Film Freak Central

Live and Let Die (1973) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Roger Moore, Yaphet Kotto, Jane Seymour, Clifton James
screenplay by Tom Mankiewicz, based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Guy Hamilton

by Ian Pugh As a young teenager and budding cinephile, I owned all the Bond films on VHS. I remember watching Live and Let Die more often than any of the others, probably because--crushes on Jane Seymour notwithstanding--as a viewer without any working sense of social context, it was the easiest film of the series to just sit back and enjoy. No Cold War scenarios requiring global perspective, no long-standing rivalries requiring explanation; Thunderball perfected the infamous Bond formula to dubious ends, but this is the entry that endeared you to its simplicity. In his first turn in the role, Roger Moore's easygoing charm was a better fit for the youngest 007 neophytes than the rough, brutish Connery--and, despite being mired in a hopelessly-dated '70s landscape, the action sequences are sharply directed and tightly edited. In fact, they'd assure that the film would hold up pretty well today for more adult sensibilities...that is, if its script didn't revolve around James Bond fighting every single black person in the Western hemisphere.

Bolt (2008)

**½/****
screenplay by Dan Fogelman, Chris Williams
directed by Byron Howard, Chris Williams

by Walter Chaw What counts as a revolution for Disney animation nowadays is tellingly only a shadow of Pixar's gracefully loaded pictures. It demonstrates that any film completed under the supervision of John Lasseter can't be that bad, but also that all the things wrong with The Mouse over the last couple of decades won't clear up with just one picture. Bolt isn't a bad start, though, handling in its light, rote way a couple of nice moments with orphaned cat Mittens (voiced by Susie Essman) that remind of Jessie's heartache from Toy Story 2 and a few well-paced action sequences that recall a superhero highlight reel from The Incredibles (speaking of films that need a sequel). The point of greatest interest is that Bolt represents the second major movie this year after Tropic Thunder that has as its protagonist an actor who doesn't realize he's no longer on a soundstage. (Collective commentary on the end of our time in Oz or Kansas?) Even without a deeper interest in answering the questions that it asks (in sharp contrast to the introspective, almost silent WALL·E), it's still light years ahead of Disney's spate of racist, misanthropic entertainments and/or direct-to-video sequels that cynically transform their Vault™ into a McDonald's franchise.

Australia (2008)

*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Bryan Brown
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Stuart Beattie & Ronald Harwood & Richard Flanagan
directed by Baz Luhrmann

by Walter Chaw Baz Luhrmann's Titanic begins--as you know that it must--with fusty, dusty-britches Mrs. Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) tumbling out of a plane into the wilds of WWII Australia and the brawny arms of fair dinkum frontiersman The Drover (Hugh Jackman). They hate each other--she his disgustingly rugged physique and brusque manner, he her high-falutin' snobbery and belief that all men want to shag her. How miraculous, then, that the two come to love one another before the one-hour mark of the longest two weeks you'll spend in a theatre this year. But first, in a nod to Australia's "Lost Generation," of course, but more directly in most viewers' minds to Rabbit-Proof Fence, introduce pint-sized product of settler/aboriginal miscegenation Nullah (Brandon Walters), who lives on Sarah's late husband's cattle farm. Nullah is the emotional glue of the film (besides more importantly being the one who brings the cast's collective age down from AARP levels), the character imperilled, monumentalized, sought after, lost, recovered, hugged over, longed over, kissed over, and, in a stupid film's deeply stupid end titles, patronized with trivia about how the POME government at last apologized to the Aborigine people for their policy of forced intermarriage. How this saccharine, torpid love saga ends as a bromide is one of those things only the genuinely gifted can achieve: set in Darwin, Australia earns a Darwin Award for its dedication to self-destruction.

