FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Blue Jasmine (2013)

August 1, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, Louis C.K., Bobby Cannavale
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda Woody Allen’s forty-third directorial effort begins with a one-sided conversation on a plane that will seem familiar to anyone who’s seen any of the previous forty-two. Jasmine (Cate Blanchett, on a brief hiatus from her Galadriel duties) spouts anecdote after anecdote to a placidly-smiling elderly woman, cycling from the banal origin of her name to the story of how “Blue Moon”–“You know the song”–was playing when she met her husband. Our poor audience surrogate is held captive by this narcissist, with whom we’re fated to spend the rest of the picture, until she meets her husband at the baggage claim and instantly spills about the stranger who “couldn’t stop babbling about her life.” It’s a curious start, not so much for the arch reveal that the women are strangers, via a rack-focus shift at the airport from this interloper to our real protagonist, as for the faintest hint of auto-critique.

Medium Cool (1969) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 31, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound B- Extras B+
starring Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill
written and directed by Haskell Wexler

by Walter Chaw No one has ever been cooler in a movie than Robert Forster is in Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool. The title comes from Marshall McLuhan’s assignation in his Understanding Media of television as a “cool” medium, i.e., one that requires a more active participation to benefit from meaning–in opposition to something like film, which he identifies as a “hot” medium. It could just as soon refer to Forster’s John Cassellis, however, the avatar for a new generation of existential detachment. The multifoliate rose of this contraption reveals its first complication in being a film about Cassellis, a television cameraman active at the very end of a decade of immense internal tumult in the United States, where television gradually emerged as primary witness–if not also prosecution, defense, jury, and judge–of the death of the counterculture. It’s telling, too, that one of the best studies of American ’60s cinema is by Ethan Mordden and titled Medium Cool–acknowledgment, along with Wexler’s film, that the movies can provide “hot” context for their “cool” counterpart.

The Fog (1980) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc|The Howling (1981) [Special Edition] + The Fog (1980) [Special Edition] – DVDs

July 29, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Werewolf

THE HOWLING
**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Dee Wallace, Patrick Macnee, Dennis Dugan, Christopher Stone
screenplay by John Sayles and Terence H. Winkless
directed by Joe Dante

John Carpenter's The Fog
***/****
BD – Image C+ Sound A Extras A
DVD – Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Houseman, Janet Leigh
screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
directed by John Carpenter

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw The theory is that gangs of artists working at around the same time in the same place, in complementary milieux, can lead to something like artistic Darwinism, a certain macho brinkmanship that pushes genres towards a kind of organic evolution. Within a very few years, artists like John Carpenter, John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, Rob Bottin, Rick Baker, Sam Raimi, Brian DePalma, Bob Clark, Dan O'Bannon, Sean S. Cunningham, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, Stan Winston, Larry Cohen, and on and on and so on, were working in and reinvigorating the horror genre–many under the tutelage of Roger Corman, still others the initial products of formal film school training, almost all the consequence of a particular movie geekism that would lead inevitably to the first rumblings of jokiness and self-referentiality-as-homage that reached its simultaneous pinnacle and nadir with Craven's Scream. In the late 1970s into the early 1980s, however, that cleverness wasn't so much the hateful, patronizing post-modernism of the last decade's horror films as what feels like a genuine affection for the genre–an appreciation of the legacy of the Universal, Corman, and Hammer horror factory traditions.

6 Souls (2013) + Dead Souls (2012) – Blu-ray Discs

July 25, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Television, Thriller, Zombie

6
SOULS (a.k.a. Shelter)
**/****
Image A
Sound A
starring
Julianne Moore, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Jeffreey DeMunn, Brooklyn Proulx
screenplay
by Michael Cooney
directed
by Marlind & Stein

