***/****
Image B Sound B screenplay by Martin Rosen, based on the novel by Richard Adams
directed by Martin Rosen
by Walter Chaw Unsentimental and terrifying and set against
lovely, John Constable-esque watercolour backgrounds, Martin Rosen's
adaptation of the Richard Adams novel Watership Down
arose in that extended lull between Disney's heyday and its
late-Eighties resurrection. (This period also saw, in addition to
Rosen's film of Adams's The Plague Dogs, Rankin
& Bass's The Last Unicorn and Ralph Bakshi's
most productive period, which included 1978's The Lord of the
Rings.) Watership Down points to the
dwindled potential for American animation to evolve into what anime
has become: a mature medium for artistic expression of serious issues.
A shame that this flawed piece is possibly the pinnacle of animation's
ambition on these shores, Richard Linklater's recent Waking
Life notwithstanding.
WARGAMES
***½/**** Image B Sound C Extras A starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy
screenplay by Lawrence Lasker & Walter F. Parkes
directed by John Badham SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
****/****
DVD - Image B Sound B+ Extras C
BD - Image A Sound A Extras B- starring John Travolta, Karen Gorney, Barry Miller, Joseph Cali
screenplay by Norman Wexler
directed by John Badham STAYING ALIVE
ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound B+ starring John Travolta, Cynthia Rhodes, Finola Hughes, Steve Inwood
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Norman Wexler
directed by Sylvester Stallone
by Walter Chaw I hadn't realized until I watched the 25th
Anniversary Edition DVD of it how intimately WarGames
is embedded in my psyche. I saw it in the theatre as a ten-year-old in
1983 and, for the rest of that decade (the prime of my excited
filmgoing experience), I didn't know that movies were ever different.
The first time, in fact, that I recognized that movies were human
was the first time they revealed themselves as something that could
fail to inspire any kind of response at all--and I wonder if that
initial moment of disappointment had more to do with the development of
my cynicism than any one picture's deficiency. Film is a progressive
addiction, says one theory: the more sophisticated you get as a viewer,
the harder it is to find the fix. WarGames
presented me with the idea of eroticism through mild scatological
exhibitionism. It had a young man in his room, alone with a young
woman, excusing himself to urinate in the next room--an act unthinkable
to me as a ten-year-old, and holding with it the thrill of taboo. The
next time they meet, the world starts to explode and, better yet, the
girl traps the boy between her legs when he tries to edge by.
**½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras C starring Robert Mitchum, Takakura Ken, Okada Eiji, Brian Keith screenplay by Paul Schrader and Robert Towne directed by Sydney Pollack
by Jefferson Robbins We'll never know
what might have been had Paul and Leonard Schrader's original
screenplay for The Yakuza gone unmolested by '70s
script king Robert Towne, or had Martin Scorsese or Brian De Palma made
good on threats to direct. Instead, the obvious gets overlaid on top of
the mysterious, and at least one partner in this marriage of the
American and Japanese gangster genres winds up shorted.
Producer-director Sydney Pollack makes the mistake his best peers in
the decade's American cinema dodged: he mistrusts the audience,
believing we can't absorb backstory through performance and suggestion.
***½/****
Image B+ Sound C Extras C starring James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michele Breton
screenplay by Donald Cammell
directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg
by Walter Chaw Emerging in the
middle of one of the most experimental, challenging periods in
cinematic history, Performance--completed in 1968
but shelved until 1970--is a product at once ahead of its time and two
years too late. Had its trippy-dippy, anachronistic cross-cutting and
madly-inappropriate scoring appeared in 1968 (the year of Rosemary's
Baby, Night of the Living Dead, If...,
2001: A Space Odyssey, and the
film to which it perhaps owes its greatest allegiance, Once
Upon a Time in the West), Performance
would've found traction and good company as a foundational film for the
American New Wave instead of as a picture that, for all its foment and
formal revolution, seemed hysterical against a maturing, more sedate(d)
mainstream avant-garde parade of stuff like El
Topo, Zabriskie Point, MASH,
and Five Easy Pieces.
***/****
Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+ starring Catherine
Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Franco Nero, Lola Gaos screenplay
by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Julio Alejandro, based on the novel
by Benito Pérez Galdós directed
by Luis Buñuel
by
Angelo Muredda You might not think it from overdetermined
schlock like Simon
Birch, but disability is a tough trope to wrangle, an
errant bodily signifier that doesn't always play nice. Just think of
Million Dollar Baby,
which tries and fails to use Hilary Swank's
impairment as a
narrative shortcut for Clint Eastwood's transformation into a tender
father,
troubled Catholic, and euthanizer-turned-agent of transcendence all at
once.
Eastwood the director has to stumble over the mechanics of his scene
partner's
newly-maimed body and horizontal status, fudging the timeline so that
her
bedsores appear to sprout within minutes of her injury and puzzling over
how to
frame her, whether as a head poking out of a hospital bed in the
background or
a wheelchair-sporting cyborg parked in dead centre, staring out her
hospital
window like a forlorn puppy. That representational awkwardness is so
common that
in disability studies, it even has a name: Ato Quayson calls it
"aesthetic
nervousness," meaning a text's tendency to collapse in a fit of nerves
before the matter of how to represent a disabled body.
