Film Freak Central

Jason Bourne (2016)

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel
written by Paul Greengrass & Christopher Rouse
directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw There are two modes in Paul Greengrass's Jason Bourne, his and star Matt Damon's return to the franchise after almost a decade away from it: thudding tedium, and incomprehensible chaos. By this fifth instalment (which follows the Jeremy Renner-starring spin-off attempt, The Bourne Legacy), it all plays a little too much like self-parody. Every time there's a conversation about THE TRUTH now, it feels like a bad SNL skit. I still love The Bourne Identity. Watching it in comparison with the Greengrass films (and with most any modern action movie) underscores exactly how superior is Doug Liman as an action director. Liman shoots an action scene like the dance sequences in Saturday Night Fever: with respect for geography and the skill and physicality of his stunt performers and cast. The car chase through Paris in the original begins with a careful consultation of a map, a few questions about the state of the car, and some light but crucial character development, then proceeds into a nice, clean set-piece that establishes stakes, spatial geometry, and destination in a way that is Friedkin-esque. It's a textbook, as good as the L-train underpass pursuit in The French Connection and the wrong-way freeway chase in To Live and Die in LA.. The Bourne Identity is defiantly classical action filmmaking and that's why it still seems fresh, even though it will be fifteen years old next year.

Café Society (2016)

**/****
starring Jeannie Berlin, Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda Woody Allen can't seem to make two consecutive films worth thinking about. Despite an abysmal trailer, pre-emptively dismantled online as insensitive or worse amidst revelations about his personal crimes, 2015's Irrational Man proved a surprisingly gritty respite from Allen's nostalgic euro-tourist cinema of the Aughts. True to its maker's aversion to progress, though, its follow-up Café Society is practically a jukebox-musical treatment of Allen's old (which is to say tired) hits, from the ennui L.A. inspires in native (which is to say white) New Yorkers to the beauty of other periods that aren't the present to romances strained under the weight of vast age discrepancies. Beautifully-lensed and defiantly dumb, it's another testament to Allen's surprisingly incremental growth as a filmmaker in his seventies, at the same time as he continues to atrophy as a writer.

Point Break (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras F
starring Édgar Ramírez, Luke Bracey, Teresa Palmer, Ray Winstone
screenplay by Kurt Wimmer
directed by Ericson Core

by Walter Chaw Not enough can be said about Kathryn Bigelow's action sense. The honkytonk slaughter sequence in Near Dark, from the first moment (when the vampires crest the hill) to the last (when the lone survivor defenestrates), is a triumph of design, of score--including the high lonesome tones of a George Strait classic on the jukebox--and editing and execution. It's that perfect economy of ideas-into-motion that indicates her cult classic Point Break, too--that, paired with absolutely perfect casting, from Keanu Reeves's Everybody's All-American football hero-turned-FBI dude Johnny Utah and Patrick Swayze's blissed-out charismatic leader all the way down to Gary Busey and Lori Petty, the best supporting staff a film about a surf-zen cult-cum-bank-robbing crew could ask for. It's a lovely marriage between ludicrous high-concept and the period immediately following the 1980s, which found the country in a reflective mood, perched there on the verge of upsetting the primacy of film for the coming digital age. Bigelow's Point Break was a showcase for practical stuntwork and, philosophically, a nice metaphor for the excess of the "greed is good"/City on the Hill period drawing to a close. The bad guys rob banks to pay their way to enlightenment. Of course it all ends in tears.

Vinyl: The Complete First Season (2016) - Blu-ray + Digital HD

Image A- Sound A Extras B-
"Pilot," "Yesterday Once More," "Whispered Secrets," "The Racket," "He in Racist Fire," "Cyclone," "The King and I," "E.A.B.," "Rock and Roll Queen," "Alibi"

by Bill Chambers A feeling of déjà vu pervades HBO's "Vinyl", and not just because it's so prototypical of the network's taste in weekly dramas. The first--and simultaneously last--ten episodes are a somewhat hellish loop of stylistic motifs, crutches, and tics. Refrains are a musical conceit, and this is a show about the record industry, so maybe there's a thematic defense for the repetition. But with all the imbibing that goes on on screen, "Vinyl"'s periodicities (running out of synonyms!) begin to make most sense as cues to take a shot. This review should provide all the drinking prompts you need while also serving as a post-mortem for the series, which got cancelled just as I sat down to write about it.¹ At the risk of beating a dead horse, here's what went wrong--and, occasionally, right--with "Vinyl".

