Film Freak Central

Gross Anatomy (1989); Betsy's Wedding (1990); The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag (1992) - Blu-ray Discs

GROSS ANATOMY
**½/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Matthew Modine, Daphne Zuniga, Christine Lahti, Todd Field
screenplay by Ron Nyswaner and Mark Spragg
directed by Thom Eberhardt

BETSY'S WEDDING
***/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Alan Alda, Joey Bishop, Madeline Kahn, Molly Ringwald
written and directed by Alan Alda

THE GUN IN BETTY LOU'S HANDBAG
**/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Penelope Ann Miller, Eric Thal, William Forsythe, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Grace Cary Bickley
directed by Allan Moyle

by Jefferson Robbins To sample three Blu-ray editions fresh out from discount distributor Mill Creek Entertainment, you'd think film comedy in the late 1980s and early '90s was at a tipping point. Or, at least, you'd think this of Touchstone, the Disney sub-studio behind Gross Anatomy, Betsy's Wedding, and The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag. All three films seem swamped by the decade shift, caught between John Hughes's early-'80s youth revolution and the hardening of romcom formulas that would come to pass after 1990's Pretty Woman (also a Touchstone product). One of the three films, in fact, barely qualifies as a comedy, although it was surely marketed as such. The sense one gets watching them today is of opportunities missed, of storytelling approaches gently meshed together when they should've been gleefully mashed, and of an aversion to risk above all.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Sir Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw It starts, maybe, with the moment Frances McDormand, as an NSA bigwig, declares that evil alien robot Decepticons should pass through customs. No--earlier, when noble alien robot Autobots infiltrate some nameless Arab state to murder Arabs. It might begin when fucking asshole Michael Bay does a long tracking shot following--in 3-D!--the toned, tanned ass of impossible-looking Carly (Victoria's Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) as she climbs a flight of stairs to straddle her ugly mutt boyfriend Sam (Shia LaBeouf)--a pairing that at least in part explains the decades-long appeal of Ron Jeremy as a porn icon. Or maybe it's the extended profanity ("dick, asshole, clusterfuck, bitch, shit" in a long-playing loop), the wholesale and semi-graphic murder of innocents by both sides, the way the robots bleed in crimson arterial sprays in this PG-13 movie, that instigates the realization that Transformers: Dark of the Moon (hereafter Transformers: Asshole) is a new low watermark for Bay and this naughty-little-boy franchise that highlights Bay's misogyny, puerility, and imbecility for all the world to see. Better, it works as a fine illustration of how this industry of ours that I spend a lot of time defending is in bed completely with the Michael Bays of the world, who represent, I think, the money-making potential of any industry that consents to peddle vice and venality to children. Think of the cash a live-action hardcore porno based on the Barbie license would bring in. Let's get on that, Bay and Zack Snyder, and give out heroin with the purchase of a ticket while we're at it. The first one's free, little girl.

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

½*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sean Patrick Flannery, Norman Reedus, Clifton Collins Jr., Billy Connolly
written and directed by Troy Duffy

by Alex Jackson The first thing I did when I got a FACEBOOK account was look up Travis, my best friend from gradeschool, whom I hadn't seen or heard from in the last twenty years. Looking at his profile, I saw that he listed "extensive" under music and "way too many to list here" for books, but under movies he had just one title: The Boondock Saints. The bands and books he loves are too numerous to mention, but there is a film that, in his mind, towers above all others. There is only one film that bears mentioning. And that film is Troy Duffy's The Boondock Saints. Is it petty of me to not put in that "friend" request? This seems to be all the update I need. Twenty years is a long time. The only things we really had in common were that we both went to the same school and both liked Nintendo and The Monster Squad. That's hardly enough to inoculate a friendship against The Boondock Saints.

The Roommate (2011) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Leighton Meester, Minka Kelly, Cam Gigandet, Billy Zane
screenplay by Sonny Mallhi
directed by Christian E. Christiansen

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Sony division Screen Gems, which went from being safe harbour for offbeat studio fare to an opponent of original thought with a remake-heavy slate^*, cynically CW-izes another exploitable but ew, old! title with their Single White Female clone The Roommate. It might be genius compared to Single White Female 2: The Psycho, but know that The Roommate is ultimately about as sensitive as that dtv sequel sounds. Playing the most conspicuously mature college freshman since Thornton Melon, "Friday Night Lights"' Minka Kelly is Sara Matthews, a small-town transplant studying fashion design at ULA, whose campus appears to consist of one courtyard, one coffee shop, a random frathouse, and a couple of dorms. (Maybe the letter "C" got custody of everything else in the divorce.) Young Sara gets a roommate in Rebecca ("Gossip Girl"'s Leighton Meester), an art student who announces herself as a humourless prig by refusing to let Sara's similarly geriatric buddy Tracy ("Hellcats"' Aly Michalka) shorten her name. Rebecca gets very clingy very quickly, and the filmmakers fail to provide any explanation for Sara's tolerance and weird rationalizations ("She's just overprotective") beyond the Freudian catchall that she, Sara, is still grieving for her dearly-departed sister. Which in itself is a non-sensical, arbitrary inversion of Single White Female, wherein the Rebecca character is cast adrift after losing her identical twin, driving her to transform herself into another woman's doppelgänger. (It was a facile yet efficient bit of pop psychology.) If the makers of The Roommate did Batman, the Joker would be a billionaire who lost his parents.

