Film Freak Central

Black Knight (2001) - DVD

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Martin Lawrence, Tom Wilkinson, Marsha Thomason, Vincent Regan
screenplay by Darryl J. Quarles and Peter Gaulke & Gerry Swallow
directed by Gil Junger

by Walter Chaw Jamal Walker (Martin Lawrence) is a groundskeeper at an all-black amusement park who, just prior to falling in a stagnant moat, is given a dressing down for being "selfish" and not community-minded enough. ("Community" referring to the African-American populace of South Central Los Angeles.) Sharp-eyed viewers should instantly recognize that Black Knight will at some point metastasize from a farce to a public service announcement. (Luckily, we're given a solid first act and a few moments in the second before it does.) When Jamal goes into the moat in pursuit of a golden medallion, he surfaces from a fetid stew in a never-never land where the plain protagonist becomes the keystone in a kingdom-wide intrigue.

The Rundown (2003) [Widescreen] - DVD

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring The Rock, Seann William Scott, Christopher Walken, Rosario Dawson
screenplay by R.J. Stewart amd James Vanderbilt
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw There's an ebullient lustre to Peter Berg's dedicatedly obnoxious The Rundown, an action film with so little pretension that it actually comes off as smart. It's the same peculiar phenomenon that makes of Laurel & Hardy geniuses after the fact, banking on timing and carefully cultivated absurdity to at once define and rejuvenate the mismatched buddy-on-the-run genre. Consider a scene in which Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson fights a tribe of pygmy Brazilian freedom fighters, edited and choreographed like a Yuen Brothers wu xia married to a Weissmuller Tarzan flick. Delirious and ridiculous, exciting in spite of itself, The Rundown is the kind of adrenalized filmmaking that is, in fact, more intelligent and misanthropic than it seems. More, it's not a fluke: Actor Berg's directorial debut Very Bad Things remains, along with Doug Liman's Go, one of the great underestimated time-capsule pitch black comedies of the late-Nineties. If not for a few glaring moments where Berg displays the first symptoms of obfuscating Danny Boyle disease (CGI pullouts, nauseating zooms, and meaningless hyper-edits), particularly in its prologue, The Rundown would be something of a cult all-timer.

Rob Roy (1995) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image B Sound B
starring Liam Neeson, Jessica Lange, John Hurt, Tim Roth
screenplay by Alan Sharp
directed by Michael Caton-Jones

by Jefferson Robbins Did they name a cocktail after William Wallace? I didn't think so. In this, the later Scots hero Robert Roy MacGregor has the advantage, as he does in the film drawn from his story. Rob Roy beat Mel Gibson's Braveheart into theatres by more than a month, and it's the superior product. But what challenge could Michael Caton-Jones's courtly, well-crafted tale of swash and buckle--his only film set in his home country--mount against the bludgeoning, ass-baring, gay-defenestrating fever dream of a megastar who yearned to be stretched on the rack in imitation of his Lord?

Thunder in the Pines (1948)/Jungle Goddess (1948) [George Reeves Double Feature] - DVD

THUNDER IN THE PINES
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring George Reeves, Ralph Byrd, Greg McClure, Michael Whalen
screenplay by Maurice Tombragel
directed by Robert Edwards

JUNGLE GODDESS
*/**** Image C- Sound B Extras C
starring George Reeves, Ralph Byrd, Wanda McKay, Armida
screenplay by Jo Pagano
directed by Lewis D. Collins

by Alex Jackson Was George Reeves a talented or interesting enough actor to merit VCI digging up a couple of his 1948 demi-features and releasing them on DVD? Without the novelty of him later becoming television's Superman and the rumours of conspiracy surrounding his suicide, there's nothing particularly engaging about the actor. In Thunder in the Pines, it looks like Reeves might be the poor man's Kirk Douglas (whose star was rising at around the same time). The Douglas persona is jovial and heroic, sensitive but manly--essentially, for me at least, he's an idealized father figure. This seems to be what Reeves is going for, but he's only operating at half the wattage. He isn't a star and hasn't the confidence of Douglas, that audacity to dominate the picture whenever he's on-screen. He's just a small fry.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) - Combo Pack: Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Andy Serkis
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo Del Toro, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Shot at a vaunted 48 frames-per-second to better approximate the television soap opera its mammoth length suggests, Peter Jackson's vainglorious trainwreck The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (hereafter "Hobbit 1") looks for all intents and purposes like its own porn knock-off. A technological "advancement" that is to the naked eye identical to any episode of reality television or live sporting event you've been watching in your living room for years, the 48fps "breakthrough" was for Jackson a way of making the increasingly unpopular new-gen 3-D a little bit less crappy. It's like putting a dress on a pig. Understand, complaints about "HFR" are not akin to the bellyaching about colour film or CinemaScope, since those innovations didn't actively cheapen the moviegoing experience. The irony of all that being, of course, that while the image indeed doesn't stutter or blur as much in 3-D, what we're forced to look at is overlit, obviously artificial, and reminded me more than once of the jarringly amateurish "Star Wars Holiday Special".

