Film Freak Central

All the President's Men (1976) - Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Warden, Jason Robards
screenplay by William Goldman, based on the book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
directed by Alan J. Pakula 

by Walter Chaw The final film in director Alan J. Pakula's loose "paranoia trilogy," All the President's Men does the impossible by making heroes of newspaper reporters and a thriller out of telephone calls and follow-up interviews. Based on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's exposé of the Watergate Scandal and President Richard Nixon's involvement in felonious dirty tricks, it's more than just a cunningly-crafted docudrama--it's a key film in the best era of the medium's history. It's a picture that highlights the period's mistrust in our leadership while establishing highly unconventional heroes for whom the stakes couldn't possibly be higher. And though we know how it all works out, it seems more poignant for our knowing how everything works out.

Paranormal Activity (2009) [2-Disc Digital Copy Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Katie Featherston, Michah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs, Ashley Palmer
written and directed by Oren Peli

by Walter Chaw It's a good try from first-time hyphenate Oren Peli, but it's ultimately an exercise bereft of satisfying, thoughtful payoffs--a couple of generally effective sequences only that way because they cause one to anticipate that something will come of them. Nothing does. Comparisons to The Blair Witch Project aren't entirely off base, either, in that Paranormal Activity is about a decade past its sell-by date with a tale of irritating technophilia that would have felt more current in the Y2K Ludditism of 1999 than it did in the resigned technocracy of 2009--explanation in part for why it's already out of the conversation and never stirred much outrage or controversy when it was causing audiences of teens to collectively fake-shudder the way festival audiences collectively fake-cathect. The new conversation is the one introduced by George Romero's Diary of the Dead and Matt Reeves's Cloverfield, where the unnatural instinct isn't whipping out a digital camera or camera phone, but not. It's a communal experience if it's anything, and as far as such things go, there are still midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show floating around out there, aren't there? Its pleasures aren't replicable, in other words, and watching it at home reveals it to be little more than a one-trick pony with one brilliant moment that isn't enough to justify the rest of it.

Walking Tall: The Trilogy [2-Disc Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

WALKING TALL (1973)
***/**** Image B- Sound C
starring Joe Don Baker, Noah Beery, Jr., Elizabeth Hartman, Rosemary Murphy
screenplay by Mort Briskin
directed by Phil Karlson

WALKING TALL PART 2 (1975)
*/**** Image B Sound C- Extras B
starring Bo Svenson, Richard Jaeckel, Bruce Glover, Robert Doqui
screenplay by Howard B. Kreitsek
directed by Earl Bellamy

FINAL CHAPTER WALKING TALL (1977)
***½/**** Image B- Sound C- Extras D
starring Bo Svenson, Margaret Blye, Forrest Tucker, Morgan Woodward
screenplay by Howard B. Kreitsek
directed by Jack Starrett

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw A hicksploitation flick that can hold its head up high among its blaxploitation contemporaries, Phil Karlson's combustible, if risible, Walking Tall features a moment where a small-town judge (Douglas Fowley) warns vigilante Buford Pusser (Joe Don Baker) to cut out his foolishness, and another where the hero's folksy grandpa Carl (Noah Beery, Jr.) declares that there's a "ragin' social disease" out there called "black equality." Yet the Pussers are the good guys, or should I say good ol' boys, and when I stumbled upon Walking Tall on late-night television as a kid, it instantly lodged itself against my red-white-and-blue heart. Watching the Coens' Raising Arizona and True Grit years later, I hear and see echoes of Walking Tall's high-dudgeon. Of course it's right there on the surface of Quentin Tarantino's films, too, and right there in any serious conversation about the transfiguration (metastasis?) of noir--Walking Tall is a remake, as Glenn Erickson aptly notes, of director Karlson's own tough-minded The Phenix City Story. More proximately, Walking Tall is the common-man's Straw Dogs. Both begin with the appearance of our hero in the middle of a rural environment, and both involve the eruption of the Natural through the thin scrim of civilization. All three films--Phenix, Walking Tall, and Straw Dogs--identify with a noir idea that the hero's morality, regardless of the laws of country and state, is the only, possibly last, light in the world.

