Film Freak Central

Sundance '09: Kimjongilia

The Flower of Kim Jong II
**½/****
directed by NC Heikin

by Alex Jackson Kimjongilia takes its title from a hybrid red begonia created in honour of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's 46^th birthday. It is said to symbolize wisdom, love, justice, and peace. Director NC Heikin juxtaposes propaganda footage romanticizing Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung's North Korea against interviews with former oppressed North Koreans who now reside in South Korea. As political filmmaking, it's pretty crude. There really aren't two sides to this issue: Kim Jong Il is a bad guy and there doesn't seem to be any way to argue that he's not. Heikin does give us a timeline explaining how the Kim family came to power after ousting the occupying Japanese from Korea, but her scope isn't broad enough to explore the difficulties of establishing a new government from the ruins of war. Instead, Kimjongilia is more a simple revel in absurdity. The propaganda pieces are beyond satire--they come off as the bastard children of Leni Riefenstahl and Lawrence Welk. They feature musical numbers routinely centred around the abundance of food, a recurrent obsession in a country hobbled by famine. There's a good moment where a North Korean singer explains that she was forbidden to sing because her voice was judged as too commercial; entertainment in communist countries apparently has to be bad enough that nobody will want to pay money for it. We then hear the kinds of stories the propaganda is meant to cover up. Three generations of a family can be placed in a prison camp for something one member did. Heikin interviews a man born into a prison camp for an unnamed crime committed by his grandfather. People are routinely incarcerated for associating with those who have embarrassed or have the potential to embarrass the Great Leader. Later, we learn that part of the reason admission standards to the prison camps are so lax is because North Korea's economy relies on slave labour to manufacture products which are subsequently exported to European countries. The prison-camp stories themselves are so terrible they're darkly hilarious--no matter how bad you think things can get, they get worse. Still, I found that Kimjongilia only truly came alive during the propaganda sequences. Kim-Jong Il's bald-faced lies offer more to chew on than the secrets he keeps. I wonder how the film would work if the propaganda moved to the forefront and the point didn't lie so much in said juxtaposition. Kimjongilia isn't worthless, but it's ultimately not telling us much we don't already know.

Blue Streak (1999) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Martin Lawrence, Luke Wilson, Dave Chappelle, William Forsythe
screenplay by Michael Berry & John Blumenthal and Steve Carpenter
directed by Les Mayfield

by Bryant Frazer Very early on in Blue Streak, as Miles Logan, the character portrayed by a fast-talking Martin Lawrence, co-opts Dr. Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech to describe his own civil rights movement upon getting released from the joint after serving time for his role in a botched jewel heist, it's clear the film is aiming for giddy irreverence. But slavish conformance to most conventions of the late-1990s PG-13 action farce keeps it from scaling the kind of heights that Lawrence's confident and wholly unpretentious comic presence occasionally suggests.

Sundance '09: The Anarchist's Wife

**/****
starring María Valverde, Juan Diego Botto, Nina Hoss, Ivana Baquero
screenplay by Marie Noëlle
directed by Marie Noëlle & Peter Sehr

by Alex Jackson Affirmation, if nothing else, that Paul Verhoeven's Blackbook has become the dominant model for World War II pictures, Marie Noëlle and Peter Sehr's Verhoeven-esque The Anarchist's Wife alienated me early on by folding in stock footage to depict both the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. On some level, I suspect this is a cheapoid strategy enabling the filmmakers to reserve more of their budget for costumes and sets. Whatever its intention, it dehumanizes the characters, translating them and their problems into unthreatening movie terms. This becomes even more explicit in a strange moment where the eponymous heroine Manuela (María Valverde) supplies the soundtrack to a movie she's watching with her daughter that was silenced by a bombing raid. Valverde's classical beauty and the mere way she can model a certain shade of red lipstick appears to be the principal reason for the film's existence--the rest feels like pretext as Manuela's husband Justo (Juan Diego Botto) is captured during the war and put in a concentration camp. He resurfaces in France several years later; Manuela finds him and they reunite, but he's secretly preoccupied with an anti-fascist group planning to overthrow Franco in Spain. There's a good movie in here somewhere, with Justo realigning his allegiances away from his family in their absence and identifying more exclusively as a revolutionary. But Noelle and Sehr seem reluctant to ever make either Manuela or Justo unsympathetic. Justo is never really held accountable for favouring the cause over his wife and family and Manuela is never held accountable for preferring her family to the cause. Noelle and Sehr see Justo's idealism as noble and romantic and Manuela doesn't waver in her devotion to her husband. The throughline between the flaw in the film's first half (said movieness) and the flaw in its second (the lack of any real conflict) suggests that too high a premium was placed on palatability. Indeed, The Anarchist's Wife goes down smooth, but it's not nearly bold enough to produce anything resembling nutritional value.

