Film Freak Central

SDAFF '21: Catch the Fair One

***½/****
starring Kali Reis, Tiffany Chu, Michael Drayer, Kevin Dunn
screenplay by Josef Kubota Wladyka
directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Josef Kubota Wladyka follows his Colombian drug-trafficking adventure film Dirty Hands with the concussive, propulsive sex-trafficking thriller Catch the Fair One, announcing himself as an artist with the chops to handle an efficient action vehicle that functions as a vibrant social statement, too. It's a rich, angry work that has not a hint of sentimentality to it nor an ounce of fat on it. The uncharitable would maybe call it too straightforward: a march, brutish and uninterrupted, with a message that's more like a klaxon than a statement--but the picture is admirable for its unwillingness to gild the intensely ugly lily of vanished Native American women and white law enforcement's utter lack of interest in doing anything about this epidemic. Kali Reis collaborated on the story, a personal one for her as one of the most visible spokespeople for the MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) movement--visible because, as a boxer, she's the WBA super lightweight world champion.

Promising Young Woman (2020)

*/****
starring Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Connie Britton
written and directed by Emerald Fennell

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see this movie in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don't be a dick.

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Emerald Fennell's feature debut Promising Young Woman trails the same kind of buzz that accompanied David Slade's Hard Candy 15 years ago. Here, that buzz says, is a film that will turn the tables on predators in a meaningful way; it purports to put the bad guys on notice that things are about to change for them: the hunters will now enjoy a bitter draught of their own medicine. Delicious! Unfortunately, like Hard Candy, Promising Young Woman is a sheep in wolf's clothing, a mousetrap made out of wax, good intentions, and the right politics that pulls its punches in absurd, and absurdly consistent, ways. It doesn't help. It doesn't discover a new way to have an old conversation. And at the end of it all, it manufactures an ending in which the authorities it's spent its entire thesis crucifying as ineffectual are relied upon to be the cavalry coming to save the day. Promising Young Woman is the punk that wants very much to be acceptable to the system against which it's rebelling. At least it has some effective performances.

The Rhythm Section (2020)

***½/****
starring Blake Lively, Jude Law, Sterling K. Brown, Daniel Mays
screenplay by Mark Burnell, based on his novel
directed by Reed Morano

by Walter Chaw Over a black screen at the start of Reed Morano's The Rhythm Section, we're invited to think of the heartbeat as drums and breathing as the bass accompanying it. I would have swapped them, but either way it works as a symbolic framework to marry film to music, and perhaps the process of making a film to a collaborative endeavour like the frisson between musicians in a band--or the autonomous functions of the body that keep you going even when you're unconscious. When I think about "rhythm" as a metaphor, I think of the various breathing methods and strategies devised to help women through labour. Blame Stephen King's The Breathing Method, the only one of the four novellas from his Different Seasons anthology yet to be adapted for the screen. In it, a young woman has so prepared herself for the birthing process that her head goes through the motions of it even after being separated from her body. The thing to which The Rhythm Section aspires, then, appears to be to create something, or to indeed be something, so drilled and efficient that it operates purely on impulse and instinct.

Cold Pursuit (2019) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Liam Neeson, Tom Bateman, Tom Jackson, Laura Dern
screenplay by Frank Baldwin, based on the novel Kraftidioten by Kim Fupz Aakeson
directed by Hans Petter Moland

by Walter Chaw Cold Pursuit features the umpteenth iteration of Liam Neeson's angry white-vengeance avatar and its familiarity drags down Hans Petter Moland's English-language remake of his own In Order of Disappearance, as does the baggage Neeson's carrying around after revealing on the film's press junket that he once stalked the streets of Belfast, hoping a black man would start a fight with him so he could bludgeon him to death. When a white man "confesses" to being racist without initiating a conversation about his path to understanding the innate bias that would have him instantly equate the deeds of one black man with the character of all black men--not to mention instantly turn a woman's victimization and tragedy into a story of his own crisis and redemption--what he's actually doing is providing a racist/sexist dog whistle for thousands of similarly-blinkered white men to say "but for the grace of God" and, "who among us?" Except I've never thought the actions of one minority spoke to the worth, for good or ill, of an entire race. Not even when it seems like every mass shooting in the United States--and there's a new one every couple of days--is carried off by a mediocre white man who's usually angry with women for somehow identifying that he's not worth shit. I have certainly briefly fantasized about killing specific individuals for wrongs done to me or my family, but I have also never carried a weapon to their door in hopes they'd open it. I want to think I represent the majority. When the hordes sharpen their pitchforks in defense of poor Liam Neeson, though, it's cause to wonder.

Cold Pursuit (2019)

**/****
starring Liam Neeson, Tom Bateman, Tom Jackson, Laura Dern
screenplay by Frank Baldwin, based on the novel Kraftidioten by Kim Fupz Aakeson
directed by Hans Petter Moland

by Walter Chaw Cold Pursuit features the umpteenth iteration of Liam Neeson's angry white-vengeance avatar and its familiarity drags down Hans Petter Moland's English-language remake of his own In Order of Disappearance, as does the baggage Neeson's carrying around after revealing on the film's press junket that he once stalked the streets of Belfast, hoping a black man would start a fight with him so he could bludgeon him to death. When a white man "confesses" to being racist without initiating a conversation about his path to understanding the innate bias that would have him instantly equate the deeds of one black man with the character of all black men--not to mention instantly turn a woman's victimization and tragedy into a story of his own crisis and redemption--what he's actually doing is providing a racist/sexist dog whistle for thousands of similarly-blinkered white men to say "but for the grace of God" and, "who among us?" Except I've never thought the actions of one minority spoke to the worth, for good or ill, of an entire race. Not even when it seems like every mass shooting in the United States--and there's a new one every couple of days--is carried off by a mediocre white man who's usually angry with women for somehow identifying that he's not worth shit. I have certainly briefly fantasized about killing specific individuals for wrongs done to me or my family, but I have also never carried a weapon to their door in hopes they'd open it. I want to think I represent the majority. When the hordes sharpen their pitchforks in defense of poor Liam Neeson, though, it's cause to wonder.

