Eat Pray Love (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

January 4, 2011Posted in2010, 2011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Road Movie, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras D
starring Julia Roberts, James Franco, Richard Jenkins, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Ryan Murphy & Jennifer Salt, based on the book by Elizabeth Gilbert
directed by Ryan Murphy

by Walter Chaw It’s a little tempting to not take the piss out of this latest instalment of How Julia Got Her Tube Packed, but the sins of Ryan Murphy’s unwatchable Eat Pray Love are such that it’s nigh impossible for any sentient human to resist. More interesting might be to chart the route America’s sweetheart has taken to becoming one of the most irritating and hateful personas in the modern pantheon–how the once top-earning female star is lately this pinched, drawn, graceless thing trying her best and in vain to recapture the sociopathic sprightliness of her early successes. It could simply be the natural process of aging that makes it harder for her wronged-woman act to cull any sympathy: a 43-year-old woman making pouty lips and acting out is a much different animal than her 23-year-old self doing same. If she were to poison her husband or steal her best friend’s bridegroom now, it would play very differently. And play differently it does as she dumps her non-descript/non-character hubby (Billy Crudup, typecast), buys an Italian phrasebook (“Every word in Italian is like a truffle!” the moron says), and travels to Bali in search of wisdom at the feet of adorably helpful minorities who only exist in movies like this to help coddled, rich, white people be content with their unimaginable privilege. If On the Waterfront was Kazan’s apologia for singing like a canary, then Julia’s late career seems an apologia for buying someone else’s husband and getting away with it, for the most part, in the court of public opinion.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2010

January 1, 2011Posted in2000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

Top102010graphicsmall

The last year of the first ten or the first year of the next ten, 2010 finds the state of our motion pictures as an awkward, yearling thing, finding purchase in the aftermath of the fear and nihilism of the post-9/11 state in something as dark but perhaps now more purposeful than despairing. If the best films of the immediately-after are represented by stuff like No Country for Old Men and Synecdoche, NY, the best films of this liminal year are pilgrims in search of a (doomed) idea of perfection and the dreadful cost of its pursuit. Is that explanation in part for the rise of geek culture (The Social Network, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Kick-Ass), this gradual empowerment of the weaker position? While examinations of vengeance and solipsism continue to be tough themes to shake, they’ve begun taking the form of marginal uplift as opposed to mostly-undiluted nihilism.

Fantasia (1941)/Fantasia 2000 (2000) [4-Disc Special Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

December 28, 2010Posted in1940s, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD

Fantasiacap

FANTASIA
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
story direction by Joe Grant and Dick Huemer
directed by James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe, Norm Ferguson, Jim Handley, Thornton Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, and Paul Satterfield

FANTASIA 2000
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
directed by Pixote Hunt, Hendel Butoy, Eric Goldberg, James Algar, Francis Glebas, Gaetan Brizzi, Paul Brizzi, and Don Hahn

by Bryant Frazer More than twenty years ago, I sat in Stan Brakhage’s office at the University of Colorado, handling original frames of 65mm IMAX film stock that the avant-garde filmmaker had hand-painted with swirling layers of colour. He explained that IMAX had commissioned him to create an abstract film specifically for presentation on the huge screens of their theatres. It was a great idea, and I wondered when the film had screened. Never, Brakhage told me. The IMAX people eventually lost interest in the idea, and “Night Music” was shown instead in 16mm prints, drastically reduced from the large-gauge film stock. Although IMAX were bold enough to approach Brakhage in the first place, the company got cold feet when it came time to actually exhibit non-narrative cinema–even for only 30 seconds!–for a paying audience.

