Film Freak Central

Observe and Report (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Seth Rogen, Anna Faris, Michael Peña, Ray Liotta
written and directed by Jody Hill

by Ian Pugh The tide is changing, that much is clear. In just the last month alone, Paul Rudd and Jason Segel have turned a dependence on male bonding into a crisis of sexual identity (I Love You, Man), while Greg Mottola has deromanticized teenage nostalgia (Adventureland). Now, with their thoroughly disturbing Observe and Report, Jody Hill and Seth Rogen finish prying loose the grip that Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow have had on American comedy these past few years. More importantly, the film finally gives a clear voice to the ineluctable madness that the cinema of 2009 has poked and prodded at up to this point. The deadly sociopathy of Alan Moore's Rorschach blooms at last in security guard Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen), approached with frightened apprehension and a full understanding as to why he would nevertheless be lauded as a hero. As a result, the movie he inhabits is difficult, devastating, and paints our most recent cycles of vulgar, man-child humour as an empire built on unspoken psychosis and violent outbursts. Suddenly, the idea of Ferrell beating up a swarm of grade-schoolers in Step Brothers doesn't seem so hilarious.

The State: The Complete Series (1994-1995) - DVD

Image B+ Sound B Extras A-

by Jefferson Robbins "The State" probably had me at its opening kicker, a knockoff of the tumbling SPECIAL logo that prefaced every "Charlie Brown" program on CBS in the 1970s. The titular comedy troupe's eleven members are all about my age, so when these "twentysomething sketch-comedy whores" got their own show on MTV, this twentysomething sketch-comedy consumer was in generational tune with them. The members of The State clearly watched, and had grown up watching, a shitload of TV, just like their audience. Nostalgia's a powerful thing.

2009 TIFF Bytes #3.5: A Shine of Rainbows

originally published September 23, 2009
Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:

A SHINE OF RAINBOWS (dir. Vic Sarin)
Gawd, this movie is so nauseatingly nice. And generic. And hackneyed--any seasoned moviegoer will be able to predict every single story beat in advance. Connie Nielsen and Aidan Quinn--neither of whom is from Ireland (the director, meanwhile? From India)--play an Irish couple who adopt an adorable stuttering moppet (John Bell) from the local Dickensian orphanage. Because the kid is timid, kind of effeminate, and more than happy to learn the ropes from Nielsen, stoic, grunty Quinn can't relate to him. But then tragedy strikes (as you know it will from the first moment Nielsen tentatively clutches at her chest), and Quinn goes on a bender, and the kid steals a boat, and Quinn's grinch heart grows three sizes when the kid inevitably capsizes. Did I mention the baby seal yet? Who is this movie for? ½*/4

There may still be another capsule at the mothersite, but otherwise this it for my TIFF coverage. Apologies that I wound up reviewing such underwhelming fare; I confess I didn't pursue the buzz very aggressively--a muscle injury, coupled with the unexpected death of a friend, left me at the start of the Festival with little physical or psychic stamina. I'm kinda bummed that in the case of both Werner Herzog movies I showed up at the wrong theatre, but on that I blame a seemingly genetic aversion to doublechecking. Thanks for reading, even if you haven't felt much like commenting!

Important Things with Demetri Martin: Season One (2009) - DVD

Image A- Sound B Extras B-
"Timing," "Power," "Brains," "Chairs," "Safety," "Coolness," "Games"

by Jefferson Robbins If he ever gets tired of being Steven Wright with a guitar and a facial expression, Demetri Martin may have a future as a filmmaker. It's plain from the first season of "Important Things With Demetri Martin" that the comedian/actor thinks about the various parts of a given scenario and holds the branching possibilities in his mind in a three-dimensional way. This is typical of puzzle fiends and anagramists--terms which suit Martin well--and any producer/director worth a damn. His well-known line drawings, here set into motion by animators, make me think he's read both Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. His comedy is a realm where everything is nametagged and hypertexted. (See the title of his debut CD: "These Are Jokes".) No surprise, then, that his stand-up routine is a hit in this age of Google Maps and floating metadata. Wait 'til we're all staring through the lenses of our augmented-reality iPhones, swimming in subsurface information--then we'll truly be residents of Demetri Martin's world.

