FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Brave (2012)

June 20, 20122012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
screenplay by Mark Andrews and Steve Purcell and Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi
directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman

by Walter Chaw Brave…isn’t. Not very. It’s by far the most conventional Pixar film, and while it’s better than either Cars, that’s only because the Cars movies are simply awful. Brave has a plucky girl heroine who disobeys her mother, makes a hash of things, then solves everything at the end through the murder of the antagonist. It has an adorable animal sidekick (three of them, actually), treats an entire culture like a broad ethnic joke, and misses every single opportunity to be about something. Huzzah! When we say as a culture that something’s for children, we mean that it’s better–unless we’re talking about media culture. Brave is for children, and its only connection to things like WALL·E, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, or Ratatouille is its company’s pedigree, fading fast until Brad Bird or Andrew Stanton decides to strap ’em on and jump back in the ol’ computer-animated saddle, riding to the rescue as the company founded on their beautiful complexities descends into absolute, uncontroversial, shallow mendacity.

Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present (2012)

June 19, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Matthew Akers

by Angelo Muredda Forty years into a celebrated career kicked off by the intense bodily exposures of 1973’s Rhythm10, a solo show in which she put herself through twenty rounds of five-fingered fillet, Marina Abramović has earned the right to call herself the grandmother of performance art. “I don’t want to be alt anymore,” the Belgrade-born, New York-based artist admits early in Matthew Akers’s engaging bio-doc Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, indulging for a rare moment in her accomplishments. It’s a testament to both her frankness and Akers’s tasteful curatorial approach to her oeuvre that there’s nothing pretentious about the statement, only a clear-eyed assessment of the distinct phases in an artist’s life and work.

True Blood: The Complete Fourth Season (2011) – Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy

June 17, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Romance, Satire, Television, Vampire, Werewolf

Image A- Sound A Extras B
“She’s Not There,” “You Smell Like Dinner,” “If You Love Me, Why Am I Dyin’?,” “I’m Alive and on Fire,” “Me & the Devil,” “I Wish I Was the Moon,” “Cold Grey Light of Dawn,” “Spellbound,” “Let’s Get Out of Here,” “Burning Down the House,” “Soul of Fire,” “And When I Die”

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. To recap: “True Blood”‘s third season ended with Vampire Bill (Stephen Moyer) and his queen (Evan Rachel Wood) revealing a heretofore-unseen ability to defy gravity as they prepared to duel to the death; Hoyt (Jim Parrack) and Jessica (the staggeringly beautiful Deborah Ann Woll) receiving a creepy housewarming present (unseen by them) in the form of a moldy doll; Tara (Rutina Wesley) departing Bon Temps for anywhere less likely to be a hub of supernatural activity; and a newly liberated Sookie (Anna Paquin) disinviting Bill and Eric (Alexander Skarsgård) from her home before vanishing in a ball of light with her literal fairy godmother.

That’s My Boy (2012)

June 14, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Theatrical

**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Leighton Meester, Susan Sarandon
screenplay by David Caspe
directed by Sean Anders

by Angelo Muredda For the first time since 2009’s Funny People, That’s My Boy finds Adam Sandler straying from his usual stable-mate Dennis Dugan, this time putting his trust in Sex Drive director Sean Anders and “Happy Endings” showrunner David Caspe. At first, you wonder why he bothered. The opening, a 1984-set flashback to the sexual misadventures of a young Sandler (Justin Weaver) cut from the same cloth as The Waterboy‘s eminently punchable Bobby Boucher, isn’t promising: vagina jokes drop from the sky with the leadenness of an unaired pilot, and everyone’s features are shellacked into oblivion by floodlights on loan from life-insurance ads. Things aren’t much better in the present, where we meet the adult Donny spitballing ways out of a financial crisis–he owes the IRS some $40,000–with New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, on hand for no discernible reason except to make us miss the Brett Favre scene in the Farrelly brothers’ much funnier There’s Something About Mary.

