Film Freak Central

The Client (1994) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
starring Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones, Mary-Louise Parker, Brad Renfro
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by John Grisham
directed by Joel Schumacher

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by Walter Chaw Joel Schumacher's The Client starts out like a sequel to Schumacher's own The Lost Boys, as two little boys (one of them Brad Renfro) try out cigarettes and John Grisham's awful dialogue (augmented by awful screenwriter Akiva Goldsman) in a verdant backwoods Eden before witnessing the suicide of mob lawyer Jerome Clifford (Walter Olkewicz). "Romey" is despondent, see, because he knows where mobster Muldano (Anthony LaPaglia) has buried a body. Because little Mark (Renfro) spent quality time with the goombah before his voyage to the great Italian restaurant in the sky, Mark is now Little Italy's most-wanted. Cut to Muldano polishing off a Shirley Temple--judging by the way Schumacher makes love to the maraschino cherry between LaPaglia's teeth--at a sleazy New Orleans nightclub to complete the impression that all schlockmeister Schumacher ever wanted to make was variations on arrested-vampire movies. At least it sports Will Patton in a supporting role back when he was a well-kept secret. And JT Walsh, and William H. Macy, and Mary-Louise Parker. Plus, Anthony Edwards, Bradley Whitford, Ossie Davis, Dan Castellaneta, William Sanderson...

The Apparition (2012) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras HILARIOUS
starring Ashley Greene, Sebastian Stan, Tom Felton, Julianna Guill
written and directed by Todd Lincoln

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by Walter Chaw I think you enter into a handshake agreement with The Apparition that it's never, not for a moment, going to be scary when in its prologue, we're introduced to Harry Potter alum Tom "Draco" Felton as a grad student or something in a Doc Brown helmet prattling on about "anomalistic psychology" in that affected, pained way the Harry Potter alums (see: Emma "Hermione" Watson in The Perks of Being a Wallflower) seem to have adopted post-franchise. Or maybe it's the first scene between central pretties Kelly and Ben (Ashley Greene and Sebastian Stan), which, without fail, sports extra, meaningless, unintentionally hysterical blank reaction shots, thus announcing, in addition to hyphenate Todd Lincoln's inability to cast, his inability to frame shots or hire an editor (or three, as the case may be). To The Apparition's credit, though, milquetoast hero Ben is wearing the Bauhaus T-shirt I used to wear in high school when I wasn't trying to be hip, so...yay for being old enough to have a direct connection to a hipster reference. As for the rest of it, it's kind of astonishing that this didn't land as a dtv relic submitted for the immediate disapproval of the Netflix-streaming peanut gallery.

Tha Makioka Sisters (1983)

***/****
starring Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yuko Kotegawa
screenplay by Kon Ichikawa, based on the novel by Junichiro Tanizaki
directed by Kon Ichikawa

by Angelo Muredda "So many things have happened in this house," middle child Sachiko (Yoshiko Sakuma) tells her older sister Tsuruko (Keiko Kishi) near the end of The Makioka Sisters, an expansive period piece in miniature that could be churlishly described as a film about the sorts of mundane things that happen in houses. In settling down to adapt Junichiro Tanizaki's 500-page tome about prewar Japan in a state of profound social and economic transition, glimpsed only through the intersecting marital and financial crises of the titular siblings, writer-director Kon Ichikawa inherited a difficult task, best appreciated by pausing to consider that there's no English equivalent of George Eliot's Middlemarch (though Sam Mendes keeps trying). If historical epics are hard to translate to a medium that doesn't allow for marginal notes and flow charts to keep track of the minor players, the cloistered setting of domestic ones are doubly tricky. Consider that Joe Wright's recent and thoroughly rotten stab at Anna Karenina adapts the first part of the novel as a self-reflexive essay about how difficult it is to dramatize tragedies that take place in drawing rooms, and the rest as an utterly banal dramatization of a tragedy set in drawing rooms. Ichikawa's solution, after his own flirtation with hyper-theatricality in the first reel (which unveils the ensemble in a series of spatially disconcerting close-ups, then medium shots establishing the siblings' relatives ages), is largely to mine the charismatic reserves of his all-star cast.

