FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Cabin in the Woods (2012) + Lockout (2012)

April 20, 20122012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS
*/****
starring Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz
screenplay by Joss Whedon & Drew Goddard
directed by Drew Goddard

LOCKOUT
**/****
starring Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace, Vincent Regan, Peter Stormare
screenplay by Stephen Saint Leger, James Mather & Luc Besson
directed by Saint & Mather

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Drew Goddard’s (and Joss Whedon’s, you won’t be able to forget) unfortunate giant middle finger The Cabin in the Woods takes a shit-eating high-concept only to do nothing interesting with it for about 80 of its 100 minutes. Because the high concept is the crux of the film and the elbow of the argument, as they say, stop right here if you want to stay a spoiler virgin. For me, I went in not knowing anything about the movie–didn’t even see the trailer–on the back of assurances from many respected friends and colleagues that this was, in fact, a must-see for the genre fan. What I should have asked was, “What genre?” The Cabin in the Woods is Scream for what Joe Bob Briggs used to call “Spam in a cabin” flicks, in which a group of nubile youngsters piles into an unreliable junker to spend a fateful weekend in some backwoods hick oasis where they’re picked off, one by one, by some combination of demons and Ted Nugent. The difference being that Scream was cold, nihilistic, scary as hell, and a lovely example of the thing it was simultaneously deconstructing. The reason The Cabin in the Woods is neither revolutionary nor “ground-breaking” is that everything it does has already been done, repeatedly and better, and that rather than serving as a sterling example of that which it is trying to pinion (thus establishing its credibility as satire, see?), it’s really just another instalment in the live-action Scooby-Doo franchise.

Unforgiven (1992) – Blu-ray Disc (Digibook)

April 19, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Western

***/**** | Image A- Sound B Extras B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris
screenplay by David Webb Peoples
directed by Clint Eastwood

Even if time and HBO's "Deadwood" have made Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven into something less revisionist and more just a furthering of the Siegel/Leone mythology, the fact remains that the picture's earned its place in the company of other flawed masterpieces like The Searchers and The Man from Laramie. At the time of its release in 1992, as my editor Bill once ably laid out, its pending release was actually seen as a joke, earned at the expense of a trio of legendary, completely-indefensible flops. Its serious-mindedness–what appeared to be an unsentimental accounting for the remorseless bastards Eastwood had parlayed into immortality–therefore took audiences expecting another Heartbreak Ridge, "western edition," by surprise.

Damsels in Distress (2012)

April 19, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Greta Gerwig, Adam Brody, Analeigh Tipton, Megan Echikunwoke
written and directed by Whit Stillman

Damsels in Distress is a hard movie to sink your teeth into–a stick of gum soaked in brine. Whit Stillman’s first effort since 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, it’s a light-headed fantasia that’s committed to its gonzo vision, best expressed by a character who calls her favourite soap scent “very precise.” Very precise, indeed: Less wealthy than Metropolitan‘s socialites, Damsels‘ cadre of female sophomores breathe even more rarefied air. Though each actress works her peculiar cadence into these pronouncements to uncanny effect, they seem possessed by their creator even more than is typical for Stillman’s characters, genteelly handling accusations of hypocrisy with defenses like, “We are all flawed. Must that render us mute to the flaws of others?” Stillman’s rigorously formal dialogue is always a trial-by-fire for actors–easily passed in Last Days by Kate Beckinsale, for example, but stumbled over by Matt Keesler, who looks embarrassed to identify as a “loyal adherent to the disco movement”–but something’s different this time. Always accused of being hermetic but usually too enamoured with other people’s ephemera (e.g., collections of Scrooge McDuck memorabilia) for that to be true, this time he’s properly set up shop in the projection booth at the back of his mind.

