The Invisible Man (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Vlcsnap-2020-05-25-20h09m18s855Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Oliver Jackson-Cohen
screenplay and screen story by Leigh Whannell
directed by Leigh Whannell

by Walter Chaw Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man is a masterpiece–an adaptation not so much of H.G. Wells’s book or the James Whale film of it, but of Gavin De Becker’s indispensable The Gift of Fear, a guide for how women can learn to trust their intuition, overcome their denial, and identify signs of men on the verge of becoming violent. Men murder the women they want to possess every day and often bring harm to others in the process. As Margaret Atwood infamously summarized, a man’s greatest fear is that a woman will laugh at him and a woman’s greatest fear is that a man will kill her, and this has shaped our behaviours as a society. Men, as it happens, tend to support other men who are brought to answer for their actions, while women who speak out are castigated, cast out, and blamed for their own victimization. Virtually the only thing the “me too” movement has brought about is false confidence that it’s safe for women to speak out without fear of losing their position or reputation. The world is a foul sty and the bad sleep well.

Life During Wartime #16: OUTRAGE (Patreon exclusive)

by Walter Chaw Outrage (1950) U.S. & Canada: YouTube Ida Lupino was tough, smart, resilient, and talented. The inheritor of a centuries-old legacy of stage performers, she was only reluctantly an actress and nominal star before parlaying her reputation into a career behind the camera as producer and director. During Hollywood's so-called "Golden Age," she was something of a unicorn for the power she held as a woman in an industry dominated, then as now, by men. As an actress, her big break after years of playing some variation of prostitute/bad girl with a heart of gold came in Raoul…

Life During Wartime #15: DO THE RIGHT THING (Patreon exclusive)

by Walter Chaw Do the Right Thing (1989) U.S.: Starz Amazon Canada: Crave Starz I introduced Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing to my kids as the defining film of arguably the most important American director of the past forty years, Spike Lee. I've had a strange relationship with Lee's films, one I compared to my kids to my relationship with Neil Young. I didn't always understand Neil Young's music as a kid or, even, in truth as a younger man who should've known better--but in the last twenty years or so, his genius has become inescapable for me. In…

Days of Thunder (1990) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital; Top Gun (1986) + War of the Worlds (2005) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Vlcsnap-2020-05-18-20h31m34s612Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version of Days of Thunder

DAYS OF THUNDER
**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Tom Cruise, Robert Duvall, Randy Quaid, Nicole Kidman
screenplay by Robert Towne
directed by Tony Scott

TOP GUN
**/**** Image B Sound A+ Extras A
starring Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards
screenplay by Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Tony Scott

WAR OF THE WORLDS
***/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Bill Chambers Days of Thunder was not a crapshoot; the dice were loaded. Almost the entire creative team that made Top Gun a hit–the illustrious Robert Towne filled in for the screenwriting duo of Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr., and none of the soundtrack artists were invited back–was reuniting to do for NASCAR what the earlier film had done for the U.S. Navy’s Fighter Weapons School. Star Tom Cruise had become even more popular in the intervening years, earning an Oscar nomination for Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July. Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer had such an unparalleled track record, having shepherded Flashdance, Top Gun, and the first two Beverly Hills Cops to commercial success, that Paramount confidently renewed their contract at the start of production. As recounted in Charles Fleming’s unsparing High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Cultures of Excess, under the terms of their renegotiated deal (a “visionary alliance,” as Simpson-Bruckheimer insisted it be called in the trades), they would receive $300M for five pictures–any five pictures–over five years, as well as a host of unprecedented perqs, including creative autonomy and fully-furnished home theatres installed at the studio’s expense. Days of Thunder would be the first production of this visionary alliance. It would also, quite ludicrously, be the last.

Life During Wartime #14: UN CHIEN ANDALOU (Patreon exclusive)

by Walter Chaw Un chien andalou (1929) U.S.: IndieFlix, Flix Fling Canada: Flix Fling My kids were raised on The Pixies and for as long as they can remember, I've mentioned that the words to "Debaser," in which lead singer Frank Black screams that he's "Un chien andalousia," is a reference to a great surrealist film I would show them one day. Today was that day. The quick way to explain "surrealism" to the only moderately-interested is to ask them to imagine introducing something strange into the middle of something completely ordinary. Dreams operate on principles of surrealism: you could…