The Woman in the Fifth (2012)

June 13, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Mystery, Poland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

La femme du Vème
*½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Kristin Scott Thomas, Joanna Kulig, Samir Guesmi
screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski, based on Douglas Kennedy’s novel
directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

by Angelo Muredda Midway through Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Woman in the Fifth, Romanian femme fatale Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas) tells glum American writer Tom (Ethan Hawke) not to worry about his writer’s block. “You have the makings of a serious work now,” she reassures him: “A broken life, down-and-out in Paris.” Intended as a key to the film, a hint that we aren’t watching real events at all but rather their translation into an American’s grim European masterwork, this exchange does nothing so much as outline the limits of Pawlikowski’s imagination. His first feature since 2004’s unsettling My Summer of Love, this is an odd misstep, the kind of bad movie that can only be made with the purest of intentions. I don’t doubt that Pawlikowski, working from a thriller by American writer Douglas Kennedy, believes in this idea that good novels are born of wretched experiences–that being a disgraced literature professor and stalled artist shaking down phantoms in run-down Paris gives you a direct line to authenticity. But it’s the sort of half-baked conceit that defines countless shallow genre texts shooting for arthouse credibility, the hallmark of a Secret Window knockoff that begs to be taken as seriously as a good Paul Auster novel.

A Hollis Frampton Odyssey (1966-1979) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 10, 20121960s, 1970s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Esoterica, Short Films, The Criterion Collection

Hollisframptoncap

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B

by Bryant Frazer The avant-garde in film has always had an uneasy relationship with home video. Grainy old VHS tapes of works by luminaries like Bruce Conner or Kenneth Anger might have made the texts themselves available for more careful study by a larger audience, but the picture quality compromised the work tremendously. The arrival of DVD technology allowed for a better visual representation, yet brought with it certain dangers. For one thing, there’s a moral issue: Filmmakers who had objections to the commodification of art and culture were put on the spot as their once-ephemeral films were transferred to a new medium that was easy for an individual consumer to purchase and own. There’s also an aesthetic issue. No matter how close a video transfer gets to the visual qualities of a projected film–and a good transfer to Blu-ray can get very close indeed–a video image is not a film image. For avant-garde filmmakers, and especially for so-called “structural” filmmakers like the late Hollis Frampton, for whom film itself was subject, text, and subtext, the difference is key.

Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (2012)

June 7, 20122012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical

***/****
screenplay by Eric Darnell and Noah Baumbach
directed by Eric Darnell, Conrad Vernon, Tom McGrath

by Walter Chaw Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (hereafter Madagascar 3) is easily the best one yet and the product, I’ll bet, of co-directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath’s foray into the rigors of gag-writing for an animated TV series (“The Penguins of Madagascar”)–though I wouldn’t discount the influence of credited screenwriter Noah Baumbach, either. Madagascar 3 is deeply involved in surrealism, rivalling Disney’s pink elephants on parade in a circus sequence that, if not as good as Dumbo‘s, is not as good because it’s scored by a genuinely dreadful Katy Perry song. The picture’s so cheerfully, indefatigably strange, in fact, that at times it approaches the Golden Age of Looney Tunes. It’s an effervescent little artifact housing a psychotic, bestial gendarme named Capt. Chantel DuBois (voiced maniacally by Frances McDormand), who, in a moment of extreme cultural insensitivity, rouses her comatose henchmen with a rendition of Edith Piaf’s “Non, He Ne Regrette Rien,” right there in an Italian ICU. The picture is lawless in this way: Chris Rock’s Marty the Zebra has never been blacker (his signature song this time around has something to do with a circus afro), David Schwimmer’s Melman the Giraffe was never more of a kvetch, Bryan Cranston’s Russian tiger Vitaly is depressed and bellicose, and Martin Short’s brilliantly-conceived sea lion Stefano is enthusiastically, effervescently, Roberto Benigni-stupidly Italian.

