Hell or High Water (2016) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Posted in2016, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Thriller, Western

Hellorhigh2Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gil Birmingham
written by Taylor Sheridan
directed by David Mackenzie

by Bryant Frazer Cops and criminals may clash on desolate West Texas landscapes, but late capitalism is the real enemy in Hell or High Water. The film declares its intentions in an elaborate opening shot that follows a weary-looking woman arriving for work in the morning as a 1987 Chevy Camaro circles the parking lot in the background. (Her right wrist is in a brace, probably to fend off carpal tunnel syndrome, that occupational hazard of retail clerks and bank tellers everywhere.) The camera catches three lines of graffiti on the side of a building–“3 TOURS IN IRAQ BUT NO BAILOUT FOR PEOPLE LIKE US”–as it dollies past before panning around more than 270 degrees to the left and pushing forward as our working woman heads towards the front of the Texas Midland Bank. Clearly visible through an architectural frame-with-a-frame created by the camera move are inlaid brick patterns in the shape of three crosses on a wall across the street. Just like that, director David Mackenzie establishes, first, the idea that the men in that blue Camaro are up to no good; second, the current of economic desperation driving screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s story; and third, the religious posturing that offers an alternative to existential despair, with roadside churches, TV evangelists, and Christian radio offering a relentless white-noise stream of piety on demand to an American underclass with nowhere left to turn.

Before We Vanish (2017)

Posted in2017, 2018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Esoterica, Japan, Road Movie, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Beforewevanish

***/****
starring Masami Nagasawa, Ryuhei Matsuda, Mahiro Takasugi, Hiroki Hasegawa
screenplay by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Sachiko Tanaka, based on the play by Tomohiro Maekawa
directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Angelo Muredda The apocalypse becomes an occasion for everything from learning what makes humans tick to getting to know the distant alien who is your significant other in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s genre-defying twentieth feature Before We Vanish, which might be most firmly characterized as a black comedy if it weren’t so puckishly sunny. A return to form of sorts after Creepy and Daguerreotype, neither of which were without their charms but did feel at times like a master’s idle wheel-spinning, Before We Vanish works best as a high-concept sampler platter of the wildly divergent tones Kurosawa is uncommonly good at mixing up. That isn’t to say the alien-invasion framework and neatly bifurcated dystopian road movie/romcom structure are purely excuses to see how much mileage Kurosawa can get out of his generic indeterminacy. Still, one would be hard-pressed to deny that half the fun lies in taking the film in as the strange sum of its many seemingly ill-fitting parts.

Black Panther (2018)

Posted in2018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

Blackpanther18

**½/****
starring Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis
written by Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw There are issues Black Panther raises that I’m not equipped to discuss. I don’t understand them. I do understand that its closest analogues are Wonder Woman and Rogue One, in that these are deeply flawed films that, for particular audiences, hold a near-totemic value as representative artifacts. I can’t possibly express the joy and immense satisfaction I felt seeing Asian faces in a Star Wars film. I can’t possibly share in the same joy and sense of satisfaction that women got from Wonder Woman and that African-Americans will likely experience with Black Panther. They are all three films that you only really dislike from a position of privilege, and such is the conundrum of our current discourse. I will say that there are a handful of scenes in Black Panther that are as powerful statements of racial outrage as anything I’ve ever seen in mainstream cinema–that is, in a film that is not otherwise directly about slavery and the African-American experience. During its prologue/creation myth, I gasped at a scene of slaves, chained together, being led onto a slaver’s galley. There are moments so bold (if not reductive) that they’re genuinely breathtaking in their audacious impoliteness. Bold enough that some of my more conservative peers left the screening soon after a particular pronouncement about the legacy of slavery poisoning race relations into the modern day. At the end of it, a character proclaims they’d rather die than live in chains. It couldn’t get balder than that, nor more revolutionary. Yeah, man.

