Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

Posted in2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Superhero, Theatrical

Batmanvsuperman

**/****
starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg
written by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw This is what I know: that the first time I saw Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, a friend had to acquire it from some disreputable dealer and send it to me, unmarked, in a brown box. When I watched it, I thought to myself that the United States would never suffer something like this in the popular conversation. Not long after 9/11, The Hunger Games became a YA phenomenon capped with a run of blockbuster adaptations. I know that immediately after 9/11, witnesses on the scene could only compare it to something they would have seen in a movie. I know that the United States started remaking the nihilistic horror films that Japan had been churning out for decades, and I know that this is because after 9/11, we became the second modern, industrialized nation to experience the effects of weapons of mass destruction detonated over a civilian area. The other thing we had in common is the arrogance to believe that something about our island status left us immune to that type of offense; I know that most other nations on the planet don’t live under any such illusions. If we accept the premise that film, as all art, is sociology and history, then 9/11 is the inciting event that brought us closer as a culture, cinematically, to Japan. The myth of indomitability, whether it be that your Emperor is the descendant of the “living god” (rescinded in 1946 at the request of Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur) or that you are the island “nation” of Manhattan and your priapic symbols of financial power stood as gatekeepers to the world, suddenly dispelled by an alien power. Poof. Justlikethat. And suddenly you’re a citizen of a different place where gods are capricious and maybe not on your side, and terrible things happen for no reason. The world didn’t get more dangerous, the mainland just lost its virginity.

Jack’s Back (1988) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

Posted in1980s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Jacksback1Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring James Spader, Cynthia Gibb, Jim Haynie, Robert Picardo
written and directed by Rowdy Herrington

by Walter Chaw A quintessential dirty ’80s thriller, Rowdy Herrington’s frankly fantastic Jack’s Back follows a Jack the Ripper copycat killer circa 1988 who, it appears, is interrupted during his last murder by earnest, likeable med student John (James Spader), who’s quickly dispatched for his erudition. When I saw Jack’s Back on VHS in ’88, I was shocked by the brutality of John’s murder and that it happens about fifteen minutes into the film. Rick (also Spader), John’s twin, has a dream of his brother’s murder and appears on the scene–to the consternation of John’s grieving coworkers–to investigate the circumstances of his death. It’s a fascinating conceit, or a silly one made fascinating by Herrington’s execution of it and by a dual performance as subtle and compelling, in its way, as Jeremy Irons’s turn in Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers from the same year. Spader manages the neat trick of being two different people who aren’t two easily distinguishable types. You see the rebellion nascent in the “good” brother; you see the vulnerability in the “bad” one. Silly to say, maybe, but you see elements of one in the other. Spader’s interactions with Cynthia Gibb, playing John’s co-worker at a free clinic, are radically different from brother to brother, though not theatrically so. More than a thriller, Jack’s Back is a brilliant character study.

Allegiant (2016)

Posted in2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

Allegiant

The Divergent Series: Allegiant
½*/****
starring Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Jeff Daniels, Naomi Watts
screenplay by Noah Oppenheim and Adam Cooper & Bill Collage
directed by Robert Schwentke

by Walter Chaw Remember those gauzy, halcyon days of youth spent playing “imagination” with your buddies on the schoolyard? Starting nowhere, ending nowhere, structureless? Child-development gurus would say something about how formless mucking-about is the way we first begin to socialize. Dungeons & Dragons made it into something like a communal form of spontaneous storytelling while offering a degree of gameplay and structure. Now Allegiant–the third or fourth (who knows?) film in the Divergent series, based on the third- or fourth-generation YA spin-off trying to capitalize on the Hunger Games-cum-Twilight phenomenon of smushing sci-fi/fantasy together with tween angst–has arrived to make manifest the endless exposition of developmental social psychology. In this one, Tris (Shailene Woodley, with her constantly-surprised blankness) and Four (Theo James) find themselves in a dystopian Chicago, I think, except that later they’re taken to a place I believe is also Chicago, or at least Future O’Hare, thus as the characters repeatedly referred to “going to” Chicago, I was never for a moment not confused. I even checked Wikipedia, which confirmed for me that O’Hare is in Chicago. It is. Over the last few movies, which I’ve seen but don’t remember except as a confusion of several franchises identical in my mind, Tris and Four have apparently discovered they’re pawns in a game–A GAME, I tell you–involving their genes. THEIR GENES. It’s Aldous Huxley, don’t you get it?

