Film Freak Central

Better Off Dead (1985) - Blu-ray Disc

Better Off Dead...
***/**** Image B- Sound C-
starring John Cusack, David Ogden Stiers, Diane Franklin, Kim Darby
written and directed by Savage Steve Holland

by Jefferson Robbins Better Off Dead... probably wouldn't have outlasted its peers among cheaply-made '80s teen comedies minus three crucial factors. There's John Cusack's extraordinary Everyguy deadpan: He reacts to absurdity without visibly reacting, a still pivot for the scene around him and the best possible audience surrogate for a vehicle like this. There's writer-director Savage Steve Holland's visual wit, rooted in classic cartoons and well-abetted by editor Alan Balsam (Revenge of the Nerds). And finally, there's Holland's clearly-demonstrated understanding of what it's like to be a teenage male--collapsing in the face of spurned love, so immersed in one's own fantasies and neuroses that everyone, even relatives and close friends, seems a grotesque. This internal state gets externalized in Better Off Dead..., as no matter where Cusack's Lane Meyer goes, he's confronted with such bizarre contortions of humanity that he might as well be an astronaut among aliens.

American Graffiti (1973) - [Special Edition] Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ronny Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charlie Martin Smith
screenplay by George Lucas and Gloria Katz & Willard Hyuck
directed by George Lucas

by Jefferson Robbins The skeleton key to George Lucas's American Graffiti isn't in its setting--the cruising culture of exurban southern California, 1962, as witnessed by young participants with the '50s at their back and Vietnam ahead. Instead, it's disassembled and scattered throughout the text, oblique until it becomes obvious. There's the front-seat monologue recited by Laurie (Cindy Williams) for the benefit of her drifting boyfriend Steve ("Ronny" Howard): "It doesn't make sense to leave home to look for home, to give up a life to find a new life." It sounds like her own reverie, but in fact she's quoting an offscreen speech by her college-bound brother Curt (Richard Dreyfuss), who earlier in the film has a hushed alleyway talk with the "cool" teacher (Terence McGovern) who washed out of an artsy New England school and came back to shape young minds in his diesel-scented hometown. This teacher's name, as it happens, is Mr. Wolfe. It's not so much that you can't go home again as that home changes under your very feet. The instinct to cling to its first incarnation--Curt's fondling of his old school locker, John Milner's (Paul Le Mat) continued mingling with high-school kids at roughly age twenty--is really a hope that you'll find something just as valuable in the wider world you know you must face.

Gross Anatomy (1989); Betsy's Wedding (1990); The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag (1992) - Blu-ray Discs

GROSS ANATOMY
**½/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Matthew Modine, Daphne Zuniga, Christine Lahti, Todd Field
screenplay by Ron Nyswaner and Mark Spragg
directed by Thom Eberhardt

BETSY'S WEDDING
***/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Alan Alda, Joey Bishop, Madeline Kahn, Molly Ringwald
written and directed by Alan Alda

THE GUN IN BETTY LOU'S HANDBAG
**/**** Image C Sound D+
starring Penelope Ann Miller, Eric Thal, William Forsythe, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Grace Cary Bickley
directed by Allan Moyle

by Jefferson Robbins To sample three Blu-ray editions fresh out from discount distributor Mill Creek Entertainment, you'd think film comedy in the late 1980s and early '90s was at a tipping point. Or, at least, you'd think this of Touchstone, the Disney sub-studio behind Gross Anatomy, Betsy's Wedding, and The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag. All three films seem swamped by the decade shift, caught between John Hughes's early-'80s youth revolution and the hardening of romcom formulas that would come to pass after 1990's Pretty Woman (also a Touchstone product). One of the three films, in fact, barely qualifies as a comedy, although it was surely marketed as such. The sense one gets watching them today is of opportunities missed, of storytelling approaches gently meshed together when they should've been gleefully mashed, and of an aversion to risk above all.

The Mission (1986) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, Ray McAnally, Aidan Quinn
screenplay by Robert Bolt
directed by Roland Joffé

by Jefferson Robbins Career arcs fascinate and depress me. The Mission finds Roland Joffé at his early peak on just his second movie, making what amounts to a $25 million art film starring one of America's best-known actors. Did Joffé change beyond this point, or did he refuse to change while the ecosystem altered around him? A bit of both, I suspect, after Fat Man and Little Boy and The Scarlet Letter. These epics went unembraced, and Oscars or no, the financiers weren't always going to settle for contemplative examinations of people caught in the turning of historical tides. Yet that's where Joffé was at his best--and maybe he couldn't get beyond it. Spalding Gray had him pegged early on: "Leave it to a Brit to tell you your own history," he advised in Swimming to Cambodia. Sure enough, as in The Killing Fields, Joffé's The Mission examines pangs of conscience at a critical moment of political, religious, and cultural upheaval.

King of Kings (1961) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jeffrey Hunter, Siobhan McKenna, Hurd Hatfield, Robert Ryan
screenplay by Philip Yordan
directed by Nicholas Ray

by Jefferson Robbins Painterly and static, for the most part, Nicholas Ray's King of Kings boasts one truly remarkable, energetic camera feat: a view from the top of the crucifix, gazing down the length of Jesus's body as he's hoisted into position for martyrdom. It stuck in Martin Scorsese's mind, too, and a variation of the shot appeared in his The Last Temptation of Christ. It's not an unfair comparison, as the two films both seek new paths into the Christ story by collapsing the degrees of separation between characters, plumbing the politics of Roman-controlled Judea, and introducing moments of doubt and pain for Jesus (Jeffrey Hunter) that are not merely spiritual, but personal as well. When the Messiah visits the house of his mother Mary (Siobhan McKenna), he offers to apply his carpentry skills to a broken chair upon returning from his next fateful act of ministry, in Jerusalem. "The chair will never be mended," Mary says, and they mutually, silently acknowledge the destiny laid out for him. It's not Willem Dafoe boinking Barbara Hershey, but it is a human moment--the Son of Man craving a simple man's life.

The Verdict (1982) [Collector's Edition] - DVD

***½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B+
starring Paul Newman, Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden, James Mason
screenplay by David Mamet, based on the novel by Barry Reed
directed by Sidney Lumet

by Jefferson Robbins It's never clear if disgraced lawyer Frank Galvin (Paul Newman) is a practicing Catholic, as are so many of the souls around him in a grey, hopeless Boston--but there's a crucifix on his office wall, and he sure has the posture down. Note how many times in Sidney Lumet's legal drama Newman is caught posed in the final stage of genuflection, Roman brow in profile, knuckle touched to lips. He's skipped making the sign of the cross and gone straight to kissing a nonexistent rosary. His is a corroded soul, though in David Mamet's screenplay construction, at least he knows it's corroded. Chasing any lawsuit that will end in a payday, Galvin lies right to the faces of dozens of people. In this, he's no better than his opponents in court, save that they lie through the proxy instruments of forgery and coached testimony, keeping their hands clean. They sail through the system frictionlessly, while Galvin feels himself dying a little each time--unless it's in the service of something greater. In his wanderings, windowpanes and desk fans cast the impression of a cross over him.

Rob Roy (1995) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image B Sound B
starring Liam Neeson, Jessica Lange, John Hurt, Tim Roth
screenplay by Alan Sharp
directed by Michael Caton-Jones

by Jefferson Robbins Did they name a cocktail after William Wallace? I didn't think so. In this, the later Scots hero Robert Roy MacGregor has the advantage, as he does in the film drawn from his story. Rob Roy beat Mel Gibson's Braveheart into theatres by more than a month, and it's the superior product. But what challenge could Michael Caton-Jones's courtly, well-crafted tale of swash and buckle--his only film set in his home country--mount against the bludgeoning, ass-baring, gay-defenestrating fever dream of a megastar who yearned to be stretched on the rack in imitation of his Lord?