First Blood (1982); Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985); Rambo III 4K (1988) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

FIRST BLOOD
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy, Bill McKinney
screenplay by Michael Kozoll & William Sackheim and Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel by David Morrell
directed by Ted Kotcheff

RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Charles Napier, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and James Cameron
directed by George P. Cosmatos

RAMBO III
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Marc de Jonge, Kurtwood Smith
written by Sylvester Stallone and Sheldon Lettich
directed by Peter MacDonald

"Hate war, but love the American warrior."
-Lt. Gen. Hal Moore

by Bill Chambers I suppose I said it all in my previous review, but that was some sixteen years ago, and my feelings on the original Rambo trilogy have changed somewhat since then. I attribute this to age (if not maturity), evolving cultural attitudes, and 2008's Rambo (hereafter Rambo IV), Sylvester Stallone's powerful reclaiming of the character from the clutches of self-parody and blockbuster bloat. Rambo IV is essentially a stripped-down redux combining elements of the first three films; that there's nothing particularly innovative about its plot isn't, however, a commercial concession--what fans were really left to pander to, 20 years after Rambo III fizzled at the domestic box-office?--so much as it's part and parcel of the movie's thesis that Rambo's singular talent for warfare, a blessing and a curse, will never be wasted in a world as shitty as ours. No matter how often or how hard he tries to drop off the grid. There's a moment in Rambo IV where we hear his interior monologue as he forges himself a new blade: "War is in your blood," he says. "When you're pushed, killing's as easy as breathing." The tragic weight of these words ripples backwards across the franchise upon revisitation. For the lesser entries (the second and third films), I'd say it now counts among their redeeming qualities.

FrightFest '18: Short Film Showcases 1-3 + Miscellany|7 Questions with Filmmaker Chris McInroy

This is a nearly complete overview of FrightFest '18's short-films lineup, though technical issues unfortunately prevented us from screening Catcalls, Puppet Master, and Right Place Wrong Tim.-Ed.

by Walter Chaw

SHORT FILM SHOWCASE 1

We Summoned a Demon ***/**** (d. Chris McInroy)
Funny how the coolest '80s throwback film that isn't It happens to be this short by Chris McInroy, which channels the light ethos of that era, with VHS nasties shock-effects scattered across its brisk, five-minute runtime. Idiots Kirk (Kirk Johnson) and Carlos (Carlos Larotta) attempt a little witchcraft by sacrificing a rooster and playing a record backwards on a plastic portable turntable. They're trying to make Kirk cool so he can ask out "Brenda" for tacos, but it doesn't work. Instead, they summon a demon (John Orr) from a neon-smoked Hell portal they can't control. Or can they? With its crackerjack timing, its tight script, and the effortless control and camaraderie of its leads, We Summoned a Demon works wonders in a short span. DP E.J. Enriquez's lighting schemes make the whole thing look like Michael Mann's The Keep, and, sometimes rare for shorts, the movie knows its length and absolutely murders its landing. Listen for composer Bird Peterson's smooth sax riff when Kirk finds his inner cool. Comedy is hard, guys; We Summoned A Demon is butter. (Scroll down to the end of these capsule reviews for an interview with Chris McInroy.)

The Equalizer 2; The First Purge; Superfly (2018)

THE EQUALIZER 2
**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Ashton Sanders, Melissa Leo
written by Richard Wenk
directed by Antoine Fuqua

THE FIRST PURGE
**/****
starring Y'lan Noel, Lex Scott Davis, Joivan Wade, Marisa Tomei
screenplay by James DeMonaco
directed by Gerard McMurray

SuperFly
**½/****
starring Trevor Jackson, Jason Mitchell, Michael Kenneth Williams, Lex Scott Davis
written by Alex Tse, based on the screenplay by Phillip Fenty
directed by Director X

by Walter Chaw McCall (Denzel Washington) is Batman. He has a tragic past and a tortured rationale, a sense of morality in a fallen world that aligns him with the hardboiled detectives proliferating American popular culture in the immediate aftermath of WWII. He was Dirty Harry Callahan or Paul Kersey in the late-'70s-into-'80s. No coincidence Death Wish has already gotten its own remake. No coincidence, either, a series interested in a theoretical near-future in which a day of mayhem is sanctioned by the government in order to facilitate a "purging" of intra-cultural aggression has received four instalments and an upcoming television series. The latest, The First Purge, serves as a "prequel" to the events of the first film. It's also, full confession, the first of these movies that I've seen. I thought the premise was interesting, don't get me wrong, I just didn't really have the stomach for it. I feel the same way about that new Mr. Rogers documentary, or The Cove. The world is awful. I get it. There's a limit to how often I want to be reminded of what we've lost. What's curious about The First Purge (and the Superfly reboot) is not that all its heroes (save one) are black and all its villains are white, but rather that its relationship to something like The Equalizer 2 mimics the relationship between "The Cosby Show" and "A Different World". One provides a kind of cross-cultural reassurance that minorities are interested in the restoration of the ruling culture; the other understands the ruling culture was never threatened in the first place. Sure, subcultures evolve in the shadow of the social order, but the social order itself remains implacable and immutable.

