The Jungle Book (1967) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 23, 2014Posted in1960s, 2014, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical

Junglebook1

***/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras A
story by Larry Clemmons, Ralph Wright, Ken Anderson, Vance Gerry, inspired by the Rudyard Kipling “Mowgli” stories
directed by Wolfgang Reitherman

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Jungle Book receives only two passing mentions in Neal Gabler’s mammoth biography of Walt Disney, even though it has the distinction of being the last animated film Disney lived to produce and ended his career in a commercial triumph to bookend the early success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Gabler’s brevity on the subject suggests that The Jungle Book was of little consequence to Disney, but there are clues to the contrary between the lines, such as when Gabler writes tantalizingly about Walt’s opinion that early drafts of the script were too “sober.” Indeed, he was personally invested in the project to the point of choosing it over his relationship with long-time story man Bill Peet, who’d brought Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories to Disney’s attention in the first place. Peet’s adaptation was, as Walt saw it, beset by its fidelity to Kipling, and he solidified his vision for lighter-hearted fare by hiring radio icon Phil Harris, whose husky, hearty voice would become synonymous with Disney animation in those posthumous years. The energy and levity Harris brought to the minor character of Baloo the Bear led to a reconceiving of the narrative so that it pivoted, in Gabler’s words, on the Falstaff/Prince Hal dynamic between Baloo and child hero Mowgli.

Nebraska (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

February 17, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD

Nebraska1

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It’s easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.

Arrow: The Complete First Season (2012-2013) + Supernatural: The Complete Eighth Season (2012-2013) – Blu-ray Discs

February 12, 2014Posted in2012, 2013, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Television, Werewolf

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ARROW: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image A Sound B Extras B-
“Pilot,” “Honor Thy Father,” “Lone Gunmen,” “An Innocent Man,” “Damaged,” “Legacies,” “Muse of Fire,” “Vendetta,” “Year’s End,” “Burned,” “Trust but Verify,” “Vertigo,” “Betrayal,” “The Odyssey,” “Dodger,” “Dead to Rights,” “The Huntress Returns,” “Salvation,” “Unfinished Business,” “Home Invasion,” “The Undertaking,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “Sacrifice”

SUPERNATURAL: THE COMPLETE EIGHTH SEASON
Image A Sound B+ Extras B
“We Need to Talk About Kevin,” “What’s Up, Tiger Mommy?,” “Heartache,” “Bitten,” “Blood Brother,” “Southern Comfort,” “A Little Slice of Kevin,” “Hunteri Heroici,” “Citizen Fang,” “Torn and Frayed,” “LARP and the Real Girl,” “As Time Goes By,” “Everybody Hates Hitler,” “Trial and Error,” “Man’s Best Friend with Benefits,” “Remember the Titans,” “Goodbye Stranger,” “Freaks and Geeks,” “Taxi Driver,” “Pac-Man Fever,” “The Great Escapist,” “Clip Show,” “Sacrifice”

by Jefferson Robbins Kindred shows in more ways than just their sharing a network, a Vancouver, B.C. shooting base, and a David Nutter-helmed pilot, The CW’s “Arrow” and “Supernatural” also share a gestalt. Post-“The X Files”, post-“Buffy”, they grapple with family legacies, duty versus desire, and bonds (specifically male) threatened by the intrusion of a) monsters and b) lovers. Watching the debut season of the former alongside the eighth season of the latter, it becomes clear that “Arrow”‘s showrunners, headed by Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and Andrew Kreisberg, are just as steeped in the modes and methods of this youth-oriented action programming as “Supernatural” creator Eric Kripke. Both series find young, handsome protagonists consumed with the bloody twilight work left undone by their dead fathers; and both–despite “Arrow”‘s roots as a second-tier DC Comics property straining for multimedia relevance–are better, and bloodier, and in some ways more relevant, than one has any right to expect.

