Film Freak Central

The Creeping Garden (2014) [Limited Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
directed by Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharp

by Sydney Wegner Earth is so full of tiny things, an infinite variety of life. You might step on fifty species you've never heard of on your walk to work, and most of us will spend our lives in ignorance of these obscure wonders. But for every known organism, one can safely assume there is a fan club somewhere devoted to studying it. The Creeping Garden wants to share that devotion with the world while attempting to answer the all-important question: Who are these fanatics, and why do they care? Says co-director Tim Grabham on the Blu-ray's commentary track, "What is a slime mould?...It depends on who you are and what you're looking for," an offhand musing that could have been the film's tagline. Above all, this is a documentary about looking.

American Sniper (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

***/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Kyle Gallner, Luke Grimes
screenplay by Jason Hall, based on the book by Chris Kyle
directed by Clint Eastwood

WATCH IN iTUNES

by Angelo Muredda After delivering the first funereal jukebox musical in Jersey Boys just last summer, Clint Eastwood returns to better-fitting material with American Sniper, his most muscular and dramatically charged work in years, for whatever that's worth. The common thinking about Eastwood these days--at least, outside the critical circle that deems his every tasteful composition and mild camera movement a classical masterstroke--is that his internal compass for choosing projects has been off for a while, making him susceptible to the bad taste of undistinguished screenwriters. What's interesting about American Sniper, which works from a dicey script by Jason Hall that's always in danger of becoming either a rote action thriller meted out in shootouts or a rote antiwar melodrama about how veterans never quite make it back home, is how obstinately it resists this narrative. Contrary to the vision of Eastwood as an efficient director prone to gliding on autopilot, American Sniper shows him forging something tough and difficult to grasp out of what might have been on-the-nose material.

Saint Laurent (2014)

***/****
starring Gaspard Ulliel, Jérémie Renier, Louis Garrel, Helmut Berger
screenplay by Bertrand Bonello and Thomas Bidegain
directed by Bertrand Bonello

by Angelo Muredda Bertrand Bonello enters the postmodern biopic sweepstakes with Saint Laurent, no less than the third chronicle of the titular French designer and haute couture icon in as many years. With regrets to Pierre Thoretton's understated but chilly L'amour fou, which comes at its subject through the reminiscences of his lifelong professional and personal partner Pierre Berge, Bonello's project is almost certainly the most fetching (thanks in no small part to costume designer Anais Romand), marrying a contemporary fixation on the limits of biographical storytelling with the sort of impressionist brushstrokes the Matisse devotee might have appreciated. In the wake of filmmakers as disparate as Todd Haynes and Abel Ferrara self-consciously toying with the limits of the biopic form, ostensibly killing dynamic subjects by pinning them to the wall, Saint Laurent isn't as radical a work of genre subversion as some of its adherents claim, but it sure as hell is beautiful, channelling its subject's hedonist spirit and delicate aesthetic sensibility in roughly equal measure.

Inherent Vice (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston
screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon
directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Walter Chaw Paul Thomas Anderson's maybe-second, arguably third Thomas Pynchon adaptation after There Will Be Blood and The Master, Inherent Vice is the first official one, as well as the truest. It provides a Rosetta stone for Anderson's career to this point, Pynchon's work serving as a template for an artist crossing genres while holding true to a certain standard of intellectual rigor, a certain florid prosody, a specific interest in telling true the story of whatever the times may be. Inherent Vice also offers a framework for Anderson's intimidating film craft, his particular way of marrying image with sound, and the extraordinary shots--unbroken literally or rhythmically--that have made his movies as much pop poetry and music as narrative. Consider the reunion sequence in Punch-Drunk Love that finds Shelley Duvall singing Harry Nilsson on the soundtrack while Anderson rocks the camera like a baby in a cradle, or the wordless opening sequence of There Will Be Blood, with Jonny Greenwood's terrifying, Kubrick-ian Dawn of Man overture rattling the soundscape. Or the Gravity's Rainbow opening of The Master as our hero, on a boat, sways in another swaddle far above his madding crowd. Remarkable stuff. Cinema as high art, doing things that only cinema can do.

Game of Thrones: The Complete Fourth Season (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

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Image A Sound A Extras A-
"Two Swords," "The Lion and the Rose," "Breaker of Chains," "Oathkeeper," "First of His Name," "The Laws of Gods and Men," "Mockingbird," "The Mountain and the Viper," "The Watchers on the Wall," "The Children"

by Jefferson Robbins I suspect "Game of Thrones" has started to find its high-fantasy elements as tedious as I have. In the show's fourth season, the trio of dragons reared by Danaerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke)--the only thing that makes her a ruler, aside from her family name--is far more felt than seen, and momentarily more a curse than an asset. Brandon Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) and his young cronies have to fight off a frozen-lake's worth of Ray Harryhausen skeletons, a homage so derivative it adds up to me snorting my beer out of my nose. An epic assault on the epic-sized Wall includes an epic total of two giants. The fantasy convention of magic swords with hoity-toity names comes in for ridicule, too, when brutal asshole King Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) demands a title for his new enchanted blade and some wags in the audience yell back "Stormbringer!" and "Terminus!" Woman warrior Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie), the most gullible when it comes to matters of knightly virtue, gets a nifty pigsticker, names it "Oathkeeper," then spends her only battle of the season beating her adversary's face in with a rock. Magic, in this adaptation of contemporary fantasy's most successful novel series, is bogged down in human muck and mire.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

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*/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo Del Toro, based on the book by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Walter Chaw During the first ten minutes of the first day of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (hereafter Hobbit 3), Smaug dies. I don't intend this to be a spoiler, because, you know, the book's been around for almost as long as this movie runs, and Rankin & Bass already adapted it (somehow squeezing Tolkien's slim volume into one 77-minute animated flick)--but if you don't read and live under a rock: the dragon dies. This acts as prologue. A better prologue would recap what the hell happened in the first two Hobbits; I appear to have scrubbed them completely from the ol' memory bank in a heroic act of self-defense. This prologue, by the way, is the key moment in the book, meaning that although the CGI fireworks never let up, the rest of Hobbit 3 is the decline in action to the conclusion.