Prometheus (2012)

June 6, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, UK

*/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Charlize Theron
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw It’s time, probably long past time, to admit that Ridley Scott is nothing more or less than Tim Burton: a visual stylist at the mercy of others to offer his hatful of pretty pictures something like depth. If either one of them ever made a great film (and I’d argue that both have), thank the accident of the right source material and/or editor, not these directors, whose allegiance is to their own visual auteurism rather than any desire for a unified product. For Scott, the conversation essentially begins and ends for me with Alien, Blade Runner, and Black Hawk Down (for most, it’s just the first two, with a political nod to Thelma & Louise)–genre films, all, and each about the complications of mendacity given over to lush, stylish excess: the gothic, biomechanical haunted house of Alien‘s Nostromo mining vehicle and its hapless band of blue-collar meatbags; the meticulously detailed Angelino diaspora of Blade Runner and its Raymond Chandler refugee; and Mark Bowden’s Mogadishu, transformed in Black Hawk Down into a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Again, there’s that utility. Without it, Scott’s films are impenetrable monuments to style, as smooth and affectless as a perfume advertisement–and the more you watch them, the less memorable that style becomes.

Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods (2010) [Deluxe 2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

June 4, 20122000s, 2010, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Documentary, DVD, Superhero

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C
directed by Patrick Meaney

by Jefferson Robbins Patrick Meaney’s Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods is an excellent documentary if you like being told how cool comics writer Grant Morrison is for an hour and twenty minutes. That’s too bad, because Meaney knows comics,¹ knows his way around documentary structure, and might have been able to tease out the drama in Morrison’s rise from artsy Glaswegian youth to anointed guru of the weird for the most iconic funnybook publisher in the world. He has a charismatic polymath storyteller as his subject, as well as influential collaborators who profess their love for Morrison unabashedly. But offscreen, Morrison draws criticism like a Catwoman cosplayer draws fanboys–none of which rises into the babble of Talking With Gods.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 3, 20122011, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Mystery, UK

*½/**** Image C+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Noomi Rapace, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Michele Mulroney & Kieran Mulroney
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Angelo Muredda On my way out of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, I overheard a woman telling her friend that it was “the sort of thing you have to see a second time.” Presumably she meant the intricate scheme by which “Napoleon of Crime” Moriarty (Jared Harris, suitably menacing) seeks to deliver Europe into an early Great War, a mystery so trite that its solution hinges on whether Holmes (Robert Downey Jr., inching dangerously towards Johnny Depp levels of hackdom) can get a hold of his nemesis’s pocketbook. But showing us everything for a second time is very much Ritchie’s M.O. There are about twenty minutes of movie in A Game of Shadows, all told: the rest is instant replay, a shameless parade of alternate angles and slow-motion recaps of bullets firing out of barrels or getting jammed in the process. It’s as if in lieu of the finished product, Ritchie submitted home footage of his own work in the editing suite, dazzled by Final Cut Pro’s array of grey filters and motion blurs.

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

May 30, 20122012, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, Sam Claflin
screenplay by Evan Daugherty and John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw A handful of arresting images aside (and even those owe more than a passing debt to artist Bev Doolittle, or Terry Gilliam minus the tchotchkes–and here’s Lily Cole again, post-Parnassus), Rupert Sanders’s dreary Snow White and the Huntsman plods along without much sense on its way to producing not much with little impact and no purpose. Though beaten to it by Gary Oldman’s legendary turn in the inexplicable Tiptoes, it has a gaggle of hale British actors playing dwarves, including a humiliated Bob Hoskins, tasked with being blind-guy exposition for little miss Joan of Arc. And it has a gorgeous Charlize Theron, demonstrating in full fetish-wear that she has no idea she’s in a Twilight ripper by turning in a pretty good character performance as an evil step-witch who’s spent way too much time reading The Beauty Myth. Indeed, the Big Bad Wolf in this fairytale is Naomi Wolf.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

May 29, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola
directed by Wes Anderson

by Angelo Muredda In his post-mortem of the 65^th Cannes Film Festival, over which he presided as jury president, Nanni Moretti complained that a number of Competition filmmakers seemed “more in love with their style than with their characters.” Whether Moretti had festival opener and Competition entry Moonrise Kingdom in mind is debatable, but this is the kind of criticism Wes Anderson has faced throughout his career. Moonrise Kingdom won’t win many holdouts over to Anderson’s corner: Those who think he’s spent the last 16 years building dollhouses may snicker from the first sequence, where the camera laterally tracks through an actual dollhouse of a set to find a mid-1960s family sequestered in tiny rooms, parsing their magazines and adventure novels. Those baffled by The Darjeeling Limited‘s juxtaposition of Kinks songs with snippets of Merchant-Ivory and Satyajit Ray scores may also scoff as the camera tracks past a battery-operated record player pushing out Benjamin Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” an educational piece narrated by a disembodied voice that neatly introduces “all the separate parts of the orchestra.” As if to facilitate a no-hard-feelings exit for the unenthused, Anderson telegraphs his aesthetic from the overture.

