FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Lone Survivor (2013)

January 7, 20142013, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

***/****
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.

Eyes Without a Face (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 5, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Les yeux sans visage
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, François Guérin, Edith Scob
screenplay by Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon and Claude Sautet, based on the novel by Jean Redon
directed by Georges Franju

by Walter Chaw Five films changed the conversation in 1960. They were the fire, though the embers were stoked in the years leading up to them. Looking for signposts in the Eisenhower Fifties, you find the juvenile-delinquent cycle, plus the outré horror flicks of England’s Hammer Studios, or Japan’s tokusatsu, or France’s Nouvelle Vague. More directly, you find a pair of films based on works by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Diabolique and Vertigo. But in 1960, there was this quintet, each the product of parallel genesis, each proof after a fashion of a Jungian collective unconscious, perhaps, certainly that things long-simmering inevitably boil over. There’s an idea in my head, put there by Ethan Mordden’s Medium Cool, that everything that happened in the arts in the United States throughout the Fifties points to what was about to happen in our culture in the Sixties. Mordden is the source of my favourite teaching point when it comes to the two eras: that in the Fifties, if you didn’t listen to Mother, society was doomed; and in 1960, if you listened to Mother, you were Psycho.

FFC’s Best of ’13

January 1, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

by Walter Chaw Searching for themes in 2013, you come upon the obvious ones first: the frustrations of the forty-five percenters; the growing income gap; and the death of the middle class, encapsulated in brat-taculars like The Bling Ring and Spring Breakers and prestige pics like Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, David O. Russell’s American Hustle, and, um, Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. You see this preoccupation with the economy in Nebraska‘s quest for a million-dollar Clearinghouse payday, and in Frances Halladay’s desire for a place to sleep and a career that can subsidize it (see also: To the Wonder and Byzantium). It’s there in the identity theft of Identity Theft and the motivations of the prefab family from We’re the Millers, paid off with picket fences in an ending with echoes of My Blue Heaven and Goodfellas. Consider All is Lost, an allegory for pensioners who’ve lost everything to the wolves of Wall Street, adrift on a limitless span, taking on water but plucky, damnit. Too plucky, in the case of Redford’s Everyman hero–who, frankly, would’ve better served his allegory had he drowned with salvation in sight.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

December 24, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Jean Dujardin
screenplay by Terence Winter, based on the book by Jordan Belfort
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Angelo Muredda “For us, to live any other way was nuts,” Ray Liotta’s schnook turned gangster Henry Hill explains early on in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. With that, spoken over a montage of permed Italian men in tailored suits gorging themselves at an upscale restaurant, Hill at once launched a wave of lesser, faux-conflicted pictures about the swanky perks and ethical compromises of organized crime, and raised the fundamental moral question of Scorsese’s latest, The Wolf of Wall Street. An unashamedly indulgent, ribald, and formally troubled biopic of Jordan Belfort, this unofficial Goodfellas follow-up likewise revolves around the kind of work that makes living like a pig in shit possible. His kinship to Hill aside, Belfort has had an unusually clear-sailing trajectory to garner the interest of a filmmaker who tends to be drawn to Catholic tales of excess followed by redemptive suffering. Belfort is still a born stockbroker and swindler, despite his working-class origins and federal inquiries and stints in rehab; the fact that he debuted on Wall Street the day of the crash and remains in demand as a guru well after the financial crisis of 2008 seems to give Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter pause, as well the astonishing survival rate of cockroaches should. What better way to make a film about such a man, Scorsese and Winter appear to have concluded, than to structure his story as a Roman orgy?

Room 237 (2013) – Blu-ray Disc (UPDATED)

December 20, 20132013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Documentary, Esoterica, Stephen King

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
directed by Rodney Ascher

“A story of the supernatural cannot be taken apart and analyzed too closely. The ultimate test of its rationale is whether it is good enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. If you submit it to a completely logical and detailed analysis it will eventually appear absurd.”
–Stanley Kubrick, interviewed by Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, Part 4

by Bryant Frazer Did director Stanley Kubrick encode The Shining with an admission that he helped create phony footage of the Apollo moon-landing in 1969? Well, of course not. That’s nuts. It’s a cockamamie argument. And it’s one of several cockamamie arguments advanced by viewers given a platform for their unconventional theories in Room 237, an odd duck of a documentary about the conclusions reached by five different Kubrick fans upon very close analysis of The Shining.