Sundance '09: Everything Strange and New

***½/****
starring Jerry McDaniel, Beth Lisick, Luis Saguar, Rigo Chacon Jr.
written and directed by Frazer Bradshaw

by Alex Jackson The philosophical question at the centre of Frazer Bradshaw's incredible Everything Strange and New is as rudimentary and pragmatic as they come: how do you find happiness? And if you never find happiness but stumble upon contentment, is contentment going to be enough to sustain you for the rest of your days? The film begins with thirty-something carpenter Wayne (Jerry McDaniel) reflecting on the early years of his marriage to Reneé (Beth Lisick). She was in advertising and made more money than he did, and their complementary schedules allowed them to go out together every other day and have sex constantly. Then she got pregnant and her agency went belly up. Today she works freelance when she gets it but mostly just stays home with the kids. They bought a house. It's doubled in value since, but all that means is that they could borrow more against it, which they did. Now with the recession, they owe more on it than it's worth. Wayne says he's learned that kids can be fun, but it's not the fun he once had with Reneé. And so it goes. Everything Strange and New didn't only hit me at the right time in my life, it hit me at the right time in my week, in part because I'm coming off a bad case of bronchitis; I've been walking through this year's festival in a state of befuddlement. Whether consequently or coincidentally, the films have been so cerebral, so bereft of any easily-comprehensible sensual pleasures, that I often feel like I'm trying to create an ice sculpture with a snow shovel in writing about them. None more so than this one, which sports two of the saddest blowjobs ever committed to film. Bradshaw generally eschews music and gives us little action or overt conflict. A good deal of the time, Wayne's passivity inspires the camera to simply float through his home as he ruminates on his vague dissatisfaction via voiceover. The film is a deadening experience and it feels right. It feels necessary. The despair of Everything Strange and New is the despair of realizing that after thousands of years of human civilization, life has become synonymous with survival. If this isn't the same despair people experience right before they turn to religion, perhaps it should be. I suspect there are going to be people who will have absolutely no need for the film and that notion paralyzes me with jealousy.

Zodiac (2007) [2-Disc Director's Cut] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards
screenplay by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith
directed by David Fincher 

by Walter Chaw The best film of its kind since All the President's Men, David Fincher's Zodiac is another very fine telephone procedural drawn from another landmark bit of investigative journalism--though more fascinatingly, it's another time capsule of a very specific era, flash-frozen and suspended in Fincher's trademark amber. Still, by the very nature of its subject matter, Zodiac deals in millennial anxieties: the un-'catchable' foe; the unknowable cipher; the futility of the best efforts of good and smart men; and the disintegration of the nuclear family smashed to pudding in a diving bell collapsed under the pressure of the sinking outside. The film is as remarkable as it is because it's about something as simple and enchanted as the human animal--not just bedraggled San Francisco detective Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), but also Zodiac's two female victims and, in a strange echo, two almost-invisible wives: Toschi's (June Raphael) and that of newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). Easy to say that actresses Raphael and Chloë Sevigny are wasted by being given nary anything to work with outside a terrified moment and a single speech, respectively; better to say that they assume the only function they can in a picture revolving around male cooperation and survival in a world that has reduced itself to the barbarous niceties of macho religions and arcane rituals. No accident that the Zodiac Killer's partiality to a medieval code is central to a key revelation.

