The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) [20th Anniversary – It’s Not Easy Being Scrooge Special Edition] – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

November 19, 2012Posted in1990s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Muppets, Musical, UK

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, The Great Gonzo, Michael Caine
screenplay by Jerry Juhl, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
directed by Brian Henson

Muppetxmas4

by Bill Chambers It's all but inevitable that the Muppets would take on Charles Dickens's venerable plug-and-play app A Christmas Carol at some point. More surprisingly, Michael Caine had not only not played Ebenezer Scrooge prior to The Muppet Christmas Carol (the role is like Hamlet for English actors who've plateaued), he had never before shared a stage with the Muppets, either. This despite his being, in the '70s and '80s, the exact calibre of star the Muppets pursued for cameos, and ubiquitous besides. He is, to my taste, not a harsh-enough Scrooge–there's an irrepressible compassion there when Bob Cratchit (Kermit the Frog) asks him for Christmas Day off. And The Muppet Christmas Carol frankly surrenders too much of the spotlight to this human character: If this were my first Muppet movie, I'd've felt especially double-crossed during his song number with the also-flesh-and-blood Meredith Braun, which was restored for the VHS and TV versions of the film kids have grown up with but is absent again on the new Blu-ray. (Former FFC contributor Ian Pugh tells me he "always, always, ALWAYS" used to fast-forward this part as a child.) It's almost cheating, to finally do the Muppet version of this tale and put an interloper in the lead, when the whole point of adapting it to a pre-existing framework is to match up the archetypes and balance that against audience expectations. It is, effectively, like getting to use characters as actors by casting them as different characters. This is also why Bill Murray works so well in Scrooged, because Scrooge pings off Murray's crabby, misanthropic '80s persona.

Tippi: FFC Interviews Actress Tippi Hedren

November 17, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Interviews

ThedreninterviewtitleA conversation with the last of the Hitchcock Blondes

According to Donald Spoto’s 1983 biography The Dark Side of Genius, Alfred Hitchcock’s tendency to become overly enamoured with his blonde stars reached an ugly head with Tippi Hedren during the filming of Marnie. Revisiting the book now, several years after first reading it and resisting some of the allegations therein, I see an author whose love for Hitchcock the auteur is at war with the unpleasant details of his subject’s emotional life. As Ms. Hedren so delicately put it when I had the pleasure of chatting with her the other night: “As a man, [Hitchcock] was found wanting.” Spoto’s declaration that Marnie is a result of sloth but also unusually personal and effective as art and even memoir illustrates, I think, the schism at which most scholars of Hitchcock at some point arrive. When I read The Dark Side of Genius as a college freshman, it was a gateway to understanding better exactly what was going on in Notorious, and exactly what Hitchcock’s men are always playing out.

In the Mood for Love (2000) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 13, 2012Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Hong Kong, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk
written and directed by Wong Kar-wai


Inthemood8click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw The middle film in a loose trilogy by
Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar-wai (the others are Days of Being Wild and 2046), In the Mood for Love is a love-drunk ode to the confusion,
the intoxication, the magic, and the tragedy of being in love. It speaks in
terms proximate and eternal, presenting lovers cast in various roles across
years and alien geographies, placing some objects in the position of totem and
memento and others in historical dustbins to be abandoned, forgotten. It links
the act of watching a film to the act of seduction (Days of Being Wild
might be even better at this), and there's a
strong sense in In the Mood for Love that Wong is playing the artifactor of both sign and
signifier: He's doing the T.S. Eliot two-step of authoring Prufrock while simultaneously providing the distance to criticize it.