The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

April 17, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale
screenplay by Terence Davies, based on the play by Terence Rattigan
directed by Terence Davies

In Of Time and the City, Terence Davies's self-described love song and eulogy for his native Liverpool, the director halts his psycho-geographic walking-tour of old haunts at one point to pay backhanded tribute to the Merseybeat movement. With the meteoric rise of The Beatles, he pronounces in sulky baritone, the well-crafted love songs on which he was weaned became, overnight, as antiquated as curling tongs. Yet just as abruptly as pop turned beat, the young Davies went another way: "I discovered Mahler," he drawls, "and responded completely to his every overwrought note." Davies's studiously unfashionable gravitation to the Romantic, largely for its affinities with the torch songs he so recently mourned, finds apt expression in his sixth feature, a beautifully overripe adaptation of Terence Rattigan's 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea. Like its source, the film chronicles the misfortunes of Hester (Rachel Weisz), a judge's wife in postwar London who leaves her cerebral older spouse, William (Simon Russell Beale), for sexual fulfilment with wastrel Royal Air Force pilot Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), and subsequently finds herself unloved and in limbo. Only a recent convert to such reckless emotional indulgence, Hester, when we meet her, is very much the Mahler sort. Despite its apparent distance from more clearly autobiographical films like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, then, Davies is an ideal steward for this material–every bit as attentive to matters of exquisite sadness as his protagonist.

Goon (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Sports, Theatrical

***/****
starring Seann William Scott, Jay Baruchel, Alison Pill, Liev Schreiber
screenplay by Jay Baruchel & Evan Goldberg
directed by Michael Dowse

by Walter Chaw The best hockey movie since Slap Shot and the most pleasant and well-meaning Canuck-sploitation flick since Strange Brew, Michael Dowse's Goon is a prime example of how to make an insightful guy-movie without indulging in the cheap scatology of American Pie and its offspring. Not that there's anything wrong with cheap scatology, mind, only that it seems played-out, and so it's something of a revelation to find that franchise's own secret weapon, Seann William "Stifler" Scott (who, let's face it, is impossible not to like ever since he was brought to orgasm through manual stimulation of his prostate in that franchise), so quiet and unassuming in the title role as dim, sweet Doug Glatt. Doug's a natural-born bouncer in an armpit dive, see, who, after laying out a local bruiser taking his beef into the stands, is offered a shot at becoming a full-time enforcer for a bus-and-motel league. He shows up at his first practice wobbly in figure skates, proceeds to give his teammates a sound beating for their hooted derision, and is promptly called up to the bigger minor-league team the Halifax Highlanders.

High Chicago (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Colin Salmon, Karen LeBlanc, Fulvio Cecere, Michael Xavier
screenplay by Robert Adetuyi
directed by Alfons Adetuyi

There's a nice bit in Alfons Adetuyi's debut feature High Chicago where gambler and aspiring cinema proprietor Sam (Colin Salmon) screens Ralph Nelson's Lilies of the Field for his wife (Karen LeBlanc) at a deserted drive-in theatre. The Sidney Poitier star vehicle, about a roving handyman who stops at an Arizona farm and meets a group of nuns who are convinced he's been divinely commissioned to build them a chapel, is a smart intertext for a movie about a man on his own quixotic journey to build a drive-in theatre in Africa, not least because Poitier's performance earned him the first competitive Oscar for an African-American man. This isn't the only time the film, set in 1975, recalls important milestones in black popular culture: Sam's slow-motion, funk-inflected entrance to the poker table in the opening scene sets him up as a contemporary of figures like Richard Roundtree and Ken Norton, while his high-stakes gambling spree is scored to Fela Kuti's "Let's Start." It's the most compelling example, though, because it rises above blank name-checking and provides sorely-needed context to a narrative that too often trades on clichés about gamblers going for one last game. There's probably a good movie to be made from the outline of brother Robert Adetuyi's screenplay, and surely something interesting about this yearning to trace a lineage of black entrepreneurial spirit starting from Poitier–an obvious target, but why not?–yet High Chicago settles short of the goal.

Fightville (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein

A few minutes into Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's Fightville, we see a couple of young MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) trainees wrestling in the stark confines of a shithole tucked away in a Louisiana strip-mall. The gym's popping red-on-white colour scheme resembles nothing so much as the Space Station V lounge, but the weirdest thing might be the (unseen) stereo blasting Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" to set the mood. Tucker and Epperlein have a good eye and ear for this strange minutiae, and it's this low-key humanity that makes their follow-up to more sombre, Iraq-centered docs like How to Fold a Flag and Gunner Palace as compelling as it is. While an early backstage glimpse of bandaged wrists and wastebaskets overflowing with bloodied paper towels suggests a high-minded melodrama about the corporeal cost of fighting for a living (think The Wrestler), the filmmakers thankfully turn out to be much more interested in the daily grind that a commitment to the sport entails.

