Film Freak Central

Tippi: FFC Interviews Actress Tippi Hedren

A conversation with the last of the Hitchcock Blondes

According to Donald Spoto's 1983 biography The Dark Side of Genius, Alfred Hitchcock's tendency to become overly enamoured with his blonde stars reached an ugly head with Tippi Hedren during the filming of Marnie. Revisiting the book now, several years after first reading it and resisting some of the allegations therein, I see an author whose love for Hitchcock the auteur is at war with the unpleasant details of his subject's emotional life. As Ms. Hedren so delicately put it when I had the pleasure of chatting with her the other night: "As a man, [Hitchcock] was found wanting." Spoto's declaration that Marnie is a result of sloth but also unusually personal and effective as art and even memoir illustrates, I think, the schism at which most scholars of Hitchcock at some point arrive. When I read The Dark Side of Genius as a college freshman, it was a gateway to understanding better exactly what was going on in Notorious, and exactly what Hitchcock's men are always playing out.

The Fighter (2010)

*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo
screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson
directed by David O. Russell

by Walter Chaw In this episode of Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals, former Funky-Bunch yogi and butt-model Wahlberg gets in the ring, but his real challenge comes in the upstaging Method skull-sharpening of Christian Bale and all the white-trash broads of Style Channel's Bostonburba-licious. Oscar-baiting is the least of the picture's myriad crimes, though--tune in to director David O. Russell's absolutely gassed The Fighter for a training montage, an inexplicable '80s soundtrack (pop quiz: Last time Whitesnake used in a film without irony? It's a trick question), and a Rocky trajectory to the Big Fight, this time with Hollywood ending intact. Through it all, centring it like a brick on a shit-blanket, is Wahlberg, his dim-bulb "Say hi to your mother for me, all right?" persona the immovable object stalemating the plot's unstoppable force. The only thing really surprising about The Fighter is that Ron Howard didn't direct it.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Chris Weitz

by Walter Chaw Let's play a Mad Libs game with Chris Weitz's appalling The Twilight Saga: New Moon (hereafter New Moon) and, by so doing, avoid talking about how a new moon is actually the absence of a moon in the sky, or how moon cycles remind me of menstruation, which would be a terrible thing to happen to heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) around her boyfriend Ed (Robert Pattinson). Let's replace every time they say "do it"--and by that they mean "bite me and make me a member of the walking undead"--with "fuck" and see if this whole Twilight atrocity still appears the benign thing for your daughters to gobble up whole. When Bella implores Ed to fuck her after she graduates from high school, for instance, and Ed says that he won't fuck her until she turns twenty-one and they can get married...well, listen, this is a fairytale without any teeth, meaning it's a really, really dangerous fairytale. More, it's illiterate, invasive, moronic proselytizing from some Mormon housewife's blinkered belief system. Unconvinced? Consider that it's stated early on in this instalment of the saga that the reason Ed doesn't want to turn Bella into a vampire--oops, I mean, fuck her--is that he's afraid he'll damn her soul to eternal hellfire.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

**/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by David Slade

by Walter Chaw The first and greatest surprise of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (hereafter Eclipse) is that it's not awful; it's actually almost good for its first forty-five minutes or so, until the burden of Stephenie Meyer's genuinely, legendarily poor source material catches up to it. Until such time, there's some interest blossoming despite itself in the love triangle between mopey Bella (Kristen Stewart), fruity Edward (Robert Pattinson), and swarthy Jacob (Taylor Lautner): a hint of racial discomfort, a soupçon of class struggle, a glimmer of insight given over to the difficulties of teen relationships at a moment in life when Nancy Drew plays like Richard Wagner. Never mind that of the three leads, only Pattinson delivers a (surprisingly, too) good performance--and then only fitfully; never mind that Meyer has taken a giant, steaming dump on centuries of folklore and tradition to construct thin cardboard monsters that serve as bad metaphors for Mormon libido (as told by Judy Blume's less talented soul sister); never mind that the picture's entire last two-thirds devolves into constant repetition of the will she/won't she theme punctuated by its stupid mythology. Really, the way that new director David Slade's flat-to-the-point-of-garish camera brings out the faintest suggestion of corruption beneath the pancake makeup and baggy eyes of the film's immortal underwear models--who are, literally, ancient beasts--lends the series the dread that was buried in the first two films under volumes of camp and dreary incompetence. Not to say that Eclipse doesn't ultimately end as the same old bullshit, but for the first time, if only briefly, the clouds part for a brief, tantalizing twinkle of what it was that all this could have been.

In the Mood for Love (2000) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk
written and directed by Wong Kar-wai

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw The middle film in a loose trilogy by Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar-wai (the others are Days of Being Wild and 2046), In the Mood for Love is a love-drunk ode to the confusion, the intoxication, the magic, and the tragedy of being in love. It speaks in terms proximate and eternal, presenting lovers cast in various roles across years and alien geographies, placing some objects in the position of totem and memento and others in historical dustbins to be abandoned, forgotten. It links the act of watching a film to the act of seduction (Days of Being Wild might be even better at this), and there's a strong sense in In the Mood for Love that Wong is playing the artifactor of both sign and signifier: He's doing the T.S. Eliot two-step of authoring Prufrock while simultaneously providing the distance to criticize it.

Take This Waltz (2012) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby, Sarah Silverman
written and directed by Sarah Polley

click any image to enlarge

by Angelo Muredda As both literary adaptations and first features go, Sarah Polley's Away from Her was an astonishing exercise in restraint. Working from Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," about a seventysomething married couple whose longstanding private games turn into something else when Fiona (Julie Christie) is diagnosed with dementia, Polley forewent the ostentatious route of many first-time directors by telling the story straight. It's become customary, in speaking of that film, to chalk up this directness to the source material--Munro is, after all, known for her frankness, and apart from the expansion of Olympia Dukakis's character and a Hockey Night in Canada gag, Polley ported her narrative beats over more or less wholesale. But Munro has a certain nastiness, not least in her omniscient narrators' cutting observations, that's largely absent from Polley's adaptation, which has particular sympathy for Gordon Pinsent's reformed husband, who's more of a forgetful cad in the short story. It's a standard line to say that Munro reserves judgment, particularly towards her adulterers, but what of the ghoulishness of her characterization, in Lives of Girls and Women, of small-town scolds who say things like, "The law-yer, didn't he think he was somebody?" Polley doesn't get sufficient credit for translating what she can of that prickliness--which also runs through "Bear"--and molding the rest into something unabashedly romantic.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 (2012) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Bob Goodman, based upon the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson
directed by Jay Oliva

by Jefferson Robbins There's nothing left. Batman: Year One is so last year, The Killing Joke basically got turned into The Dark Knight, and "Watchmen" has become both a big-movie flopola and a prequel comics series. With Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 on shelves now and its concluding Part 2 due on direct-to-video disc this winter, the DC Universe has basically wrung itself dry of compelling product from the '80s comics revolution that it can repurpose into features and animated editions. The bones remain for new stories, but the cost-benefit on original work vs. revivified fan favourites ever tilts towards the latter. Those of us who discovered or returned to superhero comics as a result of Frank Miller's and Alan Moore's mature deconstructions are seeing their final fruits. The only burning question is how many shmoes bought this package from Amazon thinking they were getting The Dark Knight Rises in half of a special two-disc edition.