Fantasia Festival '18: The Vanished

**½/****
written and directed by Lee Chang-hee

by Bill Chambers A hit in its home country of South Korea earlier this year, The Vanished is a nominal ghost story in which a high-profile corpse disappears from the morgue. On the case is Detective Woo Jung-sik (Kim Sang-kyung), a washed-up alcoholic with the requisite Tragic Past (his fiancée was killed a decade earlier in a hit-and-run), which has put a pretty big chip on his shoulder for perps who might be getting away with murder. Like, say, college professor Park Jin-han (Kim Kang-woo), the "trophy" husband of the missing dead woman (Kim Hee-ae), who was the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Woo thinks Park killed his wife--which he did, using a fantasy anaesthetic untraceable after death--and has a reason to hide the body. Park, meanwhile, secretly fields taunts from his late wife that convince him she somehow survived. Because Park has connections, Woo is working against the clock to prove his guilt, and what unfolds does so over the course of one dark and stormy night in something resembling real time. The Vanished looks to be a fairly straightforward remake of a Spanish thriller unseen by me, Oriol Paulo's 2012 The Body, which is surprising since its increasingly byzantine revenge plot feels uniquely South Korean (think Oldboy lite), as does the fluid mix of tones and genres. It's also fairly engrossing and unpredictable, the satisfying albeit more pretentious version of John McTiernan's forgotten whodunit Basic, in which John Travolta tries to solve a murder on a Panama military base during a hurricane: Like a lot of SK cinema, it gets a bit bathetic in the homestretch with its distended mourning of fictional characters who don't really represent anything other than pieces on a chessboard. That being said, the whole thing might have more gravity if baby-faced Kim Sang-kyung better matched his character's shabby profile. Some time's gone by since he played the hotshot young partner in Bong Joon-ho's police procedural Memories of Murder, but evidently not enough. A simple solution might've been not to ascribe so much world-weariness to him and instead show that the grief driving Woo isn't something that's made him old, but rather frozen him heartbreakingly in amber. Fantasia Fest 2018 - Programme: Selection 2018

An Actor's Revenge (1963) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kazuo Hasegawa, Fujiko Yamamoto, Ayako Wakao, Eiji Funakoshi
screenplay by Natto Wada, based on the novel by Otokichi Mikami, adapted by Daisuke Ito and Teinosuke Kinugasa
directed by Kon Ichikawa

by Bryant Frazer An Actor's Revenge, director Kon Ichikawa's colourful melodrama depicting an elaborate revenge plot by a Japanese onnagata--a kabuki actor trained to play exclusively female roles--begins, appropriately enough, in the Ichimura Theater, where the very first shot illustrates that a panoramic aspect ratio is a perfect match for the wide proscenium. On stage, beefy and androgynous, is Yukinojo (Kazuo Hasegawa), a renowned onnagata appearing in Edo for the first time. This beautiful sequence, defined by Ichikawa's precise, modern Daiescope framing and by the intense reds, pinks, purples, and greens of Yukinojo's costume, is not just kabuki on film. It's simultaneously an expression of character, showing how Yukinojo experiences the rest of the world while in performance, and a declaration of aesthetics, introducing Ichikawa's stylized approach using techniques borrowed from or inspired by theatre.

Hana-bi (1998) - Blu-ray Disc

Fireworks
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Beat Takeshi, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi, Susumu Terajima
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano

by Walter Chaw Nishi loves her very much, but when she tries to link arms with him for a photograph, he pulls away. He's not comfortable with his emotions. He's from both a culture and a profession that frowns on that sort of thing. When his co-workers talk about him, they do so in hushed tones and warn one another not to get too familiar, even in their gossip. He's lost a daughter and his wife is very ill. They make allowances for him one day and it results in the crippling of his partner. Nishi avenges him, but another young cop dies in the process. Nishi, dispassionate, empties his gun into the bad guy's skull. But his partner is still abandoned by his wife and child for not being the man he used to be. None of this is how it's supposed to work. Men are taught to be a specific way and promised rewards for their stoicism and brutality. I'm 44 years old. It's taken most of my adult life to begin to unravel the ways that expectation and breeding have made it hard for me to tell my wife, whom I love in a devastating way, "I love you." I was afraid to have kids because I didn't know if I could tell them I loved them. I have two. I tell them every day. I make myself. Takeshi Kitano's Hana-bi deals with the consequences of masculinity--perhaps the most trenchant exploration of the theme not written or directed by Walter Hill. The film understands that some men can only express themselves through motion, which isn't enough in the best of times and is laughably insufficient in the worst of them. Of all the '90s masterpieces of world cinema, Hana-bi is my favourite.

Pumpkinhead (1988) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Lance Henriksen, John D'Aquino, Kerry Remsen
screenplay by Mark Patrick Carducci with Gary Gerani
directed by Stan Winston

by Walter Chaw F/X legend Stan Winston's directorial debut, Pumpkinhead is a strong piece with a few indelible moments. The first is when a country witch summons the titular bogey using the blood of a dead kid; another is when that same creature stalks past a kitchen window like an early draft of the Alien hybrid from Alien: Resurrection, with a similar miscegenated backstory. Between and around these high points is a boilerplate vengeance intrigue that literalizes the sins of the fathers in a Passion Play surrounding widowed dad Ed (Lance Henriksen), who, in blind grief over the loss of his adorable young son (Matthew Hurley), binds himself psychically, and physically, to the monster he's raised as his avatar. It's a Frankenstein story in that way, one with shades of E.T.--the bond between Elliot and his wrinkled flesh buddy is reconstituted in the relationship between Ed and an eight-foot monstrosity that's a little bit one of those naked cats and a little bit Giger. An impressive shot establishing Pumpkinhead as he strides into the skeleton of an old, broken-down church in blue half-light suggests more than the triumph of practical effects on a low budget and tight shooting schedule: it suggests that the film's simplicity could--should--be read as pagan folktale, complete with cautionary spiel, brutal exposition, and a surprisingly strong moral grounding. Pumpkinhead is literally about the impossibility of objective violence--every action, no matter how intimate or remote, has a spiritual impact on both victim and perpetrator. It's a surprisingly rich vein for something like this to mine, and it resonates.