John Carter (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD

May 27, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon, based on A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by Andrew Stanton

by Walter Chaw Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote grand, incendiary pulp. He in fact defined pulp for me as a kid, not so much with his Tarzan, but with his Barsoom. I remember the Gino D’Achille covers for the Ballantine run of the books, all eleven of them, and I remember how excited I felt once I finally completed my collection of them at a mildew-smelling (delicious) used bookstore that didn’t know what it had. It’s easy to forget the thrill of those discoveries in the pre-Internet bazaar. When I was on the fence about buying a Kindle last Christmas, I saw that Burroughs’s complete run of Barsoom (i.e., John Carter of Mars) novels was available for free; now I own a Kindle. Rereading the series this past year in preparation for Andrew Stanton’s John Carter, I was reminded of the scope of Burroughs’s work–its sociology, its uncompromising stance on religion, its unabashed chivalry and romance; when I read Sir Walter Scott years later, it couldn’t hold a candle to Burroughs. Barsoom was my gateway to works by Burroughs contemporaries H.P. Lovecraft (compare what Carter finds at the gate of the River Iss with the arctic nightmare of At the Mountains of Madness and tell me they didn’t influence one another) and Robert E. Howard, but at the end of it all was always, for me, Barsoom. I’ve been waiting for a big-budget, prestige presentation of this property for almost as long as I waited for the Star Wars prequels–and if I’m not as disappointed, it’s only because Episode I killed much of what was disappointable in me. John Carter is garbage.

Last Call at the Oasis (2012)

May 24, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

**/****
screenplay by Jesica Yu, based on the book The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud’homme
directed by Jessica Yu

by Angelo Muredda Last Call at the Oasis is the latest casualty of Michael Moore’s success. Like virtually every other North American informational doc with an activist slant since Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, Jessica Yu’s film tackles a serious issue–unequal access to the world’s dangerously finite freshwater supply–with a barrage of animated charts, righteous talking-head interviews, ironically spliced music cues (Johnny Cash’s cover of Bob Nolan’s “Cool Water,” Pink’s “Raise Your Glass”), and archival footage from less enlightened educational fare, in this case 1948’s “The Adventures of Junior Raindrop.” Besides having an obvious facility with these tropes, Yu has her heart in the right place; as with Participant Media’s other non-fiction efforts (among them, An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for “Superman”), with which this film shares its DNA, the politics are sound, landing firmly on the side of the disenfranchised and the weak, in hopes of bringing attention to what might otherwise be a lost cause. But there comes a point where the deluge of aesthetic shortcuts overwhelms the message, and makes the good work these movies are striving to do seem hopelessly routine.

What the !@?# is up with this new website?

May 24, 20122012, Blog

Hey folks, got your e-mails. Here's what's happening with the site: I'm currently in the process of importing a bevy of old reviews and interviews, which have to be re-encoded from scratch to comply with the redesign. My bad. But, much like before, the main page--that is to say, the middle column of the main page--displays recent content, and only recent content. You ask me where, say, our Dark Shadows review is, and the answer is, scroll down. It's not far. It can't be; we've only covered a few titles since then. Once I've finished importing the archive, that "Recent…

Men in Black 3 (2012)

May 23, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, United Arab Emirates, Will Smith

**/****
starring Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Emma Thompson
screenplay by Etan Cohen, based on the Malibu comic by Lowell Cunningham
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

by Angelo Muredda That Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black 3 isn’t garbage comes as a surprise ten years after the first terrible sequel, and amidst reports of a troubled shoot that got underway before there was even a screenplay. As detailed in a NEWSWEEK piece on the production, Will Smith’s enormous trailer guzzled fuel and idled for months while the script was hashed out on dirty napkins, looking like a readymade symbol for a lead balloon in the making. Still, that it isn’t the bust it could have been shouldn’t make us too generous towards what’s essentially a bloated and very expensive nostalgia trip not to its setting of 1969 but to the first film’s release year of 1997, a time that’s probably too near to really miss.

