Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] – Even Dwarfs Started Small (1971)

July 29, 2014Posted in1970s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Werner Herzog, DVD, Esoterica, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

Evendwarfs2click any image to enlarge

Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen
***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Commentary A
BD – Image A- Sound B+ Commentary A
starring Helmut Döring, Gerd Gickel, Paul Glauer, Erna Gschwendtner
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Even Dwarfs Started Small opens with a disquieting montage featuring a young girl rending live birds with her teeth that also culminates in the image of a chicken eating another chicken (shades of Magritte's 1927 painting "Pleasure"). Both actions speak to a sort of insensate savagery, the divorce between the Freudian Id and Ego so favoured by the surrealists–and in setting the film in a fictitious place populated entirely by the little people of the title, it touches on the surrealist belief that non-Western civilizations were closer to an undifferentiated nature. The story proper concerns the uprising of a "Prisoner"-like colony against an ineffectual, Kafkaesque godhead (Pepi Hermine) and the Institution he represents. Rebelling against the imprisonment of leader Pepe (Gerd Gickel, tied to a chair throughout), the rebels devolve from a semi-organized protest into bedlam, crucifying monkeys, organizing cockfights, and, in one of the most hopeless conclusions in film, watching as rebel leader Hombre (Helmut Döring) laughs until he chokes at the sight of a defecating camel.

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

July 28, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Transcendence2click any image to enlarge

**/**** Image B Sound A Extras D
starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jack Paglen
directed by Wally Pfister

by Angelo Muredda If his name wasn't already plastered over the ads for the nerd bona fides the studio hopes it will signal, you'd still know that Transcendence was the work of Wally Pfister from an inimitably-portentous opening shot featuring the long, steady fall of a raindrop: as meaningless a totem as Inception's ever-spinning (or is it wobbling?) top. Having lensed all but one of Christopher Nolan's joyless epics, including that "Twilight Zone" episode told with Miltonic gravitas, Pfister has at last graduated to making his own Nolan film about serious men making serious moral choices in the name of serious ideas–here, sending the first human consciousness up into the cloud to fuse with an artificially-intelligent program, the better to meddle in the affairs of mortals. The Pfister-Nolan collaboration was a fruitful one, the equivalent of a hammer repeatedly meeting its companion gong, but watching the alternately soapy and chilly Transcendence, one can't help but feel the cinematographer-turned-director would have been better served by a more conspicuous departure, a project that better indulged his more melodramatic instincts.

Lucy (2014)

July 23, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Lucy

*/****
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.

Ace in the Hole (1951) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

July 22, 2014Posted in****/****, 1950s, 2014, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Billy Wilder, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Satire, The Criterion Collection

Ace1

****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
starring Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Bob Arthur, Porter Hall
screenplay by Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels, Walter Newman
directed by Billy Wilder

by Walter Chaw Ace in the Hole is full of bees. It’s the most scabrous, uncompromised work from Billy Wilder, who never made a movie that wasn’t kind of an asshole; and never made a movie that didn’t reflect the essential nihilism of his worldview. He’s a fascinating figure, Wilder–a director of obvious genius who has defied easy auteur classification not because he didn’t have his distinguishing characteristics (the outsider hero yearning for assimilation, for instance), but because his films are only queasily liked and then only at arm’s length. His stuff is poisonous. There’s a sense that reviewing him is like trying to dissect a facehugger: if you poke too insistently, you’ll release acid. You can point to Some Like it Hot as an exception, but I would respond that that film is about a notorious gangland massacre, repressed homosexuality, rape (kind of), chiselling, and the difficulties embedded in gender expectation and objectification. Wilder’s treatment of Marilyn Monroe there and in the earlier The Seven-Year Itch, and his later comments about Marilyn’s stupidity, her breasts, and his venal rationale for working with her twice, all feeds into the read that Ace in the Hole is close to autobiography. A curmudgeon with wit is an asshole by any other name. What would Wilder have done with his dream project, Schindler’s List? Like Ace in the Hole, I imagine it would have been more about a world that would endorse such atrocity than about the atrocity itself.

