From Russia with Love (1963) – Blu-ray Disc

From Russia with Love (1963) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2008, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, James Bond, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A-
starring Sean Connery, Daniela Bianchi, Pedro Armendáriz, Lotte Lenya
screenplay by Richard Maibaum, based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Terence Young

FFC Must-Ownby Ian Pugh The first indelible image of From Russia with Love finds steely-eyed, platinum-blond killer Red Grant (Robert Shaw) taking a garrotte to James Bond (Sean Connery), slowly choking the life out of him without witty repartee or a single hope of a close-shave escape. The victim turns out to be an impostor, live-target practice for Grant’s escapades later in the film–but that momentary shock establishes right from the start that the rules have changed since last we saw 007. Here’s a point in time when we weren’t completely conditioned to accept Bond as undefeatable, when it wasn’t unreasonable to believe that these globetrotting adventures could come to an unfortunate end at any moment. In fact, I wonder if it’s reasonable to regard the unpolished Dr. No as mere prologue to From Russia with Love1, with the breezy, romantic life of a Cold War secret agent violently exposed as a lie.

Kung Fu Panda (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Kung Fu Panda (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, China, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy

½*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
screenplay by Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger
directed by Mark Osborne & John Stevenson

by Ian Pugh The generic mediocrity known as DreamWorks’ animation department is about eight steps behind the multilayered brilliance of Pixar, and with Kung Fu Panda I think they finally reveal how sore they are about it. Their latest cinematic effort seems like a particularly barbed response to Brad Bird’s The Incredibles and Ratatouille: we are told that the way to make something special is simply by believing that it’s special. Which, as Bird taught us, means you can apply that label to everything and everyone until nothing and no one is really special. In considering something so blatantly knee-jerk contradictory to his valid points, you have to wonder where, exactly, the belief in an egalitarian society ends and a genuinely destructive jealousy begins. The entirety of Kung Fu Panda strokes the middlebrow ego: the comedy is painfully broad and predictable, while the action sequences are edited into a wild, incomprehensible mess (although I must admit, watching a limbless viper perform complicated martial arts techniques is unexpectedly lovely), and at its core, it’s outright insulted by the apparently galling insinuation that talent has an impact on results in any field of endeavour. In an insane attempt to refute that, Kung Fu Panda concludes that it’s still better to be fat and lazy than talented and educated.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008) + Role Models (2008)

Posted in2000s, 2008, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Germany, Theatrical

MADAGASCAR: ESCAPE 2 AFRICA
½*/****
screenplay by Etan Cohen and Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath
directed by Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath

ROLE MODELS
***/****
starring Seann William Scott, Paul Rudd, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Elizabeth Banks
screenplay by Paul Rudd & David Wain & Ken Marino
directed by David Wain

by Walter Chaw Rote and routine, Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath’s follow-up to their popular Madagascar takes the usual sequel route towards magnification with the obnoxious Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (henceforth Madagascar 2). At the heart of it is a weird, feral mix of Lord of the Flies and Swiss Family Robinson as a group of New Yorkers gets lost on safari–commentary, if you want to formulate one, on the incursion of Americans into the rest of the world. It’s not a bad thing to try to impose on this film in this historic election year, particularly since you’re not likely to be distracted by very much else in the picture. It’s even interesting to wonder how it is that lion Alex, voiced by Jewish Ben Stiller, could have been sired by daddy Zuba (Bernie Mac) and a nameless mom (Sherri Shepherd)–shades of Simba (Matthew Broderick) somehow springing from the loins of Mufasa (James Earl Jones). What’s most potentially interesting about the piece, however, is the interspecies miscegenation (is it “bestiality” if they’re both animals? Sort of like is it still necrophilia if it’s Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron?) suggested between giraffe Melman and hippo Gloria (voiced by isn’t-he-Jewish David Schwimmer and black Jada Pinkett Smith, respectively), eventually equated ironically with the union of a penguin and a bobble-head hula doll.

