Film Freak Central

The Hustler (1961) [Collector's Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

****/****
DVD - Image B Sound B Extras B-
BD - Image B- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Paul Newman, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, Jackie Gleason
screenplay by Sidney Carroll and Robert Rossen, based on the novel by Walter S. Tevis
directed by Robert Rossen

by Walter Chaw When one engages in hunting annis mirabilis, one would do well not to overlook 1961. The year after the cinema went insane (Ethan Mordden coins this wonderful phrase that before 1960, you listened to mother or you drove off a cliff--and after it, listen to mother and you're Psycho) is marked by a beloved film based on a Truman Capote novella about two hookers falling in love in New York (Breakfast at Tiffany's) and by Brando's first and only directorial effort, the marvellously murky anti-western One-Eyed Jacks. Billy Wilder guided Jimmy Cagney through his last rapid-fire explosion in a scabrous screed on the early days of globalism in One, Two, Three, while John Huston charted the last gasps of Old Hollywood and the West in The Misfits. In the sexual repression-drives-you-crazy sweepstakes, Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass makes time with William Wyler's lesbo-drama The Children's Hour (and there's Splendor's Warren Beatty again in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone). You want race? How about the new lyrics added to West Side Story's immigrant lament? Or Lancaster cutting a square swath through the Manhattan barrio in John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages? 1961 was a miraculous year for any number of reasons, but count among the big ones Paul Newman's emergence as the quintessential avatar for the entire decade--the scurrilous anti-hero (some point to Steve McQueen, but McQueen was never an asshole on purpose and never an actor at all) who represented the truthy eruption of everything the Eisenhower kids were holding back during those rocket-bra'd, tail-finned years spent basking in the post-nuclear sun of capitalism-as-panacea.

About Schmidt (2002) - DVD

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Jack Nicholson, Hope Davis, Dermot Mulroney, June Squibb
screenplay by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor, based on the book by Louis Begley
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne's (Citizen Ruth, Election) third film is his best. He (like Wes Anderson and his third film, The Royal Tenenbaums) has come into his own as an auteur voice for a new American cinema that finds its underpinnings in David Lynch and John Cassavetes--in the Midwest grotesque and the elevation of the banal. In relating a Prufrockian tale of a man reassessing the ruin of his life upon the occasion of his retirement from a life-insurance firm, Payne strikes a balance between absurdity and pithiness, becoming in the process the sort of satire that exposes essential truths about the disintegrating spiral of life and the human condition. Married as it is to another wonderful late-career performance by Jack Nicholson, About Schmidt is heartbreaking and brilliant.

The Aviator (2004) [Two-Disc Widescreen Edition] - DVD

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale, John C. Reilly
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Martin Scorsese

 
by Walter Chaw About a third of the way into Martin Scorsese's fabulous The Aviator, a young Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio), with ingénue Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani) on his arm, attends the premiere of his lavish WWI epic Hell's Angels (1930)--a picture that burned a significant portion of Hughes's millions before becoming a smash, and one that still contains some of the most daring, astonishing aerial sequences ever shot for a motion picture. As paparazzi throng, smothering Hughes with flashbulbs and red carpet questions, he looks dazzled, confused: a consequence of his deafness in some part, sure, but also, I'd suggest, a clue into this idea of Scorsese's--which he's had since at least Taxi Driver--that film is a waking dream, a kind of bad yet thrilling hallucinogenic dope trip; this Howard Hughes is a sleepwalker who is, at this moment, struggling to stay asleep. Later, Hughes takes his lover Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) up in his airplane where they cruise the sky above the Hollywood hills and share a (gulp) bottle of milk. (No small step for the pathologically germophobic Hughes.) The source for Hughes's mental illness is traced to a haunted opening scene where as a child he is bathed by his mother (comparable in repressed eroticism to the notorious bathtub sequence in Jonathan Glazer's Birth) and warned that the world outside can only hold for him the promise of abandonment and mortal contamination.

Waking Life (2001) - DVD

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring "Wiley Wiggins and an ensemble of 74 other actors"
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Walter Chaw It begins with a child's game that ends with the chilling premonition "Dream is destiny" and closes with what appears to be the fulfillment of that statement. Richard Linklater's Waking Life is an anti-narrative with no discernible story arc: The film's conflict arises between its characters' varying cosmologies and the challenge that that presents to the viewer's own existential verities, such as Descartes's dictum cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). Waking Life is one of the most interesting and engaging films of a year that sports its fair share of complex, fascinating fare (Mulholland Drive, Va Savoir).