George A. Romero: Between Night and Dawn – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2018, Action, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: George A. Romero, Drama, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi

Romero1

There’s Always Vanilla/The Affair (1972)
*½/**** Image B- Sound C+ Extras A-
starring Ray Laine, Judith Streiner (née Ridley), Johanna Lawrence, Richard Ricci
written by R. J. Ricci
directed by George A. Romero

Season of the Witch/George A. Romero’s Season of the Witch/Hungry Wives/Jack’s Wife (1973)
***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Jan White, Ray Laine, Joedda McClain, Bill Thunhurst
written & directed by George A. Romero

The Crazies/Code Name: Trixie (1973)
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Lane Carroll, W.G. McMillan, Harold Wayne Jones, Lloyd Hollar
screenplay by Paul McCollough & George A. Romero
directed by George A. Romero

by Bryant Frazer George A. Romero, one of the unquestioned masters of American horror cinema, never intended to be a horror filmmaker. It’s one of the great ironies in film history. When the Pittsburgh-based writer and director ventured from industrial filmmaking (via his production company, The Latent Image) into features, he made a horror movie not out of any claimed interest in or affinity with the genre, but simply because exploitation pictures were considered the safest investments. And for years after its release, the man who made the epochal Night of the Living Dead (1968)–not just the blueprint for the modern zombie movie, but also a metaphor for U.S. misadventures in Vietnam and a disturbing allegory for inhuman behaviour among the living–was still apologizing for what he perceived as its shortcomings. “There’s so much terrible dialogue, and there are several really poor performances,” Romero said in a 1972 CINEFANTASTIQUE interview conducted by local actor Sam Nicotero, who was playing the role of a sheriff’s deputy in Romero’s then-in-production sci-fi/disaster hybrid, The Crazies. “Technically, the film is not that bad–but, Christ, our commercial work is better than that.”

Dial M for Murder (1954) – Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray

Posted in1950s, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, Robert Cummings, John Williams
screenplay by Frederick Knott, as adapted from his play
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw I’ve never seen Dial M for Murder in 3-D, but I can imagine how, in that format, Hitchcock’s slow push-ins and dolly-outs would create a habitable space, perhaps a sense of looming menace in his flower vases and teapots and of course the scissors with which poor Margot (Grace Kelly) manages to save herself late one night. In 2-D, Dial M for Murder is literally and figuratively flat: an adaptation of a smash stage play that Hitchcock transplanted without much “opening up”–a dry run for sister film Rear Window, a more polite rounding off of Rope, and what I have to believe was another visual/tonal experiment in a different format. How else to explain its complete airlessness in the middle of the Master’s masterpiece period? Maybe it was, as Hitch described it to Truffaut, a piffle, a contract film peeled off to appease Warner Bros.: “Coasting, playing it safe.” His own words about it comprise a good chunk of the total scholarship on the picture, but in that brief, three-page section in Truffaut’s book-length interview with him, Hitch admits that he hollowed out a pit in the floor of the soundstage, the better to create relief in low-angle shots. In 3-D, the sense of forced intimacy as we as an audience engage eye-level with, body-level with, betwixt our urbane plotters and murderers could be both suffocating and grand. I had a dream once that I attended a screening of this film in 3-D in a large, velvet-lined auditorium. Freudians, take note.

Jabberwocky (1977) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2018, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Fantasy, The Criterion Collection

Jabberwocky2

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Michael Palin, Max Wall, Harry H. Corbett, John Le Mesurier
screenplay by Charles Alverson and Terry Gilliam, from the Lewis Carroll poem
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Bryant Frazer The pre-credits sequence of Jabberwocky features director Terry Gilliam’s ex-Python troupemate Terry Jones portraying a hunter collecting trapped wild animals from a pastoral forest as shafts of sunlight stab through tree branches and featherlight moths flit among the leaves. The natural beauty is subverted, ominously, by point-of-view shots taken from far overhead, accompanied by boomy, creature-feature sound design (think Jaws, released a couple of years previous), suggesting the hunter is also the hunted. Jones glances around quizzically, a dopey, open-mouthed expression plastered across his face. With a jump cut, he turns suddenly towards the camera, wide-eyed and screaming in extreme close-up. The camera pulls back from the ground and carries Jones with it, still yelling and beating his arms frantically in the air. He jerks his head this way and that, his tongue lolling about in and around his mouth, delivering a death scene of such unexpected intensity that it’s hard for an audience to know how to respond. Is it scary, or hilarious? Or just…goofy?

