Film Freak Central

Mean Streets (1973) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, David Proval, Amy Robinson
screenplay by Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers I had my suspicion that there is no archetypal Martin Scorsese fan perhaps confirmed for me after doing an oral presentation on him in my "American Cinema" class: A football jock taking the course as an elective sauntered up to me asking to borrow my tape of Mean Streets. He couldn't believe there existed anything like the scene I had just shown--the one where Harvey Keitel's Charlie takes Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy into the back room of their hangout to get to the bottom of Johnny Boy's unpaid dues--despite the strong scent of Abbott & Costello in its staccato rhythm. (For what it's worth, this is also the passage that convinced Warner execs to acquire the film.¹) I immediately recognized the look in his eye, the Scorsese itch, and began to long for that first high, as they say; and I probably hope to become a mass enabler in reviewing Scorsese's work. Fitting that Mean Streets should be the catalyst for such nostalgia, marinated as it is in a mnemonic broth that makes the picture more explicitly autobiographical than Who's That Knocking At My Door, with Scorsese going so far as to use his own voice interchangeably with Keitel's when Charlie's narrating the piece (or, more precisely, when Charlie's talking to God).

"Miracle Mile" by Walter Chaw -- NOW ON SALE

If you follow our Facebook or Twitter accounts, you're probably aware that we've had another book in the works for quite some time. Today that book--Miracle Mile, by Walter Chaw--finally goes on sale.

In the tradition of Jonathan Lethem's They Live monograph and the 33⅓ series of longform album reviews, Miracle Mile offers a mix of cultural commentary, film criticism, and memoir as Walter dissects Miracle Mile's therapeutic function in his life following a traumatic event in the summer of 1989.

The book also features running commentary from Miracle Mile's own writer-director, Steve De Jarnatt. Meanwhile, the cover art is an original piece by Eisner Award-winning artist Paul Chadwick, whose film work includes Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and The Big Easy. One of the reasons we're not releasing an electronic version right away is to honour this glorious wrap-around illustration, which comes courtesy of Mr. De Jarnatt.

I love this book and consider it the best thing FILM FREAK CENTRAL has ever published--online or off. If you're a fan of Walter's writing and/or Miracle Mile, this is the alpha and the omega. And thus very reasonably priced, at $13.95 for the trade paperback and $9.95 for the eBook.

Miracle Mile is now available exclusively at Lulu.com. In the coming weeks, it will trickle into other outlets, but a Lulu purchase is the best way to show your support and encouragement.

Visit Lulu.com to buy the book or check out a free preview. For press inquiries, please contact Walter or myself.-Bill Chambers

Summer with Monika (1953) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Sommaren med Monika
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Harriet Andersson, Lars Ekborg, Dagmar Ebbesen, Åke Fridell
screenplay by Per Anders Fogelström
directed by Ingmar Bergman

click to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer In the annals of Early Bergman, Summer with Monika is The Big One--the international hit that established the striving Swede's cred as a major filmmaker. The irony is that it's among the slightest of his works. Its notoriety is mainly the result of a promotional campaign selling it as a sex film, using imagery that suggested a nudie pic rather than a melancholy (and cautionary) rumination on life, love, and gender relations. Of course, it wasn't just the trenchcoat brigade that turned out in force for a movie that was at one point evocatively retitled Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl(!). In fact, Monika was the one that made Woody Allen a lifelong Bergman fan. And it left a huge impression on Jean-Luc Godard, who, in 1958, wrote that Monika is "the most original film by the most original of directors," arguing that Bergman's loving photography of Harriet Andersson predated (and thus eclipsed) Fellini's widely lauded use of Guiletta Masina in a neo-realist mode in Nights of Cabiria, and that it surpassed in craft (mais oui!) Roger Vadim's employment of Bardot in And God Created Woman.