The Good Dinosaur (2015); The Revenant (2015); The Hateful Eight (2015)

THE GOOD DINOSAUR
***/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

THE REVENANT
***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, a bear, angry junketeers
screenplay by Mark L. Smith & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

THE HATEFUL EIGHT
**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He's clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him "Spot" (he's a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film's final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar's The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space--as all great westerns are--between the old ways and the encroaching new. It's far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

Mad Max (1979) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Steve Bisley, Hugh Keays-Byrne
written by James McCausland and George Miller
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw George Miller's films are warnings against dehumanization, against valuing machineries over intuition and emotions. It's what drives the Holocaust parable at the heart of his masterpiece, Babe: Pig in the City; what made him the perfect match for Twilight Zone: The Movie's remake of "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." Though terms like "visionary" and "auteur" are as overused as they are misused, Miller is both. He's a rarity in the modern conversation: an aging director who shows no signs of a slackening energy or diminished focus. See also in Miller's work an unusual sensitivity to physical deformity set up against a righteous offense at spiritual blight. (He began his career as a trauma physician.) His films seek to do no harm, but sometimes you need to cut out some healthy tissue to get at the disease. All of it--the work as a doctor, the scrappiness, the impulsiveness that led to his strapping an airplane jet on a car and hoping no one would die (no one did)--is part of a creation mythology for Miller that's as fulsome as Herzog's. Testament to Miller's enduring influence and outsider status: he's a sainted figure, for good reason.

Fantastic Fest '14: In Order of Disappearance

Kraftidioten
***/****
starring Stellan Skarsgård, Pål Sverre Hagen, Bruno Ganz, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen
screenplay by Kim Fupz Aakeson
directed by Hans Petter Moland

by Walter Chaw I've been a fan of Hans Petter Moland since his ferocious Zero Kelvin, starring a relatively unknown Stellan Skarsgård as a psychotic trapper alone with two other men in the wintry Norwegian wilderness. A wildly-successful commercial director, Moland's work is more contemplative than you might expect, considering. He was hand-picked by Terrence Malick, to give you an idea of his style, to take over The Beautiful Country for him when the director was called to another project (The New World). Moland returns to the frigid Norwegian winter with In Order of Disappearance, which opens with a man shaving, cutting a square swath through the foam on his face. Cut to the man on a giant snowplow, describing the same shape through a blanket of white. It's a beautiful moment. Moland's films are full of them.

Fantastic Fest '14: Everly

½*/****
starring Salma Hayek, Jennifer Blanc, Togo Igawa, Gabriella Wright
screenplay by Yale Hannon
directed by Joe Lynch

by Walter Chaw The film opens with a brutal, just-offscreen gang-rape perpetrated on hooker Everly (Salma Hayek) by a gaggle of Yakuza scumbags. Escaping into the bathroom, Everly retrieves a pistola, secreted away The Godfather-like, tries to call her mother and the daughter she's never known on her cell, and then goes all spree-killer on her tormentors. But Everly is neither a rape-revenge flick nor a declaration of feminism, really, what with its constantly declaring every single woman character a "whore" in its first half-hour. No, what Joe Lynch's reductive, big-dumb flick is, is a sub-Robert Rodriguez ripper, marking it as sub-sub-Tarantino. To be fair, it also rips off, shot for shot, moments from Sam Raimi; from Reservoir Dogs in a poor, bleeding-out schlub dubbed "Dead Man" (Akie Kotabe), who fans of "The Simpsons" will recognize as Frank Grimes; and from Luc Besson, in particular (and if you're a carbon copy of Besson, the image fidelity is a field of giant pixels at this point). There's so little imagination in the imitation, in fact, that the director himself has described his picture as "Die Hard with boobs." Classy.

Fantastic Fest '14: John Wick

***½/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Derek Kolstad
directed by Chad Stahelski

by Walter Chaw Essentially a remake of Kim Jee-woon's A Bittersweet Life shot through with oodles of late-'80s John Woo gunplay, stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski's John Wick is, damnit, really just so much fun. Existing in a fascinating universe that marks it as one of the better comic-book adaptations without origins in an actual comic book, it features Keanu Reeves as the titular angry guy, taking on the Russian mob because they killed his dog. That's it. The way John Wick gets from point A to point B, though, with a reliance on what appear to be practical effects and a strong, smart use of Reeves's sinewy grace and muscularity, is a thing of action-movie beauty. Ultimately, it's a showcase for elaborate stunt-work and fight choreography, and, because I'm starting to think of Stahelski's film like the films directed by Yuen Wo Ping, that's totally all right.

Evilspeak (1982) - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

**/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Clint Howard, R.G. Armstrong, Joseph Cortese, Claude Earl Jones
screenplay by Joseph Garofalo and Eric Weston
directed by Eric Weston

by Bryant Frazer Consider the pig. Pork is damned near a gourmet food these days. Celebrity chefs will serve you layers of pork belly wrapped around potatoes, figs, even pineapple. They'll dip bacon in chocolate, infuse it in vodka, or drape it across an ice-cream sundae, resplendent in its brown glory. Your local organic market probably sells artisanal bacon cured with dark, fine-grained muscovado imported from Mauritius and flavoured with angel farts and faerie dust. The recent cinema has also celebrated the pig, via two excellent Babe movies and a decent adaptation of Charlotte's Web. It wasn't always that way, though. No less an authority than God Himself went Old Testament on pork back in the day, and it took the famous and completely disingenuous "Pork: The Other White Meat" campaign to rehabilitate swine for the U.S. market. What I mean to say is that the 1982 horror movie Evilspeak, in which a trio of crazed, Satan-possessed porkers burst into a bathroom and disembowel a nude woman taking a shower, couldn't have done the humble pig's reputation any favours.

