Fire and Ice (1983) [2-Disc Limited Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

August 31, 2009Posted in1980s, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Documentary, DVD, Fantasy

FIRE AND ICE
**½/****
DVD – Image A+ Sound A (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway
directed by Ralph Bakshi

FRAZETTA: PAINTING WITH FIRE (2003)
*½/****
directed by Lance Laspina

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's something poignant about the barbarian fantasy that makes it hard to dismiss. Though I long ago abandoned the adolescent nerd's love of sword-handling macho men and their quivering female conquests, I still find the genre's tangled web of sexual denials endlessly fascinating–and highly incriminating to any boy who leafed through his "Dungeons & Dragons" manuals with less than pure thoughts on his mind. Very obviously, the whole thing revolves around sex–the sensual idea of standing nearly naked and pulsing with fury while the object of your desire writhes at your feet. But there's a sense in which it can't admit this–it has to drag in a mythological sturm-und-drang in order to justify itself as drama, when in fact it just wants to touch itself. And the sad phenomenon of talking about something without talking about it is strangely moving.

Parker Lewis Can’t Lose: The Complete First Season (1990-1991) – DVD

August 25, 2009Posted in1990s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Scream/Shout! Factory, Teen, Television

Image C Sound B Extras B-
“Pilot,” “Operation Kubiac,” “Power Play,” “Parker Lewis Must Lose,” “Close, But No Guitar,” “G.A.G. Dance,” “Love’s a Beast,” “Saving Grace,” “Musso & Frank,” “Deja Dudes,” “Radio Free Flamingo,” “Science Fair,” “”Teacher, Teacher,” “Rent-a-Kube,” “Heather the Class,” “Jerry: Portrait of a Video Junkie,” “Splendor in the Class,” “The Human Grace,” “Citizen Kube,” “Randall Without a Cause,” “Jerry’s First Date,” “Against the Norm,” “King Kube,” “Teens from a Mall,” “My Fair Shelly,” “Parker Lewis Can’t Win”

by Jefferson Robbins It’s the cool uncle of “Malcolm in the Middle”. It’s got “Scrubs” among its progeny, and the ’80s teen comedies of Savage Steve Holland somewhere back up the line of descent. It may have single-handedly established the swoosh-smash-zip school of sitcoms, festooned with sound effects, inner monologues, and discursive daydreams. If it wanted, “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose” could claim “Family Guy” as a descendant, for the way it appropriates “Parker”‘s absurdist jump-cuts to tangential situations.1

Duplicity (2009) – DVD

August 24, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

*½/**** Image B Sound A- Commentary B+
starring Clive Owen, Julia Roberts, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Giamatti
written and directed by Tony Gilroy

by Walter Chaw Tony Gilroy's droll, deadly dull Duplicity is the kind of movie Cary Grant made in the Sixties: wheel the old dear out in a nice suit and have him recite reams of dialogue to some woman in various scenic locales. It's not an elderly movie, it just seems that way. The "some woman" in this scenario is Julia Roberts (fresh from Maria Shriver's face-sharpener), making her umpteenth triumphant return to the silver screen on the sloping, mopey, rumpled, shoulders of fading A-lister Clive Owen, who apparently can't say "no" lately to would-be prestige pictures abandoned in the doldrums of the first part of the year.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

August 21, 2009Posted in****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, Theatrical, War

****/****
starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Mélanie Laurent
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

Inglouriousbasterdsby Walter Chaw There are two stars in Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino and Christoph Waltz), the one to be expected, the other a shoo-in for Oscar consideration in what’s easily the most mesmerizing, commanding performance I’ve seen in any film this year. The opening sequence, in which Waltz’s SS Col. Hans Landa interrogates a French dairy farmer as to the whereabouts of a Jewish family that’s gone missing, is, how to say this, perfect, but unlike the other perfect sequences of 2009 (the prologue of Up, the main titles of Watchmen), Inglourious Basterds matches this exceptional moment with another as Landa has a little confection with a rare survivor of his attentions, Shosanna (a stunning Mélanie Laurent); then another as German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) does her best to cover for her three suspicious pals in an underground speakeasy; then another with Landa again as he asks von Hammersmark to put her foot in his lap. At first glance two separate films that only fit together roughly, if at all, it becomes clear during Inglourious Basterds‘ final chapter, as the ghostly image of a beautiful woman cackles in the smoke above a burning auditorium (“This is the face of Jewish vengeance!”), that this is Tarantino no longer making something new and strange out of his obsessive movie-love, but something dangerous and risky about the ethics of vengeance and the shifting ground beneath moral quagmires we thought we’d put to bed. What better conflict than the last popular war to stage a conversation about whether or not the only reason the winners weren’t held accountable for their atrocities is that they were the winners.