All-Star Superman (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
screenplay by Dwayne McDuffie, based on the comic book series by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
directed by Sam Liu

by Jefferson Robbins It's an adaptation so infatuated with its admirable source material that it fails to leap the gap between the two media. Anyone who glanced at the first page of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's "All-Star Superman" when it was published in 2005 knew it was special--a book that intended to crystallize the Superman legend and then refract the character to his logical/mythological extremes. That's been one of Morrison's most alluring talents as a comics scriptor. This is the guy, after all, who had "New X-Men"'s Beast evolving into a giant blue cat-man and shitting in a litterbox. So his Superman is a guy who can read your genetic code with a glance and temper a chunk of dwarf star into a housekey; someone whose goodness is so acute he can shame superhuman tyrants into working for the commonweal, all while he's knocking on death's door. In fact, in this twelve-issue interpretation, Superman is not only the saviour of his world, but also the creator of our own. It demands repeat visits--unlike its Blu-ray spin-off. The DC Universe direct-to-video films, from the shop of producer Bruce Timm, almost all share one common element: seen once, they never need to be seen again.

Vampire Circus (1972) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Adrienne Corri, Laurence Payne, Thorley Walters, Anthony Corlan
screenplay by Judson Kinberg
directed by Robert Young

by Jefferson Robbins I'm risking all kinds of things here, not least the prospect of becoming That Guy At FFC Who Finds Too Much Depth In Hammer Horror Movies, but this is my take: Vampire Circus is about the plight of the Jews in Christian Europe. I rubbed my eyes and swabbed my ears at first, but attentive viewing didn't dispel this impression. And looking at Hammer's entire output in the fright genre, it seems like a logical consequence. The British studio always made shockers that grappled with subtext, but by 1972, Hammer was fighting for life. Its bread-and-butter franchises had been comedically pricked five years earlier by Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, which threatened to bleed gothic horror of its frights just as Blazing Saddles would soon gutshoot the Western. As Hammer's market power waned and it threw open the doors to more explicit sex and more visceral gore, some larger story ideas were bound to creep in.

Justified: The Complete First Season (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

Image A- Sound B Extras B
"Fire in the Hole," "Riverbrook," "Fixer," "Long in the Tooth," "The Lord of War and Thunder," "The Collection," "Blind Spot," "Blowback," "Hatless," "The Hammer," "Veterans," "Fathers and Sons," "Bulletville"

by Jefferson Robbins Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Timothy Olyphant gotta sidle. It's the actor's natural means of locomotion--he may approach an object or adversary or inamorata head-on at first, but by the time he's within arm's length, his gaze has tilted to squint at his target with one coyote eye dominant. It's the walk not only of an actor who's thoroughly considered the best way to present himself to a camera, but also of a man who might have to reach for his pistol at any time. It may be an actorly crutch, but Olyphant can alternately wield it as a wedge, a hook, or a truncheon to coerce a viewer into watching him more closely. We want to know what he sees that makes his glare go askance.

Easy A (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Hayden Church
screenplay by Bert V. Royal
directed by Will Gluck

by Jefferson Robbins What do I have to do these days to see a teen sex comedy where teen characters get to have sex? Filmmakers have gotten so good at larding chastity tracts with suggestiveness that you come out of the theatre believing, for fifteen minutes or so, that you actually witnessed youth in debauch. So far, the 21^st century in teenage fare is like the Hays Code era all over again, only not well-written. Terrified at being accused of portraying high-schoolers doing what millions of high-schoolers do, studios have turned sexual misdirection into the best special effect since the lightsaber.

The Pacific (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

Image A Sound A+ Extras A-

by Jefferson Robbins The Greatest-Generation worship that Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks share is appreciable and understandable, but by the close of their latest collaborative HBO miniseries, "The Pacific", you sort of hope they've got it out of their systems. That's not to say the story encapsulated here didn't warrant telling--the flash conceptualization today is of World War II as a European war, where "rules of combat" may still obtain. The fiercely bloody Pacific campaign--very much a gazing-into-the-abyss kind of conflict, making monsters of men--has become a near-afterthought. So a big-budget TV treatment, in line with the star producers' 2001 "Band of Brothers", seems natural.¹ But by remaining "true" to the experiences of the U.S. Marines who fought their way from Guadalcanal to the doorstep of Japan, the story comes across as a thing of half-reconciled parts, periscopic views of the larger picture. I mean, more than a miniseries usually does--like it's two miniseries grafted onto one another.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Hammer Horror - DVD

HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)
***/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Peter Cushing, Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling, Christopher Lee
screenplay by Jimmy Sangster
directed by Terence Fisher

DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Christopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson, Barry Andrews
screenplay by John Elder
directed by Freddie Francis

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)
***½/**** Image C- Sound B
starring Peter Cushing, Hazel Court, Robert Urquhart, Christopher Lee
screenplay by Jimmy Sangster
directed by Terence Fisher

FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969)
***/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones, Simon Ward
screenplay by Bert Batt
directed by Terence Fisher

by Jefferson Robbins As one of the twin stars of the original Hammer Films horror canon, the precise and skilful Peter Cushing had the task of portraying both villain (Dr. Frankenstein) and vanquisher (Dr. Van Helsing). His co-star Christopher Lee, on the other hand, seldom got to be the good guy: when he wasn't baring plastic fangs or crusted over with dried-prune makeup, he usually embodied a more human evil. Lee's unmasked performances were assertions of will--his Dracula, for instance, overwhelms with force of presence and a hungry smoulder in his eyes. Cushing could not disguise his native gentility and bladed intelligence, but he could turn those qualities towards sinister or humanitarian ends as needed.

Party Down: Season Two (2010) - DVD

Image A- Sound A- Extras D+
"Jackal Onassis Backstage Party," "Precious Lights Preschool Auction," "Nick DiCintio's Orgy Night," "James Ellison Funeral," "Steve Guttenberg's Birthday," "Not On Your Wife Opening Night," "Party Down Company Picnic," "Joel Munt's Big Deal Party," "Cole Landry's Draft Day Party," "Constance Carmell Wedding"

by Jefferson Robbins Hitting its sophomore stride just in time to meet the axe, the Starz sitcom "Party Down" tries its damnedest to make an arc out of its concept: catering staff with frustrated dreams of fame passes out shrimp rolls to the Hollywood elite. Off-putting and cruel in its first season, the ensemble comedy hits its rhythm this time around, even managing to develop a theme beyond "workaday despair."

Mars Attacks! (1996) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A- Sound C
starring Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan
screenplay by Jonathan Gems
directed by Tim Burton

by Jefferson Robbins When Tim Burton calls in his Hollywood chips, it's usually, to our benefit, to facilitate his darker impulses. 1989's Batman gave him free reign to make Edward Scissorhands, for instance, and Warner Bros. incubated the bitter confection of Sweeney Todd after raking in more traditional bucks on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I daresay one of those Burton Unbound documents is his A-list romp Mars Attacks!, which today gives off strange vibrations that echo forward as well as back. It's a '50s UFO-invasion flick farce, of course, based on a 1962 trading card set illustrated by, among others, comics great Wally Wood. It's anarchic, unexpected ("Wha? Trading cards?" we all said at the time), and darkly funny. It plays in the massive footprint of the same year's Independence Day, and in its more biting moments, it somehow speaks to the great collapses of the subsequent decade.

