FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Bling Ring (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

October 15, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama

Blingring1

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Taissa Farmiga, Leslie Mann
screenplay by Sofia Coppola, based on the VANITY FAIR article by Nancy Jo Sales
directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Doomed to be compared–unfavorably, I think–to Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring is better seen as another document of ennui and privilege and the different ways the same old dissatisfaction and yearning manifest in endlessly evolving, endlessly confounding ways, generation by generation. Appearing as they both do in the middle of a ceaseless recession with our leaders arguing, as they did in the late-1930s, about social programs that one side believed indispensable and the other recklessly overpriced, neither film is terribly different in structure and execution from The Wizard of Oz. Coppola, upon reflection, is the perfect artist for an updating of Dorothy’s trip to the Emerald City–she is, after all, Dorothy. If you were to freeze-frame the film during its opening titles (scored brilliantly, discordantly, by the Sleigh Bells‘ “Crown on the Ground”), you’d note, as my editor Bill did on Twitter, that Coppola’s own credit reads “Written and Directed by Rich Bitch Sofia Coppola.” Self-awareness, self-deprecation, it’s all of those things, but what it is most, I think, is a kind of acceptance: her own peace with her relationship with the two “acts” of her public life, the first indicated perhaps by her father not protecting her well enough as an actress, the second by her move to behind the camera as a director of quiet, trance-like pictures about little girls lost. If The Bling Ring is ultimately the least of Coppola’s films, it gathers weight, develops context, taken as a whole with the others. Say what you will and count me deep in her camp, Coppola is every bit the auteur her father is–and it’s his fault.

MHHFF ’13: Haunter

October 14, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*/****
directed by Vincenzo Natali

by Walter Chaw A Paperhouse/Coraline kind of movie that mixes all that familiar guff into a paste with the can’t-leave-this-house crap from The Others and, oh, why not, Beetlejuice, too, Vincenzo Natali’s follow-up to his unfairly-maligned Splice is the genuinely bad Haunter, which plays every bit like a collection of “Resident Evil” cut-scenes. Abigail Breslin is Lisa, a period-’80s teenager in a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt who, in a real knee-slapper, deadpans that “meat is murder” to her mother’s offer of meatloaf, because The Smiths, get it? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that Haunter is a master of overstatement (it wouldn’t surprise me if this Lisa is an homage to the Staci Keanan Lisa), even taking a moment at the end to pay tribute to Carpenter’s Christine for really no other reason than that it can’t help being hyperbolic: the screaming is screamier, the whispering is whisperier, and it doesn’t rain, it pours. Lisa is trapped in the last day of her life with her family in a sort of Groundhog Day conceit, except that she’s a ghost who eventually figures out that the same evil ghost dude guy has been killing young girls just like her for decades, and that it’s up to her to break the cycle. This leads, of course, to a scene from the ending of Ghost–no, not that one, the one before it where the villain gets dragged to hell by bad special effects.

Autumn Sonata (1978) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 13, 2013****/****, 1970s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Directors: Ingmar Bergman, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Music, Sweden, The Criterion Collection

Höstsonaten
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann, Lena Nyman, Halvar Björk
written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

by Bryant Frazer By 1978, Ingmar Bergman was in trouble. The director had fled his native Sweden two years earlier after an arrest on charges of tax evasion. (He would be completely exonerated in 1979, but his mood was no doubt grim until then.) He visited Paris and Los Angeles, then settled in Munich, where he would shoot his first English-language film, the 1920s Berlin-set The Serpent’s Egg, a Dino de Laurentiis co-production co-starring David Carradine and Bergman stalwart Liv Ullmann. The Serpent’s Egg was a box-office flop in Sweden, a critical and commercial failure internationally, and most of all a big artistic disappointment for Bergman himself–a decided stumble for a director riding high on the success of 1970s titles like the harrowing Cries and Whispers, which enjoyed huge success in the U.S. in the unlikely care of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, and the audience-friendly The Magic Flute. At the same time, Bergman was embarking on what would prove to be an unhappy tenure at Munich’s Residenztheater, where he managed to mount eleven productions before being fired in 1981. In this turbulent context, the very Bergmanesque Autumn Sonata can be seen as a kind of comfort film–a deliberate return to roots. Someone once described it as “Bergman does Bergman,” and the gag stuck. Bergman himself eventually quoted the remark, calling it “witty but unfortunate. For me, that is.”

