Sundance ’11: If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front

February 6, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance, Thriller, UK
**/****directed by Marshall Curry by Alex Jackson I have officially reached the point in my life where when I see a cop beating up on a hippie, I identify with the cop. There's a shot in Marshall Curry's If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front in which the police spray two ELF members directly in the eyes with mace during a peaceful sit-in. Some audience members behind me interjected, I think by pure reflex, "That's not fair!" But I found myself feeling considerably less enraged. Yes, these protesters were being entirely non-violent, but what alternatives have…

Sundance ’11: Salvation Boulevard

February 6, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance, Thriller
*½/****starring Pierce Brosnan, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Greg Kinnearscreenplay by Doug Max Stone & George Ratliff, based on the novel by Larry Beinhartdirected by George Ratliff by Alex Jackson What a waste. The cast assembled for George Ratliff's Salvation Boulevard is one for the ages. You have Pierce Bronson as super-evangelist Reverend Dan Day, Jennifer Connelly as infatuated housewife Gwen Vandeveer, Ciarán Hinds as Gwen's hard-ass Naval vet father Billy, and Ed Harris as pompous, bearded intellectual Dr. Paul Blaycock. These are traditionally serious dramatic actors in roles that lend themselves to caricature, yet they invest these characters with history…

Sundance ’11: Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles

February 6, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance
*½/****directed by Jon Foy by Alex Jackson I'll admit that I can't readily imagine anybody ever making a better film on the subject of the Toynbee Tile phenomenon than Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. The problem isn't that it's done poorly--it's that anybody thought it should have been done at all. Filmmakers Justin Duerr, Jon Foy, Colin Smith, and Steve Weinik worked on this project for five years, but I don't really understand why. Were they actually hoping to solve the mystery? And if they solved it, well, what then? Insofar as the Toynbee Tiles hold any…

Sundance ’11: Benavides Born

February 6, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Sundance
All She Can**/****starring Corina Calderon, Jeremy Ray Valdez, Joseph Julian Soria, Julia Verascreenplay by Daniel Meisel & Amy Wendeldirected by Amy Wendel by Alex Jackson Amy Wendel's Benavides Born is throwing me for a loop, and I'm getting a little frustrated about it. I understand that this film isn't trying to be Step Up 4 or the female weightlifter version of Rudy--but it's not really giving us a viable alternative to that kind of programming, either. On a very basic level, I don't know what this movie's about. The small town of Benavides, Texas has only three industries: fast food,…

Once Upon a Time in America (1984) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 4, 2011Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Gangster, Italy, Robert De Niro

****/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Tuesday Weld
screenplay by Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, Sergio Leone & Stuart Kaminsky, based on the novel The Hoods by Howard Grey
directed by Sergio Leone

Onceuponatimeinamericacap

by Bill Chambers Such is the level of cinematic sophistication in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America that all of the miserable things that happen in the picture make you giddy, filling you with the joy that is basking in an artist's command of a medium. At first, the powers-that-be didn't get it: Warner Bros. took Leone's non-linear vision and straightened it out, and the result was a picture that, though chronologically told, made no sense. This was a fascinating lesson in syntax–films are composed of "meanwhile"s, not "and then"s, perhaps none more so than Once Upon a Time in America, which is about the co-existence of past, present, and future tenses. (It's like an extrapolation of the riddle of the Sphinx: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?) Luckily, the studio saw the error of its ways and reissued Once Upon a Time in America a year after its butchered American release in its longer, knottier international form, and to illustrate the dramatic disparity between the 139-minute domestic and 227-minute global versions, critic Sheila Benson labelled the former the worst movie of 1984 and the latter the best movie of the 1980s. Pauline Kael wrote, "I don't believe I've ever seen a worse case of mutilation."

Easy A (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

February 2, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Teen

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Hayden Church
screenplay by Bert V. Royal
directed by Will Gluck

by Jefferson Robbins What do I have to do these days to see a teen sex comedy where teen characters get to have sex? Filmmakers have gotten so good at larding chastity tracts with suggestiveness that you come out of the theatre believing, for fifteen minutes or so, that you actually witnessed youth in debauch. So far, the 21st century in teenage fare is like the Hays Code era all over again, only not well-written. Terrified at being accused of portraying high-schoolers doing what millions of high-schoolers do, studios have turned sexual misdirection into the best special effect since the lightsaber.

