Film Freak Central

Executive Decision (1996) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Kurt Russell, Halle Berry, John Leguizamo, Steven Seagal
screenplay by Jim Thomas & John Thomas
directed by Stuart Baird

by Jefferson Robbins SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Stuart Baird's Executive Decision begins and ends as a bad, bad movie. It starts off wobbling distractedly from one fraught international locale to another, complete with bleeping, wordy chyrons telling us where we are and with whom. It ends in a pile of airliner-in-peril clichés and some flirty banter so terrible it puckers the ears, acting as though Airplane! never happened. In between, the picture gets better, tighter, and tenser than a sub-Tom Clancy military political thriller starring Steven Seagal has any right to be. It accomplishes this, in part, by throwing Seagal off the plane.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2011)

**½/****
starring Katie Holmes, Guy Pearce, Bailee Madison, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Guillermo Del Toro & Matthew Robbins, based on the teleplay by Nigel McKeand
directed by Troy Nixey

by Walter Chaw There are so many opportunities squandered, so many set-ups dishonoured, so many promising moments clearly assembled into incoherence in the editing bay, that it's kind of amazing how Troy Nixey's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark still manages to coast along on its monsters and its lovely, gothic atmosphere. It's not a good movie, but it's a good time, for the most part--the part where you're not thinking about how irritating it is that in movies like this parents are constantly leaving their children in peril. Produced by Guillermo Del Toro, the picture feels an awful lot like another Del Toro production, 2008's The Orphanage, which also provides solid atmosphere, a couple of gross-outs, and an overall feeling of pleasant well-being. The major difference is that Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is so disjointed and spotty that the predominant aftertaste is frustration. What a shame.

A Man Called Horse (1970) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B-
starring Richard Harris, Dame Judith Anderson, Jean Gascon, Corinna Tsopei
screenplay by Jack De Witt, based on a story by Dorothy M. Johnson
directed by Elliot Silverstein

by Bryant Frazer Hey, peoples of the world: white guys are awesome! Suppose a white guy--a pasty English lord, let's say--were kidnapped by a bunch of Lakota Sioux. Sure, he might try to escape from captivity once or twice, but after a while he'd be totally cool with it. Instead of whining like a paleface, he'd go out and kill some other Native American people, maybe grab him a scalp or two, and then finally prove himself to his tribe by undergoing a bizarre physical ritual and fucking the chief's sister. Eventually, he'll be the leader of the tribe, rocking a tomahawk and a headband and showing them how to skirmish, English-style.

Green Lantern: Emerald Knights (2011) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
Emerald Knights
screenplay by Alan Burnett and Todd Casey
directed by Lauren Montgomery
The First Lantern
screenplay by Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim
directed by Christopher Berkeley
Kilowog
screenplay by Peter J. Tomasi, based on "New Blood" by Peter J. Tomasi and Chris Samnee
directed by Lauren Montgomery
Mogo Doesn't Socialize
screenplay by Dave Gibbons, based on the story by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
directed by Jay Oliva
Laira
screenplay by Eddie Berganza, based on "What Price Honor?" by Ruben Diaz and Travis Charest
directed by Jay Oliva
Abin Sur
screenplay by Geoff Johns, based on "Tyger" by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill
directed by Christopher Berkeley

by Jefferson Robbins The DC Universe direct-to-video animation series continues to earn its reputation, for good or ill, as a by-fans/for-fans endeavour. Producer Bruce Timm and company pump out Green Lantern: Emerald Knights as a kind of B-side to Martin Campbell's disappointing Green Lantern feature film--a supporting document, the sort of thing valued mostly by collectors and fetishists. DC Comics fanboys will thrill to a flashback glimpse of planetary invasions carried out by back-issue bad-guy species the Dominators; casual viewers will likely just think it's cool how the guys with the rings blow shit up with giant green energy swords in outer space.