Krivina (2013)

***/****
starring starring Goran Slavković, Jasmin Geljo
written and directed by Igor Drljaca

by Angelo Muredda 2012 was an unusually rich year for Canadian cinema, from the strangely fruitful pairing of David Cronenberg and Don DeLillo in Cosmopolis--though it comes from DeLillo, is there a more Cronenbergian line about deformity than the doctor's insistence that Robert Pattinson let his mole "express itself"?--to the near perfect genre vehicle of Michael Dowse's Goon. Both films are legibly Canadian in terms of content, despite Cosmopolis's faux-Manhattan setting, but one of the most heartening developments in last year's crop was a turn to formalism that might confound expectations about what our movies are supposed to look and sound like. Weird Sex and Snowshoes, both Katherine Monk's book and Jill Sharpe's documentary adaptation of it, sketched a history of Canadian cinema through its dourness of tone and harsh thematic machinations--necrophilia, the malevolent north, and so on--so successfully as to canonize that image. Yet films like Panos Cosmatos's Beyond the Black Rainbow and now Igor Drljaca's Krivina (which debuted at last year's TIFF) are a nice reminder that there's also a sharp formalist strain, à la Michael Snow, for which such thematic surveys can't quite account.

The Qatsi Trilogy [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

KOYAANISQATSI (1983)
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
directed by Godfrey Reggio

POWAQQATSI (1988)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
directed by Godfrey Reggio

NAQOYQATSI (2002)
½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
written and directed by Godfrey Reggio

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by Bryant Frazer There's nothing quite like Koyaanisqatsi. Some six or seven years in the making, the mid-1980s arthouse favourite was a genuine screen spectacle that gave audiences a taste of the avant-garde and elevated Philip Glass to the status of popular musician. It's the 1970s brainchild of Godfrey Reggio, a progressive activist and community organizer who lived in New Mexico and took a dim view of industrialization in general and the information revolution in particular. Accordingly, it exalts the natural landscape, recoils from the computer-chip gridwork of the modern city, and wallows piteously in the human condition.

Frankenweenie (2012) - Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by John August, based on a screenplay by Lenny Ripps
directed by Tim Burton

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by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Back in the early-Eighties, Tim Burton was part of the conveyor belt at the Walt Disney Company, cranking out artwork for films like The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron. But drawing cuddly animals proved as bad a fit for Burton as it did for R. Crumb, and the studio eventually allowed him to separate from the pack, giving him a chance to hone his voice that was kind of unprecedented. Under the Disney umbrella, Burton produced two black-and-white shorts: the animated Vincent, a sweet and Seussian ode to his idol, Vincent Price (who narrated); and the live-action Frankenweenie, about a boy who uses mad science to bring his departed canine back to life. The latter scandalized Disney (too "scary," plus dead dogs and black-and-white have got to be roughly equivalent anathema to kiddie fare), and plans were shelved to attach the film to prints of Pinocchio in 1984. Three decades later, Disney confidently bankrolled a feature-length remake of Frankenweenie, stop-motion animated this time but still in black-and-white, and still with an undead dog at the crux of the narrative. What changed in the interim?

A Man and a Woman: Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva - TIFF Cinematheque Retrospective

by Angelo Muredda When Michael Haneke's Amour met its first wave of hosannas at Cannes, the press seemed eerily unanimous with respect to all but the film's place within the German-Austrian taskmaster's oeuvre. Although some were quick to call it the warmest of his many portraits of couples in crisis (it would be hard not to be), others saw it as of a piece with his austere horror films about complacent bourgeois hoarders reduced to ashes by external invaders--in this case, not the home intruders of Funny Games or Time of the Wolf (though there is a break-in, for those keeping score), but the more insidious threat of age-related illnesses. The truth is probably somewhere between those poles. It's no surprise that the key players in this two-hander are named, as they always seem to be in Haneke's pictures, Anne and Georges Laurent--sturdy middle-class monikers for tasteful piano teachers. But it's difficult to wholly ascribe the universal quality we often associate with Haneke's Laurents to the familiar, if weathered, faces of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, who--far more than the chameleonic Juliette Binoche or Isabelle Huppert, other Haneke collaborators--recall a bygone era of French cinema.

