Step Brothers (2008) [2-Disc Unrated Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Step Brothers (2008) [2-Disc Unrated Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Richard Jenkins, Mary Steenburgen
screenplay by Will Ferrell & Adam McKay
directed by Adam McKay

by Bryant Frazer The critical consensus is that Step Brothers is the quintessence of the ongoing cycle of American films that celebrate the adolescent man-child. Watch as it calibrates itself against the emotional needs of its now Apatow-habituated audience, first suggesting that a creepy, psychosexually underdeveloped 40-year-old living in Mom’s basement needs to grow the fuck up and join the workforce already, then–ha-ha, just kidding–drawing back to declare that what’s really important is said 40-year-old reaching a meaningful compromise with the world (like pro karaoke!) that doesn’t involve abandoning his no-doubt-considerable sense of wonder and capacity for joy.

The Heartbreak Kid (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

The Heartbreak Kid (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2007, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Romance

*½/****
DVD – Image B- Sound A- Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Ben Stiller, Michelle Monaghan, Malin Akerman, Rob Corddry
screenplay by Scot Armstrong and Leslie Dixon and Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly & Kevin Barnett, based on the short story “A Change of Plan” by Bruce Jay Friedman
directed by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw Elaine May used to be the comedy writing and performing partner of Mike Nichols, and because I like her 1972 film The Heartbreak Kid so much, I’ve always wondered how much better The Graduate would have been had May directed it. Indeed, a May-helmed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? could be excruciating–well, more so. For a while, anyway, May was the brave one, ethnically and otherwise, and I don’t know of many people who could’ve turned the premise that drives the original The Heartbreak Kid into such a delicate, even sensitive (certainly human) piece. If it were going to be remade (and it has, with Ben Stiller in the Charles Grodin role and Malin Akerman in the Jeannie Berlin role), Peter and Bobby Farrelly would seem to be the right ones for the job.

Timecrimes (2008) + Wendy and Lucy (2008)

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

Los Cronocrímenes
**/****
starring Karra Elejalde, Candela Fernández, Bárbara Goenaga, Nacho Vigalondo
written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo

WENDY AND LUCY
**/****
starring Michelle Williams, Wally Dalton, Will Patton, Larry Fessenden
screenplay by Jonathan Raymond & Kelly Reichardt
directed by Kelly Reichardt

by Walter Chaw Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes), Nacho Vigalondo’s zero-budget exercise in kitchen-sink quantum metaphysics, doesn’t fuck itself with an unearned sense of smug self-satisfaction like Shane Carruth’s Primer, but it does prove to be more tantalizing than satisfying. All garnish, no calories; take time travel and turn it into a series of unfortunate events that, although it plays with matter/anti-matter lore, doesn’t go much farther in developing either its philosophy or its narrative. The result isn’t pomo expressionism, but rather this taste of something, these suggestions of something other, that don’t amount to a hill of beans once the whole thing morphs into a breakneck thriller. It makes some sense, then, that the hero of the piece is a non-descript schlub of a man, soft, no shoulders, falling over the edge into middle-age–enough so that when he spies a naked woman in the hills behind his house through his binoculars, of course he doesn’t look away (who would, right?), and of course he doesn’t tell his wife.

Die Another Day (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

Die Another Day (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, James Bond, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image B Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Toby Stephens, Rosamund Pike
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade
directed by Lee Tamahori

by Walter Chaw There’s just no currency in deriding James Bond for being a clichéd, doddering, misogynistic boy’s club that trundles into the new millennium with the same entendres, leering, and boom-boom the franchise has ridden for four decades now. It’s a lack of currency made all the more glaring for a film, Lee Tamahori’s Die Another Day, desperate to please Bond-philes (Republicans and children, literal and figurative) by being an overt rehash of every Bond entry preceding it rather than the usual unintentional rehash. As futile as it has become to criticize the next instalment in this never-ending series, it appears that the filmmakers have decided to stop pretending they haven’t been plundering the same well of travel-worn ideas since Connery up and quit.

