Film Freak Central

Terminator: Salvation (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Bryce Dallas Howard, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris
directed by McG

by Walter Chaw The movie pretends that it's about discovering that which separates humans from machines--an idea of "functional equivalence," if you will, that Duncan Jones does a much better job with in his zero-budget Moon than McG does with in his small-country-GDP-budget Terminator Salvation. But what it's really about is blowing shit up real good for two hours. A tanker blows, a gas station blows, a field of satellite towers blows, a hole blows, and, accordingly, the movie blows. The real secret for success that the human freedom fighters of 2018, led by saviour guy John Connor (Christian Bale), should search for is the one that allows the evil Skynet robots to distinguish manmade fires in the desert that it should examine from those it should leave alone. What they discover instead is a "kill code" they can play on their futuristic boom boxes that "turns off" the machines hunting the people remaining after a nuclear holocaust has left the planet completely habitable for the hundreds of huddled masses tuning their transistor radios to fireside chats with Connor. (But not the types of fires the robots are interested in--see, the robots are only drawn to fires that humans set as ambush traps (and Guns N' Roses (you wouldn't understand)).)

Orphan (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard, Isabelle Fuhrman, CCH Pounder
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra's Orphan is a cheap, schlocky, shameless kid-peril flick with an unlikely--cowardly, even--twist and standard resolution. But I'll be damned if it isn't, despite all that, almost worth it just for its nastiness. Alas, in the end, it's not nasty enough. Without a thought in its head, without much understanding of how to earn legitimate frights without maiming (or threatening to maim) adorable children, it joins this year's similarly lost zombie girl-baby flick Grace among end-of-a-cycle, misogynistic shots at the Bad Seed genre. It's the kind of film that's more interesting for the fact of its relationship to other bad-seed flicks post-9/11 (e.g., Japanese redux The Ring and little-seen creeper Soft For Digging) than for anything it does itself. Interesting, too, that it's a relatively big-budget, mainstream picture starring a couple of extremely appealing actors (Peter Sarsgaard as John and Vera Farmiga as his wife, erm, Kate) as the patsies who adopt the titular hellchild, a Russian immigrant named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), from one of those autumnal orphanages run by nuns like cuddly Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder). Unfortunately, it's loaded with--there's that word again--cheap jump scares that, at least half the time, are so self-aware as to be parodies of themselves. Post-modernism it ain't, though--post-modernism is smart.

The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans (2009); Planet 51 (2009); Me and Orson Welles (2009)

THE BAD LIEUTENANT - PORT OF CALL: NEW ORLEANS
****/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Alvin "Xzibit" Joiner
screenplay by William Finkelstein, based on the film by Abel Ferrara
directed by Werner Herzog

PLANET 51
*/****
screenplay by Joe Stillman
directed by Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad & Marcos Martinez

ME AND ORSON WELLES
**/****
starring Claire Danes, Zac Efron, Christian McKay, Zoë Kazan
screenplay by Holly Gent Palmo & Vincent Palmo, based on the book by Robert Kaplow
directed by Richard Linklater

by Ian Pugh Playing against his sadistic instincts, police sergeant Terrence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) saves a man from drowning in a flooded prison during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, earning him not only a promotion to lieutenant but also a debilitating spinal injury. A subsequent addiction to prescription painkillers inevitably leads McDonagh to harder drugs and casual abuses of his newfound power as he attempts to solve the murder of a Senegalese drug dealer and his family. Trading Abel Ferrara's sulphuric New York for a no-less-hellish Louisiana noir, Werner Herzog's in-name-only remake of Bad Lieutenant is a work of delirious madness. That should come as no surprise from the man who's spent the last forty years cataloguing human obsession, but I don't think I'd ever really understood the method behind it until The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans (hereafter Bad Lieutenant 2). Madness is about possibility, and what better complement to that philosophy than Nicolas Cage, an actor who--at his best, like Herzog--apparently regards the conventions and boundaries of his craft as simple suggestions that must be defied? A quick look at what they're capable of accomplishing together and you're a little surprised they haven't teamed up before. As McDonagh, Cage projects the dangerous unpredictability of Kinski^* and the sympathetic brutality of Bruno S.: you don't fear him, exactly, but you're afraid of what he might become; you don't feel sorry for him, but you lament what he could have been. ("I'll kill 'im," he says at one point, the frightening indifference in his voice leaving uncertain if--or how--he plans to act on that idle threat.) Halfway through the film, after the stakes in play are thoroughly established, Cage/McDonagh suddenly adopts a muted, cotton-mouthed accent. Why?