Sundance ’11: Crime After Crime

February 2, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance
***/****documentary; directed by Yoav Potash by Alex Jackson From 1983 to 2009, Deborah Peagler was incarcerated at the Central California Women's Facility for the murder of her boyfriend, Oliver Wilson. Wilson battered Peagler, forced her into prostitution, and molested her daughter from a previous relationship, but because he took out an insurance policy before his death naming Peagler as a beneficiary, and because the actual murder was carried out by two Crips she went to for protection, the district attorney at the time presented this as a hired killing. All evidence of abuse at the hands of Wilson was suppressed.…

Alice in Wonderland [The Masterpiece Edition] (1951) + The Lion King 1½ (2004) – DVDs|Alice in Wonderland – Blu-ray + DVD

February 1, 2011Posted in1950s, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, Musical

ALICE IN WONDERLAND
**/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
story by Winston Hibler, Ted Sears, Bill Peet, Erdman Penner, Joe Rinaldi, Milt Banta, Bill Cottrell, Dick Kelsey, Joe Grant, Dick Huemer, Del Connell, Tom Oreb, John Walbridge, based on Lewis Carroll's The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass
directed by Clyde Geronimi & Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske

THE LION KING 1½
The Lion King 3: Hakuna Matata
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by Tom Rogers, Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi and Bill Steinkeller and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Bill Chambers It's not like Alice in Wonderland is necessary and The Lion King 1½ isn't–they're both unnecessary. The two latest animated Disney films to hit DVD, they have little in common formally save that they're jointly inessential; and yet, because of their proximate release windows, parents are likely to pick them up as a pair, and kids are likely to associate them as such. Bright, sophisticated children may arrive at the hypothesis that this is the day that animation died.

Sundance ’11: The Woods

January 30, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Film Festivals, Sundance
*/****starring Justin Phillips, Toby David, Nicola Persky, Brian Woodswritten and directed by Matthew Lessner by Alex Jackson A bunch of twentysomething idealists go out into the woods to get away from civilization, lugging plasma-screen displays and a refrigerator full of Capri Suns along with them. That's basically the one joke of Matthew Lessner's The Woods. It's a pretty good joke. The image of these pseudo-hippies playing "Wii Sports" in the middle of a forest is evocative in a way that cannot be readily communicated with words. Wyatt Garfield's cinematography effectively parodies the look of a Land's End or L.L. Bean…

Sundance ’11: Incendies

January 30, 2011Posted in****/****, 2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Sundance
****/****starring Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girardscreenplay by Denis Villeneuve, in collaboration with Valérie Beaugrand-Champagnedirected by Denis Villeneuve by Alex Jackson There are two incredible images in Denis Villeneuve's Incendies. The first of these is during a preamble to the main story. A small Arabic boy is having his head shaved. We push in on his face as he stares contemptuously at us. Everything childlike has been gutted out of him and he's been filled back up with rage. I can't recall the last time I saw the aftermath of child abuse concentrated so concisely and with so…

Sundance ’11: Uncle Kent

January 30, 2011Posted in2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
**/****starring Kent Osborne, Jennifer Prediger, Josephine Decker, Joe Swanberg, Kevscreenplay by Joe Swanberg & Kent Osbornedirected by Joe Swanberg by Alex Jackson Despite having recently celebrated his fortieth birthday, children's-show cartoonist Kent Osborne is no closer to leaving young adulthood behind. Never married and not a father, he finds himself too embarrassed to date anyone. Every single woman his age feels her biological clock ticking and asks, on the first date, whether he's ready to have children. With no greater purpose outside of his work, Osborne wastes his days smoking pot, frequenting Chatroulette, and trolling craigslist. You would think that…

The Mechanic (2011)

January 28, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Jason Statham, Ben Foster, Tony Goldwyn, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Richard Wenk and Lewis John Carlino
directed by Simon West

Mechanicby Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT FOR BOTH THIS FILM AND THE ORIGINAL THE MECHANIC. Michael Winner’s The Mechanic (1972) is nominally an action film, but it gets its point across with moments of extraordinary discomfort. As its primary attraction, it features Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent as contract killers with literally nothing to do, bored to tears as they stand around waiting for people to die. It’s a weird and disturbing scenario, but with modern box-office expectations being what they are, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s been effortlessly transformed into an average Jason Statham vehicle. The particulars remain the same: Hitman Arthur Bishop (Statham) is forced to kill his mentor, Harry (Donald Sutherland), under a contract from his employer (Tony Goldwyn); perhaps feeling a pang of guilt, he takes Harry’s wayward son Steve (Ben Foster) under his wing to teach him about the rules and tools of his trade. But it’s all presented in a much sillier light. There’s no other way to put it. When one of our assassins is instructed to poison his quarry, the characters (and the movie) deem this plan much too boring, and the whole ordeal ends in a gory brawl in which both parties stab each other with whatever they can get their hands on. It’s ridiculously over-the-top, sure, and although that’s to its credit, there are still too many moments where the viewer is left wanting something more substantial.