Geostorm (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

Posted in2017, 2018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disaster Movie, DVD, Sci-Fi

Geostorm3

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish, Andy Garcia
screenplay by Dean Devlin & Paul Guyot
directed by Dean Devlin

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s the near future. Not much has changed, except the President isn’t totally repulsive, “HoloFrames” have supplanted cell phones, and climate change is no longer an immediate threat, thanks to the creation of a global weather-management system called Dutch Boy, after the story of the little Dutch boy who plugs a leak in a dike with his finger. (Like all those movie scientists who’ve named their game-changer “Icarus,” the christeners of Dutch Boy should’ve read to the end of the story.) Gerard Butler’s Jake Lawson scienced Dutch Boy together but got kicked off the project when he switched it on ahead of schedule. Now, with the damn thing turning miles of Afghanistan desert into frozen tundra, White House lackey Max (Jim Sturgess with inexplicable hair) knows there is only one man who can get to the bottom of this glitch: his estranged brother Jake, who reticently returns to the International Climate Space Station (ICSS), leaving young daughter Hannah (Talitha Bateman) to fret for his safety and narrate the film for that soupçon of folksiness. More incidents accumulate both on the ground and miles above the earth, including a terrifying ordeal for a lady in a bikini who’s cornered by a flash-freeze wave, leading Jake and Max to believe that President Palma (Andy Garcia) might be plotting a planet-wide attack of hellish weather–a “geostorm,” if you will–in order to impede Dutch Boy’s upcoming transfer of ownership from America to “the world.”

Annual Professional Commentary on the Oscar Nominations (2018 edition)

Posted in2017, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blog

GetOut-FeatureArt

by Bill Chambers In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve yet to see three of the major Academy Award™ contenders, Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, or Phantom Thread. Fortunately, they’ve all been discussed on Twitter with the fanatical zeal of that machine that stuffs corn down a duck’s gullet to make foie gras, so I felt I could bluff my way through this year’s scorecard. I for one look forward to enjoying Michael Stuhlbarg’s Call Me By Your Name monologue once I’ve forgotten how good it’s supposed to be.

The Foreigner (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo

Posted in2017, 2018, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, China, DVD, Jackie Chan, Thriller, UK

Foreigner1

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jackie Chan, Pierce Brosnan
screenplay by David Marconi, based on the novel The Chinaman by Stephen Leather
directed by Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw Martin Campbell’s The Foreigner, based on Stephen Leather’s novel The Chinaman, showcases the great, the incomparable, Jackie Chan as a grief-stricken man with a Special Forces past, galvanized into action when an IRA bomb kills his only, and last, daughter in a chichi London retail block. Having failed in his attempts to bribe London officials for names, Chan’s Quan, restaurateur/owner of The Happy Peacock, focuses his attentions on former IRA/Sinn Fein leader Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan). Quan terrorizes the terrorists, stakes them out at Hennessy’s farmhouse/fortress, and generally makes life miserable for everyone until he finds the people responsible for his daughter’s death. It’s a role that Liam Neeson would have played had there not been a recent hue and cry over yellowface and whitewashing, and so Chan, in the twilight of his action career, is forced into somewhat thankless service in a film that wants to be more like The Fourth Protocol than like Police Story. The Foreigner isn’t a great film, but it’s an interesting one for all its mediocrity.