Lie to Me: Season One (2009) - DVD

Image A Sound A- Extras C-
"Pilot," "Moral Waiver," "A Perfect Score," "Love Always," "Unchained," "Do No Harm," "The Best Policy," "Depraved Heart," "Life is Priceless," "The Better Half," "Undercover," "Blinded," "Sacrifice"

by Jefferson Robbins When did we collectively decide we want to be rescued by assholes? There's a definite arc to the modern police-procedural hero, be it the off-putting but tolerable Gil Grissom of the original "CSI", deep-sea humanoid Horatio Caine of "CSI: Miami", or the despicable Dr. Gregory House. (Yes, "House M.D." is a procedural--its perps just happen to be microbes, household cleansers, and anything else that qualifies as not-lupus.) These prodigies trend towards purer and purer strains of antisocial dickishness, and their techniques of inquiry grow ever more demeaning and emotionally brutal. They use their powers of detection to heal society but in the process get to sneer at its mores.

Snatch (2000) [Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

***½/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras A
BD - Image C Sound A Extras A
starring Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina, Brad Pitt, Rade Sherbedgia
written and directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw Guy Ritchie's sophomore effort Snatch opens with a hyperkinetic homage to the first violent robbery of Ringo Lam's City on Fire and continues by aping the slick mod-cool of the British gangster films of the late-'60s and early-'70s. It is a bizarre beast that borrows, steals, re-invents, and winks knowingly when its hand is caught in the imagistic cookie jar. Guy Ritchie laughs at your erudition. He's in it for the money shots--a new champion of the gangster drama as pornography: ultimately empty but undeniably efficient.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Chris Weitz

by Walter Chaw Let's play a Mad Libs game with Chris Weitz's appalling The Twilight Saga: New Moon (hereafter New Moon) and, by so doing, avoid talking about how a new moon is actually the absence of a moon in the sky, or how moon cycles remind me of menstruation, which would be a terrible thing to happen to heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) around her boyfriend Ed (Robert Pattinson). Let's replace every time they say "do it"--and by that they mean "bite me and make me a member of the walking undead"--with "fuck" and see if this whole Twilight atrocity still appears the benign thing for your daughters to gobble up whole. When Bella implores Ed to fuck her after she graduates from high school, for instance, and Ed says that he won't fuck her until she turns twenty-one and they can get married...well, listen, this is a fairytale without any teeth, meaning it's a really, really dangerous fairytale. More, it's illiterate, invasive, moronic proselytizing from some Mormon housewife's blinkered belief system. Unconvinced? Consider that it's stated early on in this instalment of the saga that the reason Ed doesn't want to turn Bella into a vampire--oops, I mean, fuck her--is that he's afraid he'll damn her soul to eternal hellfire.

Up (2009) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras N/A
screenplay by Bob Peterson
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw There's still something breathless about Up, but I wonder if the Pixar formula isn't starting to show its seams now in its second decade of producing masterpieces--if there's a lack of freshness here in its familiarly exhilarated, cozily excited spaces. None of that fatigue is in evidence in the film's miraculous, wordless prologue, however: destined to compete with the opening-credits sequence of Watchmen as the single best stretch in any film this year, it establishes character, motivation, story of place, and sense of time without leaving a dry eye in the house. Shame the picture also peaks in these first ten minutes. It reminds of the wordless bit describing Jessie's abandonment in Toy Story 2, or the entire first half of WALL·E, and it suggests that Pixar is unparalleled in exploiting the possibilities for visual storytelling in its cavernous digital medium. The comparison of WALL·E to Chaplin is on point: When Pixar trusts the expressiveness of its mainframe and the beautiful, liquid clarity of its animation techniques, I don't know that there's ever been a better "silent" filmmaking collective. In their roster, it's arguable that they've only really faltered twice: once with the tedious Seven Samurai redux A Bug's Life, and again with the noxious redneck-baiting Cars. And while Up is nowhere near that bottom, it finds itself somewhere in the middle thanks to the peculiar ceiling to its invention (an entire Lost World and all you got is a giant bird and a talking dog?) and sentimentality that edges from sweet to mawkish. There are one too many cutaways to a dead wife's portrait and one too many winsome sighs as a plan made in childhood looms tantalizingly near.

