FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Night Porter (1974) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 28, 20151970s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Italy, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Nightporter1

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti
screenplay by Liliana Cavani and Italo Moscati
directed by Liliana Cavani

by Bryant Frazer The Night Porter is one of the most bizarre psychodramas in the history of film, using the Holocaust as a dreamy, abstract backdrop for a toxic romance between a former SS officer (Dirk Bogarde) and the “little girl” (Charlotte Rampling) he isolated, humiliated, and raped in a Nazi concentration camp. If that sounds absolutely outrageous, that was surely part of the design. This wasn’t Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS or another in the short-lived cycle of Nazi-themed exploitation pictures. This was Italian director Liliana Cavani’s first English-language feature, and Bogarde and Rampling were English-language stars. In order to recoup, The Night Porter would need to be provocative. Cavani delivered on that score. European critics are said to have taken the movie’s sociopolitical context seriously, but upon arrival in New York its outré imagery generated a mix of critical scorn and mockery that, ironically, helped earn it big returns at the box office. (Vincent Canby’s pan deriding it as “romantic pornography” was highlighted in the advertising.) If you know nothing else about the film, you probably know its signature image–Rampling, wearing black leather gloves and an SS officer’s cap, her bare breasts framed by the suspenders holding up a pair of baggy pinstriped trousers, tossing a Mona Lisa smile at the camera. That key art has kept The Night Porter in demand for more than forty years now, from arthouses and VHS tapes to DVD and now Blu-ray releases under the Criterion imprimatur.

Looney Tuesdays – “Dough Ray Me-ow” (1948)

January 27, 20151940s, 2015, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Looney Tunes, Short Films

***/****directed by Arthur Davis by Bill Chambers When Bob Clampett left Termite Terrace in 1946, his unit was assigned to Arthur Davis, who had years of experience behind him as the industry's first in-betweener (the person who draws the steps that get a pose from point A to point B) as well as a director in his own right, having helmed a number of cartoons for Screen Gems, where he worked closely with the great Frank Tashlin. (The two migrated to Warner Bros. together.) But Davis's name never became synonymous with Looney Tunes like so many of his colleagues' did,…

Lucy (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 21, 20152014, 2015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, France, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Lucy1

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C
starring Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked, Choi Min-Sik
written and directed by Luc Besson

by Walter Chaw I recall Luc Besson confessing that his The Fifth Element was based on an idea he’d had as a child; I’m going to wager the same is true of his dreadful Lucy. It’s a pre-pubescent boy’s fantasy of cool: a mash of silly pop-science buoying a beautiful woman’s mutation from impossible party girl into deity through the agency of stem-cell-related drug abuse. The good news is that South Korean superstar Choi Min-Sik (Oldboy) gets a mainstream American debut in a juicy role that nonetheless feels like a wasted opportunity (see: Beat Takeshi in Johnny Mnemonic). The bad news is Lucy is prurient pap that pup-critics will declare proof of “vulgar auteurism,” no matter the redundancy and ignorance of the term itself. Perhaps fitting, then, that the only defense of a movie this obnoxious and wilfully dumb is a term and movement founded on the same principles. I’ve defended Besson in the past–I’m an unapologetic admirer of Leon/The Professional and The Messenger (and Danny the Dog, which he produced, is a peerless statement on the relationship between Western and Asian action stars). But Lucy is reductive, sub-La femme Nikita effluvia that takes a premise niftily played with in Ted Chiang’s beyond-brilliant 1991 short story “Understand” and grinds it into a grey paste.

Looney Tuesdays – “Honey’s Money” (1962)

January 20, 20151960s, 2015, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Looney Tunes, Short Films

**½/****directed by Friz Freleng by Bill Chambers Napoleonic quickdraw Sam--who went by several aliases, such as Chilkoot Sam, Seagoin' Sam, and, most popularly, Yosemite Sam--was story man Mike Maltese's burlesque of the Missouri-born Isadore "Friz" Freleng, who appeared often as the butt of in-jokes in Warner cartoons, some of which Freleng himself made. Freleng subsequently became the character's custodian, and he was the only one foolhardy enough to give this most hostile and venal of Bugs Bunny's adversaries a solo outing, rising to the challenge not by neutering Sam, per se, but rather by identifying Bugs as essentially extraneous in…

American Sniper (2014)

January 16, 20152014, 2015, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical, War