Dr. No (1962) – Blu-ray Disc

Dr. No (1962) – Blu-ray Disc

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

**½/**** Image A+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Sean Connery, Ursula Andress, Joseph Wiseman, Jack Lord
screenplay by Richard Maibaum & Johanna Hardwood & Berkely Mather, based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Terence Young

by Ian Pugh Sean Connery looks utterly lost in Dr. No. From the vantage point of this first crack at a big-screen James Bond, it’s easy to see why Ian Fleming initially dismissed him as an “overgrown stuntman.” Unable to convey much beyond a dashing, self-important man of the world, his attempts at cold-blooded murder and forceful interrogation are dispassionate and wooden at best. Considering how his individual performances as Bond rose and fell with different interpretations of the formula1, one wonders if Connery served as a barometer of the filmmakers’ confidence in the series’ early days. It’s evident that no one involved with Dr. No had a very clear idea of what that formula was, or would be. How far should we go in directly translating the book for the screen? Even the possibility of sequels turns out to be a question that distracts from a successful product: A little too bombastic for a leitmotif, Monty Norman’s now-familiar “James Bond Theme” follows our hero around as if testing the waters, toying with the possibility that this character could support a series.

Beetlejuice (1988) [20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition] – DVD + Blu-ray Disc

Beetlejuice (1988) [20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition] – DVD + Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2008, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, DVD

Beetle Juice
***½/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B+ Extras C-
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras C-
starring Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren
directed by Tim Burton

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Give Tim Burton’s 1988 horror-comedy Beetle Juice credit for this: it’s genuinely horrifying and genuinely hilarious. Sometimes both at once. The centrepiece of the film is a dinner party where new homeowners Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones) and their guests uncontrollably lip-synch to Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O.” Seeing Jones struggle to protect himself through two outstretched hands as he growls the line “Hide thee deadly black tarantula” never fails to squeeze a chuckle out of me. At the end of the sequence, the partygoers’ shrimp cocktails become large, pink, demonic hands that grab their faces and pull them down into their bowls. This final image is startling and very creepy in the way that it transforms a familiar object into something distinctly and unmistakably otherworldly.

The Final Countdown (1980) [2-Disc Limited Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2008, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A- Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, Katharine Ross, James Farentino
screenplay by David Ambrose & Gerry Davis
directed by Don Taylor

by Walter Chaw The first nine times I saw The Final Countdown, I was on a blanket on the hood of my parents’ car, a chimichanga in one hand and a Coke in the other. This was August and September of 1980, and earlier that year I thought I’d seen the best movie ever: The Empire Strikes Back. The following summer, I’d take in–at the drive-in, at the Cooper, at the Lakeside Twin–Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman II, and Dragonslayer. I believed this to be the way movies naturally were, unaware then that I was poised at the cusp of a decade of filmmaking that would redefine fantasy and science-fiction, setting precedents for the genre with films like Back to the Future and Predator, E.T., and Blade Runner, Near Dark, and Miracle Mile–the well was as deep for flights of fancy in the Eighties as it was for incomparable character-driven paranoia in the Seventies. It was an amazing and specific time to come of age in the movies, I see in retrospect; and I owe the embarrassing chills I still get watching big-budget mainstream previews to this day to my maturation in the church of the blockbuster.

The Anchor of Independence: FFC Interviews Lance Hammer|Ballast (2008)

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, Interviews, Theatrical

Lhammerinterviewtitle
A Sundance sensation rolls up his sleeves

BALLAST
**½/****

starring Micheal J. Smith, Sr., Tarra Riggs, JimMyron Ross, Johnny McPhail
written and directed by Lance Hammer

