Avatar (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD

Avatar (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD

May 17, 2010Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Sam Worthington, Zoë Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver
written and directed by James Cameron

by Walter Chaw A morally, historically, socially, and politically childish amalgam of Pocahontas and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, Avatar finds James Cameron–still the Cameron of Titanic (or the uncomfortably simpering T2, if we’re honest with ourselves) rather than the Cameron of Aliens and The Terminator–trying his hand at being Kevin Costner: powerful, dim, and only relevant for a tiny window of time he doesn’t realize has already closed. The more simple-minded liberal proselytizing he perpetrates like Avatar, the farther away he gets from the B-movie muscularity that indicated his early career. It’s a bad thing, believe me, that the first set of movies people think to compare your latest to is first George Lucas’s ridiculous prequel trilogy–then Dances with Wolves.

Lost: The Complete Fourth Season (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

May 17, 2010Posted in2000s, 2008, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
"The Beginning of the End," "Confirmed Dead," "The Economist," "Eggtown," "The Constant," "The Other Woman," "Ji Yeon," "Meet Kevin Johnson," "The Shape of Things to Come," "Something Nice Back Home," "Cabin Fever," "There's No Place Like Home: Part 1," "There's No Place Like Home: Part 2"

by Walter Chaw Four years into its run, "Lost" appears to have hit something of a stride–at least it does until it falls completely off the rails, maybe for good. Blame the most recent Writer's Strike, which happened in the middle of this truncated season, or better yet, blame the fact that the series can't seem to leave well enough alone. It has a chance to be transcendent, see, and resigns itself to being ordinary. The best episode of the run so far happens early in the season with episode 4.5, "The Constant." A clear homage to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, it replaces Billy Pilgrim with our Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), who becomes "unstuck" in time and struggles during the course of things to find a "constant" with which to anchor his consciousness in one fixed timeline. Ingeniously executed and manufacturing the first real suspense "Lost" has managed since possibly the first episode of the first season (or since the first hatch was opened), "The Constant" suggests that there are separate Oceanic Flight 815s, that reality is slippery, and that there might be a struggle somewhere, between some things, for control over a dominant reality. "The Constant" marks the moment I became a "Lost" fan. And then, in the very next episode, "The Other Woman," everything goes to shit: "Lost" scrambles to demystify all these philosophies in favour of a vast conspiracy masterminded by an evil billionaire who, apparently, has filled a fake plane with exhumed corpses and planted it in the ocean so as to prevent his daughter Penelope–named for Odysseus's wife, right?–from reuniting with a boy of whom he doesn't approve. The problem is mainly that after three-and-a-half years of this garbage, anything the creators could come up with in terms of an Answer would not be equal to the investment the show's loyal viewers have already made in it.

Robin Hood (2010)

May 14, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, William Hurt, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Brian Helgeland
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw Predictably, achingly, perfectly okay, Ridley Scott into his dotage has produced a string of absolutely unsurprising, overlong, uninspiring-if-occasionally-visually-striking films, of which Robin Hood is only the latest. An attempt to “reboot” the Robin Hood legend with a “prequel” that shows how a middle-aged Robin (Russell Crowe) meets his Merry Mystery, Alaska Men, woos freshly-widowed “maid” Marion (Cate Blanchett), sort of composes the “Declaration of Independence,” directly influences–it’s implied–the signing of the Magna Carta (in the completion of which the film’s real hero, William Marshal (William Hurt), was instrumental) not long after the events of the movie, and enters into a life of sylvan banditry at the prodding injustice of ineffectual King John (Oscar Isaac, doing his best Russell Brand). It also suggests that Marion is a Maid of Orléans figure who rides into battle alongside the menfolk to repulse an inexplicable French invasion shot in such a way as to suggest a Gallic D-Day landing (or an attack on Northern England by the New Orleans Saints)*–marking the second time Blanchett’s done this exact scene after the admittedly-worse Elizabeth: The Golden Age. All of which is portrayed in so exacting and expository a way in that inimitably stately Ridley Scott style that the picture’s bumfuddling 140-minute runtime feels like a couple of torturous days spent at a Renaissance Fair. Maybe it’s the complete lack of stakes that hamstrings the production–the surety that no compelling issues will be broached, despite all the posturing about Robin Hood being Thoreau over six centuries before Thoreau (or Thomas Jefferson five centuries before Jefferson) in a deeply stupid town-centre meeting that more closely resembles the Endor council in Return of the Jedi than it does the requisite stirring centrepiece monologue in this prestige epic lost without an awards season.

