The Val Lewton Horror Collection – DVD

October 22, 2009Posted in****/****, 1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller, Zombie

VlewtontitleCAT PEOPLE (1943)
****/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph
screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Jacques Tourneur

THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph, Ann Carter
screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Gunther V. Fritsch and Robert Wise

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)
****/**** Image C Sound B-
starring James Ellison, Frances Dee, Tom Conway
screenplay by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray
directed by Jacques Tourneur

THE LEOPARD MAN (1943)
***½/**** Image C- Sound B-
starring Dennis O’Keefe, Margo, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell
screenplay by Ardel Wray, based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich
directed by Jacques Tourneur

THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943)
****/**** Image C+ Sound C
starring Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell, Kim Hunter
screenplay by Charles O’Neal and DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Mark Robson

THE GHOST SHIP (1943)
***½/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Richard Dix, Russell Wade, Edith Barrett, Ben Bard
screenplay by Donald Henderson Clarke
directed by Mark Robson

THE BODY SNATCHER (1945)
***½/**** Image C- Sound C+
starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Daniell, Edith Atwater
screenplay by Phillip MacDonald and Carlos Keith
directed by Robert Wise

ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945)
*/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer
screenplay by Ardel Wray & Josef Mischel
directed by Mark Robson

BEDLAM (1946)
*½/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Boris Karloff, Anna Lee, Billy House, Richard Fraser
screenplay by Carlos Keith and Mark Robson
directed by Mark Robson

VAL LEWTON: THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS (2007)
**½/**** Image N/A Sound N/A
directed by Mark Robson

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNINGS IN EFFECT. It’s not too much to speak of Val Lewton as the American Jean Cocteau. An enigmatic figure with his hand, like Cocteau, in more than one media (a novelist, he often did uncredited work on the screenplays for his films), the movies produced under his RKO watch are a repository of dream sleep, enough so that an overview of his key pictures–something made possible by Warner’s rapturous DVD collection of his horror fare–uncovers a treasure trove of indelible nightmare images. Where Cocteau affected a studiedly casual mien and came to film in his sixties, however, Lewton (who died at 47) seems the product of financial expediency and, perhaps more impressively, stamped the products of his hand despite roadblocks placed in his way. Yet the similarities are striking: Above and beyond the dreamscapes affected, there’s a common fascination with masks and false identities; an obsession with budding sexuality turned subtly aberrant; and a cycle of seduction tied to corruption in the move from innocence to experience. I see in these recurrent themes a man fascinated by the blinds that men throw before them to deny the unknowable tides governing their emotions and actions. It’s that illusion of civilization that informs Lewton’s pictures; the horror of them is in the ripping away to expose the insect underneath.

Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

October 21, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Drama, Prison, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx, Bruce McGill, Colm Meaney
screenplay by Kurt Wimmer
directed by F. Gary Gray

Lawabidingcitizenby Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The most that can be said for Law Abiding Citizen is that it understands the dichotomy of Gerard Butler, the Scottish beefcake whose schizoid career has him playing a screaming grunt one month and a kindly, rough-around-the-edges dad/love interest the next. After murdering a notable percentage of Philadelphia’s legal system, Butler’s black-ops such-and-such Clyde Shelton warns that, if he is not immediately released with all charges against him dropped, he will “KILL. EVERYONE.” Coming from a character who is initially introduced to us as Joe Average, that priceless bit of leaden melodrama almost single-handedly consigns Law Abiding Citizen to the “camp” drawer–but, improbably, it’s also an uncomfortable moment that perfectly captures Butler’s nebulous, malleable status as a movie star. The dumb joke/terrifying conjecture being that, with 300 still lingering in the air, you have no idea how far he’ll go in “killing everyone.” Is it a coincidence that the film should give Clyde comic-book disguises with which to evade capture and lure his prey? Of course not, because Butler belongs in a comic book. It’s not just his cold stare or his steel jaw, it’s the fact that, at the mercy of practically any working writer, he can represent anything or anyone, villain or hero, with preposterous ease. This time, he’s concocting bloody, convoluted vengeance against the men who destroyed his family and the system that doled out questionable justice–and in so doing, he becomes an amalgam of the Joker, the Riddler, and the Abominable Dr. Phibes.