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

**/****
starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Idris Elba
screenplay by Simon Pegg & Doug Jung
directed by Justin Lin

by Walter Chaw The cultural watershed isn't when it's revealed that Sulu (John Cho) is gay, but rather a moment just before that, when an interracial couple--an Asian man and a white woman--are used as an example of a "good" relationship. I'm Chinese, my wife is a tall redhead. When my kids watch Star Trek Beyond, it'll be the first time they see their parents reflected in a major American tentpole. There are a lot of things wrong with Star Trek Beyond, which at its best is great in the same way that David Twohy's The Chronicles of Riddick is great--and at its worst is bad in the same way the last film in this reboot series is bad (that is, self-conscious and fan-pleasing, torturously so). But when Sulu is given the one, true, rousing hero moment in the piece, it speaks not just to the vision of a multicultural United States that Lin's The Fast and the Furious movies proposed, but also, perhaps, to the real impact of an Asian-American director behind the camera. It makes sense that a Lin-directed Star Trek would make Sulu the hero; I just wasn't expecting to be so affected by it.

Equals (2016)

*/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Kristen Stewart, Jacki Weaver, Guy Pearce
screenplay by Nathan Parker
directed by Drake Doremus

by Walter Chaw Drake Doremus's Equals is Gattaca and Equilibrium and THX 1138 and Code 46 and Michael Radford's great 1984, all mashed up into an easy to conceptualize and even easier to swallow twenty-something romance that posits simply that love conquers all. It's inoffensive at all times, is only "science-fiction" because there's a blue filter on the lens, and offers so little that is its own that it's easy to miss an exceptional cast doing exceptional work. Equals is another prize example of one of those movies that people will struggle to remember (like Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go--just like, in fact) or come upon some time later on down the line only to remark how such-and-such is a big star now and how you never knew so-and-so was in this and, hey, how is it they got so many amazing folks in such a blah picture; did it even get a release?

Green Room (2016) - Blu-ray + Digital HD

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras B
starring Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Patrick Stewart
written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw I wonder if Jeremy Saulnier has ever made something that wasn't, in its dark heart of hearts, a comedy. I hadn't considered this before a dear friend suggested it after a screening of Green Room, and it caused me to reassess Saulnier's previous films, Murder Party and Blue Ruin. The labels "hardcore" and "brutal" don't feel exactly right, though his work is certainly both at times. There's a Mel Brooks quote I like that defines tragedy as you getting a paper-cut--it hurts, it's awful, it's terrible--and comedy as somebody else falling into a sewer and dying. Saulnier's films are litanies of horrible, unimaginable calamities befalling generally well-meaning schlubs who are altogether unequipped to deal with them. Murder Party, his feature debut, set the template. Its protagonist is a lonely guy who answers a general invitation to attend a Halloween "Murder Party," where he discovers that he's the only guest and that all of the hosts have decided to murder him. It's the most obviously comic of his pictures, and it ends with a moment of crystal-blue melancholy as it becomes clear that the audience has sutured not just to this guy's guilelessness, but to the loneliness driving him as well. Blue Ruin is a masterpiece of the same sort of mechanics. It's delightful: delightfully funny, delightfully smart, delightfully brutal. The hero of that piece, played by Macon Blair (who has a key role in Green Room), is another nebbish pulled from obscurity to be, briefly, the hero of his own life.