True Grit (2010)

December 22, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Spielberg, Theatrical, Western

****/****
starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Hailee Steinfeld
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Charles Portis
directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw In exactly the same way they distilled the essence of Cormac McCarthy into an overwhelming, oppressive, animal nihilism in No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen have distilled the folksy Americana of Charles Portis into their adaptation of his True Grit. That gift for translation is what made The Odyssey into their collection of regional songs and stories O Brother, Where Art Thou?, what made their Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink (the two films, along with O Brother, that True Grit most resembles) so sure in their genre approximations. More than mimics, the Coens’ genius is as interpreters and scholars, able to understand the thrust of not Preston Sturges, but of a Preston Sturges character–of not one book but, miraculously, a body of work. And though True Grit is as literal and faithful an adaptation of the novel as one could hope for, the brilliance of it is that it’s captured the immersive feeling of Portis’s prose. More than an adaptation, True Grit is an explanation of Portis’s work through the agency of an entirely different medium. It suggests that the Coens are like Tarantino’s monologue explaining Superman at the end of Kill Bill, Vol. 2: there is in their Fargos and Raising Arizonas sardonic commentary on genre and spectatorship. The big secret is that they are, in their own way, as detached and alien as cultural critics as Cronenberg is as an anthropologist.

Somewhere (2010)

December 22, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, Italy, Japan, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning, Chris Pontius, Michelle Monaghan
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere is another of her little tales of listlessness and the lost, of the beauty in the longueurs of existential crises. The summation of her riffs on loneliness and temporariness and the brief interludes of light that merely serve as punctuations for the dark, it’s her best film. Funny how one of the great, near-universally-accepted cinema fiascos could net a filmmaker damaged enough to make delicate, ambiguous pictures about the fear of growing up. It’s there at those crossroads that Coppola’s work locates itself with characters in situations larger than them, buffeted into ideological corners and forced to answer Prufrock-ian questions, cloistered in hotels and Versailles that substitute for chambers of the sea, indeed, among some talk of you and me. Somewhere feels deeply, intensely personal, though the only secrets it divulges are the obvious ones (the life of reluctant celebrity played out in anonymous rooms before invisible audiences), so that its intimacy is a product of a conversation between its impossible signs and the nostalgia for an experience of loss that we provide it. It’s gorgeous, and gorgeously broken–a movie about lifelines by a person who’s drowned.

The Town (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 20, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Ben Affleck, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Peter Craig and Ben Affleck & Aaron Stockard, based on the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan
directed by Ben Affleck

by Walter Chaw If I'm still not entirely sold on Ben Affleck as an actor of depth, I'm completely sold on him as a director of depth. A director good enough, as it happens, to identify and avoid the actor's own weaknesses and augment his strengths, and to guide Affleck the actor to his best performance in a picture, The Town, that would be something like a revelation were Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, not so exceptional. Absolutely filthy with its story of place, count The Town as a tough-love love letter to Boston suburb Charlestown, a place established in the film as a breeding ground for bank robbers. Affleck plays Doug MacCray, the head of one such crew that also includes childhood buddy Jimmy (Jeremy Renner, excellent again) in an echo of the macho/familial dynamic established in the Aussie bank robber drama Animal Kingdom. More about the ties that bind men to a place and an idea of manhood than about the crimes themselves, The Town compensates for what it lacks in originality with its patience and its bracing trust in its screenplay and cast. Monologues that could be didactic are laced with what feels like genuine yearning; a moment in which Doug tells new girlfriend Claire (Rebecca Hall) about his childhood could have (should have) been embarrassing, but comes off under Affleck's surprising wisdom as heartfelt, even resonant.

The Fighter (2010)

December 17, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Sports, Theatrical

*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo
screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson
directed by David O. Russell

by Walter Chaw In this episode of Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals, former Funky-Bunch yogi and butt-model Wahlberg gets in the ring, but his real challenge comes in the upstaging Method skull-sharpening of Christian Bale and all the white-trash broads of Style Channel’s Bostonburba-licious. Oscar-baiting is the least of the picture’s myriad crimes, though–tune in to director David O. Russell’s absolutely gassed The Fighter for a training montage, an inexplicable ’80s soundtrack (pop quiz: Last time Whitesnake used in a film without irony? It’s a trick question), and a Rocky trajectory to the Big Fight, this time with Hollywood ending intact. Through it all, centring it like a brick on a shit-blanket, is Wahlberg, his dim-bulb “Say hi to your mother for me, all right?” persona the immovable object stalemating the plot’s unstoppable force. The only thing really surprising about The Fighter is that Ron Howard didn’t direct it.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Hammer Horror – DVD