300: Rise of an Empire (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 20, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, War

30021click any image to enlarge

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, Lena Headey, Rodrigo Santoro
screenplay by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad
directed by Noam Murro

by Walter Chaw If Kenji Misumi made gladiator movies instead of the legendarily violent, indisputably awesome Lone Wolf and Cub series, they'd probably have played a lot like Noam Murro's ludicrous but committed 300: Rise of an Empire (hereafter 300 II). Pornographically (in the best way) violent and generous with Eva Green's ample, and horrifyingly-intense, charms, it tells a parallel story to Zack Snyder's gay porn-meets-military-recruitment video 300–a naval (and navel–ha!, priceless) intrigue involving Greek general Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) fending off Persian commander Artemisia (Green) in a sea of sometimes-literal blood. The film is completely unapologetic in its hard-R excess, counting among its atrocities child-rape and sexual slavery in the baddie's backstory with more squarely-clenched jaws than a Dick Tracy convention. It's a testosterone-sloppy cock-opera, of course, lending its countless skewerings the musky weight of sadomasochistic homoeroticism, but by sprinkling in Green's bonzer performance and, late in the game, Lena Headey's grief-stricken Queen Gorgo, 300 II suddenly becomes this rape-revenge/avenging-angel exploitation slasher. It's good, in other words. In a weak moment, I might admit it's even better than that.

“Bunga”

July 20, 2014Posted in2014, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog
A brief but self-indulgent post to notify that "Bunga," the latest episode of my (poorly) animated side-project "The Monster Show", recently went up on YouTube--in 1080p!--if you feel like checking it out. You can also catch up with previous instalments here.

Boyhood (2014)

July 17, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Theatrical

Boyhoodcaption

***½/****
starring Patricia Arquette, Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda “I was somebody’s daughter, and then I was somebody’s fucking mother,” Patricia Arquette’s Olivia complains early on in Richard Linklater’s uncommonly rich, deceptively titled Boyhood. Though it’s been rightly celebrated for its guerrilla shoots and nomadic production history–depicting an adolescent’s maturation from six to eighteen by reassembling the cast once a year, more or less in secret, for a few days at a time–Boyhood might be most impressive as a reflection on the impossibility of fully capturing what happens in all those “and thens” that constitute a life. An impressionistic masterwork, Boyhood is arguably both Linklater’s most ambitious project and his most easygoing, revelling in the amorphousness of his conceit as well as the freedom it allows him to putter around in the unformed material of his characters’ still-unfolding lives.

Venus in Fur (2013)

July 17, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Theatrical

Venusinfur

La Vénus à la fourrure
***½/****
starring Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric
screenplay by David Ives, based on his play
directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw If it’s stagebound, Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, an adaptation of David Ives’s play that is itself an adaptation in part of the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novel, is at least not stagebound without a purpose. It reminds of Adaptation. in its awareness of itself as an object open to deconstruction (and Derrida is mentioned in the text to make it metacritical in that sense as well); the fact that it’s a play captured on film only underscores its conceit. Venus in Fur is also a career summary for the octogenarian director at a point where his contemporaries are declining steeply in their dotage. Spry and clever, surprisingly funny at times, and at all times indisputably alive, it finds Polanski’s themes of gender subversion in high dunder, opening with a quote from the Apocryphal Book of Judith where the titular heroine seduces enemy general Holofrenes and decapitates (read: emasculates/castrates) him as he reclines in post-coital bliss. Polanski casts an actor who could be his younger doppelgänger, Mathieu Amalric, and opposite him in this two-person drama Polanski’s own wife, Emmanuelle Seigner–transparent, vulnerable, courageous casting that reminds very much of Hitchcock in his late masterpiece period. Venus in Fur is Polanski’s Marnie: a grand survey of all of his sexual peccadilloes that works as apologia, confession, and explication, eventually conveying Polanski’s acceptance of himself as deeply flawed, but better for the wisdom.

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

July 16, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, DVD

Noah1

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins
screenplay by Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw Unapologetic, curious, atavistic in its single-mindedness and simplicity, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is more impactful in the rearview than in the moment. It’s got a hell of a wake. The film is beautiful to look at, it almost goes without saying–as grand and ambitious as its ideas, with one sequence depicting what appears to be the case for intelligent design. It’s truly audacious. In many ways the movie The Fountain wanted to be in terms of scale (and featuring another Clint Mansell score that sounds every bit like a continuation of themes), Noah is a deeply insane interpretation of one of the Bible’s briefest (essentially Genesis 5:32-10:1), most contentious, most instantly-relatable and hence most-beloved of all Old Testament stories. I can only speculate what the Christian response will be (somewhere between mine and Glenn Beck’s assignation of it as the “Babylonian Chainsaw Massacre” is my guess), but for an atheist who counts many strong Christians among his friends, this interpretation is full of the menace and wonder that scripture must hold for the devout. It’s a stirring creation mythology in that it makes no bones about the interference in the affairs of men by a vengeful God. Likewise, it makes no apologies for the atrocities it represents in its visions of suffering and sin. (I can only imagine what Aronofsky’s Sodom would look like.) Noah even finds time for a dialogue about religious fundamentalism and what happens when absolute faith becomes rationale for atrocity. It’s a story about the annihilation of 99.9% of human life on the planet that’s ultimately about the value of compassion, and it’s a critical read of divine texts that skew in that direction. After a series of films attempting to explain the ways of the divine to the mundane, here’s hoping for an Aronofsky adaptation at last of “Paradise Lost”: a most comfortable marriage of material and artist.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