Ghostbusters (2016)

*½/****
starring Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones
written by Kate Dippold & Paul Feig
directed by Paul Feig

by Walter Chaw Sort of the George Cukor to Melissa McCarthy's Katharine Hepburn, director Paul Feig has shown over multiple collaborations that he knows how to make a Melissa McCarthy vehicle pretty well, perhaps explaining why none of the other funny people in his Ghostbusters reboot are funny in the slightest. "Melissa McCarthy vehicle" is a low bar besides, if a reasonably lucrative one--a low bar matched by the low bar of Ivan Reitman's terrible but revered original film. Reitman's Ghost Busters ('84 spelling, to be anal and to differentiate the two titles) shares a cultural space with other terrible movies like The Goonies and Purple Rain and pretty much everything starring Bill Murray before Quick Change. It's an aggressive movie, painfully unfunny, and for a few months when I was 11, it was the best thing I'd ever seen. 11-year-olds are very smart at being 11 and very stupid in almost every other respect. I didn't know a ghost was giving Dan Aykroyd a blowjob until years later, after I'd had one. Oh yeah, I said, that ghost gave Dan Aykroyd a blowjob. Was it to save herself from getting "busted"? That's a pretty sexually violent pill in the middle of all that arrogant improvisation. Think of it as a slave narrative where a slave woman gives a slave master a blowjob in the middle of a montage. Right, I get it, it's a comedy, lighten up; but Mel Brooks it ain't. What I wouldn't have given for a scene in the new film where one of the women receives cunnilingus from a member of the tormented undead. That would've been pointed, taboo, and smart. Looking at it again years later, the best part of Ghost Busters is Rick Moranis, because Rick Moranis is the best part of every movie he's in. He always plays a real character. He's never too good for the material.

The Legend of Hell House (1973) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowall, Clive Revill, Gayle Hunnicutt
screenplay by Richard Matheson, based upon his novel Hell House
directed by John Hough

by Bryant Frazer Released in the summer of 1973, this film version of Richard Matheson's 1971 novel Hell House arrived during a transformative period for horror movies--especially British horror. The gothic trappings popularized by England's Hammer Pictures were being upstaged by the more contemporary settings of hits like Night of the Living Dead, which reflected America's misadventures in Vietnam in a disorienting funhouse mirror, and Rosemary's Baby, which brought Satanism out of the woods and into the city. Hammer tried to keep up with more salacious endeavours like the lesbian-themed Karnstein trilogy, but the old-school horror movie was pretty much put out to pasture when The Exorcist debuted at the end of '73. By some measures, then, The Legend of Hell House was ahead of its time, even though it failed to fully capitalize on themes The Exorcist popularized: spiritual possession, sexual abandon, and the failure of rational thought to deal adequately with supernatural phenomena.

The Secret Life of Pets (2016)

ZERO STARS/****
written by Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio and Brian Lynch
directed by Chris Renaud

by Walter Chaw Brutally bad, from the exhausted hip-comic improvisational patter to the endless slapstick pratfalls that comprise the entirety of the film, Chris Renaud and co-director Yarrow Cheney's abominable The Secret Life of Pets excretes into theatres for the express purpose of distracting your young ones for 90 minutes in an air-conditioned setting. It's not remotely witty, never for a second clever, and with a typecast Kevin Hart voicing a one-trick racial pastiche of a bunny, it underscores the cultural divide between those who think Minions and The Lorax are unwatchable dreck and those who are wrong. It's machine-tooled to make money, which it will after the manner of other things that make money at the expense of your children, but it's worth considering that the reason for most of the terrible things in this world is our agreement that critical thinking is a burden, while anti-intellectualism is a roadmap to our survival as first a civilization, then as a species. In our society, saying that something is "for kids" means that it's better, safer...unless it's entertainment. The greatest trick the devil played is convincing an entire culture that it's better not to waste time wondering if what you put in your child's head is productive and smart. So long as there's no sex in it, game on. If The Secret Life of Pets (hereafter Pets) were a chair, it would be made of broken glass and rusty nails. But hey, never mind, why criticize? It's just for kids.