***/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Kyle Gallner, Luke Grimes
screenplay by Jason Hall, based on the book by Chris Kyle
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda After delivering the first funereal jukebox musical in Jersey Boys just last summer, Clint Eastwood returns to better-fitting material with American Sniper, his most muscular and dramatically charged work in years, for whatever that’s worth. The common thinking about Eastwood these days–at least, outside the critical circle that deems his every tasteful composition and mild camera movement a classical masterstroke–is that his internal compass for choosing projects has been off for a while, making him susceptible to the bad taste of undistinguished screenwriters. What’s interesting about American Sniper, which works from a dicey script by Jason Hall that’s always in danger of becoming either a rote action thriller meted out in shootouts or a rote antiwar melodrama about how veterans never quite make it back home, is how obstinately it resists this narrative. Contrary to the vision of Eastwood as an efficient director prone to gliding on autopilot, American Sniper shows him forging something tough and difficult to grasp out of what might have been on-the-nose material.

Annual Professional Commentary on the Oscar Nominations (2015 edition)

January 15, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blog

Or: The Unxpected Ignorance of Virtue

by Bill Chambers

Picture
“American Sniper” Clint Eastwood, Robert Lorenz, Andrew Lazar, Bradley Cooper and Peter Morgan, Producers = yay
“Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)” Alejandro G. Iñárritu, John Lesher and James W. Skotchdopole, Producers = barf
“Boyhood” Richard Linklater and Cathleen Sutherland, Producers = okay
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” Wes Anderson, Scott Rudin, Steven Rales and Jeremy Dawson, Producers = ugh
“The Imitation Game” Nora Grossman, Ido Ostrowsky and Teddy Schwarzman, Producers = whatevs
“Selma” Christian Colson, Oprah Winfrey, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, Producers = yay
“The Theory of Everything” Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Lisa Bruce and Anthony McCarten, Producers = lol
“Whiplash” Jason Blum, Helen Estabrook and David Lancaster, Producers = lol

Annabelle (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 14, 20152014, 2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Tony Amendola, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Gary Dauberman
directed by John R. Leonetti

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Some kind of as-yet-unclassified spin-off/rip-off hybrid, Annabelle is a prequel to The Conjuring‘s prologue that recycles said prologue for the purpose of reacquainting viewers with its title character, even though Annabelle is in fact an origin story. The Conjuring, of course, purports to be based on the actual exploits of the paranormal researchers fictionalized in Poltergeist, which was shot by Matthew F. Leonetti, brother of The Conjuring‘s DP John R. Leonetti, who moves into the director’s chair with Annabelle, a movie that arguably owes less to The Conjuring (despite labouring to evoke it) than to the malicious clown doll from Poltergeist. That low-frequency thrum you sometimes hear on its soundtrack is Hollywood getting ready to fold in on itself.

Looney Tuesdays – “Bunny Hugged” (1951)

January 13, 20151950s, 2015, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Looney Tunes, Short Films

***/****directed by Charles M. Jones by Bill Chambers Rabbit Punch's simian pugilist "Battling McGook" returns in Bunny Hugged as wrestler "The Crusher," such a fearsome opponent in the ring that his challenger--Gorgeous George parody "Ravishing Ronald," who's introduced with a bang on the J. Arthur Rank gong (suggesting a subtext of British politesse vs. American might) and hilariously announced as "a denatured boy"--is rolled out on a platter. When the Crusher uses RR's hairnet to turn him into a human punching bag, mascot Bugs Bunny ("It's a living") takes matters into his own hands. The prototype for a certain pyramid-shaped…

Looney Tuesdays: “The Big Snooze” (1946)

January 6, 2015****/****, 1940s, 2015, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Looney Tunes, Short Films

****/**** by Bill Chambers Given Bob Clampett's less-than-amicable departure from Warner Bros., not only is his final cartoon for the studio, The Big Snooze, a particularly loaded one, it also suggests a key influence on the evolution of Freddy Krueger's mythology. When Elmer Fudd tires of Bugs Bunny repeatedly steering him off the edge of a cliff in a cartoon-within-this-cartoon, he tears up his contract with Jack Warner and dances on the confetti. The delicate ecology of Looney Tunes thus upset (what is the hunted without a hunter?), Bugs disrupts Elmer's life of retirement by coating his pleasant dreams with…

FFC’s Best of ’14

January 1, 20152014, 2015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

by Walter Chaw Two things in 2014. Well, one in 2013 and one in 2014. The first was the Telluride Film Festival, which occurs on Labour Day Weekend and which I attended for the first time in a decade in 2013. The second was a conversation I had with a friend over Skype earlier this year, around the time of my 41^st birthday. They led me, those two things, to change my life over from one of quiet desperation to one of perpetual stimulation and challenge. I left a major corporation and a job that provided security and some measure of stability to become general manager of the Alamo Drafthouse in my home state of Colorado. As someone who tends towards depression, it’s hardly hyperbole to say that it was a decision that probably saved my life.