DEAD
SOULS
½*/**** Image
C Sound B Extras C
starring
Jesse James, Magda Apanowicz, Bill Moseley, Geraldine Hughes
screenplay
by John Doolan
directed
by Colin Theys

by
Walter Chaw The best scene in the surprisingly-not-awful 6 Souls happens in a toothless hinterland, up yonder in them thar hills, ’round
campfires and lean-tos and a wilderness of patchy facial hair, where
forensic
psychologist Cara (Julianne Moore) meets a Granny Holler Witch (Joyce
Feurring), who is just indescribably awesome. She’s like a refugee from
The
Dark Crystal–the very incarnation of Aughra, blind but
seeing through an
albino familiar (Katiana Davis) as she performs psychic surgery, sucking up
souls
with her mouth and depositing them in a jar she calls “shelter.” Indeed, it’s
such an awesome scene that it shows up how
perfunctory the
rest of Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein’s 6 Souls
is; how the idea of a
demon jumping bodies (like The Evil Dead, yes,
but more like Fallen)
can look very much like an early-’90s mid-prestige thriller and
therefore not
anything interesting or special. A shame, as the talent
assembled for
the piece is exceptional–Moore, certainly, along with the
always-fabulous Jeffrey DeMunn as Cara’s dad Dr. Harding. It’s his
fault that
Cara gets involved with psych-patient Adam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who, in the
process of manifesting multiple bad-accent theatre personalities, also
seems to
be manifesting their physical traits (like paralysis, say, and bad
acting,
too). Turns out it ain’t science afflicting our man Adam, but you
knew
that already.

Would You Rather (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

July 23, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Thriller

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Brittany Snow, Jeffrey Combs, Jonny Coyne, Lawrence Gilliard Jr.
screenplay by Steffen Schlachtenhaufen
directed by David Guy Levy

by Bill Chambers Iris (Brittany Snow) is a demure blonde vegetarian with a brother named Raleigh (Logan Miller) who’s dying of cancer. These traits, the only things we ever really learn about her, add up to a plucky determination that preordains Iris to be the Final Girl, though it means her character arc hinges on a reversal of expectations that haven’t been well established. In any case, mysterious philanthropist Lambrick (Jeffrey Combs, magically transformed into Stuart Wilson from Lethal Weapon 3) spots potential in her and invites her to join the eponymous high-stakes parlour game in David Guy Levy’s Would You Rather. Iris is poor as shit, and even if she did get that hostess job she’s interviewing for in the opening scene, the money it pays is hardly cancer money, ergo, she takes the bait: the promise of the best, most expensive medical care for her brother should she emerge victorious at Lambrick’s next gathering. What she doesn’t know is that the alternative to winning isn’t as easy as losing.

Lifeforce (1985) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

July 22, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Vampire, Zombie

Lifeforce2

**/****Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May
screenplay by Dan O’Bannon & Don Jakoby, based on the novel The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Bryant Frazer The early 1980s must have been a weird time to be Tobe Hooper. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had made him one of the most notorious directors in the world, and Poltergeist vaulted him onto the A-list. He would have been on top of the world if not for an extended controversy over that film: Poltergeist was produced by Steven Spielberg, and there were widespread rumours that he actually directed it, too. Hooper denied it and Spielberg issued oddly-worded statements that permanently muddied the waters. Whatever the truth of their collaboration, the controversy was a blow to Hooper’s reputation. His Texas Chain Saw felt almost like outsider art–raw and twisted, it was the antithesis of the burnished Spielberg style. Poltergeist, on the other hand, was the very quintessence of a Steven Spielberg film, from its familiar suburban family in distress to its richly detailed mise en scène‎. If Hooper really did direct it, it doesn’t say much for his authorial voice that he left virtually no discernible fingerprints on the final product.

The Conjuring (2013)

July 19, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor
screenplay by Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw Based on a true story in the same way that
a pineapple is an apple, James Wan's latest exercise in jump-scare theatre is
the workmanlike haunted house/demonic possession flick The Conjuring. In
it, the paranormal investigation team of Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera
Farmiga) Warren, co-authors of several books and shown as the film begins
lecturing a small auditorium of people on the finer points of ghost-hunting,
confront their Greatest Challenge Ever when they're called to the modest New
England farmhouse of the Perron family. It seems this was the former
home of a WITCH! Can you fucking believe the luck? An evil witch lived in this
house. Fuck. A witch. Motherfucker, am I right? You buy a house and you think
that…anyway, it really sucks that a witch lived there. It all starts out
innocently enough with the largely-indistinguishable Perron girls getting
jerked out of bed by an invisible whatever, then evolves into a game of hide
and clap (which sounds venereal but isn't, unless you're doing it really wrong)
that leads to mommy Carolyn (Lili Taylor) getting thrown down a flight of
stairs into a creepy, boarded-up cellar™. That's when daddy Roger (Ron
Livingston) calls the Warrens… Well, he doesn't, because he's away on a
week-long business trip and he's a skeptic of the Warrens, we learn after the
fact… Um… He's not a well-developed character, seeing as how Wan seems
distracted by all the loud noises and crap leaping out at the camera.