Standard Operating Procedure (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
directed by Errol Morris

by Bryant Frazer There's a tension in Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure between the subject matter--the torture and humiliation of inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad during the U.S. occupation of Iraq--and what Morris is really up to. Anyone who's read his excellent "Zoom" blog for THE NEW YORK TIMES, including his brilliant, three-part consideration of the pedigree of two different photographs taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War, knows that the director is concerned lately with the methodical, emotionless investigation of the circumstances surrounding a picture's taking. He wants to know what a photo conceals in addition to what it reveals--what's happening outside its spatial frame? Its temporal boundaries?

The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

La sindrome di Stendhal
**½/****
DVD - Image B Sound C+ Extras B
BD - Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Asia Argento, Thomas Kretschmann, Marco Leonardi
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw It's hard for me to reconcile the Dario Argento of the Seventies through to 1982's Tenebre with the Dario Argento ever after (at least until what I've heard is a remarkable comeback, the upcoming completion of his Three Mothers trilogy). The inventor almost by himself of two distinct genres of film in Italy (and just the concept of the arthouse slasher in the world), a co-writer of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, and a revolutionizer of horror-movie music became this guy who stopped aping Hitchcock and started aping...Jeunet? Himself? Even with Max Von Sydow in the fold (Non ho sonno), the pictures post-Tenebre are cheap auto-knockoffs devoid of innovation and lacking the amazingly imaginative gore that marked Argento's early gialli, the archetypal resonance of his supernaturals, or the transcendent, sometimes sublime lawlessness of his hybrids (like Suspiria, for instance, still a towering achievement). They're almost to a one these gaudy, derivative, exhausted pieces of shit.

Thunderball (1965) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Sean Connery, Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celi, Luciana Paluzzi
screenplay by Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins,
based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Terence Young

by Ian Pugh Thunderball is far from the worst Bond film--you'd be hard-pressed to even label it outright bad--but it may be the entry in this venerated series most worthy of contempt for its concerted, ultimately successful effort to formulize its hero's adventures. After the grim uncertainty of From Russia with Love and the classic iconography of Goldfinger, Thunderball is more than content to let a suddenly-enormous budget ($9M compared to Goldfinger's $3M) carry it far, far over-the-top with ludicrous underwater battles and pieces of gadgetry that become full-blown set-pieces in and of themselves. (That jet-pack sequence must have been astonishing in 1965, but it comes from a different cinematic world entirely--and, maddeningly, the filmmakers bend over backwards to accommodate it.) It's not too difficult to understand such a lopsided reliance on special effects, however, considering that Thunderball's premise is far too slim to accommodate its bloated 130-minute running time: SPECTRE hijacks a NATO bomber jet and threatens to detonate its nuclear warheads in a major city in America or Great Britain unless both governments pay a hefty ransom. Heading the operation is Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), a sinister something-or-other calling the shots out of the Bahamas. Bond travels to Nassau to contact "Domino" Derval (Claudine Auger), Largo's mistress and sister of the missing jet's pilot, and persuades her to help.

Girl on the Bridge (1999) - DVD

***½/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Vanessa Paradis, Daniel Auteuil, Frédéric Pfluger, Demetre Georgalas
screenplay by Serge Frydman
directed by Patrice Leconte

by Walter Chaw Patrice Leconte's immaculately-constructed Girl on the Bridge is a lovely, hopelessly romantic little bauble that catches the light no matter how you turn it. The picture stars gamine Vanessa Paradis as Adèle, a suicide girl broken by the lack of a soul mate and a flurry of Parisian bedsheets contemplating a George Bailey-style leap off the edge of a bridge. Her Clarence is Gabor (Daniel Auteuil), a professional knife-thrower who trolls for winsome targets looking to ride the eternity express; and together they paint the world a Fellini shade of red. The similarity is more than cosmetic: in its carnival-of-life (or better, life-as-carnival) atmosphere, the romance that develops between Gabor and Adèle is sublimated into the act of extended, trembling foreplay--lots of knives hurled at naked thighs and only a few nicks here and there to show for it. The act of actual sex is seen as something less than penetrating (Adèle pillow-hops like an adrenalized bunny), but when the pair rushes off to an abandoned train car to be alone, true intimacy only comes once Gabor starts in with the cutlery. Breathless in love like P.T. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love or Fellini's Nights in Cabiria (which likewise sports a woman of loose morals looking for love in Rome), Girl on the Bridge, Leconte's lightest confection, manages still to convey the director's themes of the mystery of luck as it governs chance meetings and meaningful hits and misses.

