Film Freak Central

True Blood: The Complete Fifth Season (2012) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Image A- Sound A Extras B
"Turn! Turn! Turn!," "Authority Always Wins," "Whatever I Am, You Made Me," "We'll Meet Again," "Let's Boot and Rally," "Hopeless," "In the Beginning," "Somebody That I Used to Know," "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," "Gone, Gone, Gone," "Sunset," "Save Yourself"

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by Bill Chambers In general, TV series aren't built to last beyond four seasons. I think it has something to do with how the educational system teaches us that four-year cycles end in graduation. Showrunners consequently feel an obligation to symbolically reboot in season five--to send the high-schoolers off to college ("Dawson's Creek"), to recast the leads ("The Dukes of Hazzard"), to have Fonzie waterski over Jaws ("Happy Days"). To be fair, redefining the status quo doesn't always mean jumping the shark: for every Cousin Oliver, after all, there's a Dawn Summers. Unfortunately, "True Blood" is not one of the exceptions to the rule, as it goes off the rails in its fifth season in a way that is different from those countless other times it seemed to be flying a kamikaze mission towards ratings oblivion. (This is a show that has elevated jumping the shark to an artform.) A good chunk of the season is devoted to vampires--creatures who can, in the "True Blood"-verse, run like The Flash, fly, and fuck like pornstars--sitting around a conference table debating politics and religion, and the other "super" groups don't exactly pick up the slack, what with the werewolves holding auditions for a new pack leader and the faes throwing slumber parties with their new BFF, Sookie.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic (2005) - DVD

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Liam Lynch

by Walter Chaw It starts off on the wrong foot and never recovers, this first showcase for the brilliant Sarah Silverman to strut her aggressively, pointedly offensive stuff. Something about the deadpan seriousness of her delivery sells jokes about being raped by her doctor ("A very bittersweet experience for a Jewish girl"), about the "alleged" Holocaust, about how the best time to have a baby is "when you're a black teenager," or about how she'll always remember 9/11 as the day she discovered how many calories were in a soy chai latte. And that you're never meant to know with absolute certainty if she's aware exactly how horrible are the things she's saying could be part of the schtick.

On the Phone with Jena Malone...: FFC Interviews Jena Malone

June 12, 2002|In the six years since she played the Jodie Foster character as a young ham radio enthusiast in Contact and Jennifer Jason Leigh's troubled daughter in Anjelica Huston's acclaimed Bastard Out of Carolina, Jena Malone has cornered the market on damaged adolescent goods. Maybe you remember her giving Julia Roberts lip in Stepmom, or asking Kevin Costner if he slept with Kelly Preston in For Love of the Game, or committing infanticide and pinning it on her dim boyfriend in a two-parter of TV's "Homicide". Perhaps, like me, you're a big fan of Donnie Darko, to which she brings the balance of calm--she is the film's earthy centre.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984) [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

****/****
DVD - Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
BD - Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Tuesday Weld
screenplay by Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, Sergio Leone & Stuart Kaminsky, based on the novel The Hoods by Howard Grey
directed by Sergio Leone

by Bill Chambers Such is the level of cinematic sophistication in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America that all of the miserable things that happen in the picture make you giddy, filling you with the joy that is basking in an artist's command of a medium. At first, the powers-that-be didn't get it: Warner Bros. took Leone's non-linear vision and straightened it out, and the result was a picture that, though chronologically told, made no sense. This was a fascinating lesson in syntax--films are composed of "meanwhile"s, not "and then"s, perhaps none more so than Once Upon a Time in America, which is about the co-existence of past, present, and future tenses. (It's like an extrapolation of the riddle of the Sphinx: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?) Luckily, the studio saw the error of its ways and reissued Once Upon a Time in America a year after its butchered American release in its longer, knottier international form, and to illustrate the dramatic disparity between the 139-minute domestic and 227-minute global versions, critic Sheila Benson labelled the former the worst movie of 1984 and the latter the best movie of the 1980s. Pauline Kael wrote, "I don't believe I've ever seen a worse case of mutilation."

Invictus (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon, Tony Kgoroge, Patrick Mofokeng
screenplay by Anthony Peckham, based on the book Playing the Enemy by John Carlin
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw During an awards season seemingly devoted to surveying the racial divide, Clint Eastwood's Invictus lands a glancing blow as a Reconciliation sports melodrama that avoids the hysterical outburst even as it fails to hit one out of the park. Of the two, I think I'd rather the former. Expecting a (more) self-important Hoosiers, I was pleasantly surprised by Eastwood's leisurely, cocksure, tempered-by-age stroll through the first days post-Apartheid as Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman, finally playing Abraham Lincoln) is tasked with the near-impossible job of suturing a nation coming out from under a long Plantation nightmare without his administration becoming exactly what the minority Afrikaner fears. It locates sports as one quick avenue to the heart of the lowest common denominator (just as the existence of Invictus locates film as another), and it fires dual salvos at its audience by first being a sports underdog uplift flick without much sports or uplift, then in not deigning to explain the fundamentals of rugby to its American audience, instead launching a quick jab at America's reluctance to engage the worlds' pastimes (rugby and soccer, notably). What it really does for the race conversation is allow Eastwood the opportunity to at last feature Freeman in a movie designed around him as opposed to having him--as he did in Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven--function as a comparative component against which the white protagonist is memorialized and measured. Better late than never.