Bored to Death: The Complete First Season (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

Image B Sound B Extras C+
"Stockholm Syndrome," "The Alanon Case," "The Case of the Missing Screenplay," "The Case of the Stolen Skateboard," The Case of the Lonely White Dove," "The Case of the Beautiful Blackmailer," "The Case of the Stolen Sperm," "Take a Dive"

by Jefferson Robbins With its accomplished but psychologically malformed boy-men, the first season of novelist-screenwriter Jonathan Ames's "Bored To Death" feels like a Judd Apatow joint transplanted to Tom Wolfe's outer boroughs. Its characters all want to be Masters of their particular Universes, but they're either hamstrung by their own neuroses or carting them along like luggage in spite of success. We know we're watching an HBO comedy, though it's often hard to discern where the comedy is supposed to be located. In Woody Allen nebbishism? In misdirection and error? In slapstick? In satirizing the hip, self-satisfied artistes of millennial New York's most fashionable burg? Barring a few episodes that succeed on the other points, the latter feels most likely.

The Prowler (1981) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Farley Granger, Vicky Dawson, Christopher Goutman, Cindy Weintraub
screenplay by Glenn Leopold and Neal E. Barbera
directed by Joseph Zito

by Jefferson Robbins Was it that the flicks got less suspenseful, or that I got savvier? Joseph Zito's The Prowler boasts an intimidating slasher (although "stabber" or "puncturer" is more apt, since he tends to pitchfork and bayonet his victims to death), a complement of gore F/X from the estimable Tom Savini, a compelling backstory that touches on the legacy of war, and a Final Girl (Vicky Dawson) who's fleet, smart, next-door pretty, and resourceful. Its closest equivalent is probably Friday the 13^th Part 2, released just six months prior, which likewise coped with horror passed down through the generations. What it lacks, though, is tension and surprise--at least in retrospect. There are no real shocks to be had, beyond the graphic nature of the killings and the choice to open a scare flick with stock '40s newsreel footage.

Dead Cert (2010) - DVD

*/**** Image B+ Sound D+ Extras C
starring Craig Fairbass, Dexter Fletcher, Lisa McAllister, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Ben Shillito
directed by Steve Lawson

by Jefferson Robbins That single star is for the concept--London gangsters vs. vampires--which, apart from some very fine lensing and decent actors, is probably the only thing that got Dead Cert any kind of release. In a genre thickly dotted with piles of shit, this thing is shit stacked high but glazed with modest visual sugar and a great high-concept. It barely merits a single viewing, yet you keep hoping something will switch on and provide a reason to persevere.

Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue (2010) - Blu-ray + DVD

**/**** ImageA- Sound B- Extras C
screenplay by Joe Ansolabehere, Paul Germain, Bob Hilgenberg, Rob Muir
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Jefferson Robbins There's this thing in children's fiction I call the Curious George Effect. A character transgresses, and in the context of that character's world it's a big hairy deal, potentially life-threatening. But the repercussions are so nifty-neato that the initial sin is shrugged off, perhaps never mentioned again, perhaps not explicitly identified as an error in the first place. The consequences for the guilty character are as follows: anxiety, cool adventure, reset to status quo.

Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue (2010) - Blu-ray + DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras C
screenplay by Joe Ansolabehere, Paul Germain, Bob Hilgenberg, Rob Muir
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Jefferson Robbins There's this thing in children's fiction I call the Curious George effect. A character transgresses, and in the context of that character's world it's a big hairy deal, potentially life-threatening. But the repercussions are so nifty-neato that the initial sin is shrugged off, perhaps never mentioned again, perhaps not explicitly identified as an error in the first place. The consequences for the guilty character are as follows: anxiety, cool adventure, reset to status quo.

Tombstone (1993) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image D+ Sound B- Extras B
starring Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Michael Biehn, Charlton Heston
screenplay by Kevin Jarre
directed by George P. Cosmatos

by Jefferson Robbins Achingly traditionalist, with an overstuffed cast, George P. Cosmatos's Tombstone is badly-served by its Old Hollywood instincts. Riding forth during one of those cyclical revivals the western seems to endure every decade, it had the bad fortune to eat the dust of Unforgiven. Clint Eastwood's dolorous drama, concerned to its core with the cost of bloodshed, was a case of an icon reminding us of what Anthony Mann did so well. In Tombstone, Cosmatos (he of Rambo: First Blood Part II fame, remember^*) was handed essentially the same opportunity, but he decided he'd rather be Henry Hathaway.

Hamlet (1996) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras B-
starring Kenneth Branagh, Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Kenneth Branagh, based on the play by William Shakespeare
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Jefferson Robbins You could tell it was an epic: it had an intermission. Kenneth Branagh's four-hour version of William Shakespeare's Hamlet may be the last mainstream film to feature an honest-to-goodness, seriously-I-gotta-pee-now pause-point in its theatrical release.¹ How daring was that, in a period when studios demanded 90-minute runtimes to crowd more asses in seats? When just a year later, people would unironically say "epic" and mean Titanic?

Soul Power (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte

by Jefferson Robbins There's a double filter of nostalgia on Soul Power, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's assemblage of decades-old footage from the Zaire '74 music festival. The Kinshasa-based event opened the fabled Muhammad Ali-George Foreman bout "The Rumble in the Jungle," where Ali reclaimed the world heavyweight championship--back when the thought that music and sport could change the world seemed less far-fetched. But while the concert showcase captures stirring performances from some of soul music's greatest figures, it still winds up being only half a documentary. The miles of film accumulated in Kinshasa--shot by Albert Maysles, among other notables--sat in storage until it got aired out for Leon Gast's rousing sports doc When We Were Kings in 1996. That piece is a valuable curation, recording exactly how Ali-Foreman (mostly Ali, by seizing the narrative early) energized a nation oppressed first by Belgian colonialism, then by Mobutu Sese Seko's dictatorship. That's not to mention how the fight (again, via Ali) reasserted ties between African-Americans and their ancestral continent, and was billed (by Don King) as a triumph for American black pride.

Daria: The Complete Animated Series (1997-2002) + Party Down: Season One (2009) - DVDs

DARIA: THE COMPLETE ANIMATED SERIES
Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
"Esteemsters," "The Invitation," "College Bored," "Café Disaffecto," "Malled," "This Year's Model," "The Lab Brat," "Pinch Sitter," "Too Cute," "The Big House," "Road Worrier," "The Teachings of Don Jake," "The Misery Chick," "Arts 'N' Crass," "The Daria Hunter," "Quinn the Brain," "I Don't," "That Was Then, This Is Dumb," "Monster," "The New Kid," "Gifted," "Ill," "Fair Enough," "See Jane Run," "Pierce Me," "Write Where it Hurts," "Daria!," "Through a Lens Darkly," "The Old and the Beautiful," "Depth Takes a Holiday," "Daria Dance Party," "The Lost Girls," "It Happened One Nut," "Lane Miserables," "Jake of Hearts," "Speedtrapped," "The Lawndale File," "Just Add Water," "Jane's Addition," "Partner's Complaint," "Antisocial Climbers," "A Tree Grows in Lawndale," "Murder, She Snored," "The F Word," "I Loathe a Parade," "Of Human Bonding," "Psycho Therapy," "Mart of Darkness," "Legends of the Mall," "Groped by an Angel," "Fire!," "Dye! Dye! My Darling," "Fizz Ed," "Sappy Anniversary," "Fat Like Me," "Camp Fear," "The Story of D," "Lucky Strike," "Art Burn," "One J at a Time," "Life in the Past Lane," "Aunt Nauseam," "Prize Fighters," "My Night at Daria's," "Boxing Daria"