Edge of Darkness (2010) + When in Rome (2010)|Edge of Darkness – Blu-ray Disc

May 9, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

EDGE OF DARKNESS
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, Bojana Novakovic
screenplay by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell, based on the television series by Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by Martin Campbell

WHEN IN ROME
*/****
starring Kristen Bell, Josh Duhamel, Will Arnett, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by David Diamond & David Weissman
directed by Mark Steven Johnson

by Ian Pugh Allegedly a radical departure from the BBC miniseries upon which it’s based, Martin Campbell’s Edge of Darkness works because there’s nothing typical about it. Boston PD detective Tom Craven (Mel Gibson) naturally blames himself when his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) is gunned down by a masked man with a shotgun, but his private inquiry into the matter reveals that Emma herself was the more likely target: it had something to do with her job at a nuclear R&D lab run by sadistic creepshow Jack Bennett (an almost-ridiculously slimy Danny Huston). The trick to Tom’s subsequent trip down the rabbit hole is that he never stops blaming himself, even once his quest is validated by the trail of bodies left by both him and the mysterious conspirators pulling the strings. This is Gibson’s first starring role in eight years following a lengthy trek through Crazytown, and he might be the only actor who could have pulled it off so flawlessly–simply because there’s always been something slightly terrified about his specific brand of martyrdom, something that points to it all being painfully unnecessary.

Iron Man 2 (2010)

May 7, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Superhero, Theatrical

*/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Scarlett Johansson
screenplay by Justin Theroux
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw A multi-million-dollar machine carefully engineered to generate the ridiculous amount of money it’s about to, Iron Man 2 is kept from total, instant obsolescence by its “too good for this shit” cast, which cleverly manages to distract from the fact that this flick is a tone-deaf, laborious mess. Front and centre is Mickey Rourke as wronged Russian physicist Ivan Vanko, an amalgam of two Iron Man villains and so enigmatic a presence that although the dumbass screenplay (by actor Justin Theroux) takes pains to make Vanko’s angst father-based, it’s hard not to be distracted by the more mysterious depths of Rourke’s performance. Similarly good are Gwyneth Paltrow, whose Girl Friday Pepper Potts is given the keys to her boss’s Stark Industries and burdened instantly by expectation and cable-news notoriety; Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, again playing himself as a tech billionaire; and Sam Rockwell as an unctuous, fake-baked rival defense contractor. Not so great are the bland set-pieces, the misguided attempt to parallel Vanko’s avenge-daddy motivation with Tony’s make-dead-daddy-proud motivation into one legacy-based leitmotif, and a series of convoluted plot mechanisms (Tony’s dying! Tony loves Pepper! No, he loves dead-eyed, one-note-but-hot Natasha (Scarlett Johansson)! Tony’s company is in trouble! Tony’s in trouble with the government! Tony likes to get drunk!) that grind the whole enterprise to a standstill at short intervals. If you can maintain your interest during an extended sequence in which our Tony plays with a bunch of virtual computer screens while building a long tube, you either drank the Kool-Aid that makes you care whether Tony lives or dies, or you’ve slipped blissfully into a coma.