American Hustle (2013)

December 19, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence
screenplay by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell
directed by David O. Russell

by Angelo Muredda “The world is extremely grey,” a con artist intones in American Hustle, which, for all its ineffectual stabs at ambivalence, is a curiously prescriptive heist movie, the kind that constantly updates its ledger about who deserves what in the end, in case someone should go unrewarded. It’s hard to say when David O. Russell–a formerly prickly sort so effectively housebroken in recent years that he’s now on the fast track to Academy Award nominations four through five–became so square as to depend on this sort of moral calculus for his dramatic fulfillment: Its equally big-picture pronouncements aside, I ♥ Huckabees seems an odd way station between the redemptive U2-scored montage that closes Three Kings and the brotherly hug of The Fighter, as well as a far more pugilistic film than the one about boxing. Whatever the genesis of his newfound softness (which Russell has insisted is the mark of his maturity as an artist), it’s never been as out of synch with either his manic sensibility or his aesthetic of distended, freewheeling set-pieces and outsized actorly emoting as it is here.

Her (2013)

December 18, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Scarlett Johansson
written and directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw Two moments early on in Spike Jonze’s Her. The first when our hero, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), initiates his new operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and is asked to characterize his relationship with his mother; the second when, in flashback, Theodore and his ex, Catherine (Rooney Mara), pretend to choke each other. They’re waypoints Jonze establishes for his piece: in one direction, there’s Blade Runner and its questions of proximate humanity; in the other, there’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and its mad love. Jonze establishes, too, that this will be a work of science-fiction owing its parentage to the best sources, that its premise will be fantastic but grounded in characters and their place in the world. Of all the compliments I can think to pay this film, the best is that Her is at least the equal of its waypoints. More, when its solution recalls the metaphysical coda to the great The Incredible Shrinking Man, it’s the equal of that as well.

The Lone Ranger (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 15, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Superhero, Western

Loneranger1

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Tom Wilkinson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Justin Haythe and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw What Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger has going for it, in addition to a genuinely ugly streak of nihilism and a surprisingly high body count, is that it doesn’t seek to “darken” its titular boy scout hero so much as offer that his brand of do-gooderism seems naïve and ineffectual in the modern conversation. It’s the same tactic taken by Arthur Penn’s own picaresque western Little Big Man, the film it most resembles right down to the framing story: an aged narrator relating his sometimes fanciful tale to a modern chronicler, used to amusing effect when the plot gets out of hand, Princess Bride-style. It’s like a lot of movies, I guess (including two Simon Wincer westerns, Quigley Down Under and Lightning Jack), which doesn’t mean it’s derivative so much as it means that it plays like any number of satires of the kind of innocence that made the Lone Ranger character a favourite of impressionable young Americans for generations. It’s more the anachronism of The Brady Bunch Movie than the update of Man of Steel, in other words–and the better for it, even if its ultimate message appears to be that the crimson tide has overtaken us, once and for all, and there’s no real room left in the world for the idealism represented by a hero with a list of creeds, the first of which is that to have friends one must first be a friend.

The Last Days on Mars (2013)

December 12, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai, Olivia Williams
screenplay by Clive Dawson, based on the short story “The Animators” by Sydney J. Bounds
directed by Ruairi Robinson

by Walter Chaw Sort of expecting an impressionistic adaptation of David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” cycle, imagine my surprise to discover that Ruairi Robinson’s The Last Days on Mars is a derivative, flaccid little space-set horror flick that proves the maxim that movies with “Mars” in the title tend to suck. It boasts an exceptional cast, anchored by the ever-steady Liev Schreiber, who receives strong assists from Olivia Williams, Romola Garai, and Elias fucking Koteas. And it features a script by Clive Dawson, based on a Sydney Bounds short story, that is so familiar to genre enthusiasts by now that if you can’t predict who lives, who dies first, even what the last shot will be, well, you just aren’t paying attention. See, The Last Days on Mars is about the last hours for this scientific expedition looking for proof of life. On the verge of giving up, they find proof of life. But the life is evil and it turns them into space zombies. No, seriously.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

December 12, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Fantasy, Theatrical

*½/****
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.

Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

December 10, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Disney, Drama, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Paul Giamatti, Colin Farrell
screenplay by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith
directed by John Lee Hancock

by Walter Chaw Oh, I get it, haha, this is some kind of joke, right? Because no one in their right mind would remake Finding Neverland as this twee bullshit. …Wait, really? Okay. Because I’m assured that this happened, presented for your approval is (snicker) Saving Mr. Banks, directed by (haha) John Lee Hancock from a screenplay by a team one half of which (bwahaha) is currently writing the Fifty Shades of Grey adaptation. This is rich–are you serious? Okay, okay. So Saving Mr. Banks is based on the adorable true story of how everyone’s favourite union-busting, HUAC finger-pointing anti-Semite Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) convinced brittle British bitch P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson, the “I’m so veddy cross” ‘elevens’ crease between her eyes upstaging her in nearly every scene) to sell him the rights to her creation, Mary Poppins. He all of practiced, televisual charm and she all of powder and crumpets; how will Walt ever batter down the barriers that Ms. Travers has erected from the hell of her Andrew Wyeth flashback childhood, complete with (snigger) Colin Farrell as her fatally-flawed (and handsomely alcoholic) da, Robert. Who gives a shit? More rhetorical questions: Who really likes–I mean really likes–garbage like this? Is there anyone at this point who thinks it a great idea to peanut-butter a shameless Thomas Newman score over every exposed nook in a movie aimed at cat ladies in Mickey Mouse sweatshirts? Saving Mr. Banks is dribble of the first order. What I wouldn’t give to see Hanks play Disney’s 1931 nervous breakdown, moreover to have our very own Jimmy Stewart choose the same late-career path as the actual Stewart and begin playing darker roles in less conventional films. Admittedly, Captain Phillips is mostly crap, but it’s not drool, and Hanks is great in it.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

December 8, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, France, Music, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake
written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw I love the Coen Brothers, despite my suspicion that most of their movies don’t think much of me at all. What’s often read as disdain for their characters I’ve read mainly as antipathy for their audience: I believe they like their characters just fine, it’s just that they could give a shit about your opinion of what happens to them. I love the Coens for their literary acumen, for their fine ability to understand not simply the form of genre–and, in their adaptations, of authors–but the entire function as well. They don’t just adapt Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis novels, they adapt those writers’ entire bodies of work. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a remarkable retelling of The Odyssey, for instance, because in addition to following the outlines of the poem, it adapts its themes and storytelling strategies; it’s a dissection and a representation and glorious, of course. They return now to The Odyssey–or, at least, to the character of Odysseus–in Inside Llewyn Davis, a picture set in 1961, among the bohos and coffee shops of a Greenwich Village on the verge of Bob Dylan and the counterculture, and it’s populated with lost souls in overlapping underworlds. Transpose that passage from Homer where Odysseus fills troughs with sheeps’ blood to draw the undead (and finds his poor deceased mother there at her drink) to scenes in Pappi’s (Max Casella) infernal nightclub as proto-hipsters and neo-beatniks assemble blandly on the edge of a trembling something while performers bleed out before them. In rituals for new gods, after all, there must be lambs to slaughter.

