Film Freak Central

The Lovely Bones (2009) + The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009)

THE LOVELY BONES
½*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by Alice Sebold
directed by Peter Jackson

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS
½*/****
starring Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Verne Troyer, Tom Waits
screenplay by Terry Gilliam & Charles McKeown
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Walter Chaw It's all a little too Puff, the Magic Dragon, isn't it. The Lovely Bones finds Peter Jackson regressing into his worst instincts and a newfound squeamishness in a film about, ick, a fourteen-year-old girl's rape and murder, leaving the most unsavoury details of Alice Sebold's revered source novel to the golden-lit imagination. (Give this to Precious: it's exploitation with the decency to titillate.) This isn't to say the book is worth much of a shit, but to say that it at least has the courage to talk about a rape and a murder where the film only has the mustard to romanticize loss and suggest that 1973 was so long ago the freak next door didn't raise any flags. It's also to say that what began its existence as a study of the bonds that hold a family together through the caprice of living has been reduced in its film adaptation to a murder mystery without a mystery, and a supernatural thriller that at every turn reminds of how much better Jackson's The Frighteners is in dealing with almost the exact same set of themes.

The Sopranos: The Complete First Season (1999) - Blu-ray Disc

Image B- Sound A- Extras B-
"Pilot," "46 Long," "Denial, Anger, Acceptance," "Meadowlands," "College," "Pax Soprana," "Down Neck," "The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti," "Boca," "A Hit Is a Hit," "Nobody Knows Anything," "Isabella," "I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano"

by Bryant Frazer By the end of its run in 2007, HBO's mob drama "The Sopranos" had become a cultural institution. Critics essayed strenuously on the series' thematic concerns, genuflecting and kissing the ring of Don David Chase, the creator and showrunner whose fingerprints are all over every scene of every episode. The show's run started in the days before DVRs splintered the television audience temporally, so viewers cleared their Sunday night schedules to take in "The Sopranos" even as they broke off into factions.

Extract (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

½*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D+
starring Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis, Kristen Wiig, Ben Affleck
written and directed by Mike Judge

by Ian Pugh It's fitting that Mike Judge's latest film, a pale imitation of a past success that endeavours to capture its essence with a bare minimum of the same charm and profundity, should be titled Extract. Perhaps it's not entirely fair to say that Judge's Office Space achieved cult status for its portrayal of nine-to-five banality even though it's actually about a wayward asshole who used that banality as an excuse to become a lazy, belligerent thief. Nevertheless, with Extract, Judge essentially confirms he thinks you liked Office Space for its company setting--and now, ten years later, he responds in kind. Work is hell in Judge's world, and hell is other people. Although Judge is at his best when he's telling you what you don't want to hear--that teenagers are capable of some pretty vile things, that the presence of a work ethic might override your distaste for the work itself, that anti-intellectualism is going to be the death of American culture--at the precise moment you don't want to hear it, in Extract he says nothing provocative beyond the occasional attempt at sucker-punching the viewer with politically-incorrect comedy that stopped being subversive around a decade ago. (Coincidence?) It's impossible to say where the shock or amusement is supposed to come from at the sight of Ben Affleck (another remnant of the P.C. '90s and its reactionary counterculture), gussied up to look like Arlo Guthrie as he curses, deals drugs, and smokes out of ridiculous bongs.

The Gary Cooper Collection: Along Came Jones; Man of the West; The Pride of the Yankees; The Westerner - DVD

ALONG CAME JONES (1945)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound C+
starring Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, William Demarest, Dan Duryea
screenplay by Nunnally Johnson
directed by Stuart Heisler

MAN OF THE WEST (1958)
****/**** Image A- Sound B-
starring Gary Cooper, Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur O'Connell
screenplay by Reginald Rose
directed by Anthony Mann

THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES (1942)
**/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras C
starring Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Walter Brennan, Dan Duryea
screenplay by Jo Swerling and Herman J. Mankiewicz
directed by Sam Wood

THE WESTERNER (1940)
**½/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Doris Davenport, Fred Stone
screenplay by Jo Swerling and Niven Busch
directed by William Wyler

by Jefferson Robbins I thought Gary Cooper was broader. The way he carried Hollywood on his shoulders from the silents through the talkies to the threshold of the New Wave, you'd expect him to be broader. Instead, he was the definition of lanky. Where his centre of gravity lay was in his Rushmore of a face: in close-up, he's an impossible granite monument, like that ever-unfinished Crazy Horse memorial in South Dakota; in full shot, in his prime years, he's a broomstick supporting a boulder.