December 14, 2010Posted in1950s, 1960s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Vampire

HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)
***/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Peter Cushing, Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling, Christopher Lee
screenplay by Jimmy Sangster
directed by Terence Fisher

DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Christopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson, Barry Andrews
screenplay by John Elder
directed by Freddie Francis

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)
***½/**** Image C- Sound B
starring Peter Cushing, Hazel Court, Robert Urquhart, Christopher Lee
screenplay by Jimmy Sangster
directed by Terence Fisher

FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969)
***/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones, Simon Ward
screenplay by Bert Batt
directed by Terence Fisher

by Jefferson Robbins As one of the twin stars of the original Hammer Films horror canon, the precise and skilful Peter Cushing had the task of portraying both villain (Dr. Frankenstein) and vanquisher (Dr. Van Helsing). His co-star Christopher Lee, on the other hand, seldom got to be the good guy: when he wasn’t baring plastic fangs or crusted over with dried-prune makeup, he usually embodied a more human evil. Lee’s unmasked performances were assertions of will–his Dracula, for instance, overwhelms with force of presence and a hungry smoulder in his eyes. Cushing could not disguise his native gentility and bladed intelligence, but he could turn those qualities towards sinister or humanitarian ends as needed.

The Other Guys (2010) [The Unrated Other Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

December 13, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Dwayne Johnson
screenplay by Adam McKay & Chris Henchy
directed by Adam McKay

FFC Must-Ownby Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Think about what sort of film would place Will Ferrell’s schlubby physique and vacant grin against Mark Wahlberg’s sharp, furrowed brow. More than just comically mismatched, these two actors belong in different movies, different genres…on different planets, even. They share something resembling a love-hate “chemistry,” but from the get-go the pairing feels off–different. Eventually you figure out that The Other Guys is the kind of movie that thrives on bizarre contradictions–the kind of movie where gun-toting heroes are sent to end corporate malfeasance, where their vehicles of choice are a Prius and a Gran Torino that runs on “100% vegetable oil,” where they loudly defend not the awesomeness of Star Wars but its scientific accuracy.1 A quintessentially American response to the quintessentially British Hot Fuzz, Adam McKay’s The Other Guys is the funniest, most delirious comedy I’ve seen in a long while, and it matches and exceeds the sharp cultural satire of McKay’s Talladega Nights in tackling not so much the conventions of the buddy-cop genre as the childish drama that attends them.

The Tourist (2010)

December 10, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, France, Italy, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and Christopher McQuarrie and Julian Fellowes
directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

by Ian Pugh The loss of Bond 23 to MGM’s umpteenth bankruptcy drama was just one of the many disappointments in the cinematic year that was–but an even bitterer pill arrived in the films that took 007’s place. With neither Daniel Craig nor Matt Damon to keep a perpetually-ailing genre on its feet, 2010’s triumvirate of identical spy thrillers (Knight and Day, Salt, now The Tourist) represents a return to the cozy arms of irrelevance. Sexpot secret agent Elise Ward (“Salt” herself, Angelina Jolie) leads her superiors on a wild goose chase through Venice in search of American math teacher Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), whom they believe to be her mysterious fugitive beau, Alexander Pearce. Unfortunately, this little game also garners the attention of a gangster (Steven Berkoff) to whom Pearce is rather severely indebted. The Tourist is not a daring picture by any means. The most unconventional thing about it, other than the casting of Depp, is the oddity of hiring Timothy Dalton to play a version of “M” when this is so clearly a Roger Moore movie: a romantic trip across Italy in a white tuxedo, peppered with stunts that border on slapstick.