PARTY DOWN: SEASON ONE
Image A- Sound A- Extras B
"Willow Canyon Homeowners Annual Party," "California College Conservative Union Caucus," "Pepper McMasters Singles Seminar," "Investors Dinner," "Sin Say Shun Awards Afterparty," "Taylor Stiltskin Sweet Sixteen," "Brandix Corporate Retreat," "Celebrate Rick Sargulesh," "James Rolf High School Twentieth Reunion," "Stennheiser-Pong Wedding Reception"

by Jefferson Robbins If he hadn't helped oversee the death of the music video, Abby Terkuhle's tenure at MTV could be viewed as the network's Silver Age. "The State", "Liquid Television", "Beavis and Butt-Head"--apogees or nadirs, depending on your perspective, they defined the channel in the '90s, until "Road Rules" and "Cribs" redefined it into irrelevance. Terkuhle, the network's director of animation and overall creative chief, left MTV in 2002, but when hipsters in the decade just passed whined that such-and-such MTV show wasn't available on DVD, they were usually talking about something he'd incubated. His reign straddles the cultural shift from the Age of Irony (David Foster Wallace, "Daria") to the Age of Schadenfreude ("Mad Men", the shitty-childhood memoirs of Augusten Burroughs). We used to be able to contemplate human abasement and crack wise about it, like Daria Morgendorffer; now the abasement is our entertainment, and we sit slack-jawed before the awesome pathos of Snooki and The Situation.^*

Pontypool (2009) - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly
screenplay by Tony Burgess, based on his novel Pontypool Changes Everything
directed by Bruce McDonald

by Jefferson Robbins Few things give me the willies like the sublimation of self. The idea that my essential me-ness could someday drain away and be lost--to injury, dementia, what have you--makes me shudder. At the extreme, there's the fear that some invading force, a me supplanted by a not-me, might subjugate my personality. Little wonder that Brian O'Blivion's monologue in Videodrome about communicating with his own brain cancer, or almost any mind-control scenario scripted for comics by Grant Morrison, can set me cringing.

The Yakuza (1975) - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras C
starring Robert Mitchum, Takakura Ken, Okada Eiji, Brian Keith
screenplay by Paul Schrader and Robert Towne
directed by Sydney Pollack

by Jefferson Robbins We'll never know what might have been had Paul and Leonard Schrader's original screenplay for The Yakuza gone unmolested by '70s script king Robert Towne, or had Martin Scorsese or Brian De Palma made good on threats to direct. Instead, the obvious gets overlaid on top of the mysterious, and at least one partner in this marriage of the American and Japanese gangster genres winds up shorted. Producer-director Sydney Pollack makes the mistake his best peers in the decade's American cinema dodged: he mistrusts the audience, believing we can't absorb backstory through performance and suggestion.

The Age of Unintended Consequences: FFC Interviews David Russo

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF LITTLE DIZZLE *** (out of four)

starring Marshall Allman, Vince Vieluf, Natasha Lyonne, Tygh Runyan written and directed by David Russo

The scion of a constipated generation, Seattle tech worker Dory (Marshall Allman) is sampling religions like grab-bag candy when a sealed bottle floats past during his lunch-hour Bible study. The message within could be either from God or from the famously polluted Puget Sound itself, but it sets Dory on a career-destroying spiral that ends with a new job on an office cleaning crew, scrubbing johns alongside renegade "artist" OC (Vince Vieluf). One of their clients is product lab Corsica Research, where a young exec (Natasha Lyonne, long missed but giving the least authentic performance here) decides the trash-scavenging janitors are perfect test subjects for an awful but addictive new cookie. The active ingredient impregnates men first with an altered consciousness (whole concepts break loose from language and float free in the air, in electrically beautiful F/X sequences), and finally with what can only be described as an incandescent blue lungfish. But it's not so much an Alien-esque affliction as an epiphany, with each man finding peace and even enlightenment in this scatological process of "childbirth." No longer adrift, they're vessels for a new life--the only kind that can survive, it's implied, in a world where Zoloft flows from the kitchen tap and breakfast just isn't a meal without Yellow Dye No. 5. Allman and Vieluf play perfectly off each other under Seattle writer-director David Russo, whose jitter-editing and hallucination segments recall Darren Aronofsky and whose screenplay references Philip K. Dick. Russo's deployment of soundtrack music skillfully twists the knife where it counts--witness the lo-fi but enchanting version of the Carpenters' "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" (by The Langley Schools Music Project, fascinating in itself) that closes the film, as Dory deposits a new message in the water and contemplates, as all new fathers must, a future for his children.-JR

April 21, 2010|The films of David Russo have a distinctly handmade feel, and often the hand becomes visible. A largely self-taught filmmaker and animator, he makes no pretense that he's not manipulating the action. When he sets his models into neon time-lapse against backdrops that strobe from sky to sea to blackness, he almost always winds up in the shot. In Russo's short creations and in his first feature film, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, bespoke art objects--or even just words--make long, looping journeys in search of some answer. But like most philosophical quests, the journey is more important than its endpoint.

While he developed his craft Russo carried on an eleven-year career as a janitor, a vocation that sharpened his sense of the things society values: what we keep, what we cast away, what we flush. His short art films Populi (2002) and Pan With Us (2003) (viewable here, along with most of the artist's other work) gave him his first wider exposure, competing at the Sundance Film Festival in consecutive years. More recently, his hand-wrought animation lent texture to the video for Thom Yorke's "Harrowdown Hill" (2006).

Dizzle's path from script to screen was fraught with financing issues and a slender production window. It wasn't bought for distribution after its Sundance debut in early 2009, and by the time it reached Russo's hometown Seattle International Film Festival the same year, its hopes for release were no better. Finally, Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film picked up Dizzle for a brief 2010 New York theatrical engagement and a video-on-demand run that starts today. Russo's renegade janitors, chemically enlightened and midwifing the birth of a new species, might manage to swim free of the sewers after all.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Sci-Fi Adventures - DVD

THEM! (1954)
***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness
screenplay by Ted Sherdeman
directed by Gordon Douglas

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, Kenneth Tobey
screenplay by Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger, suggested by the story "The Fog Horn" by Ray Bradbury
directed by Eugène Lourié

WORLD WITHOUT END (1956)
**½/**** Image A Sound B-
starring Hugh Marlowe, Nancy Gates, Rod Taylor
written and directed by Edwards Bernds

SATELLITE IN THE SKY (1956)
*/**** Image C Sound B
starring Kieron Moore, Lois Maxwell, Donald Wolfit
screenplay by John Mather, J.T. McIntosh and Edith Dell
directed by Paul Dickson

by Jefferson Robbins We're all mutants now. Those of us who weren't literally irradiated by the Atomic Age still carry its glowing cultural DNA. As we've built better ways to destroy ourselves, we've also spurred the creators of our science-fiction to imagine life in newer Waste Lands. Their work assumes that no matter how we survive each new apocalypse, our circumstances will be quite changed. The upshot of our atom-splitting folly would be not sloughed skin or violent cancer, but marvels and wonders, which would then seek our destruction on their own terms.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) - DVD

***/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones, Simon Ward
screenplay by Bert Batt
directed by Terence Fisher

by Jefferson Robbins I've wondered for a long time why I love the Hammer Film takes on the Universal monsters. I discovered them in my youth, so there's the nostalgia thing; and they typically involve stuff a young man loves: disfigurement, cleavage, viscera, cleavage, death. But the communion is somehow deeper than that. Guillermo del Toro describes his youthful exposure to creature features in the language of a Catholic embracing Jesus: "At a certain age, I accepted monsters in my heart." Yeah.