Frances Ha (2013) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

December 5, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Charlotte D’Amboise, Adam Driver
screenplay by Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda There’s a lot to love in Frances Ha, but the highlight is surely a tracking shot of star, muse, and co-writer Greta Gerwig clumsily bounding through the streets of Brooklyn to the sounds of David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” (In a daily dispatch for mubi.com, Fernando Croce astutely toasts her “galumphing radiance.”) You could read this moment as either a joyous corrective to Michael Fassbender’s miserable NYC jog in Shame or a direct lift, down to the song’s abrupt stop, from Leos Carax’s Mauvais sang–think of Gerwig as the Ginger to Denis Lavant’s Fred. Or you could just accept it as the clearest expression of the film’s ambling structure: a lovely, headlong dive through traffic en route to somewhere safe but rewarding.

Curse of Chucky [Unrated] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

December 3, 20132013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Horror, Thriller

Curseofchucky1

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Fiona Dourif, Danielle Bisutti, Maitland McConnell, Brad Dourif
written and directed by Don Mancini

by Bryant Frazer Say what you will about the Child’s Play movies, but don’t accuse franchise creator Don Mancini of being a hack. Sure, his Chucky, a walking-and-talking “Good Guy doll” possessed by the soul of a serial killer, is a steal. Nothing original about it. Chucky is a foul-mouthed iteration of creepy Toys “R” Us killers from any number of horror films–most of them dating to Cavalcanti’s famous segment from 1945’s Dead of Night, though another key influence was the notoriously pants-wetting 1975 TV movie Trilogy of Terror, with its murderous Zuni fetish doll sharing the screen with a terrified Karen Black. But something about Mancini’s formulation clicked with Fright Night director Tom Holland, and the 1988 Child’s Play, which detailed Chucky’s origin story and pitted him against a young boy, was a low-budget success that naturally demanded sequels. Mancini remained on board as screenwriter as two more directors took on two more Child’s Play entries. After 1991’s Child’s Play 3, the character seemed played-out, but Mancini successfully resurrected him with the tongue-in-cheek Bride of Chucky, which brought Jennifer Tilly into the fold along with director Ronny Yu, and Mancini finally took the directorial reins himself with the even more broadly comic Seed of Chucky, which numbered Britney Spears and Martha Stewart among its victims.

SDFF ’13: Borgman

November 26, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Netherlands, Thriller

****/****
starring Jan Bijvoet, Hadewych Minis, Jeroen Perceval, Sara Hjort Ditlevsen
written and directed by Alex van Warmerdam

by Walter Chaw Screening at the SDFF and now travelling with the Alamo Fantastic Fest, Alex van Warmerdam’s Borgman gets the Yorgos Lanthimos Award for Most Devastating Absurdist Metaphor for Familial Dysfunction. Smart as hell and unapologetically surreal, its central motivating image is a tableaux vivant of Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare,” tipping off not just the ethos of the film, but also that there may be running threads concerning mothers (Fuseli was Mary Wollstonecraft’s lover), monsters (Mary being the mother of Mary “Frankenstein” Shelley), the empowerment of women (the mother again), nightmares, of course, and maybe Romanticism, if only in the picture’s awareness and perversion of nature. Demanding a specific kind of active spectatorship, Borgman is a complex film with heat, and somewhere in the middle of it there’s a performance within a performance that ends with a declaration of intent that stands as one of the most existentially chilling things in cinema this year.

A Perfect World (1993) – Blu-ray Disc

November 25, 2013****/****, 1990s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Road Movie, Thriller

****/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Laura Dern, T.J. Lowther
screenplay by John Lee Hancock
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Time and distance have conspired to replace Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven with A Perfect World in my mind as his best film and one of the best movies of the ’90s. The two occur within a year of each other and mark, with In the Line of Fire between them, a renaissance of the Eastwood brand that had taken a few licks of late with embarrassments like Pink Cadillac, The Rookie, City Heat, Heartbreak Ridge, and on and on. While I was growing up, Eastwood was a Dirty Harry joke and the guy who acted with Orangutans. The first time I saw him in anything was in Bronco Billy, which, frankly, isn’t the first time you want to see anyone in anything. What Unforgiven did for me was inspire a curiosity about Sergio Leone and, with that, a new reason to respect Eastwood’s legacy; my first time through A Perfect World disturbed my notion of who Kevin Costner was (baseball player/cowboy) at the height of his power and sway in Hollywood, and I was distracted. Every time I’ve revisited A Perfect World since (and I’ve been compelled to revisit it at least once every few years), as Costner’s star has faded and Eastwood’s elder statesmanhood behind the camera has somehow dwarfed his iconhood in front of it, I feel the melancholy nostalgia of the film more and more. It’s an American masterpiece. I make that distinction because it’s distinctly American; and I mean it when I say that it’s as fine an essay of the dying of an age as anything in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.