American Reunion (2012) [Unrated] - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + Ultraviolet

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C
starring Jason Biggs, Alyson Hannigan, Chris Klein, Eugene Levy
written and directed by Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg

click any image to enlarge

by Bill Chambers The conceptual pretext for American Reunion is actually pretty brilliant when you consider that any sequel to a years-old teen movie (see also: Scream 4) holds the same ghoulish appeal as a high-school reunion--although enough of the American Pie cast has aged in the spotlight that the novelty wears off faster than it did when, say, "Still the Beaver" aired to an audience of appreciative rubberneckers back in 1983. In fact, one character appears to have been retconned in for the express purpose of providing the dramatic before-and-after contrast that's mostly missing from the film: As Selena, the lovely Dania Ramirez is engulfed in hideous prosthetics for a yearbook photo that instantly and a little cruelly betrays her as a member of band (nicknamed "Lard Arms") to her former classmates. At any rate, once the eyes adjust to Chris Klein's receding hairline and Thomas Ian Nicholas's douche beard, the big question becomes whether the American Pie formula--or should I say brand (and it is a brand, thanks to mercenary dtv sequels that catered to an audience of undiscriminating/horny teenagers)--can accommodate actors in their mid-30s. More specifically, since casting older is a genre staple, actors in their mid-30s playing their age.

Bell, Book, and Candle (1958) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, Jack Lemmon, Elsa Lanchester
screenplay by Daniel Taradash, based on the play by John Van Druten
directed by Richard Quine

by Jefferson Robbins What a strange companion piece this makes for Vertigo, released the same year by Paramount. Columbia issued Bell, Book, and Candle as a Christmas confection, but it's bitter chocolate--both for the extratextual residues carried over by Vertigo co-stars James Stewart and Kim Novak and for the conceit of a powerful woman who must rein herself in to become worthy of a clueless paramour. In each, Stewart is a bewitched man who throws away much of his dignity in pursuit of a sexual obsession and torments a beautiful apparition of a woman to tears. Re-examined now, despite its technical proficiency, its occasionally risqué dialogue, and its mindfulness of New York's post-Beat subculture of the time, Bell, Book, and Candle is also a fantasy of limited vision. It posits a world of real magic but never contemplates the ramifications beyond its heroes' immediate personal needs. This shortsightedness, unfortunately, is now engraved on the thirteenth chromosome of all romantic comedies; the exceptions that dare glance up at the wider world are mutations. Still, Bell, Book, and Candle carries off some covert gender reversals most contemporary comedies couldn't muster, and it echoes in the "Harry Potter" franchise of novels and films in ways that make me think J.K. Rowling was a fan.

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

**/****
starring Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry
screenplay by Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin, based on Alibar's play "Juicy and Delicious"
directed by Benh Zeitlin

by Angelo Muredda The trailer for Beasts of the Southern Wild promises a harmless experience, but woe to anyone who goes in expecting a triumphal horn concert only to find Benh Zeitlin's accomplished yet exasperating debut, a libertarian wolf in a fuzzy Aurochs suit. That the film is far trickier than its marketing hook suggests is at once refreshing and troubling, given what it actually has up its sleeve. An oyster banquet pitched on a burial site, it's the sort of ethnographic celebration of a disenfranchised people that ends with the unspoken maxim, "And then they all died like men, and faded into legend."

Our long-overdue review of Margaret (2011)

***½/****
starring Anna Paquin, J. Smith-Cameron, Jean Reno, Matt Damon
written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan

by Angelo Muredda The early word on Margaret was that it was a promising three-hour-plus city symphony wrested away in the editing room from writer-director Kenneth Lonergan. Still mired in legal troubles from the production over the course of its quiet release and critical resurgence last fall, Lonergan briefly spoke up to deny that what a coterie of critics and audience members had seen up to that point was damaged goods, admitting the 150-minute theatrical version is more or less his Director's Cut. While the Blu-ray release includes the famed longer version*, then, it bears mentioning that if the theatrical cut is a thwarted masterpiece, uneven but conceptually daring and powerful, it's very much Lonergan's thwarted masterpiece.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (2011)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Billy Burke
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Appalling by pretty much every measure, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (hereafter Twilight 4.1) is the predictable end result of a film based on a book written by an illiterate Mormon housewife mistaking her profound ignorance for profundity. It's about a really old guy who talks a really young girl into marrying him and enduring really, really painful childbirth as her portion of God's judgment on her kind; and then it's about another kind of pedophilia, wherein a 19-year-old badly in need of acting lessons gets turned on by a baby and decides he's going to marry that infant once she's old enough to breed. Still with me? So, yes, I knew it was going to be bad and, yes, I went anyway. And you know what? For as girded as I was to the raw incompetence of this franchise, Twilight 4.1 still managed to plumb a few new depths. See, Twilight 4.1 is an apologia for spousal abuse and a clumsy pro-life screed (what about this crap isn't clumsy?) before turning into cartoon Grand Guignol horseshit meant to freak out an audience of pre-teens and lonely housewives who think that this object of their devotion is selling them anything except loneliness and delusion. It's sledgehammer racist in its depiction of a native housekeeper cast as Maria Ouspenskaya, and it has a moment in which a circle of wolves "think-talk" to each other in some ineffable evocation of an Optimus Prime pep talk. It's completely inexplicable, in other words, and irritating for it.

