Film Freak Central

The Master (2012) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Of all the recognizable and memorable phrases that John Keats contributed to the English language, this ranks high:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/****Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins, Edward Everett Horton
screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the play by Noel Coward
directed by Ernst Lubitsch

by Walter Chaw The impulse to call the work of Ernst Lubitsch "frothy" and "bubbly" and otherwise insubstantial (a practice excoriated, rightfully so, by film scholar William Paul on Criterion's Blu-ray release of Design for Living) obscures the fact that none of Lubitsch's romantic masterpieces would carry any kind of resonance without an essential heart of darkness and decay. The oft-invoked "Lubitsch Touch"--that well-circulated anecdote that Billy Wilder hung the words "What Would Lubitsch Do" above his office door--suggests to me the wellspring of the asshole element in Wilder's works: the idea that Wilder was just Hitchcock undercover, with Lubitsch influencing both directors in ways obvious and not so and not in terms of a "light" touch so much as a decidedly bitter one. Take my favourite Lubitsch film, Trouble in Paradise, which begins with a trash barge in the middle of the night in a Venice we don't see again until Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. The picture proceeds to document the love affair between two professional thieves and the innocent woman who falls victim to them. In that, there's a direct reference to hated President Hoover's deep-in-the-Depression platitude that "prosperity is right around the corner," offered in piercing irony for a cash-strapped audience for whom the theatre had most likely just lowered their admission to a dime. The "Lubitsch Touch," indeed: edged and between the ribs before you know it's being brandished.

The Butcher Boy (1998) + The Brave One (2007) - DVDs

THE BUTCHER BOY
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Eammon Owens, Alan Boyle
screenplay by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe, based on the novel by McCabe
directed by Neil Jordan

THE BRAVE ONE
***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews, Nicky Katt
screenplay by Roderick Taylor & Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort
directed by Neil Jordan

THE BUTCHER BOY

by Walter Chaw Opening with a series of panels from Golden Age comics produced circa the era in which the film is set (i.e., 1962), The Butcher Boy identifies Neil Jordan as a director with a secret yen for superhero fantasies. It certainly jibes with the filmmaker's affection for protagonists who, for whatever reason, live in private worlds, in fairytale dreamscapes populated by emblems of good and emissaries of evil--worlds where the most colourful places are the interiors of churches, where the characters' fears and failings alike are assets. Jordan's films are unfailingly about transformation (though sometimes they're about the failure to transform adequately, or quickly enough) and heavy with the illness of existential introspection--the Judas strain with which the modern superhero pantheon is sick. His heroes are rendered simple by their duality, confronted by the idea that for as hollow as it is to change to fit the demands of a particular time and place, it's equally useless to try to stay the same as the world falls down. Jordan makes the movies Terry Gilliam never quite made until Tideland; far from the compassionate fare many label it, his oeuvre is comprised of harsh little ditties about the voraciousness of the social organism and the bites it takes out of individuals living perpendicular to the absolute mean. For me, all of his films, from The Crying Game to Mona Lisa, from The End of the Affair to Interview with the Vampire, are pointedly concerned with the futility of compensatory measures in the lives of deviants.

The Loneliest Planet (2012) - DVD

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Hani Furstenberg, Bidzina Gujabidze
screenplay by Julia Loktev, based on the short story by Tom Bissell
directed by Julia Loktev

by Walter Chaw Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet is an existentially terrifying little film about life's essential loneliness, the absolute mutability of interpersonal relationships, and the ways our identities are formed not only by our perceptions of others, but by our preconceptions of the roles we play and, in turn, cast others to play, unbeknownst to them or to anyone. It gives the lie to the possibility of an unconditional relationship, to the idea that we can ever truly know ourselves or the people with whom we choose to share our lives. Most uncomfortably of all, it posits that everything we believe, everything we hold most dear about who we are and who we think we are, can change in an instant. It's about love in that way, but love only in the context of the brutal, capricious, arbitrary world--love in the sense that we invest everything in it in acts of faith entirely unjustified by Nature and circumstance. There's a scene in The Loneliest Planet where two pairs of feet play with each other on top of a sleeping bag, followed fast, after something small but terrible happens, by the owner of one pair of those feet watching the owner of the other walk away and eventually disappear into the ugly, insensate terrain of Russian Georgia's Caucasus mountains. I think it's no accident that the film takes place there, where mythology places Titan Prometheus in his eternal torment: Prometheus the bringer of fire, and life, and foresight (literally, in his name)--the father of Man flayed bare and reintroduced to the carnal night.