The Proposal (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

October 20, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds, Malin Akerman, Betty White
screenplay by Peter Chiarelli
directed by Anne Fletcher

Proposalcap

by Bryant Frazer Reviewing a romantic comedy can feel a bit like criticizing a kitten. So what if the feline puked in your slippers? What cat lovers generally want is something that will curl up in their lap, purr like nobody's business, and maybe give off a little heat on a cold winter's night. Complaining that the hungry little fuzzball won't fetch your slippers, can't guard your house, and bears no singular distinguishing marks or characteristics comes across as a tad churlish.

Natural Born Killers (1994) – Blu-ray Disc (Digibook) + Natural Born Killers: The Director’s Cut [Original Uncut Version] – Blu-ray Disc

October 18, 2009Posted in****/****, 1990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/****
R-RATED Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
NC-17 Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tommy Lee Jones
screenplay by David Veloz & Richard Rutowski & Oliver Stone
directed by Oliver Stone

Mustownby Walter Chaw Lodged in there like the apple in Gregor Samsa's back next to the spine of the American character is this corrupt speck of frontier spirit, transmogrified in the heat of late-'50s cynicism and irony by heartland bogies Ed Gein and Charles Starkweather–the veneration of them in our collective heart of darkness stoked by a long tradition of outlaw worship from Jesse James to Bonnie and Clyde. The cinematic children of Gein and Starkweather, erupting from the Eisenhower Eden of rocket ships and Cadillacs, range from epoch-shaking pictures like Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to New American Cinema masterpieces like Badlands and Take the Money and Run. The heartbeat of the zeitgeist can be kenned in this finger to this pulse, in the individualism we celebrate and the establishment against which we secretly nurse these little serpentine malignancies. Enter Oliver Stone, not so much the provocateur as a perverse, self-indulgent chronicler of that American disease–and why not Stone, who's only ever good when he's talking about the United States and only ever talking about the United States when he's talking about anything else. He takes the Starkweather case and fashions it, from a story by Quentin Tarantino, into a work of extreme, fanatical patriotism: Natural Born Killers.

Accept with Simplicity: FFC Interviews Michael Stuhlbarg

October 17, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Interviews

MstuhlbarginterviewtitleOctober 18, 2009|When you're a stage actor who's suddenly found himself the lead in the new Coen Brothers picture and playing Arnold Rothstein on "Boardwalk Empire", Martin Scorsese's upcoming HBO series, you're more or less obliged to accept the mantle of Rising Star. There's no doubting this guy is going places. Yet A Serious Man's Michael Stuhlbarg is exceedingly modest in describing his craft, dismissing his own contributions with a day-job casualness that seems to leave the fancy artistic crap for his directors to figure out. All things considered, his superficial distance from in-depth discussion might be a consequence of the endless variations on "What's it like to work with the Coens?" or "What's it like working with Scorsese?" he'd undoubtedly been asked dozens of times before we met at Boston's Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Either that, or he's reluctant to put too fine a point on a profession (and a film) noted for its slippery nature.

Stop Making Sense (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

October 13, 2009Posted in****/****, 1980s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Concert Doc, Directors: Jonathan Demme, FFC Must-Own, Music

Stopmakingsensecap

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
directed by Jonathan Demme

Mustownby Bryant Frazer Stop Making Sense opens sparely, with a close-up of a man striding onto an empty stage. By “empty stage,” I don’t mean a bare stage, exactly. I mean a big empty theatre space–it’s basically a rectangular room behind a proscenium, illuminated by bare light bulbs dangling overhead–with furniture, ladders, scaffolding, and the like cluttered near the walls. It feels less like a performance is about to begin than like a rehearsal or, maybe more to the point, an audition. And by “close-up,” I don’t mean a tight shot on the man’s face. Rather, we are looking at his lower extremities–white shoes, white pants–in a Steadicam shot that follows him to a waiting microphone stand. He plops a boombox down beside him and announces, in a faux-naïf voice, “I have a tape I want to play.” If you know the Talking Heads, you’ll recognize this immediately as David Byrne’s shtick. But if this film is your introduction to the band–as it was for teenaged me–there may be something off-putting about the whole precious set-up. “What’s up with this fucking twerp,” I remember thinking, “and his art-damaged affectations?” I quickly learned the joke was on me.