SDFF ’13: I Used to Be Darker

November 24, 20132013, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Music

***/**** directed by Matthew Porterfield by Walter Chaw Matthew Porterfield's quiet and humane I Used to Be Darker provides an interesting contrast to Richard Linklater's talkier improvisations while covering the same interpersonal landscapes of how people speak to one another, react to one another, and interact physically within a space. One of the first images is of a little Irish girl, Taryn (Deragh Campbell), taking a knife to a couple of paintings. It's a rejection of many things, as well as a declaration. I Used to Be Darker will privilege the cinematic (i.e., showcase the complexity and eloquence of communication…

Nature Calls: FFC Interviews Denis Côté|Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013)

November 22, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Not long into Denis Côté’s equal parts unnerving and affecting Curling, we get a taste of what might charitably be called the social life of its cloistered central characters, stolid dad Jean-François (Emmanuel Bilodeau) and his taciturn daughter Julyvonne (Philomene Bilodeau): When Julyvonne does her chores, her father grants her a rare glimpse of the world beyond their home in the chilly Quebec countryside, courtesy of the living-room stereo. Father and daughter quietly tap their fingers and rock their knees to songs like Tiffany’s improbably upbeat “I Think We’re Alone Now”–pop hits from a bygone era that, for all the unschooled Julyvonne knows, could be the present. The irony of that reveal, which is perhaps unsurprising to anyone familiar with Côté’s filmography, is that Jean-François and Julyvonne have their own, perfectly private lives outside this sheltered world, him through his work as a repairman whose job necessitates roaming into hotels and bowling alleys, her through a number of clandestine trips to the forest that put her in touch with a tiger and its possible prey.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

November 20, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Philip Seymour Hoffman
screenplay by Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw Portentous, eagerly anticipated, ending on an abrupt cliffhanger aboard a spaceship… Yes, I’m talking about The Matrix Reloaded–I mean, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (hereafter Catching Fire), which, for all the conceptual visual improvements inherent in moving from The Hunger Games director Gary Ross to director Francis Lawrence for this instalment, still suffers from hilarible, unspeakable dialogue and a scenario seldom honoured by the execution. Those who haven’t read the books (myself included), fair warning that you’ll not be able to follow a moment of this one without revisiting the first film–again like The Matrix Reloaded. From what I could glean based on the fragments of The Hunger Games I haven’t blocked out is that this girl, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence, earnestly dreadful), has won a televised deathmatch sponsored by a monolithic government to keep control of twelve impoverished, racially- and class-coded districts. I get it, it’s a metaphor and, um, a satire of some sort.

Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

November 19, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Jared Leto, Denis O’Hare
screenplay by Craig Borten & Melisa Wallack
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

by Walter Chaw Agreeable, well-meaning horseshit in the Lorenzo’s Oil vein (but horseshittier), Jean-Marc Vallée’s really bad Dallas Buyers Club is saved to some extent by a couple of fine, showy performances from a skeletal Matthew McConaughey and a skeletal Jared Leto in drag, but ultimately defeated by the standard straw-man activist biopic formula. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s this fall’s Promised Land: another liberal movie that injures the credibility of the liberal platform by being so shrill and didactic as to play like melodrama of the worst kind–that is, the self-important kind. All of which is not to say that I didn’t sort of enjoy it in the moment (it’s fun to marvel at how close to death McConaughey looks, and how pretty Leto is), but to say that the act of writing about it means taking the time to think about it, and that Dallas Buyers Club doesn’t suffer much thinking-about.

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