The Grey (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD

May 14, 2012Posted in2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, James Badge Dale
screenplay by Joe Carnahan & Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, based on Jeffers’s short story “Ghost Walker”
directed by Joe Carnahan

by Angelo Muredda The teaser for Joe Carnahan’s The Grey closes with Liam Neeson MacGyver-ing a wolf-punching power glove out of mini-liquor bottles. It’s a great hook, and easily the best trailer of the year. It’s also kind of a lie. To be fair, Carnahan’s latest–after the dreadful one-two (wolfless) punch of Smokin’ Aces and The A-Team–is a career-saving return to form, although Narc was hardly epic stuff. Adapted from a short story by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, The Grey ambitiously aspires to be a Jack London-esque exploration of ruffians fighting for their lives against an unmoved wilderness; tonally, it sits somewhere between the gritty naturalism of “To Build a Fire” and the bros-only philosophical seminar of The Sea-Wolf. Carnahan brings an admirable seriousness to this task and invests his band of rogues with some nice human touches, but there’s a dopiness to this material that doesn’t always pass muster. Watching The Grey‘s arctic powwows between protagonist Ottway (Neeson) and his sad burly men, I was most reminded not of endangered-man potboilers but of The Breakfast Club, which similarly gathers a group of rejects around the high-school equivalent of a makeshift fire for some prime bonding. Slogging through these men’s tales of woe isn’t exactly detention, but eventually, it does start to feel like homework.

Killer Nun (1979) – Blu-ray Disc

May 13, 2012Posted in1970s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, Italy

Killernuncap

Suor Omicidi
**/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
starring Anita Ekberg, Joe Dallesandro, Lou Castel, Alida Valli
screenplay by Giulio Berruti and Alberto Tarallo, from an idea by Enzo Gallo
directed by Giulio Berruti

by Bryant Frazer It sounds like a grand old time, all right. First, there’s that title. Killer Nun. Adjective noun, conveying irony and promising subversion. Then there’s the cast. How can you not want to see Anita Ekberg star with Joe Dallesandro in a killer-nun movie? And the premise (dope-addled sister at a convent hospital starts abusing patients) does not disappoint–imagine a season of “Nurse Jackie” under showrunners Dario Argento and Abel Ferrara. Yet somehow, director Giulio Berruti blows it: A derivative slasher pic and an only mildly lascivious sex film, Killer Nun is the sort of sleepy-eyed misfire that could give nunsploitation a bad name.

Spellbound (1945) – Blu-ray Disc

May 13, 2012Posted in1940s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock

Spellboundcap1

*/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras B
starring Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov, Leo G. Carroll
screenplay by Ben Hecht, suggested by Francis Beeding’s novel The House of Dr. Edwardes
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw It’s tempting to give Hitchcock’s Spellbound a pass because there’s a good chance the whole thing was intended as either a childish, depressive prankster’s most expensive prank or a passive-aggressive jab at Selznick (or, more than likely, both). Tempting, because like all of Hitchcock’s films, its qualities are directly relatable to Hitch’s own inconquerable peccadilloes. In a movie that’s essentially about an individual’s ability, or lack thereof, to banish his or her personal demons, Spellbound gets a little credit just for being so damned ironic for the fact of it. It’s successful, in other words, if its intention was to be a disaster–a grenade offered up to a hated creative rival (Hitch would pretend the camera was broken whenever Selznick visited the set, only to have it spring back to life upon his departure) as a gambit to not only get closer to getting out of his seven-year contract with Selznick, but also provide celluloid testimony to the fact that, contract or not, he’s nobody’s bitch. It makes sense, too, to recruit Ben Hecht–he of Lifeboat and later Notorious, it’s true, but of His Girl Friday and The Shop Around the Corner as well–to write a script packed to the gills with bad screwball and Catskills Freud bits, the better to put David O.’s much-ballyhooed therapy out there formulated to the motion picture frame. This is Hitchcock ridiculing his boss on the most conspicuous stage one could imagine and, here’s the punchline, using that same boss’s money to do so. Let’s feel safe in surmising that when Hitch told Selznick he had the perfect idea for a movie about Selznick’s new psychotherapy jones (brought on in part by his affair with Jennifer Jones, no doubt), he wasn’t suddenly, spontaneously displaying compassion and the desire to collaborate with Selznick.

Keeping Score: FFC Interviews “Payback” Filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Margaret Atwood

May 10, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Interviews

Paybackinterviewtitle

It’s PAYBACK’s time

March 16, 2012 | The Massey Lectures are as much a Canadian institution as the RCMP, so it’s fitting that I spotted honorary Mountie Paul Gross in the audience of Margaret Atwood’s closing talk back in 2008. Landing at the anxious first crest of the financial crisis, Atwood’s lectures, collected and published as the best-selling Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, were regarded as the latest in the internationally-renowned author’s string of prophesies come true. (The Handmaid’s Tale‘s dystopian vision of an American theocracy that reduces women to reproductive concubines might now be mistaken for Rick Santorum’s four-year prospectus.) Yet Atwood wastes no time in announcing that debt is not in vogue so much as hardwired into human patterns of thinking. Nor does she offer financial advice, playfully following her interest in score-keeping wherever it takes her, whether to the Victorian novel, where a parent’s balance sheet can make or break a marriage, or to how we think about the penance in penitentiaries.

The Lady Vanishes (1938) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 9, 2012Posted in1930s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Mystery, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

Ladyvanishescap3small

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood, Paul Lukas, Cecil Parkerscreenplay by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw There’s something ephemeral about Ms. Froy (Dame May Whitty), from her sudden appearance at a hotel desk to her first words obscured by ambient noise, to her initial exit facilitated by an invisible hand. She seems from the start a metaphor, the first of Hitchcock’s women-as-metaphor, leading up to his gaggle of Birds and an unlikely companion in that way to the seagulls-into-women who discover a body at the beginning of the previous year’s Young and Innocent. She occupies a space as well with the unnamed second Mrs. De Winter in Hitch’s American debut, Rebecca: a cipher, without an identity of her own, the MacGuffin made flesh and the embodiment, in The Lady Vanishes, of perhaps the director’s desire to pursue his career across the pond, with only a contractual obligation to Jamaica Inn standing in his way. (The Lady Vanishes starts in a way station, yes? Gateway to greater adventure.) Indeed, the picture cemented David O. Selznick’s interest in Hitchcock, the irony being that unlike the majority of his work before and after, The Lady Vanishes‘ production was already well underway before he hopped onto the saddle. On second thought, maybe it was the idea that Hitchcock could be a hired gun that attracted Selznick–a belief that holds countless ironies of its own.

Looney Tunes [Platinum Collection – Volume One] – Blu-ray Disc (Incomplete Review)

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

Looneytunesbg

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

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****/**** 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, 2012Posted in2012, 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 + DVD + Digital Copy

May 6, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, 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, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

***½/****

by Angelo Muredda Like a delicate magic trick, Only the Young is 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, 2012Posted in2012, 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 Summer of 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, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

***½/****

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, 2012Posted in2012, 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, 2012Posted in2012, Argentina, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Chile, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Netherlands

***½/****

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, 2012Posted in2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero

Avengers

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, 2012Posted in2012, 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, 2012Posted in2012, 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

The Bodyguard (1992) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

May 2, 2012Posted in1990s, 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, 2012Posted in2012, 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 task force 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, 2012Posted in1950s, 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.