Unknown (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras D
starring Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones, Frank Langella
screenplay by Oliver Butcher & Stephen Cornwell, based on the novel Out of My Head by Didier van Cauwelaert
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Ian Pugh Knight and Day, Salt, and The Tourist failed as '60s spy throwbacks because they constantly reassured you that everything would be all right; if there was something about their various intrigues we didn't quite understand (or weren't supposed to know before some big third-act twist), we could rest assured that someone was pulling the strings to keep the world from falling apart. Unknown finally removes that safety net, and from there it approaches the fear and uncertainty that so fascinated Alfred Hitchcock and Terence Young about the Cold War--this sinking feeling that whatever conspiracies may be driving the plot, there will never be a way to extricate yourself from their tangled webs. True, Unknown's primary attraction is the dissection of identity, and it's simply incapable of stunning you in the same way that the Bourne trilogy stunned you with its own methodical examinations of the self. (If the picture feels derivative of that series, that's because it is.) But at the end, you're left feeling uncomfortable, because you just know you haven't uncovered all its secrets yet.

Cars 2 (2011)

*½/****
screenplay by Ben Queen
directed by John Lasseter

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Trading the '50s Americana of the original for '60s British adventure, Cars 2 seems, for a moment there, like it might actually work. The inhumanity that Walter Chaw correctly attributed to Cars scores a few subversive points in this sequel, filled as it is with complicated stunts that are, amusingly, impossible for automobiles to perform. (Even sillier: all of the anthropomorphic spy cars are retrofitted with Gatling guns and assault rifles.) But all is lost as tow-truck hick Mater (voice of Larry the Cable Guy) takes centre-stage in a convoluted espionage scheme, meaning that Cars 2 stoops to the same mistaken-identity spy parody that children's movies have beaten into the ground since 1966's The Man Called Flintstone. The subversion runs completely dry after the pre-title sequence, as our resident Connery (?) Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) jumps and shoots his way across oil derricks, only to hand over the reins to the blander heroes of the previous film. So the same old car jokes prevail as Pixar keeps shovelling coal onto a dead fire. Find one more extraneous character in Finn's liaison Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer), whose primary function is to prove that Bondian double-entendres don't have much impact when everyone's name is a double-entendre.

Soylent Green (1973) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D+
starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Edward G. Robinson
screenplay by Stanley R. Greenberg, based on the novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
directed by Richard Fleischer

by Walter Chaw I've spent a lot of time in my life dancing with Richard Fleischer's dystopian Soylent Green. Sometimes it leads, sometimes I do. For everything it does well, there are some things it does badly; and if the things it does well it does extremely well, the things it does badly it, likewise, does just awfully. No half measures here. Beginning with the good, here's Edward G. Robinson tapping his mortality (he succumbed to cancer less than two weeks after production wrapped), finding in his celluloid swan song a depth of despair he rarely touched in his career proper. It's up there with Montgomery Clift's devastated cameo in Judgment at Nuremberg--enough so that when he closes his eyes in appreciation of a leaf of lettuce his long-time companion Det. Thorn (Charlton Heston) has scavenged from the apartment of dead industrialist Simonson (Joseph Cotten, in his last role, too), it actually doesn't make you want to laugh. Not so the incongruities of this dystopian, post-apocalyptic future in a Manhattan (and world) destroyed by over-population, but not to the point where the streets don't empty in observance of a curfew. It presents a future in 2022 that seems unlikely not because we're not currently on the verge of some great ecological disaster, but because rough math suggests that the Heston character would've been born the year before the film's 1973 release and thus his declaration that he'd never seen a grapefruit (or grass, or cows) should worm its way into the audience consciousness as Soylent Green's statement that it's not serious, thoughtful science-fiction, but rather soapbox and screed timed to coincide with, in 1972, the first international conference on climate change.