Dumb and Dumber To (2014) + Horrible Bosses 2 (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

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DUMB AND DUMBER TO
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jim Carrey, Jeff Daniels, Rob Riggle, Laurie Holden
screenplay by Sean Anders & John Morris and Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly & Bennett Yellin & Mike Cerrone
directed by Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly

HORRIBLE BOSSES 2
**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Aniston
screenplay by Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Sean Anders

WATCH DUMB AND DUMBER TO IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

WATCH HORRIBLE BOSSES 2 IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Bill Chambers The Farrelly Brothers' Dumb and Dumber To opens with Jim Carrey's Lloyd Christmas emerging from twenty years of catatonia. As the trailers were eager to give away, he's just been playing an elaborate hoax on best friend Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels), but still: point taken. To put things in perspective, more time elapsed between Dumb and Dumber and its sequel than did between The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III, and the popular form--along with the popular taste in--movie comedy has changed significantly in the interim. This is the Rip Van Winkle of franchises, squarely un-hip no matter how evergreen is its scatological humour; the filmmakers, ultimately to their credit, value tonal continuity with Dumb & Dumber over blending in. With a plot revolving around a McGuffin that felt rickety when the first one did it in 1994, the picture embraces the quaint charms of the old school to ironically novel effect.

Penny Dreadful: The Complete First Season (2014) - Blu-ray Disc

Image A Sound A Extras C
"Night Work," "Séance," "Resurrection," "Demimonde," "Closer Than Sisters," "What Death Can Join Together," "Possession," "Grand Guignol"

WATCH THE SHOW IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Bryant Frazer One of the hallmarks of contemporary remix culture is derivative artistic ventures that seek shortcuts to the id, making a playful, self-aware succotash of genre tropes in lieu of inventing new cosmologies. Cleverly done, the approach can yield brainy ruminations on form and content along the lines of Alan Moore's Watchmen or alternate-universe joyrides like Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds. When the endeavour is shabby and commercial, executed with no love, you end up with smug mediocrities like The Cabin in the Woods or smarmy trash like Dracula Untold. (Nobody--not George Lucas, not Ridley Scott--seems to grok less about what made the original properties they're trying to exploit great in the first place than the fools charged with revitalizing the monster franchises at Universal.) Somewhere in the middle, you get a project like "Penny Dreadful", a monster mash-up set in late-Victorian London that earns no originality points for series creator John Logan, best known for his screenwriting credits on Hugo, Skyfall, and Rango. Named after the pulpy serial publications that sold in old London for a penny each, his show is even more specifically derivative of latter-day pastiches like Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Kim Newman's Anno Dracula than it is of their own 19^th-century sources. Still, at its best, his knock-off has an engaging flamboyance that makes it, if not must-see TV, at least agreeable popcorn drama.

Looking: The Complete First Season (2014) - Blu-ray + Digital HD

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Image A Sound A Extras C
"Looking for Now," "Looking for Uncut," "Looking at Your Browser History," "Looking for $220/Hour," "Looking for the Future," "Looking in the Mirror," "Looking for a Plus-One," "Looking Glass"

by Jefferson Robbins Not fair to call it a gay "Girls", in part because it dodges the character grotesques of that show in favour of...a less provocative mix of personality types, shall we say. That's a polite way of calling Michael Lannan's HBO dramedy "Looking" boring by comparison--and finally, prettily, boring on its own merits, however better-lensed and more grounded in real personal motivations it might be than Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow's zeitgeister. Handsome gay men abroad in San Francisco's fully actuated sexual culture is a fine launchpad; Lannan and collaborator Andrew Haigh treat their core trio of characters with respect and care; and the cast is all-pro, managing the mini-crises thrown their way as if they actually matter. But while there's no there there in either "Looking" or "Girls", at least the latter goes big and madcap enough to tempt continued viewing; it's not afraid to entertain, or to anger. The curtainfall on "Looking"'s first season incites little hunger for the second.

A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

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***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens, David Harbour, Boyd Holbrook
screenplay by Scott Frank, based on the novel by Lawrence Block
directed by Scott Frank

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Bryant Frazer First, let's be clear about what kind of movie A Walk Among the Tombstones is. The film's signature image is that of a blonde woman, nude or nearly nude, atop a white bed. A man caresses her slowly, runs his fingers through her hair, and nuzzles her face. If we watch closely, we eventually notice that she cringes at his touch. As new camera angles afford us a better look at the tableau, we notice the bed is covered in plastic. Two men are watching the woman. And her mouth is taped closed. The newly-disturbing scene is photographed with a luxe aesthetic--soft light, lush bokeh, off-axis shot compositions--that suggests a commercial for pharmaceuticals, if not early-'90s Playboy Channel programming. The intended irony is clear enough, but the coyness makes the scene ugly. After a close-up on the woman's dirty feet, the camera cuts to a view of her face, looking directly into the camera, as her body is being pushed at, rhythmically, from just outside the frame. The question, then, is whether she's being raped, dismembered, or eviscerated.

The Boxtrolls (2014) - Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

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***/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Irena Brignull, Adam Pava, based on the book Here Be Monsters by Alan Snow
directed by Graham Annable & Anthony Stacchi

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Walter Chaw Stop-motion animation studio Laika (Coraline, ParaNorman) continues its winning streak with the perverse, lovingly-detailed The Boxtrolls, which nails the company's developing penchant for inserting a sting of relevance on the trailing end of assorted Nick Park-ian silliness. It's basically the usual kid-flick moral of not judging lovable books by their horrible, green, warty covers, but there's also a little bit about the danger of starting wars based on black pretense for unsavoury purposes. Likewise buried in the puns and gross-out gags are a class melodrama, a deep criticism of the ruling class, and a fairly disturbing aside about anti-intellectualism and the misuse of technology. It's Schindler's List in the sense that even that film was Spielberg's own remake of E.T., substituting the industrious, wizened space goblin for Ben Kingsley; The Boxtrolls isn't as effective a Holocaust/Łódź ghetto allegory as the hotel-clearing in Babe: Pig in the City, but no question the aim of its villains is ultimately genocide.

Lucy (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

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*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C
starring Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked, Choi Min-Sik
written and directed by Luc Besson

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Walter Chaw I recall Luc Besson confessing that his The Fifth Element was based on an idea he'd had as a child; I'm going to wager the same is true of his dreadful Lucy. It's a pre-pubescent boy's fantasy of cool: a mash of silly pop-science buoying a beautiful woman's mutation from impossible party girl into deity through the agency of stem-cell-related drug abuse. The good news is that South Korean superstar Choi Min-Sik (Oldboy) gets a mainstream American debut in a juicy role that nonetheless feels like a wasted opportunity (see: Beat Takeshi in Johnny Mnemonic). The bad news is Lucy is prurient pap that pup-critics will declare proof of "vulgar auteurism," no matter the redundancy and ignorance of the term itself. Perhaps fitting, then, that the only defense of a movie this obnoxious and wilfully dumb is a term and movement founded on the same principles. I've defended Besson in the past--I'm an unapologetic admirer of Leon/The Professional and The Messenger (and Danny the Dog, which he produced, is a peerless statement on the relationship between Western and Asian action stars). But Lucy is reductive, sub-La femme Nikita effluvia that takes a premise niftily played-with in Ted Chiang's beyond-brilliant 1991 short story "Understand" and grinds it into a grey paste.

