Film Freak Central

The Rules of the Game (1939) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

La règle du jeu
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Nora Grégor, Marcel Dalio, Mila Parély, Roland Toutain
screenplay by Jean Renoir and Carl Koch
directed by Jean Renoir

by Jefferson Robbins One political cue most firmly plants Jean Renoir's masterwork in pre-World War II France, and it doesn't come amidst the posturing of the elegant rich at La Colinière country manor. Rather, it's in the kitchen, where the domestic staff breaks bread and gossips about the master of the house, the Marquis Robert De La Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), outed by the help as a "yid" whose family made good with money and a title. The gossipers turn for confirmation to the huntsman who's just materialized on the stairs, and the combination of words is chilling: "Isn't that right, Schumacher?" The italics are mine, and despite the fierce Teutonic consonants of his name, the marquis's game warden (Gaston Modot) is Alsatian. He remains metaphorically sticky, though, since his home state was variously French or German for 200 years, and his dress and cap bespeak armed authority. He's rough and field-hardened, arguably ignorant, and looked down upon by his fellow servants, who see him as a thing apart from their world. Cuckolded and exiled from his wife, the housemaid Lisette (Paulette Dubost), he's also the most prone to physical violence as he seeks to control her and eliminate all rivalry. On the matter of La Chesnaye's Jewishness, Schumacher demurs: "I don't know what you're talking about." But the point is made, the knife already twisted.

Straw Dogs (1971) - DVD

****/**** Image B Sound B
starring Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Peter Vaughan, T.P. McKenna
screenplay by David Zelag Goodman and Sam Peckinpah, based on the novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm by Gordon M. Williams
directed by Sam Peckinpah

by Walter Chaw Straw Dogs is about an evil man who has so divorced himself from animal logic that he's become monstrous. He's cruel to his wife, comparing her to a child when she's lonesome and an animal when she's amorous, and he blames her for his detachment from himself. She gets impatient during foreplay if he chooses to take a moment to set his alarm or remove his watch, ergo she must be a nymphomaniac of low breeding. At one point, she mischievously changes a "plus" sign on his chalkboard to a minus and he changes it back so that it looks like a crucifix: the instrument of his martyrdom, the faith of his castration--the ideology that seeks to isolate him from his bestial nature. Finally, when she wishes to run away, he loses his grip on carefully-nurtured civilization, slaps her across the face, and orders her upstairs to the bedroom in the same way that Victorian women were banished from the room upon outliving the delight provided by their servile domesticity. This monster moves to a small Cornish village, where he insists on the creature comforts of home, paid for by a grant to study mathematics, of all things. And in the village the monster ultimately finds himself amongst men of a truer nature.

Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue (2010) - Blu-ray + DVD

**/**** ImageA- Sound B- Extras C
screenplay by Joe Ansolabehere, Paul Germain, Bob Hilgenberg, Rob Muir
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Jefferson Robbins There's this thing in children's fiction I call the Curious George Effect. A character transgresses, and in the context of that character's world it's a big hairy deal, potentially life-threatening. But the repercussions are so nifty-neato that the initial sin is shrugged off, perhaps never mentioned again, perhaps not explicitly identified as an error in the first place. The consequences for the guilty character are as follows: anxiety, cool adventure, reset to status quo.

Orca: The Killer Whale (1977) - DVD

Orca
***/**** Image B Sound B
starring Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, Will Sampson, Bo Derek
screenplay by Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati
directed by Michael Anderson

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I was scared off of Orca, widely considered to be one of the worst films of all-time. The movie had a reputation as a bad Jaws rip-off and my last viewing of a bad Jaws rip-off was Lamberto Bava's Devilfish on "Mystery Science Theater 3000", which was awful enough to make me question what I was doing spending my Saturday mornings watching "Mystery Science Theater 3000". Well, I'm pleased to report that Orca's reputation is completely unwarranted. Critics and audiences were wrong, they just didn't get it. They labelled it a "Jaws rip-off" before setting foot in the theatre and watched it on autopilot.