Hall Pass (2011) [Enlarged Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C-
starring Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis, Jenna Fischer, Christina Applegate
screenplay by Pete Jones & Peter Farrelly and Kevin Barnett & Bobby Farrelly
directed by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Rick Mills (Owen Wilson) is in real estate and Fred Searing (Jason Sudeikis) sells life insurance--and yet these guys treat their own marriages, indeed their own lives, as an epic burden, so where do they get off trying to sell us peace-of-mind? Their leering obsession with sex has become all-consuming of late, prompting their wives (Maggie (Jenna Fischer) and Grace (Christina Applegate)) to grant them a hall pass: a "week off from marriage" in which they have the freedom to do whatever they want with the opposite sex without fear of recrimination. The Farrelly Brothers' Hall Pass tells a fairly conventional story about men and women who very slowly come to recognize just how much they love their significant others. But one thing it doesn't fully reconcile is this impulse that finds the movie's middle-aged male characters blinking madly at attractive women, taking "mental photographs for [their] spank bank"--because even once they've learned their lessons and shouted them from the rooftops, they're still taking those mental photographs. Beneath a thin veneer of sex jokes, the movie is about the denial and suppression of regret that occurs in the quest for long-term happiness.

Subjectivity: FFC Interviews Mike Mills

Starting fresh with the director of BEGINNERS

June 19, 2011|All of Mike Mills's films--narratives, documentaries, and music videos alike--share a common theme of perspective: how the individual views others, how others view the individual, and the projections that exist on both sides. Although I was somewhat skeptical of its indie quirk, Mills's Beginners left me thinking about the people in my life, past and present; I was genuinely affected by its interpersonal dynamics. As it happens, a major fulcrum of Mills's work is that he creates a dialogue not only between the artist and the masses--he also strives to forge a bond with the individual. After several days of combing through his filmography in preparation for the interview below, I finally discovered that Mills had been keeping a video diary on the official website for Beginners chronicling the sights he's seen and the people he's met on the movie's press tour. It hardly came as a surprise.

Green Lantern (2011)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Greg Berlanti & Michael Green & Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg
directed by Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw Martin Campbell's Green Lantern is just awful. It's a mess, a boring mess, featuring boring Ryan Reynolds in a skin-tight green super suit (and not-boring Blake Lively, not) trying to "grow up" and accept the responsibility of becoming an intergalactic Dudley Do-Right--a titular "Green Lantern," which in the DC UNIVERSE parlance apparently means that you say crap about will being stronger than fear and manifest a giant Matchbox race set as the best way to save a crashing helicopter. Cool? Cool if your concept of cool is The Last Starfighter as written by Tony Robbins. There's just so much empowerment going on in this thing, and unresolved daddy issues that are raised without any clue as to how to parallel the dysfunction in the characters or honour what is fast turning out to be this year's driving thematic force. It's no wonder, really, that the bad guy in this one is a giant mess of cosmic goo called "Parallax": the picture jumps around from one point-of-view to another with no sense to bridge the turbid gulfs between them. Worse, Green Lantern's threat to go the ambiguous, Dark Knight, fight-fear-with-fear route fails to materialize in the loudest possible way with an unintentionally-hilarious nonsense soliloquy delivered before a council of detached Kuato. I didn't think I'd see a movie this bad before Transformers: Euphemism for Asshole docks next month.

Vroom! Vroom!: Grand Prix (1966); Le Mans (1971); Fast Company (1979) - Blu-ray Discs

GRAND PRIX 
***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Yves Montand, Toshiro Mifune
screenplay by Robert Alan Arthur
directed by John Frankenheimer 

LE MANS
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras D
starring Steve McQueen, Siegfried Rauch, Elga Andersen, Ronald Leigh-Hunt
screenplay by Harry Kleiner
directed by Lee H. Katzin

FAST COMPANY
**/**** Image A- Sound C+ Extras A+
starring William Smith, Claudia Jennings, John Saxon, Don Francks
screenplay by Phil Savath, Courtney Smith and David Cronenberg
directed by David Cronenberg

LE MANS

by Walter Chaw Of the major films produced during John Frankenheimer's fulsome period (that stretch between The Young Savages and Seconds that saw him as a giant among giants, tearing off masterpieces major (The Train, The Manchurian Candidate) and minor (The Birdman of Alcatraz, Seven Days in May)), Grand Prix has always stuck out for me as a swing-and-a-miss. There's no disputing either its technical innovation, which saw cameras mounted to Formula One cars for the first time, or Frankenheimer's fire, which seemed to single-handedly will the production to the finish line despite prickly subjects, competition from a Steve McQueen Formula One project in simultaneous development, and insurance companies pulling out when Frankenheimer insisted on his stars doing much of their own driving. But only upon my most recent revisit, occasioned by the picture's Blu-ray release, did it become clear to me the relationship that Grand Prix has with the same year's Seconds, far and away Frankenheimer's best film: an element of the biomechanical--of Frankenstein, sure, but Icarus¹, too, where man metastasizes himself with machines of his own creation to achieve the forbidden, whether it be beauty, or endurance, or speed...or immortality. It's therefore a film that may get at the heart of auto racing's allure for not only its participants but also its true believers. Elements of Harlan Ellison's "Ernest and the Machine God"--this idea that while anything's possible through technology, the debt of that ambition is paid out in blood.