The Act of Killing (2012)

July 18, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Denmark, Documentary, Norway, UK

***½/****
directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

by Angelo Muredda Like Claude Lanzmann’s otherwise incomparable Shoah, Joshua Oppenheimer’s bracing documentary The Act of Killing reanimates a historical catastrophe without leaning on archival footage. In relying primarily on testimonials grounded at the site of violence, both films argue for a more radical than usual method of bearing witness to unspeakable genocides–in this case, the murder of nearly a million communists, intellectuals, and ethnic Chinese in mid-1960s Indonesia by a cadre of paramilitaries and gangsters who were backed by an American-funded military and subsequently never brought to trial. Yet as much as each project seeks to drag a monstrous past into the light by shooting at the present scene of the crime, Oppenheimer’s work is given an even more surreal kick by virtue of the incredible status still afforded to members of the killing squads, politically-connected goons who openly boast of their murders to anyone within earshot, including the film crew.

Computer Chess (2013)

July 18, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Patrick Riester, Myles Page, James Curry, Robin Schwartz
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

by Walter Chaw Sneakily, the best science-fiction film of
the summer is Andrew "Godfather of Mumblecore" Bujalski's decidedly
lo-fi Computer Chess, shot with a late-'60s, made-for-home-video Sony
AVC-3260 analog tube video camera that approximates the very look and feel of something you'd
find in a box in someone's garage. It endeavours to tell the story of a weekend
tech convention where proto-hackers engage in mortal combat over who will be
the first to create a computer chess program that can defeat a human master
(Gerald Peary (!)) and, incidentally, collect a $75k booty. The money, though,
is incidental to the glory of scientific discovery, of being the first to push
the limits of artificial intelligence to the point of…what? Aggression?
Sentience, perhaps? It's telling that Bujalski, at the forefront of a specific
DIY subgenre of independent cinema reliant on largely-improvised performances
with no budget nor, theoretically, affectation (it's like the American version
of the Dogme95 movement), has produced the most affectless, genuine artifact of
the dogme philosophy through his greatest feat of affectation: he's
created a time capsule of an era in a film about the eternity of the human
instinct to create simulacra first and deal with issues of functional
equivalence later. In its way, Computer Chess works like a sprung, found-footage diary of the birth of Skynet. It's Mary Shelley, and Blade Runner, and it
gets to being about what it's about without being an asshole about it.

The Newsroom: The Complete First Season (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

July 18, 20132011, 2012, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A Sound B+ Extras B
“We Just Decided To,” “News Night 2.0,” “The 112^th Congress,” “I’ll Try To Fix You,” “Amen,” “Bullies,” “5/1,” “The Blackout, Part 1: Tragedy Porn,” “The Blackout, Part 2: Mock Debate,” “The Greater Fool”

by Jefferson Robbins The more I think about Aaron Sorkin’s chimerical HBO beast “The Newsroom”, the more I think it would work far, far better as a Broadway musical. That may be because Sorkin loads the ranks of his ensemble drama with accomplished theatre vets, or it may be because of the endless dialogue references to stage classics, beginning and ending with Man of La Mancha. But it’s also a matter of timing: The show offers strange eruptions of relationship palaver, set in the midst of world-altering sociopolitical changes and the daily churn of building a TV newshour around them. They arrive oddly, maddeningly, and frequently, just when the storylines involving real-world events are beginning to compel, and they feel almost uniformly dishonest and manufactured. What I’m saying is, they’d go down easier if they were sung.