Across the Universe (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

August 14, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Musical

Acrosstheuniversecap

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs
screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais
directed by Julie Taymor

by Bryant Frazer Long considered sacrosanct, in recent years the catalogue of music recorded by The Beatles has become fairer game. The success of a 2000 CD reissue of #1 singles may have greased the wheels for Beatles-related projects, including a 2006 Cirque du Soleil extravaganza based around the group’s songs and mounted in Las Vegas, a comprehensive four-year-long digital remastering project involving all the original albums, and even a Beatles-only edition of the hit videogame series Rock Band. In this context, Across the Universe feels like a cog in a much bigger marketing machine. To some degree, it’s impressive that director Julie Taymor managed to build a period-romance-cum-rock-musical entirely around Beatles songs, although the film never manages to answer the question of why such a project might be worth undertaking in the first place.

District 9 (2009)

August 14, 2009Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, South Africa, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Nathalie Boltt, Sylvaine Strike
screenplay by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
directed by Neill Blomkamp

District9by Walter Chaw An unlikely marriage of Alien Nation and David Cronenberg's The Fly, Neill Blomkamp's remarkable District 9 is that occasional genre picture that's both topical and so good it made my stomach knot. Set in South Africa, it opens by rejecting the Eurocentrism of most science-fiction pictures. Here, the little green men don't hover over the Lincoln Memorial or the Eiffel Tower, but rather Johannesburg, where the malnourished, crustacean-like denizens (they're called, derogatorily, "prawns") of a giant mothership are quickly relegated to a barbed-wire enclosed slum, the titular "District 9." Its parallel to Alien Nation is obvious, down to that film's equation of aliens with Chinese immigrants in San Francisco; these are the "bestial" blacks of Afrikaner nightmares: physically powerful, engaged in illicit activities, and blamed for every casualty outside their heavily-segregated "district." But where Alien Nation identified the threat to that immigrant community as an insidious ghost of its traditional past (an opium allegory? How 18th-century), District 9 satirizes the numbing effect of cable news networks, as well as the dangers faced by any outcast culture trying to eke out subsistence existences on the fringes of majority society. In a very real way, District 9 is a film about not only the corrosive potential of grossly-overfed public perception, but also the immigration debate that rages on worldwide.

Sleuth (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

August 10, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Mystery, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Michael Caine, Jude Law
screenplay by Harold Pinter, based on the play by Anthony Shaffer
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw Call it an actor's workshop, if you must, but it's more like an actor's mausoleum, and the Anthony Shaffer source material, as punched-up by Harold Pinter just prior to Pinter's death in the classic unfilmable Pinter style, is hopelessly stagebound and déclassé. It's old people playing at Patrick Marber, falling into the exact trap that most adaptations of Ian McEwan have fallen: mistaking the author fucking with us for great insights into the human condition. Sleuth, Kenneth Branagh's reboot of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's museum piece starring Laurence Olivier and a thirty-six-years-younger Michael Caine, brings Caine back in the Olivier role, with Jude Law once again taking over for Caine after the Alfie remake. It's terrible stuff, stiff and laboured and crippled by self-importance, self-aggrandizing camera trickery, and foreground symbolism that fails from its Osterman Weekend surveillance paranoia all the way through to its willing suspension of disbelief in a pair of performances that never for a moment feel like anything but performances. Most disappointingly, there's a conspicuous lack of fun in a picture that seems more interested in the antagonists' psychology than in exploiting the possibilities of a piece surgically tuned to being a lark. Excavations of male psychology beyond the urge to gamesmanship have absolutely no place in Sleuth: you can talk about why guys lay their dicks on the bar, but you shouldn't do it for an entire feature. Branagh's strength as a director of Shakespeare is as an ambassador for the Bard's latent themes of sociological aggression and animism, while his Dead Again proved that even without Shakespeare, his ear for the operatic could carry the day in an artfully campy supernatural melodrama. But in applying his anthropologist's touch to Sleuth, he's met his match: there's nothing to unearth because the dig site is, frankly, sterile.