Sundance '09: Boy Interrupted

***/****
directed by Dana Perry

by Alex Jackson In 2005, Dana and Hart Perry's 15-year-old son Evan fulfilled a life-long obsession with suicide by jumping out his bedroom window. Documentary filmmakers by profession, the Perrys worked through their grief by making this feature-length memorial to him. Exactly the sort of thing that seems immune to criticism, the film is nonetheless admirably free of sentimentality. When Perry includes footage of herself pregnant with Evan, she does so as a professional documentarian economically conveying the depth of a mother's attachment to her offspring. Given that one of Evan's dying wishes was to be forgotten, I can't help but think that Boy Interrupted was intended, on some level at least, as an act of defiance. The last thing Evan wanted from his parents was for them to mourn his death and here they are revelling in grief over him, spiting him and refusing to let him weasel away from the consequences of his actions. Perhaps the most frightening thing about the film is that there is no mystery as to why Evan did what he did. He suffered his entire life with bipolar disorder and had manic periods of depression. As his half-brother surmises from reading his suicide note, Evan had all the same thoughts that every teenager does, only his disorder left him several times more vulnerable to their ill effects. Ever since he was a child, Evan had suicidal ideations; he was hard-wired from the very beginning to commit suicide. His actions were determined not by his environment or by choice, but first and foremost by his biology. Of course, Boy Interrupted can't be said to spread awareness of bipolar disorder or teenage suicide. As Evan's psychologist says near the end of the piece, medication and attempts at inpatient treatment simply postponed the inevitable. There is little anybody can do to stop it. Perhaps, then, it's enough that the film might have expunged a little of its makers' pain.

Sundance '09: The Killing Room

**/****
starring Chloë Sevigny, Peter Stormare, Clea DuVall, Timothy Hutton
screenplay by Gus Krieger, Ann Peacock
directed by Jonathan Liebesman

by Alex Jackson Jonathan Liebesman's The Killing Room would still have been pretty hokey five years ago, but in 2009, with the election and inauguration of Barack Obama, it's looking nothing short of obsolete. Genre filmmakers are going to have to face the fact that the Bush years are over. One of our new president's very first acts while in office was to shut down Guantanamo Bay; if torture porn wants to survive into the next decade, it's going to have to reinvent itself. In The Killing Room, four strangers are locked in a room together and made to answer a trivia question. The person whose answer is farthest away from the correct one is executed. It's a Machiavellian government experiment designed to aid the United States in the War on Terror. I won't reveal how, but suffice it to say I have serious doubts as to the plan's cost efficiency. Moreover, I cannot conceive of any possible way that the methods used could yield the intended results. Peter Stormare is the evil mastermind behind the curtain. At the beginning of the film, he has taken Chloë Sevigny as his apprentice and is training her by reviewing footage of a previous experiment. Fresh out of grad school, she finds herself struggling to maintain her carefully-cultivated professional demeanour as she discovers her new job requires her to oversee and participate in the murder of innocent people. The scenes between Stormare and Sevigny undermine the entire movie, breaking the tension at key points and artificially inflating the material with pretentious ruminations on how much evil we're willing to commit in the name of the greater good. When we're in the killing room with the test subjects, the film is perfectly effective. The first execution is genuinely startling and the picture's very last line is quite deliciously sick. There's a good sequence involving the subjects smearing blood all over the white walls so they can read the etchings previous occupants may have carved in. But even if The Killing Room stayed within its eponymous location and explained a lot less than it does, it wouldn't register as much more than a well-made Saw clone. This late in the game, we deserve better.