American Sniper (2014)

***/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Kyle Gallner, Luke Grimes
screenplay by Jason Hall, based on the book by Chris Kyle
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda After delivering the first funereal jukebox musical in Jersey Boys just last summer, Clint Eastwood returns to better-fitting material with American Sniper, his most muscular and dramatically charged work in years, for whatever that's worth. The common thinking about Eastwood these days--at least, outside the critical circle that deems his every tasteful composition and mild camera movement a classical masterstroke--is that his internal compass for choosing projects has been off for a while, making him susceptible to the bad taste of undistinguished screenwriters. What's interesting about American Sniper, which works from a dicey script by Jason Hall that's always in danger of becoming either a rote action thriller meted out in shootouts or a rote antiwar melodrama about how veterans never quite make it back home, is how obstinately it resists this narrative. Contrary to the vision of Eastwood as an efficient director prone to gliding on autopilot, American Sniper shows him forging something tough and difficult to grasp out of what might have been on-the-nose material.

Annabelle (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

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½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Tony Amendola, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Gary Dauberman
directed by John R. Leonetti

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Some kind of as-yet-unclassified spin-off/rip-off hybrid, Annabelle is a prequel to The Conjuring's prologue that recycles said prologue for the purpose of reacquainting viewers with its title character, even though Annabelle is in fact an origin story. The Conjuring, of course, purports to be based on the actual exploits of the paranormal researchers fictionalized in Poltergeist, which was shot by Matthew F. Leonetti, brother of The Conjuring's DP John R. Leonetti, who moves into the director's chair with Annabelle, a movie that arguably owes less to The Conjuring (despite labouring to evoke it) than to the malicious clown doll from Poltergeist. That low-frequency thrum you sometimes hear on its soundtrack is Hollywood getting ready to fold in on itself.

FFC's Best of '14

by Walter Chaw Two things in 2014. Well, one in 2013 and one in 2014. The first was the Telluride Film Festival, which occurs on Labour Day Weekend and which I attended for the first time in a decade in 2013. The second was a conversation I had with a friend over Skype earlier this year, around the time of my 41^st birthday. They led me, those two things, to change my life over from one of quiet desperation to one of perpetual stimulation and challenge. I left a major corporation and a job that provided security and some measure of stability to become general manager of the Alamo Drafthouse in my home state of Colorado. As someone who tends towards depression, it's hardly hyperbole to say that it was a decision that probably saved my life.

Looney Tuesdays: "Slick Hare" (1947)

**/****
directed by I. Freleng

by Bill Chambers Old Hollywood may possess a timeless quality that prevents Slick Hare and others like it (Hollywood Steps Out, Hollywood Daffy, even 8 Ball Bunny) from becoming an instant relic à la the Michael Jordan-fronted Space Jam, but celebrity cameos in animation nonetheless have a habit of accelerating the ripening process. Gags like Ray Milland paying a tab with a typewriter--and getting change in the form of mini-typewriters--straddle the line between obsolescence and posterity, today only earning laughs among the movie-minded while also presenting a valuable snapshot of the pop-cultural consciousness circa 1947. Thing is, Carl Stalling's music, a smorgasbord of timely references, tends to already carbon-date these cartoons in an arguably wittier, more whimsical way than does straight-up parody. Slick Hare finds Dave Barry reprising his Humphrey Bogart impersonation from Bacall to Arms as Bogie, here gangsterish in a way that actually would've seemed a little archaic by this point, gives "Mocrumbo" waiter Elmer Fudd twenty minutes to prepare fried rabbit, and...you know the drill. Best joke? Maybe Leopold Stokowski conducting the house band--they really had a hard-on for Fantasia over at Termite Terrace. Bugs Bunny disguising himself as Groucho Marx, on the other hand, might be putting too fine a point on it. One of the more colour-saturated Looney Tunes, in any event. Alternate Audio (Blu-ray/DVD): Michael Barrier tells us the filthy kitchen seen in Slick Hare was, eek!, modelled on that of the real Mocambo, a West Hollywood nightclub that was popular among the glitterati. Perhaps its health-code violations aren't surprising, since the place lined the walls with live caged birds! Available on: Looney Tunes: Platinum Collection, Volume Three [Blu-ray]|Looney Tunes: Golden Collection, Volume Two (Running Time: 7:45)

Unbroken (2014)

*/****
starring Jack O'Connell, Domhnall Gleeson, Miyavi, Garrett Hedlund
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson
directed by Angelina Jolie

by Walter Chaw I genuinely believe that Angelina Jolie means well. She's like the distaff Sean Penn. Unlike Sean Penn, she probably shouldn't direct more movies. Jolie does her research by going to the places she makes movies about. She cares. She adopts children from those places. She takes embarrassing publicity photos with her subjects, sometimes, that indicate not malicious self-promotion, but rather an unaffected, Costner-esque surprise and wonder. She's growing in her morality before our very eyes, and it's great, but her second time up to the plate, Unbroken, is naive and simpering. The only thing remotely interesting about it is that its subject, Olympic athlete and WWII POW Louis Zamperini (Jack O'Connell), after getting tortured by the Japanese for a while, decided post-war to embrace Billy Graham and forgive his torturers. That bit, the interesting bit, is left to a few lengthy end-title cards. It's sort of like reading the Old Testament and calling it good and, um, wanting to post the Ten Commandments in schools instead of the Sermon on the Mount. Never mind.

The Gambler (2014)

**/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Jessica Lange
screenplay by William Monahan, based on the screenplay by James Toback
directed by Rupert Wyatt

by Angelo Muredda "The only way out is all in," teases the dishonest poster for The Gambler, a safe adaptation of Karel Reisz and James Toback's 1974 original that would surely bore its own hero. It's hard to say who's most at fault for turning Toback's semi-autobiographical moral tale of a failed author turned debt-ridden professor into such easygoing pap--the antithesis of all-in. The contenders run from Toback's own smug paean to male irascibility in the original to Rupert Wyatt's slick commercial style, as forgettable as it is watchable. But it's tempting to put all your money on William Monahan. Oscar-certified out of the gate for The Departed's heavy philosophical nothings and largely unheralded since (except by Ridley Scott apologists), Monahan has apparently had some time to think about what it means for a serious man with serious thoughts to not quite live up to his potential. The Gambler becomes the unwitting dumping ground for all he's learned, a redemptive character study of a shitty guy who accepts congratulations for every last baby step he takes into adulthood.