RoboCop (2014)

February 11, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Robocop2014

***/****
starring Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Joshua Zetumer, based on the screenplay by Edward Neumeier & Michael Miner
directed by José Padilha

by Walter Chaw There’s a scene at the end of José Padilha’s RoboCop reboot where nearly-widowed Clara Murphy (Abbie Cornish), nervous about being reunited with her nearly-murdered husband, Det. Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), takes care to put on makeup and something nice. (For me, Cornish trying to get prettier is like a tree trying to get tree-ier.) Padilha lingering here tells me a lot about both him and a film that doesn’t touch the Verhoeven original, of course (few movies could, just in terms of sheer force of personality), but does care about developing its relationships, if not necessarily its characters. It reminded me of the kind of helpless love I feel when my wife tries to dress it up for me–I mean, honey, you don’t have to do that. It’s human, in other words, and if the franchise–a subgenre of machine/man existentialism–is about anything, it’s about the difference between the little moments that make us human and all the other ones that align us more closely with machines. You could go deeper and describe it as an Apollonian/Dionysian thing–a mind/body dichotomy, the marriage of Heaven and Hell and on and on; or you could simply look at RoboCop as a pretty good action flick with lots of PG-13 fatalities that features more than its share of good actors in supporting roles as familiar action-movie staples. It’s clear after the halfway point that that’s what it’s really aspiring to be. Either way, it manages a few times to make a case for this mythos to be, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, one of those things each generation should consider adapting to their particular dysfunctions. It’s no satirical masterpiece, no Grand Guignol exercise, but as slight entertainment, there’s some meat on the bone.

The Monuments Men (2014)

February 6, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, War

Monumentsmen

*½/****
starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett
screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov, based on the book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter
directed by George Clooney

by Angelo Muredda There have been far worse prestige films than George Clooney’s delayed Oscar season also-ran The Monuments Men, but there’s rarely been a more misguided one. Hinging on a conceit that even the filmmaker appears to realize is weak sauce and based on a true story that’s probably worth its weight in magazine articles that really make you think, the film follows the exploits of a team of ragtag art dealers and curators turned Allied troops, sent into Europe in the closing days of WWII to save the Western world’s finest paintings, sculptures, and, yes, monuments, before Hitler could destroy them. It’s perhaps a mild credit to Clooney the humanitarian that the overwhelming gaucheness of the premise–that European art is the thing most worth preserving amidst a war that saw the systematic genocide of 6 million Jews–rates not just a mention but a guilty structural response, too, in the form of a framing story that sees Clooney the actor, as team leader Stokes, lecturing his overseers on the ambiguous value of the mission. It’s also to his shame as a screenwriter (alongside usual partner Grant Heslov) that the response is so ill-considered–the same canned “Art is all of us” spiel politicians who couldn’t give a damn about art give in the promotional material for government-funded cultural events.

Argento’s Dracula 3-D (2012) – Blu-ray 3D & Blu-ray

February 5, 2014Posted in2012, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy, Romance, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS

Dracula2

Dario Argento’s Dracula
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Thomas Kretschmann, Maria Gastini, Asia Argento, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Dario Argento, Antonio Tentori, Stefano Piani, based on the novel by Bram Stoker
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw I used to love Dario Argento. Heck, who didn’t? But at a certain point, it became clear that the quality of Argento’s work is directly proportional (or it was for a while) to the quality of work he’s riffing on. A shame that lately he appears to be mostly riffing on himself–the elderly version of a vital artist doing his best to recapture something he’s lost. It was Hitchcock as muse, of course, initially, joining Argento at the hip for a while with Brian DePalma, who was doing kind of the same thing at the same time with about the same audacity in the United States. There was genius there in the Deep Reds and Suspirias, certainly in the logic-bumfuddling submerged ballroom the heroine must enter to retrieve a key in Inferno. Argento didn’t really start to make bad movies until after Tenebre. Since, with notable half-exceptions like Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome, he’s made almost nothing but. It all comes to a head–or a tail, as it were–with Dario Argento’s Dracula: the worst entry in a filmography that includes stuff like Sleepless and Giallo, and frankly belonging somewhere in the conversation of the worst films of all time. Until you’ve endured it, I can’t quantify it. Coming from someone once revered for his innovative camera, for his groundbreaking work with music and production design–coming from the guy involved at some level with the conception/production of Once Upon a Time in the West and Dawn of the Dead, fer chrissakes (who, indeed, counted Leone and Bertolucci and George A. Romero as friends and collaborators), it’s a fucking tragedy.