Dead & Buried (1981) [Limited Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc + I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) [Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

DEAD & BURIED
***/****
DVD - Image B- Sound C+ (Remixes)/B (Mono) Extras A
BD - Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring James Farentino, Melody Anderson, Jack Albertson, Lisa Blount
screenplay by Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon
directed by Gary A. Sherman

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
**/****
DVD|BD - Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze, Jr.
screenplay by Kevin Williamson, based on the novel by Lois Duncan
directed by Jim Gillespie

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gary A. Sherman's Dead & Buried and Jim Gillespie's I Know What You Did Last Summer, released theatrically fourteen years apart, together demonstrate that the more the horror genre stays the same, the more it changes. Each of these B-movies resorts to similar cheap tricks (first and foremost a coastal setting (the atmospheric equivalent of a non-perishable in horror)) and traffics in pessimism, yet one is genuinely hopeless and the other is trendily nihilistic--karo syrup as late-Nineties fashion accessory. A great gulf stands between the sensibilities of the two pictures that's unearthed by drawing other such subtle distinctions: one is cruel, the other callous; one is about death, the other about killing; one is sexy, the other exploitive; and so on and so forth. Virtually indescribable to modern audiences despite its familiar elements, Dead & Buried is a Darwinian fossil of the horror cinema, whose DNA has been perverted by the progressive commercialization of the culture and weakening of the intellectual position. Simplified: Current scare flicks still sometimes enjoy provocative subtext (like the recent Freddy Vs. Jason); more often, they die on the vine from WB-itis.

Sundance '09: Stay the Same Never Change

***½/****
starring Tate Buck, Dirk Cowan, Matthew Faber, Mary Nichols
written and directed by Laurel Nakadate

by Alex Jackson In the first five to ten minutes of Laurel Nakadate's Stay the Same Never Change, a beautiful blonde teenage girl eats a bowl of Trix in a surreally white kitchen. Nakadate gives us a series of close-ups of lips moist with milk and cutaways to the Trix box art. We then see the girl lounging around in her pyjamas, sometimes watching TV but mostly doing pretty much nothing at all. While she doesn't do anything overtly sexual, there is something almost pornographic about the attention Nakadate throws upon her. The girl's innocence and her sensuality are inextricable from one another: she's sexy when she eats breakfast cereal and she's sexy when she watches TV; everything she does or doesn't do renders her a sexual object and she is all the sexier for not really realizing it. Nakadate seems to have found a fresh and absurdly funny way of illustrating the Lolita problem, whereby sexuality provides young women more power than they know what to do with. Once this sequence is over, she switches to lower-resolution video and puts her non-actors in nakedly goofy scripted scenes. One teenager drowns her teddy bear. Another dresses up as the Hulk and rolls around on the floor. A third creates a muscle-bound love doll and takes him to the drive-in to see Evan Almighty. Because they're talking now, her girls are no longer aesthetic objects and the juice drains out of the picture. But they aren't actual people, either. Nakadate doesn't evince any clear idea of what she wants to accomplish in these scenes and her cast's line readings are flat and mechanical. The film acquires an amateurish quality that appears to fit one's preconceptions of what bad movies are like. Yet this amateurishness is perhaps even more interesting than the arty first sequence, in that the horror inherent in the material is effectively neutralized. Nakadate introduces an ephebophilic kidnapper early in the film, but he is portrayed as neither a manifestation of a subconscious death wish nor a metaphor for the destructive forces of adulthood. He's just a loser. If Nakadate establishes in her virtuoso prologue the Midas touch of pretty teenage girls, where their every gesture vibrates with subsumed erotic tension, the hyper-banality of the rest of her film manages to push that notion to its breaking point.

Miracle at St. Anna (2008) - DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonzo, Omar Benson Miller
screenplay by James McBride, based on his novel
directed by Spike Lee

by Ian Pugh Beginning with a moment of vocalized contempt for the John Wayne-ification of World War II in popular culture, Miracle at St. Anna thoroughly establishes its primary aim to give credit where credit is due to the unsung black heroes of the era. Director Spike Lee brings a broader sense of humanism to the table as well, though, orchestrating innumerable moments of fear and sympathy across several languages to impress upon viewers that there were, indeed, honest-to-gosh people on each side of a conflict not typically remembered for its moral ambiguity. If it's been done before, considering that Valkyrie subtly co-opted righteous, intelligent rebellion as an exclusively Anglo-American invention just a few short months after St. Anna's release, it's something of a necessary evil. Yet the picture is finally done a near-fatal disservice by Lee's often-painful (and, some might say, trademark) didacticism, with plenty of telegraphed prophecies on hand to reiterate that faith is more important than religion and that the common link of humanity overrides any national divisions. Messages well worth repeating, no doubt, but the film feels the need to drive them home with talking heads spouting heavy-handed philosophical ruminations that subtly give the mind license to wander. Sure, whether or not God exists, we should all act like He does--what else ya got?