Rails & Ties (2007) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2007, 2008, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras D
starring Kevin Bacon, Marcia Gay Harden, Miles Heizer, Marin Hinkle
screenplay by Micky Levy
directed by Alison Eastwood

by Ian Pugh Alison Eastwood’s directorial debut makes its first–and, as it turns out, fatal–misstep by taking the wrong page from her father Clint’s own career, applying a fundamentally tragic story to the straightforward misery of his winter output, thus bypassing the elegiac poetry of his late fall period. Distant wives dying of cancer, mentally unstable mothers tossing themselves into the paths of moving trains, and no one given the benefit of any examination beyond the prodding reminder that such things happen every day: Rails & Ties is another stultifying entry in the post-Crash, post-Babel cycle of cinema that doesn’t want to educate or enlighten you with any perspective about these occurrences or their effect on humanity–it just wants to transform you into an emotional punching bag.

The Go-Getter (2008) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Road Movie, Romance

**½/**** Image B Sound C Extras C+
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Zooey Deschanel, Jena Malone, Maura Tierney
written and directed by Martin Hynes

by Alex Jackson Martin Hynes’s The Go-Getter is a sweet but thin wafer of a movie. It isn’t great art, it doesn’t evoke an especially strong or complex emotional reaction, and it doesn’t ask any difficult questions. It doesn’t aspire to do anything more than pleasantly and efficiently eat up an hour and a half of your time. That’s the very definition of faint praise, but praise I’m offering it all the same. When I first saw the film at Sundance in 2007, I felt rejuvenated. This had come after a string of bad movies that nonetheless demanded a lot from me. The sheer frivolousness and good cheer of The Go-Getter was a kind of tonic that helped me remember why I love the movies in the first place. Still, I knew enough to give it only two-and-a-half stars, and my second viewing pretty much confirms that two-and-a-half stars is about right.

Black Christmas (1974) – Blu-ray Disc

Black Christmas (1974) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Christmas, FFC Must-Own, Horror

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon
screenplay by Roy Moore
directed by Bob Clark

FFC Must-Own

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. At the beginning of Bob Clark’s other yuletide favourite, the influential horror classic Black Christmas, college student Clare Harrison (Lynne Griffin) is getting ready to go home for the holidays. The sorority she belongs to receives an obscene phone call; when her “sister” Barbie (Margot Kidder) humours the pervert, sensible Clare–at the risk of making them sound one-dimensional, these characters are deftly drawn with a minimum of brushstrokes–suggests they not antagonize him. She then goes upstairs to pack, investigates a noise coming from her closet, and is asphyxiated with a plastic bag. A dread-bound dissolve from some hideous nativity scene in the attic in which Clare serves as a mummified Madonna takes us to a spot on campus the following day, where Clare’s father (James Edmond), a prudish but decent man, is waiting to pick up his daughter. Not knowing what we know but indeed perplexed when Clare fails to materialize at the appointed time and place, he absently scans his surroundings, only to be struck hard by a snowball like a cosmic pie to the face. The fates clearly have it out for this family.

For Your Eyes Only (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

For Your Eyes Only (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2008, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, James Bond, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Roger Moore, Carole Bouquet, Topol, Julian Glover
screenplay by Richard Maibum and Michael G. Wilson
directed by John Glen

by Ian Pugh Already something of a dinosaur in a season that saw Indiana Jones explode onto the cinematic landscape, For Your Eyes Only was the first 007 film that found Roger Moore looking too old to be a roguish, oversexed secret agent. Having played Bond four times previously over the course of eight years, it was readily apparent that Moore aged well, better than most–which clearly accounted for his longevity in the role. I have to wonder, then, if his suddenly-elderly appearance here is a reflection of the fact that he’s so clearly out of his element. He found his footing in the part once the powers-that-be realized he could succeed where Connery had failed: The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker were overblown and more than a little silly, but they were legitimized in part by their star’s sly grin and complete comfort in tackling the largest, most preposterous schemes possible–something to which the admirably analog Connery could never entirely adjust. For Your Eyes Only was intended to bring the series back to its down-and-dirty roots, but it only managed to remind that Moore was a square peg unfit for the round hole his predecessor occupied.