A man kills himself somewhere in the Mississippi Delta; his twin brother Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith, Sr.) tries to do the same but fails. After a brief stay in hospital, Lawrence is sent home to contemplate the direction his life has gone. Meanwhile, Lawrence’s sister-in-law (Tarra Riggs) and nephew (JimMyron Ross) struggle to survive on a minimum-wage income. At first glance, this scenario feels almost hopelessly generic–though the long, meditative shots across empty landscapes and drained performances from non-actors serve to remind of a Bresson film. What finally makes Ballast so uniquely fascinating is how it seems to take place in a post-apocalyptic land, with the initial suicide the atomic bomb that transforms its inhabitants into defeated shells given to moments of hatred and violence without ever really understanding their own motives. (Scenes in which Lawrence raids a grocery store certainly make end-of-the-world comparisons inevitable.) Drugs and attempted suicide are not exactly ways to pass the time in Ballast, nor are they even treated as logical escapes from such hellish surroundings. They are simply the only constants in a world from which there doesn’t appear to be any escape.

Ballast is well worth a look for its dignified portrayal of poverty and desperation, and of how their attendant problems tend to form a vicious cycle of silent, festering madness–but, ironically (or appropriately) enough, it starts to sputter around the hour mark, once its characters begin picking up the pieces to rebuild their lives. The film certainly leaves plenty for the viewer to figure out on his own, complete with the dichotomy of journeys vs. destinations in the elusive search for better tomorrows. Yet for a movie that thrives on such an ambiguous setting, Ballast is curiously compelled to provide concrete answers to questions it should leave a little more open-ended. And its continued reliance on defeated, contemplative stares comes across as fatuous and proselytizing in a Sullivan’s Travels kind of way. While Ballast is quite obviously a labour of love and the work of a preternatural talent, a more judicious hand in the editing room, particularly as applied to its last fifteen minutes, would have helped immensely.–IP

November 2, 2008|Ballast director/producer Lance Hammer isn’t really the scruffy outsider that photos out of Sundance had led me to believe–at least, not in demeanour. Indeed, sporting a clean-shaven face and a soft, folksy tone of voice, he’s a very polite fellow who just happens to have given the studio system a pass in favour of self-distributing his fascinating directorial debut. Hammer occasionally borders on a somewhat distracting formality, but that’s only because he has very specific ideas about his film and wants to make sure that you understand them in their totality. (He expresses genuine regret upon confirming that I had watched the film on a DVD screener instead of on the big screen.) His quiet manner belies a fierce stubbornness, an admirable quality in an artist of his budding stature; here’s a man who knows exactly what he wants from his cinematic career and is more than eager to expound on the present and future of distribution, not to mention his place in it. (The corners cut and chances taken in the promotion of Ballast are readily apparent–the film’s advertising budget is, apparently, so low that this interview was conducted at my local ad agency’s very own offices in downtown Boston instead of the Four Seasons Hotel, where movie press tours are traditionally hosted.) Near the end of our discussion, I threw a few intentional curveballs to better assess his opinion of the overall quality of independent film in the United States, but in retrospect, I wish I had challenged him a little more on his rather bleak views of the mainstream market and, moreover, the very future of cinema itself.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson, Jason Mewes
written and directed by Kevin Smith

by Walter Chaw There’s something wrong with Kevin Smith. Which is not to say that there isn’t something wrong with most artists, just that in the case of Smith, it’s become steadily apparent that whatever’s wrong with him is manifesting itself in genuinely sad ways. Zack and Miri Make a Porno (hereafter Zack and Miri) is dreadful in the unique style of that guy who traps you in a conversation and proceeds to drop lame Star Wars references and ancient race riffs laced with pathetic interludes about his syrupy, jejune concept of romantic love. Afraid to seem “uncool,” this guy will leaven his horny-dork shtick with dusty “blue” material–but every step along the way, all Smith does is demonstrate that he’s not funny anymore (if he ever was), and that if there was a time that he slipped in under the zeitgeist, that time is over.