The Road Movie (2017)

Posted in2017, 2018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Documentary, Russia, Theatrical

Theroadmovie

**½/****
directed by Dmitrii Kalashnikov

by Alice Stoehr Dashboard-mounted cameras are surveillance tools. They can prove who’s at fault in an accident, counter insurance scams, and record run-ins with the police; in the corruption-riddled nation of Russia especially, they’ve become widespread as legal safeguards. But the footage they capture can also double as entertainment. For what, in the whole history of moviegoing, has stimulated a viewer’s lizard brain better than a car crash? In The Road Movie, documentarian Dmitrii Kalashnikov has compiled dozens of clips shot by his countrymen on dashcams and uploaded to video-hosting websites. Their lengths range from a few seconds to a few minutes, and the events they document are unpredictable, but they all share the same vantage point: gazing through a windshield onto the road. The director’s input is subtle. He’s present mostly in the curation and arrangement of the videos, with signs of trimming here and there. Kalashnikov achieves a seamless flow that keeps the film’s 70 minutes from growing monotonous. So, for example, during one stretch a cloud of smoke pours from a burning bus; runaway horses block a car’s progress through the snow; then a driver ricochets off a snowbank and right into oncoming traffic. Kalashnikov doesn’t impose any context on them, so that task falls to the vehicles’ occupants, whose faces usually go unseen and whose subtitled chatter is only sporadically relevant to the scene in the road.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Posted in2017, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

Br20492Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana De Armas, Jared Leto
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is oblique without inspiring contemplation, less a blank slate or a Rorschach than an expository nullity. It’s opaque. There are ideas here that are interesting and inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick source material, but they’ve all been worked through in better and countless iterations also inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick. The best sequel to Blade Runner is Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, with a long sidelong glance at Under the Skin, perhaps–and Her, too. All three films are referenced in Blade Runner 2049 without their relative freshness or, what is it, yearning? There aren’t any questions left for Villeneuve’s picture, really, just cosmological, existential kōans of the kind thrown around 101 courses taught by favourite professors and at late-night coffee shops and whiskey bars. Yet as that, and only that, Blade Runner 2049 is effective, even brilliant. It’s a tremendous adaptation of a Kafka novel (a couple of them), about individuals without an identity in tension against a faceless system intent on keeping it that way. It has echoes of I Am Legend in the suggestion that the future doesn’t belong to Man, as well as echoes of Spielberg’s A.I. and its intimate autopsy of human connection and love, but it lacks their sense of discovery, of surprise, ultimately of pathos. This is a film about whimpers.

It (2017) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

It (2017) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Posted in****/****, 2017, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Stephen King

It: Chapter One
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Jaeden Lieberher, Wyatt Oleff, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Bill Skarsgård
screenplay by Chase Palmer & Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw There’s a girl, Beverly (Sophia Lillis), she must be around thirteen or so, she’s standing in front of a wall of tampons at the drugstore, trying to make a decision on her own because her dad (Stephen Bogaert) is alone, and a creep, you know, a little scary in how he keeps asking her if she’s still his “little girl.” So she has to do this by herself, even though it’s embarrassing–but she’s doing it. The next aisle over, a few boys, they call themselves “The Losers” because why not, everyone else does, are gathering medical supplies to help the new kid, Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), who’s been cut up pretty bad by bully Henry (Nicholas Hamilton). They need a distraction because they don’t have enough money to pay, so Bevvie provides one, and now she’s a “Loser,” too. I read Stephen King’s It in September of 1986, when I was thirteen. Thirteen exactly the age of its heroes in the “past” of the book, the flashback portion that’s paralleled with the kids, as adults, called back to the Derry, ME of their youth, where they had forgotten that, once upon a time, they fought a thing and won. There is nothing better when you’re thirteen than Stephen King. It was my favourite book for a while, although I didn’t entirely understand why. I think I might now. Better, I believe Andy Muschietti, director of the underestimated Mama, and his team of three screenwriters, Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman, understand that what works about It isn’t the monster, but the fear of childhood as it metastasizes into the fear of adulthood–and how those two things are maybe not so different after all.