Looney Tuesdays: “Slick Hare” (1947)

December 30, 20141940s, 2014, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Looney Tunes, Short Films

**/****directed by I. Freleng by Bill Chambers Old Hollywood may possess a timeless quality that prevents Slick Hare and others like it (Hollywood Steps Out, Hollywood Daffy, even 8 Ball Bunny) from becoming an instant relic à la the Michael Jordan-fronted Space Jam, but celebrity cameos in animation nonetheless have a habit of accelerating the ripening process. Gags like Ray Milland paying a tab with a typewriter--and getting change in the form of mini-typewriters--straddle the line between obsolescence and posterity, today only earning laughs among the movie-minded while also presenting a valuable snapshot of the pop-cultural consciousness circa 1947. Thing…

Unbroken (2014)

December 24, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Coen Brothers, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, War

*/****
starring Jack O'Connell, Domhnall Gleeson, Miyavi, Garrett Hedlund
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson
directed by Angelina Jolie

by Walter Chaw I genuinely believe that Angelina Jolie means well. She's like the distaff Sean Penn. Unlike Sean Penn, she probably shouldn't direct more movies. Jolie does her research by going to the places she makes movies about. She cares. She adopts children from those places. She takes embarrassing publicity photos with her subjects, sometimes, that indicate not malicious self-promotion, but rather an unaffected, Costner-esque surprise and wonder. She's growing in her morality before our very eyes, and it's great, but her second time up to the plate, Unbroken, is naive and simpering. The only thing remotely interesting about it is that its subject, Olympic athlete and WWII POW Louis Zamperini (Jack O'Connell), after getting tortured by the Japanese for a while, decided post-war to embrace Billy Graham and forgive his torturers. That bit, the interesting bit, is left to a few lengthy end-title cards. It's sort of like reading the Old Testament and calling it good and, um, wanting to post the Ten Commandments in schools instead of the Sermon on the Mount. Never mind.

The Gambler (2014)

December 24, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Jessica Lange
screenplay by William Monahan, based on the screenplay by James Toback
directed by Rupert Wyatt

by Angelo Muredda "The only way out is all in," teases the dishonest poster for The Gambler, a safe adaptation of Karel Reisz and James Toback's 1974 original that would surely bore its own hero. It's hard to say who's most at fault for turning Toback's semi-autobiographical moral tale of a failed author turned debt-ridden professor into such easygoing pap–the antithesis of all-in. The contenders run from Toback's own smug paean to male irascibility in the original to Rupert Wyatt's slick commercial style, as forgettable as it is watchable. But it's tempting to put all your money on William Monahan. Oscar-certified out of the gate for The Departed's heavy philosophical nothings and largely unheralded since (except by Ridley Scott apologists), Monahan has apparently had some time to think about what it means for a serious man with serious thoughts to not quite live up to his potential. The Gambler becomes the unwitting dumping ground for all he's learned, a redemptive character study of a shitty guy who accepts congratulations for every last baby step he takes into adulthood.

Into the Woods (2014)

December 24, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Johnny Depp
screenplay by James Lapine, based on the musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine
directed by Rob Marshall

by Walter Chaw Into the Woods looks exactly like what a legendary Sondheim production would look like were it adapted by that idiot who made Memoirs of a Geisha into a Vegas drag space-opera dragged through a scrim of horrific Occidental Orientalism. (Well, at least to the extent that Memoirs wasn’t that already.) It’s gaudy in every pejorative connotation of the word, packed to the rafters with distracting, stupid, show-offy clutter of the sort that people accumulate when they fear they don’t have substance without it. I rather liked Marshall’s adaptation of Chicago, strangely enough, which speaks more to the un-fuck-up-ability of Kander, Ebb, and Fosse than it does to any latent modesty in director Marshall. Call it beginner’s luck, perhaps, of the kind that has long since dissolved. Marshall has already exceeded all expectations for bloated suck by somehow making the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise more difficult to endure than it had been by the third film. I’d challenge that you could swap Into the Woods out for a print of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and no one would even frickin’ notice. It’s this year’s Les Misérables.