Starman (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

August 10, 2009Posted in1980s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, Romance, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith, Richard Jaeckel
screenplay by Bruce A. Evans & Raynold Gideon
directed by John Carpenter

Starmancap

by Bryant Frazer Strange as it may sound, back in the early-1980s this gentle yet seriously weird fantasy about a woman who drives a socially-challenged clone of her dead husband across the U.S. (so he can rendezvous with his spaceship) was actually considered a safe commercial bet for the embattled director John Carpenter. Carpenter was always an avowed fan of traditional Hollywood entertainments, and he claimed to be attracted to making Starman as a contemporary version of It Happened One Night, Frank Capra's prototypical screwball comedy about an antagonistic couple who learn to love one another on the road. It seemed like an unlikely gearshift for Carpenter, who had recently remade The Thing from Another World as a tense, supremely chilling, and truly horrific metaphor for paranoia. But for the man who had his ass handed to him when that masterpiece had the bad luck to open not only in a moviegoing environment that had turned hostile to horror, but also directly opposite the ripely sentimental box-office juggernaut E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Starman represented something else. It wasn't merely an opportunity for Carpenter to helm a fundamentally good-natured, optimistic science-fiction film–it was possibly a chance to rehabilitate his career.

Docu-Drama: FFC Interviews Charlyne Yi and Jake Johnson

August 9, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Documentary, Interviews

PaperheartinterviewtitlePAPER HEART's Charlyne Yi and Jake Johnson talk love and filmmaking

August 9, 2009|It's early afternoon, and I'm at an empty nightclub lounge to discuss Paper Heart with the film's lead actress and co-writer Charlyne Yi and her co-star Jake Johnson. Immediately upon introducing myself, she tells me that "Ian" was the name of her kindergarten crush. Segues into hybrid-documentaries about the nature of love and romance don't get much easier than that, but this little tidbit establishes a casual-yet-uncomfortable tone for the rest of our conversation. Yi is only a year-and-a-half younger than I am, and the discussion is so natural, the setting so easygoing, that I suppose it became difficult to not regard each other as peers. Her nervous laughter is always present, punctuating even the most self-evident of observations (oftentimes prompting nervous laughter of my own), but she's not nearly as clumsy and coy as her comedy act would have you believe. Meanwhile, Johnson's appearance–complete with an unshaven face and a long, dark, horseshoe moustache–is so far removed from his role as a fictionalized version of the film's director, Nick Jasenovec, that it takes me a moment to mentally register with whom I'm actually speaking. He's an interesting fellow, very animated and willing to engage you no matter what you ask–but as our dialogue heats up, he throws me off again by effortlessly taking the reins on most of the "filmmaking" questions. Even I begin to mistake him for his cinematic counterpart, unconsciously turning to him when the questions are more technical in nature.

Paper Heart (2009)

August 6, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Charlyne Yi, Jake Johnson, Michael Cera
screenplay by Nicholas Jasenovec & Charlyne Yi
directed by Nicholas Jasenovec

Paperheartby Ian Pugh The twain where mainstream comedy conventions and a certain vogue-ish indie aesthetic meet, Paper Heart is desperate to be seen as an earnest exploration of love but done in by an almost suffocating desire to please. Any emotion or profundity to be taken from this hybrid documentary is rendered irrelevant by its attempts to increase its entertainment value through cheap laughs. Comic Charlyne Yi (Knocked Up) is touring the nation asking passersby from all walks of life their thoughts on the nature of love when a chance encounter with young gadabout Michael Cera (Michael Cera)–more or less Yi's ideological soul mate–convinces her documentary's director, Nick Jasenovec (played on camera by an affable Jake Johnson), that they've found the perfect opportunity for romantic skeptic Yi to experience love first hand. It's a prefab narrative scenario meant to complement the documentary footage, though it's not exactly a "standard" love story since it casts doubt on whether anyone is actually in love. The problem is that it employs the worn-out tactics of pretty much every lame juvenile laffer from the last four years: bad jokes are told, then let out in the air to die–and everyone stares at each other for longer than is deemed socially acceptable. Because even the documentary aspects aren't enough to stand on their own, each story of true love is recreated by one of Yi's intentionally-amateurish puppet shows/third-grade dioramas, with the major players represented by Popsicle-stick people and every metaphor literalized to the point of ridiculousness.

