The Horse Whisperer (1998) – Blu-ray Disc

October 14, 2012Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, Scarlett Johansson

Horsewhisperercap

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D+
starring Robert Redford, Kristin Scott Thomas, Sam Neill, Scarlett Johansson
screenplay by Eric Roth and Richard LaGravenese, based on the novel by Nicholas Evans
directed by Robert Redford

by Bill Chambers  SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Revisiting Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer fourteen years after I last saw it, I am relieved to encounter a film that isn’t simply marking time until a climactic moment that was for me a cherished eureka at the movies. The picture begins with Grace (13-year-old Scarlett Johansson) rising at the crack of dawn to go horseback riding with her friend Judith (Kate Bosworth, billed as “Catherine”). Redford focuses on Johansson’s socked feet slinking past her parents’ bedroom door, and subsequently draws a lot of attention to legs and feet here–not in a fetish-y way, but as if they’re a person’s “tell.” I misremembered this scene, for what it’s worth, as Grace doing something wrong by sneaking out, but in fact her parents are not at all surprised to find her gone by the time they’re up and around. Mom (Kristin Scott Thomas) is basically Anna Wintour–her name’s even Annie–and Dad, Robert (Sam Neill), is, we infer, the kind of lawyer who does a lot of pro bono work.

Keep the Lights On (2012)

October 11, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical

Keepthelightson

***/****
starring Thure Lindhardt, Zachary Booth, Julianne Nicholson, Paprika Steen
written and directed by Ira Sachs

by Angelo Muredda Life imitated art when Ira Sachs’s Keep the Lights On won the Teddy for best feature at the 2012 Berlinale. In the film, the same honour–albeit in the documentary category–goes to Erik (Thure Lindhardt) for his long-gestating profile of queer photographer and filmmaker Avery Willard, a project Sachs himself realized this year, concurrently with his fictional surrogate. Despite the intimate overlaps between Sachs’s life and his most affecting movie to date, knowing the writer-director’s background going in is hardly a prerequisite to falling for Keep the Lights On‘s honest charms. Sachs lets his biography seep into the material, effectively colouring it blue.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952) – Blu-ray Disc

October 9, 2012Posted in****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Romance

Singinintheraincap

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Cyd Charisse
screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
directed by Stanley Donen

by Bryant Frazer Not just the best Gene Kelly film, and not just the best movie musical ever made, Singin’ in the Rain is a genuine national treasure–a single text proving for posterity what a wondrous thing the Hollywood studio system could be when it was firing on all cylinders. It’s the quintessential studio picture and smart as hell about its own nature. Unpretentious and unabashedly entertaining, it’s a self-reflexive product of the same filmmaking process it simultaneously documents and lampoons.

All the President’s Men (1976) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

October 7, 2012Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Thriller

Allprez6

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Warden, Jason Robards
screenplay by William Goldman, based on the book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
directed by Alan J. Pakula 

by Walter Chaw The final film in director Alan J. Pakula’s loose “paranoia trilogy,” All the President’s Men does the impossible by making heroes of newspaper reporters and a thriller out of telephone calls and follow-up interviews. Based on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s exposé of the Watergate Scandal and President Richard Nixon’s involvement in felonious dirty tricks, it’s more than just a cunningly-crafted docudrama–it’s a key film in the best era of the medium’s history. It’s a picture that highlights the period’s mistrust in our leadership while establishing highly unconventional heroes for whom the stakes couldn’t possibly be higher. And though we know how it all works out, it seems more poignant for our knowing how everything works out.

