FILM FREAK CENTRAL

TIFF ’12: A Royal Affair

September 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Czech Republic, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Sweden, TIFF

En Kongelig Affære
***/****
directed by Nikolaj Arcel

by Angelo Muredda A Royal Affair isn’t exactly Barry Lyndon, but as period pieces go, it’s surprisingly robust, the rare costume drama that takes a genuine interest in how the unruly personalities of rulers and politicians determine a nation’s political outcomes as much as the ideologies they represent. It doesn’t seem so promising at first, beginning as it does with a title card that sets the scene with ominous overtones. “It is the Age of Enlightenment,” we’re told in the tasteful font of “Masterpiece Theatre”, and while the rest of Europe has gone through a massive philosophical and ethical shift with respect to its perception of peasants and landed gentry, Denmark has remained an outpost of the old, thanks in no small part to the conservative court that pulls the strings of mad young King Christian (Mikkel Følsgaard, Best Actor winner at Berlin). Enter his blushing new Welsh bride and our narrator, Caroline (Alicia Vikander), a revolutionary intellect–her book collection doesn’t pass the Danish board of censors–who flounders in the country she now rules until things are livened by Johann Friedrich Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen), a German doctor and secret pamphleteer of the Enlightenment sent to bring sense back to the erratic King.

Gray’s Anatomy (1996) [The Criterion Collection] + And Everything is Going Fine (2010) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Discs

September 4, 2012****/****, 1990s, 2000s, 2010, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Documentary, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

GRAY’S ANATOMY
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
directed by Steven Soderbergh

A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN THEATER
***½/****
directed by Skip Blumberg

AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE
****/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras A
directed by Steven Soderbergh

SEX AND DEATH TO THE AGE 14
***/****
directed by Dan Weissman and Brad Ricker

by Walter Chaw The first ten minutes of Steven Soderbergh’s Gray’s Anatomy are obnoxious, and though there are few artists as interesting to me or as influential in my own life as Spalding Gray, the last 109 don’t exactly blow my skirt up, either. Let me back up. I tripped over Swimming to Cambodia in English class, Freshman year, then procured my own copy at Boulder’s invaluable The Video Station so that I could go back to it and, sure, impress Liberal Arts girls with it on a double-bill with Stop Making Sense. You might say that Gray and David Byrne were my wingmen for a couple of years there; it’s fitting that my VHS copies of both those pieces are now and forever in the possession of ex-girlfriends and love interests. I wonder if I would ask for the tapes back were I to run into them again. I know that one of them, after I was married, tried to return Swimming to Cambodia, and I asked her to please keep it. If you don’t know what Swimming to Cambodia is, it’s Spalding Gray’s unbelievably great performance-“monolog” about his time on set, on location, shooting Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields. I’ve never heard Joffe speak, but I have Gray’s impersonation of Joffe–calling out to a tripping-balls Gray, floating in shark-infested surf in the South China Sea–lodged in my brain. I pull it out once in a while at a party, just as a sonar ping to see if anyone could possibly identify the echo of the echo.

TIFF ’12: Reality

September 3, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Italy, Satire, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Matteo Garrone

by Angelo Muredda Reality, Matteo Garrone’s follow-up to the urban planner’s nightmare of Gomorrah, is a nasty little thing, at once an indictment of the mass delusion of celebrity culture and a finely-wrought character study of Luciano, a fish merchant and small-town Neapolitan crook who dreams of being a contestant on “Big Brother”. Luciano is played with wide-eyed wonder and deep sincerity by Aniello Arena, a mafia hitman currently serving a life sentence for a triple-homicide–unlike his modest fictional counterpart, who’s involved in a baffling scheme to resell pastry-making robots on the black market. It’s a terrific performance, somehow sweet and deranged in equal measure, and it’s the reason Reality works as well as it does when it begins to assume his warped perspective.