Evil Dead (2013) – Blu-ray + Digital

July 15, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror

Evildead131

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas
screenplay by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues, based on the screenplay by Sam Raimi
directed by Fede Alvarez

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The greatest irony of Fede Alvarez’s otherwise laudably straightforward reboot of Sam Raimi’s Spam-in-a-cabin classic The Evil Dead is that the moments where it references its primogenitor are actually the movie’s weakest. I’m thinking, in particular, of handsome young hero David (Shiloh Fernandez) getting thrown around a wet cellar in high Raimi smash-zoom style, which only underscores how much the original films drew their tone from Bruce Campbell–and how much this new one misses him. The danger of casting a group of beautiful people and taking itself deadly seriously (and jettisoning the “The,” in a gesture that reads as hipster insouciance) is that Evil Dead might draw closer to the mainstream and farther from its grindhouse roots. The small miracle of it, then, is that in both its absolute glee in finding the line of how much gore to show and then crossing it (a pair of glasses stop a hypodermic needle…but only for a moment) and its surprising efforts at locating a deeper thread in a frayed brother/sister relationship and the impact of drug addiction, Alvarez’s film is a solid, even affecting genre piece that allows for an abundance of memorable money shots. Compare its intelligence and earnestness, its infernal energy, against the disrespectfulness and self-satisfaction of The Cabin in the Woods to see that Evil Dead is not just a taste of the old religion, it’s really pretty great.

The Attack (2013)

July 11, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, France, Lebanon, Qatar, Theatrical

L’attentat
***/****
starring Ali Suliman, Remonde Amsellem, Evgenia Dodina, Karim Saleh
screenplay by Joelle Touma and Ziad Doueiri, based on the novel by Yasmina Khadra
directed by Ziad Doueiri

by Walter Chaw Lebanese-born Ziad Doueiri, an assistant cameraman on Quentin Tarantino’s first three features, demonstrates as a director the kind of elliptical reserve more commonly associated with Terrence Malick. Indeed, the most powerful stretches of his sophomore effort, The Attack, recall the fragments of The Thin Red Line that elucidate Pvt. Bell’s wife’s betrayal through a series of voiceovers, remembered conversations, and gauzy/idealized images of a bucolic existence that may or may not have ever existed. An adaptation of a novel by Yasmina Khadra, The Attack details the discovery by an Arab emergency-room surgeon based in Israel, Amin (Ali Suliman), that his wife Siham (Reymond Amsalem, who has the quality and pitch of Illeana Douglas–a wonderful thing) is the suicide bomber responsible for an attack in Tel Aviv, the casualties of which we watch Amin try to save. Amin has been “accepted” by the Jews, we understand, though there’s tension throughout the early scenes as his friends and colleagues awkwardly navigate around him in a way that reads initially as condescending, then increasingly hostile as events unfold. Hannah Arendt would have something to say about this; so would Paula Deen and her legion of insensate followers. When Amin receives an award for his work, his acceptance speech includes the platitude that all Arabs have a little Jew in them and vice versa; by the picture’s last words, “Every time you go away, a little piece of me dies,” one wonders if he means the little piece that has empathy for the opposition’s point of view.

Pacific Rim (2013)

July 10, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**/****
starring Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day
screenplay by Travis Beacham & Guillermo del Toro
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I have this theory that the reason the
United States started remaking Japanese movies (particularly the J-Horror
stuff) almost immediately post-9/11 is that it was after that pivotal event that the
country assumed a distinctly Japanese worldview. Suddenly, it was possible for
something unthinkable to happen to civilians; the universe was callous and
arbitrary in its measuring out of lives, and the idea of a “civilian target”
or, more to the point, of “innocence,” was hopelessly quaint. It’s as
good an explanation as any as to why there are so many evil children in
Japanese horror–the same explanation, as it happens, for why there were so
many evil children in late-’60s/early-’70s American horror–the
difference being that there was usually an explanation for why the children
were bad in the United States (the Devil, mostly). In Japan? Not so much. In America’s post-9/11 evil-kid flicks, even the ones not remaking
Japanese films, the kids are generally just born that way. Even the rise of “torture
porn” is more or less a not-as-graphic reproduction of Japan’s “Guinea
Pig” cinema–seven pictures from the ’80s (including the indescribable Mermaid
in a Manhole and Flower of Flesh & Blood, which caused a
credulous Charlie Sheen to call the FBI), culminating now in the United States
with a pretty rough update of Maniac starring everybody’s favourite
probably-murderer, Elijah Wood.