Dollhouse: Season One (2009) – DVD | Blu-ray Disc

August 5, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

DVD – Image N/A Sound N/A Extras N/A
BLU-RAY – Image A- Sound B Extras B
"Ghost," "The Target," "Stage Fright," "Gray Hour," True Believer," "Man On the Street," "Echoes," Needs," "A Spy In the House of Love," "Haunted," "Briar Rose," "Omega"
—
"Epitaph One," "Echo"

by Jefferson Robbins They're committing a grand social experiment over there at FOX, using some of the most loyal genre lovers in fandom as their rhesus monkeys. The disease they seek to wipe out, it appears, is the intermediary of the critic. Take much-abused, much-adored TV creator Joss Whedon; kick dirt in the face of his latest brainchild, "Dollhouse", when the poor thing is too weak to stand; and then, upon achieving maximum buzz by holding back longed-for portions of the resulting science-fiction series, release them through a hidden proxy and pretend it's a leak. It's pandering to geeks' idea of the Internet as a wild frontier, where the dispossessed can build a community and you can't stop the Signal, man. Meanwhile, for critics with a yen to stay independent of the studio's manipulation, they send out watermarked, shit-quality burns minus the fourth disc in the "Dollhouse" home video release. That missing platter features basically all the supplements any reasonable person would expect with their purchase, as well as the original, scrapped pilot "Echo" and the unaired thirteenth episode, "Epitaph One." So any critical analysis–like the one I'm about to perform–can be written off as sour grapes, spilt milk, the breast-beating of a self-appointed arbiter of good taste who's just mad because he didn't see it first.

CJ7 (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

August 4, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, China, Comedy, Esoterica, Family, Hong Kong, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Stephen Chow, Xu Jiao, Huang Lei, Kitty Zhang
screenplay by Vincent Kok, Tsang Kan Cheong, Sandy Shaw Lai King, Fung Chih Chiang, Lam Fung
directed by Stephen Chow

Cj7cap

by Bryant Frazer Lord knows we need inspired lunatics like Stephen Chow. Chow is a genial, graceful physical comic in the mode of Jackie Chan, yet even sillier, if you can imagine that. Like Chan, he makes movies that feel conspicuously alien in a Hollywood context, in large part because he's expert in a discipline that Hollywood has lately devalued. In the U.S., the dominant style of comedy is verbally oriented, with quips, awkward characters, and contrived situations driving the gags. For Stephen Chow, comedy is largely body-oriented. It's not that he doesn't script situation comedy–a movie like God of Cookery, with its parody of celebrity-chef competitions (and John Woo movies!), is built on an elaborate sitcom frame–but that he's more obsessed with performance. Chow is preoccupied with people's faces, their body types, the way they approach one another, and how they stand in conversation or confrontation. By the time he did Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, it was easy to see how he found the newly-affordable field of digital VFX work to be an avenue for extending the reach of a physical gag, using digital doubles to subject characters to the kind of strain and abuse that wouldn't fly with real actors.

Sunshine Cleaning (2009); The Last House on the Left (2009); Race to Witch Mountain (2009)|Race to Witch Mountain – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

August 2, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Wes Craven

SUNSHINE CLEANING
**½/****
starring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Alan Arkin, Jason Spevack
screenplay by Megan Holley
directed by Christine Jeffs

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT
**½/****
starring Garret Dillahunt, Sara Paxton, Monica Potter, Tony Goldwyn
screenplay by Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth, based on the motion picture written and directed by Wes Craven
directed by Dennis Iliadis

RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Dwayne Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, Carla Gugino, Ciarán Hinds
screenplay by Matt Lopez and Mark Bomback, based on the book Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander Key
directed by Andy Fickman

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Norah (Emily Blunt) is a sort of overripe Juno MacGuff: older but no wiser, quick-witted but shiftless. As she sticks her hand underneath a railroad track, pulling it out just before a train passes, the question is clear: why is she here, doing something so unbelievably stupid, when she should be out trying to get a life? Turns out this game of chicken reminds her of the day she and her sister Rose (Amy Adams) discovered that their mother committed suicide. Christine Jeffs's Sunshine Cleaning feels like a response to a recent spate of smarmy little indie films in the sense that it bothers to explore the self-aware idiosyncrasies typically taken for granted, and it comes to the startling conclusion that perhaps these "personality quirks" aren't the building blocks of individualism, but rather signposts for unresolved trauma and budding mental illness. (Given how contradictory this film is to the Little Miss Sunshine mentality (and Alan Arkin's presence makes the comparison inevitable), can we assume that its title is a double entendre?) You may laugh when Rose's son Oscar (Jason Spevack) is kicked out of school for licking his teacher's leg, or when her father Joe (Arkin) hustles unsuspecting business owners with one get-rich-quick scheme after another, yet the lingering question is whether or not they'd engage in "funny" behaviour if not for their inherited anguish. "It's tough raising a kid by yourself, huh?" Joe tells Rose after she asks him to babysit at an inconvenient time. "Try two." The attempt to mine humour from these tragic aftermaths doesn't make Sunshine Cleaning a morbid film, exactly–but it definitely makes for a haunted one.

