Film Freak Central

Hot Fuzz (2007)

***/****
starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg
directed by Edgar Wright

by Walter Chaw Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost return after the triumph of Shaun of the Dead with the nominal success of Hot Fuzz: the one a dead-on skewering of/homage to the zombie genre, the latter an equally-dead-on skewering of/homage to the buddy-cop genre that leads one to conclude that the zombie genre is infinitely more fulsome a target than the buddy-cop genre. Though it's clearly the product of smart guys who care about the films they lampoon, there's obviously a difference between making a movie that can stand proudly alongside George Romero's body of work and making one that could keep good company with Michael Bay's. (There's a lot of meat to be mined in a clever dissection of the zombie genre, in other words, whereas most action flicks of this type are already self-parodying exercises in excessive hetero-affirmation amidst much piece-fondling and weeping.) What works best about Hot Fuzz isn't its admirable respect for and similarly keen understanding of films like Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man and Richard Rush's fondly-remembered Freebie and the Bean, but that it, like Shaun of the Dead, functions remarkably well as an example of the genre--something of which most parodies (i.e. arbitrary garbage like Shrek) are completely incapable.

Transcendence (2014)

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jack Paglen
directed by Wally Pfister

by Angelo Muredda If his name wasn't already plastered over the ads for the nerd bona fides the studio hopes it will signal, you'd still know that Transcendence was the work of Wally Pfister from an inimitably-portentous opening shot featuring the long, steady fall of a raindrop: as meaningless a totem as Inception's ever-spinning (or is it wobbling?) top. Having lensed all but one of Christopher Nolan's joyless epics, including that "Twilight Zone" episode told with Miltonic gravitas, Pfister has at last graduated to making his own Nolan film about serious men making serious moral choices in the name of serious ideas--here, sending the first human consciousness up into the cloud to fuse with an artificially-intelligent program, the better to meddle in the affairs of mortals. The Pfister-Nolan collaboration was a fruitful one, the equivalent of a hammer repeatedly meeting its companion gong, but watching the alternately soapy and chilly Transcendence, one can't help but feel the cinematographer-turned-director would have been better served by a more conspicuous departure, a project that better indulged his more melodramatic instincts.

Normal Life (1996) - DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Ashley Judd, Luke Perry, Bruce Young, Jim True
screenplay by Peg Haller & Bob Schneider
directed by John McNaughton

by Bill Chambers I might be apocryphally attributing this to Pauline Kael, but I'm fairly confident that it was she who said there's no such thing as bad acting, only bad casting. When people hear that John McNaughton's Normal Life stars Luke Perry and Ashley Judd, they tend to lose interest, but to quote another of my favourite critics, Alex Jackson, "a great performance incorporates and molds a persona. It deals with it. Their body, voice, and persona are inescapable facts [and] the greatness of a performance lies in nothing more [than] the acknowledgment of these facts." It's interesting that the contemporary actors most likely to be credited with soul-searching to find the emotional truths of a character--Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, even Mark Ruffalo--are heirs apparent to Lon Chaney, gradually transforming themselves from without. In the same piece quoted above, a review of Midnight Express published just prior to last year's Academy Awards, Jackson says he values Christina Ricci's work in Monster over that of her co-star Charlize Theron: Where Ricci plumbs the depths of her established screen persona, Theron's aesthetically-assisted turn is so anomalous in terms of her career as to register as standoffish. "I suspect that it takes more courage to be an icon than an actor," Jackson brilliantly surmises.

Notes on a Scandal (2006) - DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Bill Nighy, Andrew Simpson
screenplay by Patrick Marber, based on the novel by Zoë Heller
directed by Richard Eyre

by Walter Chaw When Judi Dench's brittle enunciation breathes life into the prologue of Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal, there's a hope, however fleeting, that the film will deserve the performance. Her tweedy, support-hosed teacher Barbara Covett is set up as a distaff Richard III, looking to subvert the beautifuls acting as the royals in her school's social strata--the newest member of which, Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), attracts the greatest amount of envy and desire. The characters' names are embarrassing (why not call them "Barbara Lust" and "Sheba Love"?), and it's not long before the picture follows suit, becoming as obvious and stillborn as its first half hour is scabrous and dangerous. Adapted from the Zoë Heller novel, it reminds of screenwriter Patrick Marber's Closer and how Mike Nichols's film adaptation similarly suffered from a gradual slackening of shock with the realization that its umbrella of misanthropy doesn't cast a dark shadow on all of us so much as it provides a vicarious thrill, like watching a cockfight, say, or a mantis eating its mate: though foul, its pungency is isolatable.