The Virgin Spring (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

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****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Max von Sydow, Birgitta Valberg, Gunnel Lindblom, Birgitta Pettersson
screenplay by Ulla Isaksson
directed by Ingmar Bergman

by Bryant Frazer A pivotal film in Bergman’s corpus, The Virgin Spring is also perhaps the most disreputable. Borrowing the basic frame of a story from the 13th-century ballad “Töre’s Daughter at Vänge,” and set, to gloomy effect, during Sweden’s transition from paganism to Christianity, it chronicles the brutal rape and murder of a teenaged girl carrying candles to church, her father’s equally violent vengeance against the culprits, and (critically, because this is Bergman) his subsequent anguish at the silence of an apparently cruel and uncaring God. Considering the film offers what feels like a concentrated dose of the director’s pet themes, it’s interesting that Bergman has no writing credit on the picture. Instead, he hired the Swedish novelist Ulla Isaksson for the adaptation. Isaksson developed a colourful cast of characters and some background to bolster the material included in the ballad, but her biggest alteration was moving the miraculous appearance of the spring that gives the picture its title to the very end of the story.

Life During Wartime #13: THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN + LA CIGARETTE (Patreon exclusive)

by Walter Chaw The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) U.S. & Canada: YouTube La cigarette (The Cigarette) (1919) U.S. & Canada: YouTube Germaine Dulac was a filmmaker (and a great one), but that may be the least of what she was. A theorist, photographer, journalist, and critic, her interests were varied, canted towards the experimental and the surreal. As a film programmer, she was elected president of the Federation de cine-clubs and presided over the introduction of at least one certifiable genius, Jean Vigo. Her masterwork, The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), came out the year prior to Luis Buñuel's…

Life During Wartime #12: FARGO (Patreon exclusive)

by Walter Chaw Fargo (1996) U.S.: Starz, DirecTV Canada: rental only My kids have a great deal of experience with the Coen Brothers. Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn't There, True Grit, Hail, Caesar!--all seen by both children. My daughter, the more adventurous moviegoer of the two, has also seen The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and No Country for Old Men, which she declared to be the most frightening movie she'd ever watched. This is coming from a veteran of The Exorcist, Poltergeist,…

Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother – Books

Director-barry-sonnenfeld

Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker
FFC rating: 8/10
by Barry Sonnenfeld

by Bill Chambers Barry Sonnenfeld is a renowned cinematographer and a director with more than a few blockbusters on his resume (The Addams Family, the original Men in Black trilogy), but the Sonnenfeld who’s front and centre in his autobiographical Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker is the raconteur who’s honed his craft on talk shows with comic tales from his civilian life as the offspring of overbearing parents and husband of the beloved “Sweetie,” many of which reach their final form here. Cinephiles may consequently find the book to be something of a disappointment compared to, say, fans of humorists like David Sedaris. While Sonnenfeld does touch on his experiences in filmmaking (including a stint in porn), he skips blithely over some milestones on his CV or remembers them for exceedingly idiosyncratic reasons that won’t sate any conventional curiosity one might have about them. For example, Miller’s Crossing, arguably the pinnacle of his three-movie collaboration with the Coen Brothers, is reduced to the production that climaxed with his wedding. On the other hand, there’s value in Sonnenfeld’s somewhat dumbfounded consideration of his unlikely journey up the Hollywood food chain, which shows that fate and, let’s face it, white male privilege can play major roles in launching a film career. His utter lack of sentiment when it comes to his achievements makes for a tonic against the typical showbiz-dreamer’s success story.

It is also a very, very funny book.

Life During Wartime #11: LE GRAND AMOUR (Patreon exclusive)

by Walter Chaw Le Grand Amour (1969) U.S.: The Criterion Channel Canada: The Criterion Channel Jerry Lewis once declared that he learned the meaning of the word "genius" twice: the first time when he looked it up in the dictionary, the second when he met Pierre Étaix. As the story goes, neither spoke the other's language, so they expressed their mutual admiration by pantomiming scenes from each other's films. However accurate the recollection, it's a lovely anecdote, and Lewis and Étaix's friendship was forged quickly and well documented. Lewis even cast Étaix in his still-suppressed Holocaust film The Day the Clown…

Life During Wartime #10: THE TERMINATOR (Patreon exclusive)

by Walter Chaw The Terminator (1984) U.S.: Showtime, Fubo Canada: CTV After making an inauspicious directorial debut with Piranha II: The Spawning, James Cameron hit it out of the proverbial park with The Terminator (1984). I was 11 when the film came out, and figuring out a way to get our parents to let us watch it was an all-consuming project for me and my pals. I was so desperate to be cool that I lied to a buddy about having seen it, declaring that the laser-sight glimpsed in the television teasers was a laser gun cutting clubgoers in half…