Living in Oblivion (1995) – DVD|[20th Anniversary] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Satire, Scream/Shout! Factory

Lio1

***/****
DVD – Image B Sound B Extras B-
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, Danielle Von Zernick
written and directed by Tom DiCillo

by Walter Chaw A film carefully structured in three parts, Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion demands tired adjectives like “offbeat” and “quirky” while dancing dangerously close to hyperbole along the lines of “brilliant” and “incisive.” What it is, though, is its own beast–a meta-structure of dream sequences (the first two segments “are,” the third is “about”) concerning six takes of scene six–the devil’s number applied to the trials of filmmaking, including technical accidents, the egos of the stars, and behind-the-scenes relationships that threaten professionalism. With those plates spinning, DiCillo layers in elements of fantasy bleeding into reality (the second section ends with the oft-repeated scene sloughing into “reality,” then into dream), the final segment integrating spoof symbols (an apple, a little person) with a real symbol (the mother).

In the Heart of the Sea (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

In the Heart of the Sea (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2015, 2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disaster Movie, Drama, DVD

*/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Charles Leavitt, based on the book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
directed by Ron Howard

by Bill Chambers In the Heart of the Sea is Ron Howard’s water movie, just like Backdraft is his fire movie, Far and Away is his earth movie, and Apollo 13 is his air movie. It’s also his first fish movie since Splash, suggesting that Howard is retracing his steps in a career reboot that began with Rush, his first car movie since his directorial debut, Grand Theft Auto. But one waits for history to repeat itself with some sign of accrued wisdom beyond obvious markers like technical proficiency. In fact, in its show-off-iness and ersatz emotionalism, In the Heart of the Sea seems the less mature film next to Splash, which has a formal self-control and hints of real pathos despite a fantastical premise that sees a landlubber falling in love with a woman who’s secretly a mermaid. (It’s the first film to seize on Tom Hanks’s Jimmy Stewart quality, as well as the rare one to tap into his anger.) There’s hardly a genuine moment in In the Heart of the Sea, and a framing device only exacerbates the problem by adding another layer of dramatization to something that already plays like a big-budget History Channel re-enactment.

Knight of Cups (2016)

Posted in****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

Knightofcups

****/****
starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Wes Bentley
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups is an obvious companion piece to Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere and Fellini’s 8½, and a less obvious spiritual companion to the Coens’ Hail Caesar!, Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, and even Fosse’s All That Jazz. Its most direct influence is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, with Malick borrowing phrases entire from its text along with its sense of wandering, seeking, and the pilgrim meeting various incarnations of sin and redemption on the road to salvation. Malick, as has become his hallmark, places people against images of eternity. In Los Angeles, the only external nature he can find is the ocean, and so he sends his “Christian” (Bale), playing a film director named “Rick,” to the shore repeatedly with a succession of women who are incarnations of Bunyan’s “Evangelical” and “Faithful” and “Mercy,” including his wife (Cate Blanchett), whom he rejects and, if Malick follows form, who will be the centre of another story all her own. Rick wanders through streets, studio lots, highrise suites that are Bunyan’s City of Destruction and Vanity Fair and, in a sequence where one guide (Natalie Portman) reveals that she’s pregnant with either Rick’s child or her husband’s, Slough of Despond, before finally discovering peace of sorts alone in the Delectable Mountains of Joshua Tree.

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

10cloverfieldlane

***½/****
starring John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallagher Jr.
screenplay by Josh Campbell & Matt Stuecken and Damien Chazelle
directed by Dan Trachtenberg

by Walter Chaw I don't believe that art ever occurs in a vacuum. I believe that movies, no matter their relative quality, speak to the time in which they were created, eloquently or accidentally–sometimes both. In that context, Dan Trachtenberg's 10 Cloverfield Lane, the follow-up to Matt Reeves's badly-underestimated Cloverfield (which itself pairs with Spike Lee's 25th Hour as the best elegies for 9/11 New York (Reeves's film even more in some ways, in its emulation of Japan's kaiju cycle)), is about the way the frightening underbelly of paranoid American fanaticism has suddenly gained legitimacy and voice in the mainstream. When speaking mournfully of his estranged daughter and how his wife has taken her away from him, survivalist Howard (John Goodman) mutters that some people just can't understand what's in the best interest of their survival. He's shut himself in an underground bunker with the bunker's architect, Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), like some Egyptian Pharaoh, girding himself against an apocalypse that may or may not be personal. He's also "abducted" a young woman passing by, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), though Howard would say he saved her from the end of the world. His plan, see, is that the three of them wait out the fallout from whatever seismic event did or didn't happen, as a makeshift family. No touching.