Funny People (2009)

July 31, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Eric Bana
written and directed by Judd Apatow

Funnypeopleby Walter Chaw I liked the first hour of Judd Apatow's Funny People quite a lot–the last four not so much. Needless to say, focus and pacing are a problem. Focus and pacing are a problem for just about any film that runs two-and-a-half hours. It starts as something different and strange, an experiment that seems to be working whereby Adam Sandler's sociopathic persona is put under the microscope and left to squirm. And then it turns into a James L. Brooks melodrama, and then a Kevin Smith joint. (Its epilogue, taking place in a deli between two protagonists after the storm, is shot in exactly the same way as Brooks's conclusion to Broadcast News, while a late-film kiddie rendition of "Memory" from "Cats" exhumes musty memories of Jersey Girl's Sondheim desecration.) What I'm saying is that Funny People starts as Punch-Drunk Love, transmogrifies into Spanglish, and metastasizes into Jersey Girl. If this were a boxing match between film and audience, the rope's the only thing holding us up for the last six rounds. It would be wrong to say that I hated Funny People; it squanders so much potential that it's closer to the truth to say the overwhelming feeling it engenders is one of intense disappointment.

Go (1999) – Blu-ray Disc

July 29, 2009Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Crime, Drama

***½/**** Image B Sound A Extras C+
starring William Fichtner, Katie Holmes, Jay Mohr, Sarah Polley
screenplay by John August
directed by Doug Liman

by Walter Chaw I saw Doug Liman’s Swingers at the right age to recognize it as a pretty fair portrait of me and my buddies a couple of years removed from college, playing Sega hockey against each other into the small hours and doing our best to score with as wide a variety of women as possible while responsibility loomed. The dialogue struck us as true and hilarious. Three years later, 1999, I had met and married my wife and was taking for granted a genuinely great year at the movies. I remember loving The Matrix, and The Iron Giant; Fight Club changed my life a little, The Phantom Menace broke my heart, Being John Malkovich blew my mind, and Sleepy Hollow and The Blair Witch Project provided portholes backwards and forwards into beloved genres. It seems strange to say it, but without thinking much about it, I saw more films at the theatre in 1999 than I probably had in any year since the matinee of my movie-love in high school. And my wife and I have complementary tastes, always have; in retrospect, that film cemented our relationship in those first few years makes a lot of sense. But we were drawn to it insensate.

Southland Tales (2007)

July 28, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake
written and directed by Richard Kelly

by Walter Chaw Call it professional vanity, or just vanity vanity, but I like to be the iconoclast. I want to be the one who understands the movie nobody else seems to understand–the lone champion of Unleashed as a sharp critique of popular East/West relationships, for instance. There are times, I think, it's the only reason I go to films that are riding waves of negative buzz or frankly otherwise lacking much cause for confidence. Southland Tales, Richard Kelly's follow-up to his cult classic Donnie Darko, had the bad buzz (from a legendarily jeered screening at Cannes) but a great pedigree despite the extent to which Kelly had begun to cast Donnie Darko as a fortuitous accident through his DVD commentary for that film, his ill-wrought Director's Cut of the same, and his script for the excrescent Domino.

Valkyrie (2008) – DVD

July 27, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Thriller, Tom Cruise, UK, War

***/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras A
starring Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie & Nathan Alexander
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw Tight as a drum, deadly serious, and a mild corrective to not the enduring misconception that there were no men of conscience in Hitler's Germany, but rather to sickly, condescending awards-season bullshit like Defiance, The Reader, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Bryan Singer's Valkyrie swoops down like its titular winged avatar to deliver the Holocaust melodrama to a minor kind of Valhalla. It's sober-minded and fact-based, with another handsome-destroying performance by Tom Cruise (though he only loses one eye here after losing both in Minority Report) that places him in uneasy orbit alongside Warren Beatty as another pretty boy aspiring for seriousness through mutilation of the self. It's a sober thriller, and because the outcome is never in doubt in a historically-based plot to assassinate Hitler, it lives and dies by its ability to sound smart and cast well.