Maniac (1980) [30th Anniversary Edition] + Vigilante (1983) - Blu-ray Discs

MANIAC
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A+
starring Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro
screenplay by C.A. Rosenberg and Joe Spinell
directed by William Lustig

VIGILANTE
*½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Robert Forster, Fred Williamson, Richard Bright, Woody Strode
screenplay by Richard Vetere
directed by William Lustig

by Walter Chaw William Lustig reduces exploitation cinema to the filthy stepchild of Sams Peckinpah and Fuller: one part animal logic, one part tabloid paranoia. He wallows in impulse, and his sensibility is 42^nd Street grindhouse through and through, from kitchen-sink production values to disjointed vignette presentations to a generally lawless indulgence towards atrocity. If Lustig's pictures have achieved a kind of cult lustre, credit his ability to alternate action sequences with B-legends showcases. It would be a mistake to attribute more to Lustig's pictures than workmanlike efficiency as applied to formula prurience, though there's something to be said for knock-off garbage done with a lack of pretension--done, in fact, with a distinct, naïve childishness that doesn't quite get down there with Jess Franco or Herschell Gordon Lewis (nor up there with Mario Bava or Dario Argento), but manages a little interest despite itself now and again, probably by (who cares?) accident.

Side Effects (2013)

***/****
starring Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Channing Tatum
screenplay by Scott Z. Burns
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Whatever you may think of the distinctive yellow patina that creeps across his filmography, Steven Soderbergh is something of a chameleon artist, prone to the compulsive shape-shifting that's led some to mischaracterize commercial work like the Ocean's series as mere Hollywood capital to be cashed in on ambitious curios like Bubble. If anything, it's the Ocean's movies that most bear his signature in their attention to complex systems run amok and their indulgence of postmodern genre pastiche, which recur in projects as disparate as Haywire and Magic Mike. Both tendencies are in full force in psycho-thriller Side Effects, ostensibly the last of Soderbergh's theatrical releases and in many ways the most quintessentially Soderberghian despite its impersonal subject. It's an unusual swan song but perhaps the ideal one for a director who's always revealed himself in his formalist rigor, the conspicuous act of emptying out his idiosyncrasies into preexisting generic containers--in this case, half-a-dozen of them.

The Vampire Diaries: The Complete First Season (2009-2010) - Blu-ray Disc

Image C+ Sound B- Extras C-
"Pilot," "The Night of the Comet," "Friday Night Bites,""Family Ties," "You're Undead to Me," "Lost Girls," "Haunted," "162 Candles," "History Repeating," "The Turning Point," "Bloodlines," "Unpleasantville," "Children of the Damned," "Fool Me Once," "A Few Good Men," "There Goes the Neighborhood," "Let the Right One In," "Under Control," "Miss Mystic Falls," "Blood Brothers," "Isobel," "Founder's Day"

by Walter Chaw You can diagnose things like Kevin Williamson's tween opera "The Vampire Diaries" by how much of the dialogue consists of peoples' names. "Hey, Ben is with Carrie down in the tomb with Josie and Halley. Chris said he and Caroline would meet us there, but then Damon said that Stefan was going instead, but Stefan still has feelings for Elena..." OMFG, amiright? Add to that a liberal use of music by the likes of Matt Kearney, The Fray, and Bat for Lashes, mix sloppily with flavour-of-the-month genre fetish, and, voilà!, the kind of thing everyone describes as a "guilty pleasure"--which basically means they're not telling you they also enjoy "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo". The remainder of the dialogue is interested in secret parentage, secret siblings, and this and that about lore to establish credibility while simultaneously demonstrating that everyone involved in this one has read more books than Stephenie Meyer (a low bar) and is aware of Stephenie Meyer...and Heath Ledger...and Emily Brontë. Never mind, you wouldn't understand. Similarly difficult to understand are magic rings that allow vampires to walk around in daylight, ancient tombs sealed by Creole witches led by that bitch from "A Different World", and a complex series of events that need to happen before one of this show's vampires is able to turn one of this show's hot little nymphos into a vampire. It's a metaphor--not for abstinence, per se, but maybe for embarrassing tumescence. That's right, "The Vampire Diaries" is a boner joke.