The Guardian (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Guardian1

*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jenny Seagrove, Dwier Brown, Carey Lowell, Brad Hall
screenplay by Stephen Volk and Dan Greenburg and William Friedkin, based on the novel The Nanny by Greenburg
directed by William Friedkin

by Bryant Frazer The Guardian, made in 1990 as an apparent attempt to cash in on director William Friedkin’s reputation as the man behind The Exorcist, is one of those terrible movies by a powerful director working at the low ebb of his career. The wildest thing about The Exorcist–one of the greatest horror movies–is that despite its defining influence on his career, Friedkin has never shown much interest in horror. (That’s one of the things that makes The Exorcist work so well: Despite the requisite special-effects outlay required to depict demonic possession, on one level The Exorcist is just the story of a problem and the professionals who are dispatched to address it; on another level, it’s a family drama about a single parent dealing with adolescent rebellion.) So while it’s understandable that either Friedkin or the studio bankrolling The Guardian would see commercial potential in a return to genre filmmaking, any attempt at out-and-out horror was probably ill-fated from the start. That the story being attempted (loosely adapted from a novel by Dan Greenburg) was so very woolly–the supernatural villain the title references is a sexy, polymorphous druid who takes jobs as a live-in nanny to steal babies from their parents–would have been an advantage in, say, a potboiler out of Charles Band’s Empire Pictures. In the hands of a no-nonsense craftsman like Friedkin, alas, it was a blueprint for disaster.

Zootopia (2016)

Posted in2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Theatrical

Zootopia

***/****
screenplay by Jared Bush & Phil Johnston
directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush

by Walter Chaw Early on in Disney’s Zootopia, directed somehow by a triumvirate (Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush) from a screenplay by Bush and Phil Johnston, a baby fox declares that it would like to grow up to be an elephant. It even has an elephant hoodie; the creature idolizes, it appears, elephant culture. It gets a laugh. It’s worth the conversation to wonder what about this is funny. At its essence, the idea that something could grow to be something else is funny. It’s also funny because it knowingly, gently pokes fun at our culture of “you can be anything you want to be,” the source of more sometimes-murderous disappointment than any other child-rearing strategy endemic to the West. Astronaut? No problem. And Zootopia opens on a children’s pageant where a little animal solemnly declares that where in primordial times he would have been predator or prey, in civilized times, he has the choice to maybe be an astronaut, or an accountant. The third way this is funny is harsher, in that it begins to touch on the truism that there are certain traits you’re born with, and while that’s a no-brainer when it comes to the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s a tough thing for most proud Judeo-Christians to accept. We have hardwiring, see, and accepting that means there are a lot of other things we need to accept as well, almost none of them politically correct and all of them fraught with delicate dancing around the issue. Zootopia is complicated as hell.

Creed (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2015, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Sports, Stallone

Creedblu1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad
screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Aaron Covington
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I do. It’s not perfect. The love interest is underbaked and the fight choreography of the final match is unfortunately disjointed. But I love this movie–unconditionally, I guess. The story goes that Ryan Coogler, the young director of Fruitvale Station, pitched Sylvester Stallone on the idea of rebooting Rocky with Apollo Creed’s son. (Something the Indiana Jones series needs to do with a grown-up Short Round, by the way.) The auto-critical analysis of the film is that it’s essentially a father/son intrigue, which lends some insight into the Rocky/Mickey relationship of the original Rockys, and there are enough references to same to gratify the cultists. What I liked most about Stallone’s willingness to take a shot on a fresh idea from a minority perspective–this is the first instalment of one of his two venerable franchises not to spring from a Stallone-written script–is that it feeds into the idea of Stallone as an auteur maybe, a canny cultural anthropologist definitely. Every Rocky, every Rambo, is distinctly a product of its time. I don’t feel qualified to talk about this, but to the extent that I understand the theory, I’m sold.

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1960s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory

Braindie1

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Herb Evers, Virginia Leith, Leslie Daniel
screenplay by Joseph Green
directed by Joseph Green

by Bryant Frazer “I remember fire,” murmurs Jan Compton, a disembodied head resting in a surgical pan, at the end of the first act of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. The moment comes about 20 minutes into a movie that’s conspicuous in its cheapness (stiff performances, unconvincing sets, that particular lethargic pace that pads a Z-grade feature out to a bookable running time), and still it’s chilling. There’s a kind of poetry in the words–which refer to a car accident in the previous reel–that generates the shiver. “Burning,” she whispers to the mad scientist (her lover) who has preserved and reanimated her head. “Let me die. Let me die.” Naturally, he ignores her plea. And it’s the tension between her wishes and his actions that generates the horror in this technically inept but effectively weird fright show.

