Film Freak Central

Geostorm (2017) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish, Andy Garcia
screenplay by Dean Devlin & Paul Guyot
directed by Dean Devlin

 

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's the near future. Not much has changed, except the President isn't totally repulsive, "HoloFrames" have supplanted cell phones, and climate change is no longer an immediate threat, thanks to the creation of a global weather-management system called Dutch Boy, after the story of the little Dutch boy who plugs a leak in a dike with his finger. (Like all those movie scientists who've named their game-changer "Icarus," the christeners of Dutch Boy should've read to the end of the story.) Gerard Butler's Jake Lawson scienced Dutch Boy together but got kicked off the project when he switched it on ahead of schedule. Now, with the damn thing turning miles of Afghanistan desert into frozen tundra, White House lackey Max (Jim Sturgess with inexplicable hair) knows there is only one man who can get to the bottom of this glitch: his estranged brother Jake, who reticently returns to the International Climate Space Station (ICSS), leaving young daughter Hannah (Talitha Bateman) to fret for his safety and narrate the film for that soupçon of folksiness. More incidents accumulate both on the ground and miles above the earth, including a terrifying ordeal for a lady in a bikini who's cornered by a flash-freeze wave, leading Jake and Max to believe that President Palma (Andy Garcia) might be plotting a planet-wide attack of hellish weather--a "geostorm," if you will--in order to impede Dutch Boy's upcoming transfer of ownership from America to "the world."

In the Heart of the Sea (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

*/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Charles Leavitt, based on the book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
directed by Ron Howard

by Bill Chambers In the Heart of the Sea is Ron Howard's water movie, just like Backdraft is his fire movie, Far and Away is his earth movie, and Apollo 13 is his air movie. It's also his first fish movie since Splash, suggesting that Howard is retracing his steps in a career reboot that began with Rush, his first car movie since his directorial debut, Grand Theft Auto. But one waits for history to repeat itself with some sign of accrued wisdom beyond obvious markers like technical proficiency. In fact, in its show-offiness and ersatz emotionalism, In the Heart of the Sea seems the less mature film next to Splash, which has a formal self-control and hints of real pathos despite a fantastical premise that sees a landlubber falling in love with a woman who's secretly a mermaid. (It's the first film to seize on Tom Hanks's Jimmy Stewart quality, as well as the rare one to tap into his anger.) There's hardly a genuine moment in In the Heart of the Sea, and a framing device only exacerbates the problem by adding another layer of dramatization to something that already plays like a big-budget History Channel re-enactment.

San Andreas (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Carlton Cuse
directed by Brad Peyton

by Bryant Frazer Back in the 1970s, Hollywood thrillers broke a sweat trying to depict a single terrible event--just one burning building, overturned luxury liner, or airship disaster. These days, the imagery has gotten a lot more freewheeling. Armed with powerful computer algorithms that generate cartoonish eruptions of earth, fire, wind, and water, today's VFX supervisors have a mandate to make bad things happen on screen--all of the bad things, preferably at the same time. In San Andreas, the terrible, horrible, no-good very bad day includes a disintegrating Hoover Dam and a container ship that cartwheels end-over-end into the Golden Gate Bridge. Skyscrapers collapse in on themselves, generating 9/11 flashback clouds of dust and debris that blast through city streets. A tsunami and its attendant flooding sends murky water pulsing through the floors of submerged high-rises, trapping helpless victims inside like goldfish behind glass. It would all be a little hard to take if the visual effects were more convincing (they're cartoonish) or the action scenes at all naturalistic (ditto), but director Brad Peyton isn't especially ambitious. His operative aesthetic is purely Theme Park.

World War Z (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Max Brooks
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster's World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks's cause célèbre novel (think Stephen Ambrose on the zombie apocalypse) that had a production so troubled the real surprise is Terry Gilliam had nothing to do with it, lands as half an idea, handsomely mounted in a really expensive crater. With almost no relationship to the book beyond honouring its concept of a conflagration told in vignettes, it feels almost exactly like James L. Brooks's I'll Do Anything, which began life as a musical and ended up, after extensive reshoots and careening budget overages, song-free, yet whole somehow despite the trauma. That sense of a sudden change in direction, in genre, is all over World War Z--something in its almost apologetic reserve, something in its unmistakable indecision. Indeed, it serves as a fitting metaphor for a zombie as a corpse similarly brought to shambling half-life, but frankly, it could've been a lot worse. It works for what it is in the same way that Steven Soderbergh's Contagion works, and with the same limitations, ambivalence, anticlimax, and handsome mounting. If, at the end, its Damon Lindelof-penned solution* (the twelfth-hour salvation of a freight train jumped its tracks) is as stupid as you would expect something Lindelof to pen, at least the journey there is interesting, even occasionally (if only very occasionally) arresting. A shame that Forster hasn't gotten any better at directing action since Quantum of Solace.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw For all its overreaching (and what's perilously close to a training montage), Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises is fascinating, engaging, and aggressively present. It's a wonderfully-performed melodrama about the sad, intractable state of our sorry state, painted in broad strokes in a muted palette. It's what many would think impossible despite the evidence of its predecessor: a comic book for grown-ups. And it accomplishes what it sets out to do without much in the way of action sequences or hero moments--the irony being, of course, that The Dark Knight Rises is fated to become the best-reviewed and most-lucrative release of 2012 for having the very same qualities for which the deeply-underappreciated Superman Returns was lambasted. I would argue that a wide swath of the people who will adore it will have difficulty articulating exactly why.