Bionic Woman: Volume One (2007) - DVD

Image A- Sound A Extras C
"Pilot," "Paradise Lost," "Sisterhood," "Faceoff," "The Education of Jaime Sommers," "The List," "Trust Issues," "Do Not Disturb"

by Ian Pugh David Eick's remake of the old Lindsay Wagner series "The Bionic Woman" is a near-literal relic straight out of 1976 so thoroughly convinced of its premise's timelessness that it merely tosses the same old shit together with popular concerns of the 21^st century--terrorism, the Iraq War, North Korea, the omnipresence of computer technology--in the vague hope that it will all alchemize into something that can stand on its own two feet. Call it the oblivious antithesis to an astonishing meta property like Live Free or Die Hard: it carries the expectation for tension within a battle of seemingly-incalculable odds when the outcome was long ago decided in the little guy's favour--I mean, like, decades ago. Interestingly enough, amid its largely indifferent applications of wire-fu, the new "Bionic Woman" offers the best auto-critical metaphor with its mustiest holdover from its precursor: the super-futuristic "action" sound effect that originated in "The Six Million Dollar Man" has been replaced by something that sounds like a computerized approximation of a stalled car.

Fair Game (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B+ Sound C Commentary C
starring Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, David Andrews, Sam Shepard
screenplay by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, based on the books The Politics of Truth by Joe Wilson and Fair Game by Valerie Plame Wilson
directed by Doug Liman

by Walter Chaw I remember distinctly somewhere in year two of W.'s administration the feeling of extreme "outrage fatigue"--that burnout that occurs when you've spent so much time incredulous that you realize you're the idiot for expecting something different. Subsequently, I recall being the only one in my circle of friends to predict W.'s re-election, as well as the only one not surprised when we didn't find any WMDs. It's not that I'm particularly smart, it's that I'm dick enough to be right half the time. Why fight it? Bad movies tend to win the weekly box office, bad music dominates the charts, bad TV gets renewed; rather than declare it a new phenomenon, take cold comfort in knowing that it was always this way and it's not necessarily worse now. Sophocles wasn't selling out the Coliseum, after all. So if Fair Game, Doug Liman's adaptation of Valerie Plame's memoir of her betrayal by the Bush Administration for the sins of her big-mouthed, self-righteous husband Joe Wilson, doesn't have shock and outrage going for it, it at least has the smarts to portray Joe as a deeply ambiguous figure. He's a jackass, but he's right, and Sean Penn's portrayal of him is uncompromised, unflattering, and completely in keeping with stuff like his Into the Wild and The Assassination of Richard Nixon: liberal shots that don't offend the conversation.

p.s. (2004) + Birth (2004)|Birth (2004) - DVD

p.s.
**½/****
starring Laura Linney, Topher Grace, Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden
screenplay by Helen Schulman and Dylan Kidd, based on the novel by Helen Schulman
directed by Dylan Kidd

BIRTH
****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Danny Huston, Lauren Bacall
screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière, Milo Addica, Jonathan Glazer
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw Second chances, erasing memories, manipulating perception--films this year like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Code 46, The Forgotten, The Manchurian Candidate, The Village, The Butterfly Effect, Before Sunset, 50 First Dates, The Final Cut, and so on suggest a collective desire to wash the slate clean, put on blinkers, and regain a little of that sweet, blithe ignorance of the day before yesterday. It's never as easy as all that, of course, since things have a tendency of coming back--and when an artifact of the past intrudes on the present it carries with it (along with all those memories of green) an aggressive payload of unexpected reactions. You can never go home again, nor can home ever return to you. Nevertheless, it tries to in a pair of films, two sophomore efforts, as it happens: Dylan Kidd's p.s. and Jonathan Glazer's Birth. Curiously, just the idea of the first film after a triumphant debut is tangled with the desire to recapture a little of the magic of the past.