Summer Interlude (1951) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Sommarlek
***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras D
starring Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjelin, Annalisa Ericson
screenplay by Herbert Grevenius and Ingmar Bergman
directed by Ingmar Bergman 

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer 1951's Summer Interlude offers a glimpse of Ingmar Bergman's later career in embryonic form. Maj-Britt Nilsson plays a sexy, precocious teenager in love, and if that doesn't sound very Bergman-esque to you, know that she also plays a wary, regretful dancer approaching the functional end of her career at the Stockholm Royal Opera. The story darts forwards and backwards in time as the dancer, Marie, recalls an ill-fated love affair on the Stockholm archipelago while considering the status of her current relationship, a tentative affair with a newspaper hack who doesn't deserve her.

Camelot (1967) (DigiBook) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero, David Hemmings
screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, based on his play and The Once and Future King by T.H. White
directed by Joshua Logan

by Jefferson Robbins Joshua Logan's Camelot sucker-punched audiences, I suspect, and did so in slow-motion. Maybe the source musical, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, did as well. Mention the legend of King Arthur and our first notions are of magic and righteous triumph; we forget the betrayal and Fall. The overall air of the film is stabs of paradise framed by battle and tears, with most of the misery encroaching from offstage. Yet when the King's dream finally dies, it dies viscerally. Find late in Camelot Arthur (Richard Harris) hiding from the collapse of his new social order in the wooded bower where he once studied with his vanished tutor Merlyn. He imagines soaring as a bird, as he did while Merlyn's pupil, but his spirit-animal is interrupted by a hunter. It's Mordred (David Hemmings), the fruit of Arthur's forgotten sins, and his entry with bow and arrow reasserts the brutality that will pull down the kingdom.

Blood Work (2002) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
starring Clint Eastwood, Wanda De Jesús, Jeff Daniels, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Michael Connelly
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw You can figure out the pivotal clue in Blood Work if not by the title alone--which gives altogether too much away--then surely come the thirty-minute mark. You can deduce the identity of the murderer as soon as he saunters on screen, and you can predict the love story almost before it happens just by dint of the kind of movie that Blood Work is. The only thing you can't figure out is why Clint Eastwood, who sometimes makes interesting movies like Bird, A Perfect World, White Hunter, Black Heart, and Unforgiven, almost as often makes boring, predictable, prosaic movies like The Rookie (1990), Absolute Power, True Crime, and now Blood Work.

To Rome with Love (2012)

**/****
starring Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penélope Cruz
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There's an odd moment early in To Rome with Love that makes you sit up and wonder if Woody Allen has made good on the promise shown by his surprisingly warm Midnight in Paris. Stumbling out of a movie theatre with his wife and another couple, regular schmo Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) mounts a rousing defense of Saverio Costanzo's The Solitude of Prime Numbers, offering that its openness to human mystery makes it far superior to The King's Speech. I can't say I agree with him, but how nice to see such an idiosyncratic opinion voiced in earnest. That's a good sign, coming from a director whose characters often sound like variations on one another in his lesser works--but it's also a false one, when much of what follows plays out like a flat homage to omnibus city movies.