2009 TIFF Bytes #3: A Gun to the Head; Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould

originally published September 22, 2009
Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:
A Gun to the Head (d. Blaine Thurier)
Those who, like me, missed Male Fantasy, the sophomore feature of Blaine Thurier, may find themselves at a loss to distinguish between Thurier's growth as a filmmaker and advancements in digital video since his directorial debut, the better-in-retrospect Low Self Esteem Girl. Thurier's latest, the Vancouver-lensed A Gun to the Head, is comparatively polished, yet the film, with its focus again on suburban drug culture, feels dismayingly unevolved coming from someone who leads a prolific life that includes a steady gig as the keyboardist for the indie-rock supergroup The New Pornographers--even as it cops to a certain anxiety about abandoning comfortable milieux via Trevor (Tygh Runyan), a newlywed struggling with the demands of marriage in the face of his old freedoms. Basically a bush-league Mikey and Nicky, the picture has Trevor ferrying paranoid cousin Darren (Paul Anthony) all over town on a drug run just to avoid the dinner party his wife (Marnie Robinson, the spitting image of Jordana Spiro) is throwing back home; eventually the two run afoul of Darren's suppliers, who have already shown themselves capable of murder. I will say that Thurier is good with actors--this cast really brings it, with the suddenly-vivacious Sarah Lind a particular standout. (Revealing hidden comic chops, she plays a nasal-voiced bimbo who only picked up the word for "um" on her trip to Japan.) Lead baddie Hrothgar Mathews unfortunately bears a sometimes-striking resemblance to Glenn Gould the same year a documentary about the famous pianist plays alongside A Gun to the Head at the TIFF. Which leads me to... (**/4, by the way.)

2009 TIFF Bytes #2.5: Vincere

originally published September 21, 2009
Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:

Vincere (Win) (d. Marco Bellocchio)
Structurally and even editorially, the oddly-titled Vincere (Win) is kind of a mess, but the badass opening scene hooked me. Therein, a slender, dark-eyed journalist with a good head of hair--you guessed it: Benito Mussolini--sets a pocket watch and gives God five minutes to strike him down; if he's still alive when time runs out, Mussolini (Filippo Timi) tells the pious crowd gathered before him, it means there is no God. I really wanted to like this guy, but the movie's about his mistress and alleged other wife, Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who has the sort of face you can lose yourself in), whose story pretty much precludes any chance of that. Ida bears Mussolini a son and sells all her worldly possessions to subsidize his fascist newspaper, but as soon as his political career starts to gain a little traction, he has her exiled and eventually institutionalized. (Benito Jr. (Timi again) is committed as well once he reaches adulthood.) I'm not sure what the movie's out to prove, other than that Mussolini was a fucking fuckhead, but it's hard not to feel a subversive tickle during the fairly-graphic sex scenes between he and Ida, which reduce Il Duce in the act of giving him human urges. As much as veteran director Marco Bellocchio wants to honour Ida's Snake Pit ordeal, he does seem a little wistful about the aesthetics attendant to her ruin. Indeed, Inglourious Basterds might be the second-most cinema-fetishistic war movie I've seen this year, and it's hard to deny the strange enchantment of a war hospital tableau in which religious silents are projected onto the ceiling to placate the wounded. ***/4

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The Dark Crystal (1982) [Superbit] + [25th Anniversary Edition] - DVDs|Blu-ray Disc

***/****
Superbit DVD - Image B Sound C+
Anniversary DVD - Image A Sound B+ Extras A
BD - Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
screenplay by David Odell
directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz

by Bill Chambers When Jim Henson passed away in 1990, he left behind a diverse legion of fans and a company whose ultimate success, it now seems, hinged on his input. Jim Henson Productions and The Creature Shop are still thriving financially, but as the past few Muppet films (or that silly-looking computer-generated monkey from Lost In Space) demonstrate, the thrill and genius are gone. I'm positive that The Dark Crystal made today by Henson's successors would not provoke from an audience of kids five to fifty the same spellbound response the 1982 original does. Which is not to say there isn't room for improvement.