July 9, 2014Posted in****/****, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Dawnoftheplanetoftheapes

****/****
starring Andy Serkis, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Mark Bomback
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw Matt Reeves's remarkable Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (hereafter Dawn) isn't the best sequel since The Empire Strikes Back, but it is the best sequel since The Dark Knight. It's uncomplicated but beautifully executed–so pure and genuinely-felt that its conclusions about the unavoidable zero-sum game of tribalism land as not didactic but poetic. That certain sense of Tennyson bleeds into the overgrown post-apocalyptic landscape, all torpid acedia in its human ruins and in a tree-bound ape village that represents a sort of circular hopelessness. We recognize it as the beginning of a successor civilization that is unfortunately exactly like the beginnings of the civilization on which it's being built. Dawn's best trick is in balancing our sympathies in this way. We cast our lot with heroic Caesar (Andy Serkis, in a motion-capture performance that is one of the great silent-movie turns, ever), who's pushing against a Cheney-manqué in Koba (Toby Kebbell). Caesar gratifies our instinct for the underdog: it's easier to identify with Adam than with Nero. And then Reeves shifts to a human refuge and populates it with people, specifically Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and Ellie (Keri Russell), working on a peaceful solution against the more bellicose and paranoid of their number (Kirk Acevedo and Gary Oldman). No fair guessing which philosophy wins out–it's the only one that ever seems to.

Winter’s Tale (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 6, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Mystery, Romance, Will Smith

Winterstale1

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras D+
starring Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Jennifer Connelly, Russell Crowe
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Mark Helprin
directed by Akiva Goldsman

by Walter Chaw Cloud Atlas for the early buffet crowd, Akiva Goldsman’s unsurprisingly dreadful Winter’s Tale hits every single number in the legendary shipwreck lotto, vacillating wildly between unwatchable dreck and oddly-compelling unwatchable dreck. That it’s badly-written is no shocker, given that it’s Goldsman; the treat this time is that the awful script is matched by a horrific first-time director (Goldsman, too) whose dream it was to adapt an essentially unadaptable magic-realist novel by Mark Helprin that offers the again not-shocking glad-handing Carlos Castenada philosophy of healing light and Manifest Destiny. Just like Cloud Atlas, it’s killed most any desire I may have held to read the source material (which I’m sure is a pity), but unlike Cloud Atlas it resists employing yellowface to make its point. That’s an improvement. Not an improvement is casting Will Smith as a monologue-delivering Lucifer–yes, that Lucifer; Eva Marie Saint as a 110-year-old woman; and young Jessica Brown Findlay, a casualty of “Downton Abbey”, who boasts the sucking void of the vacuous and the genuinely uncharismatic. To be fair, she doesn’t get a lot to work with.

Final Exam (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

July 3, 2014Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Finalexam1

*½**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C
starring Cecile Bagdadi, Joel Rice, Ralph Brown, DeAnna Robbins
written and directed by Jimmy Huston

by Bryant Frazer Beware the toothless horror film–it’s no fun being gummed to death. That’s how you feel, more or less, by the climax of Final Exam, a low-budget Halloween knock-off crossed with a dopey frat-boy comedy. Written and directed by Jimmy Huston, who had made a series of southern-fried features for the drive-in circuit with North Carolina-based actor-producer Earl Owensby, Final Exam is a vintage programmer about a handful of students on a mostly-deserted college campus and a serial killer slicing his way through them, essentially at random.