St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) + About Last Night… (1986) – Blu-ray Discs

October 13, 2009Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance, ZERO STARS

ST. ELMO’S FIRE
ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound C+ Extras C
starring Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore
screenplay by Joel Schumacher & Carl Kurlander
directed by Joel Schumacher

ABOUT LAST NIGHT…
½*/**** Image C- Sound C Extras C
starring Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, James Belushi, Elizabeth Perkins
screenplay by Tim Kazurinsky & Dennis DeClue, based on the play Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet
directed by Edward Zwick

by Walter Chaw The Brat Pack as a phenomenon is something that largely, blissfully escaped this child of the Eighties–just a touch too young, just a tad too disinterested. When Sixteen Candles came out, I was embarrassed by the Asian caricature enough to avoid talking about it (ditto The Goonies and Temple of Doom–though not, oddly enough, The Karate Kid); when St. Elmo’s Fire came out, I was busy sneaking into consecutive showings of Back to the Future. I remember a party where The Breakfast Club was playing in the background, and a girl I had a crush on exclaiming how much she loved it. Later, they played A Nightmare on Elm Street, and whoever’s mother it was at whoever’s house it was broke up the festivities not long after the bodybag in the hall. (I don’t know that I ever saw either movie in its entirety until I was well into my twenties.) Ferris Bueller was my connection to John Hughes, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Marty McFly were my thing–not a Molly Ringwald in sight. The closest I came to assimilation was Red Dawn, which, while awful, is also awesome in a deadening, testosterone-sick way. Looking back, the moment the ’80s matured for me was Near Dark, The Evil Dead, Predator, and David Cronenberg’s The Fly and not, as it was for many people in my peer group, Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful. I remember hosting a sweltering screening of Broadcast News in my bedroom with a couple of dozen pals, a considerably less well-attended showing of Angel Heart a few weeks later, and a private viewing of Pump Up the Volume with a girl I really liked and to whom I crystallized my theory of how it was always better to watch a movie in the theatre…but not tonight. It was a hot evening. All my memories of movies in the ’80s are accompanied by suffocating heat. The decade in my memory is one long summer.

Couples Retreat (2009)

October 9, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Vince Vaughn, Jason Bateman, Jon Favreau, Faizon Love
screenplay by Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn & Dana Fox
directed by Peter Billingsley

Couplesretreatby Ian Pugh Peter Serafinowicz–a creepy, irony-free Christopher Walken prototype who appears to have strolled in from a different movie entirely–keeps Couples Retreat out of the running for Worst Film of 2009. What is it with these romantic comedies, exactly, that the characters left in orbit are always crafted with more care and love than the ones with whom you're forced to spend the most time? I look at this latest trainwreck of clichés and I can only see it as director and former child star Peter Billingsley's payback for being trapped in the amber of A Christmas Story and Hershey's Syrup commercials in the decades since. A few ill-placed dick jokes are there to force the medicine down–call it the equivalent of Bob Saget's stand-up career. To be fair, early trailers featuring adulterous parking-lot trysts seem to indicate that test screenings may have taken some substantial bite out of the filmmakers' original intentions. But even with that in mind, this is still the kind of film that saves a few moments for the lead character's precocious toddler (Colin Baiocchi), who, like an ersatz Olsen twin, regurgitates whatever elementary dialogue is fed to him. This is also the kind of film that saves the same little urchin for the last image before the credits, as he takes a shit in a display toilet. Coo and scream with laughter where appropriate–and realize that whatever the movie's original intentions might have been, it's doubtful that a few backseat hump sessions would have tied them together.