Into the Woods (2014)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Johnny Depp
screenplay by James Lapine, based on the musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine
directed by Rob Marshall

by Walter Chaw Into the Woods looks exactly like what a legendary Sondheim production would look like were it adapted by that idiot who made Memoirs of a Geisha into a Vegas drag space-opera dragged through a scrim of horrific Occidental Orientalism. (Well, at least to the extent that Memoirs wasn't that already.) It's gaudy in every pejorative connotation of the word, packed to the rafters with distracting, stupid, show-offy clutter of the sort that people accumulate when they fear they don't have substance without it. I rather liked Marshall's adaptation of Chicago, strangely enough, which speaks more to the un-fuck-up-ability of Kander, Ebb, and Fosse than it does to any latent modesty in director Marshall. Call it beginner's luck, perhaps, of the kind that has long since dissolved. Marshall has already exceeded all expectations for bloated suck by somehow making the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise more difficult to endure than it had been by the third film. I'd challenge that you could swap Into the Woods out for a print of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and no one would even frickin' notice. It's this year's Les Misérables.

The Vanishing (1988) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

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Spoorloos
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege, Gwen Eckhaus
screenplay by Tim Krabbé and George Sluizer, based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé
directed by George Sluizer

by Bryant Frazer What scares you the most? If you chew on that question for a while, then imagine a narrative that gets you to that terrible place, your story might look a little like the one told by The Vanishing (Spoorloos). Completed in 1988, this downbeat thriller didn't reach the U.S. until a couple of years later, when it coincidentally landed in New York within weeks of The Silence of the Lambs. The Vanishing isn't, strictly speaking, a serial-killer movie like Silence, though it shares that film's deep interest in the psychopathology of its villain. Like a good (and by "good," I mean "lurid") true-crime book, its interest is similarly piqued by the painful, quotidian details of an abhorrent crime.

Looney Tuesdays: "Little Red Riding Rabbit" (1944)

****/****
directed by I. Freleng

by Bill Chambers The Shrek movies dream of being this renegade. Little Red Riding Hood (a brilliant Bea Benaderet, using a halting squeal that suggests the '40s equivalent of uptalk) is on her way to Grandma's house with a picnic lunch: Bugs Bunny. The Big Bad Wolf gets there first, of course, though he has to kick other wolves out of Grandma's bed. (Where's Grandma? "Working [the] swing shift at Lockheed." Wartime audiences must've howled, pardon the pun.) When Red arrives, the Wolf can't hustle her out fast enough in his desire to eat Bugs, and both he and Bugs grow impatient with formal niceties as Red keeps interrupting the ensuing farce to try to fulfill her outmoded narrative function. Introduced belting out Glenn Miller's "Five O'Clock Whistle," this Red is a bobby-soxer by definition, and the combination of her cute figure and abject brattiness create a seductive-repulsive push-pull that is damn near Lolita-esque--honouring, in a roundabout way, the erotic component that is essential to any retelling of the original fairy tale. Red, for what it's worth, meets a less grisly yet somehow more subversive end here than she does at the hand of Charles Perrault; punchlines or "release gags," as they're called, weren't necessarily director Friz Freleng's forte, but this one's ingeniously grim and worthy of Tex Avery, whose style is emulated throughout. Unfortunately the Blu-ray and DVD releases offer no isolated audio for Little Red Riding Rabbit: As animation curator Andrew Farago posits in The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes Cartoons, "what makes this cartoon stand head and shoulders above the 300-plus others Freleng directed is the music." Available on: Looney Tunes: Platinum Collection, Volume Three [Blu-ray]|Looney Tunes: Golden Collection, Volume Two (Running Time: 7:06)

Vengeance is Mine (1979) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

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***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Ken Ogata, Mayumi Ogawa, Mitsuko Baisho, Frankie Sakai
screenplay by Masaru Baba, based on the novel by Ryuzo Saki
directed by Shohei Imamura

by Walter Chaw It would be tempting to say that nature is appalled by all the terrible things Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) does. Just after Enokizu hammers an old man to death in a garden and takes his stuff, Nature erupts in a windstorm--furious witness, it seems: a tempest as analogy for the rough gales driving the mysterious tides of this murderer's soul. Yet Shohei Imamura has something else entirely on his mind. Vengeance is Mine is about the fallacy of a moral universe. It's not that it believes there's no reason for atrocity; rather, it believes there's no definition for atrocity. Imamura is the spiritual brother of guys like Werner Herzog and Terrence Malick. The questions he asks aren't about ethics and morality, they're about all the ways that men lie to themselves about being bound by ethics and morality, only to transgress those boundaries they create, whether they be bans on religion, law, or philosophy. They're not evil. They can't help it. No one can.

"Santa vs. the Puppies vs. Monster Part Two"

 

by Bill Chambers Another self-serving post to notify that the long-delayed sequel to "The Monster Show"'s 2012 Christmas episode, animated by yours truly, finally went live in glorious HD earlier this week. Truth be told I came close to crediting myself as Alan Smithee on this one, but we persevered through so many false starts it'd be perverse to hide (from) it. FYI, it'd probably be even harder to follow this episode without seeing the original, so I've included links to both. Get it before cyber terrorists threaten us to pull it!

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

*/****
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo Del Toro, based on the book by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

by Walter Chaw During the first ten minutes of the first day of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (hereafter Hobbit 3), Smaug dies. I don't intend this to be a spoiler, because, you know, the book's been around for almost as long as this movie runs, and Rankin & Bass already adapted it (somehow squeezing Tolkien's slim volume into one 77-minute animated flick)--but if you don't read and live under a rock: the dragon dies. This acts as prologue. A better prologue would recap what the hell happened in the first two Hobbits; I appear to have scrubbed them completely from the ol' memory bank in a heroic act of self-defense. This prologue, by the way, is the key moment in the book, meaning that although the CGI fireworks never let up, the rest of Hobbit 3 is the decline in action to the conclusion.

Looney Tuesdays: "Gorilla My Dreams" (1948)

**½/****
directed by Robert McKimson

by Bill Chambers Bugs Bunny floats in a barrel to the ape colony of Bingzi-Bangzi, where Mrs. Gorilla, in the throes of baby envy, mistakes him for a delivery from the stork. A sympathetic Bugs goes along with it, but her husband Gruesome--an obvious relative of Bunny Hugged's The Crusher--is vexed by the impostor, and opens up a can of whup-ass on "Junior." Although Bugs's pantomime of a gorilla brings down the house (Robert McKimson's paunchier Bugs really lends itself to the gag), ultimately the central conflict is too esoteric to sustain a 7-minute cartoon, as evidenced by a non-ending that has Gruesome simply wearing himself out. Also, Mrs. Gorilla's emotional fragility is almost unbearably poignant and palpable; sometimes the folks at Termite Terrace didn't know their own strength. Loosely remade eleven years later under Friz Freleng's direction as the considerably less charming and more literalminded The Apes of Wrath--a spoof title that appears on a book cover in Gorilla My Dreams (along with "Our Vines Have Tender Apes") in a tableau of an ape family sitting together reading that bespeaks postwar ideals. Alternate Audio (Blu-ray/DVD): Jerry Beck, co-author of the indispensable Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons, sheds light on the pop-culture references destined to sail over the heads of young viewers and takes inventory of McKimson's stylistic hallmarks. Available on: Looney Tunes: Platinum Collection, Volume Three [Blu-ray]|Looney Tunes: Golden Collection, Volume Two (Running Time: 7:25)