The Cove (2009) + Home (2009)

THE COVE
***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
directed by Louie Psihoyos

HOME
***/**** Image C+ Sound B-
directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

by Jefferson Robbins Critically assessing the environmental documentary is often a hard road, because it forces you to bear the competing tensions of shame, anger, and self-righteousness. You know you're part of the problem as you sit there spinning a petrol-derived video disc, typing on a laptop with tantalum capacitors strip-mined from Africa, but, damnit, you didn't personally spit-roast those lemurs. The best you can hope for, usually, is some beautiful photography, a compelling story, and a degree of responsibility on the filmmakers' part--a commitment to balancing science and passion in respectful measure.

The Gary Cooper Collection: Along Came Jones; Man of the West; The Pride of the Yankees; The Westerner - DVD

ALONG CAME JONES (1945)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound C+
starring Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, William Demarest, Dan Duryea
screenplay by Nunnally Johnson
directed by Stuart Heisler

MAN OF THE WEST (1958)
****/**** Image A- Sound B-
starring Gary Cooper, Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur O'Connell
screenplay by Reginald Rose
directed by Anthony Mann

THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES (1942)
**/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras C
starring Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Walter Brennan, Dan Duryea
screenplay by Jo Swerling and Herman J. Mankiewicz
directed by Sam Wood

THE WESTERNER (1940)
**½/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Doris Davenport, Fred Stone
screenplay by Jo Swerling and Niven Busch
directed by William Wyler

by Jefferson Robbins I thought Gary Cooper was broader. The way he carried Hollywood on his shoulders from the silents through the talkies to the threshold of the New Wave, you'd expect him to be broader. Instead, he was the definition of lanky. Where his centre of gravity lay was in his Rushmore of a face: in close-up, he's an impossible granite monument, like that ever-unfinished Crazy Horse memorial in South Dakota; in full shot, in his prime years, he's a broomstick supporting a boulder.

Lie to Me: Season One (2009) - DVD

Image A Sound A- Extras C-
"Pilot," "Moral Waiver," "A Perfect Score," "Love Always," "Unchained," "Do No Harm," "The Best Policy," "Depraved Heart," "Life is Priceless," "The Better Half," "Undercover," "Blinded," "Sacrifice"

by Jefferson Robbins When did we collectively decide we want to be rescued by assholes? There's a definite arc to the modern police-procedural hero, be it the off-putting but tolerable Gil Grissom of the original "CSI", deep-sea humanoid Horatio Caine of "CSI: Miami", or the despicable Dr. Gregory House. (Yes, "House M.D." is a procedural--its perps just happen to be microbes, household cleansers, and anything else that qualifies as not-lupus.) These prodigies trend towards purer and purer strains of antisocial dickishness, and their techniques of inquiry grow ever more demeaning and emotionally brutal. They use their powers of detection to heal society but in the process get to sneer at its mores.

I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009) - DVD

*½/**** Image N/A Sound N/A Extras C
starring Hayden Panettiere, Paul Rust, Jack T. Carpenter, Lauren London
screenplay by Larry Doyle, based on his novel
directed by Chris Columbus

by Jefferson Robbins I believe this is what it looks like when a veteran director throws in the towel. Morosely paced, edited with no ear for slapstick, perfectly mediocre in its staging, timing, scripting, and performances, I Love You, Beth Cooper (hereafter Beth Cooper) betrays benign neglect on the part of producer-director Chris Columbus. It's as if he tossed together all the ingredients for a thoughtful but teen-friendly confection--a recipe inherited from his late mentor John Hughes--and took it on faith that the cake would bake itself. There's even a weird invocation of the dead god of teen comedies: Columbus casts Alan Ruck, a.k.a. Cameron in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, as the hero's dad and supplies the sidekick with Cameron's absent, oppressive shadow of a father. That's not homage--that's the desperate rubbing of a talisman, a prayer to recapture lightning that leaked out of the bottle long ago.

The State: The Complete Series (1994-1995) - DVD

Image B+ Sound B Extras A-

by Jefferson Robbins "The State" probably had me at its opening kicker, a knockoff of the tumbling SPECIAL logo that prefaced every "Charlie Brown" program on CBS in the 1970s. The titular comedy troupe's eleven members are all about my age, so when these "twentysomething sketch-comedy whores" got their own show on MTV, this twentysomething sketch-comedy consumer was in generational tune with them. The members of The State clearly watched, and had grown up watching, a shitload of TV, just like their audience. Nostalgia's a powerful thing.

Important Things with Demetri Martin: Season One (2009) - DVD

Image A- Sound B Extras B-
"Timing," "Power," "Brains," "Chairs," "Safety," "Coolness," "Games"

by Jefferson Robbins If he ever gets tired of being Steven Wright with a guitar and a facial expression, Demetri Martin may have a future as a filmmaker. It's plain from the first season of "Important Things With Demetri Martin" that the comedian/actor thinks about the various parts of a given scenario and holds the branching possibilities in his mind in a three-dimensional way. This is typical of puzzle fiends and anagramists--terms which suit Martin well--and any producer/director worth a damn. His well-known line drawings, here set into motion by animators, make me think he's read both Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. His comedy is a realm where everything is nametagged and hypertexted. (See the title of his debut CD: "These Are Jokes".) No surprise, then, that his stand-up routine is a hit in this age of Google Maps and floating metadata. Wait 'til we're all staring through the lenses of our augmented-reality iPhones, swimming in subsurface information--then we'll truly be residents of Demetri Martin's world.

Dollhouse: Season One (2009) - DVD | Blu-ray Disc

DVD - Image N/A Sound N/A Extras N/A
BLU-RAY - Image A- Sound B Extras B
"Ghost," "The Target," "Stage Fright," "Gray Hour," True Believer," "Man On the Street," "Echoes," Needs," "A Spy In the House of Love," "Haunted," "Briar Rose," "Omega"
--
"Epitaph One," "Echo"

by Jefferson Robbins They're committing a grand social experiment over there at FOX, using some of the most loyal genre lovers in fandom as their rhesus monkeys. The disease they seek to wipe out, it appears, is the intermediary of the critic. Take much-abused, much-adored TV creator Joss Whedon; kick dirt in the face of his latest brainchild, "Dollhouse", when the poor thing is too weak to stand; and then, upon achieving maximum buzz by holding back longed-for portions of the resulting science-fiction series, release them through a hidden proxy and pretend it's a leak. It's pandering to geeks' idea of the Internet as a wild frontier, where the dispossessed can build a community and you can't stop the Signal, man. Meanwhile, for critics with a yen to stay independent of the studio's manipulation, they send out watermarked, shit-quality burns minus the fourth disc in the "Dollhouse" home video release. That missing platter features basically all the supplements any reasonable person would expect with their purchase, as well as the original, scrapped pilot "Echo" and the unaired thirteenth episode, "Epitaph One." So any critical analysis--like the one I'm about to perform--can be written off as sour grapes, spilt milk, the breast-beating of a self-appointed arbiter of good taste who's just mad because he didn't see it first.