MHHFF ’13: FFC Interviews “We Are What We Are” Director Jim Mickle

October 12, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews

The Curtis Hotel is right across the street from the Denver Performing Arts Complex–a city block “hollowed out” in the middle that houses Denver’s premier venues: the ones for the opera, the ballet, the symphony, and touring companies of Broadway productions. On a hot day in September, I walked through the complex, under the four-storey-high glass canopy, to the Curtis. It’s a fun place, this hotel; the floors have themes. I met Jim Mickle on the superhero floor, on the morning his film was to screen at the 4^th Mile High Horror Film Festival. He’s a tall guy, affable, friendly, and not at all what I was expecting after watching his sober, dense, matriarchal horror movie We Are What We Are. I expected, at the least, a tweed coat with leather patches on the elbows. On the last day of publicity for the film, after which he was returning to editing duties on his adaptation of Joe Lansdale’s awesome noir Cold in July, I promised I would try to avoid asking him questions he’d already answered a few dozen times before–although I couldn’t resist bringing up Kelly McGillis and Witness because, yeah, I’m a big, giant dork. We started off, though, talking about Antonia Bird’s Ravenous and his own film’s Ravenous feel.

Bastards (2013)

October 11, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, France, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller

Les salauds
****/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille, Lola Creton
screenplay by Jean-Pol Fargeau and Claire Denis
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda A Claire Denis film through and through, Bastards is nevertheless a brilliant departure for one of the most distinctive artists in world cinema–an indignant revenge thriller with, of all things, a straightforward plot. Of course, the plot is scrambled, doled out in the runic fragments that have become Denis’s stock-in-trade. We open, for instance, in the rain, as a throbbing Tindersticks track underscores a series of beautiful but inscrutable nocturnal images: glimpses of a man forlornly staring out his window, languorous tracking shots of a nude young woman in heels roaming through a deserted street, and finally a tableau of a dead man’s body splayed out beneath a fire escape, surrounded by paramedics in the background as a woman, probably his wife, is draped in a tinfoil blanket in the fore. Although films like L’Intrus have primed us to accept such shards as part of an impressionistic array of visual information, adding up to a textured view of nighttime Paris as a hopelessly lonely place, in Bastards the pieces fit together in a precise way we’re simply not allowed to know until we’ve arrived through the movie’s own idiosyncratic channel, and at its own deliberate pace. That makes it one of the most elegantly constructed of Denis’s eleven features–a grim noir story broken into its component parts, then reassembled into a haunted funhouse image of itself.

MHHFF ’13: Big Bad Wolves

October 10, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, Israel, Thriller

***/****
starring Tzahi Grad, Llor Ashkenazi, Rotem Keinan, Dov Glickman
written and directed by Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado

by Walter Chaw A winning, stylish mixture of black humour, perversion, and character study, Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s Big Bad Wolves presents a popular moral quandary in a way that would make Park Chan-wook proud. Indeed, it would fit comfortably in a conversation with that director’s “Vengeance Trilogy” as a companion piece in theme, even execution, to Sympathy for Lady Vengeance that finds a father and a rogue police officer brutally torturing an unassuming schoolteacher because they both suspect he’s responsible for the death of a little girl. With the question of guilt beside the point, the real thrust of the piece is the toll that some actions take on the soul, no matter why they’re undertaken. Crucially, it’s not a product of the United States or South Korea, two cultures married to a specific kind of morally relativistic nightmare that have produced films like this for years, but of an Israeli movie industry that marks this as only their second “horror” release. (The first, incidentally, was a product of this same writing-directing team: 2010’s Kalavet.) For an Israeli thriller to tackle the issue of the zero-sum game of rendition and torture without due process feels dangerous–particularly with the ancillary character of an Arab man on horseback who is wry, handsome, and utterly normal, nay, the only normal one in the entire film.

