sense of simply by drawing.

Elite Squad – The Enemy Within (2010)

Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Brazil, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Tropa de Elite 2 – O Inimigo Agora É Outro
***/****
starring Wagner Moura, Irandhir Santos, Andre Ramiro, Milhelm Cortaz
screenplay by Bráulio Mantovani & José Padilha
directed by José Padilha

by Angelo Muredda Early in Elite Squad – The Enemy Within (hereafter The Enemy Within) José Padilha’s blustery follow-up to his 2007 hit Elite Squad, deluxe cop Lt. Colonel Nascimento (Wagner Moura, Brazil’s answer to Mark Ruffalo) promises to give us a history of Rio that happens to coincide with his life story. It’s a tall order, but Padilha and co-screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani are ambitious and foolish enough to undertake it, returning to the favelas they brought to boot-stomping life in the first Elite Squad while shifting focus this time from drug lords to corrupt cops. No one would call their work subtle, but they strike a surprisingly watchable balance between Goodfellas-type insider confessional and incendiary political exposé, ditching the tight timeframe and local scope of the original and going for a more sprawling survey of Rio as Hell on Earth. Yet as much as The Enemy Within deserves solemn back-pats for its anaesthetized, everybody’s-guilty project, it really takes off in brutally violent set-pieces that forgo neutrality. Cut loose from his earnest ambitions to tell an ambivalent political fable that clucks its tongue equally at anti-poverty activists and conservative law-and-order types, Padilha shows his directorial hand in testosterone-charged gunfights where either all the right people get shot or all the good ones go down as martyrs, and it’s the hand of a vigilante sympathizer drawn to the romance of man-to-man violence. Fascist? No doubt. But as ideologically suspect apologies for rogue justice go, this one’s pretty well-executed, and at times just plain more fun than the hemming and hawing of The Dark Knight.