The Prisoner: The Complete Series (1967-1968) - Blu-ray Disc

Image A Sound A- Extras B
"Arrival," "The Chimes of Big Ben," "A, B, and C," "Free for All," "The Schizoid Man," "The General," "Many Happy Returns," "Dance of the Dead," "Checkmate," "Hammer into Anvil," "It's Your Funeral," "A Change of Mind," "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling," "Living in Harmony," "The Girl Who Was Death," "Once Upon a Time," "Fall Out"

by Walter Chaw The closest television came to true surrealism until the inception of "Twin Peaks", Patrick McGoohan's remarkable, landmark brainchild "The Prisoner" is the headwaters for a dizzying array of modern genre confections. It's audacious in its ironclad refusal to provide the happy ending; in its determination to bugger expectation with every complex set-up and sadistic resolution, the show effectively honours the surrealist manifesto of defeating classification. The fact of it is the function of it--the delight of it being that the series functions as a tonal sequel to Antonioni's Blowup, using the disappearance of that film's photog protag as the launching point for its hero's imprisonment in his Welsh oubliette. Colourfully, quintessentially mod, it even looks the part, after all, acting in 1967 as prescient post-modern (po-Mod?) commentary on the elasticity of this genre model (Bond films in particular, the lead in said franchise McGoohan was offered, er, once upon a time) as allegory for the plastic-fantastic of a progressively absurd world. In its setting of a small town, isolated and beset by what seems a common psychosis, find a connection to Robin Hardy and Anthony Schaffer's claustrophobic The Wicker Man (1973), John Frankenheimer's similar-feeling Seconds (1966), and, yes, Godard's structuralist textbook Alphaville. Of all the ways to approach "The Prisoner", in fact, the most fulsome--if also potentially the most obscure--is that, like Alphaville, it establishes itself as a structuralist (as in Claude Levi-Strauss) exercise while predicting through its execution the post-structuralism/deconstructionism (and eventually surrealism) of, say, a Jacques Derrida.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) + The Road (2009)

FANTASTIC MR. FOX
**/****
animated; screenplay by Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Roald Dahl
directed by Wes Anderson

THE ROAD
*½/****
starring Viggo Mortensen, Guy Pearce, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron
screenplay by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
directed by John Hillcoat

by Walter Chaw There's nothing much going on in Wes Anderson's stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox--which is a terrible shock, because there's generally so much going on in Anderson's and Dahl's respective canons. With Anderson's every attempt to infuse this piffle with his brand of Salinger-esque autumnal, familial melancholy registering as ever-so-slightly desperate, it strikes particularly pale in such close proximity to Spike Jonze's magnificent Where the Wild Things Are. Missing is the vein of emotionality that runs rich in Anderson's best films, the idiosyncrasies of his misfit family groups somehow rendered ordinary transplanted into foxes and opossums. I wonder if it isn't something to do with the idea that "cute" animation as a genre and not a medium has "quirk" as its bread and butter. More to the point, it probably has something to do with the fact that for all those charges of "pretentious" Anderson has collected over the course of a career, when you pile all of his pathos into a film that seems mainly interested in being adorable, they're actually deserved.

North by Northwest (1959) - DVD|North by Northwest (1959) [50th Anniversary Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

****/****
DVD - Image A Sound B Extras A
BD - Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is Alfred Hitchcock's most mercurial anti-hero, the soup bone reduction of the Master's wrong-man theme. An advertising executive so at ease with changing his identity at the fall of a hammer, he has, by film's end, become/done all of the things he's wrongfully accused of being/doing at the beginning of the film. Indeed, Hitchcock would never again mine the idea of the wrong man with this kind of heat--veering off as he did into a more metaphysical kind of guilt transference à la Vertigo with The Birds, Psycho, and Marnie. As North by Northwest opens, Thornhill gives his regards to a night porter's wife ("We're not talkin'!"), steals a cab from a Good Samaritan, and instructs his secretary to send a neglected lover a box of gold-wrapped candy because "she'll think she's eating money." He's a charmer--and he's as oily, despicable, and fast-talking as almost every one of Grant's romantic comedy heroes. Hitch undermines and exploits Grant for the fourth and final time here as a guy we love until we stop for a second to catch our breath and take stock of the myriad ways in which we've been bribed, glad-handed, misled, and led-on.

I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009) - DVD

*½/**** Image N/A Sound N/A Extras C
starring Hayden Panettiere, Paul Rust, Jack T. Carpenter, Lauren London
screenplay by Larry Doyle, based on his novel
directed by Chris Columbus

by Jefferson Robbins I believe this is what it looks like when a veteran director throws in the towel. Morosely paced, edited with no ear for slapstick, perfectly mediocre in its staging, timing, scripting, and performances, I Love You, Beth Cooper (hereafter Beth Cooper) betrays benign neglect on the part of producer-director Chris Columbus. It's as if he tossed together all the ingredients for a thoughtful but teen-friendly confection--a recipe inherited from his late mentor John Hughes--and took it on faith that the cake would bake itself. There's even a weird invocation of the dead god of teen comedies: Columbus casts Alan Ruck, a.k.a. Cameron in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, as the hero's dad and supplies the sidekick with Cameron's absent, oppressive shadow of a father. That's not homage--that's the desperate rubbing of a talisman, a prayer to recapture lightning that leaked out of the bottle long ago.