The Double (2014) + Cold in July (2014)

THE DOUBLE
**½/****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, James Fox
screenplay by Richard Ayoade & Avi Korine, based on the novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky
directed by Richard Ayoade

COLD IN JULY
***/****
starring Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, Vinessa Shaw, Don Johnson
screenplay by Nick Damici & Jim Mickle, based on the novel by Joe R. Lansdale
directed by Jim Mickle

by Walter Chaw Writer-director Richard Ayoade's follow-up to his well-received feature debut Submarine, this loose interpretation of Dostoevsky's The Double plays rather like Kafka adapted by David Lynch, or Terry Gilliam at his most restrained. It's good. It doesn't plough new ground, necessarily, but its dedication to a theme and a very fine performance by Jesse Eisenberg as a man and his titular doppelgänger carry it over its rougher patches. Visually engaging with its washed-out, diseased, Cronenbergian/Lars von Trier colour palette and packed with innovative, maybe self-conscious camera flourishes and affectations, it all plays out a bit insular, a little too obvious given the entire history of the double in this kind of movie, but at least it's executed with a persistence of vision. What catches me up short about Ayoade's films, though, is that ineffable quality of audition reel. They're entirely identifiable by the breadth of their references: Submarine for its obvious connection to Harold and Maude (and why do I keep hearing "The Only Living Boy in New York" when it unspools?), now The Double with its portfolio of referents. If it happens to be assembled smartly, more's the frustration. I can't tell whether the movie is good because Ayoade's a gifted filmmaker or simply a great scrap-booker. I guess it doesn't really matter.

Maleficent (2014)

***/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Sharlto Copley, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley
screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Robert Stromberg

by Walter Chaw A gyno-centric reimagining of Disney's own Sleeping Beauty, visual-effects guy Robert Stromberg's directorial debut Maleficent (from a script by never-good Disney house-overwriter Linda Woolverton) takes all the ingredients for a horrible disaster and somehow wrestles a fitfully fascinating film from them. It hates men, that much is certain. Paints them as alternately servile and monstrous. Good men follow orders and are easily intimidated; bad men are sexually dangerous and violent. Good men know their place, led about on a tether and bullied into situations by women in groups or singly; and the rest, well...sufficed to say that Sharlto Copley, the most Ellis-from-Die-Hard human, is cast as chief BigBad, the good king Stefan. The film even goes so far as to suggest that romantic, heterosexual love is a sham, a dangerous one at that--something it tries to soften with a couple of doe-eyed exchanges during the epilogue, though I'm not buying it. In fact, had Maleficent truly committed to its themes of feminine empowerment and rage, had it linked them together hand-in-hand without entire agonizing stretches of Disney-fication, it could have entered into the same conversation as Tarantino's Kill Bills. Here's another film with a kick-ass female protagonist who finds strength in motherhood. Alas, for as often as it's great, it's limited by what its masters will allow.

Death Wish (1973) - Blu-ray Disc + Stone Cold (1991) - DVD

click any image to enlarge

DEATH WISH
***½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Charles Bronson, Vincent Gardenia, William Redfield, Hope Lange
screenplay by Wendell Mayes, based on the novel by Brian Garfield
directed by Michael Winner

STONE COLD
**/**** Image C+ Sound B-
starring Brian Bosworth, Lance Henriksen, William Forsythe, Sam McMurray
screenplay by Walter Doniger
directed by Craig R. Baxley

by Jefferson Robbins The urban vigilante is one of cinema's most potent, enduring figures, and it's worth asking how he got there. Michael Winner's influential but derided Death Wish drafts an explicit genealogy for its cosmopolitan avenger, granting him claim to the mantle of the lone lawman of the Old West. Bereaved through violence, Manhattan architect Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) takes an assignment revising a valuable development plan near Tucson. There he pauses to watch a cowboy shootout re-enacted for tourists, the bad guys toppling until the besieged sheriff is the sole, righteous survivor. It's a cheap, thrilling, thoroughly Hollywood portrayal of frontier justice, and it represents an ethos Paul's host Jainchill (Stuart Margolin) urges him to carry in his heart back to New York, where unlicensed firearm possession has been illegal since 1911. This tension isn't original to Wendell Mayes's relatively terse screenplay--it originates in Brian Garfield's 1972 source novel, published after the author spent a decade cranking out pulp western yarns. But Death Wish uses this element to make its own statement, grafting the mediated concept of frontier self-justification onto an urban morality play. The western may be dead, and it may have been a lie to begin with (and it may be the cinema of the '70s that killed it), but Death Wish is among the genre's inheritors. Don't all children eventually hope to supersede their parents?

Ms. 45 (1981)

Ms. .45
***½/****
starring Zoë Tamerlis, Bogey, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto
screenplay N. G. St. John
directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I first saw Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45 the way I suspect most men my age saw it: furtively, in my bedroom, on VHS. It had about it that aura of skeeviness I spent a good portion of my time hunting for at the local video store. My nose for such things had been rewarded with likes of I Spit on Your Grave and The Last House on the Left, films that never failed to be prurient in their rape sequences, no matter their nods to subsequently avenging our fair, fairly defiled, maidens. What Ferrara presents with this, arguably his second-most notorious film (The Addiction is unbelievable, and still only available on VHS), is a rape-revenge tale that does nothing to de-feminize its heroine--rather correctly, powerfully, identifying that the loci of a woman's power is indeed her sexuality, even as that sexuality draws the objectifying, dehumanizing gaze. It's why, after all, so many fertility goddesses are also destroyers, isn't it? There's a moment in the third Terminator where the female terminator, played by the already-intimidating Kristanna Loken, makes a decision to enlarge her breasts prior to confronting a male victim. If only the rest of that film were so wise.

