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.