Night of the Comet (1984) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

February 3, 2014Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Zombie

Nightofthecomet1

½*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B
starring Robert Beltran, Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Geoffrey Lewis
written and directed by Thom Eberhardt

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There’s a quote from the seventh season of “The Simpsons” that applies to the problem before us where Bart, happening on a “Schoolhouse Rock” thing and learning from Lisa that it’s one of “those campy ’70s throwbacks that appeals to Generation X-ers,” says, “We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little.” If there were, and if it had, we might’ve avoided the current rage for hipsterism–if the Joss Whedons of the world (and David Cranes and so forth) had found themselves casualties in some hostile jungle setting, then would this current youth generation have adopted, ironically, that last generation, and would people like me at my tender age of 40 be fuelling demand for hale distribution/archival companies like Shout! to produce exhaustively-supplemented HiDef releases of garbage like Thom Eberhardt’s excruciating Night of the Comet? Look, I’m not immune–I wrote an entire monograph (200+ pages, no kidding) on Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile that, in my defense, was more memoir than anything else (or is that more disclaimer than defense?). Still, I’ll proclaim to my grave that Miracle Mile has substance, while Night of the Comet has none. The first and greatest danger of nostalgia is that, having grown up with certain artifacts, we treat them like family and tend to love them unconditionally, as family does. This affection doesn’t mean that Junior isn’t a grinning idiot, however, because at least in this instance, he is. And I’m a strong believer that if one of your family members is a grinning idiot, it’s actually your job not to inflict him or her on other people.

John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

February 2, 2014Posted in1990s, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Escapefromla1

**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kurt Russell, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Cliff Robertson
screenplay by John Carpenter & Debra Hill & Kurt Russell
directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer The 1990s were unkind to John Carpenter: The stock market was booming, there was a Democrat in the White House, and the American horror film was at a low ebb. That was the decade when Carpenter–arguably the best B-movie auteur in the world during the 1980s and certainly the most audacious–lost his mojo. Exhausted from the experience of making two genre classics (They Live and Prince of Darkness) back to back, Carpenter took a couple of years off from filmmaking. When he was ready to work again, he considered making The Exorcist III but eventually settled on an ill-fated Chevy Chase vehicle, the $40 million sci-fi adaptation Memoirs of an Invisible Man, that torpedoed his attempted return to big-budget filmmaking. Carpenter tore through three more projects in the next three years–the Showtime horror anthology Body Bags, the Lovecraft riff In the Mouth of Madness, and a Village of the Damned remake–before deciding to pillage his own back catalogue with a sequel to the dystopian Escape from New York.

Weekend (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 30, 2014Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Road Movie, Satire, The Criterion Collection

Weekend1

WEEK END
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Georges Staquet, Juliet Berto
written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

by Angelo Muredda “The horror of the bourgeois can only be overcome with more horror.” So says a militant cannibal as he stands over the remains of one such bourgeois husk late in Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s farewell to the alienated pop art and American genre gerrymandering of his early period. As the line about horrors piled upon horrors implies, Weekend is nasty, as valedictory addresses go–a scorched-earth attack on France under Charles de Gaulle that finds nearly all of its citizens massacred in car crashes of their own design and converted into consumable products, namely food. The humanism of minor tragedies like Vivre sa vie and the heedless joy of Frank Tashlin homages like Une femme est une femme has here curdled into a new, ugly form. Although its title suggests a world of leisure and free play, one doesn’t enjoy Weekend so much as one endures it.