Romeo Must Die (2000) + Cradle 2 the Grave (2003) – Blu-ray Discs

September 2, 20122000s, 2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Martial Arts, ZERO STARS

ROMEO MUST DIE
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jet Li, Aaliyah, Isaiah Washington, Delroy Lindo
screenplay by Eric Bernt and John Jarrell
directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak

CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras D
starring Jet Li, DMX, Anthony Anderson, Gabrielle Union
screenplay by John O’Brien and Channing Gibson
directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak

by Walter Chaw There are a lot of interesting things about Jet Li’s sad run through Hollywood, among them the fairly simple question of why, in Romeo Must Die, this particular yellow Romeo must die. But then he doesn’t die, and he also doesn’t get to kiss the girl, who isn’t white but Aaliyah (black)–mitigating, I would have thought, the taboo against Asian men in American cinema having any kind of sexuality that isn’t ridiculous (see: Long Duk Dong) or that involves a white lady. In his next film, Kiss of the Dragon, Jet teams up with a white prostitute (Bridget Fonda) and, belying the sly Orientalist promise of the title, doesn’t get to kiss her, either–and she’s a fucking hooker. It’s a cultural ban so stringent that there’s a specific category of porn, deeply perverse, that is not only interracial, but specifically Asian man on white woman. Not long after 2003’s Cradle 2 the Grave, Li played an Asian man kept on a leash who, at a word, is made to perform martial arts for his white master’s favour. Danny the Dog (retitled Unleashed in the United States…why, again? Because of Hollywood’s sensitivity?) is probably the most poignant expression of the plight of the Asian action hero in the United States: castrated, humiliated, valued for the single trait of knowing kung fu–even if, as it was for Jackie Chan in the Karate Kid reboot, Chinese “kung fu” is reconfigured as Japanese “karate.” Chris Tucker’s favourite joke in the Rush Hour movies, after all, is to mistake the two cultures–a favour to neither and funny, probably, only to Tucker.

TIFF ’12: The Hunt

September 2, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Sweden, TIFF

Jagten
**½/****
directed by Thomas Vinterberg

by Angelo Muredda The Hunt hinges on a misunderstanding, a nasty story born of a child’s bruised ego and happily seized by a pack of overeager concern trolls calling themselves adults. But there’s a whole other story about misunderstanding to be spun from how the film will surely be received in different quarters as either a devastating portrait of small-town life or a grim black comedy. That one is all on director and Dogme 95 cofounder Thomas Vinterberg. While it’s always dicey to ascribe authorial intent, Vinterberg seems to waffle between middlebrow tragedy and scattershot satire not out of some postmodern commitment to walking the edge of irony, but because the script can’t really sustain a further push in either direction. That makes The Hunt a provocative film, sure, but also a bit of a lazy one–a conversation starter without much follow-through.

TIFF ’12: Rebelle

September 1, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, War

a.k.a. War Witch
***/****
written and directed by Kim Nguyen

by Angelo Muredda A firm refusal of the charge that Canadian filmmaking is unable to see much farther than its own backyard, Kim Nguyen’s Rebelle tackles a complex sociopolitical situation without reducing it to easy lessons learned. The most recent reference point for what Nguyen is doing with this first-person chronicle of Komona (Rachel Mwanza), a 12-year-old abducted from her home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and turned into a child soldier for rebel forces, is probably Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies. But though that film also reaches for global significance in tracing the grim trajectory of a politically disenfranchised child, its vagueness stands in sharp contrast to Nguyen’s accomplishment here, which is to ground Komona’s story in a particular milieu.

TIFF ’12: Picture Day

August 31, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, Teen, TIFF

***/****
written and directed by Kate Melville

by Bill Chambers 27 according to the IMDb but convincingly aged down, Tatiana Maslany gives a star-making performance in Picture Day as 18-year-old Claire, who’s forced to repeat the twelfth grade after failing math and phys-ed. It seems obvious that she in fact chose not to be jettisoned from the womb of high school just yet, though she shows little interest in actually attending classes, to the consternation of the vice principal (Catherine Fitch). (“You can’t stay in high school forever, Claire,” the VP tells her. “You did,” Claire snaps.) One day, she joins a kid who’s deviated from his gym class to smoke up–are teenage potheads really this brazen now?–and discovers that he’s Henry (Spencer Van Wyck), the timid boy she used to babysit, all grown up. A science wiz who turned down a private-school education (he sort of resents his intellect–plus, it was an all-boys academy), he even grows his own marijuana, in a closet that contains, among other things, a shrine to Claire filled with enough traces of her DNA–chewed gum, soiled tissues, hair bands–that one wonders if he intends to clone her.