A Touch of Sin (2013)

***/****
starring Jiang Wu, Zhao Tao, Wang Baoqiang, Luo Lanshan
written and directed by Jia Zhangke

by Angelo Muredda The blood doesn't flow so much as it spurts in A Touch of Sin, Jia Zhangke's invigorated if uneven return to straight fiction following an extended sojourn in hybridized documentaries about modern Chinese cities. More than the formal homecoming, however, it's the nature of the storytelling that surprises in his newest--the leap from the elegiac tone of films like 24 City into the more primal stuff of pulp. A wuxia anthology with revenge-thriller overtones, A Touch of Sin is an unusually direct genre exercise for a master filmmaker, in the sense that, unlike Steven Spielberg's Munich and other comparably shame-faced prestige films that dip a single toe in the waters of genre, it doesn't condescend to the populist trappings of the material. Jia isn't slumming so much as tapping into the righteous indignation of a popular tradition of stories about wronged knights and ruined innocents, sincerely transposed here to the working-class fringe of a nation state in the throes of late capitalism. If Jia's violence comes fast and leaves a mess, then, it's a testament to his willingness to get his hands dirty where others might have kept a safer distance.

Bastards (2013)

Les salauds
****/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille, Lola Creton
screenplay by Jean-Pol Fargeau and Claire Denis
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda A Claire Denis film through and through, Bastards is nevertheless a brilliant departure for one of the most distinctive artists in world cinema--an indignant revenge thriller with, of all things, a straightforward plot. Of course, the plot is scrambled, doled out in the runic fragments that have become Denis's stock-in-trade. We open, for instance, in the rain, as a throbbing Tindersticks track underscores a series of beautiful but inscrutable nocturnal images: glimpses of a man forlornly staring out his window, languorous tracking shots of a nude young woman in heels roaming through a deserted street, and finally a tableau of a dead man's body splayed out beneath a fire escape, surrounded by paramedics in the background as a woman, probably his wife, is draped in a tinfoil blanket in the fore. Although films like L'Intrus have primed us to accept such shards as part of an impressionistic array of visual information, adding up to a textured view of nighttime Paris as a hopelessly lonely place, in Bastards the pieces fit together in a precise way we're simply not allowed to know until we've arrived through the movie's own idiosyncratic channel, and at its own deliberate pace. That makes it one of the most elegantly constructed of Denis's eleven features--a grim noir story broken into its component parts, then reassembled into a haunted funhouse image of itself.

The Burning (1981) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Brian Matthews, Leah Ayres, Brian Backer, Lou David
screenplay by Peter Lawrence and Bob Weinstein
directed by Tony Maylam

by Walter Chaw The pleasures of Tony Maylam's The Burning, such as they are, arise when one engages it in an extra-textual conversation about why at the end of the American '70s there suddenly bloomed an exploitation slasher subgenre to provide a nihilistic gateway into the Reagan '80s. Really, when you look at the wonderland of '80s blockbuster cinema, there is throughout an undercurrent of Friday the 13^ths and Elm Street flicks, of course, but also stuff like Slumber Party Massacre, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, Maniac, Camps Cheerleader and Sleepaway, Mother's Day (which Roger Ebert referred to as a "geek" show--the kind that bit heads off chickens, not the kind that founded Apple)...all the lurid VHS covers that made browsing the neighbourhood rental joint such delicious taboo delight. It's that thrill that The Burning captures and evokes still--that feeling adolescent boys of a certain age got, pre-Internet, by renting something they shouldn't rent with the suspicion, nay, promise, it would provoke the same erotic tingle as hardcore porn would in a couple years' time. It's a movie very much like Tolkien's writing: if you don't discover it in junior high, you'll never appreciate it the way it was meant to be appreciated again.

Rolling Thunder (1977) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B+
starring William Devane, Tommy Lee Jones, Linda Haynes, James Best
screenplay by Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould
directed by John Flynn

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer Rolling Thunder's reputation was burnished considerably in the 1990s when Quentin Tarantino declared it one of his favourite films. It's a good call; Tarantino owes his career to his long-standing love affair with the grindhouse, and Rolling Thunder is in many ways the quintessence of Hollywood exploitation. Director John Flynn, who made a name for himself with his 1973 adaptation of a Donald E. Westlake novel, The Outift, comes across as an efficient, focused storyteller who pares narrative to the bone. That style of filmmaking really allows (or requires) performance to come to the fore, and in the intense vigilante fantasy Rolling Thunder, both William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones deliver smart and scary interpretations of the soul-damaged protagonist and sidekick, respectively. Flynn certainly wasn't a self-conscious stylist, and he ended up toiling in the gulag of undistinguished action pictures like the 1989 Stallone-in-prison flick Lock Up and the Steven Seagal revenge thriller Out for Justice. He died in 2007, and Rolling Thunder is just remarkable enough that you want to bemoan his anonymity.

Woochi: The Demon Slayer (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

Woochi
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Kang Dong-won, Kim Yoon-seok, Im Soo-jung, Yoo Hae-jin
written and directed by Choi Dong-hoon

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer With directors like Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, and Bong Joon-ho doing their level best to reinvent genres like the revenge thriller, the lurid melodrama, and even the monster movie, recent Korean cinema has been a wellspring of intrigue for movie buffs. You won't get that kind of ambition from Woochi, a middle-of-the-road adventure yarn constructed out of bits of Korean mythology, formulaic action beats, and Hollywood-style VFX work. It's featherweight through and through, adventurous only inasmuch as it switches gears partway in, moving from the generic conventions of a period martial-arts film to those of an urban fantasy opus set in modern South Korea, where centuries-old wizards are vying to retrieve an ancient relic. If you listen carefully enough during the quiet bits, you can almost hear the popcorn being chewed.