To Have and Have Not (1944) + The Big Sleep (1945/6) – DVDs

July 8, 2013****/****, 1940s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
****/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Dolores Moran
screenplay by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Howard Hawks

THE BIG SLEEP
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone
screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett & Jules Furthman, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler
directed by Howard Hawks

by Walter Chaw While biographer Todd McCarthy refers to the two versions of Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep as marking the delineation point separating linear (early) Hawks from non-linear (later) Hawks, I feel like you can mark the director’s affection for bonzo non-sequiturs throughout his sultry To Have and Have Not. The picture tells its tale of immigrants marooned off the islets of war and sexual sophistication–an island bell jar and pressure cooker envisioned as a sequel of sorts to Casablanca. But where Casablanca‘s sex was mature and companionate (the sizzle replaced by simmer) and tinged with regret, To Have and Have Not has a slick of bestial sweat to it that promises that the explosion of really naughty stuff is looming rather than in the rear-view. (There’s no sexier film in all the Forties.) The story of the corrupt Vichy government and the brave French underground unfolding behind the red-hot flirtation between diplomatically non-affiliated fishing boat captain Harry “Steve” Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) and lost American teen “Slim” (Lauren Bacall) is punctuated helter-skelter by husky lounge numbers courtesy Slim and Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael) and riff sessions with Steve and Slim that have the cadence and unpredictability of jazz improvisation. It’s not so much a narrative as a medley in a bouncy key, and Hawks is not so much a director as a bandleader. Much has been made of Hawks’s skill in casting (and it’s hard to argue otherwise when he sniffs out the alchemical enchantment between old man Bogie and new thing Bacall (and Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell; and Dean Martin and a bottle)), but looking at To Have and Have Not–the first of Bogie/Bacall’s four collaborations–is to glimpse something more than a good casting eye: it’s to witness the evolution of a true musical genius. The rhythms are subterranean, the verses in between the words; to watch this and The Big Sleep (Hawks’s other collaboration with Bogie/Bacall) back-to-back is as close to rapture as this experience gets.

Rolling Thunder (1977) – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 20131970s, 2013, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

click any image to enlarge

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B+
starring William Devane, Tommy Lee Jones, Linda Haynes, James Best
screenplay by Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould
directed by John Flynn

by Bryant Frazer Rolling Thunder‘s reputation was burnished considerably in the 1990s when Quentin Tarantino declared it one of his favourite films. It’s a good call; Tarantino owes his career to his long-standing love affair with the grindhouse, and Rolling Thunder is in many ways the quintessence of Hollywood exploitation. Director John Flynn, who made a name for himself with his 1973 adaptation of a Donald E. Westlake novel, The Outift, comes across as an efficient, focused storyteller who pares narrative to the bone. That style of filmmaking really allows (or requires) performance to come to the fore, and in the intense vigilante fantasy Rolling Thunder, both William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones deliver smart and scary interpretations of the soul-damaged protagonist and sidekick, respectively. Flynn certainly wasn’t a self-conscious stylist, and he ended up toiling in the gulag of undistinguished action pictures like the 1989 Stallone-in-prison flick Lock Up and the Steven Seagal revenge thriller Out for Justice. He died in 2007, and Rolling Thunder is just remarkable enough that you want to bemoan his anonymity.

Swimming to Cambodia (1987) – DVD

July 7, 2013****/****, 1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Concert Doc, Directors: Jonathan Demme, DVD, Scream/Shout! Factory

****/**** Image C Sound C Extras B
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw I learned about memoir as art watching Spalding Gray in Jonathan Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia. Although I was a freshman in college when I first saw it, I’m not sure that I ever really knew what “memoir” was before, and, since, I’ve been hard pressed to find any examples that measure up to the bar it sets. Swimming to Cambodia also provides an impossible standard for direction, as Demme takes Gray’s “monolog” format (essentially him, alone, on a stage) and turns it into something like an expressionistic piece, something that is at once inside Gray’s mind and inside yours using thoughtful editing choices and clever sound and lighting design. In a year that saw the release of Predator, Full Metal Jacket, The Untouchables, Empire of the Sun, Raising Arizona, Near Dark, A Better Tomorrow II, Angel Heart, Evil Dead II, and RoboCop, it’s a little astonishing to realize the best-directed film is this one with a guy sitting at a table. For what it’s worth, as I was writing my own memoir of a very particular moment in my life, the only readership I really imagined for it consisted of my father and Gray–Gray, who killed himself over water in 2004, and my father, who died a year before that. If the one was the reason, the other was the way.