Postal (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Postal (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Germany, Satire, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Zack Ward, Dave Foley, Chris Coppola, Seymour Cassel
screenplay by Uwe Boll and Bryan C. Knight
directed by Uwe Boll

by Bryant Frazer Uwe Boll may not be the world’s worst filmmaker, but when he made his name internationally by turning beloved videogame titles into movies (the zombie shooter House of the Dead, the survival-horror adventure Alone in the Dark) that played like cheap, cynical cash grabs, he earned that sobriquet along with the undying enmity of a certain branch of the movie-nerd contingent. Go ahead and run a Google search on “worst filmmaker alive” and see how many times Boll’s name comes up on the first page alone.

The Dark Knight (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

The Dark Knight (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2008, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Superhero, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw It’s the best American film of the year so far and likely to remain that way. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is revelatory, visceral, grim stuff–a vision of the failure of our idealism before the inexorable tide of entropy, another masterpiece after last year’s No Country for Old Men that as much as says that the only morality in the midst of chaos is chance. No coincidence that both films feature villains who let a coin-flip act as judge and jury. But what’s adjudicated? What shape does the court take? The failure of reason is the great bogey of this modern day–and the inability to properly frame questions, much less ken answers, feeds this feeling of hopelessness. That widening gyre, it turns out, is a labyrinth, or an Escher print, illuminating a Sartrean paranoia of no hope for escape, no possibility of exit. Nolan’s Gotham City is a beatification of Chicago: the city’s glass and metal elevated into holy relic and presented in such grand, panoramic vistas that the little things done in spite of it or on its behalf seem like so many futile pittances–the dreamlife of mice in their sterile maze that is this sprawling microcosm of all of the miseries and suffering of the world.

Psycho (1960) [Special Edition – Universal Legacy Series] – DVD

Psycho (1960) [Special Edition – Universal Legacy Series] – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2008, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, John Gavin, Vera Miles
screenplay by Joseph Stefano, based on the book by Robert Bloch
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