TIFF ’12: Amour

August 30, 20122012, Austria, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Palme d'Or Winner, TIFF

***½/****
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Angelo Muredda From the moment it screened at Cannes, Amour became the odds-on favourite to win the Palme d’Or, and no wonder: Terrence Malick worked more or less the same formalist-auteur-goes-humanist formula to great success just last year. But while The Tree of Life‘s cosmic drama was hardly a stretch for Malick, you have to think Amour, which ultimately did cop the big prize, was a harder nut to crack for Michael Haneke. He was, of course, first awarded the Palme for a thuddingly obvious Village of the Damned knockoff designed for people who don’t do horror. Would he prove himself human after all?

TIFF ’12: Rust and Bone

August 30, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Romance, Singapore, TIFF

De rouille et d’os
**/****
directed by Jacques Audiard

by Angelo Muredda On paper, the most troubling thing about Rust & Bone is the suggestion, right from the title, that we’re in for a yarn about maimed bodies that go bump in the night, grinding their way into oblivion. You have to give some credit to Jacques Audiard–who’s otherwise taking a decisive step back from A Prophet–for going surprisingly easy on the figurative potential of a love story between Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), a whale trainer turned double-amputee after a rough day on the job, and Ali (Bullhead‘s Matthias Schoenaerts), a brutish security guard and distant father who moonlights as a back-alley boxer. Based on two short stories (it shows) from Toronto-born author Craig Davidson, the film puts itself squarely in the specious Paul Haggis tradition of the crisscrossing tragedy but keeps the stakes pretty low much of the time, mostly sparing us the usual tortured hymns about how we’re all connected at some primal level. As a disability film, a problem genre that finds little middle ground between triumph-of-adversity celebrations and euthanasia apologies, it’s also fairly attuned to mechanical matters that usually lie outside the bounds of melodrama. Consider Stephanie’s insurance-paid apartment, a smartly-organized space for a wheelchair user, down to the widened doorframes and easily-accessible washer and dryer. Ephemera counts for something.

Swamp Water (1941) – Blu-ray Disc

August 29, 20121940s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Jean Renoir, Drama

***/**** Image A Sound B- Extras C
starring Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews
screenplay by Dudley Nichols, based on the novel by Vereen Bell
directed by Jean Renoir

by Walter Chaw Jean Renoir’s Swamp Water stands out as an example of how an artist’s genius can assert itself even when his product has been taken away from him, re-edited and in some places reshot. Renoir’s insistence on actually shooting on location in Georgia’s Okefenokee, declared a Federal Wildlife Refuge by FDR in 1937, resulted in a grassroots movement lobbying Darryl Zanuck to hold the premiere locally. It was an artistic choice Godard would later say “revolutionized Hollywood.” I’m not sure what Okefenokee residents must have thought of the picture, one that is equal parts offensive cornpone melodrama and haunted, gravid Romanticism. There’s an indelible, hard-to-quantify melancholy to the film that’s at odds with its boilerplate narrative; it feels like a Joseph Conrad, even if it reads like a Vereen Bell. It’s an interesting case study, too, because it might never have happened were Renoir’s masterpiece The Rules of the Game not savaged by critics and audiences in his native France, where it would go on to be radically recut, twice-banned, and destroyed in a bombing raid. I like this story, because I think Americans get a bad rap for not recognizing the fruit of their creativity. I like it even more because the French get a lot of credit for being the ones who do.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

August 28, 2012****/****, 1980s, 2012, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, FFC Must-Own, UK, War