In a Lonely Place (1950) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid
screenplay by Andrew Solt, adaptation by Edmund H. North, based upon a story by Dorothy B. Hughes
directed by Nicholas Ray

by Walter Chaw In another time and place, they would've called Gloria Grahame "one sick twist," and the brand would've stuck. There are stories, a few of them true. There's the one about her stepson, and the thing where she keeps getting plastic surgery until her face is paralyzed, which was the alleged goal after Grahame became morbidly devoted to Kuleshov's editing theories. There's the weird book an ex-lover wrote about her last days, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, and indeed, her story has been told largely through the men who wanted her, the men who had her, and the men who ruined her. In many ways, she's the quintessential femme fatale of the noir era, not just for the roles she took, but because the roles she took reflected the traps she was in. She's the patron saint of the way we treat women first as objects of desire, then as objects of disgust. Her late moment as the girl who "cain't" say no encapsulates the perversity of Rodgers & Hammerstein, sure, and the sad decline of a woman who confessed at the end of her life that she never quite figured out Hollywood--though it sure looks like Hollywood had her figured. She is one of the great tragic figures of the age, both microcosm and avatar of that wonderland of image-fixers and dream-crushers. For my money, the film that best captures Grahame in her complexity, in all her multifoliate relationships with the world and her millions of voyeurs, is Nicholas Ray's scabrous In A Lonely Place. It's a masculine confession and an apology. It's hollow. Aren't they all.

No Way Out (1987) - Blu-ray Disc

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

***/**** Image B- Sound B Commentary C
starring Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Sean Young, Howard Duff
screenplay by Robert Garland, based on the book The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw I was lucky enough to be 14 in 1987, right at that age where my buddies and I were dropped off at the theatre by our parents for whatever we wanted to see. Because we were generally not well-supervised in such matters, we talked them into buying us tickets for stuff like Hellraiser, RoboCop, Lethal Weapon, Full Metal Jacket, and The Untouchables. My first R-rated theatrical experiences were, in other words, magical. They were gleefully violent, extravagantly so, and the sex... Jesus. The sex in mainstream movies in 1987 was combustible--enough so that it formed the backbone of my onanism for the next several years. I saw Angel Heart this way, and Fatal Attraction of course. Key in there is Roger Donaldson's largely-forgotten but durable political-paranoia thriller No Way Out. Starring Kevin Costner, cementing a legendary winning streak that began a month or two earlier with his starmaking turn in The Untouchables and continued with the dead sexy Bull Durham the following year and the legendarily-chaste Field of Dreams a year after that. Lost in conversations about Costner's stardom during this period is his preternatural ability to be an Everyman sex symbol. Girls loved him, and guys didn't mind because Costner isn't really all that threatening. He sure is likeable, though. When he introduced a note of menace into his nice-guy archetype in A Perfect World, he in fact discovered his perfect role. The problems came when he tried to be something more than that. Cowboy, baseball player, fish-man, all-around all-American? No problem. Attorney, doctor--now we got issues.

The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

***/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer, based on the "Tarzan" stories created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw David Yates's The Legend of Tarzan is at once a long-overdue, if massively-fictionalized, biopic of George Washington Williams's time in the Congo observing colonial Belgium's abuses of the rubber, ivory, and diamond trades; and it's an adaptation, nay, updating of Edgar Rice Burroughs's first five Tarzan books, with heavy creative license taken but the spirit kept largely intact. Although it's more successful as the latter than as the former, both endeavours are carried through with seriousness and intelligence. It's not a perfect film: the editing is terrible, particularly during the action sequences, suggesting this was probably a longer movie truncated out of fear of diluting the "good" bits. I also don't love the washed-out colour palette that paints everything in a blue gloom--at least not as much as Yates seems to, between this and the last four Harry Potter films. And it bears mentioning that Samuel L. Jackson isn't really an actor anymore and that Margot Robbie arguably never has been. Yeah, The Legend of Tarzan is hard to defend objectively. It does, however, understand the appeal of the Tarzan mythos, answering in grand moments why it is that he's found his way into over 200 motion pictures and dozens more serials and television series (live-action and animated). I should disclaim, too, that I read (re-read, in some cases) all 24 original Burroughs Tarzan novels in the weeks leading up to the picture's release. In other words, I'm a big, giant pulp nerd.