What Makes Sammy Run? (1959) - DVD

***½/**** Image C Sound C Extras B-
starring Larry Blyden, John Forsythe, Barbara Rush, Dina Merrill
teleplay by Budd & Stuart Schulberg, based on Budd's novel
directed by Delbert Mann

by Jefferson Robbins In adapting his hit 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run? for a planned live TV broadcast, writer Budd Schulberg dropped two elements: driven Hollywood producer Sammy Glick as union-buster; and Glick as self-hating Jew. In an interview with Schulberg featured on the telecast's DVD release, he cops to scrubbing the former but not the latter. "I didn't think I would have enough time and space to adequately describe what the Writers Guild was and what the whole problem was," he says. Though Schulberg's not queried on Sammy's Judaism, it's safe to assume that throughline was a non-starter for a network (NBC) trying to capture Middle-American living rooms in 1959.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Like: FFC Interviews Lynn Shelton

Humpday director Lynn Shelton wants her men get to know each other better

July 10, 2009|It's mere coincidence, filmmaker Lynn Shelton will tell you, that her last two movies plumb the phenomenon of men reaching a make-or-break point in their friendships. Coincidence also, one assumes, that both films feature these bosom bros sprawled out across the same bed after the climax. The soft-spoken exploration Shelton began in My Effortless Brilliance (2008) finds a comedic payoff in Humpday, her third feature, which won a special jury prize at Sundance. In June, the film came to the Seattle International Film Festival for its first screening in Shelton's native city and base of operations--where it proceeded to win none of SIFF's upper-echelon awards, netting low runner-up status in the categories of best film and best actor (for Mark Duplass) and a second-place showing for Shelton as best director (with first-place going to The Hurt Locker's Kathryn Bigelow). Symptoms of a hometown backlash? Still, her flick had already outpaced many of its SIFF fellows in the race for distribution and strong word-of-mouth.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: Hachiko: A Dog's Story

Hachi: A Dog's Tale
ZERO STARS/****
starring Richard Gere, Joan Allen, Sarah Roemer, Jason Alexander
screenplay by Stephen P. Lindsey
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Jefferson Robbins SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's better than Marley & Me, but so's a Tasering. At least the title alerts you up front to the presence of a dog in this Lasse Hallström movie--the latest Japanaptation, after Shall We Dance, to star serial sentimentalist Richard Gere. As a lifelong mutt owner, I'm unimpressed by stories of fierce canine loyalty and homing instinct. The dog hears your train coming and runs to meet you? That's because he knows you're gonna feed him, you ass. The dog that persists for a whole decade after you're dead, however, could be called obsessive and stupid, not loving and noble. But because it's a G-rated movie based on a Japanese film (Hachiko Monogatari) that was in turn "based on a true story," producer/star Gere demands that your throat tighten. (This even as Hallström shoots Hachiko's POV in an alienating low-angle Cujovision.) Our famous Buddhist reluctantly adopts a lost Akita pup at his commuter railway station, unaware that this particular hound was whelped and shipped direct from a Nippon monastery, fated to shadow him through his earthly turn on the karmic wheel and beyond. That's the judgment of Gere's wise Japanese co-worker (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), who doubles as his kanji interpreter and kendo partner. (Offscreen, he no doubt instructs his friend in the tea ceremony, shiatsu, and how to make those cool ninja smoke bombs.) The dog must be magic: it arrives in Gere's Northeastern hamlet of "Bedridge" (you're shitting me) while the Christmas lights are hanging, just in time for the 1996 World Series. This film does for continuity what my dogs do for my lawn, it doesn't care enough about its supporting characters to name them aloud, and it even misidentifies Hachiko's breed. Gere's music professor composes the kind of faux-Vivaldi piano twinkles (courtesy Jan A.P. Kaczmarek) that grace the soundtracks of...well, of Lasse Hallström films; his work is so crucial that he ignores loyal Hachi's warning to stay home on the day he's bound to die. Not that it would've helped--if he can't be saved upon collapsing in a crowded university lecture hall, what are the odds he'd ride out a stroke reading NEWSWEEK on his own crapper? Too bad Hachi's owner showed so little concern in kind, letting him wander for years, leashless and untagged, through the town's busiest streets. Hachiko is the perfect illustration of George Lucas's alleged rule of cinematic emotionalism: if you want your audience to cry, kill a cute animal. It's instructive, in light of Hachiko, to revisit Hallström's 1985 breakthrough My Life As A Dog. In each, a grown man engages in barking to get into his wife's knickers. Also? Both films suck, and Hallström hasn't improved one lick since the first dog he murdered to make us cry.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: Deadgirl

***/****
starring Shiloh Fernandez, Noah Segan, Jenny Spain, Candice Accola
screenplay by Trent Haaga
directed by Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel

by Jefferson Robbins The word "zombie" is never uttered in Deadgirl, but the movie belongs to that genre, both in its plot device and in the way it uses the animate dead to probe a particular neurosis of our culture. In this way, it does the best job of its ilk since 28 Days Later..., and it resembles that movie in its question of women as currency or possessions in a world gone feral. Drinking and breaking shit in an abandoned mental hospital, two sexually-frustrated high-school slackers stumble upon a hidden prize: a beautiful, incoherent girl, chained naked to a gurney, apparently for years. She can't be killed (although she doesn't heal from injury, either), and her alienness makes her little more than a blow-up doll in the eyes of young punk JT (Noah Segan, channelling Christian Slater c. 1988). His pal Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) struggles with his conscience, torn between objectification of the Deadgirl and idealization of his still-living longtime crush (Candice Accola). A small cabal of rapists slowly grows around this sexually-available figment, and the lycanthropic JT gets trapped in the latter half of his madonna/whore complex, a prisoner-prince of his own personal sex dungeon. The young men of Deadgirl have no visible family life (scenes meant to give Rickie some stereotypically lower-class domestic grounding feel like afterthoughts) and fail whenever a chance at a healthy relationship presents itself. By instinct, they favour the pliable--with a hint of filth and barely restrained danger--over the real. Porn is easier than love, after all, and the same immature fantasy construct that allows JT to rape lets Rickie see himself as a white knight. Fernandez, the more classically handsome of the male leads, seems overwhelmed by the film's need to make Rickie both sympathetic and culpable. A reversal of roles, with Segan resisting Fernandez's call to prurience, might have held more surprise, while a single line of post-dubbed dialogue adds too much justification to Rickie's final choice. As the dead girl in question, Jenny Spain has no lines, but her portrayal is brave for rising to all its other strenuous demands--and her eyes leave us in doubt as to how mindless this creature truly is. It must be a good horror movie: I've been thinking about it ever since.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: Fifty Dead Men Walking

**/****
starring Ben Kingsley, Jim Sturgess, Kevin Zegers, Rose McGowan
written and directed by Kari Skogland

by Jefferson Robbins You're watching the wrong guy if you keep your eye on Martin McGartland (Jim Sturgess), a Special Branch mole in the Belfast IRA circa 1988. The one to mark in Fifty Dead Men Walking is his handler, codenamed "Fergus" and played by Ben Kingsley under a hairpiece that makes him look astonishingly like Ben Gazzara. As he transitions from mere manipulation of his charge to fatherly love, Fergus reveals himself to be the only character made valid by the script and fully fleshed out by the performer. Inspired by, but not based on, McGartland's memoir of the same name, Kari Skogland's film packs a history lesson on the Troubles into its opening act, then expects us to bond with a hero whose only personality trait is a lack of political conviction. Sturgess's McGartland is a Catholic hood with no love for the IRA, the Ulster Unionists, or the British peacekeepers in his divided city; "I don't have opinions" is his only self-disclosing line of dialogue. Fergus keys in on that alienation and grooms McGartland as an infiltrator, but the latter's turn towards informant is unbelievable, despite his stated desire to save lives. And who can tell why he rises so easily in the IRA hierarchy, treated as he is like a foster son by a high-ranking commander (Tom Collins)? He gets asked a few times if he's bucking for sainthood, and it's the only reasonable answer. (Consider his rebuff of flame-haired Volunteer captain Grace (Rose McGowan), who's strictly there to give family man Martin some temptation to deny.) Music-wise, any film that starts off with a blast of Stiff Little Fingers' "Alternative Ulster" is jockeying for my respect, but Ben Mink's score is The Edge minus the atmosphere. Skogland has some effective visual tricks--note how often characters are separated by ancient, broken walls--but her ace is Kingsley, who can carry off the clunkiest dialogue ("The hunters become the hunted," "The price of a conscience is death") and finds leeway in small moments that make his Fergus a human rather than a type. We thought we'd lost you, Sir Ben, somewhere between BloodRayne and The Love Guru. Well met. Nice hair.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: Art & Copy

