FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Looney Tunes [Platinum Collection – Volume One] – Blu-ray Disc

May 9, 2012****/****, 1940s, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Looney Tunes

by Bill Chambers It's been fun to skylark about a Blu-ray release of vintage Looney Tunes since the format's inception, but until Warner announced this "Platinum Collection" box set, I don't think anybody truly expected it to happen. And while the DVD transfers that graced the "Golden Collection"s were more than adequate, the truth is that a taste of Bugs, Daffy, et al in standard-def–via recycled "Behind the Tunes" featurettes–after seeing them in all their HiDef splendour is a lot like Dorothy's unintentionally depressing return to Kansas at the end of The Wizard of Oz. Presented pillarboxed in their original 1.37:1 aspect ratio, these shorts pop like never before but have not, unlike Disney's animated features, undergone a digital repainting–though I remain skeptical of a radioactive shade of green that crops up in Daffy's Robin Hood outfit and on the bars of Tweety's cage in Tweetie Pie (to cite two examples), because it looked so revisionist when applied to the title character of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" on Warner's Blu-ray version of same. Nevertheless, the restorers use a gentle touch, dustbusting and correcting damage to the prints while leaving grit trapped between the cels alone. The dark Scaredy Cat is dotted with so much white you might think the background plate doubled as a coke tray.

Vertigo (1958) – Universal Legacy Series DVD

May 7, 2012****/****, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore
screenplay by Alec Coppel & Samuel Taylor, based on the novel D’Entre Les Morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. What Vertigo lacks that others of Alfred Hitchcock’s undisputed late masterpieces do not, just in terms of sheer bulk volume, is scholarship. Weird, because the film is Hitchcock’s most complex, albeit in many ways also his most opaque. It’s as if it defies analysis by being at once too obvious and too obscure, enough so that critical reads of it are inevitably both naïve and pompous. It’s true that attempts at unlocking the film are akin to diagnosing a particularly-disturbed patient’s dysfunction: that you’re fucked up is right there on the surface for everyone to see, but the reasons why are damnably difficult to beat from the grey bramble. Attempts to articulate what works about the picture invariably wind up describing the technical mechanism (the perspective distortion, the monumentalism, the voluminous and self-announcing rear projection) rather than the ineffable, perverse rapture that it provokes.

The 5 Pre-“Avengers” Flicks In Order Of Quality

May 7, 20122012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blog, Superhero

by Jefferson Robbins

5. Iron Man 2 (2010)

It's a messy casserole of Avengers promotion and crossover frippery, shoehorning in unnecessary supporting characters and dual archvillains, devolving its hero to the shallow dickweed he was at the start of the first movie just to generate some character conflict, throwing in a little slapstick martial arts so its director can have an onscreen star moment alongside a sexy A-lister…

The Muppets (2011) – The Wocka Wocka Value Pack Blu-ray Disc

May 6, 20122011, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Family, Muppets, Musical

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jason Segel, Amy Adams, Chris Cooper, Rashida Jones
screenplay by Jason Segel & Nicholas Stoller
directed by James Bobin

by Bryant Frazer I stopped paying attention to new Muppet movies after creator Jim Henson's untimely death in 1990. I just didn't have the heart for it. But I was aware that the Henson legacy continued with The Muppet Christmas Carol, Muppet Treasure Island, and, finally, Muppets from Space. (For Gen X-ers, 1999 was a very bad year: George Lucas told you that The Force was really tiny space critters living in your bloodstream, and Team Muppet expected you to believe that Gonzo was an extraterrestrial.) Muppets from Space was the last hurrah for Frank Oz, Jim Henson's right-hand man for so many years, although the Muppets endured on a newly humble scale, reaching in 2005 what fans generally agree was the nadir of their existence, the made-for-TV The Muppets' Wizard of Oz.

Hot Docs 2012: Only the Young (ds. Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet)

May 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda Like a delicate magic trick, Only the Youngis best watched in a state of rapt fascination. An unostentatious feature debut from Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet, the film chronicles a few months in the lives of three impossibly sweet teens in a desert town. Impressively, it does so without signposting major events along the way. Instead, we weave through their relationship and family dramas with only their changing hairstyles as obvious chronological markers, catching everyday lyricism in first car rides and teen girls’ catlike head nudges.