Inherent Vice (2014)

****/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston
screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon
directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw Paul Thomas Anderson's maybe-second, arguably third Thomas Pynchon adaptation after There Will Be Blood and The Master, Inherent Vice is the first official one, as well as the truest. It provides a Rosetta stone for Anderson's career to this point, Pynchon's work serving as a template for an artist crossing genres while holding true to a certain standard of intellectual rigor, a certain florid prosody, a specific interest in telling true the story of whatever the times may be. Inherent Vice also offers a framework for Anderson's intimidating film craft, his particular way of marrying image with sound, and the extraordinary shots--unbroken literally or rhythmically--that have made his movies as much pop poetry and music as narrative. Consider the reunion sequence in Punch-Drunk Love that finds Shelley Duvall singing Harry Nilsson on the soundtrack while Anderson rocks the camera like a baby in a cradle, or the wordless opening sequence of There Will Be Blood, with Jonny Greenwood's terrifying, Kubrick-ian Dawn of Man overture rattling the soundscape. Or the Gravity's Rainbow opening of The Master as our hero, on a boat, sways in another swaddle far above his madding crowd. Remarkable stuff. Cinema as high art, doing things that only cinema can do.

In Case You Missed 'Em (12/11/14)

Going wide this week are Wild and Top Five, two festival favourites Walter and I, respectively, covered last fall.

F for Fake (1973) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

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***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Orson Welles, Oja Kodar, Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving
written and directed by Orson Welles

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Bryant Frazer In 1971, Pauline Kael did her best to kill Orson Welles. In "Raising Kane," an essay originally published in THE NEW YORKER and later used as a lengthy introduction to the published screenplay, she argued that Welles had unfairly taken authorial credit for a film whose real creative force was Welles's credited co-screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz. Kael's piece was persuasive but hardly comprehensive, cherry-picking evidence in an effort to make a liar of Welles. (In his definitive 1978 book The Making of Citizen Kane, Robert Carringer described Kael's charge that Welles did not contribute to the script as "a flagrant misrepresentation," although he did allow that Welles may have hoped not to credit Mankiewicz.) Making the case against Kane was an opportunity for Kael to escalate her ongoing crusade against the auteur theory; it doesn't seem that she held any personal grudge against Welles, especially given her loving notice for his Chimes at Midnight, made just a few years earlier. But for the aging Welles, by that time a subject of mockery in Hollywood who struggled to finance even the most bargain-basement film projects, the apparently unprovoked attack must have stung. F for Fake is his elegant response: a good-natured but deeply-felt riposte, executed with his considerable showmanship and meant to humble artist and critic alike.

Dolls (1987) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

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***/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras B-
starring Stephen Lee, Guy Rolfe, Hilary Mason, Carrie Lorraine
screenplay by Ed Naha
directed by Stuart Gordon

by Bryant Frazer A cross between "Hansel and Gretel" and The Old Dark House, Dolls is director Stuart Gordon's idea of a family-friendly horror movie. That is, it puts a little girl in peril from square one and admires her serenity and good-heartedness in the face of danger all around. The dark house belongs to the Hartwickes, an adorable elderly couple with an extensive collection of murderously ambulatory dolls. The little girl is 7-year-old Judy Bower (Carrie Lorraine), and the peril comes not from the old folks or their killer figurines but from her lousy parents--a loveless father and stepmother who have brought her on vacation only because joint custody keeps the child-support payments low. Joining the unhappy family at Hartwicke Manor on a dark and stormy night are fellow travellers-in-refuge Ralph (Stephen Lee), an earnest but overgrown man-child, and Isabel (Bunty Bailey, best-known from A-Ha's "Take on Me" music video) and Enid (Cassie Stuart), the shifty rocker-girl hitchhikers he picked up. Naturally, the guests start to disappear one by one. Who will be left at the end of the night?

Tammy (2014) [Extended Cut] - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

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*½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Melissa McCarthy, Susan Sarandon, Allison Janney, Kathy Bates
screenplay by Melissa McCarthy & Ben Falcone
directed by Ben Falcone

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Bill Chambers Though in the vein of the crude, crass characters Melissa McCarthy has given us since her breakout performance in Bridesmaids, McCarthy's Tammy swaggers onto the screen with a presumptuousness for which the actress's young but popular big-screen persona can't fully account. Even more than other SNL spinoff Sims like Joe Dirt or Hot Rod, there's something uncannily familiar about Tammy, and the maddening struggle to contextualize her makes her, ironically, all the more inexplicable. Tammy is about the adventure that spirals out from one very bad day for the title heroine: In quick succession, her car hits a deer, she gets fired, and she catches her husband (Nat Faxon) wining and dining their neighbour (Toni Collette, in perhaps the most thankless role of her career). But Tammy's slovenliness, minimum-wage job, and obvious lack of education--she doesn't know what "pattern" means--contrast sharply with details like the good housekeeping of her home, Faxon's zombie-like unflappability, and the mis-typecasting of Allison Janney in soccer-ready Solondz mode as her mom. A shorthand bit of characterization the filmmakers seem to nurture (by putting Tammy on a jet ski and casting Steve Little) sees the overbearing Tammy as the distaff equivalent to Kenny Powers of "Eastbound and Down"--but Kenny had legitimate talent and success behind him, thus explaining, if not justifying, not only his monstrous ego, but also some of the slack people cut him. Without either that foundational backstory or the luxury of an established cultural identity, Tammy remains a private joke between McCarthy and her co-writer/director/husband, Ben Falcone.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014)

*½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Danny Strong and Peter Craig, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw In this episode of "Katniss Loves Peeta--No, Gale. No, Peeta! No, Gale", Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) spends a lot of time underground, delivering speeches and crying. It's an extended entry in hormonal-teen mood-swing theatre, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (hereafter Mockingjay 1), an allegory not for political corruption and the Orwellian influence of media, but for what it's like to be a teenage girl no one understands or ever could. It's "Are You There God? It's Me, Moreta, Dragonlady of Pern"--a Judy Blume coming-of-age opera exuded out by Anne McCaffrey. It has all the feelings. Mostly feelings of martyrdom, but the noble kind that you choose to defend the honour of one of your boyfriends--the less handsome one, so there's a problem, amiright ladies? It's not about looks, though, as Mockingjay 1 takes a moment to remind when some old guy says they shouldn't put Katniss in makeup because it makes her "look 35," handily identifying exactly the demographic assembled for this film: tweens and everyone else pretending they didn't glance at J-Law's naughty selfies. Feelings of tremendous, overwhelming, Titanic-like levels of love, too, where the only way to really represent how much you love this boy (or that one--no, this one) is by standing on the corpses of your loved ones and a few thousand bystanders. It's that much love. You couldn't understand. Only my diary could understand.