La Grande Illusion (1937) [StudioCanal Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 2, 2012Posted in****/****, 1930s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Jean Renoir, Drama, FFC Must-Own, War

Grandillusion1

Grand Illusion
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay, Marcel Dalio
screenplay by Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak
directed by Jean Renoir

by Bryant Frazer If you watch it cold, the opening scenes of La Grande Illusion (hereafter Grand Illusion) make for a confounding experience. The film opens in a French canteen, equipped with bar and phonograph player, where an aristocratic captain calls a working-class lieutenant to accompany him on a routine reconnaissance mission. One short dissolve later, without even the narrative pleasantry of a stock-footage flight over enemy territory, we’re in a German canteen, equipped with bar and phonograph player, where an aristocratic captain announces that he’s shot down an enemy plane. Another fade-out, and the Frenchmen are quickly welcomed at the German dinner table. The German captain even apologizes for the French lieutenant’s broken arm.

Cinderella (1950) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

October 2, 2012Posted in1950s, 2012, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, Family, Romance

Cinderella3

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
directed by Clyde Geronomi & Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske

by Bill Chambers Despite its streamlining of the particulars, Walt Disney’s feature-length Cinderella ultimately takes fewer liberties with the source material (chiefly, Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella, or The Glass Slipper”) than almost any of his other animated fairytales. Consequently, there remains the problem of a heroine who’d still be sweeping the floors were it not for her Fairy Godmother, the deus ex machina to end deus ex machinas. The Cinderella myth, as Perrault interpreted it, is at best anachronistic–we learn that beauty is a virtue but that grace is a gift…whatever that means. Disney’s contemporization turns it into a karma fable of sorts, with martyrdom paying off like a jackpot and the comeuppance of Cinderella’s tormentors the real happily-ever-after of the piece. Cinderella’s a less-than-ideal role model for the millions exposed to the movie in childhood, really, because she accepts victimhood until external forces intervene on her behalf.

Child’s Play (1988) [Chucky’s 20th Birthday Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray + DVD; Chucky: The Killer DVD Collection

October 1, 2012Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Romania, Satire, Thriller, UK

Childsplaycap

CHILD’S PLAY
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon, Alex Vincent, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Don Mancini and John Lafia and Tom Holland
directed by Tom Holland

CHILD’S PLAY 2 (1990)
**/**** Image C+ Sound A-
starring Alex Vincent, Jenny Agutter, Gerrit Graham, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Don Mancini
directed by John Lafia

CHILD’S PLAY 3 (1991)
*/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Justin Whalin, Perrey Reeves, Jeremy Sylvers, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Don Mancini
directed by Jack Bender

BRIDE OF CHUCKY (1998)
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jennifer Tilly, Brad Dourif, Katherine Heigl, Nick Stabile
screenplay by Don Mancini
directed by Ronny Yu

SEED OF CHUCKY (2004)
*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C-
starring Jennifer Tilly, Brad Dourif, Billy Boyd, Redman
written and directed by Don Mancini

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Twenty years and four sequels later, it’s obviously pointless to try to conceal that Child’s Play is about a serial killer (Brad Dourif) who transfers his soul into an innocuous doll, but watching it today–more than a decade after it thoroughly traumatized me as an impressionable preteen–I was surprised to learn that the film itself didn’t do much to hide that fact from the start. Oh, sure, when you first approach Child’s Play, you’re ostensibly supposed to wonder whether little Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent) is responsible for the murders peppered throughout, despite his loud protestations that Chucky did it. But no, it never really tries to pretend that these horrible acts are being committed by anyone other than that godawful doll. In taking that perspective, Child’s Play preys upon the irrational fears we all harbour–that sting of dread we get at the sight of an unintentionally unsettling toy, immediately wished away by safe, immutable reason: that’s impossible–a doll can’t hurt you.

Walking Tall: The Trilogy [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

September 26, 2012Posted in1970s, 2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Scream/Shout! Factory

Walkingtall1

WALKING TALL (1973)
***/**** Image B- Sound C
starring Joe Don Baker, Noah Beery, Jr., Elizabeth Hartman, Rosemary Murphy
screenplay by Mort Briskin
directed by Phil Karlson

WALKING TALL PART 2 (1975)
*/**** Image B Sound C- Extras B
starring Bo Svenson, Richard Jaeckel, Bruce Glover, Robert Doqui
screenplay by Howard B. Kreitsek
directed by Earl Bellamy