Assassins/Cobra/The Specialist [Triple Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

June 30, 2014Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Stallone, Thriller

Cobra1click any image to enlarge

COBRA (1986)
*/**** Image C+ Sound C Extras D
starring Sylvester Stallone, Brigitte Nielsen, Reni Santoni, Andrew Robinson
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel Fair Game by Paula Gosling
directed by George P. Cosmatos

THE SPECIALIST (1994)
*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, James Woods, Eric Roberts
screenplay by Alexandra Seros
directed by Luis Llosa

ASSASSINS (1995)
*½/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, Julianne Moore, Anatoly Davydov
screenplay by Andy Wachowski & Larry Wachowski and Brian Helgeland
directed by Richard Donner

by Walter Chaw As easy as it is to dismiss Sylvester Stallone as your everyday, run-of-the-mill swinging dick, another in the pantheon of Eighties-into-Nineties box-office meatsticks assembled anew by Sly in his Expendables franchise, it becomes clear in retrospect that Stallone has his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist in his most personal projects, if not always in his contract jobs. Although an obvious and atrocious failure whose Stallone-authored screenplay, the end-product of a series of rewrites Stallone took it upon himself to inflict on Beverly Hills Cop, Cobra manages still to deliver a few smart genre mash-up moments, a few topical reflections of late-'80s crime-wave paranoia. Sandwiched in there right between his second and third Rambo films and fourth and fifth Rockys, Cobra is the kind of vanity piece that appears now and again in Stallone's repertoire to distract attention away from all the other stuff that only looks like a vanity project. Stallone is sneaky in a very particular way. As a sociologist, intentional or not, he is absolutely brilliant, and just on the strength of his Rocky and Rambo pictures, he's managed as good a diary of the fears and hopes of the last twenty years as any other body of work from any other single artist. He's the Bruce Springsteen of popular cinema. Bruce produced a lot of crap, too.

True Detective (2014) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

June 29, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Television

Truedetective1

Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
“The Long Bright Dark,” “Seeing Things,” “The Locked Room,” “Who Goes There,” The Secret Fate of All Life,” “Haunted Houses,” “After You’ve Gone,” “Form and Void”

by Jefferson Robbins SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. On the original 2003 recording of The Handsome Family‘s “Far from Any Road,” husband-and-wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks intertwine their voices sinuously, trading the song’s lonesome-death verses on equal footing. Her part pared down for the mesmeric opening credits of HBO’s “True Detective”, Rennie’s whisper becomes a sudden intrusion, jarring both the lyrical and visual narrative. It’s a hint of what’s to come in the eight-episode series itself. When a woman character exerts an active pull upon the story of tormented Louisiana State Police detectives Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), it’s an interruption, a vitriolic hiccup. Prompted by Marty’s stalking and volcanic abuse, his much younger mistress Lisa (Alexandra Daddario) reveals his serial infidelity to his wife Maggie (Michelle Monaghan). To poison Marty for his adulteries, Maggie seduces a drunken Cohle. The two cops have no female peers, only suspects, victims, bereaved mothers, hookers, and strippers to be interrogated, rescued, or ignored.

Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

June 26, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Michael Bay, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

Transformers4

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Nicola Peltz, robutts
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw Early on in Transformers: Age of Extinction (hereafter Trans4), director Michael Bay seems to be equating the unjust hunt for our noble robot allies the Autobots with the Tea Party's persecution of immigrants, and then it goes to shit. It's a meaningless, impossible-to-follow trainwreck in the patented Michael Bay style that, also in the Michael Bay style, is deeply hateful of women and difference. What's new this time out is that the central object of violation for our lascivious appreciation is 17-year-old Tessa (19-year-old Nicola Peltz), who, upon introduction, is leered at by an assortment of older gentlemen before Bay whips out a (no-kidding) legal justification for our statutory interest. It reminds of the Tony Danza vehicle She's Out of Control not only in that its father figure, Cade YEAGER-because-it's-America-fuck-yeah (Mark Wahlberg), is over-interested in his daughter's budding sexuality, but also in that Trans4 is awful. Awful in its misogyny, sure, and awful because, in what has become a tradition in Bay's Transformers franchise, the only African-American character is comic relief…and a slave. Never mind. Oh, and it hates the infirm and misses no opportunity to mock their infirmity. Again, never mind.