Jersey Boys - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

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*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Christopher Walken
screenplay by Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice
directed by Clint Eastwood

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Angelo Muredda Clint Eastwood has never been the most self-referential filmmaker, preferring shopworn competence to flashy displays of idiosyncrasy. But it's hard to imagine he's not at least slightly gaming his audience throughout Jersey Boys, an otherwise limp tour through the Four Seasons' early discography. What else are we to make of the gag where baby-faced songwriter Bob Gaudio (Chris Klein dead ringer Erich Bergen) catches an image of his director's grizzled mug in "Rawhide" on a hotel TV? While that feels like a pretty straightforward joke on Eastwood's uncanny endurance all the way from "Sherry" (1962) to Jersey Boys the Broadway musical (2005), it's a bit harder to read an equally surreal moment like the dispute between producer and sometime lyricist Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle) and wise-guy guitarist Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) over the band's sound. "I'm hearing it in sky blue," Crewe whines in the middle of a recording session, "and you're giving me brown." On the one hand, it's not like Eastwood to take the piss out of his own work, but on the other, what better analogy for his adaptation process can there be than the conversion of a sky-blue all-American songbook to a shit-brown sung résumé, rendered all in blacks and greys save for the odd splash of salmon and the occasional scrap of tweed?

In Case You Missed 'Em (11/14/14)

Opening in limited release this week, Foxcatcher and Rosewater (sounds like a great cop duo), both of which Walter Chaw covered previously during Telluride.

Draft Day (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

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*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Denis Leary, Chadwick Boseman
screenplay by Rajiv Joseph & Scott Rothman
directed by Ivan Reitman

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Walter Chaw The first Broncos game I remember watching was on the couch with my father. October 16, 1977. I was four. They were playing the Oakland Raiders--hated rivals, I'd come to understand--and featured players from my eternal morning like Craig Morton, Haven Moses (who I had the pleasure of sharing a couple pitchers and a few dozen hot wings with a decade ago), Riley Odoms, Louis Wright, and Otis Armstrong. I have all of their signatures on an old ball, gathering dust on a bookshelf in my office. I have all of their rookie cards in little plastic holders. Since that first game, I've seen every one in its entirety save four, most of them in real time. (I was in the hospital for some reason or other for three of those.) When the Broncos won their first Super Bowl against the Green Bay Packers in 1998, I cried like a baby and worried for hours afterwards that there had been some mistake--that the universe could take it all away.

The Innocents (1961) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

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****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Deborah Kerr, Peter Wyngarde, Megs Jenkins, Michael Redgrave
screenplay by William Archibald and Truman Capote, based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
directed by Jack Clayton

by Walter Chaw Jack Clayton's incomparable tale of sexual repression and a very particular vintage of Victorian, feminine hysteria opens with shadows, wrung hands, and the sound of weeping. The Innocents is of a kind with Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" and Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress": that marriage of high burlesque and menacing metaphysics that is on the one hand dense and open to unravelling, and on the other as smothering and lush as a Raymond Chandler hothouse. By opening in the exact same way as Jacques Tourneur's/Val Lewton's I Walked with a Zombie--a flashback/forward to a non-diegetic scene, a sitting-room interview, a claustrophobic setting laced with musk and frustration and the ghosts of the sins of the father--it announces itself as an expressionistic piece orbiting around a Brontë heroine. Having Truman Capote adapt Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, right in the midst of his In Cold Blood period (two taxonomists of beasts in the jungle of the Id), is an act of genuine inspiration. Their shared illness infects the film.

The Normal Heart (2014) - Blu-ray Disc

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***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, Julia Roberts
written by Larry Kramer, from his play
directed by Ryan Murphy

VIEW IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Bryant Frazer The Normal Heart begins in 1981, as a ferry pulls in to Fire Island Pines, the nexus of social life for well-off gay New Yorkers who prize sunshine and sexual freedom. Stepping off that boat is Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), a writer from New York who seems at once titillated and disturbed by the buff, barely-dressed men suddenly surrounding him. Weeks, it turns out, is a notorious buzzkill. He wrote an infamous novel criticizing promiscuity ("All I said was having so much sex makes finding love impossible," he objects when called on it), and he resists joining the party with his sexually-active friends, instead watching from the sidelines when their dancing gets dirty. Still, he's human, and wanders into the woods in search of more ephemeral--and anonymous--companionship. As he leaves the island, a newspaper headline draws his attention: "Rare Cancer Is Diagnosed in 41 Homosexuals." And so it begins.

Interstellar (2014)

***/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw When my wife was pregnant with my daughter, we thought she would miscarry. We'd been through several miscarriages already; the doctors weren't optimistic. I don't know why we agreed to risk it again, the crippling grief and unrecoverable loss. We told ourselves that if we couldn't carry this last child to term, we'd console ourselves with a long vacation, the two of us. The appointment with the doctor the day we were to learn the timing of our misfortune, he found a heartbeat, and we held our breath for the next seven months, through a difficult pregnancy and birth, until she was here. My daughter turned 11 last week and she's perfect. Her brother is 8, and he's perfect, too. I spent the first several months with my daughter as her primary caregiver; I was teaching and writing and my wife was making our living, and I have a relationship with my daughter unusual for it, I think. I look back and it's not her birth that was miraculous--as miracles go, that one happens a few hundred thousand times a day. No, the miracle is what I suddenly understood about the world now that I was the happy accessory to someone else's happiness and security.

Maleficent (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

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***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Angelina Jolie, Sharlto Copley, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley
screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Robert Stromberg

by Walter Chaw A gyno-centric reimagining of Disney's own Sleeping Beauty, visual-effects guy Robert Stromberg's directorial debut Maleficent (from a script by never-good Disney house-overwriter Linda Woolverton) takes all the ingredients for a horrible disaster and somehow wrestles a fitfully fascinating film from them. It hates men, that much is certain. Paints them as alternately servile and monstrous. Good men follow orders and are easily intimidated; bad men are sexually dangerous and violent. Good men know their place, led about on a tether and bullied into situations by women in groups or singly; and the rest, well...sufficed to say that Sharlto Copley, the most Ellis-from-Die-Hard human, is cast as chief BigBad, the good king Stefan. The film even goes so far as to suggest that romantic, heterosexual love is a sham, a dangerous one at that--something it tries to soften with a couple of doe-eyed exchanges during the epilogue, though I'm not buying it. In fact, had Maleficent truly committed to its themes of feminine empowerment and rage, had it linked them together hand-in-hand without entire agonizing stretches of Disney-fication, it could have entered into the same conversation as Tarantino's Kill Bills. Here's another film with a kick-ass female protagonist who finds strength in motherhood. Alas, for as often as it's great, it's limited by what its masters will allow.