H.P. Lovecraft's From Beyond (1986) [Unrated Director's Cut] + Blood and Black Lace (1964) [Unslashed Collectors' Edition] - DVDs

From Beyond
**½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras B
starring Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree, Ted Sorel
screenplay by Dennis Paoli
directed by Stuart Gordon

Sei donne per l'assassino
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A+
starring Cameron Mitchell, Eva Bartok, Thomas Reiner, Mary Arden
screenplay by Giuseppe Barilla, Marcel Fonda, Marcello Fondato and Mario Bava
directed by Mario Bava

BLOOD AND BLACK LACE

by Walter Chaw Stuart Gordon's follow-up to his flat-awesome Re-Animator reunites that film's Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton with source material by H.P. Lovecraft for From Beyond¹, a nominal splatter classic that lacks the energy and cohesiveness of Re-Animator, even as it establishes Gordon as a director with a recognizable, distinctive vision. A picture that arrived concurrently with Clive Barker's "The Hellbound Heart" (the source material for Hellraiser), it's useful as a means by which Lovecraft's and Barker's fiction can be paired against one another as complementary halves of a symbolist, grue-soaked whole. With the latter's cenobites, his most enduring contribution to popular culture², consider that Barker's vision of an alternate, infernal reality shimmering just beneath the surface of the mundane has its roots in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos--a dimension of Elder Gods lurking behind the doors of perception. Lovecraft and Barker give description to the indescribable, name to the nameless. They are in pursuit of the sublime and their quest underscores the idea that any such chase is, at its heart, inevitably a spiritual one.

The Cell 2 (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Tessie Santiago, Chris Bruno, Frank Whaley
screenplay by Lawrence Silverstein & Alex Barder and Erik Klein and Rob Rinow
directed by Tim Iacofano

by Walter Chaw Blaringly shot on digital video so that the whole of this shitstorm looks like someone's bat mitzvah, The Cell 2's only reason for existing appears to be to clarify just how underestimated is Tarsem's original The Cell. This dtv trainwreck substitutes Jennifer Lopez with another Latina, Tessie Santiago, seemingly because the producers thought it the best way to soften the blow of the realization that this is an otherwise-unfilmable script retrofitted to launch a franchise. Santiago, a kind of Eva Longoria/Sandra Bullock hybrid, is Maya, the requisite "seer" in another serial-killer intrigue full to bursting with macho exchanges between the men and hysterical exchanges between Maya and anyone else. Tortured by not having thwarted Jigsaw-like murderer The Cusp three years prior, she's brought back on the case not merely because she's a psychic or something, but also because she was The Cusp's only fish that got away, thus giving her unique, erm, insight? Who knows? The Cusp's MO, see, is to repeatedly kill and revive his victims, which actually explains both Frank Whaley's appearance in this thing and what happens to his career by being in it. Irony. They should've called it "The Cell 2: Poor Frank Whaley."

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
***/****
DVD - Image B Sound C+ Extras B
BD - Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Ray Lovelock, Christine Galbo, Arthur Kennedy
screenplay by Sandro Continenza & Marcello Coscia
directed by Jorge Grau

by Walter Chaw Without having to squint much, you could see the hero of Jorge Grau's The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, art-dealing Easy Rider hippie George (Ray Lovelock), trying to deliver the airplane propeller his spiritual brother, David Hemmings' mod-photog from Blowup, buys in tribute to form over function midway through Antonioni's counterculture classic. Instead, George is trying to deliver the sister of the fatal fertility juju from Arthur Penn's Night Moves through titular Manchester into the green countryside on the back of his too-cool motorcycle. He's thwarted initially by the bumper of maiden fair Edna (Cristina Galbo), then by the hungry undead stalking the countryside in search of meaty sociological metaphors, then by an ossified Scotland Yard dick (Arthur Kennedy). Luckily, there's plenty of allegorical beef for everyone, as Grau paints a vivid picture of Mod Madness in steady, deteriorating orbit around the entropy and hedonism of the time--sprinkling it liberally with a disdain for dictatorships Grau no doubt nursed whilst working under the heel of Francisco Franco's regime.