TIFF '09: Up in the Air

**½/****
directed by Jason Reitman

by Bill Chambers Jason Reitman's Up in the Air calls inveterate bachelor George Clooney to the stand to defend his enviable lifestyle to the civilized world. Alas, since this is mainstream Hollywood, where no undomesticated man goes unpunished, the jury's rigged. But first, the rest of it. Clooney's thinly-veiled alter ego, Ryan Bingham, is a corporate hatchet-man-for-hire who loves travelling and all the freedom from responsibility that implies. He's never been married, has no kids, and with business booming (thanks to our current economic crisis), it looks like he's not that far off from achieving his (only) long-term goal of getting enough miles under him to earn executive privileges from his airline. Then Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a new hire at Bingham's company eager to impress, proposes a revolutionary idea--fire people over the Internet using iChat--that would effectively bring an end to Ryan's jet-setting. Assigned to show Natalie the ropes on the road trip that follows, Ryan tries to prove to her the value of terminating someone's employment in person, partly out of self-preservation but also because he respects the sensitive nature of his work. (He may be commitment-phobic and a bit of a hustler, but he's no sadist.) The story's Nebraskan starting point and wedding-bound trajectory, plus the use of Ryan's white-trash roots as a self-evident punchline, made me wonder how Up in the Air escaped becoming an Alexander Payne movie, and truth be told the Clooney character could've used Payne's penchant for locating his protagonists' Achilles heels: Ryan is so free of neuroses that his inevitable comeuppance--er, epiphany--feels moralistic, if not outright cruel. Nevertheless, all isn't lost with the increasingly slick Reitman, who has the good sense to not slather every emotional beat with music and really seems to like his actresses. Vera Farmiga typically smoulders as Ryan's female counterpart ("Think of me as yourself with a vagina"), though it's the singular Kendrick who walks away with the movie--quite literally, as Natalie's premature departure from the narrative sends Up in the Air into a tailspin, pun intended.

TIFF '09: Mother

Madeo
***/****
directed by Bong Joon-ho

by Bill Chambers Bong Joon-ho's deliciously serpentine Mother is the story of an aging mom (Kim Hye-ja, awesome) who has supported her mentally-challenged son, Yoon Do-joon (Bin Won), into adulthood; monitoring him from afar while chopping roots, she's so watchful that she doesn't notice herself cutting off her own finger. She even sleeps in the same bed with him, though Bong doesn't sink to Bad Boy Bubby depths of depravity. When Yoon Do-joon is scapegoated in the killing of a schoolgirl, Mother makes it her sole (soul? Seoul?) mission in life to prove his innocence, which gradually transforms her into a distaff Kyle MacLachlan as she goes sleuthing in the city's Lynchian underbelly. (Much has been made of the murder victim's archetypal resemblance to "Twin Peaks"' Laura Palmer (she's the local teenaged Madonna/whore), but the picture's most brazen homages are to David Lynch's earlier Blue Velvet--and Bong is such a clever and enthusiastic pastiche artist that Mother is no less effective for it). It's not as gonzo as The Host and not as unsettling as Memories of Murder, but its wizardly craft does provide further evidence that Bong is one of the most formidable filmmaking talents to have emerged this decade, and its vision of maternal instinct rings painfully true. Mother also begins to throw some of the director's predilections and leitmotifs of Bong's work into relief, including a Hitchcockian distrust of law enforcement (Memories of Murder is essentially Zodiac starring the Keystone Cops, and in Mother, once the police are finally right, they're still wrong), vigilant parents, field imagery, unexpected humour, and, regrettably, a tendency to overstay his welcome. Just a smidge. Programme: Special Presentation (Originally published: September 19, 2009.)

The Odd Couple (1968) [Centennial Collection] - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, John Fiedler, Herb Edelman
screenplay by Neil Simon, based on his play
directed by Gene Saks

by Alex Jackson My high-school psychology teacher used The Odd Couple's Oscar and Felix as an example of two men who had never resolved the anal stage of Sigmund Freud's model for psychosexual development. Oscar (Walter Matthau) is anal expulsive, rebelling against toilet-training well into adulthood, wallowing in his own filth and living completely in the moment. Felix (Jack Lemmon) is anal-retentive, finding pleasure in withholding his feces as a child, and as an adult obsessively cleaning and re-cleaning his surroundings and living by a strictly-controlled schedule. Indeed, playwright Neil Simon's The Odd Couple seems custom-built to illustrate the anal-stage concept in Freudian psychosexual development. In a broader sense, The Odd Couple is also an overt embodiment of the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy: Felix represents the need to create order, whereas Oscar represents the need to maintain a natural chaotic state.