Escape from Tomorrow (2013)

October 9, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, Katelynn Rodriguez, Alison Lees-Taylor
written and directed by Randy Moore

by Walter Chaw Randy Moore’s ridiculously-ballsy Escape from Tomorrow proves itself to be a good deal more than a gimmick–said gimmick being that it posits the Magic Kingdom as the locus, the key modern metaphor, for bourgeois discontent, with much of the picture shot surreptitiously on the grounds of Disneyland and Disney World. It’s very much the model of a Luis Buñuel film, not just for its expert surrealism, but also for its sharply-reasoned social satire. It does the impossible in our modern conversation by feeling urgent and fresh, presenting something that’s genuinely shocking to our jaded sensibilities. If there’s anything left that is perverse, one is this violation of such a famously litigious sacred cow. It isn’t even that the idea of using Disney as the eye of a capitalist/vaguely fascistic hurricane is particularly novel: consider that David Mamet took it on in his collection of essays Some Freaks–not to mention the gallons of ink spilled on its essentially corrupt nature by wanks following the long immolation of Disney products Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus. No, what’s novel about Escape from Tomorrow is that it does what it does through images; it is essentially this generation’s Superstar, in which Todd Haynes told the life and death of Karen Carpenter using Barbie and Ken dolls. A picture that understands its subject and its relationship to popular culture well enough to make everyone pretty uncomfortable with their own complicity in it all, it’s an indictment of a collective upbringing. The recognition you experience is of your own indoctrinated childhood.

MHHFF ’13: We Are What We Are (2013)

October 8, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

***½/****
starring Bill Sage, Ambyr Childers, Julia Garner, Michael Parks
screenplay by Nick Damici and Jim Mickle
directed by Jim Mickle

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It begins with a leaf falling into a river and a woman, confused and trembling, declaring to a shop owner that she’s fine but that the damp will sometimes get into her head. Jim Mickle’s smart, downcast We Are What We Are looks to Nature as not just insensate, savage, but also the first testament to a greater power. It locates the source of religion in the need to control Nature, more specifically to find meaning in the capricious-seeming meaninglessness of the universe. It implicates the ugliest, most selfish aspect of Nature in the founding of the United States, mining resonance in the idea of “Manifest Destiny”–in the process giving women a starring role: positions of real power in which they’re depended upon for their strength rather than exploited for some idea of their weakness. We Are What We Are enacts a matriarchal melodrama in that way; connecting the feminine aspect to Nature is nothing new, of course, but the picture does so in a way that feels true and is in its own way touching. It opens with a quote that seems Biblical (later, one of the characters will ask another, “Is that from the Bible?”–it’s not then, either), which serves the multifoliate purposes of establishing the mood of the piece, clarifying that religion is born in the breast of man, and establishing a woman as the artifactor of the Word. The woman with the damp in her head, a mother, falls into water and drowns–the first of several images of baptism in the picture, and one that predicts the flood imagery running throughout. Water suggests change, unearths things, washes them clean. It’s all heavy stuff, I know, yet the thrill of We Are What We Are is that it’s about all these things without being obviously about any of it.

MHHFF ’13: Ghost Team One

October 8, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror

*½/****
directed by Ben Peyser & Scott Rutherford

by Walter Chaw Kind of a cross between Paranormal Activity and American Pie, Ben Peyser and Scott Rutherford’s Ghost Team One is buoyed by a game cast and a certain relentlessness but let down by an extended conclusion that finally crosses the line from offensive-but-funny to offensive-offensive. Before that, there’s virgin Sergio (Carlos Santos) and his horny, neo-Stiffler buddy Brad (J.R. Villarreal) outfitting their pad with cameras and enlisting a third, largely-unseen buddy at the handheld in the pursuit of ghost-hunting–or so they tell the beautiful Fernanda (Fernanda Romero). Really, this project seems designed around the chance of maybe capturing some uploadable gonzo porn. This promises oodles of nudity in a supernatural-tinged sex romp, but, alas, what we get are a lot of masturbation jokes and an Asian burlesque from otherwise-hilarious frat-boy Chuck (Tony Cavalero), which starts in a bad place and descends to a very bad place during an extended exorcism scene. Opportunities to attack Mormons are squandered along with the chance to craft something with the sort of ’80s lawlessness of The Last American Virgin. The film can’t even take a successful swipe at The Blair Witch Project, though it tries.