Life During Wartime #9: DUCK SOUP (Patreon exclusive)

by Walter Chaw Duck Soup (1933) U.S.: rental only Canada: n/a It's easy to see the Marx Brothers as a relic of their time. The challenge with introducing an American vaudeville comedy team from the turn of the twentieth century is finding a pathway that doesn't rely on condescension. Duck Soup (1933) is about the disastrous toll of a feckless narcissist holding the highest office in the land and how his enablers prop up a useful idiot who will protect their wealth and social position. Duck Soup, as I said, is about the United States in 2020. Vaudeville had its roots in…

1984 (1984) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

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Nineteen Eighty-Four
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B

starring John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, Gregor Fisher
written and directed by Michael Radford

by Walter Chaw George Orwell’s 1984 is a fabulously paranoid fantasy in which everything predicted has not only come to pass but proven mild in comparison. Orwell himself failed to foresee how Big Brother’s intrusion into all aspects of our lives would be a privilege we happily facilitated and paid for at a premium through the acquisition of our manifold devices and subscriptions. Cameras and microphones are recording every aspect of our existence…and that’s just the way we wanted it. Capitalism is the most pernicious form of authoritarianism. We are slaves to ease. 1984 is, for all intents and purposes, a plagiarism of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a novel written in 1923 and instantly suppressed in Zamyatin’s native Russia for being ideologically undesirable. It wasn’t published there until 1988 in the temporary spirit of glasnost, though copies of it had been in circulation abroad for decades. Orwell, reviewing We for TRIBUNE MAGAZINE in January of 1947, identified it as one of “the literary curiosities of this book-burning age.” “This is a book to look out for when an English version appears,” he wrote, and suggested that Aldous Huxley had borrowed from it extensively for A Brave New World. (For what it’s worth, Huxley denied the charge vociferously and, having read We, I’d have to agree with him.) Orwell went on to criticize We for lacking political focus in favour of a more general fear of “the machine.” So I like to think of 1984, written three years after this review of We, to be Orwell’s attempt to correct what he identified as that work’s essential flaw rather than a more cynical wholesale lift. I like to think he was driven more by the urgency of the message than by the venality of stolen valour.

Life During Wartime #8: THE SEVENTH SEAL (Patreon exclusive)

by Walter ChawThe Seventh Seal (1957)U.S.: Criterion, Kanopy, FuboTV, Watch TCMCanada: CriterionI showed my wife Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal for the first time in 2003, when we were pregnant with my daughter. As we were watching, we both, separately, decided to name our baby after the Bibi Andersson character, Mia, because Mia in the film is surrounded by loved ones, free from worry, happy, and protected from the death and despair that surrounds her. As a joke, I tell people that our daughter was named after a character in The Seventh Seal: "My daughter's name is Antonius Block." It's…

Lock Up (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

00017.m2ts_snapshot_01.08.37_[2020.04.14_17.46.33]Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Donald Sutherland, John Amos, Sonny Landham
screenplay by Richard Smith and Jeb Stuart and Henry Rosenbaum
directed by John Flynn

by Bryant Frazer Lock Up came out in 1989, but for much of its running time it feels like it could have been made at least 15 years earlier. Shot mainly on location at a real state prison (with real prison inmates serving as extras) in Rahway, New Jersey, it isn't exactly gritty, but it's convincing enough. Director John Flynn knew what kind of movie he was trying to make–a straightforward vehicle for star Sylvester Stallone, who was restlessly seeking new roles that would help sustain the first post- Rambo and Rocky stage of his career. And despite his relative anonymity in Hollywood, Flynn was a good pick for the project, having a body of work that included taut cult classics like the 1970s pulp adaptation The Outfit (featuring Robert Duvall as Donald E. Westlake's favoured screen version of his iconic Parker character) and the revenge drama Rolling Thunder (with William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones as Vietnam vets tracking down a gang of small-time thugs), as well as 1987's critically acclaimed Best Seller, starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy. Flynn earned a journalism degree from UCLA, and his deceptively simple directorial style evinces what strike me as sound reportorial instincts: he finds the kernel of every scene and assembles the fewest and least fussy shots required to get the point across.

