Film Freak Central

Tess (1979) [The Criterion Collection] - Dual-Format Edition

click any image to enlarge

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Nastassia Kinski, Peter Firth, Leigh Lawson, John Collin
screenplay by Gerard Brach, Roman Polanski, John Brownjohn, based on the novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
directed by Roman Polanski

by Bryant Frazer In the annals of feel-bad literature, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a corker, pitting natural beauty and goodness against a battery of opposing forces--the church, the aristocracy, modern technology, human avarice--and finding beauty debased. It was a loaded area of study for Roman Polanski, who adapted it as a Hollywood artist in exile, working in France rather than nearer the book's setting of Wessex, England, for fear of his deportation to the U.S. on rape charges. Just as Polanski's bloody Macbeth has been interpreted as a howl of pain following the murder of his beloved wife, Sharon Tate, his Tess can be read as an act of penance, if not a bid for rehabilitation.

Noah (2014)

***/****
starring Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins
screenplay by Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw Unapologetic, curious, atavistic in its single-mindedness and simplicity, Darren Aronofsky's Noah is more impactful in the rearview than in the moment. It's got a hell of a wake. The film is beautiful to look at, it almost goes without saying--as grand and ambitious as its ideas, with one sequence depicting what appears to be the case for intelligent design. It's truly audacious. In many ways the movie The Fountain wanted to be in terms of scale (and featuring another Clint Mansell score that sounds every bit like a continuation of themes), Noah is a deeply insane interpretation of one of the Bible's briefest (essentially Genesis 5:32-10:1), most contentious, most instantly-relatable and hence most-beloved of all Old Testament stories. I can only speculate what the Christian response will be (somewhere between mine and Glenn Beck's assignation of it as the "Babylonian Chainsaw Massacre" is my guess), but for an atheist who counts many strong Christians among his friends, this interpretation is full of the menace and wonder that scripture must hold for the devout. It's a stirring creation mythology in that it makes no bones about the interference in the affairs of men by a vengeful God. Likewise, it makes no apologies for the atrocities it represents in its visions of suffering and sin. (I can only imagine what Aronofsky's Sodom would look like.) Noah even finds time for a dialogue about religious fundamentalism and what happens when absolute faith becomes rationale for atrocity. It's a story about the annihilation of 99.9% of human life on the planet that's ultimately about the value of compassion, and it's a critical read of divine texts that skew in that direction. After a series of films attempting to explain the ways of the divine to the mundane, here's hoping for an Aronofsky adaptation at last of "Paradise Lost": a most comfortable marriage of material and artist.

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

click any image to enlarge

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Bernhard Wicki
written and directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Walter Chaw The second film in a loose quartet of Modernist, existentially-despairing--some would say brutal--Michelangelo Antonioni pictures, La Notte is the one I would identify, if pressed, as the best among L'avventura, L'eclisse, and Red Desert. I'd even go so far as to call it Antonioni's best movie overall: the one that most completely encompasses the filmmaker's worldview and puts into sharpest relief the tools with which he expresses it. He's at the height of his powers here. I would argue that although his Blow-Up both defined foreign film as a genre for American audiences (while proving instrumental in defeating the Production Code, heralding the level of acceptance and permissiveness that made the American '70s in film possible) and is indisputably his most influential work (indeed, it's among the most influential films of all time), it's La Notte that offers the cleanest insight into who and what Antonioni is as an artist.

Justice League: War (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

click any image to enlarge

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
screenplay by Heath Corson, based on the graphic novel Justice League: Origins by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee
directed by Jay Oliva

by Jefferson Robbins The red underwear is gone, and with it, all humility. Justice League: War marks the first true animated appearance of Superman and the rest of the DC Universe heroes since the comics publisher's New 52 gambit launched in 2011, resetting at least twenty-five years of pulp history.¹ What that means for viewers is a militaristically-clothed Superman (vocal chameleon Alan Tudyk) who threatens to choke people to death and a dangerously naive Wonder Woman (Michelle Monaghan) who's definitely going to have sex with him after the credits. This, effectively, is the characters' debut. Set aside all those past versions you know, toss out even the previous direct-to-video titles you may have collected (including four "Justice League" movies) since the DCU animated line officially launched in 2007. This is where the Justice League meets--and where we meet them--for the first time. And, boy, are they a bunch of pricks.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