FINAL CHAPTER WALKING TALL (1977) ***½/****
Image B- Sound C- Extras D
starring Bo Svenson, Margaret Blye, Forrest Tucker, Morgan Woodward
screenplay by Howard B. Kreitsek
directed by Jack Starrett

by Walter Chaw A hicksploitation flick that can hold its head up high among its blaxploitation contemporaries, Phil Karlson’s combustible, if risible, Walking Tall features a moment where a small-town judge (Douglas Fowley) warns vigilante Buford Pusser (Joe Don Baker) to cut out his foolishness, and another where the hero’s folksy grandpa Carl (Noah Beery, Jr.) declares that there’s a “ragin’ social disease” out there called “black equality.” Yet the Pussers are the good guys, or should I say good ol’ boys, and when I stumbled upon Walking Tall on late-night television as a kid, it instantly lodged itself against my red-white-and-blue heart. Watching the Coens’ Raising Arizona and True Grit years later, I hear and see echoes of Walking Tall‘s high-dudgeon. Of course it’s right there on the surface of Quentin Tarantino’s films, too, and right there in any serious conversation about the transfiguration (metastasis?) of noir—Walking Tall is a remake, as Glenn Erickson aptly notes, of director Karlson’s own tough-minded The Phenix City Story. More proximately, Walking Tall is the common-man’s Straw Dogs. Both begin with the appearance of our hero in the middle of a rural environment, and both involve the eruption of the Natural through the thin scrim of civilization. All three films–Phenix, Walking Tall, and Straw Dogs–identify with a noir idea that the hero’s morality, regardless of the laws of country and state, is the only, possibly last, light in the world.

Dark Shadows (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

September 23, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, DVD, Horror, Vampire, Werewolf

Darkshadows3

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green
screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith, based on the television series “Dark Shadows” by Dan Curtis
directed by Tim Burton

by Angelo Muredda Like so many of his recent dioramas, Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows starts off looking suspiciously like a real movie. The director’s tendency to Burtonize cherished texts into gauche self-portraits is suppressed in an economical opening that tells with a straight face the dolorous tale of Barnabas Collins, once-imprisoned and newly-freed vampire star of Dan Curtis’s late-afternoon soap. The mood is sombre–a nice hat-tip to Curtis’s morose series, which, if you’ll pardon the wonky chronology, played out like a Smiths song drained of irony. Alas, before long Barnabas awakens in 1972 to meet his distant relatives and dissipated hangers-on, and the mere presence of pasty-white, pink-shaded, ginger-wigged Helena Bonham Carter as family psychiatrist Julia Hoffman is enough to break the spell. Carter’s mannered and carefully sculpted weirdness alerts us that this is yet another wax museum standing in for a film no one had the heart to finish.

Friday the 13th: From Crystal Lake to Manhattan [Ultimate Edition DVD Collection] + Friday the 13th [Uncut]|Friday the 13th Part 2|Friday the 13th Part 3 3-D – Blu-ray Discs

September 22, 2012Posted in1980s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Revenge

FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980)
**½/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B-
BD – Image A Sound B Extras B+
starring Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram
screenplay by Victor Miller
directed by Sean S. Cunningham

F131capby Alex Jackson

“Do you think you can get through the summer?”

“I don’t think I can get through the week.”

One look at the teenagers in Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th and we can see they’re displaced, without religion or identity. Shallow, dim, they don’t have any past and they don’t have any future. Their existence is entirely ephemeral and half-developed. Their lives consist solely of pot, sex, and menial work. We know that they’re really talking about life in the above-quoted exchange–life as a biological process that will come to an abrupt stop for most of them by the end of the week, if not by the end of the summer. They think they’re just talking about work and boredom.