Savages (2012)

*/****
starring Blake Lively, Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson, John Travolta
screenplay by Shane Salerno & Don Winslow & Oliver Stone, based on the novel by Winslow
directed by Oliver Stone 

by Walter Chaw Another disgusting piece of crap that Oliver Stone makes watchable and even fitfully interesting, Savages sees Stone returning to ground he already plowed in Salvador, his screenplay for Scarface, and arguably his best film in hindsight, the filthy U-Turn. One possible excuse for its foulness, in an ocean of possible excuses, is a cast headlined by Taylor Kitsch, the new Paul Walker; Aaron Johnson, the new Skeet Ulrich; and Blake Lively, the new...I don't know, Bridget Fonda? Another possible explanation is a godawful script by Don Winslow (author of the novel upon which the film is based), Shane Salerno, and Stone hissownself that opens with a ridiculously bad voiceover tease and ends with same, sandwiching in between a tale of blissed-out California marijuana kingpins Chon (Kitsch) and Ben (Johnson) vs. the Mexican cartel, led by Lado (the always amazing Benicio Del Toro) and Elena (Salma Hayek). Sound awful? It's awful. And it would have been even without an embarrassing John Travolta, wheedling and whinging through an entire performance as a corrupt DEA agent. With him, however, Savages at least has the benefit of occasionally elevating from entirely-useless to sometimes-whimsical camp artifact.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

**/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Sally Field
screenplay by James Vanderbilt
directed by Marc Webb

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The only reason for choosing (500) Days of Summer helmer Marc Webb to steer the Spider-Man property in a new direction is the hope that Webb would somehow inject into it a twee, precious, emo-romantic pheromone irresistible to Zooey Deschanel-brand nerd-chicks. Think: Twilight for girls who aren't illiterate. It's not a bad movie in and of itself, but I'm ambivalent about its nominal success, just because rebooting a franchise that's still so fresh (Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 was a mere five years ago) proves a terrible distraction. As much as I like Andrew Garfield, the new Peter Parker, I spent a lot of time comparing his performance to Tobey Maguire's in the same role (ditto Emma Stone (the new Gwen Stacey) and Kirsten Dunst (the former Mary Jane)) and wondering what Raimi would have done with a Lizard (Rhys Ifans) voiced/motion-captured by Dylan Baker, had he been allowed to finally pay off that thread. I spent a lot of time, too, distracted by cool emo touches, like having Peter decorate his room with a lovely, vintage Rear Window poster, ostensibly because this Parker is soulful enough a 17-year-old to not only have seen the film but also perhaps modeled his own photography jones after that film's shutterbug protagonist. But what about Rear Window's hero being a voyeur? A scene early on in The Amazing Spider-Man where Parker snaps a surreptitious photo of Gwen hints at a draft of the screenplay that maybe wanted to deal with Parker as a real, honest-to-goodness fucked-up kid. Sad that only moments now and again suggest any kind of depth or greater purpose. Sad, too, that the movie's not otherwise exciting or innovative.

The Sweet Hereafter (1997) - Combo Blu-ray + DVD

****/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Ian Holm, Maury Chaykin, Peter Donaldson, Bruce Greenwood
screenplay by Atom Egoyan, based on the novel by Russell Banks
directed by Atom Egoyan

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer For anyone left reeling by Atom Egoyan's Exotica, with its sexualized miasma of grief and longing lingering in the mind, the very first shot of The Sweet Hereafter is vertigo-inducing. Once again, the camera tracks very slowly from left to right as the titles appear on screen--a signal, perhaps, that more human misery awaits. Egoyan eventually alights on a scene of tranquility, as a family of three--mother, father, child--sleeps on a bare wooden floor. Beyond the stylistic link to the opening of Egoyan's previous film, I'm not sure what it is about this tableau that should be so disquieting. Partly it's the slow, deliberate camera move that brought us here. Partly it's the voyeuristic viewing opportunity. (Sleeping families are, of course, vulnerable, and the casual exposure of most of the woman's breast puts the audience in the place of intruders spying on a private moment.) And partly it's that the God's-eye P.O.V. suggests the omnipotence and indifference of the universe at large when tragedy is the subject.