FFC Must-Ownby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I’d wager there aren’t any films that have been more analyzed than Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the expanse of scholarship spent on it a curious echo of its own curious psychobabble anti-climax. Find studies of this film as the wellspring for everything from feminist film theory to measured leaps into psychoanalytic theory, from technical dissertations to Citizen Kane-style forays into authorship pitting the contributions of Hitch against those of graphic designer Saul Bass. I’ve read pieces on composer Bernard Herrmann’s unparalleled work in the picture; on the artwork used in the Bates Motel; on the ways that Hitch’s own queasy obsessions–themselves on the verge of explosion with his collaborations with poor Tippi Hedren–bled into the production. I’ve read about how the film was shot with Hitch’s television crew on a minimal budget and about the controversy surrounding, of all things, the depiction of a toilet for the first time since the pre-Code silent era in the United States. I even recall writing something about how this film, along with the other miraculous releases of 1960 (Peeping Tom, Eyes Without a Face, Breathless, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Rocco and His Brothers, Shoot the Piano Player, The Stranglers of Bombay, and Nabuo Nakagawa’s miraculous Jigoku), announced that cinema after this very particular point would never be the same. I’ve heard Janet Leigh’s oft-repeated tale of how the flesh-coloured pasties on her breasts peeled away as they tried to get that shot of her hanging over the tub and how, damnit, she wasn’t going to move even if it meant the crew in the rafters getting a good look at those world-class goodies. I know my favourite quote regarding the Sixties in film belongs to Ethan Mordden’s indispensable Medium Cool, comparing the previous decade to the new day dawning like so: “Surrender to the Wild Ones yields a dissolution of society.  Surrender to Mrs. Bates turns you psycho.” I’ve heard the apocryphal tales, the legends; I’ve listened to Truffaut interview Hitch about the shoot. Hell, I’ve taught the picture a few times in my own limited way to classrooms still surprised to learn there are more things left to discover in Psycho.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson
screenplay by Zach Helm
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is a thinly-sketched IRS agent who obsessively measures out his life in coffee spoons. One day, he hears the stentorian, patrician voice of his own personal narrator, reclusive author Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), providing him an interiority with Douglas Adams-like serendipitous surreality. Marc Forster’s Stranger than Fiction even winks at the Adams connection with a sentient wristwatch and a moment where Crick’s apartment gets demolished, Arthur Dent-like, by an uncommunicated work order. It also features sudden, unexpected love at the end of the universe with Crick’s opposite, a free spirit baker named Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who falls under the eye of Crick’s glum audit and, as literature professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) informs Crick, only hates him until she loves him if Crick’s narrator is writing a romantic comedy. The struggle within the film is the same as the struggle without, then, as Crick tries to determine whether or not Eiffel’s calm (and, as it happens, excellently-written) exposition will result in his poignant death or–good for him, bad for us–in his resurrection as a bland, non-descript leading man in another piece too frightened to allow itself the most appropriate ending. One way leads to a surprise masterpiece that soars on the chemistry (surprise again) between Ferrell and Gyllenhaal–the other leads to a film that’s a lot better than I expected it to be, weighed down by a resolution that it itself comments on as equivocal, cowardly, and disappointing. To crib the analysis of Prof. Hilbert, Stranger than Fiction is just “okay.”

Live and Let Die (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

Live and Let Die (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2008, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, James Bond, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Roger Moore, Yaphet Kotto, Jane Seymour, Clifton James
screenplay by Tom Mankiewicz, based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Guy Hamilton

by Ian Pugh As a young teenager and budding cinephile, I owned all the Bond films on VHS. I remember watching Live and Let Die more often than any of the others, probably because–crushes on Jane Seymour notwithstanding–as a viewer without any working sense of social context, it was the easiest film of the series just to sit back and enjoy. No Cold War scenarios requiring global perspective, no long-standing rivalries requiring explanation; Thunderball perfected the infamous Bond formula to dubious ends, but this is the entry that endeared you to its simplicity. In his first turn in the role, Roger Moore’s easygoing charm was a better fit for the youngest 007 neophytes than the rough, brutish Connery–and, despite being mired in a hopelessly dated ’70s landscape, the action sequences are sharply directed and tightly edited. In fact, they’d assure that the film would hold up pretty well today for more adult sensibilities…that is, if its script didn’t revolve around James Bond fighting every single black person in the Western hemisphere.

Bolt (2008)

Posted in2000s, 2008, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Disney, Drama, Family, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Dan Fogelman, Chris Williams
directed by Byron Howard, Chris Williams

by Walter Chaw What counts as a revolution for Disney animation nowadays is tellingly only a shadow of Pixar’s gracefully loaded pictures. It demonstrates that any film completed under the supervision of John Lasseter can’t be that bad, but also that all the things wrong with The Mouse over the last couple of decades won’t clear up with just one picture. Bolt isn’t a bad start, though, handling in its light, rote way a couple of nice moments with orphaned cat Mittens (voiced by Susie Essman) that remind of Jessie’s heartache from Toy Story 2 and a few well-paced action sequences that recall a superhero highlight reel from The Incredibles (speaking of films that need a sequel). The point of greatest interest is that Bolt represents the second major movie this year after Tropic Thunder that has as its protagonist an actor who doesn’t realize he’s no longer on a soundstage. (Collective commentary on the end of our time in Oz or Kansas?) Even without a deeper interest in answering the questions that it asks (in sharp contrast to the introspective, almost silent WALL·E), it’s still light years ahead of Disney’s spate of racist, misanthropic entertainments and/or direct-to-video sequels that cynically transform their Vault™ into a McDonald’s franchise.