click any image to enlarge

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Jean Dujardin
screenplay by Terence Winter, based on the book by Jordan Belfort
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Angelo Muredda "For us, to live any other way was nuts," Ray Liotta's schnook turned gangster Henry Hill explains early on in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. With that, spoken over a montage of permed Italian men in tailored suits gorging themselves at an upscale restaurant, Hill at once launched a wave of lesser, faux-conflicted pictures about the swanky perks and ethical compromises of organized crime, and raised the fundamental moral question of Scorsese's latest, The Wolf of Wall Street. An unashamedly indulgent, ribald, and formally troubled biopic of Jordan Belfort, this unofficial Goodfellas follow-up likewise revolves around the kind of work that makes living like a pig in shit possible. His kinship to Hill aside, Belfort has had an unusually clear-sailing trajectory to garner the interest of a filmmaker who tends to be drawn to Catholic tales of excess followed by redemptive suffering. Belfort is still a born stockbroker and swindler, despite his working-class origins and federal inquiries and stints in rehab; the fact that he debuted on Wall Street the day of the crash and remains in demand as a guru well after the financial crisis of 2008 seems to give Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter pause, as well the astonishing survival rate of cockroaches should. What better way to make a film about such a man, Scorsese and Winter appear to have concluded, than to structure his story as a Roman orgy?

Nymph()maniac (2013)

Nymph()maniac: Vol. I
Nymph()maniac: Vol. II
***½/****
starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf
written and directed by Lars von Trier

by Angelo Muredda Partway through the second volume of Lars von Trier's surprisingly nimble Nymph()maniac, wounded storyteller Joe (three-time Trier MVP Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells her rapt listener Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) about the time she went to a support group for her sex addiction. When the group's straight-edge policy proved more than she could bear, Joe bowed out, but not before quipping that her fellow sufferers are nothing but "society's morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the earth so that the bourgeoisie won't feel sick." At last, one thinks, von Trier has found his ideal authorial surrogate in Gainsbourg, whose weird Brechtian delivery is halfway between earnest declaration and stiff high-school rendition of The Crucible. Von Trier has been a professional troll, masking his underlying seriousness with outré gestures, since long before he started sporting T-shirts emblazoned with "PERSONA NON GRATA," in tribute to Cannes' goofy decision to brand him uncouth for joking that his Wagner fixation owed to a latent penchant for Nazism. (All joshing aside, it obviously stung him.) But he's never shown himself to be as sophisticated at joking through tears (or crying through nasty punchlines) as he is in Nymph()maniac. Clocking in at over four hours in two rich parts, at least in the edited version debuting this weekend at Toronto's Lightbox, it's a landmark of seriocomic storytelling that is simultaneously a satire of biographical tall-tales, a depressive's bildungsroman, and an alternately tender and lacerating self-portrait, defending all the Joes and Larses of the world for their obscenity without sparing them the lash.

Le Week-End (2013)

***½/****
starring Jim Broadbent, Lindsay Duncan, Jeff Goldblum, Olly Alexander
screenplay by Hanif Kureishi
directed by Roger Michell

by Walter Chaw Nick (Jim Broadbent) has been fired from his professorship, and, not to celebrate but maybe to memorialize it, he and wife Meg (Lindsay Duncan) take a romantic trip to the City of Light. Well, a trip, anyway. After two awful films (Morning Glory and Hyde Park on the Hudson), Roger Michell returns to form (and to screenwriter/playwright Hanif Kureishi) with this bitter little pill, Le Week-End, whose title, read the way I think it was intended to be read, just drips with acerbic disdain. It reminds me of an exchange about midway through where a desperate Nick tells Meg that he loves her and Meg hisses, in a way that only a British actress at the absolute peak of her powers could hiss, "Love... DIES." Yet Meg doesn't hate Nick and Nick, for his part, isn't quite the milquetoast he presents himself as in moments like these, when he falls on the street and injures his knee to the ringing, castrating laughter of his mate, or when he infers that Meg wants to leave him and starts to whimper like a child. Also at about the halfway mark, the couple encounters an old colleague of Nick's, Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), who promptly invites them to a dinner party in honour of Morgan's latest literary success ("It could happen to anybody," he says; "It didn't happen to me," Nick responds), and suddenly Michell and Kureishi have the meat of professional and personal jealousy to worry off the bone, too.