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 2014Posted in1970s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Electraglideinblue

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Robert Blake, Billy (Green) Bush, Jeannine Riley, Elisha Cook
screenplay by Robert Boris
directed by James William Guercio

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. By 1973 in the United States, film had already become chronicles of listless motion, failed ideologies, ironic Westward expansion, and rampant paranoia. American cinema was in the process of cannibalizing itself in great gulps of genre reconsideration, taking the lead of the movies-by-critics of the French New Wave and reassessing the western/film noir/thriller cycle of studio-era Hollywood through a new mirror darkly: The iconography of the hero mythology Americans hold most dear (cowboy, hardboiled detective, two-fisted man of action), forced now to be populated by incoherent psychopaths and, worse, effeminate ones–lawyers, journalists, ex-cons, ex-soldiers back from an unpopular war, unloved, disrespected, lost and still losing.

We’re the Millers (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 23, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Road Movie
Werethemillers1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts, Ed Helms
screenplay by Bob Fisher & Steve Faber and Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber

by Walter Chaw Rawson Marshall Thurber’s return to the territory of the screwball gross-out comedy that put him on the map, the better-than-it-should-be Dodgeball, is the better-than-it-should-be (but not as good as Dodgeball) We’re The Millers, an essentially plotless road-trip intrigue that nonetheless glances off 2013’s concern with the decline of the middle class while providing a couple of chuckles along the way. It’s the lowbrow version of Albert Brooks’s Lost in America if looked at through a particularly sympathetic lens–a hint of a conversation about class, a whiff of something about how hard it is to make a living on streets getting meaner by the day. Ultimately, it’s probably just lucky that the cast assembled has an impressive improvisational pedigree (and that the director is open to making adjustments midstream), lending a stale comedy of mistaken identity a degree of perhaps-undeserved life. It probably doesn’t hurt that We’re the Millers never, at any point, tries to be something it’s not: rescued by a total lack of ambition.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 21, 2014Posted in1970s, 2014, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: John Carpenter, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

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***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer, Nancy Loomis
written and directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer Written and directed by USC film-school grad John Carpenter, Assault on Precinct 13 is the work of a man with something to prove. Carpenter had finished one film, the shot-on-16mm SF parody Dark Star, co-written with Dan O’Bannon, but he found that nobody in Hollywood took it (or him) seriously. After winning a for-hire writing gig for Columbia Pictures (Carpenter wrote the screenplay that became The Eyes of Laura Mars), he got his hands on a hundred thousand dollars and wrangled some of his friends from USC to help him make the first “real” John Carpenter film. The project, which borrowed its story from Rio Bravo and its mood from Night of the Living Dead, was a siege movie set in an abandoned police station in the fictional Anderson, CA, identified on screen as “a Los Angeles ghetto.”

Plus One (2013) – DVD

January 19, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller, Time Travel

Plusone4

+1
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Rhys Wakefield, Logan Miller, Ashley Hinshaw, Natalie Hall
screenplay by Bill Gullo
directed by Dennis Iliadis

by Walter Chaw David (Rhys Wakefield) screws up and loses girlfriend Jill (Ashley Hinshaw), only to run into her the night of a gigantic, hedonistic, Gatsby-esque party attended by rave strippers, DJs, and drug dealers. An unlikely place to stage a comeback, David, with buddy Teddy (Logan Miller), coaxes Jill into a conversation that goes south–but then the lights cut out, there’s a weird meteorite event outside, and David finds himself with the opportunity to try the conversation again: same place, different Jill. It seems that something’s created a quantum split–a little bleed-over maybe from a parallel dimension that twists time and creates doubles of all the revellers, though only a few notice. The ones who don’t party on in a kind of nightmarish inattention that reminds of the dreamscapes of Miracle Mile and After Hours; the ones who do begin to wonder what will happen when the time-slips overlap and they find themselves attempting to share the same space as their doppelgängers.