MHHFF ’13: Cheap Thrills

October 7, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

***½/****
starring Pat Healy, Sara Paxton, Ethan Embry, David Koechner
screenplay by Trent Haaga & David Chirchirillo
directed by E.L. Katz

by Walter Chaw A lean, mean, pleasantly unpleasant little clockwork from first-time director E.L. Katz, Cheap Thrills feels and acts like the best kind of noir–the kind where you don’t like anyone very much. Reuniting Pat Healy and Sara Paxton from The Innkeepers (another movie that disproves the maxim that genre film is in trouble), this is a fairly stunning, if a bit on the nose, parable of our recessionary state, as car mechanic/aspiring writer Craig (Healy) is faced with the eviction of his young family from their tiny apartment and a layoff from his already-not-paying-enough job. Drinking his sorrows away at a bar, he runs into an old buddy, Vince (a fantastic Ethan Embry), and an odd couple, Colin (David Koechner) and Violet (Paxton), celebrating Violet’s birthday. Mysteriously wealthy, it seems that Colin is looking to solve the puzzle of what to get the impossibly pretty younger wife who has everything, and the answer is to stage a series of increasingly sadistic stunts between Craig and Vince for various bounties. $200 for saying something to the meth-addict at the bar to make her slap you; $500 if you hit the strip-club bouncer first. The stakes escalate, tensions rise, and it all ends with probably the single best expression of the current state of manhood in the lower-middle-class United States circa 2013.

Mile High Horror Film Festival ’13: An Introduction

October 7, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Horror

by Walter Chaw I’d been vaguely aware of the Mile High Horror Film Festival its previous three years to the extent that I’d reached out at some point to see about coverage, but it came to nothing and was easy for me to ignore. Then a good friend moved from the Denver Film Society to the newly-opened Denver location of Alamo Drafthouse as creative director, and one September morning, I found myself driving down to meet with him and chat about his new position. This Drafthouse is beautiful, by the way, and for cinephiles in the Denver area, it’s a hope devoutly wished, answered. If you don’t support this venue and its mission statement (“to save cinema,” its co-owner, Tom, declared to me proudly), you don’t deserve it. Anyway, in the cavernous, leather-lined lobby, I met my friend, who had just come from a planning meeting with festival founder Tim Schultz. Handshakes facilitated, I got in touch with ace PR guy Travis Volz a few days later, and suddenly found myself sitting in a little booth across from Jim Mickle, director of a very, very good remake/not-really-a-remake of We Are What We Are.

The Hangover Part III (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

October 6, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Road Movie

*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
starring Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, John Goodman
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Craig Mazin
directed by Todd Phillips

by Angelo Muredda When Project X spilled forth from its amniotic septic tank last spring, I read it as a prime example of a producer-driven form of auteurism pioneered by Judd Apatow. That found-footage chronicle of a house party-turned-apocalypse, I suggested, was a monument to producer Todd Phillips’s equally noxious Hangover series, where the same Dionysian impulses and deep-seated hatred of the different–whether female, trans, queer, or disabled–were championed by a trio of middle-aged men. What a difference a year makes. If Project X was a brand consolidator and The Hangover Part II was a morbidly curious recalibration of its predecessor, displacing Phillips’s demonic impulses and scarcely controlled misogynist rage from Bradley Cooper’s Phil to Ed Helms’s Stu, Part III is an actors’ contract negotiation sputtered to life. Since the previous instalment, Cooper has become a respectable leading man and Oscar nominee and Helms has been savaged for the degeneration of his irritating Andy Bernard character on “The Office”, while co-star Ken Jeong’s fortunes have inexplicably risen. Consequently, gone now are the days of Phil’s “Paging Doctor Faggot,” along with Stu’s loveable dude-rage and the Wolfpack’s infinite jokes about Mr. Chow’s shrunken Asian manhood. In their place is a surprisingly neutered, if inarguably more ethical, product with very few laughs and no reason for being.

Heads-up!

October 3, 2013Blog

If you're looking for our review of this week's big release Gravity, just a reminder that Walter Chaw reviewed it last month as part of his Telluride Film Festival coverage. Check it out here.