The Good Dinosaur (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2015, 2016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, Family, Pixar, Road Movie

Gooddino1

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He’s clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him “Spot” (he’s a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film’s final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space–as all great westerns are–between the old ways and the encroaching new. It’s far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

The Witch (2016)

Posted in****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

Thewitch

The VVitch
****/****
starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Nelson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw
written and directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw Robert Eggers’s The Witch details a young woman’s coming-of-age as a thing of wonder and, to her Puritanical community, an incalculable and infernal threat. It has analogs in any number of films dealing with female sexuality, unlocking avenues for critical dissection. It parallels Osgood Perkins’s extraordinary February, rhyming it in not just tone but denouement, too, as young girls dance with the devil literally and metaphorically, and find it good. It parallels Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders in its tale of budding sex and the surreal phantasmagoria that explodes in the imagination around such a thing. It parallels Park Chan-wook’s Stoker, which shares a scene of illicit bliss and similarly decodes the incestuous loathing coiled in the belly of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Speaking of Hitchcock, The Witch parallels The Birds, where the intrusion of a woman’s heat makes things odd. There’s a moment in The Birds where heroine Melanie Daniels is confronted by a group of women who accuse her of causing Nature to go weird, while in The Witch, a family alone in the American pre-colonial wilderness blames eldest daughter Tomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) for the same thing. In both cases, they’re right. The misfortune generally begins with menstruation or codes for the same–a blot of red on white cloth, a mention in The Witch that Tomasin has begun her period and thus should probably be sent to live with a different family as a servant in order to protect…well, not herself, anyway.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1940s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK, War

Colonelblimp3

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Anton Walbrook, Deborah Kerr, Roger Livesey, Roland Culver
written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

by Walter Chaw The prototype in many ways for Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, although lighthearted and easily mistaken for a romp, is an existential horror film that, for all the things it’s otherwise about, is most vitally about what it’s like to grow old. There’s a moment early on–when our hero, Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), realizes he’s let the love of his life marry his best friend–that clarifies exactly what the picture has on its mind. For the rest of the film, as the kingdom of his memories grows to a size that dwarfs modernity rushing past, Candy finds shades of the lost Edith (Deborah Kerr), his personal Lenore, resurfacing in the faces of young women the world over. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp understands that as one grows old, an entire village sprouts in the mind, full of beloved businesses and places that have long since disappeared, peopled by old flames and loved ones, dead or just vanished, but in any case never again to resume the form in which memory has frozen them. Though memorable for its technical brilliance, its Technicolor vibrancy, and its courageously sprung narrative structure, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp‘s ability to pinion the sadness, the loneliness, that experience carries with it is what makes the movie what it is. Life as a process of emotional attrition: Last man standing is cold comfort, indeed.

Deadpool (2016)

Posted in2016, Action, Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

Deadpool

**/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, T.J. Miller, Gina Carano
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
directed by Tim Miller

by Walter Chaw I get it. Deadpool is post-modern. It's absolutely aware of itself. It's The Cabin in the Woods. The primogenitor of Deadpool is Dennis Miller's '90s standup: sneering, smarmy, arch, and peppered with pop-culture references running the gamut from Ferris Bueller to Limp Bizkit to the fact that there are two Professor X's in Fox's X-Men franchise. Carted off to stand before the beloved X-Man, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) asks, "McAvoy or Stewart?" And an audience of savvy comic-book/film fans cheers because they've been recognized. It's the button rock stars push when they say, "Hello (wherever they are)!" at the beginning of a set. It announces that they are aware of the space they occupy, and legions of concertgoers make the devil horns and light their lighters in appreciation: "Yeah, man, you're here. In that you are correct." Deadpool is about recognizing itself for what it is and recognizing its audience for recognizing where they are (which is there, recognizing that their hero recognizes where he is). When Deadpool's alter ego, being wheeled into the place where he's going to be turned into Deadpool, begs them not to give him an animated green suit, well, you knew that Reynolds was disastrously the hero in Green Lantern, right? It's only the second time it's referenced. He also calls a little bald girl Sinead O'Connor twice, because it's hard to write jokes. He could have called her "Blue Sunshine," except the only thing Deadpool can't afford to be is smarter than its audience. Relax–it never is.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) [The Signature Collection] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in****/****, 1930s, 2016, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Romance