La Femme Nikita (1990) + Killing Zoe (1994) - DVDs|La Femme Nikita - Blu-ray Disc

Nikita
***/****
BD - Image A- Sound B+
DVD - Image B Sound A- (English)/B (French)
starring Anne Parillaud, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Tcheky Karyo, Jeanne Moreau
written and directed by Luc Besson

KILLING ZOE
***/**** Image A Sound B
starring Eric Stoltz, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Julie Delpy, Gary Kemp
written and directed by Roger Avary

by Bill Chambers When DVD screeners of La Femme Nikita and Killing Zoe arrived concurrently in my mailbox, I thought I had an angle for a piece: actor Jean-Hugues Anglade, a co-star in both films. I began taking notes, asking myself how they fit into his oeuvre and whether, viewed in tandem, these actioners represent career progression. That's when I realized: What I know about the work of Jean-Hugues Anglade you could fit on the head of a pin; I've only seen him in one other performance, as Zorg in Betty Blue (a.k.a. 37°2 le matin), a movie with obvious but ultimately superficial parallels to La Femme Nikita. So howzabout this for a thematic compromise? Nikita (its native title) and Killing Zoe each take place in France--that's as good a link between them as Anglade.

From Russia with Love (1963) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A-
starring Sean Connery, Daniela Bianchi, Pedro Armendáriz, Lotte Lenya
screenplay by Richard Maibaum, based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Terence Young

by Ian Pugh The first indelible image of From Russia with Love finds steely-eyed, platinum-blond killer Red Grant (Robert Shaw) taking a garrotte to James Bond (Sean Connery), slowly choking the life out of him without witty repartee or a single hope of close-shave escape. The victim turns out to be an impostor, live-target practice for Grant's escapades later in the film--but that momentary shock establishes right from the start that the rules have changed since last we saw 007. Here's a point in time when we weren't completely conditioned to accept Bond as undefeatable, when it wasn't unreasonable to believe that these globetrotting adventures could come to an unfortunate end at any moment. In fact, I wonder if it's reasonable to regard the unpolished Dr. No as mere prologue to From Russia with Love¹, with the breezy, romantic life of a Cold War secret agent violently exposed as a lie.

Kung Fu Panda (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

½* Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
screenplay by Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger
directed by Mark Osborne & John Stevenson

VIEW IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Ian Pugh The generic mediocrity known as DreamWorks' animation department is about eight steps behind the multilayered brilliance of Pixar, and with Kung Fu Panda I think they finally reveal how sore they are about it. Their latest cinematic effort seems like a particularly barbed response to Brad Bird's The Incredibles and Ratatouille: we are told that the way to make something special is simply by believing that it's special. Which, as Bird taught us, means you can apply that label to everything and everyone until nothing and no one is really special. In considering something so blatantly knee-jerk contradictory to his valid points, you have to wonder where, exactly, the belief in an egalitarian society ends and a genuinely destructive jealousy begins. The entirety of Kung Fu Panda strokes the middlebrow ego: the comedy is painfully broad and predictable, while the action sequences are edited into a wild, incomprehensible mess (although I must admit, watching a limbless viper perform complicated martial arts techniques is unexpectedly lovely), and at its core, it's outright insulted by the apparently galling insinuation that talent has an impact on results in any field of endeavour. In an insane attempt to refute that, Kung Fu Panda concludes that it's still better to be fat and lazy than talented and educated.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008) + Role Models (2008)

MADAGASCAR: ESCAPE 2 AFRICA
½*/****
screenplay by Etan Cohen and Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath
directed by Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath

ROLE MODELS
***/****
starring Seann William Scott, Paul Rudd, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Elizabeth Banks
screenplay by Paul Rudd & David Wain & Ken Marino
directed by David Wain

by Walter Chaw Rote and routine, Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath's follow-up to their popular Madagascar takes the usual sequel route towards magnification with the obnoxious Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (henceforth Madagascar 2). At the heart of it is a weird, feral mix of Lord of the Flies and Swiss Family Robinson as a group of New Yorkers gets lost on safari--commentary, if you want to formulate one, on the incursion of Americans into the rest of the world. It's not a bad thing to try to impose on this film in this historic election year, particularly since you're not likely to be distracted by very much else in the picture. It's even interesting to wonder how it is that lion Alex, voiced by Jewish Ben Stiller, could have been sired by daddy Zuba (Bernie Mac) and a nameless mom (Sherri Shepherd)--shades of Simba (Matthew Broderick) somehow springing from the loins of Mufasa (James Earl Jones). What's most potentially interesting about the piece, however, is the interspecies miscegenation (is it "bestiality" if they're both animals? Sort of like is it still necrophilia if it's Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron?) suggested between giraffe Melman and hippo Gloria (voiced by isn't-he-Jewish David Schwimmer and black Jada Pinkett Smith, respectively), eventually equated ironically with the union of a penguin and a bobble-head hula doll.

Dr. No (1962) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Sean Connery, Ursula Andress, Joseph Wiseman, Jack Lord
screenplay by Richard Maibaum & Johanna Hardwood & Berkely Mather, based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Terence Young

by Ian Pugh Sean Connery looks utterly lost in Dr. No. From the vantage point of this first crack at a big-screen James Bond, it's easy to see why Ian Fleming initially dismissed him as an "overgrown stuntman." Unable to convey much beyond a dashing, self-important man of the world, his attempts at cold-blooded murder and forceful interrogation are dispassionate and wooden at best. Considering how his individual performances as Bond rose and fell with different interpretations of the formula¹, one wonders if Connery served as a barometer of the filmmakers' confidence in the series' early days. It's evident that no one involved with Dr. No had a very clear idea of what that formula was, or would be. How far should we go in directly translating the book for the screen? Even the possibility of sequels turns out to be a question that distracts from a successful product: A little too bombastic for a leitmotif, Monty Norman's now-familiar "James Bond Theme" follows our hero around as if testing the waters, toying with the possibility that this character could support a series.

Beetlejuice (1988) [20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition] - DVD + Blu-ray Disc

Beetle Juice
***½/****
DVD - Image A- Sound B+ Extras C-
BD - Image A- Sound A- Extras C-
starring Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren
directed by Tim Burton

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Give Tim Burton's 1988 horror-comedy Beetle Juice credit for this: it's genuinely horrifying and genuinely hilarious. Sometimes both at once. The centrepiece of the film is a dinner party where new homeowners Delia (Catherine O'Hara) and Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones) and their guests uncontrollably lip-synch to Harry Belafonte's "Day-O." Seeing Jones struggle to protect himself through two outstretched hands as he growls the line "Hide thee deadly black tarantula" never fails to squeeze a chuckle out of me. At the end of the sequence, the partygoers' shrimp cocktails become large pink demonic hands that grab their faces and pull them down into their bowls. This final image is startling and very creepy in the way that it transforms a familiar object into something distinctly and unmistakably otherworldly.

The Final Countdown (1980) [2-Disc Limited Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

**½/****
DVD - Image A Sound A- Extras B
BD - Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, Katharine Ross, James Farentino
screenplay by David Ambrose & Gerry Davis
directed by Don Taylor

by Walter Chaw The first nine times I saw The Final Countdown, I was on a blanket on the hood of my parents' car, a chimichanga in one hand and a Coke in the other. This was August and September of 1980, and earlier that year I thought I'd seen the best movie ever: The Empire Strikes Back. The next summer, I'd take in--at the drive-in, at the Cooper, at the Lakeside Twin--Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman II, and Dragonslayer. I believed this to be the way movies naturally were, unaware then that I was poised at the cusp of a decade of filmmaking that would redefine fantasy and science-fiction, setting precedents for the genre with films like Back to the Future and Predator, E.T., and Blade Runner, Near Dark, and Miracle Mile--the well was as deep for flights of fancy in the Eighties as it was for incomparable character-driven paranoia in the Seventies. It was an amazing and specific time to come of age in the movies, I see in retrospect; and I owe the embarrassing chills I still get watching big-budget mainstream previews to this day to my maturation in the church of the blockbuster.