Iron Man 3 (2013)

Iron Man Three
*½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Drew Pearce & Shane Black
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw I laughed once during Shane Black's Iron Man 3--an unfortunate milestone for me and Black's films, which I have found, without exception, pretty amusing. That one moment is a reference serial post-modernist and industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) makes to Michael Crichton's 1973 cult fantasia Westworld. The Tony Stark character is not just the cocksure pop-cultural embodiment of Roland Barthes's work on semiotics and myth: he'd be Barthes's greatest subject for analysis--the object that presumes a pop-cultural universal constant. The place where Black works, in other words, is that place where everyone's seen and read and heard everything they "should have" seen and read and heard. When Stark drops the Westworld bomb, then, we understand the implication that Stark is observing an evil henchman to not only appear to be robotic and indestructible, but maybe sexy and Yul Brynner-esque as well--maybe a female fantasy, maybe a "stupid sexy Flanders" homosexual fantasy. Certainly there's a recognition that dropping a reference like this is pleasurable in a way that structuralism would appreciate, but only for the nerd bourgeoisie. It's a moment meant to create a sense of exclusionary cloister in the midst of one of the most widely-dissembled entertainments in human history, and I liked that.

The Fury (1978) [The Limited Edition Series] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Carrie Snodgress, Charles Durning
screenplay by John Farris, based on his novel
directed by Brian DePalma

click any image to enlarge

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. While Brian DePalma is nothing if not a leitmotif filmmaker, it's curious that he chose to direct The Fury right after Carrie. Imagine Spielberg following up Jaws with Orca--it's like De Palma was begging to be pigeonholed. And it's not surprising that The Fury wasn't as zeitgeisty: it lacks the classical simplicity and youth appeal of Carrie, with almost no one in the cast under 30 save for future softcore legend Andrew Stevens and Carrie holdover Amy Irving, a good actress who just doesn't have that X factor. But The Fury's echo can still be heard, because its ending is indeed that impactful. Nearly every review mentions it, and the terms in which Pauline Kael and her acolytes described it gave it a kind of porny rep that's since inspired generations of young film buffs to seek the movie out. (Armond White called it an "orgasm.") It is a great ending, but a revisit makes clear that The Fury is worth reading for the articles.

Django Unchained (2012) - Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw If Inglourious Basterds was an ambiguous, brilliant indictment of "Jewish vengeance" wrapped in this impossibly canny exploration of violence through screenwriting, performance, and love of film, think of Quentin Tarantino's follow-up, Django Unchained, as a glorious continuation of what has become a singular artist's evolving theme. It demonstrates an absolute command of the medium, of what film can do when tasked to do more than usual, and it does it by being some of the finest film criticism of the year. If the Coens are our best literary critics, then Tarantino is our best film critic cum sociologist, and his topics, again, are how we understand history through specific prisms and how violence can be both catharsis and atrocity--often in the same breath and almost always in the same ways. Consider that this difficult film's most difficult moment comes, as it does in Inglourious Basterds, at the very end, in an unbearably ugly act of violence perpetrated against not the expected slave-owner antagonist, Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), but his manservant Stephen/Stepin (Samuel L. Jackson). Consider, too, the idea that vengeance--particularly in our post-9/11 environment--is the proverbial tiger we've caught by the tail: our cultural legacy that we try to justify through any means, given that our ends are so very righteous.

Peter Pan (1953) [Diamond Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
directed by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson

click any image to enlarge

by Bill Chambers Since the 1950s, mainstream audiences have grown up knowing Walt Disney's Peter Pan as the definitive adaptation of J.M. Barrie's play and its subsequent novelization (Peter and Wendy), and that's a mixed blessing. For every thing the Disney does well, like the swashbuckling, it does something horribly wrong, like compounding Barrie's 19^th-century notions with retrograde values all the movie's own. For instance, the English Barrie may have regarded Native Americans as exotic creatures by locating them in Never Land, but it's Disney who immortalized them in literal red skin, then gave them a song celebrating their mono-syllabic cretinism:

Friday the 13th: From Crystal Lake to Manhattan [Ultimate Edition DVD Collection] + Friday the 13th [Uncut]|Friday the 13th Part 2|Friday the 13th Part 3 3-D - Blu-ray Discs

FRIDAY THE 13^TH (1980)
**½/****
DVD - Image B+ Sound B-
BD - Image A Sound B Extras B+
starring Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram
screenplay by Victor Miller
directed by Sean S. Cunningham

by Alex Jackson

"Do you think you can get through the summer?"

"I don't think I can get through the week."

One look at the teenagers in Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13^th and we can see they're displaced, without religion or identity. Shallow, dim, they don't have any past and they don't have any future. Their existence is entirely ephemeral and half-developed. Their lives consist solely of pot, sex, and menial work. We know that they're really talking about life in the above-quoted exchange--life as a biological process that will come to an abrupt stop for most of them by the end of the week, if not by the end of the summer. They think they're just talking about work and boredom.

Night Train Murders (1975) - Blu-ray Disc

L'ultimo treno della notte
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Flavio Bucci, Macha Méril, Gianfranco De Grassi, Enrico Maria Salerno
screenplay by Renato Izzo, Ettore Sanzò and Aldo Lado
directed by Aldo Lado

by Bryant Frazer It's feeding time for the monsters again in director Aldo Lado's 1974 quasi-giallo¹ Night Train Murders, which sees the young and lovely Margaret and Lisa (Irene Miracle and Laura D'Angelo, respectively, making their film debuts) cross paths with violent criminals while travelling overnight by rail from Germany through Austria to Italy. The stage is set as Pacino-esque stickup man Blackie and his harmonica-blowing sidekick Curly (Flavio Bucci and Gianfranco De Grassi) mug an alcoholic sidewalk Santa Claus in Munich's Marienplatz. Menace! With that kind of element loose in the cities, why would two girls choose to ride some skeevy midnight train into Italy instead of opting for a sensible air flight? From one mother to another, via telephone: "Planes are never on time these days."