**½/****
directed by Doug Pray

by Jefferson Robbins The metaphors that Doug Pray's subjects arrive at to describe their chosen medium--advertising, in all its forms--are atmospheric. "It's like air and water," says Jeff Goodby, creator of the "Got milk?" campaign. "It's around you. It's gonna happen to you." Art director and ad legend George Lois ("I want my MTV") is perhaps more honest: "I think advertising's a poison gas." Pray's documentary does a great job of illustrating where we are now in our relationship with our ads. Where it doesn't succeed is as a history lesson, save for opening nods to the era familiar to fans of "Mad Men". It was ad pioneers like Bill Bernbach who paired artists with writers beginning in 1949, sparking the "creative revolution" that put paid to Don Draper's business model. But in one sentence, I just told you more about that era, including its relevant date, than all of Art & Copy does. The personalities of DDB and other groundbreaking agencies aren't much explored; understandably, as a filmmaker, Pray is far more interested in the ads themselves, particularly TV ads. Moreover, he's only interested in the successful campaigns, not the stinkers. His earliest hero on that front is Mary Wells, a DDB veteran who later ran a campaign for Braniff Airlines that turned its ads (and planes) into theatrical productions. (In 1977, Wells taught us how to ♥NY.) Pray's talking heads display an unexpected philosophical bent (save Goodby's partner Rich Silverstein, an epic douche who thought "Got milk?" was a stupid idea). The late Hal Riney, who sold wine coolers and Ronald Reagan's second term with the same sepia tinge, admits to an unhappy childhood that fed into his advertising style. The best advertisers, all agree, are less artists than antennae--they capture what's already in the air, and spur their clients to strive for quality. "If the product isn't any good, I'll put it out of business," the wonderful Lois roars, "because people'll run and buy it and find out it's a piece o' shit!" Despite the theme they spell out for him, Pray can't successfully tie these amazing characters to his advertising-infrastructure factoids, and he seems to imply that we've been creating and consuming advertising ever since we made the first rock carvings. I'd prefer to think my ancestors had larger souls than mine.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: Black Dynamite

***/****
starring Michael Jai White, Byron Minns, Salli Richardson-Whitfield
screenplay by Michael Jai White, Byron Minns, Scott Sanders
directed by Scott Sanders

by Jefferson Robbins When last we saw Michael Jai White, it was in the biggest movie of 2008, getting a shiv in the uvula from Heath Ledger. The veteran action performer (Spawn, Universal Soldier) wants to shrug that one off with a joke of his own. The pre-credits scenes in Scott Sanders's Black Dynamite, a vehicle created specifically for White, make you fear another I'm Gonna Git You Sucka or Undercover Brother--a satire on '70s blaxploitation tropes that uses actual, professional camera setups, editing, and continuity. That doesn't last long. Black Dynamite finds its ground once Sanders appropriates the which-end-of-the-camera aesthetic of the worst/best black grindhouse cinema. (Rudy Ray Moore's Dolemite is uppermost on the creators' minds.) The titular hero is all that Shaft and Black Belt Jones wish they could be: Vietnam vet, ex-CIA assassin, martial arts master, and urban avenger, capable of sexually sating five ethnically-diverse ladies at once. (Understandably, he's prone to a lot of flashbacks.) There's a "new smack on the streets," flooding the ghetto in tandem with a plot to sexually disempower American black men. When his brother is killed in the crossfire, B.D. roundhouse kicks his way through a passel of thugs, Mafiosi, government operatives, and dangling boom mics--pointing out, with the up-trending body count, that the heroes of these things are seldom better than cackling psychopaths. White turns out to be adept at kicking ass while cracking jokes; someone should have given him an action-comedy years ago. It would be nice if romantic interest Gloria (Salli Richardson-Whitfield, a crackerjack straight-woman) had followed in Pam Grier's footsteps by proving Black Dynamite's female equal, but the character amounts to mere bed candy. Too, the filler is evident, though these points are great excuses to go get another beer. Ultimately, Black Dynamite achieves that confrontation with American political power that so much cinema of the 1970s--grindhouse or otherwise, overtly or in subtext--seemed to demand.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: I Sell the Dead

**/****
starring Dominic Monaghan, Larry Fessenden, Angus Scrimm, Ron Perlman
written and directed by Glenn McQuaid

by Jefferson Robbins I was genetically engineered to like this movie, a Hammer Films riff with dollops of Evil Dead slapstick and EC Comics creep-out--so I guess I have to blame the filmmakers for fumbling the experiment. It's rare that a gothic-Guignol seems to drag, but at 84 minutes Glenn McQuaid's graverobbing comedy I Sell the Dead could still be shorter, some bits of business dropped without harm. Then you've got a great hour of television with a fuckton of feature-film pedigree. Producer Larry Fessenden roleplays gleefully as resurrectionist Willie Grimes, framed for murder and ultimately beheaded. Awaiting his own execution, Grimes' partner Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan) unspools his story to a confessor priest (Ron Perlman), detailing how the pair moved from simply digging up the deceased for mad Dr. Quint (Angus Scrimm, who really should play Scrooge sometime) to exhuming the undead for added profit. The cast is game, but the movie can't seem to narrow its focus. McQuaid even injects a note of modern science-fiction to no real effect and introduces a third-act love interest (Brenda Cooney) who gets no real arc, though some redemption is granted when one completely predictable reversal is followed by an unforeseen second. In sum, it's a lightweight Halloween rental, a close cousin to Bubba Ho-Tep--although it lacks the heft of that film's meditation on aging and death.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: Cold Souls

**½/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Dina Korzun, David Strathairn, Emily Watson
written and directed by Sophie Barthes

by Jefferson Robbins We have much to praise and condemn Charlie Kaufman for, and popularizing science-fiction and meta-fictional elements to eyeball modern emotional displacement could count in both columns. In her first feature, writer-director Sophie Barthes deploys an amazing cast in an effort that will, for better or worse, be invariably compared to Kaufman's Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Paul Giamatti (Paul Giamatti) is in theatrical rehearsals for "Uncle Vanya", and all that Russian ennui is weighing on his soul. So why not have his soul removed and placed in cold storage, in a lab run by Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn)? "If you'd rather avoid sales tax, it can be shipped to our New Jersey warehouse," Flintstein assures him. In a machine that looks like an MRI from Woody Allen's Sleeper, Giamatti as Giamatti gets his chickpea-shaped spirit (or at least 95% of it) siphoned out, complete with the sound effect of a toilet flushing. But Flintstein also deals in "transplants" and contracts with unscrupulous Russian mobsters, represented by soul-mule Nina (Dina Korzun), who hauls the raw materials in her own head through transatlantic customs...so Giamatti's valuable anima isn't in the most trustworthy hands. Korzun is moving as a woman whose heart is contaminated with the pain of others, but Giamatti is the hinge for this relatively flimsy contraption. Still, what a hinge: bored and detached after the removal of his soul, he runs on fumes from his lizard hindbrain, and his "Vanya" goes from troubled to comically inauthentic. No one wears embarrassment, frustration, or self-doubt better, and an agitated Giamatti is so twitchy he actually blurs. Without him, a bedroom confession to his wife (Emily Watson, squandered) is a worthless moment. With him, it's Chekhovian. A Russian-lit scholar could probably unearth levels in Cold Souls that are hidden to me, though the film is valuable in two unexpected ways: it contemplates the way Russian oligarchs commodify the lives of their countrymen for their own enrichment; and it makes me hungry to see Giamatti as Philip K. Dick in the much-discussed biopic The Owl in the Daylight. If we're going to talk about misplaced selves and implanted experiences, let's talk with a master, played by a masterful actor.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: Nurse.Fighter.Boy