Gangster Squad (2013)

*/****
starring Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn
screenplay by Will Beall
directed by Ruben Fleischer

by Angelo Muredda In his recent chat with David Poland, Ruben Fleischer bristled at the suggestion that Gangster Squad shares any DNA with Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. That's the sort of aesthetic family resemblance a lightweight like Fleischer ought to milk for all it's worth, but hear him out: Sean Penn's enterprising mob boss Mickey Cohen, he insists, isn't a cartoon bruiser in the tradition of Al Pacino's Big Boy Caprice, but a real guy whose face only looks a little off because it's been molded by other men's fists. He isn't a comic strip-grotesque, then, but a seasoned boxer-turned-kingpin reanimated by a grand old actor and his team of historically-faithful makeup artists. What more could one ask of a Warner Bros. crime movie than such attention to detail? A lot, apparently--especially if the finished product looks more like Elmer Fudd than any retired amateur boxer. Verisimilitude is a nice goal, but it doesn't suit Gangster Squad, at once a lumbering history lesson and a squib of a gangster picture--a zit on the ass of Mulholland Falls, Lee Tamahori's somehow more accomplished stab at L.A. noir.

Annual Professional Commentary on the Oscar Nominations (2013 edition)

by Bill Chambers

Best Motion Picture of the Year

Amour (2012): To Be Determined = sure

Argo (2012): Grant Heslov, Ben Affleck, George Clooney = shrug

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012): Dan Janvey, Josh Penn, Michael Gottwald = barf

Django Unchained (2012): Stacey Sher, Reginald Hudlin, Pilar Savone = still haven't @!$#ing seen it

Les Misérables (2012): Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Debra Hayward, Cameron Mackintosh = barf

Life of Pi (2012): Gil Netter, Ang Lee, David Womark = hmmm

Lincoln (2012): Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy = you knew this was coming

Silver Linings Playbook (2012): Donna Gigliotti, Bruce Cohen, Jonathan Gordon = yawn

Zero Dark Thirty (2012): Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow, Megan Ellison = thumbs-up emoticon

Cosmopolis (2012) - Blu-ray Disc

****/****Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by David Cronenberg, based on the novel by Don DeLillo
directed by David Cronenberg

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by Walter Chaw David Cronenberg's North by Northwest, his adaptation of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis functions as a difficult, arctic précis of the Canadian filmmaker's career-long obsession with the insectile nature of, and indulgence in, hunger. Cronenberg's proclivity for parasites, after all, is essentially the admiration of creatures defined by their hunger. His latest is Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a voracious sexual predator who lives in the dark cocoon of his stretch limo as it inches its way across Midtown to a barbershop that would be more at home in the bucolic small town of A History of Violence than in the metal canyons of Manhattan. Its existence, like a little diner along the way, like a bookshop with paper- and leather-lined walls, is further evidence of infestation--pockets of disease on the glistening skin and sterile surfaces of industry. No wonder the filthy rabble protesting in Gotham's streets have as their unifying symbol the rats that are the true inheritors of man's work. Cronenberg recalls his own Crash in these ideas--and not just in his desire to adapt literary properties considered unadaptable. He recalls his Naked Lunch in the idea that language is a neurological contagion, and he recalls most of all both his Videodrome (in his identification of screens with every intercourse) and his eXistenZ (in the erasure of any meaningful line between our interiors and exteriors). Cosmopolis is dense and multifarious--the absolute pinnacle of pretentious, too, in its desire to explain not only its creator, but all of the world at this moment in time in our age of missing information.