Footnote (2011)

April 17, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Israel, Theatrical

Hearat Shulayim
***/****
starring Shlomo Bar-Aba, Lior Ashkenazi
written and directed by Joseph Cedar

by Angelo Muredda Joseph Cedar’s Footnote (Hearat Shulayim) begins with what looks like a son’s loving tribute to his intellectual origins. Rising to accept his invitation to the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities, slick Talmud scholar Uriel Scholnik (Lior Ashkenazi) waxes reverent about the professional example set by his uncompromising father, Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-Aba), himself a Talmud scholar who spent the better part of his adult years toiling away on textual variants observed in microfiche while his son cut his teeth on high theory. We stay tight on Eliezer, his head bowed and his mouth locked in a grimace, as his son tells an anecdote about a survey he had to fill out as a primary student, identifying his father’s profession. “Say that I’m a teacher,” the younger Scholnik recalls Eliezer saying, portraying a man at once too modest to own up to his repute as a philologist and fixated on the pedagogical value of his work–an obsession Uriel claims to have happily inherited.

The Hunger Games (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Gary Ross and Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray, based on the novel by Collins
directed by Gary Ross

Now that the United States has remade Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale, it's fair to wonder when it'll tackle Ichi the Killer or Tetsuo, the Iron Man. It's all part of a greater conversation around what it is that made the U.S. more sympathetic to Japan after 9/11, whereas before, films like Fukasaku's grim little sociological masterpiece were seen as contraband in America. Marinating in social superiority only gets you so far, I guess, until the detonation of a WMD over a civilian population suddenly redraws the lines and changes your worldview. It's no accident that Suzanne Collins's series of tween dystopia books is wildly popular in this post-millennial zeitgeist–no accident, either, come to think of it, that the "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" books, featuring brutal rape and unforgivable fantasy vigilantism (and a fetching girl-hero, it bears mentioning), were the rage of blueblood, blue-haired reading circles: grandma in the Times Square grindhouse circa 1974. What's genuinely frightening about the wide, middlebrow acceptance of such traditionally deviant fare is that it's a glimpse into what happens when a country founded by Puritans suddenly has its apocalyptic paranoia and hardwired xenophobia briefly confirmed. If you're a Republican with a moral barometer in these, our United States of America in 2012, take a good, hard look at what's happened to your party and tell me that I'm wrong. It takes a hell of a lot of crazy to make Margaret Atwood seem prophetic–to make Mel Gibson trend towards the middle.

Payback (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Theatrical

***½/****
written and directed by Jennifer Baichwal, based on Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood

by Angelo Muredda Midway through Payback, Jennifer Baichwal's fifth feature documentary, we're given an alarming overhead view of the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill. At first, all we see is a dark pool of water, but before long a sickly orange substance starts tracking left through it, nearly filling the frame. The orange stuff, we're told, is chemical dispersant, and its job is to both break up the oil slick and push it below the surface, whatever the cost to the animal and plant life that happens to already be there. Not least for the way it suggests a scale that's been thrown out of balance, it's a striking visual metaphor for Baichwal's subject, which is the impossible work of translation we undertake whenever we try to square intangible debts with material payouts–in this case, dispersing oil with toxic chemicals. As one commentator points out, it'll be decades before we know just how large the ecological debt we've amassed as a result of the Gulf spill is–and even then, to think of it in terms of dues paid is to forget that dead fish can't cash cheques.

Being Elmo (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

**½/****
directed by Constance Marks

My 2-year-old nephew's favourite YouTube video is a "Sesame Street" clip where Elmo's birthday card to fellow monster Rosita is swept away by the wind. It's a bizarre little skit, devoid of anything like closure or uplift, but the nephew gets caught up in it every time. He narrates, tearing up and saying, "Oh no!" as Elmo does, and asking where the card went, though he already knows. Then it ends, and he promptly demands, "Again." I didn't know what to make of this at first, but my sense, watching Constance Marks's Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, is that the titular red guy is a sort of Everykid for preschoolers, feeling what they feel. The film charts Kevin Clash's impressive rise from inner-city Baltimore puppeteer to one of Jim Henson's trusted collaborators. It's a straightforward and strictly chronological account, beginning with his preteen years of making puppets out of his dad's trench coats and following him through to his work on "Captain Kangaroo," Labyrinth, and most importantly "Sesame Street." Long-time Muppet ally Whoopi Goldberg is our throughline, narrating in her sweetest story time voice and telling us things like, "One of Kevin's first characters was Hoots the Owl!" as we see, well, Hoots the Owl.