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D’Onofrio, Lee Ermey
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, based on Hasford’s novel The Short Timers
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson One of the most noticed Stanley Kubrick trademarks is a scene in a bathroom. I haven’t read too much about why there is always a scene in a bathroom, but rarer still are comments related to what goes on in the bathroom. Different activities have different meanings. Urination (A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut) is a sexually arrogant act. It’s the one bathroom activity in Kubrick’s films that is done with the door open. Bathing (Spartacus, Lolita, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange again, The Shining) is a hedonistic, bourgeois indulgence and an escape to a safe place. Kubrick is not beyond exploiting the bath’s mythological, symbolic connotations as the unexplored subconscious (the subversion of Aphrodite iconology in The Shining) or the womb (Star Child Alex in A Clockwork Orange); bathing is largely a private activity, you see. It is sometimes interrupted, but when that happens the invasion of privacy has significance. (James Mason’s interrupted bath in Lolita, for example, had purely narrative- and character-based implications. He regarded it as just another humiliation to add to the pile.) Defecation is even more private, so private that a Kubrick character has never interrupted it. To defecate (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey) is human, you see. Everybody has to take a shit, but to shit is shameful. The perfect human being would not shit, would indeed be beyond shitting. The HAL computer doesn’t shit, does it? Does the Star Child shit? I sincerely doubt it!

Unstoppable (2010) – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

August 27, 20122010, 2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tony Scott, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson, Ethan Suplee
screenplay by Mark Bomback
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw It’s strange to be writing this review a couple of days after Tony Scott ended his life by walking off a bridge in California–an event that inspired me to revisit my favourite of his films (Enemy of the State and Déjà Vu) and one that spurred me, too, to finally give Scott’s Unstoppable another look after finding I had little use for it upon initial release. I have an aversion to Scott’s movies in general; I don’t have the muscle or sensitivity to distinguish between them and other stuttering, grandiloquent pictures that have resulted in things like Michael Bay. Believe me, the temptation is high to present a critical re-evaluation of his work immediately upon his passing. Positioning oneself as the guy who knew that Chris Farley was John Belushi is one of those vantages every critic wishes he had, if only for the brief respite from charges of elitism it might bring. But listen, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Domino, Spy Game, The Fan, Days of Thunder, and Beverly Hills Cop 2–there’s really no defense for any of it. And when I say that I like stuff like The Hunger, True Romance, The Last Boy Scout, or even Scott’s Jim Harrison adaptation Revenge, I’m not saying I love them. Tony Scott’s an auteur, sure–proof that “auteur” doesn’t by itself confer a positive or a pejorative connotation. I’ll give him this, though: He shot a Tarantino script as a remake of Badlands and produced a sneaky sequel to The Conversation, so, yeah, I’ll miss the bastard, too.

August 26, 2012Blog

***NEW*** 'Til Friday, September 7, receive 20% off Walter Chaw's acclaimed Miracle Mile using the coupon code CITHARA20. This discount is good for both the eBook and trade paperback versions, so don't delay! And if you haven't yet, be sure to check out not only Twitch's review of the monograph, which includes an interview with Walter Chaw, but also The House Next Door's recently-published take on the book.

Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) [15th Anniversary Edition] + High Fidelity (2000) – Blu-ray Discs

August 26, 20121990s, 2000s, 2012, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Music, Romance, Thriller, UK

Grossepointe2

GROSSE POINTE BLANK
***½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras D
starring John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Alan Arkin, Dan Aykroyd
screenplay by Tom Jankiewicz and D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & John Cusack
directed by George Armitage

HIGH FIDELITY
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring John Cusack, Jack Black, Lisa Bonet, Joelle Carter
screenplay by D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & John Cusack and Scott Rosenberg, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Stephen Frears

by Jefferson Robbins John Cusack spent much of the 1990s stubbornly trying to dodge his high-school reunion. Barely present in Sixteen Candles, he nevertheless may have suffered a bit of the curse that pursued John Hughes’s other players: We wouldn’t let them grow up for quite a while, and careers were hampered. Cusack navigated this impasse better than most, netting late-’80s leads both romantic (Say Anything…) and dramatic (The Grifters) that unpack and showcase his mature dimensions. Cusack has, if it’s not too oxymoronic, a vulnerable edge–his characters are deeply attuned to others, but only out of self-defense. Lloyd Dobler, Roy Dillon, and, in the two films under discussion, Martin Blank and Rob Gordon constantly assess input to learn how the prevailing emotional currents of a scene affect them, not others. “You think I’m a dick,” Lloyd determines when Diane (Ione Skye) gives him a Pen of Friendship as a parting gift. His feelings, dependent on hers, are paramount. Cusack’s heroes are sensitive but far from selfless, yet the actor somehow convinces us otherwise.