Sundance ’11: I Saw the Devil

January 26, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Revenge, South Korea, Sundance, Thriller
Ang-ma-reul bo-at-da***½/****starring Lee Byung-hun, Choi Min-sik, Jeon Gook-hwan, Jeon Ho-jinscreenplay by Park Hoon-jungdirected by Kim Ji-woon by Alex Jackson The rape scenes in Kim Ji-woon's I Saw the Devil are the most blatantly eroticized and sadistic I've seen since Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, but they're countered by the hilariously gory revenge scenes against the rapist (Choi Min-sik) by his victim's boyfriend (Lee Byung-hun). The film isn't trying to rationalize the rape with the revenge or the revenge with the rape. Rather, it regards women and the men who rape them as equally undeserving of our sympathy. One is tortured for…

The Killer/Hard-Boiled [Blu-ray Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 2011Posted in****/****, 1980s, 1990s, 2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: John Woo, Drama, Hong Kong, Romance, Thriller

THE KILLER (1989)
****/**** Image C- Sound C Extras B
starring Chow Yun-Fat, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh, Chu Kong
written and directed by John Woo

HARD-BOILED (1992)
***/**** Image C Sound B Extras A+
starring Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung, Teresa Mo, Philip Chan
screenplay by Barry Wong
directed by John Woo

by Walter Chaw It's possible to try to detail the history of John Woo at the beginning of the Heroic Bloodshed movement in Hong Kong–how, with the first two A Better Tomorrows (the second of which features a genuinely astonishing amount of violence and the infamous subtitled malapropism "don't fuck on my family!"), he created in buddy Chow Yun-Fat a fashion/role model in the James Dean mold, and how he eventually left for Hollywood's golden shore at the service of Jean-Claude Van Damme and John Travolta (twice) and Nicolas Cage (twice). It's possible–but Planet Hong Kong, City on Fire, Hong Kong Babylon, and on and on have done a pretty fair job of it already. Better to say that Woo's group of films from this period–the A Better Tomorrow pictures, his acknowledged masterpiece The Killer, his flawed but undeniably bombastic Hard-Boiled, and his ambitious, deeply felt Bullet in the Head–meant the world to me as a Chinese kid growing up in a predominantly white area in predominantly white Colorado. I saw a devastated 35mm print of The Killer at a midnight show in CU Boulder's Chem 140 auditorium in the early-'90s. It was dubbed (a mess), the screening was packed, and I, for maybe the first time in my life (and still one of the only times in my life), felt a genuine kinship with my countrymen and a certain pride in being Chinese. Here, after all, was the best action film I'd ever seen, and it wasn't John McTiernan's or Robert Zemeckis's or Steven Spielberg's name above the title, but someone called John Woo. And he was directing not Bruce Willis nor Arnie nor Sly nor any of the tools he would eventually work with in the United States, but a handsomer version of me with the same last name. As existential epiphanies go, it wasn't bad.

Sundance ’11: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

January 25, 2011Posted in****/****, 2011, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Music, Sundance, Sweden
****/****directed by Göran Hugo Olsson by Alex Jackson Goran Hugo Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 begins with a disclaimer explaining that this film is not intended to categorically define the Black Power movement, but merely to represent a few Swedish filmmakers' impressions of it. This seemingly innocuous statement raises more questions than it answers. Why would Swedes want to tell this story in the first place? Do they have the right to tell this story? And what's the point of looking at the Black Power movement of the late-Sixties and early-Seventies in 2011? It seems the moment you make…

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) + Secretariat (2010) – Blu-ray Discs + Conviction (2010)

January 24, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Family, Romance, Spain, Sports, Switzerland, Theatrical, UK

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER
**/**** Image A Sound B
starring Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones
written and directed by Woody Allen

SECRETARIAT
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Diane Lane, John Malkovich, Dylan Walsh, Scott Glenn
screenplay by Mike Rich, suggested by the book Secretariat: The Making of a Champion by William Nack
directed by Randall Wallace

CONVICTION
**/****
starring Hilary Swank, Sam Rockwell, Minnie Driver, Juliette Lewis
screenplay by Pamela Gray
directed by Tony Goldwyn

by Ian Pugh You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger represents the apotheosis of what shall now be called the New Woody Allen Average–those perfectly competent nothing movies that never rate more than two, two-and-a-half stars. I say that without a hint of sarcasm, and I say that as someone who considers Allen's work a primary influence–and as the guy who regularly defends Scoop. But I have to be honest: the New Woody Allen Average has become so predictably mediocre that I just can't take it anymore. The director's latest surrogate is another novelist, Roy (Josh Brolin), who's struggling to complete his latest book. It's putting a strain on his marriage to Sally (Naomi Watts), so he looks into the window of his pretty next-door neighbour (Freida Pinto) for romantic respite. Sally, an art curator, feels the same pressure, and casually drifts closer to her boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas). Sally's father Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) has left his wife for a prostitute (Lucy Punch), while his ex, Helena (Gemma Jones), retreats to spirituality, consulting a medium to find out where she stands in the great cosmic plan. It's a matter of "what you want" versus "what you take" in a race to see which floundering/philandering idiot can make the most tragic mistakes in the span of 90 minutes. Is it any different from Vicky Cristina Barcelona? When you break it down to its most basic components…no, not really.