2009 TIFF Bytes #2: A Single Man; Trash Humpers

originally published September 18, 2009
Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:

A Single Man (d. Tom Ford)
I can't speak for Christopher Isherwood's novel, which seems like it must be a pre-emptive eulogy for the relationship documented in Chris & Don. A Love Story, but the movie made from it is pretty embarrassing. For better or worse (worse, if you ask me), A Single Man is precisely what you'd expect from fashion designer Tom Ford, even if you can't quite picture that sensibility as applied to a movie set in the world of academia circa the early-'60s. (Cue much "Mad Men" envy.) I don't think I've ever seen digital colour-timing so serially abused, or so hammily: Colin Firth is an English professor trying to go about his routine after the recent death of his long-time companion (Matthew Goode, better than he was in Watchmen), whom he can't publicly mourn; every time he sees something 'sublime,' like a pretty little girl in a dress who asks him why he looks sad, the image goes from washed-out pastel shades to near-blinding Technicolor. Lee Pace, Ginnifer Goodwin, and Elisabeth Harnois are squandered inasmuch as one can squander those actors and Julianne Moore is cringe-inducing as a go-go lush hoping against hope that Firth will start to swing both ways, but the pièce-de-resistance is Nicholas Hoult, all grown up but still disconcertingly sporting the same head he had in About a Boy. Hoult's character, a student of Firth's who stalks him like a lost puppy, is ascribed an emotional clairvoyance Hoult himself is utterly incapable of conveying authentically. Indeed, he's matured into such a terrible actor that it's actually disturbing to watch him in scenes with Firth (solid here), as though he's some theatre geek who's cut himself into the film with iMovie. */4

2009 TIFF Bytes #1.5: White Material

originally published September 15, 2009
Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:

White Material (d. Claire Denis)
This is Claire Denis' very own Gone with the Wind, and she seems to denote it as epic by shooting it in 2.35:1 widescreen. Headstrong Maria (Isabelle Huppert) struggles to keep the Vial coffee plantation operating in the midst of an African civil war despite accumulating exit cues. Her entire workforce heeds the evacuation call she chooses to ignore. She finds a severed animal's head among the beans. Her son (Nicolas Duvauchelle) goes mad after a brush with the rebels. Highly sought-after resistance fighter The Boxer (Isaach de Bankole) takes up residence in the Vials' shed far too conspicuously. And still she remains undeterred. One of Denis' most fascinating protagonists, Maria is an interloper everywhere she turns: a white woman in Cameroon, a divorcée living on the estate of her ex-husband (Christopher Lambert), the boss of a plantation she has no formal stake in; Denis subverts the paternalism of shit like I Dreamed of Africa, as you'd expect from the director of Beau Travail and Chocolat. But I have to admit, for all its indisputable richness of theme and craft, I found it a little tedious and just didn't connect with it; Walter's final words for Public Enemies ("It doesn't mean a thing to me") rang unfairly in my ears. No matter: Denis already made one for me this year (the lovely 35 Shots of Rum), and I am content to have discovered that Lambert is aging into a far more interesting actor than he ever was in his youth. **½/4

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TIFF '09: The Hole

**/****
starring Chris Massoglia, Haley Bennett, Nathan Gamble, Teri Polo
screenplay by Mark L. Smith
directed by Joe Dante

by Bill Chambers At the outset, it worried me that The Hole (no relation to any of the films bearing that title in the past), the great Joe Dante's return to the big screen, has little to no marquee value. Silly, I know: It's not like Gremlins' Zach Galligan was or is a household name--and besides, this is one of Dante's kid-oriented pictures, which are never star-driven. Still, to go from "and Steve Martin" to "and Teri Polo" in six short years is pretty humbling; Dante long ago paid his dues in B-movies and, however happy he might be to get away from studio interference/oppression, I'm sad to see him back there--not just because he hardly deserves such a Wellesian fate, but also because he's a director whose imagination grew in proportion to his funding, and he seems no longer inspired but instead stupefied by a shoestring budget. At least where his feature work is concerned.

Obsessed (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Idris Elba, Beyoncé Knowles, Ali Larter, Christine Lahti
screenplay by David Loughery
directed by Steve Shill

by Bryant Frazer When Hollywood types assimilate exploitation tropes and tactics, they start concocting films like Obsessed, in which Skinny White Bitch Ali Larter runs seriously afoul of Virtuous Black Woman Beyoncé Knowles by throwing herself at Good Husband Idris Elba. In fact, Obsessed is less a movie than it is a marketing plan, calculated to snare audiences entranced by its whiff of sex, celebrity, and dysfunctional race relations. Sure, those are movie-ready elements, but when they're mixed up by filmmakers as staidly unimaginative as the audience they're targeting, the recipe has a distinctly unsavoury flavour combination--gutless as well as tasteless.