Party Down: Season Two (2010) – DVD

December 8, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, DVD, Television

Image A- Sound A- Extras D+
“Jackal Onassis Backstage Party,” “Precious Lights Preschool Auction,” “Nick DiCintio’s Orgy Night,” “James Ellison Funeral,” “Steve Guttenberg’s Birthday,” “Not On Your Wife Opening Night,” “Party Down Company Picnic,” “Joel Munt’s Big Deal Party,” “Cole Landry’s Draft Day Party,” “Constance Carmell Wedding”

by Jefferson Robbins Hitting its sophomore stride just in time to meet the axe, the Starz sitcom “Party Down” tries its damnedest to make an arc out of its concept: catering staff with frustrated dreams of fame passes out shrimp rolls to the Hollywood elite. Off-putting and cruel in its first season, the ensemble comedy hits its rhythm this time around, even managing to develop a theme beyond “workaday despair.”

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD + One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (’08 release + ’10 reissue) – Blu-ray Discs

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD + One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (’08 release + ’10 reissue) – Blu-ray Discs

December 7, 2010Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Jack Nicholson

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras B+
FFC Must-Own’08 BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
’10 BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
starring Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, William Redfield, Will Sampson
screenplay by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, based on the novel by Ken Kesey
directed by Milos Forman

by Bill Chambers Philosophically sound, motivational, inspirational, Czech director Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of a small number of Best Picture winners to actually deserve the statuette. Arriving at the crest of a European-influenced period of filmmaking, before “brats” Spielberg and Lucas hijacked Hollywood once and for good, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not popularly considered a seminal movie of its cinematically lauded decade, though it did change the tenor of Jack Nicholson’s career (he’d always played loose cannons, but of a squarer breed) and became the first film since 1934’s It Happened One Night to sweep the five major Oscar categories: Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, and Screenplay.

Lost in Translation (2003) – Blu-ray Disc + Anything Else (2003) – DVD

Lost in Translation (2003) – Blu-ray Disc + Anything Else (2003) – DVD

December 6, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, UK, ZERO STARS

LOST IN TRANSLATION
***½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B
starring Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

ANYTHING ELSE
ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Woody Allen, Jason Biggs, Christina Ricci, Danny DeVito
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Walter Chaw It feels a lot like life is an endless succession of heartsickness and anticipation of heartsickness. After a while, taking a line from Tender Mercies, it’s hard to trust happiness anymore when happiness feels so ephemeral compared to the weight of grief. Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is about the wear of time and the unbearable burden of experience–it’s about how even what’s new and fresh is darkened by the ghosts of regret and time. When Bill Murray’s fading star Bob Harris arrives in Tokyo to lend his image to a top-shelf whiskey, he is suffused with so much of the sadness of living that the surprise of life has become something to be viewed with suspicion. Newness fades, and that familiar malaise, weary and grey, inevitably takes its place, sometimes even before the exhilaration of newness can reinvigorate. Bob meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in the hotel bar; she’s in town with her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi), and together Bob and Charlotte paint the town blue.

Black Swan (2010)

December 3, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey
screenplay by Andres Heinz and Mark Heyman and John McLaughlin
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw She’s incapable of reaching climax throughout the first hour of Black Swan, but then the floodgates open in the most Keatsian work in Darren Aronofsky’s growing portfolio of Romanticist explorations. Call it a ballet of the consummation sublime, the idea that once achieved, the immediate disappointment and disgust for the act overwhelms the sexual release of the moment before–and watch Black Swan in a lovelorn double-feature with Jane Campion’s Bright Star for the full impact of Aronofsky’s achievement here. As a thriller, Black Swan doesn’t do much more than graft a few phantom frames onto the periphery of Jean Benoit-Levy’s Ballerina, Altman’s The Company, or Powell/Pressburger’s The Red Shoes–but note how the picture owes its creepy intensity to the sort of social satire-through-body horror popularized by David Cronenberg. (Though it’s Cronenberg as fever dream rather than as insectile chill.) Note, too, how Natalie Portman finally finds herself the actor she was always considered to be in a role that breaks her legs and feet, forces her to masturbate and self-mutilate, and in the end transforms her into the very effigy of the absolute, voracious, consumptive nature of creation. In its nasty sexual biology, it’s the evocation of the secret ending to Charlotte’s Web–the off-stage fucking, and cannibalism, and matricide, and all that hunger prettified into a phrase artfully turned.