Sundance ’11: Hobo with a Shotgun

January 24, 2011Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror, Sundance, Thriller
**½/****starring Rutger Hauer, Brian Downey, Gregory Smith, Molly Dunsworthscreenplay by John Daviesdirected by Jason Eisener by Alex Jackson Director Jason Eisener and screenwriter John Davies must have been left in the care of a particularly negligent babysitter throughout the 1980s. Their Hobo with a Shotgun, an adaptation of a fake trailer the two made for Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse contest back in 2007 (it won, and was subsequently attached to Canadian prints of the film), not only cites Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Robocop, and probably Cobra among its myriad references but also pays what I think is an incontrovertible homage to…

Barney’s Version (2010) + No Strings Attached (2011)

January 21, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

BARNEY'S VERSION
***/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Rosamund Pike, Minnie Driver, Dustin Hoffman
screenplay by Michael Konyves, based on the novel by Mordecai Richler
directed by Richard J. Lewis

NO STRINGS ATTACHED
**/****
starring Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher, Cary Elwes, Kevin Kline
screenplay by Elizabeth Meriwether
directed by Ivan Reitman

by Ian Pugh It's easier to accept Barney's Version once you realize it doesn't have much to say. Little more than a series of vignettes, the film surveys in piecemeal fashion the life of one Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti), a Jewish artist who endured three tumultuous marriages (the wives are played by Rachel Lefevre, Minnie Driver, and Rosamund Pike) and the mysterious death of best friend Boogie (Scott Speedman, whom I initially mistook for Hugh Jackman) along the way to producing a popular soap opera. Giamatti doesn't do outstanding work here, but he's reliable in that familiar Giamatti way: perpetually locked in a state of concentration, trying to understand the subtext of whatever fortunes or misfortunes befall him. Seems like we're all trying to figure things out, doesn't it? The film doesn't know whether to focus on life as a comedy or as a drama, and for that reason alone, it feels incredibly disjointed. It should be. It's supposed to be.

The Pacific (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

January 20, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Television, War

Image A Sound A+ Extras A-

by Jefferson Robbins The Greatest-Generation worship that Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks share is appreciable and understandable, but by the close of their latest collaborative HBO miniseries, "The Pacific", you sort of hope they've got it out of their systems. That's not to say the story encapsulated here didn't warrant telling–the flash conceptualization today is of World War II as a European war, where "rules of combat" may still obtain. The fiercely bloody Pacific campaign–very much a gazing-into-the-abyss kind of conflict, making monsters of men–has become a near-afterthought. So a big-budget TV treatment, in line with the star producers' 2001 "Band of Brothers", seems natural.1 But by remaining "true" to the experiences of the U.S. Marines who fought their way from Guadalcanal to the doorstep of Japan, the story comes across as a thing of half-reconciled parts, periscopic views of the larger picture. I mean, more than a miniseries usually does–like it's two miniseries grafted onto one another.

Inception (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

January 19, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Christopher Nolan, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw I dunno, the wordiness of The Dark Knight didn't bother me that much. I suppose it has something to do with it being a comic-book movie and plot-driving pronouncements seeming the order of the day. I find it impossible now to think of The Dark Knight without seeing it as a corollary to No Country For Old Men: the one composed of broad, garish strokes, the other of grace notes you hesitate to call delicate, but that's just what they are. With Inception, Christopher Nolan's correlative piece is Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY, and the comparison in this instance doesn't prove mutually evocative so much as devastating to Nolan's film, exposing his shtick as reams of deadening exposition interrupted by the occasional virtuoso set-piece. It is, in other words, aggressively nothing-special, save for a few astonishing zero-g sequences. As it happens, saying the best part of Inception is its weightlessness is a pretty pithy criticism of the whole damned enterprise. For a film about dreams, it's distinctly light on possibility: Armed with the power to shape reality, our erstwhile dream-weavers fold a city in half in a dorm-room Escher shout-out but decline to, you know, fly and stuff. More, Inception doesn't confront archetypes of any kind, instead retreating into some basic stuff about projections and the architecture of the unconscious being a freight elevator while relying overmuch on the built-in gravitas of father and dead-wife issues. And in case you miss any of that, Nolan crams it into the dialogue like one crams elephants into elevators. Rule of thumb: if a movie uses the word "deep" as much as this one does, it probably isn't.