Take This Waltz (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

November 12, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance

Takethiswaltz1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby, Sarah Silverman
written and directed by Sarah Polley

by Angelo Muredda As both literary adaptations and first features go, Sarah Polley’s Away from Her was an astonishing exercise in restraint. Working from Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” about a seventysomething married couple whose longstanding private games turn into something else when Fiona (Julie Christie) is diagnosed with dementia, Polley forewent the ostentatious route of many first-time directors by telling the story straight. It’s become customary, in speaking of that film, to chalk up this directness to the source material–Munro is, after all, known for her frankness, and apart from the expansion of Olympia Dukakis’s character and a Hockey Night in Canada gag, Polley ported her narrative beats over more or less wholesale. But Munro has a certain nastiness, not least in her omniscient narrators’ cutting observations, that’s largely absent from Polley’s adaptation, which has particular sympathy for Gordon Pinsent’s reformed husband, who’s more of a forgetful cad in the short story. It’s a standard line to say that Munro reserves judgment, particularly towards her adulterers, but what of the ghoulishness of her characterization, in Lives of Girls and Women, of small-town scolds who say things like, “The law-yer, didn’t he think he was somebody?” Polley doesn’t get sufficient credit for translating what she can of that prickliness–which also runs through “Bear”–and molding the rest into something unabashedly romantic.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 11, 2012Posted in2012, Action, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Superhero, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Bob Goodman, based upon the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson
directed by Jay Oliva


Tdkreturns1

by Jefferson Robbins There's
nothing left. Batman: Year One is so last year, The Killing
Joke basically got turned into The Dark Knight, and "Watchmen" has become both a big-movie flopola and a prequel
comics series. With Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 on shelves
now and its concluding Part 2 due on direct-to-video disc this winter,
the DC Universe has basically wrung itself dry of compelling product from the
'80s comics revolution that it can repurpose into features and animated
editions. The bones remain for new stories, but the cost-benefit on original
work vs. revivified fan favourites ever tilts towards the latter. Those of us
who discovered or returned to superhero comics as a result of Frank Miller's and
Alan Moore's mature deconstructions are seeing their final fruits. The only
burning question is how many shmoes bought this package from Amazon thinking
they were getting The Dark Knight Rises in half of a special two-disc edition.

Lincoln (2012)

November 8, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Spielberg, Theatrical

Lincoln

**/****
starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Tommy Lee Jones
screenplay by Tony Kushner
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Bearing no relationship to the Gore Vidal biography with which it shares its name, Steven Spielberg’s predictably uneven Lincoln features moments of real grandeur narrated to death by John Williams’s inspiring™ and rousing™ score. No speech from Honest Abe (Daniel Day-Lewis) goes without ample and gaudy decoration, making me wonder which one Spielberg doesn’t trust to deliver the goods: Day-Lewis, or Lincoln. More to the point, what Spielberg probably doesn’t trust is the viewer’s intelligence and humanity, meaning the real question is whether he thinks the kind of people who would go to a movie about Abraham Lincoln are morons. Either way, it’s not the sort of behaviour that should be rewarded or go unremarked upon. Consider that the absolute best, most powerful moment of the film arrives within the first five minutes as Lincoln sits in a bivouac, taking questions from foot soldiers–and consider that this instance of naturalism is neatly destroyed by Spielberg’s instinct towards swatting flies with Buicks. What could have been an affecting, quiet bit with our most revered national figure ends with a clumsily proselytized mission statement as a black soldier recites the end of the Gettysburg Address–a not-subtle reminder that the mandate of Lincoln’s second term carried with it the responsibility to push the 13th amendment ending slavery through a divided Congress.

Skyfall (2012)

November 7, 2012Posted in2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Espionage, James Bond, Theatrical, Thriller, Turkey, UK

**/****
starring Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Judi Dench
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and John Logan
directed by Sam Mendes

Skyfall

by Walter Chaw For me, the James Bond films are the literalization of a very particular Conservative fantasy in which a suave, quippy, emotionally-arrested sociopath battles Cold War foes, beds beautiful women without consequence, always has the latest technology, and engages in the endless murder of foreigners. Just suggesting a "license to kill" reveals a certain level of arrogance; and it's their confrontation of the noisome wake left by those attitudes that makes On Her Majesty's Secret Service and the more recent Casino Royale the powerhouses that they are. Skyfall, the latest in the decades-spanning series, tries but fails to do the same. A good part of the problem can be traced back to non-action director Sam Mendes (superseding Marc Forster, non-action director of the disastrous Quantum of Solace), who, in trying to honour the visceral requirements of the genre, finds himself unable to produce either a meaty melodrama or a capable action vehicle.