The Mission (1986) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, Ray McAnally, Aidan Quinn
screenplay by Robert Bolt
directed by Roland Joffé

by Jefferson Robbins Career arcs fascinate and depress me. The Mission finds Roland Joffé at his early peak on just his second movie, making what amounts to a $25 million art film starring one of America's best-known actors. Did Joffé change beyond this point, or did he refuse to change while the ecosystem altered around him? A bit of both, I suspect, after Fat Man and Little Boy and The Scarlet Letter. These epics went unembraced, and Oscars or no, the financiers weren't always going to settle for contemplative examinations of people caught in the turning of historical tides. Yet that's where Joffé was at his best--and maybe he couldn't get beyond it. Spalding Gray had him pegged early on: "Leave it to a Brit to tell you your own history," he advised in Swimming to Cambodia. Sure enough, as in The Killing Fields, Joffé's The Mission examines pangs of conscience at a critical moment of political, religious, and cultural upheaval.

Solaris (1972) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Jüri Järvet, Anatoli Solonitsyn
screenplay by Fridrikh Gorenshtein & Andrei Tarkovsky, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

by Bryant Frazer Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of Solaris, a novel by the Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, betrays the director's general disinterest in conventional SF tropes. His film does honour the mind-blowing outlines of Lem's concept, which deals with a manned mission to investigate a planet-sized extra-terrestrial consciousness. But where Lem speculated about the practical boundaries of human intellect in the shadow of the universe, Tarkovsky opts to explore human feelings of loss and insecurity in the face of mortality. For Lem, the failed Solaris mission is emblematic of the difficulties we humans would have comprehending and communicating with a radically different form of life. For Tarkovsky, the mission re-opens old psychic wounds, flooding us with regret that we weren't better to the people we loved. "Shame [is] the feeling that will save mankind," murmurs protagonist Kris Kelvin near the end of the film. In Tarkovsky's Solaris, we have made contact with the aliens, and they want you to call your mom.

The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971) - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Il gatto a nove code
**½/****
DVD - Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
BD - Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring James Franciscus, Karl Malden, Catherine Spaak, Pier Paolo Capponi 
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Nicknamed "The Italian Hitchcock," Dario Argento is more aptly classified "The Italian DePalma": a director with his own set of stylistic excesses who, especially early in his career, borrowed many tropes from the Master of Suspense en route to crafting his own distinctive thrillers. Again like DePalma, Argento of late has fallen on hard times, creating a series of clunkers that have blundered from the brilliant homage of his nascence to the tired and derivative garbage of his twilight. Indicated by somewhat straightforward mystery plots that elaborate death scenes and gory climaxes serve to punctuate, the giallo (so named for the colour of the covers--yellow--that enshrouded Italian penny dreadfuls) genre of thriller reached its stylistic apex with Argento's 1975 Deep Red, just prior to the director experimenting in the "supernatural" sub-genre of Italian horror with his masterpiece, Suspiria. Argento's first three films, the so-called "animal trilogy" (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o' Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet) deepened the giallo as introduced to cinema by the late, great Mario Bava.

X-Men: First Class (2011)

**/****
starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, Kevin Bacon
screenplay by Ashley Edward Miller & Zack Stentz and Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn
directed by Matthew Vaughn 

by Walter Chaw The half of Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class (hereafter X-Men 4) involving Erik "Magneto" Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) and Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) is spellbinding pulp; the other half is puerile bullshit. The starkness of that division is evidence of a screenplay with six credited authors, expectations of a franchise that went astray when it abandoned Bryan Singer (as all potentially great franchises seem to abandon Bryan Singer, to their detriment), and a director who's capable of giving good genre (Kick-Ass) saddled with material that's at least fifty-percent garbage. Start with the good in an Auschwitz prologue that handily reclaims Magneto's origin story from that idiot Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand while introducing energy-absorbing supervillain Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), the future-leader of the Hellfire Club, which includes among its members Emma Frost (January Jones, eternally in lingerie--not that I'm complaining) and teleporting Azazel (Jason Flemyng). Shaw plans in the present day (1962) to engineer nuclear war via the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it's up to an avenging Magneto and bookish Professor X to stop him. Unfortunately, the team they assemble is composed of a few non-descript punks with stupid mutant powers (the one who "adapts"; the one who screams; the one with little fairy wings; oh, and Beast (Nicholas Hoult), the one who's smart and has prehensile feet) whom Vaughn puts through the paces of frat/sorority shenanigans. CIA agent Moira McTaggert finds another way to waste Rose Byrne, and then there's a young, image-tortured Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), who carries the load of the "mutant and proud" trope Singer pulled off so intimately and effortlessly.