Bad Boys II (2003)

½/****
starring Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Gabrielle Union, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw The very curious thing about Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer's latest dip into the shallow end is that for as vile as it is, for as putrid and unforgivable as it is, Bad Boys II may be the first Bay/Bruckheimer collaboration that marks a clear debt to a filmmaking tradition other than that blazed by John McTiernan. Sure, it's got the slick surfaces and the ear-shattering explosions, the impossible sets (a cop can afford a few acres of prime beachfront property in Florida only in this breed of American mainstream twaddle) and class hatred (complete with fetishistic worship of guns and cars and all other things associated with diminutive penis size), but what Bad Boys II also has is a child's working knowledge of the incendiary Hong Kong "heroic bloodshed" cinema of the 1980s. What it lacks is that genre's sense of gravity, interest in the balance between good and evil, and the mysterious bonds between men--it's missing finesse in its choreography, purpose in its relentless bloodletting, even a basic understanding of decency and honour. Without any recognizable human qualities, then, what Bad Boys II presents to the world is something genuinely sinister and twisted: nothing more than a reptilian collage of seething and hatred that stands as possibly the most misanthropic, nihilistic, exploitative, hopeless film ever released as a major studio's mainstream blockbuster. It is easily the most expensive exploitation film I've ever seen--and besides, not nearly so funny or interesting as the similarly-themed Joe Piscopo/Treat Williams shoestring vehicle Dead Heat of many moons ago.

Finding Neverland (2004)

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by David Magee, based on the play "The Man Who Was Peter Pan" by Allan Knee
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster's Finding Neverland is well-traveled territory: a historical melodrama that's been over-scored to the point of diabetes and overwritten to the point of retardation. The presumption isn't that we're unfamiliar with J.M. Barrie's play "Peter Pan", but that we're incapable of understanding that this adaptation of Alan Knee's play "The Man Who Was Peter Pan", now three degrees removed from history, lives and dies by its conveyance of the idea that the dagger of make-believe is mightier than the mundane sword of reality. How better, after all, to tell the tale of the man who created one of the darkest, most brilliantly subversive attacks on the status quo than to return him to the land of storytelling and mythmaking? Forster seems to get it--the film looks ravishing and the casting of sprightly, ethereal Johnny Depp as Barrie is a stroke of genius, but both actor and director are betrayed by a project that side-steps the disturbing issues at hand in its suggestion of this Barrie's suspected paedophilic tendencies and his inability to grow up. "Peter Pan" is the shadow; the tedious and evasive Finding Neverland is the candle. The J.M. Barrie estate is upset that the film isn't accurate. They should be upset that it isn't very good.

Peter Pan (2003)

***½/****
starring Jason Isaacs, Jeremy Sumpter, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Lynn Redgrave
screenplay by P.J. Hogan and Michael Goldenberg, based on the play by James M. Barrie
directed by P.J. Hogan

by Walter Chaw A perverse lollapalooza of loaded images and disquieting implications, P.J. Hogan's live-action Peter Pan is this year's most intriguing Freudian shipwreck, resurrecting the darkness and poetic pessimism of J.M. Barrie's play--and Peter and Wendy, Barrie's own novelization--that has been all but forgotten since Disney's well-regarded 1953 treatment. (While nowhere near as saccharine as something as mendacious as Brother Bear, that animated version is still of a Disney tradition that washes dangerous source material mostly clean of credible malice.) At its heart, consider that the Pan story is about child seduction/abduction in the Yeatsian "Stolen Child" tradition, and a colony of "lost boys" that have forgotten their parents and, crucially, been forgotten in turn. The mirror of a parent's love discarded in this way renders the film's heart-warming conclusion a touch bitter, with the spectre of the question "but what about their parents?" hanging over it.