Ben-Hur (1959) [Fiftieth Anniversary Limited Edition] - Blu-ray Disc|[Fiftieth Anniversary] Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, Haya Harareet, Stephen Boyd
screenplay by Karl Tunberg, based on the novel by Lew Wallace
directed by William Wyler

click any image to enlarge

Editor's Note: Warner has just reissued Ben-Hur on Blu-ray minus the third disc and material bonuses of the box set, although this release does include the commentary and isolated music score. Technical specs remain unchanged.

by Jefferson Robbins Charlton Heston's Judah Ben-Hur is a Jew in a Roman world, but his emotional journey is all Greek. It's 26 AD, and Judah's bond of friendship, his philia, with Roman noble Messala (Stephen Boyd), is sorely tested. When this bond breaks and Judah's entire family suffers under the Roman version of justice, his romantic love, eros, for his servant's daughter, Esther (Haya Harareet), is smothered by hate and vengefulness. What is left him? Only a really bitchin' chariot race--the paramount action-chase scene in movie history, not matched for twenty years (see below) and still never bettered--and the hope of agape, the love and yearning between Man and God. This faithful but frustrated son of the Torah must learn that path through brushing contact with the new rabbi in town: a humble carpenter's son, bound for glory on the Hill of Skulls.

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

ZERO STARS/****
starring James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams
screenplay by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Based on L. Frank Baum's little-known Pussyhound of Oz, Sam Raimi's career nadir Oz the Great and Powerful (hereafter O-Gap) answers the question of who you would ask to anchor your $300M+ tentpole extravaganza: yes, James Franco, who's now claimed the mantle of the worst actor in the United States from the quiescent Paul Walker. Franco is an avatar of the picture's bad decisions, from the Zach Braff-voiced CGI monkey sidekick to the sassy CGI Hummel figurine to the tragic miscasting of Mila Kunis as Theodora, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West. Yes indeedy, fans of the MGM original, of Baum's wondrous series of books, and of the shit-show "Wicked" will all hate it equally--almost as much as neophytes to the whole damned mess who will come for what Raimi's proudly proclaimed "the ultimate Disney movie" and leave with a mouthful of exactly as promised. It's blindingly obnoxious, tasteless in a meaningless way, and occasionally makes reference to Army of Darkness just because, I suspect, Raimi's last-resort defensive posture is to fall back on what he knows. But it's not nearly enough to save him here. The argument with weight is that the more expensive a movie becomes, the less likely it's going to be good; the first clue that Raimi is creatively bankrupt is that while his buddy Bruce Campbell appears in this film, Campbell isn't the star.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre, Nova Pilbeam
screenplay by Charles Bennett, D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, Edwin Greenwood and A.R. Rawlinson
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw The first fascination of Alfred Hitchcock's original The Man Who Knew Too Much is that when a dashing foreign agent (Pierre Fresnay) is shot just minutes into the film, it's Jill (Edna Best), the wife in the heroic central couple, who's privy to his last words. They're dancing together in the middle of a ballroom that feels like a glass cage (naturally) when the dastardly deed is done, a married English woman on holiday with husband Bob (Leslie Banks) and daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam), who look on approvingly. When Hitchcock remakes this movie 22 years later with Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart, he has Ugly American Jimmy (the one privy to the dying man's last words) drug his hysterical wife in the first of many instances of Hitchcock undermining Stewart's status as everyone's favourite Yank. 1934's The Man Who Knew too Much, like so much of Hitchcock's British output (this is the first of his six films for Gaumont), remains current for scholars looking for tropes, images, sequences that prefigure his later work. The premature demise of what would have traditionally been the star of the picture (poor, dead Louis, also a champion ski-jumper) prefigures Psycho, of course, while the glass cages recur everywhere from Young and Innocent (which likewise features the musical plot point of this film) to Notorious to Hitch's collaborations with Tippi Hedren. A gaze at the 34-minute mark through wrought-iron gates predicts the moment of discovery in Strangers on a Train, followed fast by a deliciously uncomfortable dentist sequence I'm surprised Hitch never came back to. Leave that, I suppose, to William Goldman and Marathon Man.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)

*/****
starring Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Sean Bean
screenplay by Craig Titley, based on the novel by Rick Riordan
directed by Chris Columbus

by Walter Chaw You don't have to have read Ovid to enjoy Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (hereafter The Lightning Thief), because, hell, no one involved in the production appears to have read him. In fact, having a cursory knowledge of Greek mythology will mostly serve to irritate you, as the picture runs roughshod over a whole other religion whilst merging many of its images with Christian myth in an attempt to somehow justify itself to an imaginary audience of affronted, I don't know, Protestants? What other reason could there be to bastardize the Greek conception of the underworld by mixing it with Milton's? Actually, in conception, the movie's Hades (Steve Coogan) owes a lot more to Peter Jackson's Balrog than to Blake's illuminations, and suddenly director Chris Columbus's motivations come into sharper focus. Not having any familiarity with Rick Riordan's popular tween novels, the first of which is adapted for this film, I can only comment that I also didn't appreciate a Stepin Fetchit character, Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), who fulfills a threefer function as talking animal/pet (he's a satyr), token black guy comic relief, and uncomfortable throwback to the bad old days of sideshow coon. No better way to inject levity than to have a hilarious black guy crack wise, widen his eyes, and declare his everlasting fealty to massah. Maybe he exists under the same rationale as Jar Jar Binks and the Na'vi: that fictional creatures can't be racist caricatures and, besides, this venomous stereotyping is in a children's film, so we should all just relax. Regardless, The Lightning Thief could play on a double bill with The Blind Side for a cozy trip back to the '30s in American cinema.

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.