FILM FREAK CENTRAL

sex, lies, and videotape (1989) – Blu-ray Disc

August 12, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, Palme d'Or Winner

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
starring James Spader, Andie MacDowell, Peter Gallagher, Laura San Giacomo
written and directed Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Appearing in 1989 at the very end of the blockbuster decade and on the cusp of a digital revolution, Steven Soderbergh’s micro-budgeted sex, lies, and videotape heralded a doomed renaissance in independent film that would find it melded, ultimately and inseparably, with mainstream concerns. It posits that people only tell the truth when they’re captured on celluloid–that when the video camera starts running, the assumption of roles begins. By the end of the ’90s, precisely a decade later with American Beauty, there’s another character with a video camera, but in that one, everything has turned: the lies are on film, and the truth is digital. (See also: Michael Almereyda’s endlessly rewarding Hamlet (2000) and the still-incomparable The Blair Witch Project (1999).)

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] – My Best Fiend (1999)

August 11, 20141990s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Scream/Shout! Factory

Mein liebster Feind – Klaus Kinski
**/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B+
BD – Image B+ Sound B+
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw My Best Fiend is Werner Herzog trying to dispel some of the myths surrounding his career by magnifying a few of the myths surrounding Klaus Kinski’s. As such, it feels a lot more like a cheap shot than like a tribute, burying as it does Kinski’s indisputable genius beneath a lot of documentary evidence that Kinski was a slavering lunatic. And though Herzog betrays a definite affection for Kinski (nowhere more so than in a hilarious/warm reminiscence offered to the very proper German couple living in the apartment once shared by the director and actor), more often the piece is given to obfuscating outtakes and anecdotes. Consider the eclipsing impact that B-roll footage of a raving Kinski on the set of Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Herzog’s comments about the natives offering to kill the actor for him have on Kinski’s astonishingly reserved, haunted performance in the film. If you’ve never seen Aguirre, you’d think that Kinski was awful in it–and if you have seen Aguirre, your mind begins to blur what’s actually on the screen. It’s subtle, but it starts to resemble a snowjob akin to the belief, held by most (even those who’ve seen the films), that Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are splatter flicks, when in fact there’s more blood in Psycho than in those two films combined.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

August 8, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, Johnny Knoxville
screenplay by Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec and Evan Daugherty
directed by Jonathan Liebesman

by Walter Chaw Jonathan Liebesman’s brutally awful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a Michael Bay co-production in conjunction with kid’s basic-cable network Nickelodeon, meaning it’s a PG-13 piece of shit aimed at preteens that packs a payload of sexual objectification, mild torture, and assorted grotesquerie. That’s really all there is to say about it. It implies bestiality in the constant come-ons aimed at Bay’s favourite target (Megan Fox) by a foul-looking monster, then makes a joke out of a human counterpart staring at her ass while she’s dangling out a car window. Best is the moment where one of the monsters declares Ms. Fox to be “so hot I can feel my shell tightening,” which comes just after she’s equated with a “sexy bird,” because birds are slim animals as opposed to fat animals like pigs and cows. Later, Whoopi Goldberg appears as that Cabbage Patch doll you didn’t get for Christmas because you’re going to a Michael Bay-produced movie advertised on a children’s cartoon channel, and one of the bad guys instructs his henchmen to “drain every last drop of blood” from our heroes, “even if it kills them.”

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] – Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)

August 5, 2014****/****, 1970s, 2014, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mexico, Peru, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

Aguirre1

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes
****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Commentary A
BD – Image A- Sound B+ Commentaries A
starring Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Ruy Guerra
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw A work of holy madness about acts of holy madness, Aguirre, The Wrath of God is a transcendent, haunting film that defies description and captures, somehow, what it means to be human in all the venal, small, sometimes grand things that being human implies. Once seen, it’s never forgotten, and upon repeat viewings, it’s one of those pictures that makes you want to cry for no particular reason but that it is, in almost every non-quantifiable way, perfect, a film alight with invention, love, and passion–a memoir of the worm in the gut that demands blood and glory. Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) is an under-lieutenant in the bona fide Peruvian expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés) to find the lost city of gold, El Dorado, a fiction of the Peruvian Indians meant as a suicide pill for their conquistadors. Once the expedition bogs down in the mud of the rainy season, Pizarro sends nobleman Don Pedro de Ursua (Ruy Guerra) off with Aguirre on a satellite mission to scout a path ahead for the main body. Though neither party was ever heard from again, Aguirre, The Wrath of God proposes to tell the final days of Ursua’s doomed men.