The War Room (1993) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 6, 2012Posted in1990s, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
directed by Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker

by Angelo Muredda "When I think of an old calendar, I see George Bush's face on it." How things have changed since lead Democratic strategist James Carville made that case against then-incumbent President George H.W. Bush in the winter of 1992, long before the rise of Dubya necessitated the use of such cumbersome initials. The War Room, a fly-on-the-wall account of the wildly successful but not always charmed Bill Clinton campaign from the POV of his key operatives, now feels like a time-capsule itself, an old calendar from an era before the internet and Super PACs radically changed the way presidential campaigns were run from moment to moment. Far from feeling hopelessly outdated, though, Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker's unofficial sequel to Pennebaker's work on Primary, which followed JFK's vanquishing of opponent Hubert Humphrey, is an illuminating look at how one of the most successful national campaigns in modern electoral history was waged from an unassuming office in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Your Sister’s Sister (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

November 5, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mark Duplass, Mike Birbiglia
written and directed by Lynn Shelton


Yoursistersister1

by Angelo Muredda Lynn Shelton tends to swim in the deep end of the mumblecore pool. More improvisatory than the scripted films of the Duplass brothers (despite their overlap in casting), her work, in an odd sort of way, is probably closer in spirit to Joe Swanberg's. Swanberg's shabbier DIY aesthetic masks the heady nature of his projects, which explore the same three or four ideas about modern relationships in forms as disparate as the anthology film (Autoerotic) and the meta-slasher (Silver Bullets). In Humpday, Shelton nicely marries her own high concept–to make a movie about hetero male insecurity writ large–with a pair of naturalistic performances that elude Swanberg's scratchier efforts. Her M.O. appears to be to let her actors fumble through a convoluted situation that, on the strength of their characterizations, never feels as unnatural as it probably should.

La promesse (1996) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 4, 2012Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Belgium, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Drama, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jérémie Renier, Olivier Gourmet, Assita Ouedraogo, Rasmane Ouedraogo
written and directed by Luc Dardenne & Jean-Pierre Dardenne


Lapromesse1click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer Since the mid-1990s,
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have been the standard-bearers for French-language
Belgian cinema. Born in Engis and raised in nearby Seraing (both located in the
industrial Belgian province of Liège), the Dardennes started making
documentaries in the 1970s, followed by a pair of narrative films they
immediately disavowed. 1996's La promesse was a completely fresh start.
The Dardennes' non-fiction work demonstrated a social consciousness that
remained in effect once they found their narrative voice, and it's amazing how
fully realized this effort is, exhibiting many of the formal strategies and
much of the narrative sensibility that would serve them well over the next
decade and a half.

Midnight’s Children (2012)

November 1, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Fantasy, India, Theatrical

**/****
starring Satya Bhabha, Shahana Goswami, Rajat Kapoor, Darsheel Safary
screenplay by Salman Rushdie, based on his novel
directed by Deepa Mehta


Midnightschildren

by Angelo Muredda It's a nice bit of synergy, good for at least one heavily-latexed Tom
Hanks reincarnation, that Deepa Mehta's adaptation of Midnight's Children should come out so soon after the Wachowskis'
and Tom Tykwer's ill-fated stab at Cloud
Atlas, perhaps the only contemporary novel more labyrinthine than Salman
Rushdie's magic-realist opus. So earnest are both efforts that one is tempted
to ignore their fundamental failures as either cinema or adaptation and bow to
the good intentions of the faithful stewards. Yet one wonders about the value
of such graceful gestures when, combined, the two films take up a staggering
five hours–indefensible, given the limpid mysticism they have to show for
themselves at their muted conclusions. Read together, they're proof that in the
absence of a real necessity for adaptation, big novels make for small movies.