The Yakuza (1975) – DVD

May 4, 2010Posted in1970s, 2010, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Crime, Drama, DVD, Japan, Romance, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras C
starring Robert Mitchum, Takakura Ken, Okada Eiji, Brian Keith
screenplay by Paul Schrader and Robert Towne
directed by Sydney Pollack

by Jefferson Robbins We’ll never know what might have been had Paul and Leonard Schrader’s original screenplay for The Yakuza gone unmolested by ’70s script king Robert Towne, or had Martin Scorsese or Brian De Palma made good on threats to direct. Instead, the obvious gets overlaid on top of the mysterious, and at least one partner in this marriage of the American and Japanese gangster genres winds up shorted. Producer-director Sydney Pollack makes the mistake his best peers in the decade’s American cinema dodged: he mistrusts the audience, believing we can’t absorb backstory through performance and suggestion.

K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

May 3, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller, UK, War

*½/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson, Sam Spruell, Peter Stebbins
screenplay by Christopher Kyle
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw The film opens with a false alarm because drills are how all cookie-cutter closed-vehicle thrillers begin. Screenwriters free of the limiting bonds of imagination call it “foreshadowing”; critics forced to watch at least one film that begins this way per year prefer “tedious.” K-19: The Widowmaker (hereafter K-19) has a tedious narrative married to vein-swelling performances presented in that frank gracelessness indicative of director Kathryn Bigelow’s sledgehammer-chic since long about Point Break, brought together under the steady hand of a legendary editor (Walter Murch) that only just guides this behemoth of conflicting ideas and wet (and drunken) Russian submariners into the dry dock of coherence.

The Karate Kid Collection – DVD|The Karate Kid I & II [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

The Karate Kid Collection – DVD|The Karate Kid I & II [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

May 3, 2010Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Family, Martial Arts, Romance, Sports

THE KARATE KID (1984)
***½/****
DVD – Image C+ Sound C+ Extras A
BD – Image A- Sound B+ Extras A
starring Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, Elisabeth Shue, Martin Kove
screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen
directed by John G. Avildsen

THE KARATE KID PART II (1986)
**/****
DVD – Image B- Sound C+ Extras D
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras D
starring Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, Yuji Okumoto, Tamlyn Tomita
screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen
directed by John G. Avildsen

THE KARATE KID PART III (1989)
*/**** Image C Sound C+
starring Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, Robyn Lively, Thomas Ian Griffith
screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen
directed by John G. Avildsen

THE NEXT KARATE KID (1994)
½*/**** Image B+ Sound C+
starring Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, Hilary Swank, Michael Ironside, Constance Towers
screenplay by Mark Lee
directed by Christopher Cain

by Walter Chaw Movies from the magic hour of my moviegoing experience cover that brief period of time between my being able to go to the cinema unattended (dropped at the theatre with a quarter to call the folks afterwards) and my being able to decide that there are actually films I’d rather not see for any price. You never love movies as much or in the same way as you do during this tiny porthole, and when my family first got a VCR (we were the last ones on the block), I pirated Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, and The Karate Kid onto one tape that I watched until you could see through the ribbon. Each seminal films of the fabulist ’80s in their own way, all three spawned multiple sequels–though, at least until Indiana Jones struggles back to the screen with a walker and oxygen tank, The Karate Kid holds the record with four instalments in total. (And one that launched the career of a two-time Oscar winner, to boot.) Credit a lot of things for that: Bill Conti’s classic score; John G. Avildsen’s intuitive direction; and Pat Morita’s and Ralph Macchio’s superlative performances. But credit most of all the enduring power of a familiar tale told with conviction and skill. Take the intimidating volume of formulaic exercises that fall by the wayside (including The Karate Kid‘s own sequels) as testament to the difficulty of capturing a tiger by its tail.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