Project X (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Thomas Mann, Oliver Cooper, Jonathan Daniel Brown, Dax Flame
screenplay by Matt Drake and Michael Bacall
directed by Nima Nourizadeh

by Angelo Muredda With Bridesmaids, Judd Apatow made the case for the producer as auteur–a spiritual godparent to screenwriters' Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumulo's every deferred comedic beat. It's only taken one try–the perfunctorily- titled, written, and staged Project X–but Todd Philips can now claim the same, to everyone's great detriment. Late in the game, protagonist Thomas's dad surveys the wreckage of his vanilla son's soiree and says, with something like pride, "I didn't think you had it in you." It's a callback to the strained thematic machinations of The Hangover Part II, where straight-laced Stu (Ed Helms) recognizes he has a "demon" in him, and if that makes him a horrible spouse, then so be it. While Project X is suffused with the same deep misogyny and awe before Dionysian dickishness as its producer's directorial work, it's also a testament to Helms's grounded performance as those films' mild-mannered demon-in-wait–and proof of how unsustainable Philips's poisonous alchemy is in the hands of the truly useless. That would be first-time director Nima Nourizadeh, who has no instinct for narrative, characterization, or composition, and whose licentious camera unfailingly roves up the skirt of every 18-year-old extra lassoed in what the press notes eerily call a "nationwide talent search." Woe and hilarious Taser gags to anyone who searches for talent here.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011)

April 17, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Theatrical

Les neiges du Kilimandjaro
**½/****
starring Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Gérard Meylan, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet
screenplay by Jean-Louis Milesi and Robert Guédiguian
directed by Robert Guédiguian

by Angelo Muredda Committed leftist Robert Guédiguian's newest film The Snows of Kilimanjaro opens with a lottery. The local Marseilles shipyard is set to lay off twenty workers, and faithful union leader Michel (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) has been entrusted with carrying out the draw, eventually calling out even his own name–entered voluntarily despite his privileged position. The titular snows refer not to the Hemingway short story of the same name but to a popular song recited at Michel's premature retirement party, a paean to the middle-class luxuries of touring the world in one's golden years and a good fit for the African vacation his friends have ordered for him and his wife, Marie-Claire (Ariana Ascaride, excellent). Alas, before the couple gets its due, Michel's unionist chickens come home to roost in the form of a humiliating robbery of the travel fund later that evening, which could only have been committed by one of the party's guests–likely one of the unfortunate nineteen other names he called out earlier that week.

A Man Escaped (1956)

April 17, 2012****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, France, Theatrical

Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut
****/****
starring François Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, Maurice Beerblock, Roland Monod
written and directed by Robert Bresson

by Angelo Muredda “This is a true story. I’ve told it as it happened, unadorned. –Robert Bresson.” So begins A Man Escaped, with a handwritten statement of purpose that throws down a gauntlet to itself. Based on the memoirs of French Resistance member André Devigny (here rechristened Fontaine (François Letterier)), who escaped from Lyon’s Fort Montluc prison just hours prior to his execution, the film delivers on its ambitious promise. It stays faithful to this claim to tell the story unadorned except with the light garnish of Fontaine’s cool descriptions of the task before him–really an ever-unfolding expanse of smaller tasks like chipping away at a doorframe with a spoon over a month’s time. Its focus is almost strictly on matters technical, to the point where even its spiritual ruminations spring organically out of moments of real labour. When a fellow prisoner’s escape attempt is undone by his overeager hope for his next life to begin, he passes his knowledge of the precise spot he went wrong onto Fontaine with the solemnity of a wizened gamer delivering an annotated walkthrough to a novice. If these men are going to be reborn, we’re assured, it’ll only be by their own hands.