Swing Vote (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Kevin Costner, Paula Patton, Kelsey Grammer, Madeline Carroll
screenplay by Jason Richman & Joshua Michael Stern
directed by Joshua Michael Stern

by Walter Chaw Another simple-minded liberal screed that does more harm to the liberal cause than the whole of Fox News could possibly dream, this salvo from the left positions itself as a wagging finger to the non-voters of the United States--so long as those non-voters are earnest (literally: the hero of the piece is named Ernest) and have precocious, politically-savvy preteen daughters. Yes, it's the Homer and Lisa Simpson dyad reproduced with Kevin Costner and Abigail Breslin 2.0 Madeline Carroll. This year's Man of the Year, Swing Vote is the kind of lefty pinko wet blanket that can't take a stand without providing narration for it, until finally it reveals itself as a public-service announcement for the sanctity of casting a vote that's properly counted. Hooray, Constitution! This doesn't preclude a few potshots at the press, natch--take that, stupid First Amendment! Every scene of the film is an exclamation point delivered from atop a worst-of-Capra soapbox; those bemoaning that they don't make 'em like they used to, take a big, heaving bite of Swing Vote, compared to which the Pollyannaism of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington reads like P.J. O'Rourke snark. Maybe it's better to see the picture as a scary-prescient prediction of what would happen if someone like Ernest were not only tasked with choosing the next President of the United States, but moreover tabbed as the vice-presidential nominee of a major candidate. Think of Swing Vote as the mother-loving Sarah Palin story and suddenly the movie's every bit the frightening satirical comedy it wasn't upon initial release.

Day of the Dead (2008) + Lost Boys: The Tribe (2008) [Uncut Version] - DVDs

DAY OF THE DEAD
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Mena Suvari, Nick Cannon, Michael Welch, Ving Rhames
screenplay by Jeffrey Reddick
directed by Steve Miner

LOST BOYS: THE TRIBE
*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Tad Hilgenbrinck, Angus Sutherland, Autumn Reeser, Corey Feldman
screenplay by Hans Rodionoff
directed by P.J. Pesce

by Walter Chaw As I'm an avowed fan of George Romero's severely underestimated Day of the Dead, imagine my unsurprised chagrin when über-hack Steve Miner's remake of Romero's third zombie outing falls far nearer in quality to Tom Savini's dishonourable remake of Night of the Living Dead than to Zach Snyder's better-than-the-original Dawn of the Dead. A mess from conception to execution, the picture's first misstep is to turn the splatter effects over to cheap-o CGI phantoms and allow the ridiculous cardboard stencils played by Mena Suvari and--horrors--Nick Cannon to run roughshod. The soul of Romero's flicks--of all good zombie flicks--lies in their social awareness and in the ultimate feeling that whatever chills and thrills enjoyed along the way, it was all a metaphor for something more interesting than an end-of-days high concept.

Touch of Evil (1958) [50th Anniversary Edition] - DVD

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles, Joseph Calleia
screenplay by Orson Welles, based on the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson
directed by Orson Welles

by Alex Jackson Particularly in light of its 50^th Anniversary DVD reissue, which gathers together all three extant versions of the film, I find myself grouping writer-director Orson Welles's Touch of Evil with multiple-incarnated masterworks like Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, and, to a lesser extent, Dawn of the Dead and Brazil. Moreover, I don't quite see it as a 1950s noir thriller from Universal, or even really as an Orson Welles picture--rather, I look at Touch of Evil as a canonical part of every young (male?) cinephile's indoctrination. It occurs to me that you should be able to buy one-sheets for it at your local record store. So I was mildly surprised to hear Jonathan Rosenbaum admit in his audio commentary that he disliked the picture when he saw it as a teenager. He explains that he tied it too closely into the film noir genre and found it an unpleasant specimen. David Edelstein, in his theatrical review of the 1998 restoration, writes that he initially regarded it as one of the worst movies ever made. The picture neatly conformed to his preconceptions of what bad movies are like.