April 29, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Wes Craven

½*/****
starring Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy
screenplay by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer
directed by Samuel Bayer

by Walter Chaw Listen, I like remakes. I think that for the same reason no one complains about a new production of “Hamlet”, no one should complain about the umpteenth iteration of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I like the new Dawn of the Dead better than the original, the new The Manchurian Candidate almost as much; I’m not trying to start an argument, I’m simply saying that I don’t hate the new A Nightmare on Elm Street on principle. I hate the new A Nightmare on Elm Street because it really sucks. Samuel Bayer’s ridiculously amateurish take on the franchise earns the only nod it deserves by going all the way with the loathsomeness of its Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley). Otherwise, it’s strictly jump-scare theatre, a geek leaping from the bushes, clashing cymbals, in the very imitation of a jack-in-the-box for ninety soul-sucking minutes. For what it’s worth, it drags its claw along the text of the Wes Craven original pretty faithfully, down to recreating a few of the kills and resurrecting the iconic body-bag sequence, all to drastically diminished returns. To say the movie’s not scary in the slightest is both a surprise and not at all a surprise. But it is a shame, considering that Craven’s oneiric A Nightmare on Elm Street is an inventive, nasty little low-budget chiller with enough of a thought in its head to germinate a beloved franchise and a proud member of the bogey pantheon.

The Losers (2010) + The Back-up Plan (2010)

April 22, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

THE LOSERS
*½/****
starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoë Saldana, Chris Evans, Jason Patric
screenplay by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt, based on the comic book series by Andy Diggle and Jock
directed by Sylvain White

THE BACK-UP PLAN
½*/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Alex O’Loughlin, Eric Christian Olsen, Linda Lavin
screenplay by Kate Angelo
directed by Alan Poul

by Ian Pugh We’ve got a long summer ahead of us, full of remakes and spoofs straight out of the ’80s, and The Losers celebrates its imminent arrival by taking a dump on the action flicks of the era. Blinkered hostility is as much a mood-killer as uncritical nostalgia, and The Losers never misses an opportunity to remind you that its characters have one-note personalities defined by terse nicknames. The film begins, as it must, in the Bolivian jungle, where the titular team of U.S. soldiers (led by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is forced to go underground after an errant missile–intended for them–kills twenty-five Bolivian children they’d just saved from an evil drug lord. At first glance, that opening raid points to a toned-down Predator reference, but it’s really just a paint-by-numbers scenario meant to demonstrate how pretty much everything from that decade is stilted, corny, and hopelessly dated. So it goes for the rest of the film–how else to explain a brief chase sequence set to “Don’t Stop Believin'”? It’s not merely junk; it’s self-conscious, wilfully misinterpretive junk.

An Education (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

April 21, 2010Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Carey Mulligan
screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber
directed by Lone Scherfig

by Walter Chaw Director Lone Scherfig is perhaps notoriously the first woman to direct a Dogme95 picture (Italian for Beginners) and preserves her effortlessness with actors and light romantic imbroglios with An Education. Yet it shows little maturation, particularly after her scabrous, delicately balanced, Hal Ashby-esque Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, instead regressing into the ghetto of only-adequate BBC coming-of-age story. If An Education is remembered at all, it will be for raising the profile of the immensely appealing Carey Mulligan. She’s Jenny, a sharp, sensitive sixteen-year-old schoolgirl with a promising future in letters and eyes on Oxford until she’s distracted by the allure of a bohemian lifestyle with pretentious friends, who pretend at the civilization she would rightfully earn in time. Leader of said bohemians is creepy/suave David (Peter Sarsgaard), whose courtship of Jenny is a laudable contrast to Twilight in showing a worldly older man using all the benefits of his experience to impress, and eventually deflower, an easily-exploited high-schooler with stars in her eyes.

The Age of Unintended Consequences: FFC Interviews David Russo

April 20, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Interviews, Theatrical

Drussointerviewtitle

April 21, 2010|The films of David Russo have a distinctly handmade feel, and often the hand becomes visible. A largely self-taught filmmaker and animator, he makes no pretense that he’s not manipulating the action. When he sets his models into neon time-lapse against backdrops that strobe from sky to sea to blackness, he almost always winds up in the shot. In Russo’s short creations and in his first feature film, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, bespoke art objects–or even just words–make long, looping journeys in search of some answer. But like most philosophical quests, the journey is more important than its endpoint.