Sleepaway Camp (1983) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

June 25, 2014Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Teen, Thriller

Sleepawaycamp1

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Mike Kellin, Katherine Kamhi, Paul DeAngelo, Jonathan Tiersten
written and directed by Robert Hiltzik

by Bryant Frazer Ah, summer camp. Softball games, capture the flag, night-swimming, and life-changing boating accidents. Not to mention killer bees, child molesters, maniacs in the shower, and one kid with a whole lot of baggage, if you know what I mean. Sleepaway Camp is a slasher movie, and it depicts lakeside Camp Arawak as a pressure cooker of hormones and teenage flop sweat. Into this fetid milieu step Ricky and Angela, teenaged cousins united by tragedy: a boating accident that killed Angela’s parents and sibling some years earlier. Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) might be a little awkward, but he just wants to fit in; Angela (Felissa Rose), meanwhile, seems downright disturbed, spending much of her time dead silent, staring down her fellow campers with a mournful, almost accusatory glare. Before long, some of those campers start dropping dead as surely as the flies that coat the glue strips dangling in Arawak’s kitchen. There’s a soup incident, a shower incident, and an incident involving a toilet stall and angry bees. There’s a bit of business with a curling iron that’s probably inappropriate in a movie starring underage actors. The slasher’s hands appear on screen, but do they belong to unhappy Angela? Overprotective Ricky? Or someone else entirely?

Jersey Boys (2014)

June 19, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Musical, Theatrical

Jerseyboys

*/****
starring John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Christopher Walken
screenplay by Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda Clint Eastwood has never been the most self-referential filmmaker, preferring shopworn competence to flashy displays of idiosyncrasy. But it’s hard to imagine he’s not at least slightly gaming his audience throughout Jersey Boys, an otherwise limp tour through the Four Seasons‘ early discography. What else are we to make of the gag where baby-faced songwriter Bob Gaudio (Chris Klein dead ringer Erich Bergen) catches an image of his director’s grizzled mug in “Rawhide” on a hotel TV? While that feels like a pretty straightforward joke on Eastwood’s uncanny endurance all the way from “Sherry” (1962) to Jersey Boys the Broadway musical (2005), it’s a bit harder to read an equally surreal moment like the dispute between producer and sometime lyricist Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle) and wise-guy guitarist Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) over the band’s sound. “I’m hearing it in sky blue,” Crewe whines in the middle of a recording session, “and you’re giving me brown.” On the one hand, it’s not like Eastwood to take the piss out of his own work, but on the other, what better analogy for his adaptation process can there be than the conversion of a sky-blue all-American songbook to a shit-brown sung résumé, rendered all in blacks and greys save for the odd splash of salmon and the occasional scrap of tweed?

The Lego Movie (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 19, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Family

Legomovie1click any image to enlarge

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
screenplay by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Emmet is the platonic Everyman who becomes embroiled in adventure and intrigue after stumbling on a fabled MacGuffin called the Piece of Resistance. It's Hitchcock with a dash of Star Wars or The Matrix, or maybe vice-versa, as Emmet is designated "the Special" (a.k.a., the Chosen One), the saviour who will lead a band of rebel misfits to victory against the nefarious Lord Business. Oh, and Emmet's a little Lego dude with the voice of Chris Pratt. His predicament takes him on a globe-trotting journey through Legoland (not the theme park but a realm where Lego characters bloom to life à la Toy Story), not quite north by northwest but with a pit stop in the Wild West, where he picks up a wizardly black mentor named Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman–one wants to type "natch"). Lacking obvious talent and vision, Emmet is doubted and doubts himself but eventually rallies the troops and, when Lord Business finally unleashes his liquid freeze-ray known as the Kragle, voluntarily sacrifices himself for the greater good. It helps that he's desperate to impress the sultry, resourceful Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), who considers Emmet hopelessly uncool–especially compared to her boyfriend, Batman (Will Arnett).

Evilspeak (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

June 16, 2014Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory, Teen

Evilspeak1click any image to enlarge

**/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Clint Howard, R.G. Armstrong, Joseph Cortese, Claude Earl Jones
screenplay by Joseph Garofalo and Eric Weston
directed by Eric Weston

by Bryant Frazer Consider the pig. Pork is damned near a gourmet food these days. Celebrity chefs will serve you layers of pork belly wrapped around potatoes, figs, even pineapple. They'll dip bacon in chocolate, infuse it in vodka, or drape it across an ice-cream sundae, resplendent in its brown glory. Your local organic market probably sells artisanal bacon cured with dark, fine-grained muscovado imported from Mauritius and flavoured with angel farts and faerie dust. The recent cinema has also celebrated the pig, via two excellent Babe movies and a decent adaptation of Charlotte's Web. It wasn't always that way, though. No less an authority than God Himself went Old Testament on pork back in the day, and it took the famous and completely disingenuous "Pork: The Other White Meat" campaign to rehabilitate swine for the U.S. market. What I mean to say is that the 1982 horror movie Evilspeak, in which a trio of crazed, Satan-possessed porkers burst into a bathroom and disembowel a nude woman taking a shower, couldn't have done the humble pig's reputation any favours.