Film Freak Central

Get Hard (2015) [Unrated] - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras Oy
starring Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, Alison Brie, Craig T. Nelson
screenplay by Jay Martel & Ian Roberts and Etan Cohen
directed by Etan Cohen

WATCH IN iTunes

by Walter Chaw The title pretty much says it all, as screenwriter Etan Cohen's gay-panic directorial debut Get Hard works as the exact antidote to his own work on the smart, occasionally vital Tropic Thunder. It's puerile and indelicate--that much to be expected, I suppose, but it's laboured, too, and flat as a pancake. If Get Hard were a middle-aged man, you'd be calling an ambulance for all the wheezing. Two scenes: in the first, Wall Street wolf James King (Will Ferrell) does a patented Will Ferrell freak-out, mistaking attendant Darnell (Kevin Hart) for a carjacker, ending with Darnell saying, "I didn't mean to freak you out, man;" in the second, two scary-looking Boyz N the Hood-era gangbangers say, "Wall Street is where the real criminals at!" The former demonstrates how poorly-matched are the improvisational styles of the leads, with Ferrell needing a deadpan straight world to his shenanigans; one wonders at the wisdom of casting two alpha-comedians in a film--with no one setting up the jokes, there's never anything to pay off. (It's why Jeff Daniels is Jim Carrey's counterpart in the Dumb and Dumber movies and not Robin Williams.) The latter demonstrates how desperate the film is in trying to be smart and relevant. What could be more sophisticated and racially sensitive, after all, than a screenplay written by a bunch of identical-looking white guys imagining a Los Angeles street gang called the Crenshaw Kings transitioning their drive-by and street-smart jive business into day-trading?

The Films of Hayao Miyazaki (1979-2001)|Spirited Away (2001) - Blu-ray + DVD

Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro) (1979)
***/****
Buy DVD at Amazon.com|Buy Blu-ray at Amazon.com
Adapted from a Monkey Punch manga that was itself based on Maurice LeBlanc's popular super-spy Lupin, Hayao Miyazaki's first feature-length film The Castle of Cagliostro came about as an offshoot of his experiences producing television episodes of a popular Lupin series (1977-1981). As such, the animation and backgrounds are more simplistic, the story is more cartoonish (though the very basic Miyazaki hallmarks of a girl in transition, flight, and gadgetry are already in place) and one-dimensional, and the pace is more relentlessly breakneck than occasionally meditative. Beginning as a heist comedy and continuing as an impenetrable fortress/princess in a tower action adventure film, The Castle of Cagliostro is a light, irreverent slapstick exercise with a healthy share of nifty gadgets and derring-do. Missing is a sense of completion and the deeper examination of themes that one will come to associate with the director's work, but The Castle of Cagliostro stands on its own merits; despite being shackled somewhat by the artistic and thematic requirements of an in-place franchise, the picture reveals the burgeoning promise of a filmmaker who would become the most important voice of the new anime medium. 100 minutes

Miami Blues (1990) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Fred Ward, Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nora Dunn
screenplay by George Armitage, based on the novel by Charles Willeford
directed by George Armitage

by Jefferson Robbins Remember when handheld camera was a technique deployed to signal disorientation, estrangement, and vulnerability and not simply "the way we shoot movies now"? In George Armitage's Miami Blues, the otherwise-steady camera first comes unhinged when ex-con Frederick "Junior" Frenger Jr. (Alec Baldwin) orders newly-requisitioned hooker Pepper (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to roll over on her belly, presumably so he can employ her the way male prisoners employ each other sexually. He can't, though, because there's something different there, and an afternoon's purchased pleasure becomes an affair. Armitage's use of the camera is a punctuation, a chapter break in Junior's story, reassuring us that while Junior is malevolent and unpredictable, Pepper won't immediately meet the same fate as the Hare Krishna that Junior (kind of accidentally) murdered an hour before. Still, you should probably worry for her.

Inside Out (2015)

**½/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve & Josh Cooley and Pete Docter
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw Films are objects and their interpretations are subjective. I start this way because there's a sequence in Pete Docter's Inside Out that enters an area of, literally, abstract thought--and then later, its characters accidentally spill crates of "facts" and "opinions" and have trouble getting them sorted out again. ("It happens all the time," they're reassured.) Someone brilliant once said that the measure of a work is the extent to which it's examined. Inside Out is destined to be examined a lot and, therefore, deserves a great deal of merit--but for as uncannily perceptive as it is at times, it's just as often pernicious in its gender stereotyping and establishment of straw situations that betray its core honesty. I'm reminded of Docter's similarly-flawed, similarly-schizophrenic Up, whose prologue is easily among the cinema's best silent melodramas while the rest of it is missed opportunity, curious under-reaching, and overly dependant on shtick. Docter's cited Paper Moon as a seminal film in his development. Of his three movies thus far, only his first, Monsters, Inc., deserves mention in the same conversation from start to bittersweet finish.

Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets (2014)

**½/****
directed by Florian Habicht

by Bill Chambers There's an episode of "The Larry Sanders Show" where tragic sidekick Hank Kingsley asks producer Artie what he thinks of him opening his solo act with Blood, Sweat & Tears' "Spinning Wheel." "It's a showstopper, Hank," Artie says, briefly raising Hank's hopes before delivering the kicker: "Never open with a showstopper." I was reminded of this at the outset of Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets, which opens with the title band giving a rousing performance of their "Common People" that is, for those of us watching after the fact, vicariously thrilling. "[1996] won't produce a more indispensable song," wrote rock authority Robert Christgau, and indeed, "Common People" went on to crystallize the Britpop movement and be covered by the disparate likes of Tori Amos and William Shatner. If you're a dilettante like myself, you go into this first sanctioned documentary about Pulp (lead singer Jarvis Cocker receives a "concept" credit alongside director Florian Habicht) wishing to hear "Common People," and what follows pales for the instant gratification--at least until it becomes clear that "Common People" had to be up front: for purposes of this film, it's nothing less than the national anthem.

Run All Night (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Vincent D'Onofrio, Ed Harris
screenplay by Brad Ingelsby
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

WATCH IN iTunes

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra's Run All Night fulfills every requirement of the Liam Neeson subgenre of elder-vengeance while simultaneously completing the Grumpy Old Men trilogy in an unexpected way. It's a hollow stylistic exercise that mainly exposes how good We Own the Night was, and while some slight comparisons have been to Phil Joanou's underestimated State of Grace, really the only thing Run All Night resembles is everything else Neeson has decided will be his legacy since the first Taken movie about seven years ago. What's most painful, I think, is how consistently great Neeson is at doing this one thing over and over again. He makes it hard, in other words, to stop wishing he'd go back to doing something worthy of him.

New Year's Evil (1980) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Roz Kelly, Kip Niven, Chris Wallace, Grant Cramer
screenplay by Leonard Neubauer
directed by Emmett Alston

by Bryant Frazer Every 1980s slasher movie needed a gimmick, and New Year's Evil has two: a Halloween-inspired holiday tie-in and a youth-culture exploitation angle. A Hollywood-based serial killer promises to murder a victim at the stroke of midnight in each of the four continental U.S. time zones, announcing his intentions by calling "Hollywood Hotline", a New Year's Eve countdown TV show hosted by Roz Kelly (the erstwhile Pinky Tuscadero on "Happy Days") that features live performances by punkish new wave acts. The results are surprisingly watchable. The psycho-killer story is actually a bit twisty as these things go, with a mid-film reversal of fortune aiming to give audiences a rooting interest in the villain. And though the bands on screen (Shadow and Made in Japan) seem to be employed mainly to help pad out the film's 86-minute running time, their proto-Guns N' Roses sounds are not entirely disagreeable.

Jurassic World (2015)

***/****
starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D'Onofrio, Ty Simpkins
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow
directed by Colin Trevorrow

by Walter Chaw Jurassic World is Dada. It is anti-art, anti-sense--wilfully, defiantly, some would say exuberantly, meaningless. In its feckless anarchy, find mute rebellion against narrative convention. You didn't come for the story, it says, you came for the set-ups and pay-offs. It's history's most expensive porno: broad characters in familiar situations and then the fucking and the money shot. There's a scene in the first third where raptor-wrangler Dirk, or is it Chet? Shane? No, wait...Owen (Chris Pratt), yeah, Owen, tells uptight eventual conquest Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) that his raptors are driven by eating, hunting, and *grunt--fist-push--grunt*, and surely Claire must be motivated by at least...one...of those things. Cue the throbbing bass and dirty guitar. There are also constant call-outs to the first film, old enough now to be held as totem to a generation of people wanting to recapture that initial experience. Jurassic Park was similarly a bad movie with great set-pieces; what time has taught us is that it hardly even matters if these films have human actors in them as long as they don't waste too much time on them. It's fantasy gratification, and the fantasy it's trying to gratify is that you can lose your virginity again.