A Serious Man (2009); The Invention of Lying (2009); Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

October 7, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Esoterica, France, Romance, Satire, Theatrical, UK

A SERIOUS MAN
***½/****
starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick
written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

THE INVENTION OF LYING
*½/****
starring Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, Tina Fey
written and directed by Ricky Gervais & Matthew Robinson

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY
**½/****
directed by Michael Moore

by Ian Pugh The appropriate, even inevitable capper to a loose nihilist trilogy following No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man is so utterly dark and dire that it almost plays like self-reflexive parody–an adaptation of Barton Fink's "beautiful" wrestling script, perhaps, or an honest-to-gosh realization of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? Preston Sturges imagined once upon a time. Even the title is sarcastic. This is a scenario whereby life-altering misfortunes fall with ridiculous timing and precision; the dismal tides and the coming storms are now damningly literal, such that it's nearly impossible to take it with any semblance of seriousness. In making time during the game to explain Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, our hapless Job, physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), offers, if you haven't surmised, a fairly concise metaphor for everything that happens in this film. Why are the Coens being so on-the-nose about themes they've lately approached with a legitimately intimidating brilliance? Maybe it's because their mordant philosophy has amassed unprecedented critical and commercial acceptance over their last two pictures. Maybe the idea that anyone could actually commiserate with them strikes the Coens as so terrifying that the time has come to cast such notions aside in the most punishing way possible.1 For now, anyway.

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007) – DVD

October 6, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Italy, Romance, Spain

Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon
**/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Andy Gillet, Stéphanie Crayencour, Cécile Cassel, Serge Renko
screenplay by Eric Rohmer, based on the novel L’Astrée by Honoré d’Urfé
directed by Eric Rohmer

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Of all the Cahiers du cinema New Wave heroes, Eric Rohmer is the one I’ve thought about the least. His subdued, tasteful chamber drama never had the grab of the other four: he wasn’t compellingly over-intellectual like Godard, entertaining to a fault like Truffaut, pointedly genre-ready like Chabrol, or off-book bizarre like Rivette.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing. To think about Truffaut and Godard is to think about a couple of grandstanders–one for “cinema,” one for anti-cinema–who drew battle lines so intense and unreasonable that you felt dragged into a bloodbath. To think about Chabrol and Rivette–the popular artist and the intellectual–is to think of people working through their kinks without such alibis, and who are very good at the work.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula/Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [Collector’s Box Set] – DVD|Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) + Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) – Blu-ray Discs

October 5, 2009Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Japan, Robert De Niro, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK, Vampire

BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA
Dracula
**/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+
BD – Image C Sound A Extras A+
starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by James V. Hart
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN
**½/****
DVD – Image D Sound B+
BD – Image B+ Sound B
starring Robert De Niro, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hulce, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont
directed by Kenneth Branagh

Bramdracvidcap3by Walter Chaw The first thirty minutes of Francis Ford Coppola’s retelling of the Dracula legend are dazzling and assured: a self-consciously cinematic, fulsome display of technique and loud emotions–expressionism writ large against lurid backdrops and red, backlit shadow plays. It seems impossible that Coppola could keep this up for the duration of the picture, could see to fruition the kind of viable update/continuation of Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that the Akira Kurosawa film he helped produce, Kagemusha, with its sanguineous, medieval battlegrounds painted with heavy brushes, aspired to be. And sure enough, what begins as a clarion call settles into a somewhat familiar period costume drama spiced up now and again with racy sequences nonetheless sobered by the memory of the delirious hedonism of that opening, wherein we get Dracula’s backstory as a hero of a holy war, repulsing Muslim invaders in Romania, turning to blasphemy when the vengeful Turks fool his wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) into believing that her beloved has died on the battlefield, and gleefully chewing artificial scenery with toothy relish.