Australia (2008)

Posted in2000s, 2008, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK, War, Western

*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Bryan Brown
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Stuart Beattie & Ronald Harwood & Richard Flanagan
directed by Baz Luhrmann

by Walter Chaw Baz Luhrmann’s Titanic begins–as you know that it must–with fusty, dusty-britches Mrs. Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) tumbling out of a plane into the wilds of WWII Australia and the brawny arms of fair dinkum frontiersman The Drover (Hugh Jackman). They hate each other–she his disgustingly rugged physique and brusque manner, he her high-falutin’ snobbery and belief that all men want to shag her. How miraculous, then, that the two come to love one another before the one-hour mark of the longest two weeks you’ll spend in a theatre this year. But first, in a nod to Australia’s “Lost Generation,” of course, but more directly in most viewers’ minds to Rabbit-Proof Fence, introduce pint-sized product of settler/aboriginal miscegenation Nullah (Brandon Walters), who lives on Sarah’s late husband’s cattle farm. Nullah is the emotional glue of the film (besides more importantly being the one who brings the cast’s collective age down from AARP levels), the character imperilled, monumentalized, sought after, lost, recovered, hugged over, longed over, kissed over, and, in a stupid film’s deeply stupid end titles, patronized with trivia about how the POME government at last apologized to the Aborigine people for their policy of forced intermarriage. How this saccharine, torpid love saga ends as a bromide is one of those things only the genuinely gifted can achieve: set in Darwin, Australia earns a Darwin Award for its dedication to self-destruction.

Standard Operating Procedure (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Standard Operating Procedure (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
directed by Errol Morris

by Bryant Frazer There’s a tension in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure between the subject matter–the torture and humiliation of inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad during the U.S. occupation of Iraq–and what Morris is really up to. Anyone who’s read his excellent “Zoom” blog for THE NEW YORK TIMES, including his brilliant, three-part consideration of the pedigree of two different photographs taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War, knows that the director is concerned lately with the methodical, emotionless investigation of the circumstances surrounding a picture’s taking. He wants to know what a photo conceals in addition to what it reveals–what’s happening outside its spatial frame? Its temporal boundaries?

The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Directors: Dario Argento, DVD, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

La sindrome di Stendhal
**½/****
DVD – Image B Sound C+ Extras B
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Asia Argento, Thomas Kretschmann, Marco Leonardi
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw It’s hard for me to reconcile the Dario Argento of the Seventies through to 1982’s Tenebre with the Dario Argento ever after (at least until what I’ve heard is a remarkable comeback, the upcoming completion of his Three Mothers trilogy). The inventor, almost by himself, of two distinct genres of film in Italy (and just the concept of the arthouse slasher in the world), a co-writer of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, and a revolutionizer of horror-movie music became this guy who stopped aping Hitchcock and started aping…Jeunet? Himself? Even with Max Von Sydow in the fold (Non ho sonno), the pictures post-Tenebre are cheap auto-knockoffs devoid of innovation and lacking the amazingly imaginative gore that marked Argento’s early gialli, the archetypal resonance of his supernaturals, or the transcendent, sometimes sublime lawlessness of his hybrids (like Suspiria, for instance, still a towering achievement). They’re almost to a one these gaudy, derivative, exhausted pieces of shit.

