Grey Gardens (1976) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 7, 2014Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2014, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

Greygardens1 Greygardens1

GREY GARDENS
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer and Susan Froemke

THE BEALES OF GREY GARDENS (2006)
***/****
directed by Albert Maysles & David Maysles

by Jefferson Robbins “It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and present.” That cast-off remark from Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale early in Grey Gardens, the documentary molded from her enclosed and deluded life, is a cornerstone truth in so many sad domestic stories like hers. Every Gothic romance novel knows it, with their living ghosts rattling around grand old manses much like Little Edie’s 19th-century East Hampton estate–not least Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, a work she returns to over and over. It’s an affliction, this unstuckness in time, and it besets the aged and the ill until nostalgia becomes, essentially, the place where they live. Her mother, Edith Ewing “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale, the more insightful of the pair, recognizes it in her daughter as well as herself. “I’ve certainly got ideas about living in the wrong time,” the matriarch says from the stained twin bed at Grey Gardens she seldom bestirs herself to leave. And then one of her many cats defecates in a corner, sheltering behind the vivid oil portrait of Big Edie in her beautiful, younger years.

The Terminal (2004) – Blu-ray Disc

May 6, 2014Posted in2000s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Spielberg

Terminal1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Chi McBride
screenplay by Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Early in the latest Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks collaboration The Terminal, Russian splinter exile Viktor Navorski (Hanks) runs up a staircase, throwing his suitcase onto the “up” escalator as he goes so that his baggage, in essence, is left to finish its journey on its own. It’s a lovely, complicated visual metaphor for abandonment or freedom, for Spielberg the scenarist’s twin obsessions with the idea of little boys lost and of little boys escaping and for Spielberg the director’s inability to take responsibility for his subtext so that he might finally make that mature film he’s so desperately wanted to since The Color Purple. But The Terminal is film-festival offensive, encouraging its audience to coo over the adorable antics of its madcap cast of society’s blue-collar “invisibles” (playing in this respect like the slick, imminently forgettable version of Stephen Frears’s working class morality play Dirty Pretty Things) in a way that isn’t sympathetic so much as paternalistic. Foreigners and minorities are resourceful children, operating eternally at the mercy of the dominant majority, and Neverland is the big cities of the United States, where grown-ups have families and problems.

Hot Docs ’14: The Overnighters

May 5, 2014Posted in2000s, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2014

Hotdocsovernighters

***/****
directed by Jesse Moss

by Angelo Muredda The intersection of the financial crisis and the North Dakota oil boom has turned Williston, ND into an unlikely mecca in the past few years. The influx of unemployed men who’ve left their homes for a new, thoroughly American, and probably-doomed shot at redemption on the oil fields is the subject of Jesse Moss’s Sundance-feted The Overnighters, a complex look at how this mass exodus and uneasy resettlement has brought the residents of Williston to the limits of their compassion and brotherly love. The film focuses on the Herculean efforts of pastor Jay Reinke, who has turned his church into a makeshift home base for the new arrivals–to the chagrin of the facility’s neighbours, who are skeptical about the men’s scruffy appearance and possible criminal backgrounds, and the open hostility of the town newspaper, which wages war on Reinke’s new congregation by publishing a list of former sex offenders harboured in the church as well as in the pastor’s own home.

Hot Docs ’14: Joy of Man’s Desiring

May 4, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2014

Hotdocsjoy

Que ta joie demeure
***/****
directed by Denis Côté

by Angelo Muredda Although it’s set in a factory rather than a zoo, Denis Côté’s Joy of Man‘s Desiring makes a fitting companion piece to his own Bestiaire. Where the minimalist, formally austere Quebec filmmaker’s previous documentary unfolded through a series of static frontal tableaux featuring animals displaced into some rather unnatural habitats, surrounded by bars and cages (the most extreme one being Côté’s own mise-en-scène), his newest focuses on the alienated humans behind the machines that yield all manner of metal alloys, wood cases, and garments. Following an elfin worker’s dramatic monologue about the nature of labour and human intimacy–she’s played by an actress, the first of many instances where Côté throws a theatrical dirt bomb into the staid form of nonfiction–the symphonic title sequence sets the tone. It’s a montage of self-propelling machines engaged in uncannily human dance moves, more unnerving still when considered in the context of some of the curiously mechanical human behaviour that follows, like when a worker loops around a cart full of boxes, elegantly dispensing a ream of Scotch tape as if he’s wrapping a mummy.