The Polar Express (2004) [Two-Disc Widescreen Edition] – DVD|The Polar Express Presented in 3-D – Blu-ray Disc

The Polar Express (2004) [Two-Disc Widescreen Edition] – DVD|The Polar Express Presented in 3-D – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical

**/****
DVD – Image A Sound A- Extras C
BD – Image A Sound A Extras C
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis & William Broyles Jr., based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Walter Chaw Robert Zemeckis’s The Polar Express seems to be the culmination of a lot of his weird obsessions: his celebration of middle-class Aryan heroes; his tendency towards the tense and anxious; his love of casting an actor in multiple roles; Tom Hanks; Eddie Deezen; and that subtle quality of nightmare that infects even the most innocuous of his movies. (Zemeckis produces horror films in his spare time under the “Dark Castle” imprint; I wonder if he’ll ever, What Lies Beneath notwithstanding, just cut the bushwah and make a straight shocker.) When Christopher Lloyd’s Nazi-esque Judge Doom from Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit “dips” an adorable animated shoe into a corrosive sludge, Zemeckis foreshadows the engine that drives all of The Polar Express. It’s infernal entertainment and comparisons to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will are unavoidable (particularly in a disturbing rally scene), but it’s hard to know how much of that intense martial creepiness is intended as satire, and how much of it is just what lies beneath.

W. (2008) + Trouble the Water (2008)

Posted in2000s, 2008, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Theatrical

W.
**½/****
starring Josh Brolin, James Cromwell, Elizabeth Banks, Ellen Burstyn
screenplay by Stanley Weiser
directed by Oliver Stone

TROUBLE THE WATER
**½/****
directed by Carl Deal & Tia Lessin

by Walter Chaw John Powers once called Nixon-era Oliver Stone our most Nixonian director: smart, driven, divisive, unlikeable. So the neatest trick of Stone’s latest biopic, W., is to make George W. Bush–arguably the most reviled, detached, ideologically arrogant president since James Buchanan–a figure of genuine pathos. Never mind that this incurious, adolescent, fundamentalist fanatic is our proverbial Nero, fiddling while every foundational tenet of Lincoln’s party is fed to anti-intellectualism and evangelical Christianity. George Orwell said something once about how the end of democracy is heralded by millionaires leading dishwashers; what’s unexpected for me is the extent to which the Republican party in the new millennium has not only convinced the blue-collar to vote against its own self-interests by waging class warfare against liberals, but also begun to turn against the intellectuals in its own party. “Georgetown cocktail party” conservatives are now painted with the same broad brushstroke as “Latte-sipping” lefties–and this idea of abandoning the middle class takes on the onus of not just money and privilege, but education and eloquence as well. The logical end-point of wanting a President as ill-read, venal, and feckless as your alcoholic born-again Uncle Festus is a figure like Governor Sarah Palin, whose chief qualification appears to be her ability to blend into your local chapter of Oprah’s Fan Club without a ripple. Hate, division, ugly innuendo, and racism: sowing fear and reaping the political benefits until the house falls down.

The Shining (1980) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

The Shining (1980) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2008, Authors: Alex Jackson, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Jack Nicholson, Stephen King

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Shining has perhaps dated the most of Stanley Kubrick’s films. It’s not as stylized as Dr. Strangelove or Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick pictures set in the “present” that nonetheless feel as foreign as those set in the future and distant past. Particularly with the earthy orange-pinks and piss-yellows dominating the Overlook Hotel’s lobby in the opening sequence, not to mention the child star’s shaggy head of hair, the film has deep roots in the late-Seventies to early-Eighties. However, I’m beginning to think that the aging process itself has provided the necessarily alienating “timeless” quality.