Echoes (10/31/14)

Grease (1978, d. Randal Kleiser):

Christine (1983, d. John Carpenter):

Force Majeure (2014)

Turist
****/****
starring Johannes Bah Kuhnke, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Clara Wttergren, Vincent Wettergren
written and directed by Ruben Östlund

by Walter Chaw As so few people saw the magnificent The Loneliest Planet (including a few who actually reviewed it), it's hardly a spoiler to say that Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure is essentially the droller, married version of Julia Loktev's masterpiece of relational/gender dynamics. Set at an exclusive ski resort in the French Alps, the picture follows handsome workaholic Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) and his beautiful wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), as they spend a week with their two adorable children in what should be a winter paradise. On the first day, something terrible happens and, more to the point, Tomas doesn't act or react in the way one would expect of a husband and father, leading to a series of increasingly awkward conversations between not only the couple, but also their friends Matts (Kristofer Hivju) and Matts's much-younger girlfriend, Fanny (Fanni Metelius). The brilliance of Force Majeure is how carefully it builds itself to the "big event" and then, after, how perfectly Östlund captures the way people talk to one another, whether married with children or just starting off. It's a withering essay on masculine roles and ego--one, too, on the parts women play in easing or exacerbating those expectations. It's amazing.

Hell of the Living Dead (1980)|Rats: Night of Terror (1984) [Blood-Soaked Double Feature] - Blu-ray Disc

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Virus
*/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B
starring Margit Evelyn Newton, Franco Garofalo, Selan Karay, Robert O'Neil
screenplay by Claudio Fragasso, J.M. Cunilles
directed by Bruno Mattei

Rats - Notte di terrore
*½ Image C- Sound B Extras B
starring Richard Raymond, Janna Ryann, Alex McBride, Richard Cross
screenplay by Claudio Fragasso, Hervé Piccini
directed by Bruno Mattei

by Bryant Frazer It's quite possible there is no better-known director of truly terrible genre movies than the late Italian filmmaker Bruno Mattei. Though I've not seen any other Mattei films, I feel comfortable making that assessment based solely on the "blood-soaked double feature" assembled here by the B-movie mavens at Blue Underground. By any rational measure, Hell of the Living Dead and Rats: Night of Terror are cheesy barrel-scrapings, budget-starved and blandly offensive horror counterfeits. But by the standards of Mattei's oeuvre--which also includes nunsploitation, Nazisploitation, women-in-prison flicks, and mondo-style "documentaries"--they are the cream that rises to the top of the milk. Unless you're willing to make a case for his nunsploitation flick The Other Hell, or maybe one of the early Nazi sexploitation pictures, these two films seem to form the cornerstone of Mattei's reputation, such as it is, among genre buffs.

Stonehearst Asylum (2014)

Eliza Graves
*½/****
starring Kate Beckinsale, Jim Sturgess, Brendan Gleeson, Michael Caine
screenplay by Joe Gangemi, based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
directed by Brad Anderson

by Walter Chaw Brad Anderson has made a few interesting movies that seem to be more interesting to other people. I like Session 9 well enough, The Machinist is fine, Transsiberian's fine; they're all fine. His latest, Stonehearst Asylum, based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe that's been adapted a couple of times already, is fine, too, I guess. It's the literalization of inmates running the asylum, following young Dr. Newgate (Jim Sturgess) as he travels to the titular nuthatch to begin his tutelage under good Dr. Lamb (Sir Ben Kingsley), who has some pretty unconventional ideas about how the best way to treat psychotics and the like is to not treat them at all. Also, there's a beautiful noblewoman with people-touching-her issues named Eliza (Kate Beckinsale), after whom the European version of this film is still named, which says something about what distributors think audiences will tolerate in our respective markets, methinks.

Motel Hell (1980) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

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**/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Rory Calhoun, Paul Linke, Nancy Parsons, Wolfman Jack
screenplay by Robert Jaffe and Steven-Charles Jaffe
directed by Kevin Connor

by Bryant Frazer SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. If you give Motel Hell credit for anything, score it full marks for its infamous abattoir-set climax, in which an overalls-clad farmer wearing a grotesque pig mask and wielding a chainsaw battles the local sheriff--also wielding a chainsaw--over the body of a damsel in distress bound to a conveyer belt feeding an industrial meat slicer. Motel Hell wasn't particularly original, even in the annals of American B-movies of the era, and it's not especially scary or creepy--director Kevin Connor doesn't have much of a taste for horror. But he was certainly able to recognize a spectacle. During a long career, Connor directed Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Mickey Rooney in a fantasy called Arabian Adventure, shot on location in Japan another horror film starring Susan George, and even helmed a TV biopic of Elizabeth Taylor starring Sherilyn Fenn. It's the signature image of Farmer Vincent wearing a hog's head and brandishing a power saw, though, that has followed him through the decades.

Insomnia (1997) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

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***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Stellan Skarsgård, Sverre Anker Ousdal, Bjørn Floberg, Gisken Armand
screenplay by Nicolaj Frobenius & Erik Skjoldbjærg
directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg

by Walter Chaw A rather astonishing feature debut, Erik Skjoldbjærg's Insomnia is dour, surreal, nihilistic, and steadfast in its theme of masculine self-reflection. It's as slippery to pin down and single-mindedly purposeful as its protagonist--a procedural only inasmuch as Oedipus Rex is a procedural. It's a work of Expressionism, in other words: its exteriors are projections of its interiors in all their canted, perverse, blighted ugliness. An essential misnomer to call it a "noir," Insomnia in its best moments is an absurdist nightmare that pinions male behaviour as these constant vacillations between violence and frailty. (This choice to discuss the world in terms of gender relationships is likely why it's considered a noir at all.) It's the movie that brought Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård to international prominence via a role that suggested a departure, hot on the heels of Breaking the Waves, though a quick peek at his earliest work (especially Zero Kelvin) hints at the volatility of Insomnia's Det. Engstrom. He's the centre of a dark universe. Setting the film in a place above the Arctic Circle where the sun doesn't set has the interesting effect of lighting Engstrom, as he commits his many black deeds, like a particularly ill patient in a doctor's examining room.