Amadeus: Director’s Cut (1984/2002) – [Two-Disc Special Edition] DVD|[DigiBook] Blu-ray Disc

May 23, 20121980s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, France, Music, Musical

Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus: Director’s Cut
***/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
BD – Image B Sound A Extras A
starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow
screenplay by Peter Shaffer, based on his play
directed by Milos Forman

by Walter Chaw Bringing the highbrow to the status-hungry middle in the same way as those “Bach’s Greatest Hits” collections and the awful faux-llies of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Milos Forman’s bawdy, jittery adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s fanciful play “Amadeus” is not so much about Mozart as it is about genius and its burden on the mediocre. Mozart (Tom Hulce) is an adolescent boor touched by the hand of God; Emperor Joseph’s (Jeffrey Jones) court composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) becomes obsessed and desperately jealous of Mozart’s gift, leading him to the madhouse and confessions of murder. Amadeus works because of Forman’s gift for the seedy (and portraying asylums–he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, after all) and because of Abraham’s deeply felt performance.

Your Call is Important to Us, Please Stay on the Line

May 19, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers

Turn Me On, Goddammit (2011)

May 17, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Norway, Romance, Teen

Få meg på, for faen
(a.k.a. Turn Me On, Dammit!)
***/****
starring Helen Bergsholm, Malin Bjørhovde, Henriette Steenstrup, Beate Støfring
screenplay by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, based on the novel by Olaug Nilssen
directed by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen

by Angelo Muredda Turn Me On, Goddammit opens with a provocation worthy of its title. Our introduction to fifteen-year-old Alma (Helene Bergsholm) finds her on the kitchen floor, masturbating to a phone-sex line (she’s a preferred caller and sort-of friend to operator Stig (Per Kjerstad)) while her dog watches with interest. That’s some hook, but Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s first dramatic feature after a string of documentaries is at its best when it bypasses this kind of frontal assault and plays to Jacobsen’s strengths, namely her delicate touch with nonprofessional actors and sharp distillation of the gender politics of small-town life. While the film nicely delineates its washed-out setting of Skoddeheimen, a remote mountain village in Norway whose welcome sign kids unfailingly raise a middle-finger to on the bus ride home from school, Jacobsen’s real boon is to capture a spectrum of teens’ sexual attitudes within a hermetically-sealed but still fairly typical environment. While that might make Turn Me On, Goddammit sound like a dry sociological tome, Jacobsen and Bergsholm, in her debut, are adept at making Alma not a blank Norwegian Everygirl but someone who’s credibly starting to cultivate her sexual proclivities in a hostile space.

World on a Wire (1973) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 15, 2012****/****, 1970s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi, Television, The Criterion Collection, West Germany

Worldonawirecap1

Welt am Draht
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Klaus Löwitsch, Barbara Valentin, Mascha Rabben, Karl Heinz Vosgerau
screenplay by Fritz Müller-Scherz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, based on the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye
directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

by Jefferson Robbins If computer engineer Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) doesn’t realize he’s a digital simulation, you can forgive him for not having seen The Matrix. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s two-part 1973 movie for German TV, World On A Wire, populates Stiller’s environment with so many characters who are obviously automata, of greater and lesser sophistication, that he really should get a clue. Most of the people he encounters are over-painted, pancaked and rouged to the point of looking like mannequins or clowns. There are the beautiful women who materialize exactly when needed and stand by for male appreciation. There’s the bartender who stands waxen until, as if activated, he lunges forward to offer a cocktail. Even Stiller’s own responses to stimuli seem at times posed and inauthentic. But we suspect Fassbinder’s satirizing a notoriously affectless society. The distant miens of Stiller’s peers and strangers could simply reflect a heart-freezing German ennui–or a universal egotism, in which we mentally reduce everyone not in our immediate circle to the status of clockwork extras.¹

Caught by the Tides (2024)

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

Fight or Flight (2025)