Chronicle (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Teen, Theatrical

***/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan, Michael Kelly
screenplay by Max Landis
directed by Josh Trank

by Walter Chaw Josh Trank and Max Landis’s Chronicle is so good for so many extended stretches that its flaws are all the more frustrating. It’s too smart for its own good, presenting a superhero origin story without allowing any of its characters to ever once even whisper the word (a lot like “The Walking Dead” making everyone look like assholes by avoiding the term “zombie”) and spending too much time letting its teen titans drop names like Schopenhauer before making it clear that the character who most embraces the philosopher’s theories of aesthetics and self-abnegation ultimately takes up the mantle of one of Schopenhauer’s offshoots, Nietzsche. Boring, I know. And not smart enough, as meta-introspection goes, to bridge the gaps in Chronicle, like a badly under-developed “hero” and an equally under-developed “villain,” their relationship to each other, and, at the end, an emotional coda that feels unearned and tacked-on. Compare Chronicle to what history is vetting out as the only good M. Night Shyamalan flick, Unbreakable: it’s missing that film’s sense of awe, sense of (what has come clear as exceedingly rare in Shyamalan’s pursuits) respect for what the hero mythology of comics means, and has always meant, to 98lb. weaklings indulging a fantasy of largesse and empowerment and thus primed to order the Charles Atlas Workout off the ads on the back page.

Albert Nobbs (2011)

April 17, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Glenn Close, Mia Wasikowska, Aaron Johnson, Janet McTeer
screenplay by Gabriella Prekop, John Banville & Glenn Close, based on the short story by George Moore
directed by Rodrigo Garcia

by Walter Chaw On the one hand, Rodrigo Garcia’s Albert Nobbs is a patently ridiculous science-fiction tale set in a Victorian England run amuck with drag-king transvestites just looking for an opportunity to scrape out the same hardscrabble Dickensian existence as their male counterparts. On the other, it’s a star-in-her-dotage’s suffocating vanity piece excruciatingly bloated from a more comfortable one-act scale into full-blown awards-baiting period-piece virulence. If you discount Glenn Close-as-Bicentennial Man’s freakish appearance, it’s still impossible to believe that all of her/his co-workers have afforded him/her the same courtesy. It’s an issue not ameliorated by the appearance of house painter Hubert (Janet McTeer), who, in one of the more terrifying scenes of nudity in the history of cinema, reveals that he is also a she, and married, I guess, to the oddest-looking one from The Commitments (Bronagh Gallagher). It’s that moment of horrific, aggressive, obscene (?) sexuality (stoked by her pairing with another oddity) that briefly clarifies what Albert Nobbs should have spent the rest of its time being–the one moment that hints at what David Cronenberg would have done with this material. Alas, the horror of the body is relegated to just this moment and later only ancillary to a breakout of typhus, while a flat, useless subplot involving a young handyman (Aaron Johnson) and the grasping maid Helen (Mia Wasikowska) he’s banging takes centre court. Albert wants Helen for his own, you see, because he’d like to open a tobacco shop.

Bigger Stronger Faster

April 17, 2012Blog

Welcome to Costco, I love you. No, wait--welcome to the new and (hopefully) improved FILM FREAK CENTRAL. Pardon the mess (the broken/missing links, the bugs, the general chaos), as we are in the process of importing all our old content and thus rebuilding the site, brick by brick. The last time FILM FREAK CENTRAL got renovated was 2001. That became a strange point of old-school pride, but a redesign--complete with all the social-media widgets you demanded (I got your letters, thanks)--felt like the perfect way to mark the occasion of our 15th anniversary on the web. With any luck, this…

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) – Two-Disc Special Edition DVD + Blu-ray Disc

April 16, 2012****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, FFC Must-Own