Flight (2012)

November 1, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Drama, Theatrical

Flight

**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle, Kelly Reilly, Melissa Leo
screenplay by John Gatins
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Bill Chambers We open on a dingy little hotel room. It’s hard to say what the night before was, but this is definitely a “morning after.” A beautiful woman (Nadine Velazquez) emerges from bed, fully nude. There’s another warm body there, a man, churning and groaning awake beneath the covers. He stirs to take a phone call from an ex-wife about child support while the woman gets dressed, unfazed. Finally the man, Whip (Denzel Washington), wills himself out of bed to sip his morning coffee, or in this case, to take a giant toot of cocaine. The film then cuts to him at work–he’s an airline pilot. It’s a sickly funny reveal unavoidably ruined by the trailer, the commercials, even the poster image of Washington in uniform, but what’s fascinating is how the joke now works in reverse: The audience starts tittering in disbelief the moment Whip is introduced, since they already know what he does for a living.

Strangers on a Train (1951) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

October 31, 2012Posted in****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Thriller

Strangers5

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, Robert Walker, Leo G. Carroll
screenplay by Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Alfred Hitchcock’s queerest film (Rope notwithstanding) and proof positive of the director’s knack for casting men of ambiguous sexual mooring in roles that cannily exploit it, Strangers on a Train, shot in vibrant contrasts by the great Robert Burks, is best read as a dark comedy–a noir in the most perverse sense of the term. Find in it the finest performance by troubled Robert Walker, tormented to his grave by David O. Selznick’s infatuation with and eventual theft of wife Jennifer Jones and committed, not long after Strangers on a Train finished shooting, to a mental institution, where he was the victim of an accidentally-lethal dose of sedative. Playing a character named after the kidnapper and murderer of the Lindbergh baby, Walker is Bruno, a spatted dandy who bumps shoes with hero Guy (Farley Granger–the “girl” in the Rope dyad) on a train and ostensibly hatches a plan with the pliant tennis star to “criss-cross” murders (trade assassinations, as it were), freeing each of them from the burden of blood motive. Bruno wants his father dead; Guy, involved in a very public affair with the senator’s daughter Anne (Ruth Roman) but shackled to loathsome Miriam (Kasey Rogers), would benefit from Miriam’s timely demise. So when Miriam turns up dead by Bruno’s hand, Guy is trapped by circumstance into either murdering Bruno’s dad or going to the police and implicating himself and his lover in a conspiracy.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) – Blu-ray Disc

October 30, 2012Posted in1980s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras A
starring Grant Cramer, Suzanne Snyder, John Allen Nelson, John Vernon
screenplay by Charles Chiodo & Stephen Chiodo
directed by Stephen Chiodo



Killerklowns1

by Walter Chaw Boy, you know, I
really like the Chiodo Brothers' Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I can't
help it. I like it more than Night of the Creeps, more than Matinee, more
than any other film that would see 1950s creature-features
resurrected, be it through homage or farce or satire. I like it because it's
unapologetic, and because its high concept is broad enough that there are sufficient gags to peanut-butter across the entire runtime. I like, too, that they don't end
a scene without a groaner, meaning they're unerringly true to their stated
mission of erecting a shrine to Irvin S. Yeaworth's The Blob (truer, even, than the contemporaneous remake of The Blob) and doing it
with a relentlessly light touch. It's never scary (unless you're a true
coulrophobe), but it is often uproarious–like when one of the titular alien Bozos squirts angry Officer Mooney (John Vernon, just fantastic) with gag
flowers, to which Mooney, out of proportion to the affront, responds, "I oughta
shoot you right now." I also appreciated the moment when head girl Debbie
(Suzanne Snyder) asks why they're being shot with popcorn and her
boyfriend Mike (Grant Cramer) replies, "Popcorn? Because they're clowns!"
Well, no shit, Debbie, try to pay attention.