Snowwhite1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
story adaptation Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Richard, Earl Hurd, Merrill De Maris, Dorothy Ann Blank, Webb Smith
supervising director David Hand

by Bill Chambers Walt Disney was shooting for the moon with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, not just his first but the first animated feature. He of the Silly Symphony wanted it to have prestige, fostering an obsessive-compulsive streak within the studio that is curiously reflected in the film’s epic preoccupation with orderliness, cleanliness, and labour. It has the air of manifesto when one considers that of the eight songs on the soundtrack, two, “Whistle While You Work” and “Heigh-ho,” are about the satisfaction of work1 while a third, “Bluddle-Uddle-Um-Dum,” is a set of bathing instructions subtitled “The Dwarfs’ Washing Song.” In her unrelenting fastidiousness, Snow White reeks of self-portraiture (armchair Freuds might speculate on Snow White’s other qualities, such as her being so perfect as to drive the competition mad, as they apply to Disney, already an Ozymandian figure armed with multiple Academy awards by the time of production), and it’s because of this that her predilection for housework doesn’t feel like the typical chauvinism abundant in the Disney canon. When she scolds two squirrels for sweeping dirt under the carpet, it’s difficult not to hear it as an ethos.

Ghost Story (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Ghoststory2Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A+
starring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., John Houseman
screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen, based on the terrifying best-selling novel by Peter Straub
directed by John Irvin

by Walter Chaw Jack Cardiff’s reputation as a world-class cinematographer began, really, with the Archers, progressed through Hitchcock’s underestimated, and gorgeous, Under Capricorn (every inch as beautiful a film as Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and A Matter of Life and Death), and was maintained in collaborations with the likes of John Huston, Joe Mankiewicz, King Vidor, and Henry Hathaway. He did two films with John Irvin: the great Dogs of War, and this, 1981’s seedy, singularly unpleasant Ghost Story, which represents the final screen appearances of Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Melvyn Douglas. I think the biggest disappointment of the film is that it doesn’t look better, given Cardiff’s behind the camera. In fact, it looks like a TV movie (acts like one, too, as it happens); the possibilities of having Cardiff lens a classic ghost story in the gothic style are delicious and, until the last ten minutes or so, largely frustrated. Blame the picture’s settings, various brightly-lit exteriors and contemporary environments (office buildings, college campuses)–even when the movie is in a grand old house, our aged heroes’ Chow-duh Society huddled together in pools of shadow, scaring each other with spooky stories, the joke seems to be that someone is always turning on the lights.

Hail, Caesar! (2015)

Posted in****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Mystery, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical

Hailcaesar

Hail, Caesar!: A Tale of the Christ
****/****
starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes
written and directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Halfway through the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, studio head/fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin playing Jon Polito) stands against the opulent, grand entrance to his golden-age Hollywood movie studio and talks about the coming of the future. There’s a scene in a Chinese restaurant where someone pulls out a photograph of a mushroom cloud taken at a freshly-nuked Bikini Atoll and declares, solemnly, that it’s a picture of the future. There’s another scene where waves crash against a pair of rocks in a direct callback to Barton Fink, the Coens’ other golden-age Hollywood homage, outside the bachelor-pad mansion of Gene Kelly-type Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), who happens to be the head of an enclave of Communists (are there ten?) calling themselves “The Future.” The Coens at their best describe spiritual blight. They do it in a lot of ways, across multiple genres. Hail, Caesar! opens with Mannix, a real-life figure in Hollywood tangentially connected to George Reeves’s death (murder? Suicide? Who knows?), in a confessional just a day after his last confession and a day before his next. (“Really, it’s too much Eddie. You’re not that bad.”) Mannix–more fictional than actual, it should be noted, in exactly the same way that O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the most faithful adaptation of The Odyssey there ever was despite having almost no relationship to the literal text–indeed doesn’t seem all that bad when most of what he confesses is lying to his wife (Alison Pill) about quitting cigarettes. “It’s hard, Father.” And he cries. The movie is about spiritual blight, and the sin that Mannix is constantly trying to confess is that he doesn’t know what he believes. For me, the Coens are at their best when they tackle this spiritual blight through the prism of artists and their attempts to create. Every artist is a Frankenstein. Every work is a monster.

Zoolander (2001) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc (2016)

Posted in2000s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Satire

Zoolander2

**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BLU-RAY – Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Christine Taylor
screenplay by Drake Sather & Ben Stiller and John Hamburg
directed by Ben Stiller

by Walter Chaw Ben Stiller has a very particular genius for satirical imitation. When he says that he based Derek Zoolander on “some cross between Jason Priestly and Luke Perry,” one can be sure that the offspring is an uncomfortably dead-on collection of insouciant pouts, long blank stares, and dim-witted pronouncements. We know that Stiller is good at destroying celebrity; the bigger question is can an extended sketch featuring one of his burlesques sustain interest and consistently inspire laughter? The answer is “fitfully,” so, yes and no.