Hot Docs ’14: Actress

May 2, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2014

Hotdocsactress

***½/****
directed by Robert Greene

by Angelo Muredda “It wasn’t just the character,” Brandy Burre muses in voiceover as she watches herself in the kitchen in an artfully-framed dishwashing scene during the opening moments of Robert Greene’s Actress: “It’s me. I tend to break things.” That’s an appropriately wily introduction to a documentary that adroitly blends domestic melodrama, biography, and sociological study. “Brandy Burre is Actress,” the surprisingly ostentatious (for nonfiction) title card announces, and so it goes: Burre stars as herself, a Master’s-holding former supporting player from “The Wire” who took a break from acting after the birth of her first child, and who now seeks to get back in the game at a moment when her long-term relationship appears to be breaking apart like the dishware.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

April 30, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

Amazingspiderman2

***/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Sally Field
screenplay by Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci & Jeff Pinkner
directed by Marc Webb

by Walter Chaw A notable improvement in almost every way on Marc Webb’s first film in this reboot series, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (hereafter Spidey 2) sports the same weaknesses, the same bloat, the same catering to the summer cult of boom-boom, but it ramps up the intelligence and a certain comfort with darkness that pays off in a pair of genuinely gratifying character resolutions. Despite what the trailers would spoil, it really only has one antagonist, Jamie Foxx’s Electro–well, him, and our hero’s (Andrew Garfield) struggles with trust in his relationships, whether they be with his Aunt May (Sally Field) or girlfriend Gwen (Emma Stone) or best friend Harry (Dane DeHaan) or lost father Richard (Campbell Scott). It’s a film about class struggle, as May picks up double-shifts and moonlights in nursing school to provide tuition for her adopted boy (giving Sally Field the chance to resurrect her blue-collar Norma Rae), while shut-in Max (Foxx), electrical engineer at monolithic Oscorp and low man on the corporate totem pole, comes clear, fascinatingly, as a riff on the unnamed protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Persona (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

April 29, 2014Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Ingmar Bergman, Documentary, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Sweden, The Criterion Collection

Persona1

PERSONA
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullman
written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

LIV & INGMAR
**½/****
directed by Dheeraj Akolkar

by Bryant Frazer In early 1965, under the influence of the French New Wave, half dead from pneumonia and subsequent antibiotic poisoning, and depressed by more than just the view from his Stockholm hospital bed, Ingmar Bergman cobbled together some ideas for a small movie about two women. Addled by the administrative headaches of his position as the head of Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre–and probably discouraged by the frosty reception that greeted his recent comedy and first colour film, All These Women–he felt a small movie was the only kind he would be able to make. And so he started putting together, in his head, a modest drama. He imagined two women comparing hands. One of them, he decided, would be talking, and the other would be silent. It went from there.

Darkman (1990) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

April 22, 2014Posted in1990s, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Sam Raimi, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Darkman1

***½/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras A
starring Liam Neeson, Frances McDormand, Colin Friels, Larry Drake
screenplay by Chuck Pfarrer and Sam Raimi & Ivan Raimi and Dan Goldin & Joshua Goldin
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II is among the best American films of the 1980s. It’s audacious and ingenious, the kind of movie people describe as having been made by the seat of one’s pants–the kind of movie that’s doomed to be underestimated because its genre is disreputable and its sensibilities are too cartoonish. Indeed, the energy in Raimi’s early, best work is akin to Tex Avery and Three Stooges, but he controls it, wields it; the anti-David O. Russell. Only in Crimewave does he overuse that muscle. In Evil Dead II, the humour is low, there is absolutely no shame, and in a real way, the picture encapsulates what was delirious and sloppy about ’80s blockbuster cinema. It’s a thing of beauty, exaggerated pathos, and Wagnerian derring-do. Raimi followed it in 1990 with what’s essentially a rebuttal to Tim Burton’s Batman, the “biggest movie of the moment” from the year before. Batman was the first salvo in a barrage of prestige “pulp” entertainments that presented the Comic Book as “A” material; Raimi drags it back into “B,” at least for a little while. His movies are EC and off-Code and Bernie Wrightson and Jack Davis and Al Williamson, while Burton’s are German Expressionism and sad, sometimes inscrutably solipsistic tales of Oyster Boys. Raimi, in 1990, made the best comic-book movie there ever was, a title only challenged by Raimi’s own Spider-Man 2: Darkman.