G-Force (2009)

July 23, 2009Posted inAction, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Disney, Family, Nicolas Cage, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**/****
starring Bill Nighy, Will Arnett, Zach Galifianakis, Kelli Garner
screenplay by The Wibberleys and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio and Tim Firth
directed by Hoyt Yeatman

Gforceby Ian Pugh It's no small wonder, I suppose, that Disney's 3-D contraption G-Force isn't nearly as bad as it could–and by all rights should–be. Certainly, there are people at the Mouse House still convinced that an overload of genre clichés (here the conventions of the spy movie) are made instantly clever when applied to talking, farting animals (here guinea pigs), and that the company's morality factory hasn't already exhausted the virtues of makeshift families and believing in yourself. But encoded in the formula this time around is an odd, unspoken thesis about facing the hitherto-ignored consequences of cruelty towards those who can't defend themselves. Most intriguing to that end, the big-name actors roped into lending their voices to this mess are appropriately cast, their live-action personae transferred to a sticky CGI concoction of animal nature and human spite. Steve Buscemi cuts loose as an insane, sadistic hamster (his paranoid tendencies–he jealously guards his territory while mumbling to himself–born of "the psych ward at UCLA"), for instance, while Nicolas Cage, as an orphaned, star-nosed mole named "Speckles," improbably gives his best performance in years. Utilizing his weirdo inflections from Peggy Sue Got Married, Cage manages to channel his familiar space-case into an unlikely outlet and pump it with quiet desperation–dare I say pathos–without even the smallest hint of the self-parody that's plagued him of late. More than what the film deserves? Most definitely, although the high points of G-Force suggest that, at some stage of production, in some alternate universe, it may have actually deserved it.

Watchmen: Director’s Cut (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

July 22, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino
screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse, based on the graphic novel by ALAN MOORE and Dave Gibbons
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw It knows the notes but doesn't hear the music. Watchmen, Zach Snyder's long-awaited, over-hyped adaptation of Alan Moore's venerated graphic novel, is technically proficient and occasionally beautiful-looking but also flat and nerveless. It has no heart and, more damning, no real understanding of the irony of itself, save for a title sequence set to the tune of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" that's bound to be the best five minutes I'm going to see in any movie this year. In this stirring montage, a travelogue through the three ages of comics against the backdrop of American history, Snyder captures the idea that what Moore accomplished in casting a conversation about idol-making through the most populist medium of pop culture is in fact translatable through film, this other most populist medium of pop culture. Where the picture missteps is in restoring the superhero group Watchmen to the heavens, resurrecting pop icons in impossible, perfect, virtual tableaux: the character designs are impeccable, the suits are clean, and the violence is obscene, yes, but glossy enough that when things stop for a moment to delve into one character's appalling creation story, it feels unearned and exploitive–so much so that the question that fast follows of why the rest of it feels removed and inhuman almost derails the entire enterprise. Coming from a guy who more admires the Moore source than loves it, it occurs to me that Watchmen is a movie made by Dr. Manhattan; it should've been made by Rorschach.

The Ruins (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

July 22, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore, Laura Ramsey
screenplay by Scott Smith, based on his novel
directed by Carter Smith

by Walter Chaw Based on a novel by the guy who wrote A Simple Plan and directed by first-timer Carter Smith, The Ruins was lost in the shuffle of a seeming barrage of beautiful-tourists-getting-slaughtered splatter flicks, which may prove to be one of the many genre legacies of the ugly-American, difference-abhorrent Bush Jr. administration. (Not to mention that the flick could easily be read as an eco-horror picture. Lots of legacies, that W., all of them fertile for the horror genre.) What distinguishes it from the Hostels and the Turistas' and Club Dreads is a seriousness in its execution and a feeling that there's nothing happening in the film that is a result of stupidity or even caprice–that the gauntlet our gorgeous heroes go through is only the best example of the futility of our evolution since The Blair Witch Project. It's a fable of that Sophoclean idea that knowledge brings no profit to the wise, and though it might be a reach, it feels in this time and place like a story about how knowing that we're going to get blown up by an angry young man over a large body of water doesn't do a thing to prevent it from occurring. It's a film that talks about hopelessness and, like in a powerful moment from Marcus Nispel's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the youth of its cast suddenly bespeaks of a squeezing-off of potential rather than just tits-and-ass exploitation. Closer to the point, the titillation you feel during the prologue of our cast bathing on a Mexican beach before embarking on their bloody, intimate deaths is brutally punished. The destruction of beauty in The Ruins (the title finally makes sense) becomes allegory for a collective fear of suffering: just as porn works on some level as a fantasy of "if she'll do that, she'll do me," The Ruins works on the level of, If it could happen to these kids, smart and beautiful, then it sure as shit is going to happen to me.