WarGames (1983) [25th Anniversary Edition] + Saturday Night Fever (1977)/Staying Alive (1983) [Double Feature] - DVDs|Saturday Night Fever [30th Anniversary Special Collector's Edition]- Blu-ray Disc

WARGAMES
***½/**** Image B Sound C Extras A
starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy
screenplay by Lawrence Lasker & Walter F. Parkes
directed by John Badham

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
****/****
DVD - Image B Sound B+ Extras C
BD - Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring John Travolta, Karen Gorney, Barry Miller, Joseph Cali
screenplay by Norman Wexler
directed by John Badham

STAYING ALIVE
ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring John Travolta, Cynthia Rhodes, Finola Hughes, Steve Inwood
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Norman Wexler
directed by Sylvester Stallone

by Walter Chaw I hadn't realized until I watched the 25^th Anniversary Edition DVD of it how intimately WarGames is embedded in my psyche. I saw it in the theatre as a ten-year-old in 1983 and, for the rest of that decade (the prime of my excited filmgoing experience), I didn't know that movies were ever different. The first time, in fact, that I recognized that movies were human was the first time they revealed themselves as something that could fail to inspire any kind of response at all--and I wonder if that initial moment of disappointment had more to do with the development of my cynicism than any one picture's deficiency. Film is a progressive addiction, says one theory: the more sophisticated you get as a viewer, the harder it is to find the fix. WarGames presented me with the idea of eroticism through mild scatological exhibitionism. It had a young man in his room, alone with a young woman, excusing himself to urinate in the next room--an act unthinkable to me as a ten-year-old, and holding with it the thrill of taboo. The next time they meet, the world starts to explode and, better yet, the girl traps the boy between her legs when he tries to edge by.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter
screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke & Stanley Kubrick, based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel"
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson Seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey as a film about evolution is natural but ultimately inaccurate, I think. The Darwinist views evolution as an external response to the world--a survival mechanism--while the Nietzschian views it as an internal, ethical one. Both are touched on in 2001 and both are misleading in that they fail to acknowledge that Man's evolution in this film is born out of destiny. Out of fate. More appropriate to view evolution here in terms of the lifespan of the butterfly or moth. Guided by a supreme alien intelligence, the species of 2001 evolves from the larva (ape) to the pupa (human) to the butterfly (star child).

Ripley's Game (2002) - DVD

**** Image A Sound A
starring John Malkovich, Dougray Scott, Ray Winstone, Lena Headey
screenplay by Charles McKeown and Liliana Cavani, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Liliana Cavani

by Walter Chaw When I heard that The Night Porter auteur Liliana Cavani was adapting one of Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley novels, I knew to expect something more in line with René Clément's brilliant Purple Noon than Anthony Minghella's lavishly simpering The Talented Mr. Ripley. What I didn't anticipate was that this film, which never received any sort of domestic theatrical distribution before being summarily dropped, supplement-free, onto the home video market, would be one of the best of its year--indeed, of its kind. Ripley's Game is doomed to the "direct-to-video" label and an ignominious eternity buried in the Blockbuster shelves for the occasional stunned bemusement of the well traveled and the John Malkovich fetishist--it languishes there while over-masticated tripe like The Alamo finds its way to thousands of screens, its lingering impact to remind again that the slippery slope in Hollywood's distribution game just got steeper. Ripley's Game would have looked great on the big screen--and some genius robbed us of the opportunity to see it that way, thinking we'd prefer American Splendor or Along Came Polly.

Django Unchained (2012) - Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw If Inglourious Basterds was an ambiguous, brilliant indictment of "Jewish vengeance" wrapped in this impossibly canny exploration of violence through screenwriting, performance, and love of film, think of Quentin Tarantino's follow-up, Django Unchained, as a glorious continuation of what has become a singular artist's evolving theme. It demonstrates an absolute command of the medium, of what film can do when tasked to do more than usual, and it does it by being some of the finest film criticism of the year. If the Coens are our best literary critics, then Tarantino is our best film critic cum sociologist, and his topics, again, are how we understand history through specific prisms and how violence can be both catharsis and atrocity--often in the same breath and almost always in the same ways. Consider that this difficult film's most difficult moment comes, as it does in Inglourious Basterds, at the very end, in an unbearably ugly act of violence perpetrated against not the expected slave-owner antagonist, Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), but his manservant Stephen/Stepin (Samuel L. Jackson). Consider, too, the idea that vengeance--particularly in our post-9/11 environment--is the proverbial tiger we've caught by the tail: our cultural legacy that we try to justify through any means, given that our ends are so very righteous.

Wonder Boys (2000) - DVD

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand, Katie Holmes
screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by Michael Chabon
directed by Curtis Hanson

by Walter Chaw While safely cocooned in the lushly-padded walls of academia, I had as my advisor a Grady Tripp--a man I respected as a professor and as a friend. We exchanged books often, we talked a great deal about the obscure minutiae of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's life, and we argued over whether William and Dorothy Wordsworth were engaged in a seedy incestual entanglement. (Yes, Brad, they were.) I even suspect that there was a tattered, coffee-stained manuscript tucked in the top drawer of his desk. If you've ever had a professor who shaped your opinions and a good portion of your intellectual life, and if you were additionally lucky enough to call him a friend as well as a mentor, then you're predisposed to liking Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys.

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.