TIFF ’12: Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story

September 21, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
directed by Brad Bernstein

by Angelo Muredda “If you want to give them an identity, children should be traumatized,” illustrator Tomi Ungerer says in Far Out Isn’t Far Enough, speaking about his life as much as his career obsession with drawing the macabre. Brad Bernstein’s feature debut has the benefit of an articulate subject with a captivating life story, from his confused wartime upbringing in Strasbourg–“the sphincter of France,” as he calls it–to his early American days as a freelancer, to his later erotic drawings (of “bondage and so on,” he explains) and role as a sort of artist-in-residence for the civil rights movement. What it lacks is assurance, frequently getting in the way of its powerful material with hammy stylistic flourishes and a treacly score better suited to a Disney-channel docudrama.

TIFF ’12: Imogene

September 21, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

a.k.a. Girl Most Likely
**/****
directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini

by Bill Chambers The Wizard of Oz is the paradigm for Kristen Wiig’s first starring vehicle since Bridesmaids–though for the sake of managing expectations, it’s probably better to think of Imogene as Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s follow-up to their dire HBO flick Cinema Vérité. The movie opens with the title character as a child playing the lead in an unlikely school production of The Wizard of Oz and lodging the precocious complaint that Dorothy’s desire to return to drab Kansas is irrational. Many years later, Imogene is an aspiring/failed playwright in the Laura Linney-in-The Savages mold reduced to staging a suicide tableau in a last-ditch effort to win back her ex-boyfriend (Brian Petsos). The frenemy (June Diane Raphael, who’s in every goddamn movie like this) who finds her instead calls 9-1-1, and Imogene, thanks to the intervention of the Sitcom Fairy, is forced to serve out her mandatory psych stay at home–specifically, her childhood home in Atlantic City, where her man-child brother Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald) still lives with their gambling-addict mother (Annette Bening), mom’s weird boyfriend (Matt Dillon), and Lee (Darren Criss), the young boarder who moved into Imogene’s old room.

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

September 19, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Esoterica, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Beyond4

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras F
starring Michael Rogers, Eva Allan, Scott Hylands
screenplay by Panos Cosmatos, inspired by the book Be Your Self by Mercurio Arboria
directed by Panos Cosmatos

by Angelo Muredda Panos Cosmatos claims he wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies as a kid and had to make do with the lurid box covers he saw on video store shelves. Rising above those less-than-ideal conditions, the first-time helmer and son of famed Cobra and Rambo: First Blood Part II director George P. Cosmatos makes an auspicious debut with Beyond the Black Rainbow. As befits its retro title, this is a bravura pulp homage that recreates the feeling of a preteen creeping down the hall to catch a sidelong glance of the bygone genre cinema pulsing out of the living-room TV and painting the walls orange. Still, it’s best approached not as a found object from that time, but as a mood piece–a sustained exercise in atmospheric nostalgia for what LCD Soundsystem eloquently called the “unremembered ’80s.”

TIFF ’12: The Paperboy + At Any Price

September 18, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sports, Thriller, TIFF

THE PAPERBOY
*/****
directed by Lee Daniels

AT ANY PRICE
*/****
directed by Ramin Bahrani

by Bill Chambers The great Pete Dexter writes tersely about criminal perversity in the southern United States; the problem in adapting him to the cinema is that without his hardboiled prose, which lends everything he writes the whiff of reportage (a newspaperman originally, he turned to novels after drug dealers beat him nearly to death over one of his columns), the psychosexual situations he describes threaten to collapse into camp. Because of this, Dexter and Precious/Shadowboxer auteur Lee Daniels sounded like a match made in Hell to me, but the blunt force of Daniels’s shamelessness proves strangely compatible with Dexter’s writing in The Paperboy, based on the latter’s 1995 best-seller. If only he could direct! Daniels is like a less bourgeois Henry Jaglom, cutting between a panoply of indifferently-composed shots like a frog on a griddle with little feeling for either spatial or character dynamics.