While he developed his craft, Russo carried on an 11-year career as a janitor, a vocation that sharpened his sense of the things society values: what we keep, what we cast away, what we flush. His short art films Populi (2002) and Pan With Us (2003) (viewable here, along with most of the artist’s other work) gave him his first wider exposure, competing at the Sundance Film Festival in consecutive years. More recently, his hand-wrought animation lent texture to the video for Thom Yorke’s “Harrowdown Hill” (2006).

Dizzle‘s path from script to screen was fraught with financing issues and a slender production window. It wasn’t bought for distribution after its Sundance debut in early 2009, and by the time it reached Russo’s hometown Seattle International Film Festival the same year, its hopes for release were no better. Finally, Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Film picked up Dizzle for a brief 2010 New York theatrical engagement and a video-on-demand run that starts today. Russo’s renegade janitors, chemically enlightened and midwifing the birth of a new species, might manage to swim free of the sewers after all.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Sci-Fi Adventures – DVD

April 19, 2010Posted in1950s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK

THEM! (1954)
***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness
screenplay by Ted Sherdeman
directed by Gordon Douglas

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, Kenneth Tobey
screenplay by Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger, suggested by the story “The Fog Horn” by Ray Bradbury
directed by Eugène Lourié

WORLD WITHOUT END (1956)
**½/**** Image A Sound B-
starring Hugh Marlowe, Nancy Gates, Rod Taylor
written and directed by Edwards Bernds

SATELLITE IN THE SKY (1956)
*/**** Image C Sound B
starring Kieron Moore, Lois Maxwell, Donald Wolfit
screenplay by John Mather, J.T. McIntosh and Edith Dell
directed by Paul Dickson

tcmscifithem-1733871by Jefferson Robbins We’re all mutants now. Those of us who weren’t literally irradiated by the Atomic Age still carry its glowing cultural DNA. As we’ve built better ways to destroy ourselves, we’ve also spurred the creators of our science-fiction to imagine life in newer Waste Lands. Their work assumes that no matter how we survive each new apocalypse, our circumstances will be quite changed. The upshot of our atom-splitting folly would be not sloughed skin or violent cancer but marvels and wonders, which would then seek our destruction on their own terms.

Minority Report (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

Minority Report (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

April 19, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller, Tom Cruise

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, based on the short story by Philip K. Dick
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Despite a remarkable first hour, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report washes out as an overlong retread of tired thriller/mystery elements, capped by the director’s trademark propensity for moralizing epilogues. It suffers from mainstream cinema’s squeamishness in regards to true ambiguity of character and character motivation, and for all its claims to a faithful reproduction of Philip K. Dick’s dark dystopian future, the picture is ultimately about Spielberg’s itch for restoration of order rather than Dick’s entropic dissolution of it. Distracting and unforgivable plot holes yaw beneath the narrative, making it clear that Minority Report is just another failed attempt by Spielberg to tell an adult tale. Here is an attractively packaged summer bonbon with an essentially hollow, nutritionally empty centre.

The Wolfman (2010)