Seconds (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 1, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Sci-Fi, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Rock Hudson, John Randolph, Salome Jens, Frances Reid
screenplay by Lewis John Carlino, based on the novel by David Ely
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the longest time I wanted to write a book about John Frankenheimer, the crux of which would be a closer look at the relationship, if there was one, between the declining quality of his work and the assassination of his buddy Bobby Kennedy. It would be a cultural study, see, this way to tie the death of the Sixties with a director who for me definitively speaks to the rises and valleys of that decade, and who paved the way for the despairing paranoia flicks of the 1970s. In the end, I was defeated by the prospect of dealing with Frankenheimer’s later films–not because they were all as bad as Prophecy (or that any of the others are near as bad as Prophecy, or that anything could be), but because many of them are really, really good in really, really difficult ways to quantify. Closer to the truth of his output post-RFK assassination is not that it’s terrible, but that it’s all Seconds again in some form or another: diaries of personal apocalypses and the constant threat of the dissolution of identity. Besides, I think there might be an entire book in 52 Pick-Up alone.

The Collection (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

September 30, 20132012, 2013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Thriller

*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Josh Stewart, Emma Fitzpatrick, Lee Tergesen, Christopher McDonald
screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
directed by Marcus Dunstan

by Walter Chaw A cheap, loose remake of Aliens that substitutes rampaging hordes of xenomorphs with a gimp-masked kung-fu master, Marcus Dunstan’s stupid sequel to his stupid The Collector at least, this time around, doesn’t function as a lame, who-cares-if-it’s-intentional echo of Home Alone. No, this one vaguely recalls turn-of-the-century serial ghoul (and hotel owner) H.H. Holmes, who built a giant hotel for the express purpose of culling his guests for, among other things, medical skeletons and simple shits and giggles. Oh, who’m I kidding–the only thing The Collection reminds me of is that I have other things I should probably be doing…oh, and that Steve Beck’s Ghost Ship opens with a bunch of people getting bisected by a runaway cable. The Collection, incidentally, opens with everyone getting chewed up by a combine attached to a runaway cable at a nightclub. This leaves Elena (Emma Fitzpatrick, of interest for the short For Your Consideration, in which she absolutely nails Anne Hathaway’s Les Misérables performance) to be packed into a steamer trunk, because for all the things our bogey The Collector (Randall Archer) is, he’s also a Jazz-era ocean-liner passenger. The Collector promptly spirits her away to his horror hotel, the one he’s set up with boobytraps and galleries of pickled people parts (and tarantulas, of course, in case he needs to set them free to gross out girls and stuff), making it a terrible place to stay but still better than most Motel 6s. BAM! Take that, Motel 6.

Watermark (2013)

September 27, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Jennifer Baichwal & Edward Burtynsky

by Angelo Muredda Although it’s the first of her films to be co-directed (by Manufactured Landscapes subject and Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky), Watermark is less a departure for Jennifer Baichwal than it is the apotheosis of her style. Since 1988’s Let it Come Down, Baichwal has been the most formally adventurous documentarian of the artistic process, not just profiling the work of makers as disparate as Paul Bowles and Shelby Lee Adams, but attempting to recreate their singular visions as well. In her previous film, Payback, that meant converting Margaret Atwood’s lecture series of the same name into an evocative position paper about debt in all its global permutations, from blood feuds to legal restitution. In Manufactured Landscapes, it consisted of finding a way to translate Burtynsky’s large-scale images of factories and pock-marked terrains into cinematic tableaux, with collaborator Nick de Pencier’s cinematography of Burtynsky’s stomping grounds effectively adding a sense of duration and movement to the print-bound stasis of the originals. Watermark might be the most radical variation on this approach, an abstract consideration of the interaction between water and human-made structures, carried out largely through wordless aerial photography of streams bisecting grotesque landscapes rather than the usual talking-head exposition.

Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve (2013) + The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013)

September 26, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Theatrical

MONEY FOR NOTHING: INSIDE THE FEDERAL RESERVE
**½/****
directed by Jim Bruce

THE TRIALS OF MUHAMMAD ALI
***/****
directed by Bill Siegel

by Walter Chaw It’s difficult to review Jim Bruce’s incendiary, scholarly Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve (hereafter Money), because even as I was understanding the role of the Federal Reserve Bank for the first time in my adult life (how its adjustments of interest actually drive the economy of not merely this nation, but every industrialized nation in our rapidly-shrinking world), I found myself comparing the film to one of those informational videos that play on endless loops in Natural History museums. It’s immensely educational…and dry as a soda cracker. What I find to be problematic about it is the same thing I found problematic about Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth: it’s not really art, is it? Not to open that can of worms, but for me, as a personal demarcation, art inspires something like Kierkegaardian fear and loathing–existential trembling, yes: a mirror held to nature in all the myriad, alien, surprising, often terrifying forms that nature assumes. What Money does, and does admirably, is explain what the hell happened to the United States’ financial institutions right around 1998 or so and continuing on into now–explain what the bailout was and how/why it affects the average American. Most fascinatingly, it explains how far in estimation the once god-like Alan Greenspan has fallen in the eyes of those who worshipped him. But while these are noble achievements, they’re not enough.