Zombieland (2009)

October 1, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Zombie

½*/****
starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
directed by Ruben Fleischer 

by Walter Chaw Bad by every measurable, objective standard, Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland is a shining, sterling example of what happens when a bunch of idiots get together with their asshole high-concept and proceed to make an abominable hash of it. It’s a conversation halfwits have: what would happen if you married the teen romance with the zombie flick? The problem being that Fleischer and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick don’t have much of a grasp on what it is about teen romances and zombie flicks that are interesting in the first place. It’s the right choice, casting the poor man’s Michael Cera, Jesse Eisenberg, in his second “-land” movie of the year (after the fantastic coming-of-age flick Adventureland); it’s entirely the wrong choice to have Eisenberg provide film-long voiceover narration that takes the piss–without the benefit of wit or trenchant observation–out of zombie flicks before dropping him in the middle of that old familiar wistful love intrigue. The object of his desire is a fellow survivor of an apocalyptic zombie plague, Wichita (Emma Stone, deee-lish), who is travelling with little sis Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). Ohio (Eisenberg), meanwhile, has hooked up with Woody Harrelson’s redneck-with-a-heart-of-gold Tallahassee–yes, if these characters are actually named after the places from which they hail, they have some ‘splainin’ to do. Our four ragamuffin protags proceed through the long middle of the movie with no zombies in sight, alone with reams of smug, moronic, self-satisfied dialogue that has as the basis of every punchline how much of a virgin pussy is Ohio, and how much of an inbred thug is Tallahassee.

Observe and Report (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

September 30, 2009Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Seth Rogen, Anna Faris, Michael Peña, Ray Liotta
written and directed by Jody Hill

mustown-4826607by Ian Pugh The tide is changing, that much is clear. In just the last month alone, Paul Rudd and Jason Segel have turned a dependence on male bonding into a crisis of sexual identity (I Love You, Man), while Greg Mottola has deromanticized teenage nostalgia (Adventureland). Now, with their thoroughly disturbing Observe and Report, Jody Hill and Seth Rogen finish prying loose the grip that Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow have had on American comedy these past few years. More importantly, the film finally gives a clear voice to the ineluctable madness that the cinema of 2009 has poked and prodded at up to this point. The deadly sociopathy of Alan Moore's Rorschach blooms at last in security guard Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen), approached with frightened apprehension and a full understanding as to why he would nevertheless be lauded as a hero. As a result, the movie he inhabits is difficult, devastating, and paints our most recent cycles of vulgar, man-child humour as an empire built on unspoken psychosis and violent outbursts. Suddenly, the idea of Ferrell beating up a swarm of grade-schoolers in Step Brothers doesn't seem so hilarious.

The State: The Complete Series (1994-1995) – DVD

September 28, 2009Posted in1990s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, DVD, Television

Image B+ Sound B Extras A-

by Jefferson Robbins "The State" probably had me at its opening kicker, a knockoff of the tumbling SPECIAL logo that prefaced every "Charlie Brown" program on CBS in the 1970s. The titular comedy troupe's eleven members are all about my age, so when these "twentysomething sketch-comedy whores" got their own show on MTV, this twentysomething sketch-comedy consumer was in generational tune with them. The members of The State clearly watched, and had grown up watching, a shitload of TV, just like their audience. Nostalgia's a powerful thing.

2009 TIFF Bytes #3.5: A Shine of Rainbows

September 23, 2009Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Ireland, TIFF
originally published September 23, 2009Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:A SHINE OF RAINBOWS (dir. Vic Sarin)Gawd, this movie is so nauseatingly nice. And generic. And hackneyed--any seasoned moviegoer will be able to predict every single story beat in advance. Connie Nielsen and Aidan Quinn--neither of whom is from Ireland (the director, meanwhile? From India)--play an Irish couple who adopt an adorable stuttering moppet (John Bell) from the local Dickensian orphanage. Because the kid is timid, kind of effeminate, and more than happy to learn the ropes…

Important Things with Demetri Martin: Season One (2009) – DVD

September 22, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, DVD, Television

Image A- Sound B Extras B-
"Timing," "Power," "Brains," "Chairs," "Safety," "Coolness," "Games"

by Jefferson Robbins If he ever gets tired of being Steven Wright with a guitar and a facial expression, Demetri Martin may have a future as a filmmaker. It's plain from the first season of "Important Things With Demetri Martin" that the comedian/actor thinks about the various parts of a given scenario and holds the branching possibilities in his mind in a three-dimensional way. This is typical of puzzle fiends and anagramists–terms which suit Martin well–and any producer/director worth a damn. His well-known line drawings, here set into motion by animators, make me think he's read both Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. His comedy is a realm where everything is nametagged and hypertexted. (See the title of his debut CD: "These Are Jokes".) No surprise, then, that his stand-up routine is a hit in this age of Google Maps and floating metadata. Wait 'til we're all staring through the lenses of our augmented-reality iPhones, swimming in subsurface information–then we'll truly be residents of Demetri Martin's world.