The Vanishing (1988) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 23, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Netherlands, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

click any image to enlarge

Spoorloos
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege, Gwen Eckhaus
screenplay by Tim Krabbé and George Sluizer, based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé
directed by George Sluizer

by Bryant Frazer What scares you the most? If you chew on that question for a while, then imagine a narrative that gets you to that terrible place, your story might look a little like the one told by The Vanishing (Spoorloos). Completed in 1988, this downbeat thriller didn't reach the U.S. until a couple of years later, when it coincidentally landed in New York within weeks of The Silence of the Lambs. The Vanishing isn't, strictly speaking, a serial-killer movie like Silence, though it shares that film's deep interest in the psychopathology of its villain. Like a good (and by "good," I mean "lurid") true-crime book, its interest is similarly piqued by the painful, quotidian details of an abhorrent crime.

Looney Tuesdays: “Little Red Riding Rabbit” (1944)

December 23, 2014****/****, 1940s, 2014, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Looney Tunes, Short Films

****/****directed by I. Freleng by Bill Chambers The Shrek movies dream of being this renegade. Little Red Riding Hood (a brilliant Bea Benaderet, using a halting squeal that suggests the '40s equivalent of uptalk) is on her way to Grandma's house with a picnic lunch: Bugs Bunny. The Big Bad Wolf gets there first, of course, though he has to kick other wolves out of Grandma's bed. (Where's Grandma? "Working [the] swing shift at Lockheed." Wartime audiences must've howled, pardon the pun.) When Red arrives, the Wolf can't hustle her out fast enough in his desire to eat Bugs, and…

Vengeance is Mine (1979) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 17, 20141970s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Japan, The Criterion Collection

click any image to enlarge

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Ken Ogata, Mayumi Ogawa, Mitsuko Baisho, Frankie Sakai
screenplay by Masaru Baba, based on the novel by Ryuzo Saki
directed by Shohei Imamura

by Walter Chaw It would be tempting to say that nature is appalled by all the terrible things Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) does. Just after Enokizu hammers an old man to death in a garden and takes his stuff, Nature erupts in a windstorm–furious witness, it seems: a tempest as analogy for the rough gales driving the mysterious tides of this murderer's soul. Yet Shohei Imamura has something else entirely on his mind. Vengeance is Mine is about the fallacy of a moral universe. It's not that it believes there's no reason for atrocity; rather, it believes there's no definition for atrocity. Imamura is the spiritual brother of guys like Werner Herzog and Terrence Malick. The questions he asks aren't about ethics and morality, they're about all the ways that men lie to themselves about being bound by ethics and morality, only to transgress those boundaries they create, whether they be bans on religion, law, or philosophy. They're not evil. They can't help it. No one can.

“Santa vs. the Puppies vs. Monster Part Two”

December 17, 20142014, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Comedy, Short Films

by Bill Chambers Another self-serving post to notify that the long-delayed sequel to "The Monster Show"'s 2012 Christmas episode, animated by yours truly, finally went live in glorious HD earlier this week. Truth be told I came close to crediting myself as Alan Smithee on this one, but we persevered through so many false starts it'd be perverse to hide (from) it. FYI, it'd probably be even harder to follow this episode without seeing the original, so I've included links to both. Get it before cyber terrorists threaten us to pull it!

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

December 16, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, New Zealand, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo Del Toro, based on the book by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

by Walter Chaw During the first ten minutes of the first day of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (hereafter Hobbit 3), Smaug dies. I don’t intend this to be a spoiler, because, you know, the book’s been around for almost as long as this movie runs, and Rankin & Bass already adapted it (somehow squeezing Tolkien’s slim volume into one 77-minute animated flick)–but if you don’t read and live under a rock: the dragon dies. This acts as prologue. A better prologue would recap what the hell happened in the first two Hobbits; I appear to have scrubbed them completely from the ol’ memory bank in a heroic act of self-defense. This prologue, by the way, is the key moment in the book, meaning that although the CGI fireworks never let up, the rest of Hobbit 3 is the decline in action to the conclusion.

Looney Tuesdays: “Gorilla My Dreams” (1948)

December 16, 20141940s, 2014, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Looney Tunes, Short Films

**½/****directed by Robert McKimson by Bill Chambers Bugs Bunny floats in a barrel to the ape colony of Bingzi-Bangzi, where Mrs. Gorilla, in the throes of baby envy, mistakes him for a delivery from the stork. A sympathetic Bugs goes along with it, but her husband Gruesome--an obvious relative of Bunny Hugged's The Crusher--is vexed by the impostor, and opens up a can of whup-ass on "Junior." Although Bugs's pantomime of a gorilla brings down the house (Robert McKimson's paunchier Bugs really lends itself to the gag), ultimately the central conflict is too esoteric to sustain a 7-minute cartoon, as…

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