Ms. 45 (1981)

January 17, 2014Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Revenge, Theatrical

Ms45

Ms. .45
***½/****
starring Zoë Tamerlis, Bogey, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto
screenplay N. G. St. John
directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I first saw Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 the way I suspect most men my age saw it: furtively, in my bedroom, on VHS. It had about it that aura of skeeviness I spent a good portion of my time hunting for at the local video store. My nose for such things had been rewarded with likes of I Spit on Your Grave and The Last House on the Left, films that never failed to be prurient in their rape sequences, no matter their nods to subsequently avenging our fair, fairly defiled, maidens. What Ferrara presents with this, arguably his second-most notorious film (The Addiction is unbelievable, and still only available on VHS), is a rape-revenge tale that does nothing to de-feminize its heroine–rather correctly, powerfully, identifying that the loci of a woman’s power is indeed her sexuality, even as that sexuality draws the objectifying, dehumanizing gaze. It’s why, after all, so many fertility goddesses are also destroyers, isn’t it? There’s a moment in the third Terminator where the female Terminator, played by the already-intimidating Kristanna Loken, makes a decision to enlarge her breasts prior to confronting a male victim. If only the rest of that film were so wise.

Stranger by the Lake (2013)

January 17, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Strangerbythelake

L’inconnu du lac
***½/****
starring Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou, Patrick d’Assumçao, Jérôme Chappatte
written and directed by Alain Guiraudie

by Angelo Muredda Late in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, a detective sent to investigate the murder of a young man at a nude male beach designated as a gay cruising spot breaks from his procedural script to unload his exasperation on a potential suspect. “You guys have a strange way of loving each other sometimes,” the investigator (Jérôme Chappatte) points out when it seems that no one can provide him with so much as the first names of their recent conquests, much less recall the moment the handsome guy with the ballcap vanished without a trace, save for his abandoned beach towel. His assessment cuts two ways in a film that, before veering into the territory of gothic sex thrillers with uncommon ease, takes a wry anthropological approach to good sex and bad love in a space designed to indulge both in their most rarefied forms. On the one hand, the detective is an anticipatory mouthpiece for the conservative critics who would rain down on the movie he’s in, eager perhaps to brand this tribe he’s wandered into as perverse, borderline sociopathic death-seekers with no regard for their fellow neighbours. Yet his curiosity and suspension of judgment might also mark him as Guiraudie’s ideal audience: a serene observer held in thrall to the strange lengths people will go to satisfy their desires.

Message from Space (1978) – DVD

January 15, 2014Posted in1970s, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory
Messagefromspace1

***/**** Image C+ Sound C- Extras C Madness A
starring Vic Morrow, Sonny Chiba, Philip Casnoff, Peggy Lee Brennan
screenplay by Hiroo Matsuda
directed by Kinji Fukasaku

by Walter Chaw Essentially a big-budget, feature-film version of Calvinball if Bill Watterson were a manga artist undergoing a psychotic break, Kinji Fukasaku’s balls-insane Message from Space is a very special brand of genius. It honours no structural logic that I can discern, though it does have a kinetic kid-logic, the kind honed from endless summer afternoons tromping around with your buddies, making shit up and being happier than you’ll ever be again in your life. Message from Space captures that headiness, that heedlessness, the sort of reckless creativity that charts the course between memorable films by someone like Ed Wood and forgettable films by every other hack with the same level of talent but not the same joyful dedication. I’m not saying Message from Space is a good movie–I can’t even say that the reasons for its existence are particularly honourable (it’s an obvious Star Wars cash-grab). But I can say that Message from Space is crazy-energetic and has more delightful moments packed into it than a dozen “normal” movies. I also wouldn’t underestimate its influence on a generation of kids Star Wars-hungry during that three-year gap between the first film and The Empire Strikes Back. Herein, find the source of Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy at least, and, incidentally, the better version of Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs (and Stewart Raffill’s The Ice Pirates).