The Princess and the Frog (2009)

*½/****
screenplay by Ron Clements & John Musker & Rob Edwards
directed by Ron Clements & John Musker

by Ian Pugh Disney has resurrected its traditional (i.e., 2-D) animation department only to plunder plots and themes from its own vault, but because we're all familiar with what Disney represents in this day and age, we're meant to accept it with a wink and a nod. This is the same old Cinderella trope located firmly within the "Family Guy" generation, the film's hip acknowledgment of genre conventions (the absurdity of talking animals, the modern irrelevance of royalty) nevertheless failing to capitalize on that newfound consciousness in any meaningful way. So while it offers the reasonable assertion that the importance of love and family shouldn't be lost in the pursuit of a dream, it still ends with a message of no-happiness-without-marriage straight outta the 16^th century. And whatever PR folderol you've read about The Princess and the Frog representing the company's "first black princess," be aware that Bold Leaps Forward are hardly the priority here, the common but wholly-valid criticism being that the characters spend more screentime as frogs than as people.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw It's easily worse than Mike Newell's go at The Goblet of Fire, and it's satisfying to note that it fails for many of the same reasons. For all the gorgeously-decayed gothic architecture, the German Expressionism, the bleached colour palette, etc., Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (hereafter Harry Potter 6) isn't the moody requiem before the bloody mass of parts 7 and 7a in the next couple of years, but instead this ungainly tween romcom with a sudden horde of amphibious zombies (not unlike the aquatic sequence in Harry Potter 4), inexplicable cameos from Ursa, Non, and Zod, and silly broomstick rugby. Dark undercurrents? No question. But they're allowed to wither as the film focuses its attention on three non-professional actors doing their best to transform ridiculous, sweet-sixteen romantic imbroglios into Chekhov and Shakespeare, with the combined might of what seems the entire pantheon of great modern British movie actors milling around behind them. The problem isn't that the film is character driven; the problem is that the characters' problems are insipid. Gone is the intense, sticky, stunningly emotional father issues tackled by Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban--the first real hint that this series could become the grown-up artifact the books never quite will given their much-publicized "meh" denouement. Gone is the continuation of that unsolvable Oedipal complexity that arose when the father figures were revealed as less than godlike in Yates's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the best film of the series by a nose--and one of the best American films of that year). In their place is a lot of insufferable slapstick carried off by actors no one would assume capable of screwball in environments better suited to Hammer. horrors: it's "Abbott & Costello Meet the Dementors."

Brothers (2009) + Everybody's Fine (2009)

BROTHERS
***/****
starring Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Mare Winningham
screenplay by David Benioff, based on the motion picture Brødre by Susanne Bier
directed by Jim Sheridan

EVERYBODY'S FINE
*/****
starring Robert De Niro, Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell
screenplay by Kirk Jones, based on an earlier screenplay by Massimo De Rita & Tonio Guerra & Giuseppe Tornatore
directed by Kirk Jones

by Ian Pugh If you're feeling charitable towards Susanne Bier's Brødre, you'll probably consider Jim Sheridan's Brothers an extraordinarily faithful remake--one that follows the original recipe so closely it could be considered a step-by-step recreation. But a quick survey of what screenwriter David Benioff excised and expanded reveals that he wasn't merely a glorified script doctor, having squeezed some real pathos from a tactless source. It's still the story of a loving father, Sam (Tobey Maguire), who is forced to perform unspeakable acts as a POW in Afghanistan. Because Sam's presumed dead, his ex-con brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal, finding the perfect balance between guilt and innocence) straightens out his life and grows ever closer to Sam's wife (Natalie Portman) and children. Sam's sudden reappearance in their lives is further complicated by the onset of the soldier's post-traumatic stress, but gone are the heavy-handed lines about the nature of good, evil, and death from Bier's film. In their place, moments of shaky acceptance as new members are integrated into a family--followed by stares of betrayal as loved ones become interlopers in their own home.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947) - DVD

***/**** Image F (colorized)/B+ (b&w) Sound B Extras C
starring Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn, Gene Lockhart
screenplay by George Seaton, based on the story by Valentine Davies
directed by George Seaton

by Alex Jackson George Seaton's Miracle on 34^th Street isn't my Christmas movie of choice. My most potent movie memory of Christmas is actually watching the Star Wars trilogy when it was broadcast on the USA network however many years ago. Accordingly, I make it a point of marking the holiday by watching some kind of Star Wars-like "deep reality" science-fiction or fantasy film, such as The Lord of the Rings, or Blade Runner. A couple years back, I watched The Passion of the Christ. But I digress. Of all the major Christmas movie cults--including those surrounding A Christmas Story, It's a Wonderful Life, Elf, and 1951's A Christmas Carol--the Miracle on 34^th Street cult is the one with which I'd most want to spend the holidays. The film manages to be irreverent without becoming sacrilegious and sentimental without becoming saccharine. It's a pretty silly film, but I guess you could say that it's serious about being silly. It values silliness for its restorative, therapeutic quality.