Transcendence (2014)

April 17, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Transcendence

**/****
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.

Hateship Loveship (2014)

April 17, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

Hateshiploveship

*½/****
starring Kristen Wiig, Guy Pearce, Hailee Steinfeld, Nick Nolte
screenplay by Mark Poirier, based on the short story by Alice Munro
directed by Liza Johnson

by Walter Chaw A knuckle-biting bounty of casting riches, Liza Johnson’s twee, somewhat over-directed, generally overdone Hateship Loveship features dozens of lovely actorly moments that add up to not a whole lot, although the movie tries. Boy, does it try. In its put-on listlessness, it wants to belong to the Matthew Porterfield/Nathan Silver school of contemplative indie flicks, but it’s not quiet enough nor patient enough in withholding its epiphanies and emotional rises and falls. It tends to narrate; it wants to tie up loose ends; and it’s not comfortable with entropy as much as it wants to be, what with its central character odd, awkward caregiver Johanna (Kristin Wiig) and its central setting a broken-down hotel, uninhabited but burdened with poor junkie Ken’s (Guy Pearce) dreams of restoration. It’s a big, clumsy metaphor for Ken trying to rebuild his life after killing his wife, McCauley’s (Nick Nolte) daughter and Sabitha’s (Hailee Steinfeld–thank God she’s getting work) mom, in a tragic speedboat accident. It all kind of sounds like a Wes Anderson sub-story. Anyway, Sabitha and her queen bitch bestie Edith (Sami Gayle) pen fake love letters from Ken to erstwhile nanny Johanna, leading to not the painful story we want, but a different painful story involving why you shouldn’t sway your camera back and forth when shooting dialogue exchanges and how poignant zooms don’t substitute for genuine feeling.

The Slumber Party Massacre Collection – DVD|The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

April 15, 2014Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2014, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Satire, Scream/Shout! Factory

Slumberparty2
THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (1982)
**½/****
DVD – Image C+ Sound C- Extras C+
BD – Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Michelle Michaels, Robin Stille, Michael Villella, Debra Deliso
screenplay by Rita Mae Brown
directed by Amy Jones

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II (1987)
**½/**** Image C+ Sound C Extras A-
starring Crystal Bernard, Patrick Lowe, Kimberly McArthur, Atanas Ilitch
written and directed by Deborah Brock

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE III (1990)
*/**** Image C Sound C Extras A-
starring Keely Christian, Britain Frye, M.K. Harris, David Greenlee
screenplay by Catherine Cyran
directed by Sally Mattison

by Alex Jackson 1982’s The Slumber Party Massacre isn’t a film so much as a work of film criticism. It was produced and directed by Amy Holden Jones, perhaps better known today as the screenwriter of Mystic Pizza and Indecent Proposal, and written by established Lesbian Feminist poet and author Rita Mae Brown, who is perhaps best known for the 1973 book Rubyfruit Jungle, typically considered one the earliest coming-of-age lesbian novels.

Ernest & Celestine (2012) + Jodorowsky’s Dune (2014)

April 10, 2014Posted in2012, 2014, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Family, France, Luxembourg, Theatrical

Ernest et Célestine
**½/****
screenplay by Daniel Pennac, based on books by Gabrielle Vincent
directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner

JODOROWSKY’S DUNE
**½/****
directed by Frank Pavich

by Walter Chaw Broad, earnest, unassuming animation from France, Ernest & Celestine is the tale of a little girl mouse, Celestine (voice of Pauline Brunner), and gruff bear Ernest (Lambert Wilson), who overcome their cultural prejudices to become fast friends. Celestine is outcast because she’d like to be an artist instead of a dentist; Ernest is outcast because he’s a busker struggling to eke out a subsistence living. Over a series of misadventures, the two end up doing the Badlands in Ernest’s ramshackle hideaway, awaiting their fate and trying to enjoy their borrowed time. It’s all leading to a grim ending, but it’s not that kind of movie.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