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.

Hannah Montana: The Complete First Season (2006-2007) + Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007) [Special Edition] - DVD

HANNAH MONTANA: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image C Sound C+ Extras D+
"Lilly, Do You Want to Know a Secret?," "Miley Get Your Gum," "She's a Super Sneak," "I Can't Make You Love Hannah If You Don't," "It's My Party and I'll Lie If I Want To," "Grandma Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Play Favorites," "It's a Mannequin's World," "Mascot Love," "Ooh, Ooh Itchy Woman," "O Say Can You... Remember These Words?," "Oops! I Meddled Again," "You're So Vain, You Probably Think This Zit is About You," "New Kid in School," "More Than a Zombie to Me," "Good Golly, Miss Dolly," "Torn Between Two Hannahs," "People Who Meet People," "Money for Nothing, Guilt for Free," "Debt it Be," "My Boyfriend's Jackson And There's Gonna Be Some Trouble," "We Are Family--Now Get Me a Water!," "Schooly Bully," "The Idol Side of Me," "Smells Like Teen Sellout," "Bad Moose Rising"

ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS
½*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras D+
starring Jason Lee, David Cross, Cameron Richardson, Jane Lynch
screenplay by Jon Vitti and Will McRobb & Chris Viscardi
directed by Tim Hill

by Ian Pugh Contemplating the factors that pushed Hannah Montana into the limelight is automatically more interesting than devoting the least amount of attention to the eponymous Disney sitcom that introduced her to her gullible constituency. The concept behind the show, a kind of rock star wish-fulfillment that teaches its tweener audience that if you tell enough people you're famous, you'll get there eventually, has proved the foundation on which to make a mint. But sit down to watch "Hannah Montana" itself and you won't see much more than the same episodic drivel from the Disney Channel--standardized junior-high antics cushioned by lame slapstick. Any significance you cull from a deeper reading invariably leads back to the construction of the carefully-groomed personality that serves as its centrepiece. Flanked by her best friends (Mitchel Musso and Emily Osment) and supported by her manager/father (Billy Ray Cyrus) and brother Jackson (Jason Earles), Miley Stewart (Miley Cyrus) divides her time between a typical teenage life and a tour through fame as bubblegum diva Hannah Montana. What she actually does with that time hardly matters.

Revolver (2005) - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

*/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras C-
BD - Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Vincent Pastore, Andre Benjamin
written and directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw Give Guy Ritchie a little credit for being ambitious and take a little away from him for being so relentlessly pussy-whipped that Revolver, his return to the neo-Mod gangster genre that made his name, is one part rumination on the mystical mumbo-jumbo of his then-wife's Kabbalah, one part exploration of the self-actualized ego, and every part pretentious, pseudo-intellectual garbage. It's so fascinated with itself that the yak-track on the film's DVD and Blu-ray releases finds Ritchie periodically consulting his assistant as an augur of whether or not Ritchie has gotten too complicated for the audience of nitwits not put off enough by the movie to avoid watching it again with the commentary activated. He believes he's created something of such vast, far-reaching, ungraspable, existential implication that this cheap, showy action pic is the ne plus ultra of modern experience, with Ritchie our schlock Zoroaster, guiding us through avatar Jake Green (Jason Statham) as he emerges from years of solitary confinement, during which he learned the parameters of the perfect con by intercepting the chess moves of the two prisoners on either side of him. Jake has claustrophobia, something Ritchie helpfully offers is a "metaphorical fear," by which I think he means that it's a metaphor for all fear; his clumsiness with the articulation of this single concept illustrates how it is that the rest of it is such a godawful mess. Consider Revolver's interesting only to the extent that Ritchie's self-absorption is ironic when applied to a picture about the internal struggle between Freud's personality strata--never mind that Jake's Super-Ego is André Benjamin and his Id appears to be motherfucking Big Pussy. Jesus, this is a stupid movie.