2009 TIFF Bytes #3: A Gun to the Head; Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould

September 22, 2009Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Documentary, Film Festivals, Music, Thriller, TIFF

originally published September 22, 2009
Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:
A Gun to the Head (d. Blaine Thurier)
Those who, like me, missed Male Fantasy, the sophomore feature of Blaine Thurier, may find themselves at a loss to distinguish between Thurier's growth as a filmmaker and advancements in digital video since his directorial debut, the better-in-retrospect Low Self Esteem Girl. Thurier's latest, the Vancouver-lensed A Gun to the Head, is comparatively polished, yet the film, with its focus again on suburban drug culture, feels dismayingly unevolved coming from someone who leads a prolific life that includes a steady gig as the keyboardist for the indie-rock supergroup The New Pornographers–even as it cops to a certain anxiety about abandoning comfortable milieux via Trevor (Tygh Runyan), a newlywed struggling with the demands of marriage in the face of his old freedoms. Basically a bush-league Mikey and Nicky, the picture has Trevor ferrying paranoid cousin Darren (Paul Anthony) all over town on a drug run just to avoid the dinner party his wife (Marnie Robinson, the spitting image of Jordana Spiro) is throwing back home; eventually the two run afoul of Darren's suppliers, who have already shown themselves capable of murder. I will say that Thurier is good with actors–this cast really brings it, with the suddenly-vivacious Sarah Lind a particular standout. (Revealing hidden comic chops, she plays a nasal-voiced bimbo who only picked up the word for "um" on her trip to Japan.) Lead baddie Hrothgar Mathews unfortunately bears a sometimes-striking resemblance to Glenn Gould the same year a documentary about the famous pianist plays alongside A Gun to the Head at the TIFF. Which leads me to… (**/4, by the way.)

2009 TIFF Bytes #2.5: Vincere

September 21, 2009Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Italy, TIFF
originally published September 21, 2009Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF: Vincere (Win) (d. Marco Bellocchio)Structurally and even editorially, the oddly-titled Vincere (Win) is kind of a mess, but the badass opening scene hooked me. Therein, a slender, dark-eyed journalist with a good head of hair--you guessed it: Benito Mussolini--sets a pocket watch and gives God five minutes to strike him down; if he's still alive when time runs out, Mussolini (Filippo Timi) tells the pious crowd gathered before him, it means there is no God. I really wanted…

The Dark Crystal (1982) [Superbit] + [25th Anniversary Edition] – DVDs|Blu-ray Disc

September 20, 2009Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Muppets, UK

***/****
Superbit DVD – Image B Sound C+
Anniversary DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
screenplay by David Odell
directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz

by Bill Chambers When Jim Henson passed away in 1990, he left behind a diverse legion of fans and a company whose ultimate success, it now seems, hinged on his input. Jim Henson Productions and The Creature Shop are still thriving financially, but as the past few Muppet films (or that silly-looking computer-generated monkey from Lost In Space) demonstrate, the thrill and genius are gone. I'm positive that The Dark Crystal made today by Henson's successors would not provoke from an audience of kids five to fifty the same spellbound response the 1982 original does. Which is not to say there isn't room for improvement.

TIFF ’09: Up in the Air

September 20, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
**½/****directed by Jason Reitman by Bill Chambers Jason Reitman's Up in the Air calls inveterate bachelor George Clooney to the stand to defend his enviable lifestyle to the civilized world. Alas, since this is mainstream Hollywood, where no undomesticated man goes unpunished, the jury's rigged. But first, the rest of it. Clooney's thinly-veiled alter ego, Ryan Bingham, is a corporate hatchet-man-for-hire who loves travelling and all the freedom from responsibility that implies. He's never been married, has no kids, and with business booming (thanks to our current economic crisis), it looks like he's not that far off from achieving his…