The Post (2017)

Posted in2017, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Spielberg, Theatrical

Thepost2017

**/****
starring Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Paulson, Bob Odenkirk
written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Two scenes. The first a posh dinner where Spielberg subtly changes the field of focus to show that the ostensible star of this show, WASHINGTON POST publisher Kay Graham (Meryl Streep), is listening in on a conversation recklessly shared in her presence. (It’s at once a subtle presentation of gender dynamics and a master class in visual storytelling.) The second a shot of Graham descending the steps in slow-motion to rapturous, feminine approval following a Supreme Court victory. Both are vintage Spielberg, the best technical filmmaker the medium has ever produced and a big giant, sentimental, cotton-headed ninny-muggins who can’t leave the audience to their own devices and doesn’t have the muscle to end things on a down note. When he manages one, his films are nigh well perfection. When he doesn’t–and he hasn’t, really, since Munich or maybe Catch Me If You Can–his films are 90% the best thing you’ve ever seen and 10% the worst. That’s good enough for most. For me, it’s the fantastic six-course feast that ends when you find a cockroach in the flan.

“The 50 Best Films of 2017” by Walter Chaw

Posted in2017, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

50bestof2017

There’s one good thing that came out of the first year of the Trump presidency, just one: this realization that what we had always indulged in terms of masculine misbehaviour is dangerous and vile. The entertainment industry, the lowest arm of which gave us Trump, took the brunt of the new “wokeness,” almost as though it were taking responsibility for birthing something like Trump by enacting a purge. It’s not over. One can only hope the enablers are next–the ones who looked the other way or silently helped normalize a flesh tax for entrance into the realm. Change has to be more than lip-service and the now-familiar tone-deaf apology for narcissism and incomprehension. I could go deeper here about my personal dismay, sense of betrayal, rage, disgust…and I want to–but men have been talking over women about their experiences for long enough.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

Posted in2017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical

Jumanji2

*½/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan
screenplay by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers and Scott Rosenberg & Jeff Pinker, based on the book Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg
directed by Jake Kasdan

by Walter Chaw Inexplicably named after a Guns N' Roses song, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (henceforth Jumanji 2) is a deeply problematic film that castrates its smartest ideas in order to please the broadest possible audience on opening weekend before dragging itself off somewhere to show up in a Redbox in a few months' time. Start with Kevin Hart–reunited with his Central Intelligence co-star, Dwayne Johnson–playing a porter, essentially, in a jungle adventure. Which, you know…what the actual fuck? I'm sure it means well, and Hart's threadbare shtick of being short and put-upon certainly fits the situation, but there's opportunity here, should director Jake Kasdan have chosen to take it, for Hart to comment on how degrading it is for a star of his stature to be appearing in a movie as Bagger Vance. He doesn't seem to notice there's baggage related to his playing a character who essentially carries a bag and hands weapons to the hero. He complains about it, though mostly he complains about not being able to run very fast and having one of his avatar's weaknesses be pound cake.

Dunkirk (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

Posted in2017, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, DVD, France, Netherlands, UK, War

Dunkirk1

*½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Tom Hardy
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw The bits of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk that are good are so good. The bits of it that are bad are just awful. I’m a Nolan fan. The only films of his I don’t like are his remake of Insomnia and his much-lauded Inception, which is so emptily pretentious that it creates a vortex in the middle of the room and sucks the air right out of it. Though a lot of people accused Interstellar of doing that, there’s a real heart in there. It’s a bad science-fiction movie, but it’s a great movie about fathers and daughters. (Not unlike Contact.) In other words, I have defended Nolan against charges of his being all of empty spectacle. I think his brand of operatic proselytizing works exactly right for the Batman character, who does the same and has the same sense of self-worth and wounded entitlement. I think The Prestige is a nasty, ugly, fantastic piece of genre fiction. Dunkirk is like a cornball version of Memento; that is, a Memento that is neither a noir nor a down film but just as much of an endurance test. Also, it’s puffed-up full of itself, and it’s about one of the most well-told tales of British pluck in WWII. It’s going to win many awards because the people who give awards generally reward movies like this. It’s like an adaptation of a Silver Age Amazing War Tales comic book.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