Stuck (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Crime, Drama, Germany, Horror, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Mena Suvari, Stephen Rea, Russell Hornsby, Rukiya Bernard
screenplay by John Strysik
directed by Stuart Gordon

by Walter Chaw Stuart Gordon, the man who gave us the Lovecraftian splatter film, has, lately, gone in for non-supernatural frights: first with the snake-infested well of man’s self-interest in the irresistibly pulpy King of the Ants; then with his superb Mamet adaptation Edmund; and now with his inspired-by-a-true-story drive-in high-concept flick Stuck. The transition from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to the mendacity of mere humanity is less a leap in that Gordon to me has always been best when dealing with how the mundane is often just the thin candy shell over the boiling mess of our fetid Id–whether that Id manifests as the cellar of elder gods or, just as unspeakable, the lizard brain for which Lovecraft’s bogeys are the metaphor, anyway. Stuck takes as its inspiration the story of 25-year-old nurse’s aid Chante Mallard, who, one night flying high on alcohol and X, embedded one Gregory Biggs in her windshield and left him to die there over the course of two days. Gordon’s film wonders what would’ve happened should Biggs have survived and, over the course of those same two days, gathered enough wits and strength to exact some measure of justice on his torturer. A delicious conceit, free of irony and post-modern self-awareness, it’s funny without being snarky about it, delighting in the solipsistic desire of his Mallard, nursing home aide Brandi (Mena Suvari, dirtying up better here than in Spun), to not jeopardize a pending job promotion by reporting that guy stuck in her windshield. The guy, Tom (Stephen Rea), has fallen on hard times himself; if anything, Stuck is a diary of the modern malady of what happens when people can’t make a living doing honest work and so find themselves stripped of dignity (sometimes literally) and exiled from civilization.

State of Mind: FFC Interviews “Synecdoche, New York” Writer-Director Charlie Kaufman

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Interviews

Riding a mental rollercoaster with one of our heroes.

October 26, 2008 | I meet Charlie Kaufman in a dark little passage beneath Denver’s Hotel Monaco, both of us surveying a spread of cold cuts and a nice salad of greens and gorgonzola on the final day of a gruelling month-long junket in support of Kaufman’s new film and hyphenate debut, Synecdoche, New York. His first interview of the day following a late-night, (packed) post-screening Q&A at the University of Colorado, I confided in Kaufman that I’d been vying for a chance to speak with him for over four years now after being thwarted at a junket for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind–an experience I documented in an essay that developed a fun second life, probably got one of my local publicists fired, and doomed me to never getting offered another junket again. Mr. Kaufman asked me what it was like. I said it was like being a bug buoyed on the back of an ant colony and finally expelled not for smelling bad, but for smelling bad in the wrong way. We’d come back to this a few minutes later.

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2008, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener
written and directed by Charlie Kaufman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I don’t feel up to writing about Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (hereafter Synecdoche), because, as with something like Mulholland Drive, it’s in the writing about it that one is bound to discover one has said altogether too much about oneself and altogether not enough about the film. The picture is a lot like Nietzsche’s abyss, you know: the more it’s examined, the more it’s a dissection of the critic’s own fears and prejudices. There’s a scene early on where theatre director Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman–cast because he’s fabulous, and maybe because “Hoffman” incidentally rhymes with “Kaufman”) sits by himself on the floor next to a telephone and we notice more than he does that there are a couple of strange boils growing on his leg. It’s just something Caden lives with, and this visual comes sandwiched in the middle of an extended, uncomfortable sequence that begins with a gash to the forehead (and a glimpse into Caden’s vanity when he’s told it will scar), progresses through gum surgery and the revelation that Caden’s contracted a virus that’s made it difficult for him to salivate, and ends with his wife (Catherine Keener) and five-year-old daughter abandoning him, moving to Germany with monstrous nanny Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) + Persepolis (2007)|Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) + Persepolis (2007)|Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2007, 2008, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Musical, Thriller, War

FFC Must-OwnSWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen
screenplay by John Logan, based on the musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler
directed by Tim Burton