Pineapple Express (2008) [Unrated Special Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Seth Rogen, James Franco, Gary Cole, Danny McBride
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw I'm willing to concede that I don't completely get it, but I'm still game to think about it because Pineapple Express has a peculiar pedigree. It boasts David Gordon Green as its director and his regular DP Tim Orr is in charge of shooting the gross-out gags and stone-faced stoner riffs. The union makes the most sense if we read the film as a throwback/homage to the Seventies cycle of grindhouse exploitation flicks (doobies and dismemberment), thus explaining the old-school wipes and funkadelic soundtrack, the mote-flecked cinematography, the cruel violence, and, if it's even possible, the air of reality throughout. Otherwise, the picture feels like a cynical patchwork stitching together this new comedy genre with a sensibility specifically designed to mock it. When über-stoner Saul (James Franco, in his Spicoli/The Dude breakout) runs through the dark woods, the flash I get isn't to Cheech & Chong but to the convulsive opening of Green's Undertow. And during an ending in an abandoned government research facility-turned-subterranean pot greenhouse, I couldn't shake Green's odd relationship with Asian stereotyping (remember the Feng Shui character from All the Real Girls?) in a troupe of black-clad Asian assassins clearly established as objects of derision. In truth, however, I don't know if the derision is levied at Asians or at the criticism levied against Green's perceived derision of the same.

Defiance (2008)

½*/****
starring Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell, Alexa Davalos
screenplay by Edward Zwick & Clay Frohman
directed by Edward Zwick

by Walter Chaw It's finally happened: Red Dawn with Russian Jews. It's not so much unthinkable as inevitable after the fact. You could go your whole life without conjuring something so perverse; it's the kind of thing "South Park" might have done at a quarter the budget, with thrice the ingenuity, and without the star power of über-studs Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber making a pretty convincing play for inclusion in the bad accent hall of fame. When Craig, as heroic bandit Tuvia Bielski, delivers his St. Crispian's Day speech in half-pidgin/half-Queen's English ("Uff vee shut die? Tlyin to liff? At least we die like human beings!") as director Ed Zwick ladles on the Fiddler on the Roof score and we get reaction shots of a Dickensian urchin all dirt and eyes, what choice do we have but to harden our hearts and wonder how it is that every "true story" run through this prestige mill ends up exactly the same grain. The moment when Tuvia and his woodsman brother Zus (Schreiber) take on the responsibility of two fine young lasses at the behest of a set-upon farm family, however, is the moment that it clicks that this piece of macho bullroar is a direct blood descendant of John Milius's stupidest movie of 1984. There but for the grace of Swayze and Sheen goes Defiance--a film so bad that it's not only worse than Red Dawn, but worse because instead of positing an imaginary occupation of heartland America, it sets itself smack dab in the middle of the Nazi occupation of Belorussia circa 1941--suggesting in the process that while it's not true there was no Jewish resistance in WWII, it might be true that the reason so many were killed is because they weren't as macho as Tuvia and Zus. Kind of a sticky wicket, that.

Film Freak Central's Top 10 of 2008

I'm going to call 2008 a "down" year, but not because there were fewer masterpieces produced--only because the theme that resonated for me the most was this sense of a cycle completing. If it's true that every generation flatters itself as the last one, it's equally true that every decade of film nears its completion with its full measure of anticipation/regret (liebestraum as zeitgeist, no?) in its eighth, sometimes ninth, year. Even films that on the surface seem filled with the fruit of human ambition and desire--like James Marsh's ebullient Man on Wire, in which the World Trade Center appears as the phantom lover of highwire artist Philippe Petit--take place, after all, at the ground zero of this epoch. What's dying throughout 2006 and 2007, all this sussing through father issues and the cult of masculinity and love and the courage of children, is dead now. It's not nihilism anymore, it's pragmatism. The dream is over, the insect is awake.