Mars Attacks! (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

Mars Attacks! (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

November 29, 2010Posted in1990s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Jack Nicholson, Satire, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A- Sound C
starring Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan
screenplay by Jonathan Gems
directed by Tim Burton

by Jefferson Robbins When Tim Burton calls in his Hollywood chips, it’s usually, to our benefit, to facilitate his darker impulses. 1989’s Batman gave him free rein to make Edward Scissorhands, for instance, and Warner Bros. incubated the bitter confection of Sweeney Todd after raking in more traditional bucks on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I daresay one of those Burton Unbound documents is his A-list romp Mars Attacks!, which today gives off strange vibrations that echo forward as well as back. It’s a ’50s UFO-invasion flick farce, of course, based on a 1962 trading card set illustrated by, among others, comics great Wally Wood. It’s anarchic, unexpected (“Wha? Trading cards?” we all said at the time), and darkly funny. It plays in the massive footprint of the same year’s Independence Day, and in its more biting moments, it somehow speaks to the great collapses of the subsequent decade.

Fight Club (1999) [10th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Fight Club (1999) [10th Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 29, 2010Posted in1990s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Esoterica

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf Aday
screenplay by Jim Uhls, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. My on-again/off-again love affair with David Fincher began with a PREMIERE article I read about how much of an asshole he was on the set of Alien3, dumping a few-hundred baby crickets on a pretty surprised, pretty pissed, pretty skivvies-clad Sigourney Weaver. But I didn’t really prick up my ears until his urban/ecclesiastical serial killer masterpiece Se7en revealed to me a key to unlocking the Coens’ Barton Fink–being, as they were, thematic doppelgängers. Soaked in wet and Hemingway, Fincher declares the world a scam and appoints himself the snake-oil barker shilling from the proscenium on the wagon; Barton Fink, also stained sepia brown, also ostensibly engaged in the pursuit of a serial killer and the excoriation of deadly sins, is the spirit to Se7en‘s flesh. Even as he flounders at the heartbeat, Fincher finds the headlong of his carnal lather again in his adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, establishing his mission statement as subterranean explorations of masculine aggression and explaining to me my tendency to confuse Fincher’s films with those of Michael Mann. Focusing on the testosterone in Fincher’s pictures offers partial explanation of the movies in his oeuvre that don’t work (and, within those failures, the parts that do). Too, it’s explanation of why it is that Fight Club‘s ending is so jarringly unsatisfying–“You met me at kind of a strange time in my life” the nancy punchline to two-plus hours of quintessential asshole cinema.

The Return of the Living Dead (1985) – DVD (2002) + Collector’s Edition DVD|Blu-ray + DVD

November 26, 2010Posted in1980s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Satire, Sci-Fi, Zombie

***/****
’02 DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A
’07 DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Clu Gulager, James Karen, Don Calfa, Thom Mathews
written and directed by Dan O’Bannon

by Walter Chaw Sort of a cross between Dawn of the Dead and Valley Girl, Dan O’Bannon’s hysterical The Return of the Living Dead most resembles in the final analysis O’Bannon’s own cult favourite Dark Star, directed by John Carpenter. Both pictures exist in an insular environment, both skewer genre and societal mores, and both, oddly enough, have something of a political conscience. Positing that Night of the Living Dead was based on a true story and that the remnants of that zombie conflagration have been stored in barrels accidentally shipped to the Uneeda Medical Supply Company (where goofy stock manager Frank (a fabulous James Karen) carelessly starts the horror cycle), The Return of the Living Dead turns a satirical eye on Reagan’s hawkish heart, the sprung logic of Italian zombie movies, and John Hughes’s brat-pack films.