Day of the Dead (1985) [Divimax] – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

September 25, 2013****/****, 1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Zombie

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Richard Liberty
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Far from the weak sister that critics and fanboys have branded George Romero’s conclusion to his zombie trilogy, Day of the Dead is at once the most hopeful and the most melancholy of the trio while falling short of the stark satirical perfection of the first (Night of the Living Dead) and the bloated satirical imperfections of the perhaps over-celebrated second (Dawn of the Dead). In fact, I find Day to be the equal of Dawn in almost every way and to exceed it in terms of its alacrity–its relative tightness in the development of its ideas about the nature of man unfolding against the backdrop of a rise of a new society. The obvious precursor to the zombie mythos is the Christian faith, with its saviour a zombie installing a new order (covenant) and its key ritual dedicated to a celebration of the eating of the saviour’s flesh and blood: a literal consumption of the Host that incorporates into its rite terms of infection and contagion. In fact, Day of the Dead, of the three, seems the most serious in exploring that spiritual/thaumaturgical connection with the introduction of what is essentially a demigod–an offspring of thought and body in the same way that Christ was meant to be God made flesh in all its weakness–in the form of the much-reviled Bub (Howard Sherman).

Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet Combo Pack

September 23, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor
screenplay by Darren Lemke and Christopher McQuarrie and Dan Studney
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw There’s an interesting moment early on in Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer, but don’t get used to it. It’s a cross-cut sequence wherein peasant Jack (Nicholas Hoult) and princess Isabelle (absolutely adorable Eleanor Tomlinson) reveal they’re both products of neglect and the devastation of a parent lost too young. This unites them in strife and turmoil (in the way that wasn’t properly addressed by the Mako/Raleigh team-up in Pacific Rim) to (likewise) battle monsters of the theoretical Id (Oedipus is the first guess, Electra the second), here literal giants in a cloud-shrouded kingdom, accessed by a priapic growth sprouting in the dead of night. It’s the only time the film identifiably belongs to Bryan Singer, a maker of large films nonetheless invested in personal, intimate deconstructions. People in my world are neatly divided between the ones who didn’t like Singer’s Superman Returns and the ones who are right. I want to believe that movie is the reason why Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor, and Ian McShane said “yes” to Jack the Giant Slayer, and not because Tucci, McGregor, and McShane are already just filthy impulses cashing paychecks à la 1980s Michael Caine.

World War Z (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

September 22, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disaster Movie, DVD, Horror, Zombie

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Max Brooks
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster’s World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks’s cause célèbre novel (think Stephen Ambrose on the zombie apocalypse) that had a production so troubled the real surprise is Terry Gilliam had nothing to do with it, lands as half an idea, handsomely mounted in a really expensive crater. With almost no relationship to the book beyond honouring its concept of a conflagration told in vignettes, it feels almost exactly like James L. Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything, which began life as a musical and ended up, after extensive reshoots and careening budget overages, song-free, yet whole somehow despite the trauma. That sense of a sudden change in direction, in genre, is all over World War Z–something in its almost apologetic reserve, something in its unmistakable indecision. Indeed, it serves as a fitting metaphor for a zombie as a corpse similarly brought to shambling half-life, but frankly, it could’ve been a lot worse. It works for what it is in the same way that Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion works, and with the same limitations, ambivalence, anticlimax, and handsome mounting. If, at the end, its Damon Lindelof-penned solution* (the twelfth-hour salvation of a freight train jumped its tracks) is as stupid as you would expect something Lindelof to pen, at least the journey there is interesting, even occasionally (if only very occasionally) arresting. A shame that Forster hasn’t gotten any better at directing action since Quantum of Solace.

Borderline (2025) + Novocaine (2025)

Snow White (2025)

O’Dessa (2025)