Game of Thrones: The Complete Third Season (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

click any image to enlarge

Image A Sound A Extras A+
"Valar Dohaeris," "Dark Wings, Dark Words," "Walk of Punishment," "And Now His Watch Is Ended," "Kissed by Fire," "The Climb," "The Bear and the Maiden Fair," "Second Sons," "The Rains of Castamere," "Mhysa"

by Jefferson Robbins Kings and counsellors indeed. George R.R. Martin's fantasy cycle A Song of Ice and Fire--five very large novels deep now--is concerned with impassioned monarchs and their desperate ministers, as well as the deformations wrought by their egotistical wars. HBO's series adaptation "Game of Thrones" maintains that fascination, the source of much of its continuing suspense and appeal: Anyone in the fragmenting kingdom of Westeros could die at any time, by sword or sorcery or simple dysentery, and the wounds of war upon the body politic are reflected on the characters.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Edward Norton, Tony Revolori
written and directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw I'd be hard-pressed to think of many sequences in the movies better than the two minutes from Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums where Richie gets picked up at the Green Line Bus by his adopted sister Margot following a lengthy absence. It's beautifully composed, emotionally weighted, and punctuated with the best use of Nico in a sentence, ever. There's a rub there--my favourite Wes Anderson films are the ones that use music in this way; I ally him in my mind with artists like Sofia Coppola and, sure, Quentin Tarantino. I think the full potential of film is only really reached when all the elements that go into a movie--the seven arts, as it were--are used in concert. Wes Anderson, as he utilizes fewer and fewer pop songs in his films (his latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is his first without any), is losing emotional complexity as his hermetically-sealed, obsessive-compulsive dreamscapes become increasingly complex. Consider the moment from Django Unchained where our heroes ride into act two to Jim Croce's "I Got a Name." It's iconic, transformative; the scene has a quarter of its power without the agency of that song. Tarantino truly gets it. When Anderson opens The Darjeeling Limited with The Kinks' "This Time Tomorrow," letting the scene play in slow-motion as Adrien Brody's character tries to outrun the ghost of his father, wow. I remember hearing about the introductory tracking shot of the research vessel in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, how Anderson was possibly planning on scoring it with a Radiohead song ("How to Disappear Completely," if memory serves) and how that potential marriage gave me a shiver of anticipation. The farther Anderson falls into his navel, the clearer it is that he no longer gets what he used to get, swallowed whole by the grey beast solipsism.

Saturn 3 (1980) - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett, Harvey Keitel
screenplay by Martin Amis
directed by Stanley Donen

by Bryant Frazer There are bad movies and there are tantalizingly bad movies, and Saturn 3 is the latter--the type of bad movie that tickles the imagination and demands an explanation. On first blush, there's nothing unusual about it. Released in 1980, it was clearly trading on the post-Star Wars mania for sci-fi movies. The casting of Farrah Fawcett, at the time a big star, was a reasonable commercial gambit. And the release of Alien a year earlier certainly explained the idea of a monster movie set in space. If you look at the credits, you simply get a sense of older Hollywood types--director Stanley Donen, actor Kirk Douglas--striving to keep up with the prevailing trends.

But then you watch the movie, and you wonder: what the hell happened here?