Ed Wood (1994) - [Special Edition] DVD + Blu-ray Disc

***½/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras A
BD - Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette
screenplay by Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski
directed by Tim Burton

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Raging Bull for starfuckers, Ed Wood is in a lot of ways the quintessential dissection of the allure of Hollywood, allying it more closely, perhaps, with a different Martin Scorsese film, The King of Comedy. (It's The King of Comedy recast with the stalked celebrity a willing participant in the stalker's obsessive lunacy.) Ed Wood diverges from most biopics in director Tim Burton's tactic of skewing the film towards the same sort of kitsch-surreal of Wood's own films, managing in so doing the trick that David Cronenberg performed with Naked Lunch: a hagiography that's as much critical analysis as hommage. It engages in a conversation about how Wood's films are seen at the same time that it endeavours to tell the highlights of Wood's life. The result is a picture that bridges the gap between cult and camp classic; the melancholic and the melodramatic; and the difference between a director of vision and a director with a vision that sucks.

TIFF '12: The Iceman

*½/****
directed by Ariel Vroman

by Bill Chambers Although The Iceman proves that a movie cannot get by on Michael Shannon's dark charisma alone, Shannon has reached that point in his career where his casting supplies the lion's share of subtext. Hence, a line like "I dub cartoons for Disney"--uttered not two minutes into the film, before there's enough context for it to be a joke or a lie--induces titters of recognition. Of course, most will know going in that Shannon's playing real-life contract killer Richard Kuklinski, who's thought to have dispatched over 100 people, professionally-speaking. In The Iceman, the film version of his life, smut-bootlegger Kuklinski starts a family with winsome Barbara (a baby-talky Winona Ryder) at the same time mobster Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta) makes him an enforcer. He keeps Barbara in the dark about his new profession (his old one, too), telling her he's a stockbroker to explain the conspicuous infusions of cash; by the time their angelic daughters are in middle-school, he's settled comfortably into the schizoid role of suburban-dad-slash-serial-killer. Eventually, he sub-contracts himself out to Pronge (Chris Evans, so skeevy I mistook him for Bradley Cooper), a free agent who operates out of a Mr. Softee truck and gives Kuklinski the idea to freeze his victims, and thus his eponymous nickname.

Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005) + Domino (2005) [New Line Platinum Series|Widescreen] - DVD

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
**½/****
starring David Strathairn, Patricia Clarkson, George Clooney, Jeff Daniels
screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

DOMINO
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo
screenplay by Richard Kelly
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw Rigorous and principled, George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. is a curiously slight film for more reasons than the fact that almost a third of it is comprised of archival footage integrated semi-successfully into the story. It's a recreation of a very specific battle in a very specific war that resonates with our Patriot Act/Guantanamo Bay situation, and indeed, that's the target Clooney seems most interested in striking. But without a larger context (the sort that would have weakened its allegorical usefulness), the picture sets itself up as something as obvious as it is minor and feather-light. It's a professional, high-minded, and staid biopic is what I'm saying, a film that says what it says with the stark B&W cinematography of a Dr. Strangelove, but in its icy, humourless way, it's the same stark B&W cinematography of a Fail-Safe, too. It's close and under-populated--and even with so insular and finely-focused a spotlight, it contains at least two completely superfluous characters.

Compliance (2012)

***/****
starring Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy, Bill Camp
written and directed by Craig Zobel

by Walter Chaw Craig Zobel's Compliance comes with a payload of controversy trailing from a notorious Sundance screening where various audience members registered their displeasure in a post-film Q&A--going so far, if reports are to be trusted, as to sexually harass lead actress Dreama Walker in one of the more ironic attempts at defending her honour. I've said it before (and it's only gotten worse), I prefer to watch a movie with a mainstream, middlebrow audience than with any festival audience under any circumstance. Sure, they applaud Michael Bay movies, but at least they don't act like their shit don't stink. Thinking back, there's the example of Sundance's old-lady reaction to Lucky McKee's The Woman, a movie that, upon closer inspection, reveals itself as shocking in neither its execution nor its conception--it's just not that controversial, and its backlash demonstrates the kind of knee-jerk liberalism that venerates easy stuff like Rabbit-Proof Fence. If you declare yourself a feminist outraged by a film that is so clearly also feminist, you identify yourself as a fucking moron and an asshole to boot. Sundance confirms the middlebrow; it celebrates uncomplicated messages wrapped in indie-glamour. When was the last time Sundance pushed something like, say, Valhalla Rising, or Synecdoche, New York? Something difficult, something remarkable, something festivals like it are supposed to champion? Or is the modus for the festival meaningless garbage that congratulates its audience for making easy connections like Beasts of the Southern Wild and anything starring John Hawkes. Fish Tank? Winter's Bone? So Compliance, which would never be mistaken for something transcendent and enduring, is actually more interesting than it first appears not only for a couple of the decisions it makes, but also for the degree to which its audience is pulled into identification with the picture's bland torturers. It's a Milgram Experiment for the viewer.