The Fox and the Hound (1981) [25th Anniversary] + The Little Mermaid (1989) [Platinum Edition] - DVDs|The Fox and the Hound/The Fox and the Hound II (2006) [2 Movie Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

THE FOX AND THE HOUND
***½/**** Image C- Sound B Extras C
uncredited screenplay, based on the novel by Daniel P. Mannix
directed by Art Stevens, Ted Berman, Richard Rich

THE LITTLE MERMAID
*½/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A
written and directed by John Musker and Ron Clements

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. With The Fox and the Hound and The Little Mermaid bookending an especially turbulent decade for a studio mortally locked in a struggle to reconcile its animation pedigree with its crass commercial instincts, the former has come to be regarded in the Disney mythology as the Good Friday to the latter's Easter Sunday. It's therefore fitting that the two films they most emulate are 1942's Bambi and 1950's Cinderella, respectively, as the Forties marked the last time the Mouse House was on the brink of foreclosure. (The Fox and the Hound goes so far as to recycle cels from Bambi.) Much like The Little Mermaid represented a somewhat cynical reboot of the fairytale default, so, too, was Cinderella a glorified salvage operation following the money-/audience-hemorrhaging pro bono work Uncle Walt did on behalf of FDR's Good Neighbor policy. Alas, the Good Friday and Easter Sunday analogy applies to not just Disney's phoenix-like resurrection but also the tonal and moral disparity between the two pictures: one is the sad truth; the other is wishful thinking.

Conan the Barbarian (2011)

*/****
starring Jason Momoa, Stephen Lang, Rachel Nichols, Ron Perlman
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and Sean Hood
directed by Marcus Nispel

by Walter Chaw It's hard for me to hate on Marcus Nispel's unwell Conan the Barbarian too much, mainly because its failings are more a matter of incompetence than of real malice. There are few pleasures as gratifying as Robert E. Howard's testosterone-rich raving, and for a while there, the movie looks to have found the mad amplification that typified the Texan author's best work. But when the wheels come off--and they come off right around the time that Conan's dad, played by Ron Perlman (naturally), checks out--the whole mess goes careening off the proverbial cliff. If only the rest of the film were as mad as its opening, with a young Conan (Leo Howard) demonstrating his innate birthright to slay every single thing within arm's reach by presenting two handfuls of severed-head to his thunderstruck village after a brutal scuffle in the forest. The level of lawlessness in its first half-hour is as legendary as the brilliant prologue to John Milius's original, from Conan's birth-by-unplanned-Caesarean on a raging battlefield to the presence of none other than Morgan Freeman, lured into a payday to provide solemn narration.

Breaking Bad: The Complete Second Season (2009) + Breaking Bad: The Complete Third Season (2010) - Blu-ray Discs

Season 2 - Image A Sound B+ Extras B+
"Seven Thirty-Seven," "Grilled," "Bit by a Dead Bee," "Down," "Breakage," "Peekaboo," "Negro y Azul," "Better Call Saul," "4 Days Out," "Over," "Mandala," "Phoenix," "ABQ"

Season 3 - Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
"No Mas," "Caballo sin Nombre," "I.F.T.," "Green Light," "Mas," "Sunset," "One Minute," "I See You," "Kafkaesque," "Fly," "Abiquiu," "Half Measures," "Full Measure"

by Bryant Frazer "Breaking Bad"'s first season delivered a pulpy, compulsively watchable crime drama. I was a fan, but I found a lot to complain about, too. The show seemed ready to burst with hackneyed family drama, inane narrative tangents, and placeholder characters who pointed the way to tense moments without earning their screentime. I didn't even like AMC's key art for that first year, a dopey shot of protagonist Walter White (Bryan Cranston) standing in the middle of the desert, pantsless and packing heat. It turns out that "Breaking Bad"'s debut season, truncated to seven episodes by a writer's strike, was just an overture. The second season is a big, meaty pot roast of a show, cooking slow and low for eleven long hours. And that tour-de-force is damn near eclipsed by Season Three, which sees the series growing leaner and meaner than before, more forceful and more focused in its almost playfully outsized sense of menace.

Mars Needs Moms (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Simon Wells & Wendy Wells, based on the book by Berkeley Breathed
directed by Simon Wells

by Angelo Muredda It's hard to say who Mars Needs Moms was made for. An expensive but passionless special-effects exercise from yeoman director and co-screenwriter Simon Wells (The Time Machine) and producer Robert Zemeckis, who's put all his creative eggs since The Polar Express in the motion-capture basket, Mars Needs Moms sits uneasily with compatriots like The Pagemaster in the no man's land of children's films too dreary for most children to sit through. If it's too taxing a journey for kids, though, it's largely a bore for anyone else--a flat 80 minutes of animated bodies tumbling through metallic space chutes and neon hallways ripped from Tron: Legacy, scarcely made watchable by some of its impressive technological feats and by its surprisingly subdued tone, which at times borders on the elegiac.