Cult Camp Classics, Vol. 3: Terrorized Travelers - DVD

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

SKYJACKED (1972)
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Charlton Heston, Yvette Mimieux, James Brolin, Jeanne Crain
screenplay by Stanley R. Greenberg, based on the novel Hijacked by David Harper
directed by John Guillermin

Skyjacked is the inevitable result of people pretending to be casual and relaxed while actually being stiff and formal. The actors would desperately like you to believe that they just happened to be on a jumbo jet when it was, by sheer chance, hijacked by a crazed veteran--but who are they fooling? As everybody is cruelly slotted into a stereotypical role (and forced to spout inane pleasantries no thinking person would utter), the artificiality of the proceedings is about as plain as the nose on Chuck Heston's face. Pulse-pounding excitement--which would have required people in whom we could invest--is not on the menu. In fact, the whole thing seems remarkably tranquil as a bunch of slumming character actors cash easy paychecks.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972) [Special Edition]; The Towering Inferno (1974) [Special Edition]; Earthquake (1974) - DVDs

THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE
**/**** Image A Sound B+ Extrss B+
starring Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Carol Lynley
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant and Wendell Mayes, based on the novel by Paul Gallico
directed by Ronald Neame

THE TOWERING INFERNO
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extrss A
starring Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, based on the novels The Tower by Richard Martin Stern and The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson
directed by John Guillermin

EARTHQUAKE
**½/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Lorne Greene
screenplay by George Fox and Mario Puzo
directed by Mark Robson

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's the politically-sensitive early-'70s. Action movies are now Balkanized along ideological lines. Bona fide westerns have become completely hippefied (Little Big Man, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), while the values of the traditional western have been transplanted whole into a new genre of gritty law-and-order cop movies (Death Wish, Dirty Harry). The question facing Hollywood is: how do you make an action movie with across-the-board appeal? Irwin Allen hit on a temporary solution with his series of disaster flicks. In 1977, George Lucas stumbled upon a permanent one. I'm not sure it really sank in until I watched Allen's The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno back-to-back just how deeply Lucas' little space opera changed the face of popular entertainment. The broadly allegorical Star Wars films were not only a collective experience, they were a powerful collective experience, too. They placed serious religious issues in a palatable context and provoked a deeply spiritual response from the masses.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

**/****
starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum, Dash Mihok
screenplay by Roland Emmerich & Jeffrey Nachmanoff
directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff

by Walter Chaw Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow completes a trilogy for the German director in which he trashes New York City, revealing either a deep hatred of the United States or a shocking disdain for civil planning. Aliens and a radioactive Japanese iguana the culprits in Independence Day and Godzilla, respectively, Emmerich's cycle of NYC flicks continues the evolution of blame from extra-terrestrial to the whimsical side-effects of military testing to, with The Day After Tomorrow, the Bush Jr. administration. The picture is overtly political, going so far as to offer a Mutt and Jeff duo as his fictional executive branch, while less stridently it presents what is possibly the first semi-literal 9/11 film in its vision of Gotham devastated from without and all warnings ignored, its denizens putting aside differences to survive and its emergency workers heroic and iconic. To compare a modern Ice Age (repeatedly referred to as a permanent shift in climate (was it ever)) to 9/11 is inelegant but, in the long run, perhaps ideologically accurate.

The Core (2003)

**½/****
starring Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Cooper Layne and John Rogers
directed by Jon Amiel

by Walter Chaw Jon Amiel's poorly-timed disaster throwback The Core is a by-the-numbers affair that features the sort of special effects mayhem that folks will reference when terrorists blow-up the Acropolis--perhaps explaining in part why this bombastic summer film is being rushed into release in the late-winter doldrums: better to get it in movieplexes before it has to be delayed for a few months. But with unfortunate mentions of the Al Jazeera news agency and a botched shuttle landing that is exceedingly uncomfortable given its proximity to NASA's recent tragedy, it could just be that The Core is a bad idea for any time, and releasing it when no one is likely to see it is just a cut-your-losses sort of thing. The Core is probably betting that people are more fatigued by the Riefenstahl-ian "embedded" live coverage of our troops in action than by their over-familiarity with this kind of Armageddon/Deep Impact/Poseidon Adventure falderal, when the truth is that it's possible to be tired of both.