Catch Me If You Can (2002)

****/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Jennifer Garner
screenplay by Jeff Nathanson, based on the book by Frank W. Abagnale and Stan Redding
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw There's an old Ray Bradbury story from 1948 called "Touch and Go" (since reprinted as "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl") that tells the tale of a burglar who surprises the homeowner in his house and accidentally kills him. Erasing his fingerprints from a few surfaces, the burglar panics and starts wiping objects in rooms he hadn't visited and items, such as the fruit at the bottom of a bowl, he could not have handled. When the police find him hours later, he's in the attic polishing old silverware. Like Bradbury's thief, Spielberg is getting away with murder in most of his films post-Close Encounters of the Third Kind (particularly A.I., Minority Report, Schindler's List, Empire of the Sun, and Saving Private Ryan) until self-doubt and paranoia consume him, seducing him to a fatal eleventh-hour appeal. Spielberg is the bad test-taker, changing his answers to damn his instincts.

Munich (2005) - DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz
screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Violence begets violence, terrorism begets terrorism, corruption begets corruption, and on and on up and down the self-righteous homily scale. Some time during the third hour of Steven Spielberg's slapdash Munich, the small lessons of this huge picture begin to feel like a ten-penny nail pounded into the middle of your forehead. There's possibly no other director who could have brought this film to fruition with such speed (principal photography began on the day Spielberg's other 2005 release, War of the Worlds, opened in the United States), but for as remarkable as that accomplishment is from a brinkmanship standpoint (about $250M-worth of film in one calendar year? Priceless), the stress begins to show in Munich--the first Spielberg film in memory so hamstrung with amateurish thematic visual concepts that you begin to wonder whether an editor fresh off the bus took over the picture's composition. Still, credit is due Spielberg, almost as well-known for his inability to resist tacking on unearned happy endings as for his savant-like conversance with the medium, for crafting a picture that's morally ambiguous (if only fitfully, and then torturously, so) as well as for daring to whisper that as a direct result of the best intentions of the bloodlust of "civilization" and Old Testament logic employed by the "good guys," the world may actually be a more dangerous place now than it was thirty years ago.

The Devil's Double (2011) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Dominic Cooper, Ludivine Sagnier, Philip Quast, Raad Rawi
screenplay by Michael Thomas
directed by Lee Tamahori

by Angelo Muredda The Devil's Double might be the first bad movie about which you can non-figuratively say, "That looked like piss." Director Lee Tamahori, who started off decently with 1994's Once Were Warriors but has since become a dependable franchise killer (Along Came A Spider, Die Another Day, xXx: State of the Union) and a Hollywood hack behind the occasional Nicolas Cage abortion (Next), bathes every shot in garish yellow lights that transform white leather couches into urine-stained gilded bars. If you're willing to excuse this aesthetic for the first few seconds of every shot as an uncomfortable and weirdly xenophobic bit of formalism--what better way to depict Iraq than to give it a nice golden shower?--good luck with the rest. When characters reposition themselves in the frame, they often seem to block the light source and thrust their companions into the dark for no good reason. DP Sam McCurdy surely considers this a clever trick, as he executes it over and over again, yet Tamahori's film, a hollow adaptation of Latif Yahia's unconfirmed autobiographical account of serving for many years as Uday Hussein's political decoy, is such a bore that the effect is one of watching someone throw buckets of neon paint on a blank canvas.

Che (2008) + Milk (2008)

CHE
***½/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Demián Bichir, Santiago Cabrera, Vladimir Cruz
screenplay by Peter Buchman, based on the memoir Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War by Ernesto "Che" Guevara
directed by Steven Soderbergh

MILK
*½/****
starring Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna
screenplay by Dustin Lance Black
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw Steven Soderbergh's Che is the curative to the Hollywood biopic formula that insists on reducing interesting/important historical figures to their workshop elements. It sees Ernesto "Che" Guevara as a charismatic figure but no T-shirt deity, as a guerrilla fighter with blood on his hands but also a revolutionary almost holy in his single-minded conviction that things weren't fair in the world and that one man--or one small group of heavily-armed men--could affect change that mattered. It's not a political film in the sense that it takes sides, rendering it a political film by the fact of it having no agenda except to make it difficult to condemn or celebrate first the events leading up to the success of the Cuban Revolution, then the failure of the Bolivian Revolution (which ended in Che's death). Soderbergh goes from close and medium shots in the first half--known as Che Part One in its marathon "roadshow" incarnation and as The Argentine in parts of the country where it and Che Part Two (a.k.a. The Guerrilla) are being treated as unique films--to an increasing distance for the second, a subtle, evocative move away from Che's idealism.