The Final Destination in 3-D (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

The Final Destination
**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten, Nick Zano, Mykelti Williamson
screenplay by Eric Bess
directed by David R. Ellis

by Alex Jackson It's the summer of 2009. I arrive at the movie theatre, a multiplex twenty miles from home (making it the closest one), to discover that while Rob Zombie's Halloween II has already started, I'm just in time to catch The Final Destination in 3-D. Thinking that I didn't really care which one I saw, that's good enough for me, and so I buy a ticket for the fourth (and, we were led to believe, last) entry in the Final Destination franchise.

The Future is Now: FFC Interviews Miranda July|The Future (2011)

Miranda July reflects on The Future

THE FUTURE ***/****

starring Hamish Linklater, Miranda July, David Warshofsky, Isabella Acres written and directed by Miranda July

In The Future, writer/director/star Miranda July indulges in the same wayward malaise of her previous film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, but, somewhat ironically, the focus on the uncertainty of "what comes next" makes this one seem a lot less scattershot. Dance teacher Sophie (July) and tech-support guy Jason (Hamish Linklater) have rescued a sickly cat from the wild and sent him to an animal shelter, and they've got a month until they can reclaim him. However, the cat will require 'round-the-clock care from them to stay alive, so they conclude that this is their last "free" month before years-long responsibilities squander their potential, and they quit their jobs in a bid to become more "spontaneous." Jason goes door-to-door selling trees for an environmental program and Sophie decides to film "thirty dances over thirty days" for a short-track to YouTube stardom. But neither one is prepared for the apathy and self-loathing that greets their cutesy little endeavours, and as they spin their wheels, they gravitate towards people who appear to "really have their shit together": Sophie becomes attracted to a single father with a small business (David Warshofsky), while Jason regularly visits an old man (Joe Putterlik) who once sold him a used hairdryer. What's important is that July quickly establishes that these behaviours are not a matter of self-improvement or jealousy--it's just a hell of a lot easier to stare at the lives of others and marvel at how organized they look from the outside. In other words, Sophie and Jason take no real "action" of their own accord; everything they do is just another bit of slacktivism to avoid the responsibilities for which they're supposedly preparing. Her self-esteem takes a hit as she views other women's "dancing" videos, so she cancels her Internet and calls it a great opportunity to focus. July makes this sheltered worldview all the more fascinating by introducing an element of surrealism--soon, her characters' paradoxical desires to move forward and stand still give them to power to bend the universe to their will, as an imminent break-up is stalled by the literal stoppage of time. (And yet, time still manages to march on.) The self-conscious obviousness of its metaphors give The Future a strong grounding in reality, rendering even July's silliest notions--such as a series of helium-inflected monologues from the cat himself (the only neglected "victim" in this scenario), waiting for his loving masters to return--deeply affecting.-IP

August 7, 2011|Miranda July is very much like the characters she plays, and they are very much like her: she stares at you with wide, intense eyes, and her responses trail off once she realizes that she's revealed all she wants to about a given subject. She's in town to promote her second feature film, The Future, for the Boston Independent Film Festival, and we both seem a little eager to discover if indeed this sophomore effort can be discussed at length. Over the course of our conversation, we shared a couple of awkward laughs--in mutual recognition, I think, of the inherent absurdity of this meeting; we had been tasked to interpret and explain an intentionally abstract piece dealing with moving on and growing older, about which the creator must refuse a "full" explanation. Still, though July insists on keeping some things secret, she comes across as utterly sincere--so much so that I felt a pang of remorse when I realized that I had unintentionally lied to her by not attending the festival's screening of The Future like I said I would. Several days later, given another interview opportunity for a different film, I made it a point to ask her husband Mike Mills to apologize on my behalf.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