Jaws (1975) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

August 25, 2012****/****, 1970s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Spielberg

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary
screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, based on the novel by Benchley
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw What’s not mentioned in very many conversations about Jaws is the pleasure it takes in work. That it’s one of the most influential films of all time–a picture commonly identified as the one responsible for the studio summer-blockbuster mentality–is a given by now. The miracle of it, though, is that it gets better every time you see it. I have the movie memorized at this point; I can recite it like a favourite song. I still jump when Ben Gardner appears in the hole in the hull of his boat, and I still laugh when Hooper helps himself to Brody’s uneaten dinner. More than a fright flick, Jaws is a beautifully rendered character piece, establishing Spielberg as–a little like Stephen King, oddly enough–a master of the easy moment. (They’re artists I’ve conflated in my head for their popularity with and influence on a generation of people my age.) It’s a little nasty, too, Jaws is, in throwaway moments like the one on the beach where, after a giant fin appears in the water, Spielberg cuts to a group of old men picking up their binoculars. They’re there to looky-loo; they’re expecting carnage. It’s not a Hitchcockian moment of audience critique (though it functions that way), but a brilliant character beat expressed with Spielberg’s savant-like visual genius. But above all, Jaws is about function and work–not unlike Star Wars, the final nail in the New American Cinema, will be two years later.

Premium Rush (2012)

August 23, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Shannon, Dania Ramirez, Jamie Chung
screenplay by David Koepp & John Kamps
directed by David Koepp

by Angelo Muredda Those who had hoped Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s presence in The Dark Knight Rises signalled some kind of Tim Drake extravaganza only to make do with his dour Robin surrogate John Blake ought to perk up, for Premium Rush is here. David Koepp’s unabashedly silly, good-natured courier thriller is curiously light on thrills, its daytime climax of a bike race in the park about as low-stakes as Harvey Keitel’s hot pursuit of a pickpocket simian in Monkey Trouble. What it lacks in dramatic heft, though, it more than makes up for in its fleetness and tight grasp on cartoon physics, as well as its smart use of Michael Shannon as an unstable roadblock and Gordon-Levitt as just the blunt instrument to push past him, a chiselled boy wonder who knows his way around a fixie, i.e., the lightweight single-gear bike to which he’s practically glued.

Compliance (2012)

August 23, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy, Bill Camp
written and directed by Craig Zobel

by Walter Chaw Craig Zobel’s Compliance comes with a payload of controversy trailing from a notorious Sundance screening where various audience members registered their displeasure in a post-film Q&A–going so far, if reports are to be trusted, as to sexually harass lead actress Dreama Walker in one of the more ironic attempts at defending her honour. I’ve said it before (and it’s only gotten worse), I prefer to watch a movie with a mainstream, middlebrow audience than with any festival audience under any circumstance. Sure, they applaud Michael Bay movies, but at least they don’t act like their shit don’t stink. Thinking back, there’s the example of Sundance’s old-lady reaction to Lucky McKee’s The Woman, a movie that, upon closer inspection, reveals itself as shocking in neither its execution nor its conception–it’s just not that controversial, and its backlash demonstrates the kind of knee-jerk liberalism that venerates easy stuff like Rabbit-Proof Fence. If you declare yourself a feminist outraged by a film that is so clearly also feminist, you identify yourself as a fucking moron and an asshole to boot. Sundance confirms the middlebrow; it celebrates uncomplicated messages wrapped in indie-glamour. When was the last time Sundance pushed something like, say, Valhalla Rising, or Synecdoche, New York? Something difficult, something remarkable, something festivals like it are supposed to champion? Or is the modus for the festival meaningless garbage that congratulates its audience for making easy connections like Beasts of the Southern Wild and anything starring John Hawkes. Fish Tank? Winter’s Bone? So Compliance, which would never be mistaken for something transcendent and enduring, is actually more interesting than it first appears, not only for a couple of the decisions it makes, but also for the degree to which its audience is pulled into identification with the picture’s bland torturers. It’s a Milgram Experiment for the viewer.