April 9, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, New Zealand

Smaug2

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extra B
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo del Toro, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

by Angelo Muredda And so arrives Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (hereafter Hobbit 2), landing at its appointed hour a year after its predecessor’s mixed debut like a job application received after the position has already been quietly filled. While middle entries in trilogies are always awkward stepchildren, Hobbit 2 is a very special problem case: It consists of roughly the midsection of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fleet fantasy book for children, cracked open and fattened with multi-coloured Post-it notes until the spine can bear no more. Here at last, then, we have the week-old meat of the only Hobbit adaptation Jackson could deliver, having spent a decade steering comically overextended editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a 3-hour version of King Kong, and a wrongheaded interpretation of The Lovely Bones as a Nintendo-ready CG light show.

The Hidden Fortress (1958) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

April 7, 2014Posted in1950s, 2014, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Japan, The Criterion Collection

Hiddenfortress1

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Toshiro Mifune, Minoru Chiaki, Kamatari Fujiwara, Susumu Fujita
screenplay by Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto and Akira Kurosawa
directed by Akira Kurosawa

by Walter Chaw It is many things, but Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress is rare for its ability to evoke a feeling ineffable of finding yourself in the company of betters and wanting desperately/doing your best to fit in. It’s a weightless feeling. There’s euphoria in it. Fear, too–the understanding that being a cool kid is a temporary state, at least for you. And then there’s the nagging embarrassment for the friend along for the ride, what that friend says about your unworthiness, and how sick it makes you that you could feel this way about your only real ally in this whole mess. It’s two movies, then: the stylized slapstick of opportunistic peasants Tahei (Minoru Chiaki) and Matashichi (Kamatari Fujiwara); and a more standard jidaigeki involving a princess in exile (Misa Uehara) and her bodyguard/retainer General Makabe (Toshiro Mifune) trying to transport a fortune in gold to re-establish their fallen kingdom. The Hidden Fortress would work without the peasants, but it would be a different movie. It would be about heroes like The Seven Samurai, or royalty like Throne of Blood. With the peasants, The Hidden Fortress is about being ordinary in a world inhabited by heroes and royalty and the existential suffering attendant to that state. The best of Kurosawa is eternally skating along that divide; Kurosawa’s own suicide attempt, I think, had more than a little to do with a Kierkegaardian fear and self-loathing. His best–films like Ikiru, Throne of Blood, High and Low–are distinctly revealing. It’s a measure of an artist that his reflection in his art is helpless to intention or style. Hitchcock’s films lay Hitchcock bare, as Mann’s, Vidor’s, Lang’s, and Welles’s do them. Kurosawa feared his worthiness; he feared being judged and found wanting.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

April 3, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

Cap2

***/****
starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw A fine companion piece to last summer’s The Lone Ranger, with another hero whose essential goodness has become anachronistic in a world defined by its ugliness and venality, the Russo Brothers’ Captain America: The Winter Soldier (hereafter Cap 2), for all its boom-boom, is surprisingly thoughtful–and surprisingly doom-laden. It’s dark as hell. Gone are the pulp machinations of Joe Johnston–this one is more The Empire Strikes Back than The Rocketeer, where the victories are Pyrrhic and the bad guys are smarter and better equipped. By the end, this most optimistic of superheroes resolves to rescue a friend while his closest comrade-in-arms advises him to look for love again. They’re small goals, the kind of goals that mere mortals happen to share with this demigod. As such, they provide the film with an unexpected payload of pathos and nostalgia for lost selves that used to believe the world would be better if only we had a friend upon which we could always depend and love that would remain evergreen. Cap 2 is about our better natures, and it’s about the realization as you grow older that you may have allowed your better nature to be subsumed by misdirected senses of duty. It’s about what it means to compromise your values on the altar of “maturity” and “sophistication”–even “progress” and “modernity.” And when it works best, it’s about what it means when you don’t.