***½/****
starring James Franco, Freida Pinto, John Lithgow, Andy Serkis
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver
directed by Rupert Wyatt

by Walter Chaw Perverse, terrifying, hilarious in exactly the right way; smart enough, emotional enough, and at the end uniquely satisfying in any number of hard-to-quantify ways, Rupert Wyatt's Rise of the Planet of the Apes (hereafter Rise) overcomes even James Franco--here miscast as a human--to produce something of a minor masterpiece. A prequel to the classic series' prequels-as-sequels, it follows the ascendancy of chimp Caesar (Andy Serkis, typecast in motion capture) as he's genetically engineered to be intelligent through an accident of birth, only to grow progressively more so in time with the devolution of adoptive human grandfather Charles (John Lithgow), who's ravaged by the Alzheimer's disease that the drug that makes Caesar smart was meant to cure. So while there's a decided "Flowers for Algernon" effect of the stuff on humans, in ape-kind it just sort of escalates geometrically, thus presenting Rise as kindred in spirit to J.J. Abrams's Star Trek reboot: problem-solving at the same pace it's delivering exceptional character moments and well-timed action sequences. Like Star Trek, too, incidentally, it's a wonderful surprise.

Bellflower (2011) + The Change-Up (2011)|Bellflower - Blu-ray Disc + DVD

BELLFLOWER
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Evan Glodell, Jessie Wiseman, Taylor Dawson, Rebekah Brandes
written and directed by Evan Glodell

THE CHANGE-UP
½*/****
starring Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde
screenplay by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore
directed by David Dobkin

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bellflower earns the right to its melodrama by asking what you have to live for and, more importantly, what you're willing to do to keep your life uncomplicated. Woodrow (writer-director Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Taylor Dawson) don't seem to have much of a life beyond hanging out with their friends and drinking too much--but their minds were suitably "warped" by a second-generation VHS tape of Mad Max. Now they spend their days constructing flamethrowers and muscle cars destined to fit right in with that film's end-of-the-world milieu. Woodrow hooks up with a young woman named Milly (Jessie Wiseman), and as the relationship blossoms (and breaks down), Glodell takes the opportunity to explore the unfathomable guilt and anger that drove George Miller's original road warrior--as well as what Glodell's own heroes have failed to understand about his journey. When we first meet him, Woodrow doesn't know too much about guilt or anger, so his coping mechanisms are extremely fractured. Confrontations with others are typically brief, sometimes without logical end, and the director intentionally tones down most of the violence so that his characters can wallow in passive-aggressive detachment. Sometimes the violent images are chopped out entirely, only to be saved for later in the movie, where they may or may not have been mentally re-edited by Woodrow to conform to a more favorable outcome. That's the thing about the apocalypse: it never goes quite the way you want.

How Do You Know (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A
starring Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, Jack Nicholson
written and directed by James L. Brooks

by Angelo Muredda "We're all one small adjustment away from making our lives work," Paul Rudd's George chirps, a little too eagerly, in the interminable, banally titled, and curiously unpunctuated How Do You Know. It's a strange thing for an indicted man on the verge of financial ruin to say, but then How Do You Know is a strange movie, less the tidy romantic comedy its trailer pitches than a monument to the incidental pleasures of narrative ungainliness and lax comic timing.

Better Off Dead (1985) - Blu-ray Disc

Better Off Dead...
***/**** Image B- Sound C-
starring John Cusack, David Ogden Stiers, Diane Franklin, Kim Darby
written and directed by Savage Steve Holland

by Jefferson Robbins Better Off Dead... probably wouldn't have outlasted its peers among cheaply-made '80s teen comedies minus three crucial factors. There's John Cusack's extraordinary Everyguy deadpan: He reacts to absurdity without visibly reacting, a still pivot for the scene around him and the best possible audience surrogate for a vehicle like this. There's writer-director Savage Steve Holland's visual wit, rooted in classic cartoons and well-abetted by editor Alan Balsam (Revenge of the Nerds). And finally, there's Holland's clearly-demonstrated understanding of what it's like to be a teenage male--collapsing in the face of spurned love, so immersed in one's own fantasies and neuroses that everyone, even relatives and close friends, seems a grotesque. This internal state gets externalized in Better Off Dead..., as no matter where Cusack's Lane Meyer goes, he's confronted with such bizarre contortions of humanity that he might as well be an astronaut among aliens.