Holy Motors (2012) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue
written and directed by Leos Carax

click any image to enlarge

by Angelo Muredda It's no great shock that Holy Motors is innovative, coming from the same headspace as The Lovers on the Bridge and Mauvais Sang--movies that seemed fashioned out of whole cloth despite their indebtedness to names like David Bowie and Herman Melville. What's most surprising is that beneath the formal variety and cheekiness, mainstays of Leos Carax's freewheeling cinema, is a moving and altogether serious exploration of what it means to be an actor, in both a professional and a metaphysical sense. Carax's films have been ranked among the boldest aesthetic manifestos since the 1980s for good reason, yet the ineffable quality that distinguishes them from the superficially similar grandstanding of nascent stylists like Xavier Dolan is their deep sincerity and unabashed adoration of the eccentric city-dwellers who cross paths on the loneliest roads in urban France. If Holy Motors is even wilder in presentation than its predecessors, then, it's also perfectly legible within a body of work that's always found a human streak in the avant-garde.

Ivan's Childhood (1962) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Ivanovo detstvo
****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Nikolay Burlyaev, Valentin Zubkov, Yevgeni Zharikov, Stepan Krylov
screenplay by Vladimir Bogomolov and Mikhail Papava (uncredited: Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky)
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

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by Bryant Frazer Ivan's Childhood opens, unexpectedly enough, inside a dream. The film is impatient. Its dreaming actually begins before the Mosfilm logo has faded from the screen, as the call of a cuckoo echoes softly on the soundtrack. Young Ivan appears, surrounded by trees (their pine needles dripping with what must be cool morning dew), our view of his face criss-crossed by the lines of a spider's web strung up between the branches. The shot is perfectly composed, with the tree's slender trunk and one of its branches creating a secondary, off-centre frame around the boy's face. Ivan pauses there for only a moment--he must be looking for the cuckoo--before turning abruptly out of frame, a move that sends the camera skyward, moving vertically up the body of the pine and revealing more of the landscape. When the camera finishes its ascent, Ivan is again visible, in the midground of the image. His scrawny body, now seen in apparent miniature, turns again towards the camera. Nature is large and beautiful; he is small and, while lovely in a way, still awkward in his skin.

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.

North by Northwest (1959) - DVD|North by Northwest (1959) [50th Anniversary Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

****/****
DVD - Image A Sound B Extras A
BD - Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is Alfred Hitchcock's most mercurial anti-hero, the soup bone reduction of the Master's wrong-man theme. An advertising executive so at ease with changing his identity at the fall of a hammer, he has, by film's end, become/done all of the things he's wrongfully accused of being/doing at the beginning of the film. Indeed, Hitchcock would never again mine the idea of the wrong man with this kind of heat--veering off as he did into a more metaphysical kind of guilt transference à la Vertigo with The Birds, Psycho, and Marnie. As North by Northwest opens, Thornhill gives his regards to a night porter's wife ("We're not talkin'!"), steals a cab from a Good Samaritan, and instructs his secretary to send a neglected lover a box of gold-wrapped candy because "she'll think she's eating money." He's a charmer--and he's as oily, despicable, and fast-talking as almost every one of Grant's romantic comedy heroes. Hitch undermines and exploits Grant for the fourth and final time here as a guy we love until we stop for a second to catch our breath and take stock of the myriad ways in which we've been bribed, glad-handed, misled, and led-on.

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005)

****/****
screenplay by John August and Pamela Pettler and Caroline Thompson
directed by Tim Burton & Mike Johnson

by Walter Chaw A self-contained, melancholic, dulcet little ode to love and sacrifice, Tim Burton's stop-motion Corpse Bride is also a sly stab at class systems, a knowing tribute to both the Hammer horror run and the Universal monster tradition, and another of Burton's evocations of German Expressionism. As fairy tale, it rivals his Edward Scissorhands, as underworld fantasia, his Beetlejuice, and as classic studio-bound horror, his Sleepy Hollow--in many ways, in fact, Burton's return to the stop-motion of his breakthrough short Vincent (and his co-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas) feels like a figurative homecoming to the technique that suits him best. William Blake described an "infernal method" in his theory of creation wherein the artist touched every page of every print of his work to infuse it, ineffably, with the hand of its creator, and so stop-motion, with every movement manipulated painstakingly by the human hand, is infused with a Romanticist's idea of (possibly Satanic) vigor. It's animation that gives the term its "soul"--there's something vital about Corpse Bride that has nothing to do with its story, and watching it, you come to the realization that the reason so much of Burton's work feels airless or dated (or that his stars are so perverse) is that his way with puppets translates only uneasily to his way with actors.