The Social Network (2010)

****/*****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer
screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw An asshole movie about an asshole, David Fincher's The Social Network is an exacting, brutal celluloid treatise on the theory that the only reason anything ever gets made in this world is because some smart guys don't get laid enough. It's the misandrous analogue to Camille Paglia's once-inflammatory assertion in her Sexual Personae that if women were in charge of civilization, we'd still be living in grass huts. Freud at its mud-wallow base, The Social Network isn't thoughtful--it's not a conversation unto itself, not much more than pocket philosophizing easily turned into a weapon for either side. In the end, it's just a series of loose, out-of-sequence vignettes chronicling the creation of a 25-billion dollar enterprise on the back of a painful break-up and a best friend getting into an exclusive campus club that said 25-billion dollar enterprise's creator could not. But it's good. Good because Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin have tapped into a vein of male anxiety in a way that feels like mainlining a particularly hot, particularly angry fix. It's Fight Club again, but with an ending that's more about the toothed pit at the middle of male loneliness and obsession--drawing that line between genius and psychosis instead of, as in Fight Club, pandering to some notion of a romantic solution capable of soothing eons of atavistic penis crises. It's Fight Club without Marla.

Julie & Julia (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina
screenplay by Nora Ephron, based on the books Julie and Julia by Julie Powell and My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme
directed by Nora Ephron

by Bryant Frazer It can hardly be disputed that Meryl Streep is among the finest, or at least the most finely proficient, of actors currently working. It's a drag, then, to see her resort to caricature and impersonation, even when she's sending some voltage through a limp premise. Riffing on demon-editor Anna Wintour, she ended up adding pathos to a cartoonish character, swallowing whole not just the working-girl melodrama that was The Devil Wears Prada, but also her poor co-star, Anne Hathaway, who appeared to be hanging on for dear life to a carnival ride. That speaks well to Streep's enduring star power, but I've always felt the effect was a little ostentatious--like one of the Rockefellers showing up to work at a soup kitchen over the holidays. It raises the question: Can a mediocre film really be redeemed by the presence of a terrific performance?

The Mill and the Cross (2011)

***/****
starring Rutger Hauer, Charlotte Rampling, Michael York, Oskar Huliczka
screenplay by Michael Francis Gibson & Lech Majewski
directed by Lech Majewski

by Angelo Muredda The opening voiceover in Polish-American filmmaker and painter Lech Majewsi's dry but compelling The Mill and the Cross nicely prepares us for both the fastidiousness and the playfulness that follows. "I want to do something about their clothing," Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel, a droll Rutger Hauer, says as he surveys a handful of the 500-odd subjects that populate his bustling 1564 painting "The Way to Calvary." At this point it's still a work-in-progress, a living tableau of Christ's crucifixion filtered through the artist's critique of the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands. Depriving us of the panorama that comprises the finished artwork, Majewski offers only a limited frontal view of the wailing women in the foreground, embodied by actresses who stand in stark relief against the computer-generated backdrop of the painting. As the camera tracks alongside them, it gets snagged, in a manner of speaking, on their dresses: it halts its procession so that Bruegel himself can enter the painting as a makeshift costume designer, fussing over their fabrics and setting the gravity of the scene through his sartorial choices. It's a smart statement of purpose, announcing Bruegel's and Majewski's simultaneous interest in the particular and the allegorical, and placing the film at various crossroads--between, for instance, art history lesson and dramatic recreation, and, more interestingly, between artifice and accident.

Moneyball (2011)

***½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright
screenplay by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, based on the book by Michael Lewis
directed by Bennett Miller

by Angelo Muredda Moneyball arrives after years in development hell with nearly as much baggage as the Oakland A's. A Steven Soderbergh project scrapped at the eleventh hour of pre-production and inherited by a high-pedigree team composed of Capote director Bennett Miller and scribes Steven Zaillian (the lone holdover) and Aaron Sorkin, it's as much a reinvention of the discarded film--apparently pitched as a data-saturated docudrama--as it is an adaptation of Michael Lewis's best-selling non-fiction book of the same name. No matter: Soderbergh successfully redirected his energy into Contagion, a snappy procedural lobbed to the same stats fetishists who might've warmed to his Moneyball, while Miller has delivered an affecting and deceptively conventional baseball movie that works on its own terms. Oscar-bait it might be, but Moneyball is surprisingly fresh, especially in how it shifts focus from the unexpected winners that most sports stories fawn over to a few perpetual losers who live off the wistful fumes of second-place finishes.