TIFF ’12: Silver Linings Playbook

September 18, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Robert De Niro, Romance, TIFF

***/****
directed by David O. Russell

by Angelo Muredda Awards season does strange things to American filmmakers in search of gold hardware. Last year, Alexander Payne delivered his James L. Brooks movie in The Descendants, toning down his tartness for a family drama both more palatable and significantly shoddier than usual. There’s a comparable transformation in the cards this year for David O. Russell, who showed signs of mellowing with 2010’s The Fighter but was still miles from the Cameron Crowe job he’s now pulled off, to surprisingly strong effect, with Silver Linings Playbook, a Jerry Maguire for manic depressives.

TIFF ’12: Something in the Air

September 16, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, France, TIFF


Après mai
**½/****
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Angelo Muredda Those who see Olivier Assayas’s new film stateside will be met with an ambivalent gesture right from the title card, which juxtaposes the Godardian red and blue of the French title, “APRES MAI” (“After May”), with the mousy English translation, “Something in the Air.” The French is the more precise, referring to the dispirited state of radicals following the events of May, 1968, while Thunderclap Newman’s yearning anthem about armed insurrection evokes only a roughly simpatico version of late-’60s American idealism falling into ’70s cynicism. Vague as the English title reads by comparison, though, it turns out to be the more fitting of the two. Indeed, for all of Assayas’s personal attachment to this material, Something in the Air isn’t significantly more illuminating about the period than something like Almost Famous, which uses the titular song to roughly the same effect, evincing the same impossible nostalgia for a time when everyone was supposedly moving together on one big bus, so to speak.

Ed Wood (1994) – [Special Edition] DVD + Blu-ray Disc

September 16, 2012Posted in1990s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, DVD

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette
screenplay by Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw Raging Bull for starfuckers, Ed Wood is in a lot of ways the quintessential dissection of the allure of Hollywood, allying it more closely, perhaps, with a different Martin Scorsese film, The King of Comedy. (It’s The King of Comedy recast with the stalked celebrity a willing participant in the stalker’s obsessive lunacy.) Ed Wood diverges from most biopics in director Tim Burton’s tactic of skewing the film towards the same sort of kitsch-surreal of Wood’s films, managing in so doing the trick that David Cronenberg performed with Naked Lunch: a hagiography that’s as much critical analysis as hommage. It engages in a conversation about how Wood’s films are seen at the same time that it endeavours to tell the highlights of Wood’s life. The result is a picture that bridges the gap between cult and camp classic; the melancholic and the melodramatic; and the difference between a director of vision and a director with a vision that sucks.

TIFF ’12: Leviathan

September 15, 2012Posted in****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, TIFF, UK

****/****
directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

by Angelo Muredda What is there to say about Leviathan, a nearly-wordless maelstrom of ravenous seagulls, blood-red waves, and severed fish-heads piled to the horizon? Colleagues at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel take the sensory as seriously as the ethnography here, producing a truly singular documentary account of a commercial fishing vessel off the New Bedford coast that puts the so-called immersive quality of 3-D baubles like Avatar to shame. Their work more than lives up to the biblical title, delivering what might be described as a fish-eye view of the Apocalypse.

TIFF ’12: Blackbird

September 15, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
written and directed by Jason Buxton

by Bill Chambers Jason Buxton’s Blackbird is an important film but a primally engaging one that doesn’t feel at all like medicine or, God forbid, an Afterschool Special. The destined-for-greatness Connor Jessup is Sean Randall, a broody but essentially sweet teen who lives with his divorced dad (Michael Buie) and loves from afar the popular Deanna (Alexia Fast). Sean’s a modern-day Boo Radley, an artistically-inclined goth kid stranded in a passive-aggressive sports culture: His father operates the Zamboni at the local rink where Deanna’s boyfriend–Cory (Craig Arnold), natch–practices hockey. Cory torments Sean at school, and a guidance counsellor suggests that rather than retaliate Sean vent his spleen on paper–which he does, via a hypothetical revenge scenario (“It’s a story”) he stupidly cross-posts to the Internet. The torch-wielding villagers show up at his subsequent court hearing like it’s a town-hall meeting; in this post-Columbine world, he’s never going to get a fair shake.