Homefront (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

click any image to enlarge

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Jason Statham, James Franco, Winona Ryder, Izabela Vidovic
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel by Chuck Logan
directed by Gary Fleder

by Bill Chambers After a drug bust goes farcically awry, undercover DEA agent--and ex-soldier, natch--Phil Broker (Jason Statham) retreats to rural Louisiana with his little girl, Maddy (Izabela Vidovic), hoping to give her a peaceful life raising horses while he makes ends meet as a carpenter. But like father, like daughter: When the school bully pushes Maddy too far on the playground one day, she fights back with a few Bourne-worthy movies, setting off a chain reaction that leads the boy's humiliated, meth-head mother (Kate Bosworth) to sic her swamp kingpin brother Gator (James Franco) on Broker, who proves so invincible against all comers that it piques Gator's curiosity. Some (too) light snooping on his part uncovers Broker's former identity, and he enlists his girlfriend (Winona Ryder--the film has an eclectic cast, to say the least) to rat Broker out to the biker gang that's looking for him. All because of an altercation on a schoolyard.

A Star is Born (1954) - Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Judy Garland, James Mason, Jack Carson, Tom Noonan
screenplay by Moss Hart, based on the screenplay by Dorothy Parker & Alan Campbell & Robert Carson
directed by George Cukor

by Walter Chaw A big, giant mess of a movie, big, giant mess of a director George Cukor's A Star is Born--a remake of the 1937 Janet Gaynor vehicle as well as Cukor's own 1932 What Price Hollywood?--finds big, giant mess of a gay icon Judy Garland quivering gallantly on the razor's edge of total mental collapse for 176 famously-restored minutes. A miracle of single-mindedness and dedication to the film-preservation cause? No doubt. A movie that could easily withstand 90 minutes of liberal pruning? Indeed. And unlike that question posed rhetorically of Joseph II in Amadeus, it's all too obvious which bits need trimming. Start with the 20-minute (might as well be 20-hour) "Born in a Trunk" number, inserted by Jack Warner unbeknownst to Cukor and intended to showcase Garland's then-healthy stage act. A "showstopper" in every sense of the word, it's unbelievably bad and, more than bad, it betrays everything that's worked about A Star is Born up to that point. A film-within-a-film-within-a-film, it has Judy vamping her way through a series of surreal set-pieces, telling her origin story while doing a medley of standards from the Warner catalogue. It's painful for all the wrong reasons.

Crawlspace (1986) - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Klaus Kinski, Talia Balsam, Barbara Whinnery, Kenneth Robert Shippy
written and directed by David Schmoeller

by Bryant Frazer I'm pretty much on board with a horror movie about a creepy landlord who stalks his college-aged tenants, waging a low-level terror campaign against them by deliberately releasing pests into their living spaces. If he's a sadist and a serial killer who keeps souvenirs of his victims (by which I mean body parts in jars), that just seems to go with the territory. If he's also a hardcore Nazi sympathizer with a daddy fixation and a concentration-camp victim locked up in the attic, well, that sounds like it might be a little over the top. But if that creepy landlord-sadist-sociopath-Nazi is played by Klaus Kinski? Now you're talking.

Hannibal: Season One (2013) - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
"Apéritif," "Amuse-Bouche," "Potage," "Œuf," "Coquilles," "Entrée," "Sorbet," "Fromage," "Trou Normand," "Buffet Froid," "Rôti," "Relevés," "Savoureux"

by Walter Chaw I read Thomas Harris's Red Dragon some time in the summer of 1985, when puberty and a crippling stutter conflated new, confusing biological drives with defensive rage. It's a wonder, really, that anyone gets out of junior-high alive. I had developed a taste for outré entertainments long around this time--thirteen, gawky, outcast in my mind, if not necessarily in reality. It was easier for me to identify with the Michael Myerses and Jason Vorheeses of the underverse: hiding, voyeuristic, jealous, yearning. I think we learn affinity with monsters as our own bodies betray us, metastasize around us, dosing our brains with liquid spikes of ecstasy and their attendant pitch-black abysses. I took refuge in movies rented from the local video stores in and around my suburban oubliette, and eventually in books like Harris's masterpiece, which, once discovered, was something I came back to like a scab, like a totem to be worried. Watching Manhunter on VHS a year or so after its release, I was astounded to discover it was Red Dragon. I hadn't considered that anyone else knew about, much less was interested in, the contents of my secret stash. In the years before Internet and the vast, instant dissemination of information, there were still such things as the private, the personal. Manhunter was validation, exposure, and sanctification of my perversion. I was outed.