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi, Fay Bainter, Thomas Mitchell
screenplay by Viña Delmar, based on the novel The Years Are So Long by Josephine Lawrence
directed by Leo McCarey

by Walter Chaw Orson Welles famously proclaimed that Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow could "make a stone cry," and it could, not because of any sentimentality, but because it pinions essential human failure mercilessly. Its tragedy is born not of high melodrama, but of low archetype. It's any story of a close, loving relationship, a mentor/apprentice relationship, that ends in less shocking than mundane betrayal that is largely preordained and even necessary. What so wounds about Make Way for Tomorrow is that the audience identifies with not only the parents who have outlived their usefulness to society and their families, but also the children who are too busy with their own lives to include them. It puts us in the role of both betrayer and betrayed. The agony it elicits is complex and multifoliate. It compounds on itself. At the end, it's even a movie about the idea that every love story is a tragedy because if everything goes exactly right, one lover will still die before the other. The film is a passion play in which the audience is Judas as well as Jesus. Make Way for Tomorrow's impact is startling some eighty years after its release, and will remain startling another eighty years from now.

Focus (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Rodrigo Santoro, Gerald McRaney
written and directed by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

WATCH IN iTUNES

by Walter Chaw The world's most polite heist/caper/con-man Charade thing, which feels it's finally time to continue that death trudge towards completion of a Matchstick Men trilogy, John Requa and Glenn Ficarra's Focus is a studiedly-inoffensive star vehicle for Will Smith that's interesting only because of Will Smith's casual attitude towards miscegenation. Easy to say that in 2015 a black guy with a white girl isn't that big a deal, but I still can't think of too many examples where a superstar like Smith is willing to repeatedly cast himself opposite a cross-racial leading lady. Smith is even a producer of Will Gluck's intriguing Annie, which, in addition to being a very strange bookend to the surveillance-state nightmare of The Dark Knight, features at its centre an interracial love story between characters played by Jamie Foxx and Rose Byrne. I'm spending a lot of time on this, because Focus, aside from the sexy shenanigans of Smith's expert con-man Nicky and his ingénue protégé Jess (Margot Robbie) and the fact of their race-mixing in a mainstream, medium-big studio flick, isn't about anything and isn't otherwise that interesting about it.

Hungry Hearts (2015)

**/****
starring Adam Driver, Alba Rohrwacher, Roberta Maxwell
written and directed by Saverio Costanzo

by Walter Chaw Not the sequel to the Bruce Springsteen song I was hoping for, Saverio Costanzo's Hungry Hearts is instead the moment at which I completely understand the appeal of Adam Driver. He's Jude; one night, after a particularly unfortunate biological episode, he meets-cute peculiar Mina (Alba Rohrwacher), who's forced to suffer the olfactory fallout with him. They move in together. She gets pregnant, and later we think back on the moment of conception with something like dread. Mina becomes increasingly difficult. She becomes the acolyte of various new-age schemes and trends, finding gurus to follow in the garbage she reads while their son fails to grow. Jude, frantic, sneaks away three times a day on various pretexts to feed his son meat. He's afraid the boy will die. One night, Mina wakes Jude, in a scene Costanzo shoots with a fish-eye lens, and says, "My son threw up meat. Do you know anything about this?"--and then she shrinks out of frame like that giant fish in that one Faulkner story about the bear. Hungry Hearts is a bit of the Naturalism of the Faulkner. It's a bit of the Gothic, too.

Brazilian Western (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

Faroeste caboclo
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Felipe Abib, Antonio Calloni, César Troncoso, Marcos Paulo
screenplay by Marcos Bernstein and Victor Atherino
directed by René Sampaio

by Jefferson Robbins If a few things fall too neatly into place in René Sampaio's Brazilian Western--like beautiful Maria Lúcia (Isis Valverde) jumping into bed with fugitive João (Fabrício Boliveira), who just held her at gunpoint in her own bedroom--well, it's a fable. That's meant literally, since the film is adapted from a megahit ballad of roughly the same name: Legāio Urbana's nine-minute barn-burner of calamity, bloodshed, love, and redemption spoke to something in the Brazilian psyche in 1987, charting João de Santo Christo's fatal misadventures with the corrupt forces that kept a boot on the underclass. Sampaio's adaptation has a lot to live up to in that respect, as well as in honouring the western genre to which the title nods. It winds up a Leone-ian Scarface of sorts, although the stakes are different--pot instead of coke, infatuation rather than the will to power, with imbalances of class and race at the forefront.