Thunderball (1965) – Blu-ray Disc

Thunderball (1965) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1960s, 2008, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, James Bond, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Sean Connery, Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celi, Luciana Paluzzi
screenplay by Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins,
based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Terence Young

by Ian Pugh Thunderball is far from the worst Bond film–you’d be hard-pressed to even label it outright bad–but it may be the entry in this venerated series most worthy of contempt for its concerted, ultimately successful effort to formulize its hero’s adventures. After the grim uncertainty of From Russia with Love and the classic iconography of Goldfinger, Thunderball is more than content to let a suddenly-enormous budget ($9M compared to Goldfinger‘s $3M) carry it far, far over-the-top with ludicrous underwater battles and pieces of gadgetry that become full-blown set-pieces in and of themselves. (That jet-pack sequence must have been astonishing in 1965, but it comes from a different cinematic world entirely–and, maddeningly, the filmmakers bend over backwards to accommodate it.) It’s not too difficult to understand such a lopsided reliance on special effects, however, considering that Thunderball‘s premise is far too slim to accommodate its bloated 130-minute running time: SPECTRE hijacks a NATO bomber jet and threatens to detonate its nuclear warheads in a major city in America or Great Britain unless both governments pay a hefty ransom. Heading the operation is Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), a sinister something-or-other calling the shots out of the Bahamas. Bond travels to Nassau to contact “Domino” Derval (Claudine Auger), Largo’s mistress and sister of the missing jet’s pilot, and persuades her to help.

Girl on the Bridge (1999) – DVD

Girl on the Bridge (1999) – DVD

Posted in1990s, 2008, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Romance

***½/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Vanessa Paradis, Daniel Auteuil, Frédéric Pfluger, Demetre Georgalas
screenplay by Serge Frydman
directed by Patrice Leconte

by Walter Chaw Patrice Leconte’s immaculately constructed Girl on the Bridge is a lovely, hopelessly romantic little bauble that catches the light no matter how you turn it. The picture stars gamine Vanessa Paradis as Adèle, a suicide girl broken by the lack of a soul mate and a flurry of Parisian bedsheets contemplating a George Bailey-style leap off the edge of a bridge. Her Clarence is Gabor (Daniel Auteuil), a professional knife-thrower who trolls for winsome targets looking to ride the eternity express; and together they paint the world a Fellini shade of red. The similarity is more than cosmetic: in its carnival-of-life (or better, life-as-carnival) atmosphere, the romance that develops between Gabor and Adèle is sublimated into the act of extended, trembling foreplay–lots of knives hurled at naked thighs and only a few nicks here and there to show for it. The act of actual sex is seen as something less than penetrating (Adèle pillow-hops like an adrenalized bunny), but when the pair rushes off to an abandoned train car to be alone, true intimacy only comes once Gabor starts in with the cutlery. Breathless in love like P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love or Fellini’s Nights in Cabiria (which likewise sports a woman of loose morals looking for love in Rome), Girl on the Bridge, Leconte’s lightest confection, manages still to convey the director’s themes of the mystery of luck as it governs chance meetings and meaningful hits and misses.

La Femme Nikita (1990) + Killing Zoe (1994) – DVDs|La Femme Nikita – Blu-ray Disc

La Femme Nikita (1990) + Killing Zoe (1994) – DVDs|La Femme Nikita – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2000s, 2008, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, France, Italy, Thriller

Nikita
***/****
BD – Image A- Sound B+
DVD – Image B Sound A- (English)/B (French)
starring Anne Parillaud, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Tcheky Karyo, Jeanne Moreau
written and directed by Luc Besson

KILLING ZOE
***/**** Image A Sound B
starring Eric Stoltz, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Julie Delpy, Gary Kemp
written and directed by Roger Avary

by Bill Chambers When DVD screeners of La Femme Nikita and Killing Zoe arrived concurrently in my mailbox, I thought I had an angle for a piece: actor Jean-Hugues Anglade, a co-star in both films. I began taking notes, asking myself how they fit into his oeuvre and whether, viewed in tandem, these actioners represent career progression. That’s when I realized: What I know about the work of Jean-Hugues Anglade you could fit on the head of a pin; I’ve only seen him in one other performance, as Zorg in Betty Blue (a.k.a. 37°2 le matin), a movie with obvious but ultimately superficial parallels to La Femme Nikita. So howzabout this for a thematic compromise? Nikita (its native title) and Killing Zoe each take place in France–that’s as good a link between them as Anglade.