The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

October 29, 2012Posted in1980s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, DVD, Horror

Death Dorm
Pranks
***/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A
starring Laurie Lapinski, Stephen Sachs, David Snow, Daphne Zuniga
screenplay by Stephen Carpenter, Jeffrey Obrow, Stacey Giachino
directed by Jeffrey Obrow and Stephen Carpenter

by Jefferson Robbins There may be nothing groundbreaking or new about a bunch of film nerds in their early twenties running around making a horror movie on the cheap, but that’s because Jeffrey Obrow and Stephen Carpenter probably did it first. Created with the kind of zeal, energy, inventiveness-on-a-budget, and adherence to forms that are symptomatic of most youthful endeavours, The Dorm That Dripped Blood–written, shot, and released under a multiplicity of titles–is very much a product of its time and zeitgeist. That doesn’t mean it lacks worth–in fact, it manages to be both fun (in an ironic, cheesemongering way) and, in its final minutes, quite compelling and suspenseful.

Night of the Living Dead (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

October 28, 2012Posted in1990s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: George A. Romero, Horror, Zombie

**½/**** Image C- Sound B Extras B
starring Tony Todd, Patricia Tallman, Tom Towles, McKee Anderson
screenplay by George A. Romero, based on the screenplay by John A. Russo and Romero
directed by Tom Savini


Notld6click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. George Romero's Night
of the Living Dead is a watershed: a quintessential drive-in/B-movie that
demonstrated without equivocation how horror/exploitation pictures are often "indicator species" in the cultural swamp–the ones that most
quickly, most effectively locate the toxins in the ecosystem. Appearing in
1968, Night of the Living Dead addressed the rise of televangelism in
its legion of communion-taking, slow-walking white people; predicted the generation gap (alongside Rosemary's
Baby) and a spate of evil-children flicks that appeared in the early-'70s; and spoke to the
Civil Rights war in its blithe casting of black actor Duane Jones and not-so-blithe murder
of his character by a posse of hillbilly vigilantes in the final frames. There's
something super-charged in the image of Jones holing up in a farmhouse with
whiter-than-white, meeker-than-meek Barbra (Judith O'Dea), something explosive
in the social microcosm represented by survivors trying,
unsuccessfully, to work together to affect their escape from what's really just a metaphorical threat. The movie resonated then; it resonates still.

Steel Magnolias (1989) – Blu-ray Disc

October 25, 2012Posted in1980s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras D+
starring Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah
screenplay by Robert Harling, based on his play
directed by Herbert Ross


Steelmagnolias3

by Walter Chaw Submitted for your
approval, shrill, neo-Tennessee Williams actress-posturing from the pantheon of
late-'80s harpies, featuring a special martyr performance from a Julia Roberts just months away from achieving sociopathic superstardom as a high-priced whore in Pretty
Woman. Not being able to relate to Herbert Ross's demographically-precise Steel Magnolias in any way, I nevertheless see in its popularity an opportunity for introspection about how little I actually understand other peoples' tastes. From my vantage, Steel Magnolias is two hours of
nattering and bon mots set in a home-salon run by Truvy (Dolly Parton, the
very definition of down-home warmth and genuineness), assisted by dizzy Arnelle
(Daryl Hannah), and frequented by diabetic Shelby (Roberts), her mother M'Lynn
(Sally Field), happy widow Clairee (Olympia Dukakis), and cranky widow Ouiser
(Shirley MacLaine). Ouiser basically stalks around swearing like a sailor and
getting shat on by birds, Clairee floats on momentum won (and fast flagging)
from Moonstruck, and M'Lynn turns into MacLaine
from Terms of Endearment. My favourite is when she force-feeds Shelby a
glass of orange juice in a vision of Hell I'd like to one day mash-up with the
brainwashing sequence from A Clockwork Orange. Along the way, the young
ones become pregnant, a stray man wanders through now and again, and each of the
grey old iron ladies gets a moment to demonstrate her humanity and humour in
the face of life's little, and big, tragedies.