PERSEPOLIS
***½/****
screenplay by Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, based on the novel by Satrapi
directed by Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi

by Walter Chaw Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is easily Tim Burton’s best film. It’s uncompromised, deceptively uncomplicated, perverse in the most delightful way, and, maybe most importantly, it represents at last the full potency of Burton’s German Expressionist vision. No surprise that it’s closest allied to Burton’s previous career pinnacle, his self-contained fairytale Edward Scissorhands–sporting, like that film, a black-clad protagonist festooned with blades who achieves his adolescence (and purpose) in a slanted attic chamber. This is another gothic romance, no explanation for snow but instead demonstration of the frugal repast of revenge’s dish served cold. It’s best described as a diary of the unrequited, a journal of terminal, irresolvable frustration. A violent, giallo-lurid succession of leering throat-slashings with a soupçon of cannibalism (I’m kind of shocked, truth be told, that the picture was completed in this form), this adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s genius 1979 musical is a timely film, boasting the sort of contemporary topicality of which only eternal works like Sondheim’s are capable. Whatever the circumstances of its creation, watching it in this way speaks explicitly to the dismal tide of 2007, the desire to recover the illusory past (its hero speaks of his younger self as “naïve”)–the recognition at the last that things are only ever as terrible as they’ve ever been; and that the only refuge from despair is embracing the tiny moments of human connection that make life liveable.

John Adams (2008) + Jimmy Carter Man from Plains (2007) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2007, 2008, Authors: Ian Pugh, Biopic, Directors: Jonathan Demme, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Television

JOHN ADAMS
Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
“Join or Die,” “Independence,” “Don’t Tread on Me,” “Reunion,” “Unite or Die,” “Unnecessary War,” “Peacefield”

JIMMY CARTER MAN FROM PLAINS
***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Ian Pugh It’s hardly anything new to explore the professional brilliance and personal failings of those upon whom history has bestowed the title of Greatness, but Tom Hooper’s epic miniseries John Adams bucks genre expectations by refusing to keep us at arm’s length with a standardized character archetypally flawed, deigning to present us instead with an actual human being. Certainly, it forges an entry point in dismissing the sense of harmonious unity we usually attribute to those early American leaders: marvel as the opinion Adams (Paul Giamatti, a delightfully bitter pill) holds of stoic, wooden George Washington (David Morse) sours from respect to resentment; smirk as he barely hides his contempt for the hedonistic Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson) and his platitudinous adages; shock as he is too late in realizing the treachery orchestrated by that prick Alexander Hamilton (Rufus Sewell). But it’s not enough to tear down romantic icons by having General Washington–who looks as if he’s leapt out of a Stuart painting–crack one of his false teeth at breakfast. “Bed, both’a ya!” Adams shouts at his children shortly after witnessing the bloody aftermath of the Boston Massacre, and suddenly the shroud of tall tales collapses in a single powerful blast from a man who may represent the antithesis of any preconceived notions we have about the era of powdered wigs and stockings.

Zombie Strippers! (2008) [Unrated Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

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

*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Robert Englund, Joey Medina, Shamron Moore, Jenna Jameson
written and directed by Jay Lee

by Bryant Frazer Imagine Richard Kelly’s woefully ambitious Southland Tales without that film’s confused grandeur and you’ll get an idea of how dispiritingly terrible Zombie Strippers! really is. Not content to merely deliver generous servings of tits and ass and blood and guts, writer/director/editor/cinematographer Jay Lee tries to class up the joint with stumblebum nods towards political satire that make latter-day “Saturday Night Live” look like Robert Benchley. (Asking this film to spell “Cheney” correctly is, apparently, too tall an order.) The dialogue wouldn’t pass muster on a sitcom and the direction would qualify as adequate only by community-theatre standards. Setting this stinking bag of turds aflame is an aesthetic that could charitably be described as indifferent: It has a cheap look, and some solid make-up FX work is compromised by quick-and-dirty CG gore effects that couldn’t have been any more expensive than the pneumatic handiwork augmenting the quite visible chests of the film’s serially zombefied softcore-sex workers. It’s not as cheerfully bad as you’d expect a movie called Zombie Strippers! to be, just distressingly lousy.