Body Bags (1993) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 13, 2014Posted in1990s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: John Carpenter, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Bodybags1

**½/**** Image A- Sound C- Extras B
starring Robert Carradine, Stacy Keach, Mark Hamill, Twiggy
written by Billy Brown & Dan Angel
directed by John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper

by Bryant Frazer In 1989, HBO debuted a horror anthology show, “Tales from the Crypt”, based on stories from the disreputable EC comic books of the early 1950s. Jump-started by a stable of Hollywood big shots like Richard Donner, Joel Silver, and Robert Zemeckis, the show was a hit, and the wisecracking “Crypt Keeper” who introduced each episode quickly became a pop-culture icon. HBO’s rival Showtime, known primarily for its softcore anthology “Red Shoe Diaries”, was presumably aiming to duplicate that success when it backed Body Bags, an anthology project led by co-executive producers John Carpenter and his wife, Sandy King. Despite that genre pedigree, the series never got off the ground, but a pilot was completed: three half-hour segments with a goofy framing story involving Carpenter himself doing a deadpan Betelgeuse impression among the stiffs in a city morgue. The finished omnibus aired on Showtime as a one-off in the summer of ’93.

Synchronicity: FFC Interviews Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado, writers/directors of “Big Bad Wolves”

January 12, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, Israel

Bigbadwolvesinterviewtitle

Just a couple of weeks after I caught writer-director Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s Big Bad Wolves at the 4th Mile High Horror Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino, having seen it himself at the Busan International Film Festival, declared it to be his favourite movie of 2013. Turns out QT screening the picture at a South Korean event represents a special kind of synchronicity, given that both he and South Korea’s fulsome genre cinema were key influences on Kehsales & Papushado. Seeing both of Keshales and Papushado’s films when I did (before I got a chance to screen Big Bad Wolves, I was inspired by the buzz on it to track down their 2010 debut, Rabies) felt like a bit of synchronicity in itself–or, at least, I felt lucky that I was able to catch this wave right at the moment that it crests and heads to shore. When I reached out to Mr. Keshales to see if he might be interested in an interview, he was quick to agree and then, over missed connections, a miscommunication about time zones (8 p.m. in Israel is 11 a.m. in Colorado, go figure), a bad Skype link, a newly-purchased cell-mike still package-fresh, and finally a cell call from a street in Israel (where Papushado almost got creamed by a car) to a suburb in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I was able to chat at last with Keshales and Papushado: the faces–the only ones, as it happens–of Israeli horror and a new day dawning in Israeli cinema.

Lone Survivor (2013)

January 7, 2014Posted in2013, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

Lonesurvivor
***/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Eric Bana
screenplay by Peter Berg, based on the book by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw Peter Berg is a great action director. He does it with verve, a good sense of space (which is increasingly rare these days), and a sense of both weight and humour. He has excellent timing, as well as an understanding of what’s meaningful visual information in there among the dross of motion and impact. Moreover, he seems obsessed with working through issues surrounding what it means to be a man–how, too often, it means your social interactions are limited to violence, threats to your sexuality, and hazing rituals dangerous and bestial. I’m a huge fan of his debut feature, Very Bad Things; visually, I think it’s wrong to underestimate how influential is his romantic rack-focus gimmick from Friday Night Lights. I love Berg’s Hancock, the movie that Man of Steel aspired to be (and if we’re talking secondary influences, Zack Snyder owes much of his cinematic vocabulary to Berg). I love The Rundown, and while Battleship is inarguably a misfire, it’s also less of a misfire than it could have been. With Lone Survivor, based on the memoir of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, the titular lone survivor of a botched four-man special forces mission in Afghanistan, Berg’s examinations of the masculine take their logical turn from bachelor parties to football to superheroes to military action. And for long moments, Lone Survivor is fantastic.