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A+
BLU-RAY Image B+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden
screenplay by Tennessee Williams, based on his play
directed by Elia Kazan

by Walter Chaw Marlon Brando is liquid sex in A Streetcar Named Desire, molten and mercurial. He's said that he modeled his Stanley Kowalski after a gorilla, and the manner in which Stanley eats, wrist bent at an almost fey angle, picking at fruit and leftovers in the sweltering heat of Elia Kazan's flophouse New Orleans, you can really see the primate in him. (Imagine a gorilla smelling a flower.) Brando's Stanley is cunning, too: he sees through the careful artifice of his sister-in-law Blanche (Vivien Leigh, Old Hollywood), and every second he's on screen, everything else wilts in the face of him. It's said that Tennessee Williams used to buy front-row seats to his plays and then laugh like a loon at his rural atrocities; he's something like the Shakespeare of sexual politics, the poet laureate of repression, and in his eyes, he's only ever written comedies. In Kazan's and Brando's too, I'd hazard, as A Streetcar Named Desire elicits volumes of delighted laughter. The way that Stanley's "acquaintances" are lined up in his mind to appraise the contents of Blanche's suitcase. The way he invokes "Napoleonic Law" with beady-eyed fervour. And the way, finally, that he's right about Blanche and all her hysterical machinations. The moment Stanley introduces himself to Blanche is of the shivers-causing variety (like the moment John Ford zooms up to John Wayne in Stagecoach), but my favourite parts of the film–aside from his torn-shirt "STELLA!"–are when Stanley screeches like a cat, and when he threatens violence on the jabbering Blanche by screaming, "Hey, why don't you cut the re-bop!"

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 9, 20122011, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Espionage, Thriller, Tom Cruise

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton
screenplay by Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec
directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Even though Brad Bird directed The Iron Giant (arguably the best film in a year, 1999, rife with great films), even though he's responsible for the best Fantastic Four flick there ever will be (The Incredibles) as well as the best overall Pixar release (Ratatouille), I still had the chutzpah to be skeptical when I heard that his live-action debut would be the fourth entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise. I am contrite. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (hereafter Ghost Protocol) is the model of the modern action picture. It has exactly two quiet moments (I counted)–the rest is audacious, ostentatious, glorious action set against not only the expected fisticuffs but also a ferocious sandstorm in Dubai and the bombing and partial collapse of the Kremlin. It's an honorary Bond movie better than any of them (only the Casino Royale redux enters the same conversation–well, maybe On Her Majesty's Secret Service, too), filled to stuffed with clever gadgets (and their logical application), exotic locales, beautiful women, and fast cars. It's sexy, sleek, knows better than to take its foot off the pedal, flirts with relevance without ever attempting depth it's not equipped to deal with, and establishes J.J. Abrams as better than idol Spielberg in the producing-good-action-movies sweepstakes. Not content to scale just any building, it has returning hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) climb the Burj Khalifa; not content to stage a brawl in a parking garage, it finds one of those robotic ones to provide a third dimension to the scrambling in vintage, brilliant, 1980s Hong Kong style. In a series that boasts John Woo as director of its first sequel, Ghost Protocol has the big, giant clanking ones to outdo Woo.

Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil (2011) – Blu-ray Disc

April 4, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Horror

Tucker and Dale Vs Evil
*½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Tyler Labine, Alan Tudyk, Katrina Bowden, Jesse Moss
screenplay by Eli Craig & Morgan Jurgenson
directed by Eli Craig

by Walter Chaw Essentially the dimwit punchline to Eli Roth's Cabin Fever ("My niggas!") extended to feature-length, hyphenate Eli Craig's debut is a polite send-up of kids-in-the-woods/Spam-in-a-cabin flicks that posits our titular rednecks as misunderstood sons of the earth while their yuppie "victims," overfed on a steady diet of too many horror flicks, are the real maniacs. It raises the interesting question of where Craig's allegiance truly lies, honestly, were one to dig into the premise, though the fact of it is that Tucker and Dale Vs Evil (hereafter Tucker and Dale)–no matter its whiplash homages to The Evil Dead, its re-enactment in part of the rape scene from Re-Animator, its obvious affection for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre–is a one-trick pony that runs out of steam about fifteen minutes in. Its earnestness allows it to play like other low-budget yuk-yuk slasher flicks like Severance and The Cottage: well-intended genre mash-notes that never entirely rise above slightly-informed spoof (in mild contrast to the uninformed-spoof Scary Movie franchise). But for the gore (and even with it, as the gore here is more cartoonish than gruesome), Tucker and Dale could be an SNL skit, interminable and bland.

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