Giant (1956) [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD

***/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Carroll Baker
screenplay by Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat, based on the novel by Edna Ferber
directed by George Stevens

by Bill Chambers Imperfect, cumbersome, George Stevens's 1956 melodrama Giant indeed lives up to its title, ploughing through its protracted story with "fee-fi-fo-fum" grace. Released during a time when films were seriously vying for attention against television, Giant stands apart from the other consequences of dire studio measures besides gargantuan length (widescreen, quadraphonic sound, more location work) by devoting its two-hundred-and-one minutes not to religion (The Ten Commandments, also 1956) or war (The Bridge on the River Kwai), but to the lives of an extended family--an ensemble ethic that had gradually fallen out of vogue following 1946's The Best Years of Our Lives. In a way, Giant ironically serves as a precursor for the sudsers and mini-series that would become small-screen mainstays, and it goes without saying that in this day and age, the cinema leeches off TV with reckless abandon.

V for Vendetta (2006) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, John Hurt
screenplay by The Wachowski Brothers, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore & David Lloyd
directed by James McTeigue

by Walter Chaw As documents for the opposition go, V for Vendetta may be the ballsiest, angriest picture of the current administration, flashing without apology images of naked prisoners of the state, shackled in black hoods and held in clear acrylic boxes while a febrile talking head and his cloistered intimates (called "fingers") form a closed fist around them. It surmises a future where the government plants stories in centrally-owned media conglomerates, controlling groupthink by providing just one point of view. Woe be unto those with a critical mind because what, after all, is more dangerous to a dictatorial theocracy than a question? But more, the picture is an impassioned plea for alternative lifestyles, exposing the melodrama of Brokeback Mountain to be embarrassed, even polite, when the struggle for equal regard is something that should be undertaken with passion and brio--it's life and death, and V for Vendetta presents it as such. There are no half measures in a film that takes as its hero an eloquent monologist in a Guy Fawkes mask (Hugo Weaving), his erstwhile, reluctant sidekick a young woman, Evey (Natalie Portman), transformed through the government-sanctioned abduction of her parents and a period of torture and imprisonment into not an avenging angel, but a voice of reason. How fascinating that the reasonable solution in the picture is the destruction of Britain's Parliament on the Thames.

The Rambo DVD Trilogy [Special Edition] - DVD

FIRST BLOOD (1981)
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy, Bill McKinney
screenplay by Michael Kozoll & William Sackheim and Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel by David Morrell
directed by Ted Kotcheff

RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II (1985)
*½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Charles Napier, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and James Cameron
directed by George P. Cosmatos

RAMBO III (1988)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Marc de Jonge, Kurtwood Smith
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Sheldon Lettich
directed by Peter MacDonald

by Bill Chambers Ted Kotcheff's melancholy First Blood opens with Vietnam vet John Rambo looking up a fellow soldier and discovering that the man has died. Sullen, he hits the road, only to be harassed by the town sheriff (Brian Dennehy), who sees long-haired drifters wearing surplus jackets and thinks: Troublemaker. Possessed of a disposition similar to that of Bill Bixby's David Banner, Rambo 'Hulks out' after being stripped of his dignity in the bowels of the police station, escaping his jailers' clutches and squealing off into a mountainous region of the Pacific Northwest on a stolen motorcycle. His mission is one of self-preservation; Rambo doesn't start committing premeditated murder until the sequel. (Unlike in the David Morrell source novel, where Rambo is a veritable serial killer, however justified his rage.)

Cloverfield (2008) - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

***½/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras A
BD - Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, T.J. Miller, Michael Stahl-David
screenplay by Drew Goddard
directed by Matt Reeves 

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I love its freedom and its exuberance, its sense of fun and its creativity. I love that it uses The Blair Witch Project as a launchpad for its low-tech, found-footage brilliance; I love its genius-level viral marketing campaign and its Ludditism and overt technophobia. Where The Blair Witch Project skewered trust-fund kids picking a particularly unfortunate senior project, Cloverfield takes on twentysomething urbanites on top of the world in Manhattan, celebrating the departure of one of their own on the night the chickens come home to roost. There's no explanation of the mayhem in Cloverfield beyond that a monster has attacked and that the recoil its rampage spawns inevitably resembles memories of our collective scarring by 9/11. All it does, really, is clarify that when people at Ground Zero referred to the falling of the WTC as "just like in a movie," it didn't point to a divorce from reality but to an inability, utterly, to conceive of anything so epoch-shaking as possible outside the prism of our precious, silver-graven images. The history depicted in our films is the only history we know.

Dark Skies (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Keri Russell, Josh Hamilton, Dakota Goyo, J.K. Simmons
written and directed by Scott Stewart

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by Bill Chambers Dark Skies takes place in the days leading up to the Fourth of July. The movie thus promises fireworks--and it delivers, albeit on a modest scale befitting its humble suburban milieu. Like Signs, it's such an insular take on the alien-visitation genre it could almost be performed on the stage; unlike Signs, it's not pious to a fault (surprisingly, given that writer-director Scott Stewart previously made Legion and Priest), and its lapses in logic aren't as maddening because they're built into the film's very ethos, with a Whitley Streiber type (lent unexpected pathos by a Hunter S. Thompson-dressed J.K. Simmons) opining late in the proceedings that aliens are unfathomable to us in the same way that humans are unfathomable to lab rats. There are a lot of superficial similarities to Signs, actually, such as the way the picture uses asthma and walkie-talkie devices as narrative keystones and its climactic transformation of the family home into a fortress. For that matter, Poltergeist, Paranormal Activity, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are liberally paraphrased as well; over three films, Stewart has shown himself to be nothing if not a magpie artist. The good news, which would normally be upsetting news, is that the producers of Dark Skies are Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who seem to rein in Stewart's other bad habits, like snail's pacing and a tendency towards arcane mythology. Third time's the charm.