Hot Docs 2012: Summer of Giacomo (d. Alessandro Comodin)

May 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Italy

by Angelo Muredda Conceptually sandwiched somewhere between Maren Ade’s terrific Everyone Else and Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Alessandro Comodin’s Summerof Giacomo is a richly textured portrait of dumb love in the grass, times two. As the lengthy credits of electric blue font superimposed on black and scored to languid birdsong suggest, this is chiefly an aesthetic experience, and Comodin delivers a gorgeously lensed (on 16mm) account of twentyish Giacomo and Stefani’s wayward hike through the countryside in search of a river by which to set up camp for the afternoon. The press notes tell us that Stefani is a childhood friend, but that hardly matters: all that we gather and need to gather is that something might have happened at some point, but outside of this hike, it’s over. What we’re left with, then, apart from their pathfinding and inevitable squabble, is a dense sensory record of the seriously goofy and – this is nicely underplayed – deaf Giacomo’s experience. His cochlear implant is briefly glimpsed in the first over-the-shoulder shot of him clanging randomly at a drum set, and you could happily read the film as an experiment in attending to the sounds, both slight and explosive, that pass through the device en route to his dufus skull.

Hot Docs 2012: The World Before Her (d. Nisha Pahuja)

May 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda The winner of Hot Docs’ Best Canadian Feature award, granted just two weeks after it snagged top doc honours at Tribeca, Nisha Pahuja’s The World Before Her is a fearless and intricately structured portrait of a nation split down the middle. The film sets out to explore women’s uneasy place in an increasingly modernized and globally inflected but still traditional India by observing how a pair of institutions go about raising girls, and to what end. Pahuja’s riskiest and ultimately smartest move is to juxtapose the personality-making rituals of the Miss India pageant with a Hindu nationalist training camp that prepares young girls to marry young, obey, and take up arms against Muslim and Christian neighbours, should the good fight of a united Hindu nation come to their doorsteps.

Hot Docs 2012: Loose ends

May 5, 20122012, Australia, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

by Angelo Muredda

The Betrayal (d. Karen Winther): The director returns to her spotty history in this intermittently affecting but mostly flat exercise. Winther combs through old journals and interviews both her parents and former friends in her effort to get to the bottom of a colossally stupid and damaging decision, when she was a troubled 15-year-old, to volunteer her far-left friends’ whereabouts to a known neo-Nazi group. As a portrait of 1990s Oslo's political bifurcations, the film is fairly compelling, but Winther is maddeningly vague about her ideological inclination in any phase of her life, and her frequent voiceovers about uncovering why she did what she did grate more than they illuminate. In any case, it's the wrong question. **/**** (Special Presentations)

Hot Docs 2012: ¡Vivan Las Antipodas! (d. Victor Kossakovsky)

May 4, 20122012, Argentina, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Chile, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Netherlands

by Angelo Muredda “The world spins, but they’re always below us.” That’s one of the many pearls in Victor Kossakovsky’s ¡Vivan Las Antipodas!, a high-concept travelogue that fleetly covers four pairs of dry-land spots at exact opposite ends of the earth. The opening epigraph from Lewis Carroll aside, Kossakovsky gravitates to such homespun maxims rather than headier stuff, and the film is all the more dazzling for it – an intoxicating riff on the Looney Tunes bit where Yosemite Sam digs through an outcrop and lands in China. While he’s interested enough in the locals, particularly the source of that comment, two guys who ferry busted cars over their pontoon bridge in Argentina, the director generally turns his Red camera to beautiful images of animal life, fauna, and architecture, weaving strange textures out of his startling juxtapositions between, for instance, a volcanic rock formation in Hawaii and an elephant’s hide in Botswana.

Marvel’s The Avengers (2012)

May 3, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero

The Avengers
**½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Joss Whedon
directed by Joss Whedon

by Walter Chaw Joss Whedon delivers his definitive artistic statement with the completely inoffensive, agreeably stupid Marvel's The Avengers. It's a giant, loud, sloppy kiss planted right on the forehead of a fanboy contingent that will somehow find jealous dork solidarity in the largest product excreted this year by a Hollywood machinery that's the playground now of Whedons and Apatows and Farrellys, where it used to be the domain of John Fords and Sam Peckinpahs and Von Sternbergs. Not a full-grown man among them, they're drunk on power and nerd cred, making references to their references and amazed that someone like Scarlett Johansson returns their calls (or that they could be married to someone like Leslie Mann in a world not gone mad). The Avengers is a brilliant balance of indecipherable against crowd-pleasing, with bouncy fight scenes, one-liners as character development, and the absolute confidence that everyone in the audience has on purpose seen each of the films designed as a prequel to this one. As the pendulum swings back to pleasuring 18-year-old boys vs. 16-year-old girls (despite Titanic in 3D's attempts at swinging it back), take heart that if, at the end, it only reminds of the loudest, most expensive team-up episode of "Shazam!", it at least has the sense to deliver the best Hulk moments…ever.