The Final Terror (1983) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

August 4, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory

*/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring John Friedrich, Rachel Ward, Adrian Zmed, Mark Metcalf
screenplay by Jon George & Neill Hicks and Ronald Shusett
directed by Andrew Davis

by Bryant Frazer Of all the lousy, Z-list horror films that flooded American multiplexes in the wake of the success of Friday the 13^th, The Final Terror may have the most incongruously A-list IMDb profile page, which explains its failure to languish in well-deserved obscurity. It is exemplary of the 1980s horror boom as opportunistic folly–horror movies were being made by people who had no interest in making horror movies, simply because that’s where the easy money was. Horror buffs know this, but still, how can any self-respecting 21^st-century genre cultist resist the siren call of a little-known slasher starring Rachel Ward, Daryl Hannah, Mark Metcalf, Adrian Zmed, and Joe Pantoliano and directed by Andrew Davis?

Extracurricular Activities: Best Supporting Actress Smackdown – 1973

August 2, 20142014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog

by Bill Chambers Just a heads-up that this week you can find me over at the great THE FILM EXPERIENCE, where I participated in the latest Best Supporting Actress Smackdown in the humbling company of actress Dana Delany, Pictures at a Revolution author Mark Harris, critics Karina Longworth and Kyle Turner, and of course TFE founder Nathaniel R. Once a month, Nathaniel invites a panel like ours to encapsulate and rate the five performances nominated for a given year's Best Supporting Actress Oscar (our own Angelo Muredda contributed to 1968)--a fascinating exercise when removed from the hype and politics of awards season.…

Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

July 31, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Eileen Atkins, Colin Firth, Marcia Gay Harden, Hamish Linklater
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There’s a scene late in Woody Allen’s mostly forgotten You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger that briefly complicates its status as one of the prolific filmmaker’s lighter doodles. Swept away by her feelings for her boss (Antonio Banderas), Naomi Watts’s normally buttoned-up Sally takes a chance and confesses. In turn, she is swiftly rejected, and summarily dismissed as a partner, a colleague, and a person in one cruel wave of the arm. It’s a scene Allen has indulged in before: he’s always liked to see his onscreen women suffer a little, whether in Isaac’s callous it’s-not-me-it’s-you dumping of Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) in Manhattan or the unceremonious jilting of poor Cecilia (Mia Farrow) in The Purple Rose of Cairo. But it’s a sharp sting in a film as innocuous as Stranger, a reminder that for all the comforts of settling into his aesthetic of Windsor typeface and big-band music, Allen is not an especially warm filmmaker, not even in his comedies. Even with that in mind, his newest, Magic in the Moonlight, is an especially baffling thing–a dry, mean-spirited essay about that old romantic-comedy staple: the inevitability of death and decay.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

July 30, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Benicio Del Toro
written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman
directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw After years of looking for a Star Wars for my son (too little for Lord of the Rings; nothing to attach to in Pacific Rim), here’s James Gunn’s awesome Guardians of the Galaxy to fit the bill. It’s science-fiction in exactly the same way that Star Wars is science-fiction–essentially a serial western, with Chris Pratt as both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, green Zoe Saldana as Princess Leia, and a raccoon and a tree subbing for Wookiee and droid. It has a secret history for our hero, a scary baddie in a black cloak, and an entire universe of wonders it treats like an amusement park. It’s also fun in the same way Star Wars was fun, and fresh in the same way, too: heedlessly, carefree, even bratty, which explains the post-credits cut-scene that’s easily the best of them. Furthermore, it has a soundtrack packed with AM Gold that lends the picture camp and hipster cred simultaneously. Heavy on exposition at times, squandering a few opportunities to demonstrate a better team action dynamic, and not about anything at the end of the day, Guardians of the Galaxy‘s sword and shield is that its irreverence and self-awareness land as self-deprecating and warm. Doesn’t hurt that it’s a blast.

Deadly Eyes (1982) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

July 29, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory

Deadlyeyes3

Night Eyes
**/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Sam Groom, Sara Botsford, Lisa Langlois, Scatman Crothers
screenplay by Charles Eglee, based on a screenplay by Lonon Smith and the novel The Rats by James Herbert
directed by Robert Clouse

by Bryant Frazer There’s really only one thing you need to know about Deadly Eyes, and I’m going to tell you right here in the lede. Deadly Eyes is a film in which hordes of giant killer rats terrorizing downtown Toronto are played by dachshunds wearing rat costumes. That’s it. A monster movie is only as good as its monster, and this monster is wiener dogs in drag. If you don’t find that off-putting–perhaps you raised your eyebrows, gasped in delight, and leaned in a little closer to your computer screen upon reading those words–then it’s quite possible Deadly Eyes is the terrible horror movie you’ve been waiting for.

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

July 29, 20141970s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Werner Herzog, DVD, Esoterica, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

Evendwarfs2

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, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Transcendence2

**/**** 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, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

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

****/**** 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, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, War

30021

***/**** 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, 20142014, 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, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Theatrical

***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, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Theatrical

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, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, DVD

***/**** 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, 2014****/****, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
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 are 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, 20142014, 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.

Borderline (2025) + Novocaine (2025)

Snow White (2025)

O’Dessa (2025)