Identification of a Woman (1982) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 20, 20121980s, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, France, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Identificazione di una donna
***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras D
starring Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, Christine Boisson, Lara Wendel
screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni & Gérard Brach
directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Angelo Muredda When SIGHT & SOUND announced the long-awaited results of their 2012 critics poll earlier this month, the Internet was abuzz with the shifting fortunes of Citizen Kane and Vertigo–the flip-flop heard ’round the world. Less noted was the latest demotion of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, which debuted at a startling second place in 1962’s poll (the film was only two years old at that point), then steadily declined with each decade before landing at number 21 on the most recent survey. What to make of this seemingly calamitous downward shift? Probably not much. Like fellow countryman Federico Fellini, who’s also been increasingly received as a curio despite the continued respect for 8½ (particularly among directors), Antonioni’s canonical films are stamped by their era; L’Avventura‘s downgraded fortune likely says as much about the limited shelf life of European modernism–which its cool classicism and intellectual rigor so fully embodies–as it does about the film itself.

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) [Unrated Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

August 19, 20121990s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Horror, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras F
starring Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer, David Thewlis, Fairuza Balk
screenplay by Richard Stanley and Ron Hutchinson
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw This is a tough one. As an avowed if guarded fan of director John Frankenheimer, his involvement with The Island of Dr. Moreau is something like a gobsmacker. Sure, he’d ventured into genre before with the ridiculous Prophecy, while, arguably, his two best films–The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds, his masterpiece–are genre pieces, too. But I think at the time, bringing in Frankenheimer three days into a troubled shoot to replace that assclown Richard Stanley was more an act of expediency than of ingenuity. If New Line thought they were getting a closer, they were right; if they thought they were getting someone who could corral the downward-spiralling Val Kilmer, they were less right (“Will Rogers never met Val Kilmer,” Frankenheimer famously said). What they probably weren’t expecting was that Frankenheimer would turn in something that, though critically-savaged at the time, had some legs. No, The Island of Dr. Moreau isn’t a whole, falling apart as it does in the last half-hour or so, but it is the sort of movie that hints at larger issues and boasts enough indelible moments to deserve another look. Truth is, only movies this odd and discomfiting earn this amount of misdirected ire. It’s not to say there’s not a lot wrong with the film, but rather to suggest that the chief criticisms of it being strange and “a mess” aren’t among them.

Dexter: The Sixth Season (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

August 15, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Horror, Television, Thriller

Image A Sound A+ Extras D+
“Those Kinds of Things,” “Once Upon a Time…,” “Smokey and the Bandit,” “A Horse of a Different Color,” “The Angel of Death,” “Just Let Go,” “Nebraska,” “Sin of Omission,” “Get Gellar,” “Ricochet Rabbit,” “Talk to the Hand,” “This Is the Way the World Ends”

by Bill Chambers LIGHT SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. My favourite episode of “The Incredible Hulk” is the two-hour premiere of the second season, “Married.” One of the unfortunately-few instalments written and directed by series creator Kenneth Johnson (a genuine pulp talent), it sees David Banner falling in love with the terminally-ill shrink (Mariette Hartley won an Emmy for the role) helping him contain the Hulk, a hypnotic process that involves David visualizing the Hulk trapped in a giant birdcage in the middle of a pristine desert–a tableau that clearly inspired the dream vistas at the outset of Tarsem’s The Cell. Kindred spirits, they eventually marry, but although unleashing the Hulk protects her from harm when external forces threaten her life, it can’t save her from the Grim Reaper. “Married” ends on an unusually hopeless note as a young boy who befriended the doctor informs David he’s going to devise a cure for her disease when he grows up and David more or less tells the boy he’s deluded. One of the most devastating pieces of genre television ever produced, it really could’ve been the series finale. Unfortunately, the show continued long enough to lapse into self-parody and longer still. Much like “Dexter”–though come to think of it, that happened about halfway through the pilot.

Borderline (2025) + Novocaine (2025)

Snow White (2025)

O’Dessa (2025)