Life During Wartime #7: SHERLOCK JR. (Patreon exclusive)

by Walter ChawSherlock Jr. (1924)U.S.: Hoopla, Kanopy, IndiePixCanada: HooplaBuster Keaton is one of the "big four" silent comedians--a group that includes Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon--who produced a fascinating body of fraught work that is slyly progressive (especially in regards to gender) and sometimes uncomfortable. While the kids have seen films by all of these guys, I was happy to give them a recap of their personas: Langdon affected a child-like, wide-eyed, powdered, often "feminized" demeanour Chaplin's "Little Tramp" presented as a "hobo" archetype, poor and lovelorn and unfailingly optimistic Harold Lloyd's harried "Glass" persona was all bespectacled,…

Rambo: Last Blood (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Vlcsnap-2020-04-12-20h38m49s377Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Oscar Jaenada
screenplay by Matt Cirulnick & Sylvester Stallone
directed by Adrian Grünberg

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Rambo: Last Blood, hereafter Last Blood, became irresistible to me the moment John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) decided to score his own climactic bloodbath with The Doors‘ “Five to One,” flooding his homemade tunnels with it to taunt and ridicule the small army hunting him. A Kevin McAllister move, one might say. Lyrics-wise, “Five to One” is a little on the nose (“Five to one, baby/One in five/No one here gets out alive, now”), but it’s still a deep cut from a band in many ways synonymous with the Vietnam War’s acid-rock energy, making it a loaded choice indeed. This was probably the soundtrack to Rambo losing his innocence; what matters is that it could’ve been. There’s a certain frisson, too, that comes with hearing a pop song in a Rambo movie for the first time, at least diegetically. It makes for a set-piece that is, in the context of le cinéma de Rambo, unusually exuberant, and one begins to suspect that without music it would be merely nauseating, maybe unbearable. Indeed, the slickness of Last Blood is the only thing keeping it from being a snuff movie.

Life During Wartime #6: THE 39 STEPS (Patreon exclusive)

The 39 Steps (1935)U.S.: Prime, Roku, Hoopla, CriterionCanada: Prime, Hoopla, Criterionby Walter ChawThere is no single director who has inspired more scholarship than Alfred Hitchcock.He made upwards of sixty films throughout his storied career, most of which survive. The first film considered to show the hallmarks of his work was his third completed feature, The Lodger, from 1926. Subtitled "A Story of the London Fog," it told the tale of a Jack the Ripper-styled murderer who may or may not be the same mysterious lodger staying with an unassuming family. Twenty films later, The 39 Steps was seen by many…

Life During Wartime #5: JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO (Patreon exclusive)

by Walter ChawJoe Versus the Volcano (1990)U.S.: Starz, DirecTVCanada: rental onlyJohn Patrick Shanley's Joe Versus the Volcano allows for a lovely introduction to both Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan right when their stardom was about to reach such great heights. Part of the Nineties pantheon of A-listers who had breakout films in the '80s (Hanks with Big in 1988, Ryan with When Harry Met Sally in 1989, her star-making moment), they collaborated twice more during the '90s on the outrageously popular Sleepless in Seattle and the Shop Around the Corner update You've Got Mail. Hanks/Ryan felt like relics from Old…

Dolittle (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Img008 (2)Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Robert Downey Jr., Antonio Banderas, Michael Sheen, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Stephen Gaghan and John Whittington, based on the novels by Hugh Lofting
directed by Stephen Gaghan

by Walter Chaw My memory of it is a little hazy now, but it’s worried my mind in the decades since I first read it, “it” being a scene from Dan Simmons’s Carrion Comfort where Holocaust prisoners are forced to be the chess pieces in a giant game, with the losing “pieces” summarily executed. Not ten minutes in, Steven Gaghan’s Dolittle, the second reboot of the legendarily disastrous (but also Oscar-nominated) Doctor Dolittle, features a sequence where Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) and cowardly gorilla Chee Chee (voiced by Rami Malek) play a game of chess with mice as the pieces. One strikes another with a tiny sceptre. It’s played for laughs, but I wasn’t laughing; I have questions. One of them concerns young Tommy’s accidental, near-mortal wounding of a squirrel (voiced by Craig Robinson) who suffers from PTSD in a vaguely terrifying flash-montage upon waking from surgery, and vows revenge. Another concerns how Dolittle, who’s been secreted away in his overgrown manse for years and years after the unfortunate death of his also-telepathic wife (not unlike another Dan Simmons novel, The Hollow Man), somehow has a very young lion cub in his care. Where does a hermit who never leaves his house get a baby lion? Wait, I figured it out: Shut up, you joyless old fuck, this isn’t for you, it’s for dim children and the parents needing a break from them.