The Kids Are All Right (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

November 23, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, France, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, Josh Hutcherson
screenplay by Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg
directed by Lisa Cholodenko

by Bill Chambers Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and her younger brother Laser (Josh Hutcherson) are the offspring of lesbian couple Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) and an anonymous sperm donor named Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Nic and Jules shared the burden of pregnancy, and though The Kids Are All Right never comes right out and says who gave birth to whom, the dispositional echoes, subtle shows of favouritism, and even just the kids’ names suggest that gynecologist Nic had the overachieving Joni and hippie-dippy Jules bore impressionable, impetuous Laser. But the movie’s more intriguing when the dots are harder to connect. Nic, for instance, gets off on watching a tape of two guys fornicating as Jules pleasures her. And Laser has to guilt goodie-goodie Joni into contacting their biological father, yet it’s Joni who takes an immediate shine to the man, while Laser sniffs, “I think he’s a little into himself”–directly mirroring Nic’s subsequent assessment of Paul as “self-satisfied.” A critical callback, it shows that Nic and Jules aren’t two single mothers sharing a roof à la “Kate & Allie”, but parents whose dynamic jointly influences their children. It’s also more convincing evidence of their togetherness than their bedtime nicknames for each other (“chicken” and “pony”), which the actresses can barely utter without giving away the blooper reel.

Bored to Death: The Complete First Season (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

November 22, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image B Sound B Extras C+
“Stockholm Syndrome,” “The Alanon Case,” “The Case of the Missing Screenplay,” “The Case of the Stolen Skateboard,” The Case of the Lonely White Dove,” “The Case of the Beautiful Blackmailer,” “The Case of the Stolen Sperm,” “Take a Dive”

by Jefferson Robbins With its accomplished but psychologically malformed boy-men, the first season of novelist-screenwriter Jonathan Ames’s “Bored To Death” feels like a Judd Apatow joint transplanted to Tom Wolfe’s outer boroughs. Its characters all want to be Masters of their particular Universes, but they’re either hamstrung by their own neuroses or carting them along like luggage in spite of success. We know we’re watching an HBO comedy, though it’s often hard to discern where the comedy is supposed to be located. In Woody Allen nebbishism? In misdirection and error? In slapstick? In satirizing the hip, self-satisfied artistes of millennial New York’s most fashionable burg? Barring a few episodes that succeed on the other points, the latter feels most likely.

Red Riding (2009) [Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

November 15, 2010Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller, UK

RED RIDING
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1974
**½/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Sean Bean, Warren Clarke, Rebecca Hall
screenplay by Tony Grisoni, based on the novel Red Riding: Nineteen Seventy-Four David Peace
directed by Julian Jarrold

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1980
***/****
starring Paddy Considine, Jim Carter, Warren Clarke, Sean Harris
screenplay by Tony Grisoni, based on the novel Red Riding: Nineteen Eighty David Peace
directed by James Marsh

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1983
**/****
starring Mark Addy, David Morrissey, Jim Carter, Warren Clarke
screenplay by Tony Grisoni, based on the novel Red Riding: Nineteen Eighty-Three David Peace
directed by Anand Tucker

by Bryant Frazer Red Riding, adapted by screenwriter Tony Grisoni into three movies from four novels by David Peace, is an awfully downbeat thing that’s difficult to classify. It’s not really a mystery, because the central crimes are barely the point (at least in the first two films), and the question isn’t whodunit, but who among all those involved is not yet corrupt. It’s not a police procedural, because the only effective police work we see is of the thuggish, back-room variety. In its specificity of time and place–nine years in Yorkshire, a county in northern England–it recalls James Ellroy’s novels about Los Angeles cops in the 1940s and ’50s. But Ellroy’s stories were bracing because their point of view came from inside a department dominated by bigotry and machismo and tormented by its own failings. Each of the Red Riding stories comes at the situation mostly from an outsider’s perspective, elevating a principled crusader to the high ground, then having the corrupt institution take potshots at him, decimating his footing.