Cat People (1982) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

April 2, 2014Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, Horror, Romania, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Werewolf

Catpeople2

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Nastassia Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard, Annette O’Toole
screenplay by Alan Ormsby, based on the story by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Paul Schrader

by Bryant Frazer Amid the American horror boom of the late-1970s and early-1980s, when everything old was new again and once-dormant studio properties like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World, and The Fly were suddenly valuable franchises, the script for a remake of Cat People, one of the most subtle of all horror classics, somehow ended up on Paul Schrader’s desk. Why Schrader? Dumb luck, mostly. Certainly he had no great love for the source material, a 1942 horror film directed by Jacques Tourneur that Schrader famously (and charmlessly) claimed “isn’t that brilliant.” But he must have seen in the raw material the opportunity to make a deeply weird movie, one that fused a new mythology with a contemporary melodrama of fear, desire, and violence. The result is not just a personal expression of Schrader’s own sex-and-death preoccupations, but a sort of high-water mark for the quixotic attempt to meld visually sophisticated erotica with commercially savvy narrative storytelling.

Thief (1981) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

April 1, 2014Posted in1980s, 2014, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, DVD, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Thief1

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Robert Prosky, Willie Nelson
screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the novel The Home Invaders by Frank Hohimer
directed by Michael Mann

“Look, I have run out of time. I have lost it all. So l cannot work fast enough to catch up, and l cannot run fast enough to catch up. And the only thing that catches me up is doin’ my magic act. But it ends, you know? It will end. When l got this, right there, it ends, it is over. So I am just asking you…to be with me.”
-Frank (James Caan), Thief (1981)

“I’m catching up. On life. Meeting someone like you.”
-John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), Public Enemies (2008)

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Like the historical Dillinger, the fictional Frank was just a punk kid overzealously punished for a petty crime by a judge looking to make an example of him. Instead, he created the man Frank is as Thief begins: a master safecracker, taught his trade in the joint by fellow convict Okla (Willie Nelson, heartbreaking). As Frank recounts in a mesmerizing monologue that Caan, for what it’s worth, has counted as his finest piece of screen acting, the other thing he learned in Joliet is how to create a forcefield around himself by disengaging from fear. It’s not Zen detachment that he’s mastered; a man of flashy tastes, he’s too much the materialist to live like Heat‘s ascetic Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), whose Modernist house in the hills is all windows and no furniture. They are cut from the same cloth, though, in that they’re acutely aware of the temporariness of their stolen lifestyles and have no qualms about jumping ship to stay ahead of the enemy.

Tess (1979) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

March 30, 2014Posted in1970s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, France, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Tess1

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Nastassia Kinski, Peter Firth, Leigh Lawson, John Collin
screenplay by Gerard Brach, Roman Polanski, John Brownjohn, based on the novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
directed by Roman Polanski

by Bryant Frazer In the annals of feel-bad literature, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a corker, pitting natural beauty and goodness against a battery of opposing forces–the church, the aristocracy, modern technology, human avarice–and finding beauty debased. It was a loaded area of study for Roman Polanski, who adapted it as a Hollywood artist in exile, working in France rather than nearer the book’s setting of Wessex, England, for fear of his deportation to the U.S. on rape charges. Just as Polanski’s bloody Macbeth has been interpreted as a howl of pain following the murder of his beloved wife, Sharon Tate, his Tess can be read as an act of penance, if not a bid for rehabilitation.

Noah (2014)

March 27, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

Noah2

***/****
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.

La Notte (1961) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 26, 2014Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Lanotte1

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Bernhard Wicki
written and directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Walter Chaw The second film in a loose quartet of Modernist, existentially-despairing–some would say brutal–Michelangelo Antonioni pictures, La Notte is the one I would identify, if pressed, as the best among L‘avventura, L‘eclisse, and Red Desert. I’d even go so far as to call it Antonioni’s best movie overall: the one that most completely encompasses the filmmaker’s worldview and puts into sharpest relief the tools with which he expresses it. He’s at the height of his powers here. I would argue that although his Blow-Up both defined foreign film as a genre for American audiences (while proving instrumental in defeating the Production Code, heralding the level of acceptance and permissiveness that made the American ’70s in film possible) and is indisputably his most influential work (indeed, it’s among the most influential films of all time), it’s La Notte that offers the cleanest insight into who and what Antonioni is as an artist.