Fox Horror Classics, Vol. 2 – DVD

Posted in1930s, 1940s, 2008, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

CHANDU THE MAGICIAN (1932)
***½/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A-
starring Edmund Lowe, Bela Lugosi, Irene Ware, Henry B. Walthall
directed by Marcel Varnel and William Cameron Menzies

DRAGONWYCK (1946)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Gene Tierney, Walter Huston, Vincent Price, Glenn Langan
screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on the novel by Anya Seton
directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

DR. RENAULT’S SECRET (1942)
*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring J. Carrol Naish, John Shepperd, Lynne Roberts, George Zucco
story by William Bruckner and Robert F. Metzler
directed by Harry Lachman

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I confess to feeling a little insecure while reading the entry for Chandu the Magician in Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide, wherein the learned film historian derides Chandu as “disappointing” and “not as good as most serials in this genre, and even sillier.” The suggestion is that he’s wholly sympathetic to the material and was actually hoping to see a good movie before being “disappointed.” Mr. Maltin may very well be in a better position than me to determine the relative merits of Chandu the Magician. Speaking as a layman, I found it to be sublime pulp fiction. Prototypical of George Lucas’s Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises, the film is remarkably shameless in its goofiness, never veering into self-deprecation or camp. It’s one of those rare pop entertainments that genuinely make you feel like a kid again.

The Big Bang Theory: The Complete First Season (2007-2008) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Television

Image B Sound B Extras D
“Pilot,” “The Big Bran Hypothesis,” “The Fuzzyboots Corollary,” “The Luminous Fish Effect,” “The Hamburger Postulate,” “The Middle Earth Paradigm,” “The Dumpling Paradox,” “The Grasshopper Experiment,” “The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization,” “The Loobenfeld Decay,” “The Pancake Batter Anomaly,” “The Jerusalem Duality,” “The Bat Jar Conjecture,” “The Nerdvana Annihilation,” “The Pork Chop Indeterminacy,” “The Peanut Reaction,” “The Tangerine Factor”

by Ian Pugh I absolutely love the fact that “The Big Bang Theory”‘s episode titles refer to throwaway gags buried in the show’s worn-out sitcom scenarios. In “The Jerusalem Duality” (1.12), theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) is flummoxed by the presence of a North Korean wunderkind who threatens to steal his thunder; eager to upstage him, Sheldon proposes to end to the conflict in the Middle East by building an exact replica of Jerusalem in the Mexican desert. Within this seemingly arbitrary naming convention, find everything “The Big Bang Theory” is attempting to accomplish–a jovial elbow to the ribs directed at the smart guys who can’t see the forest through the trees in their approach to life.

Constantine (2005) – Blu-ray Disc

Constantine (2005) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Germany, Horror, Mystery

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Shia LaBeouf, Tilda Swinton
screenplay by Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello, based on the DC comic
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw The problem with casting Keanu Reeves in the role of DC Comics anti-hero John Constantine, a chain-smoking, blue-collar bloke who happens to have a foot in a supernatural parallel world occupied by angels and demons, is that because of the actor’s ethereal–some would say “stoned”–demeanour, he never for a moment convinces that his is the sympathetic point of view. Imagine Robert Redford as Snake Plisskin, or Pierce Brosnan playing Ash in the Evil Dead films: Constantine, if they were insisting on an American actor, should have been Denis Leary. By inserting Reeves as your avatar, suddenly the whole shooting match is about CGI effects and impossible things doing impossible things (witness the last two Matrix films). But even without Reeves as the central distraction, Constantine avoids much of what made the “Hellblazer” mythology so compelling (that Lucifer is beautiful, that Constantine is genuinely an asshole instead of a lovable loser), with its worst crime coming in making the film something of an anti-smoking tract. Displaying the Surgeon General’s warning centre stage in one fiery moment and having the hero quit in the movie’s worst, most toadying, most cowardly joke, Constantine amounts to a straw man.