Nude per
l'assassino
***/****
DVD - Image A Sound C+ Extras C-
BD - Image C+ Sound B Extras C starring Edwige Fenech, Nino Castlenuovo, Femi Benussi, Solvi Stubing
screenplay by Massimo Felisatti
directed by Andrea Bianchi
by Walter Chaw It's easy to tag the prurient appeal of Andrea Bianchi's
Strip
Nude for your Killer (if I'd discovered this film in my early
teens, I never would've left the house), but without a lot of effort,
its usefulness as a tool for dissecting its audience of voyeurs becomes
clear as well. Indeed, it's possible to see the picture as a hybrid of
Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (in the equation of
scopophilia with rape and murder) and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up
(in its protagonist's profession (fashion
photographer), its boundaries-testing raciness, and a central mystery
that hinges on a photograph), with every scene of obvious leering
exploitation balanced by a long look in a mirror, a humiliating photo
shoot (something we see in both Peeping Tom and Blow-Up)
reflected upside-down in a metal surface, and what seems like knowing
interpositions of an idea of retributive guilt at the film's bloodiest
moments. Before every giallo set-piece murder, in
fact, Bianchi inserts a flash of the woman killed during a pre-credit
sequence back-alley abortion. It might not be simple morality, but it
does speak to a variety of morality: a championing of demi-innocents
undertaken by a heavy-breathing avatar in a motorcycle helmet and
leather. Could there be a whiff of the pro-woman picture in the
unlikeliest of places?
***½/**** Image
B-
Sound B
Extras D starring
Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Carrie Snodgress, Charles Durning screenplay
by John Farris, based on his novel directed
by Brian DePalma
click any image to
enlarge
by
Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN
EFFECT. While Brian DePalma is nothing if not a leitmotif
filmmaker,
it's curious that he chose to directThe
Fury right after Carrie.
Imagine Spielberg following up Jaws
with Orca--it's
like
De Palma was begging to be pigeonholed. And it's not surprising that The
Fury wasn't as zeitgeisty: it lacks the classical simplicity
and youth
appeal of Carrie, with almost no one in the cast
under 30 save for
future softcore legend Andrew Stevens and Carrie
holdover Amy Irving, a
good actress who just doesn't have that X factor. But The
Fury's echo
can still be heard, because its ending is indeed that impactful. Nearly
every
review mentions it, and the terms in which Pauline Kael and her
acolytes
described it gave it a kind of porny rep that's
since
inspired generations of young film buffs to seek the movie out. (Armond White called it an "orgasm.") It is
a great
ending, but a revisit makes clear that The Fury is worth
reading for the articles.
***½/**** starring Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty, Jack Thompson screenplay by Evan Jones, based on the novel by Kenneth Cook directed by Ted Kotcheff
by Angelo Muredda As exploitation-movie titles go, Wake in Fright suggests a high-concept
reversal of A Nightmare on Elm Street, where the only way to fall
prey to bogeymen is to stay awake. It's a bit of an odd sell, given the more
abstract horror mined by Toronto-born filmmaker Ted Kotcheff, of both The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and First Blood fame. Far from Kravitz
country in its Australian setting but still working in the same territory of
young, ambling men who want to be somebody, Kotcheff's earlier film--first
screened in 1971 to both wild acclaim and great distaste from animal-rights
activists, and somewhat forgotten until its resurrection in the
"Ozploitation" documentary Not Quite Hollywood--is more
interested in the terror of duration without purpose, of waking up when you
have no good reason, than in anything so prosaic as a slasher. Elm Street it
isn't, then, but Kotcheff burrows into his haughty lead's descent into himself--a
stand-in for every thirtysomething man's realization that his coming-of-age has
already happened, to no discernible effect--with a nihilist precision that's
tough to shake off.
COUNTESS DRACULA *½/**** Image
B Sound B+ Extras A starring Ingrid Pitt, Nigel Green, Sandor Eles, Maurice Denham
screenplay by Jeremy Paul
directed by Peter Sasdy
THE VAMPIRE LOVERS ***/****
DVD - Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
BD - Image B+ Sound A- Extras B starring Ingrid Pitt, George Cole, Kate O'Mara,
Peter Cushing
screenplay by Tudor Gates, based on the story "Carmilla" by Sheridan Le Fanu
directed by Roy Ward Baker
click any image to enlarge
by Walter Chaw
Britain's Hammer Studios all but defined the period horror film from
the late-Fifties on, making matinee idols of Christopher Lee and Peter
Cushing as Bram Stoker's Dracula and erstwhile vampire hunter Van
Helsing. But musty is what most Hammer productions remain (with notable
exceptions like Quatermass and the Pit), and as the
drive-in exploitation ethic of Herschell Gordon Lewis began to redefine
the limits of what could be shown with regards to gore and nudity in
the United States (arguably, the European films that found currency in
the Sixties with a more sophisticated audience had as much or more to
do with the "opening" of America's notorious piety), the studio found
itself distressingly out of touch--Merchant/Ivory doing The
Matrix.
The Song Remains the Same **½/****
Image A- Sound A Extras B- starring John Bonham, John Paul Jones,
Jimmy Page, Robert Plant
directed by Joe Massot and Peter Clifton
by Bill Chambers I
was a closet Led Zeppelin fanboy throughout my teen
years. It wasn't because I thought their music reflected poor taste (no
guilty pleasure, they--no need to sic Carl Wilson on me), but rather
because there are connotations to liking them I felt misrepresented me
and my affection for the band as facilitators of emotional catharsis.
Affiliate yourself with The Cure and at the very
least you'll score points with hot goth chicks; affiliate yourself with
Led Zeppelin and expect to spend
your Friday nights rolling 20-sided dice and/or mingling with ersatz
hippies. In retrospect, I had basically separated the Led
Zeppelin discography from the iconographic baggage that came
with it; and I think part of the reason I could never get through The
Song Remains the Same (the movie, not the album, although the
album is no great shakes) as a teenager--other than the fact that, no
matter how you slice it, it simply isn't very good--was
because its goofy non sequiturs and psychedelic glaze endeavoured to
undo all my hard work. I found its imagery psychically intrusive on the
seven minutes a day I spent moping to "The Rain Song."
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