Fantastic Fest '14: Whispers Behind the Wall + The Duke of Burgundy

Die Frau hinter der Wand
**½/****
directed by Grzegorz Muskala

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY
***/****
written and directed by Peter Strickland

by Walter Chaw Grzegorz Muskala's moody, sexy Whispers Behind the Wall updates Matthew Chapman's little-seen but well-remembered Heart of Midnight. Both films are about a young, vulnerable, single person in a new space, discovering Monsters of the Id hiding behind the walls. Where Chapman's film tossed literal apples at a quailing Jennifer Jason Leigh, Muskala introduces vaginal holes in his hero Martin's (Vincent Redetzki) new flat, the better to hide illicit diaries and, ultimately, ease egress into the climax. More, Muskala fills Martin's never-draining bathtub with red sludge, and hides in its drain, in one of several nods to Hitchcock, the key to the whole bloody affair. It seems that Martin, a student who looks just like Ewan McGregor in Shallow Grave, has secured his new, coveted lodgings on the strength of his willingness to allow a creepy caretaker to take a shirtless picture for hot landlady Simone (Katharina Heyer). It also seems former occupant Roger has disappeared, leaving Martin to eavesdrop on Simone banging her insane boyfriend Sebastian (Florian Panzer) before finding himself in Simone's eye, in her clutches, and in her bed.

The Guest (2014)

***/****
starring Dan Stevens, Maika Monroe, Leland Orser, Lance Reddick
screenplay by Simon Barrett
directed by Adam Wingard

by Walter Chaw With The Guest, Adam Wingard continues his examination of '80s exploitation genre flicks--'90s, too: the film is among other things a canny update of James Foley's Fear, which was home to not only Mark Wahlberg's best performance but arguably Carter Burwell's finest hour as well. Like Wingard's You're Next, The Guest acts like what it mimics and, like any good predator, breaks from camouflage at the most unexpected moments. It's funny throughout for the fan familiar with this sort of thing, but it's really funny in its final shot, when it reveals an understanding that people love movies like this because of their absurdity and not in spite of it. Best is how in its focused nastiness, it highlights exactly how grim-verging-on-nihilistic '80s teensploitation often was, how low it was willing to go, how ugly it was willing to get. Yeah, I loved it.

Fury (2014)

*½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña
written and directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw Signifying not much, David Ayer's Fury is another of his brutal excoriations/celebrations of men under pressure that people like Howard Hawks did really well because people like Howard Hawks are geniuses. It follows Wardaddy (Brad Pitt), a tank commander in the 2^nd Armored Division doing mop-up duty in the heart of Nazi Germany during the first months of 1945. His motley crew of battle-hardened, psychopathic misfits is composed of backwoods inbred "Coon-Ass" (Jon Bernthal); the quietly religious one who's going to go insane, Bible (Shia LaBeouf); Mexican guy Gordo (Michael Pena); and clean-cut-rookie-whom-Wardaddy-will-take-under-his-wing-and-see-himself-in-while-they-both-learn-something-from-each-other-they-didn't-think-they-could Norman (Logan Lerman). Episodic in the way of such things, it's a story of men and war told through a series of tank battles, intra-tank squabbling, and dramatic scenes like the one where Wardaddy makes Norman kill someone in cold blood, and that other one where Wardaddy makes Norman sleep with a beautiful young fräulein they discover hiding in the rubble (Alicia von Rittberg). Woe be to any woman in an Ayers joint, however. Spoiler.

All That Jazz (1979) [The Criterion Collection] - Dual-Format Edition

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****/***** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Roy Scheider, Jessica Lange, Ann Reinking, Leland Palmer
written and directed by Bob Fosse

by Bryant Frazer Celebrated as an incisive, self-lacerating backstage spectacle and razzed as an indulgent and pretentious passion project, genius director-choreographer Bob Fosse's All That Jazz is one of the most ambitious American films of the 1970s. At this point in his career, Fosse had nothing to prove to the show-business establishment (in 1973, he won the Oscar, the Tony, and the Emmy, all for directing), but a 1974 brush with death--exhaustion, heart attack, life-saving surgery--put him in an introspective mood, and the results were spectacular. Not content with reaching a dazzling apotheosis in the on-screen presentation of song and dance, Fosse wove singing and dancing into a semi-autobiographical narrative chronicling the final days in the life of Joe Gideon, a genius director-choreographer whose non-stop work regimen is making him physically ill. Underscoring the threat, All That Jazz opens with a line attributed to the high-wire artist Karl Wallenda, who fell to his death during a performance in 1978: "To be on the wire is life; the rest is waiting," Joe's work is his life, and the irony is that his work--along with the pills and smokes that keep him going--is what kills him.

Fantastic Fest '14: In Order of Disappearance

Kraftidioten
***/****
starring Stellan Skarsgård, Pål Sverre Hagen, Bruno Ganz, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen
screenplay by Kim Fupz Aakeson
directed by Hans Petter Moland

by Walter Chaw I've been a fan of Hans Petter Moland since his ferocious Zero Kelvin, starring a relatively unknown Stellan Skarsgård as a psychotic trapper alone with two other men in the wintry Norwegian wilderness. A wildly-successful commercial director, Moland's work is more contemplative than you might expect, considering. He was hand-picked by Terrence Malick, to give you an idea of his style, to take over The Beautiful Country for him when the director was called to another project (The New World). Moland returns to the frigid Norwegian winter with In Order of Disappearance, which opens with a man shaving, cutting a square swath through the foam on his face. Cut to the man on a giant snowplow, describing the same shape through a blanket of white. It's a beautiful moment. Moland's films are full of them.

Fantastic Fest '14: Automata

Autómata
*/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Dylan McDermott, Melanie Griffith, Birgitte Sorensen
screenplay by Gabe Ibáñez, Igora, Javier Sánchez Donate
directed by Gabe Ibáñez

by Walter Chaw Though I've seen worse movies than Gabe Ibáñez's Automata, I've also seen Automata what feels like a few dozen times. Rather than turn this into an exercise in listing source materials, however attractive shooting fish in barrels might be, best to focus on how the picture makes Isaac Asimov's three rules of robotics into two (making it different!), and how its closest film analogue is probably somewhere in the junction between Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium and Richard Stanley's Hardware. That'll have some of you feeling pretty excited and most of you either puzzled or properly dissuaded. Yes, Automata is a muddy piece of pseudo-profundity showcasing its creators' lack of vision, discretion, and judgment. It needed at least a few more passes through the typewriter, frankly, and a mid-film appearance by a distractingly-altered Melanie Griffith--altered by real-life plastic surgery, not in-film techno-debauchery--highlights exactly how brutal the Hollywood machinery is in destroying people like her and Kim Novak and Lara Flynn Boyle and on and on. Griffith's kind of like the girl-version of Mickey Rourke at this point. There's more sadness and auto-reflection embedded in how she looks now than in anything in the film.