The 6th Day (2000) - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

**/****
DVD - Image A- Sound A- Extras C
BD - Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Rapaport, Tony Goldwyn, Robert Duvall
screenplay by Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley
directed by Roger Spottiswoode

by Bill Chambers The 6th Day has one idea that made me sit up and take notice. In a future that's "sooner than you think," some henchmen from the shallow end of the gene pool have been sent to dispatch Arnold Schwarzenegger's illegally-cloned charter pilot. Said goons aren't nervous when confronting the Austrian Oak because they've always got a contingency plan: should Ah-nuld snap necks like he's been doing since Commando, the casualties will be shipped off to a lab for regeneration. In other words, the PG-13 film antiquates Schwarzenegger once and for all.

Sahara (2005)

*½/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, Penélope Cruz, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and John C. Richards and James V. Hart, based on the novel by Clive Cussler
directed by Breck Eisner

 

by Walter Chaw For as difficult as it is to read a Clive Cussler novel, it's no more or less difficult to read something by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Robert James Waller, Dean Koontz, or Nicholas Sparks. A Cussler book is exactly what it is: a bestseller written specifically for people who base their reading decisions on how many other people have bought and ostensibly read a given book--bad grammar, bad sense, and ridiculous narratives be damned. So Sahara, Breck "Spawn of Michael" Eisner's feature debut (and what star Matthew McConaughey hopes is a franchise starter despite Cussler disowning the picture and threatening to sue), is an utterly faithful adaptation of the source material in that it's destined to become one of those movies people see or avoid depending on how low their expectations are going in or how irresistible the Friday night peer-pressure gets. It's a soulless picture, a wisp of a whimsy layered across what wishes it were an epic adventure, playing fast and loose with character and charisma while slathering on the boom-crash opera. The result isn't something awful so much as a spectacle without a hint of a human centre: a blockbuster played by action figures and written by children.

Red Dragon (2002) [2-Disc Director's Edition] - DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Harvey Keitel
screenplay by Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw Because Thomas Harris's haunting novel of the same name is flawed in someone's eye, Red Dragon hacks and slices the piece with a rude imprecision that would inspire pop icon Hannibal Lecter to sharpen his carving tools. The picture opens with a ridiculous and awkwardly-staged Lecter backstory (meaning it plays like the rest of the Lecter additions) that gives a self-parodying Anthony Hopkins a ponytail in place of the self-respect to which he can no longer lay claim, bringing to mind the unwieldy cameos of Cannonball Run.

Derailed (2005) [Widescreen Edition (Unrated)] - DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Clive Owen, Jennifer Aniston, Vincent Cassel, Melissa George
screenplay by Stuart Beattie
directed by Mikael Håfström

by Walter Chaw Okay, here's the deal: if I tell you that Derailed has a big plot twist, you're going to figure it out from the trailers; and if I don't, you're going to figure it out at around the ten-minute mark--it's just that stupid. So I'm simply going to say that Jennifer Aniston is like an old studio starlet trying on her ill-fitting acting shoes in a thriller that wants to turn her into a bad girl done wrong but quails at every moment of truth. The ultimate effect of her "metamorphosis" from America's sweetheart is the uncomfortable feeling that you just saw Donna Reed (or your best friend's mom) in an S&M outfit. It makes the already-spoiled rape scene (unless ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY is an underground publication nowadays) a non-event because as you're watching it, tickling at the back of your head is the knowledge that they'd never rape Rachel in a mainstream middlebrow thriller (even if professional creep Vincent Cassel is the rapist). More, because the whole thing unfolds from the point of view of a very groggy paramour Charles (Clive Owen), the rape becomes something that's only very inconvenient for our married white male adulterer. It's despicable is what it is--compounded by a lie later on and ultimately invalidated by our tired twist, which finds at the end our Charles the spitting image of Travis Bickle but without any trace of irony.

Grindhouse (2007)

***/****
Planet Terror (**/****): starring Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Michael Biehn, Jeff Fahey
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez
Death Proof (****/****): starring Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Zoe Bell
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Robert Rodriguez is better at making an old exploitation movie and Quentin Tarantino is better at capturing the joy of watching old exploitation movies, meaning that the Rodriguez half of Grindhouse is exuberant, post-modern camp and the Tarantino half is, as Tarantino's films usually are, pure delight. Rodriguez winks and tries maybe too hard; Tarantino, being the sui generis of a very specific kind of film, proceeds to create something that resembles Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop while steering clear of irony, self-indulgence, and post-modernism in its reverence. The mistake is in seeing some of Tarantino's casting choices as ironic: what's wrong with the careers of the world's Travoltas and Pam Griers and even De Niros is that they started cashing in on the ironic value of their brand. No, what Tarantino does is remember why they became a brand in the first place. A moment where Kurt Russell, as Tarantino's bogey Stuntman Mike, flashes a giant, shit-eating grin right through the fourth wall doesn't come off as self-congratulatory so much as it shows an old genre vet excited to be back in the saddle. While Rodriguez's Planet Terror is fun in a back-clapping way, Tarantino's Death Proof is a profound insight into the sort of dick-raising entertainments that made Tarantino who he is as fanboy artist. Rodriguez likes to show off--Tarantino can only make the movies he makes: it's not the pulpiness of the subject matter that feels like the true faith in Tarantino's films, it's the sense that for all the artificiality of his aesthetic, there's not an ounce of pretense in his decisions. In short, Rodriguez is the Salieri to Tarantino's Mozart.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