Posted in2017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

Lastjedi

Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
***/****
starring Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Benicio Del Toro
written and directed by Rian Johnson

by Walter Chaw I wrestled for a long time with this review. Not what I would write but whether I should write it at all. I consider director Rian Johnson to be a friend. He’s kind, smart, true, and unaffected despite having been handed the reins to the most revered American mythology–save for becoming somehow more humble during the course of it. In the middle of a period in which everyone in the business, it seems, is being outed as a cad, Rian is something like hope that there are good and decent men left. Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (hereafter The Last Jedi) is every inch his movie. It’s about hope, see, and hope is the word that’s repeated most often in his script. By the end of it, he suggests that hope can even grow from salted earth. It’s a beautifully-rendered image as open, guileless-unto-corny, and genuine as Rian is. I don’t love everything in the film, but I do love Rian and The Last Jedi as a whole. In a franchise this venerated and valuable, it’s ballsy as fuck that he decided to do his own thing and that Disney let him. Now they’ve decided to invest another $600M or so in letting him do his own thing some more.

Blood Feast (1963) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1960s, 2017, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Thriller

Bloodfeast1

BLOOD FEAST
*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B+
starring William Kerwin, Mal Arnold, Connie Mason, Scott H. Hall
written by A. Louise Downe
directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis

SCUM OF THE EARTH (1963)
**/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C
starring William Kerwin, Allison Louise Downe (as Vickie Miles), Sandra Sinclair, Mal Arnold
written and directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis (as Lewis H. Gordon)

by Bryant Frazer One among very few genuinely terrible films that are also justly famous, Blood Feast is the oft-cited progenitor of a certain strain of American cinema: the slasher film–or, more specifically, the splatter movie. Conceived by the briefly prolific, ultra-low-budget director Herschell Gordon Lewis (who will be forever known as the Godfather of Gore)–along with producer David F. Friedman–as an alternative to the commercially competitive genre of cheap-and-easy nudie flicks, the splatter movie was at the time even more disreputable than the soft porn film, ramping up the T&A with a new women-in-peril component. Gory murder scenes combined fake human blood and real animal entrails to sickening effect. Blood Feast is venerated by gorehounds and has a “so bad it’s good” reputation among horror buffs, but what’s really breathtaking about it is its shameless demonstration that, in the grand cinematic scheme, artistic merit, cultural influence, and commercial success have precious little to do with each other.

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Posted in2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

Threebillboards

½*/****
starring Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Peter Dinklage
written and directed by Martin McDonagh

by Walter Chaw There are three young women in Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (hereafter Three Billboards)–four if you include Abbie Cornish as Woody Harrelson’s twenty-years-his-junior wife–and two of them (or three) are absolute fucking idiots and the third was raped while dying and then set on fire with gasoline. As a man who has been told often lately that it’s not his place to talk about these things, I’ll leave it at that. I didn’t think it was funny when the 19-year-old girl (Samantha Weaving) dating the abusive shit-fuck ex-husband (John Hawkes) of our anti-heroine, Mildred (Frances McDormand), is used as an object of derision/tension-breaker, and I didn’t think it was funny when secretary Pamela (Kerry Condon) is treated identically before getting punched in the face as her exit from the film. (I’m not mentioning the girl Mildred kicks in the crotch because the trailer spoiled it.) I also have a hard time with a scene where Cornish’s Anne berates Mildred for something she knows very well didn’t happen (or should know, anyway), which just goes on and on in the McDonagh fashion. Maybe it’s that there’s this cast of actors here whom I’ve loved, almost without exception, in everything I’ve seen them in and now they’re suddenly all terrible in exactly the same way. It doesn’t take talent to make a bad movie, but it takes a lot of talent to make a movie that’s bad like this. Or maybe a lot of arrogance. McDonagh, to his credit, has been doing it since the beginning–a real auteur.

ICYMI (11/24/17)

Posted in2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog
Opening this Thanksgiving weekend in select cities is Joe Wright's Winston Churchill drama Darkest Hour, starring Gary Oldman and a Costco tub of latex. And don't miss Greta Gerwig's solo directorial debut Lady Bird, which has been quietly expanding into more theatres. Our own Walter Chaw covered both films at this year's Telluride.