Byzantium (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Ireland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire

****/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley, Caleb Landry Jones
screenplay by Moira Buffini, based on her play
directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw What is it about the Irish character, that particular quality of melancholy fatalism, that seems to inform the great works of native sons Beckett, Joyce, and maybe Yeats in particular? I like G.K. Chesterton’s description of Ireland as a place of “men that God made mad,/For all their wars are merry,/And all their songs are sad.” It infects the folklore, the story of the crags and the heather, the looming, low skies pregnant with what Michael Almereyda’s criminally underestimated (and long forgotten) The Eternal fashioned into a creation story involving unimaginable losses and the sweet, bitter tears they inspire. To that film, add John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish, Neal Jordan’s Ondine, and now Jordan’s rapturous Byzantium: a quartet of supernaturally-tinged pictures that together form a lush polyptych that captures the very sensation of walking through Dublin in the rain, or along the shores of Galway, or through the pages of Ulysses in the company of Leo and Nora. As for Byzantium, it’s beautiful, and sad, and has an eternity to it that’s reflected in its tale of a “soucriant,” a succubus of sorts with a Dominican history and favoured by Jean Rhys in novels that were themselves attempts to come to terms with the tragedies of her life as an outsider. Jordan, well-read and never shy about expressing that literariness in his pictures, is producing in his later work the very evocation of a city from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (a book he once told me he admires): Ersilia, an abandoned city built not of walls, but of strings the lost inhabitants used to mark connections with one another. Jordan weaves an intricate web with Byzantium, a film that, before even attacking the tensions within, provides tensions without in its title, most likely taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which is itself about tensions between the “artifice of eternity” and the temporariness of youth. Turns out, the film is about that, too.

Museum Hours (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Mary Margaret O’Hara, Bobby Sommer, Ela Piplits
directed by Jem Cohen

by Angelo Muredda The closing
credits of Jem Cohen’s warm and wonderful Museum Hours give equal thanks
to John Berger and Patti Smith, and it’s not hard to see why. Further to being
Cohen’s friend and occasional collaborator, Smith occupies a rare place at the
intersection of art stardom and punk history, while Berger might be the only
figurehead total newcomers to art criticism can name, his TV series “Ways of Seeing” having turned innumerable undergraduates onto ideologically-inflected
readings of popular images. Whatever their personal contributions to the film
may have been, Berger’s knack for providing the novice critic with the
armature to see intelligently and ethically is as instructive here as Smith’s
mercurial punk ethos. Museum Hours–which, like Berger’s BBC miniseries
and book, is destined to have a long afterlife in college art courses–is an
absorbing and richly humanist synthesis of those seemingly contradictory
impulses, a puckish walking tour through an art gallery that doubles as a
manifesto for seeing deeply into the rubbish beyond the walls of the museum.

Band of Outsiders (1964) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 3, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, The Criterion Collection

Bande à part
****/****
Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur, Danièle Girard
screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard (uncredited), based on the novel Fool’s Gold by Dolores Hitchens
directed by JeanLuc Cinéma Godard

by Bryant Frazer For the casual observer, Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (Bande à part) may as well be titled The Eyes of Anna Karina. The famously radical director’s follow-up to the hit film Contempt isn’t a favourite of American movie buffs for its politics or its thematic rigour. Instead, it’s a veritable spoof of film noir–at times a near-farce–involving a couple of small-time schemers who take their cues from Hollywood. Though Band of Outsiders is thought of as one of Godard’s most accessible works, it’s also one of his most dissonant. It’s a gritty crime drama wrapped around a light romance; a breezy comedy shot through with intimations of the geopolitical landscape of the 1960s; an homage to U.S. culture that incidentally imagines the decline of the American empire. In Godard’s body of work, Band of Outsiders–its story based on a novel by American mystery writer Dolores Hitchens–can be read as the connective tissue between the bones of Breathless, which is full of loving references to American cinema and pulp fiction, and the later Weekend and Tout va bien, which are explicitly critical of western culture in general and capitalism in particular.

The Lone Ranger (2013)

July 1, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Superhero, Theatrical, Western

***/****
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 boyscout 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.

Heretic (2024)

SDAFF ’24: Bitterroot

Red One (2024)