Notorious (1946) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern
screenplay by Ben Hecht
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

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by Walter Chaw Other than Psycho, the most examined, most carefully raked-through picture in Hitchcock's filmography might be the cold, meticulous, perfect Notorious. It serves as a model for technique, offered as the pinnacle of Hitchcock's early American period and used as proof by some that Hitch was a misogynist. The Dark Side of Genius author Donald Spoto wrote a fitfully interesting (if ultimately useless) article about how the first half of the film is a mirror image of the second--rising to a midpoint before diminishing at the end to the same composition as the first shot. (I'd argue that you could say the same for Shadow of a Doubt--particularly during the movie's character-/setting- establishing sequences.) Stories of how the FBI began a file on Hitch because of his prescient use of uranium as his MacGuffin in Notorious are among the most beloved Hitch arcana, and critics who favour Lacan as the prism through which to analyze the Master of Suspense have found in the picture compelling demonstrations of spectatorship and gender construction. For Freudians, it has its Oedipal elements, its Madonna/Whore complexities--it's a very fine historical relic, one of maybe only two of the director's films (the other being Shadow of a Doubt) that's ever entered into a noir conversation. And at the end--among those in the know, at least--it's the better version, in every way that matters, of Casablanca. Robin Wood writes a brilliant piece on it in his second Hitchcock book, taking on previous brilliant takes by Laura Mulvey, Raymond Bellour, and Michael Renov. I probably like Raymond Durgnat's quick-hit the best, however, for his pegging of the picture's iciness and of Hitch at this moment as midway between idealistic and cynical (though I'd go farther and say he's pretty much all the way cynical by now). Notorious is possibly, neck-and-neck with Vertigo, the best film Hitchcock ever made, though it's seldom identified--unless you're Francois Truffaut--as anyone's favourite (leave that for the bitterest (North by Northwest), the most nihilistic (Psycho), the least sick (Rear Window)), and when the dust settles, the prospect of writing about it is almost as intimidating as pretending that there's anything new to say about it. But here goes.

The Apartment (1960) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

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by Walter Chaw The older I get, the better I understand Billy Wilder. And the better I understand Billy Wilder, his weariness and acerbic sense of humour, the more I feel comfortable saying, with that complicated mix of affection and fair warning that I think indicates his work as well, that his movies are assholes and mean it. Billy Wilder, the ten-cents-a-dance Austrian gigolo, the roommate of Peter Lorre who learned English by listening to Dodgers games on the radio, the admirer of Ernst Lubistch. The guy who demanded he be allowed to direct his own screenplays and so made a legendary hyphenate debut with Double Indemnity. The writing partner of both Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond, the man who made whores of Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe and Shirley MacLaine, because nothing could ever be as simple, as innocent, as it appeared at first glance. The guy who lost family in Nazi concentration camps, who came up with the best closing line in movie history, which was "nobody's perfect." Maybe the last line of The Apartment--"Shut up and deal"--is a close second. Narrative context tells us the line refers to a card game; the Wilder context suggests a certain way of looking at the world: coping, acceptance, fatalism. Would you believe The Apartment is actually one of Wilder's optimistic films? Optimistic because the way it views the world is through a scrim of absolute cynicism--and despite it, despite all the towers falling down, there's the possibility of love, sweet and simple, between Ms. Kubelik and Mr. Baxter.

Film Freak Central's Top 10 of 2012

by Walter Chaw I wish To the Wonder had been released this year--Take Shelter, too. The one because I love Terrence Malick and I'm excited that he's working so much, the other because I fear that Take Shelter is the last time Michael Shannon will anchor a picture without being instantly Christopher Walken-ized. It's his The Dead Zone, and he's amazing in a movie that takes big risks and pays off in a meaningful way; if he were to star in it now, I think it would be mistaken for camp. I also wish I'd seen Margaret in time for my 2011 list. Alas, local publicity has never been terribly interested in my participation. Nevertheless, thanks mostly to Netflix and FYC screeners, I saw a great many great films this year.