Hot Docs 2012: Shut Up and Play the Hits (ds. Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern)

May 3, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Music

by Angelo Muredda “It’s like a sad hipster DJ Revolutionary Road.” That’s recently-retired LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy on first single “Losing My Edge” in Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s by turns ebullient and funereal Shut Up and Play the Hits. “Losing My Edge” is one of the dance-rock act’s infamous “position songs.” You could think of it as a hunted gazelle’s lament before the wolves swoop in, masquerading as a thirtysomething’s off-the-cuff recitation of his musical knowledge before a pack of preternaturally all-knowing twentysomethings who are “actually really, really nice.” It’s probably the best example of Murphy’s uncanny ability to position himself at the edge of things – in this case between the accumulated experience of old-school music appreciation (it’s not for nothing that the last LCD album was called This Is Happening) and new digital ways of knowing by downloading in massive quantities. Credit Lovelace and Southern, then, for positioning their film at the same edge, and delivering a concert film of LCD’s last show at Madison Square Garden that’s a self-consciously dead record of a living wake, announcing itself as a funeral even before the credits.

Hot Docs 2012: The Frog Princes (ds. Omar Majeed and Ryan Mullins)

May 3, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

by Angelo Muredda The Frog Princes is so big-hearted you wish it had more to say than “way to go.” Copping its framing device from Rushmore, the film shadows a theatre troupe over a few months as it prepares for its debut performance of The Frog and the Princess. The hook is that the performers all have developmental disabilities, and are part of an initiative headed by Stephen Snow, a psychotherapist who teaches drama therapy at Concordia. “Steve” to his players, Snow comes across as an amiable guy whose high standards inspire self-confidence and a good work ethic in people from whom society shamefully expects little. There’s joy in seeing actors like cutely named Ray-Man, a young man with Down Syndrome, channel their untapped self-confidence into something tangible. Ray-Man makes a sharp contrast with Tanya, a clinically depressed woman with Prader-Willi Syndrome, whose nastiness and frequent minor meltdowns give the film a welcome edge whenever she’s onscreen.

The Bodyguard (1992) – Special Edition DVD + Blu-ray Disc

May 2, 20121990s, 2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music, Romance, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras C
BLU-RAY – Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Kevin Costner, Whitney Houston, Gary Kemp, Bill Cobbs
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Mick Jackson

by Walter Chaw Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston have a conversation about Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (whose title means "The Bodyguard") in the middle of Mick Jackson's hilarious camp artifact The Bodyguard, the one where Costner plays a barely-vocal lunk and Houston plays a singer-turned-actress with severe personality flaws. And that little chat, occupying a minute-and-a-half or so of screentime, encapsulates everything that's priceless about this flick: It's stupid, embarrassing, and watered-down, but it's also surreal, queer, and hermetically sealed in a rhinestone-studded mason jar. Have no fear, though, as that revelatory discussion of one of the great films in world cinema segues in record time into a heartfelt rumination on the lyrics of a Dolly Parton song, and then into a courtship ritual involving a big samurai sword and a piece of silk. Is Kevin going to sheathe his blue steel in Whitney's purple scarf? Ah, the decadent ribaldry! What could it all mean?

Hot Docs 2012: Who Cares? (d. Rosie Dransfeld)

May 2, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda A vérité portrait of a group of sex workers in Edmonton, Rosie Dransfeld’s Who Cares? is a sobering and uncondescending look at vulnerable people who work without a safety net on the outskirts of society. The film begins with a pair of police officers on a taskforce called Project Care, which spearheads other departments’ investigations of sex worker murders by registering the DNA of the living, so they can be identified in the event that, as one officer puts it, “something bad should happen.” That’s an alarming concept, and Dransfeld leaves the officer’s euphemism about an intervention that only happens after death hanging uncomfortably. It isn’t that their heart is in the wrong place, the film suggests, as the men express real sympathy and concern for the daily abuse these women face, but that their structural response to the problem leaves these workers invisible and unprotected until they’re gone.

Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) – Blu-ray Disc

May 1, 20121950s, 2012, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama

**½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Victor Mature, Susan Hayward, Michael Rennie, Debra Paget
screenplay by Philip Dunne, based on characters from the novel The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas
directed by Delmer Daves

by Bryant Frazer Add Demetrius and the Gladiators to that shortlist of Hollywood sequels that are actually better than their predecessor. This is a continuation of the story of The Robe–that most turgid of Biblical epics, known to film students the world over (and for this reason only) as the first Cinemascope release. The title of the earlier film refers to a red garment worn by Jesus as he was taken to his crucifixion. The discarded robe catalyzes the conversion to Christianity of Roman soldier Marcellus Gallio (played in the earlier film by Richard Burton), who was last seen being frog-marched to martyrdom on the orders of nutty Roman emperor Caligula (Jay Robinson). The sequel picks up the story of Marcellus's former slave, Demetrius, again played by Victor Mature, as he becomes the robe's caretaker.

Hot Docs 2012: Finding North (ds. Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson)

May 1, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda An incendiary political missive in search of a good movie, Finding North is as frustrating as it is revelatory. Directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson come at the problem of hunger in the United States with the statistical acumen of seasoned journalists. Their conceptual scope is expansive, covering everything from the daily struggles of Rosie, a seriously malnourished fifth grader, and Barbie, a single mother of two, to more abstract problems like the federal government’s complicated dance around subsidies for enormous agribusinesses at the expense of local farmers. With the help of some unexpectedly poignant commentary from celebrity…

Hot Docs 2012: Tchoupitoulas (ds. Bill and Turner Ross)

April 30, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda Tchoupitoulas is a rare thing, an aesthetic antidote to the info-dump documentary tradition of talking head interviews and old snapshots. Described in the press notes as a night-time “piggyback ride” through the French Quarter, it’s more like a sweet re-imagining of James Joyce’s “Araby.” That short story culminates in a child’s dispiriting revelation that all that glitters in a bazaar is not gold, but Tchoupitoulasstrikes at something more ambivalent and certainly more beguiling, the bleary-eyed altered state of a 3AM comedown after a night of revels.

Hot Docs 2012: Legend of a Warrior (d. Corey Lee)

April 29, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Martial Arts, Sports

by Angelo Muredda Director Corey Lee stages a moving reunion with his infamous but distant father in Legend of a Warrior. As a martial arts grandmaster and lauded trainer famed for ushering former pupil Billy Chau to a kickboxing world championship, Frank Lee spent his son’s formative years in gyms, training surrogate children while Corey went largely unattended. Now his son is trying to reconnect, relocating to the elder Lee’s Edmonton gym for a rigorous five-month training program that will submerge him in his charismatic father’s world while taking him away from his own young children. What follows is both an observational record of that process and a subtle father-son melodrama, punctuated by animated interludes that turn Frank’s early days in Canada and youth in Hong Kong into a comic-strip biography.

Hot Docs 2012: The Boxing Girls of Kabul (d. Ariel Nasr)

April 28, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

by Angelo Muredda Ariel Nasr’s The Boxing Girls of Kabulopens with clandestine footage of an execution in Kabul’s Olympic Stadium, where members of the Taliban force a woman to crawl before shooting her at close-range. That image haunts the alternately uplifting and sobering narrative that follows, which shadows the faltering Olympic hopes of a trio of young female boxers in a country where patriarchal attitudes toward women, particularly athletes, range from mild acceptance to violent hostility. This is a vibrant film, coloured by the verve of its protagonists, Shahla and siblings Sadaf and Shabnam, who speak candidly about their progressive values and their anxieties about the precariousness of their position amidst threats of assault and kidnapping. They’re presented as jocks, so it’s especially jarring when their future turns out to depend less on their athleticism than on the volatile political conditions of their country and its stance on the rights of women.

Hot Docs 2012: She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column (d. Kevin Hegge)

April 28, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda A few minutes into Kevin Hegge’s long-gestating She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column, a critic calls the titular feminist post-punk act an art band that wasn’t necessarily arty. That sounds like an interesting distinction, but it’s also as far as the idea goes in a doc that almost makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in depth. Hegge sets a fast pace, and the early history of intellectual centre and drummer GB Jones and lead singer Caroline Azar’s collaboration nicely establishes their dynamic of cryptic rock deity and big-sweatered frontwoman, with plenty of footage of…

The Last Showgirl (2024)

The Order (2024)

“The 50 Best Films of 2024,” by Walter Chaw