2009 TIFF Bytes #1: My Toxic Baby

originally published September 13, 2009
Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:

Fatal Attraction (1987) + Indecent Proposal (1993) - Blu-ray Discs

FATAL ATTRACTION
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, Anne Archer, Stuart Pankin
screenplay by James Dearden
directed by Adrian Lyne

INDECENT PROPOSAL
½/**** Image C+ Sound B Commentary C-
starring Robert Redford, Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson, Oliver Platt
screenplay by Amy Holden Jones
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Walter Chaw Adrian Lyne films live and die by the success of their moments of poignant epiphany. It's why 9½ Weeks and Jacob's Ladder work and Flashdance and Indecent Proposal do not--why his obvious and constant pandering to cultural stereotypes and softcore eroticism identifies him as the premiere commercial director of his time (more so than even Ridley Scott, who sometimes tries not to be a ponce), trafficking in easy images and the kind of strained tableaux you'd expect to see in a first-year photography classes (explanation as well for why his films are almost invariably blockbusters): a pair of Converse sneakers on a lonesome, foldout kitchen table; seagulls on a fog-shrouded pier; long shots down cluttered, penthouse-suite corridors; rubbing off to a slideshow¹; dogs and bunnies... Adrian Lyne flicks are about what happens when dicks slip into chicks, oops; it's not possible to make fun of them, because how do you make fun of an artifact that has no intrinsic weight, tells no compelling tale, and imparts no particular insight?

9 (2009)

**/****
screenplay by Pamela Pettler
directed by Shane Acker

by Walter Chaw There's something missing from Shane Acker's 9, and I'm having a hard time putting my finger on it. I think it's that for as much as I like my nihilism, there's a flavour to this year's variety of Apocalypse that suggests to me the only thing left to win is the Wasteland. There's no moral stake in scrambling for scraps, just this Pyrrhic duty to compete, lust fast-cooling on the proverbial sheets, damp and rumpled as they are from a lot of impotent thrusting. So 9 exists in an Industrial Revolution Steamboy alternate universe, ended when an evil fascist dictator creates, with the help of a scientist (Alan Oppenheimer--weird, non?), a sentient machine capable of building other machines to do its bidding. Imagined as a weapon of peace, no surprise that it turns on Man and apparently kills all living creatures, blots out the sun, and spends its time hunting down little burlap rag dolls animated with the scientist's--wait for it--soul. It's the second Terminator film of the summer, in other words, as well as the second to mention the idea of horcruxes after Harry Potter 6. Accordingly, it's a pretty empty, if visually startling, picture. Based on a celebrated, Oscar-nominated short, 9 hasn't made the transition to feature-length with much of an emotional, or intellectual, payload to justify its extended runtime. The best comparison is to Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, alas: the seed of something left fallow.

Adventureland (2009) + Alien Trespass (2009)|Adventureland (2009) - Blu-ray + Digital Copy

ADVENTURELAND
***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jake Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Martin Starr, Margarita Levieva
written and directed by Greg Mottola

ALIEN TRESPASS
***/****
starring Eric McCormack, Jenni Baird, Robert Patrick, Dan Lauria
screenplay by Steven P. Fisher
directed by R. W. Goodwin

by Ian Pugh In everyone's life there's a summer of '42, but of course it was never as wonderful as you remember. Although Greg Mottola's Adventureland is set in 1987, that's almost incidental--it really takes place in that hazy cloud known as "the past," full of fly-by-night jobs rife with fraud and deceit, fairweather friends who sock you in the crotch, and, of course, the music that brings to mind painful experiences perhaps best left forgotten. (Funny to think that this might be the ideological inverse of another great 2009 film about memory, The Uninvited: unhealthily obsessive instead of unhealthily in denial.) The key to understanding the film, I think, lies in Falco's New Wave anthem "Rock Me Amadeus," here serving as an inescapable nightmare at the titular amusement park, where it's pumped through the sound system ad nauseam ("Can you give me an ice pick that I can just jam into my ears?"). But then the romantic confusion driving the plot unravels in a series of betrayals, and that same song becomes a damning elegy. Seems strange that the director of Superbad, an instant classic of maturity-through-childishness and nostalgia-without-precedent, should deliver something so angry and contradictory for a follow-up. Perhaps it is strange--but Adventureland is also a more honest, more personal, and, most importantly, more mature film than Superbad.