***/****
starring Clark Johnson, Karen LeBlanc, Daniel J. Gordon
screenplay by Charles Officer and Ingrid Veninger
directed by Charles Officer

by Jefferson Robbins It's broad-strokes storytelling set in Toronto's Jamaican expatriate community, in which each character and situation is understood immediately, almost subconsciously. Night-shift nurse Jude (Karen LeBlanc) is herself a patient, suffering from a potentially fatal sickle-cell disorder. It's her son Ciel (Daniel J. Gordon) who keeps her going, both figuratively and metaphysically--he's a magical thinker, reaching back to Caribbean incantation and rootwork, crafting charms to preserve his mother's life. Then washed-up boxer Silence (Clark Johnson), a closed book, drifts into their sphere; manipulated by sharks into underground pit-fighting and treated by Jude for a head wound, he leaves behind a red kerchief, like a fairytale token. Silence is en route to redemption in a new career as a boxing coach for youth, but no one in Nurse.Fighter.Boy can make it alone. Small elements of the film suffer, as when a sexual affair is disposed of too easily--a risk in this kind of dialogue-light approach. But the way these characters fall into each other's orbit (Jude is drawn to the gorgeous reggae and R&B coming from Silence's window, without knowing who he is) illustrates how the strongest families are sometimes created by chance rather than by design. Director Charles Officer and cinematographer Steve Cosens paint in reds, blues, and golds but seem to recognize that few textures are more beautiful than a black woman's skin.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: The Hurt Locker

***½/****
starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce
screenplay by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Jefferson Robbins It's either a shame or a blessing for Kathryn Bigelow's tense Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker to emerge now rather than in 2004, the year of its setting. Back then, war fury was all the rage and might have doomed the movie--we had to believe that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, or why else had we buried 1,100 soldiers by the time George W. Bush won reelection? But just the same, we could have used this reminder of the casualties who were still walking and drawing breath. Seldom squeamish about sharing tight spaces with sweaty males, Bigelow climbs into the Humvee with the "Blasters" of the Bravo Company bomb squad as they defuse IEDs in occupied Baghdad. Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) is rotated into an existing bomb unit to replace a technician pulped by a shockwave (Guy Pearce, first unrecognizable, then dead); James keeps his captured bomb triggers in a crate under his bunk--the locker of the title, though so could Iraq as a whole be. For their part, his new teammates are sorting through guilt over their fellow's demise (Brian Geraghty's Specialist Own Eldridge) or clinging to safety measures and protocols (Anthony Mackie's Sgt. J.T. Sanborn) that James knows can't possibly save him every time. Each disabled bomb is a sexual rush, calling for a cigarette afterward. He can't not accept the challenge, even that of a bomb stitched into a child's dead body. For all three men, the homefront--where James has an estranged wife (Evangeline Lilly) and a baby--is at best an abstraction, at worst a distraction from their own hovering doom. In their life in the camp, they are in death, with practically every interior (even the auto pool) a stark, institutional white, like Heaven's crappy waiting room. Bigelow, getting claustrophobically close with her camera and working from Mark Boal's eloquent but unflashy script, maintains a grenade-pin tension in the bombwork scenes but, surprisingly, lets out too much slack as James tries to take the fight to the hidden triggermen who detonate their payloads from afar. Ralph Fiennes cameos as a British merc who gets the Blasters tangled up in a sniper duel, leading to Bigelow's most effective image: while the gunmen lie in wait for the enemy to slip from cover, flies nestle on their faces, as if these men who rushed to embrace war are already dead.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: Humpday

***/****
starring Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard, Alycia Delmore
written and directed by Lynn Shelton

by Jefferson Robbins SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The difference in intimacy between male friendship and married companionship gets laid bare in the opening minutes of Humpday. There's the comfortable, cuddled body contact shared by young Seattle office drone Ben (Mark Duplass) and his wife, Anna (Alycia Delmore). And then there's the bellowing, clenching reunion of Ben and free-spirited old buddy Andrew (Joshua Leonard), who, not seen in a decade, arrives unannounced on the redeye from Mexico. "I respect the FUCK outta you, man!" Andrew declares, and it's both mutual and palpable--even though Ben bunks Andrew down in his storeroom, along with all his other old memories. The two chums pick up where they left off, when Ben was young and irresponsible, leaving Anna no point of entry into their fraternal duprass. Soon a mix of inebriation, macho brinkmanship, and terror of growing old with no lasting accomplishment drives the two straight friends to plan a video in which they will have sex with each other--for the sake of art. (Ben at first wants to title it "Tender Is the Butt.") They subsequently spend much of the movie papering over, debating, and justifying their pledge. Lynn Shelton's film--and the director appears in a supporting role, prodding Ben and Andrew towards commitment--is at its best in these easygoing, naturalistic, very funny scenes; she airs the discomfort of straight male friendship rituals, already heavy on grappling and the slapping of flesh, that suddenly become engorged with sexual threat or promise. A shame, then, that Humpday is heavy on foreplay but refrains, as do its lead characters, from consummation. After laughing so long at the mere discussion of straight male-on-male sex, imagine the cleansing indictment of the audience if we'd gotten beyond the second base of hotel-room rationalizations and bare-chested hugs. Shelton does offer us an extratextual happy ending, though: the sight of Joshua Leonard, terrorized on tape for The Blair Witch Project all those years ago, at last finding something to love in a camcorder's viewscreen.

Seattle International Film Festival '09: In the Loop

***/****
starring Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Gina McKee, James Gandolfini
screenplay by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche
directed by Armando Iannucci

by Jefferson Robbins It's the Downing Street Memo actualized as comedy. Spun off from director Armando Iannucci's own 2005 BBC series "The Thick Of It", In the Loop broadens its scope from the backroom foibles of clueless, self-interested British MPs to encompass the American policy vultures, partisan hacks, and PTSD generals who devise, or are victimized by, war policy. Ported over wholesale from "The Thick Of It" is Peter Capaldi's bloodthirsty Malcolm Tucker, chief enforcer for the Prime Minister and an architect of profanity in the service of intimidation. (He builds heroic ziggurats of oaths, then bounces luckless junior officials down their jagged steps.) Tucker uses the gaffes of international development minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander)--who publicly declares that war is "unforeseeable" on the eve of an Anglo-American military push in the Mideast--for political leverage, as do the warring forces inside the U.S. Pentagon itself. This pits the British contingent against their equally self-absorbed Beltway counterparts, including policy analyst Liza Weld (Anna Chlumsky--yes, that Anna Chlumsky), whose paper exposing the maladjusted intelligence feeding the war fever is itself being maladjusted by hawkish defense undersecretary Linton Barwick (David Rasche), and General George Miller (James Gandolfini), who fears the casualty projections for the oncoming clash. ("At the end of a war, you need some soldiers left, really," he pronounces, "or it looks like you've lost.") In the Loop works both as a Stateside showcase for Iannucci's floating-camera satire of ego-powered bureaucracy and as a marker for how British power must view itself today: a mere client state. Even the most powerful UK players are blown about by the Yank whirlwind, whether they're sexually buffaloed (Chris Addison's ministerial aide Toby, enamoured of wonkette Liza) or simply checkmated by well-applied Colonial ignorance (Tucker vs. Barwick, who molds Liza's objective pre-war analysis into a casus belli: "Take out all the conditions... Like 'might have found,' make that 'have found'"). By the time Tucker is reduced to nonverbal spluttering in the United Nations' meditation chamber, the course of Empire is clearly set--and not by its own choosing.