April 17, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, Werewolf

***/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving
screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw Gloriously, exuberantly awful, Joe Johnston’s tone-perfect, imperfect-perfect update of Universal’s horror legacy begs at any moment for grieving Gwen (Emily Blunt) to cry out, “He. Vas. My. BOYfriend!” It’s easily the funniest movie I’ve seen in what seems forever–a comedy of imitation that clarifies, if anything, the extent to which our condescension to films from the ’40s allows us to enjoy the Universal monster movies without irony. Not so lucky is this product of the post-modern era in which absolutely the only way to enjoy the film in any defensible way is to profess a deep knowledge and affection for the works of James Whale, Lon Chaney, and all the boys at the old studio who found themselves, not long into their run, making movie-mashups and Abbott & Costello vehicles. At the least, this redux demonstrates some respect for its source material, from its retro effects (credited to ace werewolf guy Rick Baker) to its joyful inability to assemble anything like a coherent narrative from the various bits and pieces Johnston and company have thrown into a bucket and then onto the screen. Consider the transition from a bloody, fountain-side flashback of dead mommy to prodigal son Lawrence (Benicio Del Toro) descending a few steps into a mysterious torture chamber beneath some kind of estate-bound cemetery, where his dad (Anthony Hopkins), eyes glowing mysteriously, advises that the beast “will out.” It’s really just a collection of non-sequiturs, of scenes that don’t fit together in a landscape with no scale (Lawrence takes a full month to walk sixteen miles from London to his house and still manages to beat his carriage-riding pursuers there), strung together willy-nilly by Oedipal suggestions the film is clearly incapable, and uninterested, in exploring. The Wolfman is a big, giant, dumb movie made with such breathtaking stupidity that it actually ends with a “wolf-out” battle royale like the one in Mike Nichols’s Wolf–the difference being that The Wolfman doesn’t appear to take itself the tiniest bit seriously.

Kick-Ass (2010)

April 16, 2010Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Nicolas Cage, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Mark Strong, Nicolas Cage
screenplay by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, based on the comic book by Mark Millar & John Romita Jr.
directed by Matthew Vaughn

by Walter Chaw A wonderfully unlikely amalgam of Hong Kong-era John Woo and Shaolin Soccer/Kung Fu Hustle–era Stephen Chow, Matthew Vaughn’s ebullient, often-unconscionable Kick-Ass reimagines Woo’s iconic Tequila as an 11-year-old girl with a purple bob, an incredible potty mouth (she uses the “C” word correctly in a sentence, cunts), and absolutely no remorse in crushing a defenseless douchebag in a car cuber. Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) is destined to be an icon, a more popular tattoo-parlour fave than Calvin in evoking the cheerful, insouciant lawlessness of misdirected youth. Far from truly groundbreaking, though, sober minds could only identify her as a continuation of that quintessentially American, Huck Finn tradition of children as collective, societal Id and trickster gods. She’s even employed in the picture as a punitive, apolitical, unapologetic champion of order who limits her victims to drug dealers and gangsters, those disturbers of civilization. As her father (Nicolas Cage) clarifies in response to her unconventional upbringing, it’s not his blame to shoulder, but arch-baddie Frank D’Amico’s.

The Lord of the Rings (1978) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

The Lord of the Rings (1978) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

April 15, 2010Posted in1970s, 2010, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, Musical, Spain, UK

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
**½/****
DVD – Image C Sound C-
BD – Image C+ Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle, based on The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Ralph Bakshi

by Walter Chaw An adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Rings” books that began with The Fellowship of the Ring and ended when the money ran out in the middle of The Two Towers, Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated feature The Lord of the Rings is unintentionally disturbing, occasionally brilliant, and fatally uneven. The film is faithful to the main movements of Tolkien’s novels but told in the kind of narrative shorthand that favours truncation over summary. Its rotoscoping of actors combines uneasily with traditional modes of animation: they mix into an abstract soup of contradictory images that destroys our suspension of disbelief.

Night Moves (1975) – DVD

April 14, 2010Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Edward Binns, Susan Clark
screenplay by Alan Sharp
directed by Arthur Penn