The Anchor of Independence: FFC Interviews Lance Hammer|Ballast (2008)

A Sundance sensation rolls up his sleeves

BALLAST **½/**** starring Micheal J. Smith, Sr., Tarra Riggs, JimMyron Ross, Johnny McPhail written and directed by Lance Hammer A man kills himself somewhere in the Mississippi Delta; his twin brother Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith, Sr.) tries to do the same but fails. After a brief stay in hospital, Lawrence is sent home to contemplate the direction his life has gone. Meanwhile, Lawrence's sister-in-law (Tarra Riggs) and nephew (JimMyron Ross) struggle to survive on a minimum-wage income. At first glance, this scenario feels almost hopelessly generic--though the long, meditative shots across empty landscapes and drained performances from non-actors serve to remind of a Bresson film. What finally makes Ballast so uniquely fascinating is how it seems to take place in a post-apocalyptic land, with the initial suicide the atomic bomb that transforms its inhabitants into defeated shells given to moments of hatred and violence without ever really understanding their own motives. (Scenes in which Lawrence raids a grocery store certainly make end-of-the-world comparisons inevitable.) Drugs and attempted suicide are not exactly ways to pass the time in Ballast, nor are they even treated as logical escapes from such hellish surroundings. They are simply the only constants in a world from which there doesn't appear to be any escape. Ballast is well worth a look for its dignified portrayal of poverty and desperation, and of how their attendant problems tend to form a vicious cycle of silent, festering madness--but, ironically (or appropriately) enough, it starts to sputter around the hour mark, once its characters begin picking up the pieces to rebuild their lives. The film certainly leaves plenty for the viewer to figure out on his own, complete with the dichotomy of journeys vs. destinations in the elusive search for better tomorrows. Yet for a movie that thrives on such an ambiguous setting, Ballast is curiously compelled to provide concrete answers to questions it should leave a little more open-ended. And its continued reliance on defeated, contemplative stares comes across as fatuous and proselytizing in a Sullivan's Travels kind of way. While Ballast is quite obviously a labour of love and the work of a preternatural talent, a more judicious hand in the editing room, particularly as applied to its last fifteen minutes, would have helped immensely.-IP

November 2, 2008|Ballast director/producer Lance Hammer isn't really the scruffy outsider that photos out of Sundance had led me to believe--at least, not in demeanour. Indeed, sporting a clean-shaven face and a soft, folksy tone of voice, he's a very polite fellow who just happens to have given the studio system a pass in favour of self-distributing his fascinating directorial debut. Hammer occasionally borders on a somewhat distracting formality, but that's only because he has very specific ideas about his film and wants to make sure that you understand them in their totality. (He expresses genuine regret upon confirming that I had watched the film on a DVD screener instead of on the big screen.) His quiet manner belies a fierce stubbornness, an admirable quality in an artist of his budding stature; here's a man who knows exactly what he wants from his cinematic career and is more than eager to expound on the present and future of distribution, not to mention his place in it. (The corners cut and chances taken in the promotion of Ballast are readily apparent--the film's advertising budget is, apparently, so low that this interview was conducted at my local ad agency's very own offices in downtown Boston instead of the Four Seasons Hotel, where movie press tours are traditionally hosted.) Near the end of our discussion, I threw a few intentional curveballs to better assess his opinion the overall quality of independent film in the United States, but in retrospect, I wish I had challenged him a little more on his rather bleak views of the mainstream market and, moreover, the very future of cinema itself.