***/****
starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw A fine companion piece to last summer's The Lone Ranger, with another hero whose essential goodness has become anachronistic in a world defined by its ugliness and venality, the Russo Brothers' Captain America: The Winter Soldier (hereafter Cap 2), for all its boom-boom, is surprisingly thoughtful--and surprisingly doom-laden. It's dark as hell. Gone are the pulp machinations of Joe Johnston--this one is more The Empire Strikes Back than The Rocketeer, where the victories are Pyrrhic and the bad guys are smarter and better-equipped. By the end, this most optimistic of superheroes resolves himself to rescuing a friend, while his closest comrade-in-arms advises him to look for love again. They're small goals, the kind of goals that mere mortals happen to share with this demigod. As such, they provide the film with an unexpected payload of pathos and nostalgia for lost selves that used to believe the world would be better if only we had a friend upon which we could always depend, and love that would remain evergreen. Cap 2 is about our better natures, and it's about the realization as you grow older that you may have allowed your better nature to be subsumed by misdirected senses of duty. It's about what it means to compromise your values on the altar of "maturity" and "sophistication"--even "progress" and "modernity." And when it works best, it's about what it means when you don't.

Cat People (1982) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Nastassia Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard, Annette O'Toole
screenplay by Alan Ormsby, based on the story by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Paul Schrader

by Bryant Frazer Amid the American horror boom of the late-1970s and early-1980s, when everything old was new again and once-dormant studio properties like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World, and The Fly were suddenly valuable franchises, the script for a remake of Cat People, one of the most subtle of all horror classics, somehow ended up on Paul Schrader's desk. Why Schrader? Dumb luck, mostly. Certainly he had no great love for the source material, a 1942 horror film directed by Jacques Tourneur that Schrader famously (and charmlessly) claimed "isn't that brilliant." But he must have seen in the raw material the opportunity to make a deeply weird movie, one that fused a new mythology with a contemporary melodrama of fear, desire, and violence. The result is not just a personal expression of Schrader's own sex-and-death preoccupations, but a sort of high-water mark for the quixotic attempt to meld visually sophisticated erotica with commercially savvy narrative storytelling.

Thief (1981) [The Criterion Collection] - Dual-Format Edition

click any image to enlarge

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Robert Prosky, Willie Nelson
screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the novel The Home Invaders by Frank Hohimer
directed by Michael Mann

"Look, I have run out of time. I have lost it all. So l cannot work fast enough to catch up, and l cannot run fast enough to catch up. And the only thing that catches me up is doin' my magic act. But it ends, you know? It will end. When l got this, right there, it ends, it is over. So I am just asking you...to be with me."
-Frank (James Caan), Thief (1981)

"I'm catching up. On life. Meeting someone like you."
-John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), Public Enemies (2008)

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Like the historical Dillinger, the fictional Frank was just a punk kid overzealously punished for a petty crime by a judge looking to make an example of him. Instead, he created the man Frank is as Thief begins: a master safecracker, taught his trade in the joint by fellow convict Okla (Willie Nelson, heartbreaking). As Frank recounts in a mesmerizing monologue that Caan, for what it's worth, has counted as his finest piece of screen acting, the other thing he learned in Joliet is how to create a forcefield around himself by disengaging from fear. It's not Zen detachment that he's mastered; a man of flashy tastes, he's too much the materialist to live like Heat's ascetic Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), whose Modernist house in the hills is all windows and no furniture. They are cut from the same cloth, though, in that they're acutely aware of the temporariness of their stolen lifestyles and have no qualms about jumping ship to stay ahead of the enemy.