by Walter Chaw On the strength of his scripts for The Hired Hand, Ulzana’s Raid, and Night Moves, Scottish novelist Alan Sharp seems well at home with the better-known, more highly-regarded writers and directors of the New American Cinema. Sharp’s screenplays are marked by a narrative complexity and situations gravid with implication and doom.1 Take the moment in the Arthur Penn-helmed Night Moves where broken-down P.I. Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman, reuniting with Penn for the first time since Bonnie and Clyde), after discovering a body in a sunken wreck off the coast of Florida, watches as his two sleazeball hosts (John Crawford and Jennifer Warren)–who’ve previously exchanged an odd nod and a knowing glance in which something is silently decided about how to handle this new, inquisitive element dropped in their midst–break into a broken tango to a tune on the radio. Harry salutes them in a way that suggests he understands what the hell is going on and shuffles off to bed. It’s one of the most harrowing moments in a harrowing decade of film, and nothing much happens in it except for the look Hackman gives as a damned soul caught on the horns of an unknowable mystery. The seduction scene that immediately ensues reminds in cadence and pace of the dream sequence from Hackman’s earlier The Conversation: “Where were you when Kennedy died?” “Which Kennedy?” “I dunno, any Kennedy.” Hackman is anchored to this period because he so ably portrays the everyman who desires enlightenment against the pervasive belief that there’s no longer hope for anything like enlightenment in this post-Vietnam/post-Watergate dystopia–that the solution to everything that’s wrong in this world is, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The slow, looping circles the boat “Point of View” describes at the end of the picture constitute perhaps the most trenchant metaphor for all of the New American Cinema.

The Natural (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

The Natural (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

April 12, 2010Posted in1980s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Sports

*½/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Richard Farnsworth
screenplay by Phil Dusenberry and Roger Towne, based on the novel by Bernard Malamud
directed by Barry Levinson

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Looking up Barry Levinson’s The Natural on WIKIPEDIA, I came across this dopey quote from Bill Simmons, the ESPN reporter who goes by the insipid nickname The Sports Guy: “Any ‘Best Sports Movies’ list that doesn’t feature either Hoosiers or The Natural as the No. 1 pick shouldn’t even count.” This is why sportswriters have no business writing about movies. Aside from lacking the vocabulary necessary to analyze them (Michael Bamberger’s riveting hatchet job on M. Night Shyamalan, The Man Who Heard Voices, would read even better without so many painful sports metaphors taking the place of film terminology), they’re a maudlin lot, suckers for the human-interest story that ennobles their vocation and heightens the vicarious kick on which they as armchair jocks thrive. I’m betting Simmons hears Randy Newman’s triumphal score from The Natural while he’s brushing his teeth. (Hell, it’s probably his ringtone.) Assuming “sports movie” is not a handicap that some films are presumed to transcend–assuming that any movie featuring a protagonist whose life revolves around the playing or coaching of a single sport fits the bill, not just the uplifting ones–then I can think of at least ten titles more worthily crowned “Best Sports Movie” than Hoosiers or, especially, The Natural: Fat City, Raging Bull, Rocky, The Wrestler, Downhill Racer, The Hustler, Slap Shot, The Bad News Bears (original), and The Longest Yard (again, original). And that’s leaving subjectivity out of it as much as I know how. The problem, of course, is that only about half of those flicks send you out of the theatre feeling like a champion, whereas the rest traffic in, to borrow a phrase from The Bad News Bears, “moral” victories–which is bound to be anathema to guys like Simmons, who propagate hero myths for a living.

Big Love: The Complete Second Season (2007) – DVD

April 7, 2010Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD, Television

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“Damage Control,” “The Writing on the Wall,” “Reunion,” “Rock and a Hard Place,” “Vision Thing,” “Dating Game,” “Good Guys and Bad Guys,” “Kingdom Come,” “Circle the Wagons,” “The Happiest Girl,” “Take Me As I Am,” “Oh, Pioneers”

by Alex Jackson There’s definitely something cheeky and slyly subversive at the core of HBO’s “Big Love”. The show is the brainchild of Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, an openly-gay couple who’ve been together since the early-’90s. That single fact opens up some interesting connections when it comes to polygamy. The standard argument religious groups have against homosexuality is that it’s unnatural: Two men or two women cannot naturally procreate and therefore it’s deviant, godless behaviour. By contrast, polygamy is possibly more natural than monogamy–you could argue that males are hardwired to spread their seed with as many females as possible and it is not cost-efficient, evolutionarily speaking, to restrict yourself to one woman. And if the ability to procreate is what makes heterosexuality more moral than homosexuality, then we have to admit that polygamists are able to procreate “better” than monogamists, and so polygamy should be embraced as the morally superior lifestyle.