The Raven (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

October 24, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Mystery, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring John Cusack, Luke Evans, Alice Eve, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Ben Livingston & Hannah Shakespeare
directed by James McTeigue


Raven1

by Walter Chaw I'm
no nineteenth-century cop, but I personally would begin by interrogating the guillotine-pendulum maker. James McTeigue's abominable The Raven posits
legendary Marylander Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) as a crazed, alcoholic, frustrated-artist type who has a bar tab the length of his arm to go with a fiery temper
and a quite-requited, it turns out, affair with toothy Emily (from Aardman Studios: Alice Eve), daughter of Captain Hamilton (Brendan Gleeson).
Alack-alay, what should happen but a wax museum breaks out as a critics-hating
serial killer (just like Theatre of Blood, which I should've revisited instead) enacts scenes from Poe's stories whilst
dressed in the hat and cape of McTeigue's V for Vendetta protag. Good copper
Det. Fields (Luke Evans) is hot on the miscreant's trail, enlisting Poe as a
Poe expert to try to get one step ahead of the well-read marauder. There is,
alas, no ratiocination the equal of the mystery of Ben Livingston and Hannah
Shakespeare's (no relation, I hope) bewilderingly bad screenplay. No one, no
one, could deliver these lines–a mush of anachronistic phrases and
"period" posh–with conviction, much less the miscast Cusack and a motley
band of supporting players. The good news is that The Raven is funny. The bad news
is that it's so awful, it makes you the kind of person who watches a
movie just to be superior to it.

Cloud Atlas (2012)

October 23, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Sci-Fi

**/****
starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski, based on the novel by David Mitchell
directed by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski


Cloudatlas

by Walter Chaw It speaks to the
extraordinary hubris of the tripartite godhead behind Cloud Atlas (the
Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer) that in the middle of a 172-minute film composed of
interminable exposition and multiple timelines, they would invoke
long-winded Russian prisoner Solzhenitsyn without fear of ironic reprisal.
More, it speaks to their hubris that they would make a film this sprawling and
messianic about the Disney maxim that you're never too puny to change the
world, so don't stop trying, tiger! If you're at all offended by white
people doing the "ah, so" thing in yellow-face, by the way: relax,
because there're also white people doing the evil Fu Manchu thing in
yellow-face. What there isn't is white people doing blackface, suggesting that
if you're about to make the argument that Cloud Atlas is about how we're
all the same under the skin to the extent that we could have been different
races in past and future lives, then don't bother. That doesn't stop the movie,
though, from talking about the evils of slavery with a super-duper,
plantation-attitudes-changing Magic Negro, or from positing a future-Korea that
clones wage-slaves before paying off never-accidental post-modern
self-referents. If you were to take Cloud Atlas remotely seriously,
in fact, you'd have to address it as an attempt to create a completely
post-modern artifact in a world that didn't already have "Beavis &
Butthead". Quick, look, the author of that manuscript the old editor in
the 2012 timeline is reading was written by the kid from the 1973 timeline who had a crush
on one of the black versions of Halle Berry (the one playing Pam Grier)! Did I
mention that Berry has a timeline in whiteface? Or that Hugo Weaving and
Ben Whishaw have ones in drag?

Magic Mike (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

October 22, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD, Theatrical

Magicmike1

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, Cody Horn, Matthew McConaughey
screenplay by Reid Carolin
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Magic Mike opens with Saul Bass’s red-and-black Warner Bros. logo, retired in 1984. That gesture is meant, I think, to pitch what follows as a throwback to smarter studio fare along the lines of Hal Ashby’s Being There, but it also courts less flattering comparisons to the likes of the Police Academy movies. Steven Soderbergh’s latest pop exercise falls somewhere between those two poles–a little too close for comfort to the Guttenberg side. Conceived as a loose riff on star Channing Tatum’s time as a male stripper, it has a solid run as a cheerful smut delivery mechanism before hanging up its thong to become a rote ‘80s melodrama about good kids corrupted by bad drugs. If the howl of “Yes!” that greeted the first bared ass at my screening is any indication, that transformation won’t hurt the bottom line (a figure these strippers always seem to have on their minds), though it does make Magic Mike another promising yet half-baked Soderbergh project instead of a good movie, sans asterisks.