Falling Down (1993) - Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras C-
starring Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey, Tuesday Weld
screenplay by Ebbe Roe Smith
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw Atrociously written by actor Ebbe Roe Smith and atrociously directed (it goes without saying) by Joel Schumacher, it's also got a really terrible old-person performance by Robert Duvall, who would court Oscar with this exact hand-patting, repeating himself, huffy-giggly shtick at the end of the '90s with The Apostle. The whole thing is dreadful, rife with an unbearable self-satisfied rattle of social outrage that it's entirely unwilling to decipher to any useful end. Falling Down is a barely-literate rant, delivered at the top of the proverbial lungs, that suggests not-shockingly that L.A. is the epicentre of immigrant tension, gang violence, racial warfare, and class resentments. It postulates at the centre of this ever-swirling maelstrom crew-cut cipher Bill, known mainly by his vanity plate "D-FENS," who cracks one day in the middle of a Fellini homage and decides to abandon his car to the fates and walk to the house of his ex-wife (Barbara Hershey) and daughter. They've got a restraining order against him, of course, because he's a nutball. And because we're talking social satire here, Bill's been laid off for a month without telling anyone and, man, this recession sure is taking its toll, isn't it? Over the course of his Swiftian travels, Bill encounters a Korean grocer charging too much at his mini-mart; Hispanic gang-bangers who try to kill him in a drive-by; a white supremacist NRA nut (Frederic Forrest, who, like Duvall, used to be better than this) running an army surplus store; and a little black kid who knows how to use a bazooka.

Julie & Julia (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina
screenplay by Nora Ephron, based on the books Julie and Julia by Julie Powell and My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme
directed by Nora Ephron

by Bryant Frazer It can hardly be disputed that Meryl Streep is among the finest, or at least the most finely proficient, of actors currently working. It's a drag, then, to see her resort to caricature and impersonation, even when she's sending some voltage through a limp premise. Riffing on demon-editor Anna Wintour, she ended up adding pathos to a cartoonish character, swallowing whole not just the working-girl melodrama that was The Devil Wears Prada, but also her poor co-star, Anne Hathaway, who appeared to be hanging on for dear life to a carnival ride. That speaks well to Streep's enduring star power, but I've always felt the effect was a little ostentatious--like one of the Rockefellers showing up to work at a soup kitchen over the holidays. It raises the question: Can a mediocre film really be redeemed by the presence of a terrific performance?

The Young Victoria (2009) + Antichrist (2009)

THE YOUNG VICTORIA
**/****
starring Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend, Paul Bettany, Miranda Richardson
screenplay by Julian Fellowes
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

ANTICHRIST
****/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg
written and directed by Lars von Trier

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As the beginning of an emotional history for Queen Victoria, Jean-Marc Vallée's The Young Victoria makes for an interesting bookend to John Madden's Mrs. Brown. A lavish, romantic depiction of the monarch's courtship with future husband Prince Albert (Rupert Friend), it's the very definition of a quotidian costume drama, skirting over the major issues of the early years of Victoria's reign to speak in broader terms about her idealism, the problems presented to her by her youth, and the manipulation of her affections by courtly politics. It's something like the older sister to Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette: less hip, but still in love with its naivety, its evergreen youth. It says something to me that in 2009, there's a film about Queen Victoria that's less interested in the stuffiness for which the Monarch is probably most popularly known than in her liberalism, her progressive attitude towards the humanism inspired by first the Colonies, then the French Revolution, then Britain's own Reform Act, enacted just five years before her coronation. An early film churned up in the wake of the optimism engendered by an Obama presidency? It's tempting to read it as such, not simply because you do hope this administration is better than the last, but also because, as the decade of the aughts draws a curtain on nine years of increasing outer and inner dark, there's at least the faint hope for some cloudbusting in the cinema, too.

The Blind Side (2009)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron, Kathy Bates
screenplay by John Lee Hancock, based on the book by Michael Lewis
directed by John Lee Hancock

by Walter Chaw Just in time for Christmas, professional schmaltz peddler John Lee Hancock updates Richard Pryor's The Toy by giving another privileged white brat a black man he can fuck with, call his victories his own, and keep in the guest room. This Michael Oher--as played sub-vocally by gentle, Lenny-ian giant Quinton Aaron--is not only the Super Duper Magic Negro who heals a household of rich shitkickers ("Shoot! We done gots a Black Man living with us 'fore we ever even MET a Democrat! Hoot!"--forgetting that wealthy southern landowners have a long tradition of keeping black people on their grounds without commensurately progressive attitudes), but is the passive, mute object around which every single person who likes The Blind Side convinces themselves they aren't racist for the liking of it. If this movie doesn't piss you off, if it doesn't make you nauseated with its dangerous smugness, you're part of the problem.