Drive (2011)

****/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks
screenplay by Hossein Amini, based on the novel by James Sallis
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn 

by Walter Chaw The pink, cursive font of the opening credits immediately calls to mind '80s classics like Smooth Talk while the obsessive interest in functionality and work (and Cliff Martinez's awesome Tangerine Dream soundtrack) recalls Michael Mann's Thief, but it's that certain quality of masculine stillness that marks Drive as another Nicolas Winding Refn masterpiece. Its story is boilerplate noir: loner (Ryan Gosling) falls for young mother (Carey Mulligan) and is forced by circumstance to protect her and her son (Kaden Leos) against all the bad men. Drive is, in other words, Taxi Driver if Mann had made it in the eighties, a meticulous character study done in long, drawn-out takes and extended silences punctuated now and again by extreme violence. It's a smart movie--a quintessentially L.A. one, too, in its self-awareness (the nameless hero is a stuntman, Richard Rush fans take note), and it has an extraordinary quality of stillness that paints in confident strokes what it feels like to be completely alone by luck you call choice. A late scene with "Driver" holding himself around the middle, then getting in his car as Refn splashes neon on him and The Chromatics play on the soundtrack is something like a perfect moment in a film indicated by them.

Maniac (1980) [30th Anniversary Edition] + Vigilante (1983) - Blu-ray Discs

MANIAC
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A+
starring Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro
screenplay by C.A. Rosenberg and Joe Spinell
directed by William Lustig

VIGILANTE
*½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Robert Forster, Fred Williamson, Richard Bright, Woody Strode
screenplay by Richard Vetere
directed by William Lustig

by Walter Chaw William Lustig reduces exploitation cinema to the filthy stepchild of Sams Peckinpah and Fuller: one part animal logic, one part tabloid paranoia. He wallows in impulse, and his sensibility is 42^nd Street grindhouse through and through, from kitchen-sink production values to disjointed vignette presentations to a generally lawless indulgence towards atrocity. If Lustig's pictures have achieved a kind of cult lustre, credit his ability to alternate action sequences with B-legends showcases. It would be a mistake to attribute more to Lustig's pictures than workmanlike efficiency as applied to formula prurience, though there's something to be said for knock-off garbage done with a lack of pretension--done, in fact, with a distinct, naïve childishness that doesn't quite get down there with Jess Franco or Herschell Gordon Lewis (nor up there with Mario Bava or Dario Argento), but manages a little interest despite itself now and again, probably by (who cares?) accident.

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?

I Spit on Your Grave (1978) + I Spit On Your Grave (2010) - Blu-ray Discs

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (a.k.a. Day of the Woman)
**/**** Image A Sound B Extras B+
starring Camille Keaton, Eron Tabor, Richard Pace, Anthony Nichols
written and directed by Meir Zarchi

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE
*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sarah Butler, Jeff Branson, Daniel Franzese, Andrew Howard
screenplay by Stuart Morse, based on a screenplay by Meir Zarchi
directed by Steven R. Monroe

by Bryant Frazer Rape-revenge is the basest of movie formulas. What amounts to a social contract exists with the audience: during the first half of the film, you will experience the sadistic, brutal, misogynistic sexual abuse of an innocent, probably naïve young woman at the hands of cavalier thugs. And during the second half of the film, you will see this broken woman--this survivor--pull herself together long enough to exact a terrible revenge on those who wronged her.

Sundance '11: I Saw the Devil

Ang-ma-reul bo-at-da
***½/****
starring Lee Byung-hun, Choi Min-sik, Jeon Gook-hwan, Jeon Ho-jin
screenplay by Park Hoon-jung
directed by Kim Ji-woon

by Alex Jackson The rape scenes in Kim Ji-woon's I Saw the Devil are the most blatantly eroticized and sadistic I've seen since Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, but they're countered by the hilariously gory revenge scenes against the rapist (Choi Min-sik) by his victim's boyfriend (Lee Byung-hun). The film isn't trying to rationalize the rape with the revenge or the revenge with the rape. Rather, it regards women and the men who rape them as equally undeserving of our sympathy. One is tortured for thrills, the other tortured for laughs. There doesn't appear to be any kind of coherent moral perspective here, it's just Kim pushing our buttons and taking whatever strong reaction he can get. What makes I Saw the Devil so very good is that he pushes them exceptionally well. I kind of agree with Bret Easton Ellis, who said, "If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you're screwed. I think that's not a way to look at movies." I suppose you could dismiss I Saw the Devil as superficial or even immoral, but that seems to minimize how viscerally stimulating it all is. There's the shocking first attack, a tour-de-force multiple stabbing in a taxicab, witty homages to Blue Velvet, Kill Bill, Vol. 1, and Se7en, and the strangely poignant image of the rapist-killer playing guitar over the body of his latest conquest. If the film has anything substantive to say about vengeance, it might actually be saying it through its length. After two-and-a-half hours of revenge and counter-revenge, we're just plain exhausted. More than the idea that the boyfriend has essentially changed roles with his girlfriend's rapist, or that he's doing this more for himself than for her, what ultimately comes across is that neither the rapist nor the boyfriend will ever stop on his own accord. It's perfectly noble to ensure that evildoing is ultimately punished, but you reach a point where you simply have to let it go and get on with your life.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro
screenplay by Ehren Kruger & Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw The worst summer in recent memory continues as Michael Bay brings his slow push-ins and Lazy Susan dolly shots back to the cineplex with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (hereafter Transformers 2), the ugliest, most hateful, most simple-minded and incomprehensible assault on art and decency since the last Michael Bay movie. It's bad (that goes without saying), and it's possible that even its fans will have the brute sense to recognize that it's bad--but it's bad in such a way that defies easy description. It's so bad, it's exasperating. The action, as you'd expect, is impossible to follow, with long stretches cascading in on one another without the slightest notion of who's winning, where, and to what end. But that's not why it's bad. It suggests that the evil robots have perfected Terminator technology in the manufacture of a gorgeous slut-bot (Isabel Lucas), who, before trying to kill the returning Sam (Shia LaBeouf) with her go-go-gadget tongue, is humiliated by having heroic Autobot Bumblebee money-shot robot semen all over her face. But that's not why it's bad, either. Ridiculously poor filmmaking and Bay's wearying misogyny aren't "bad," per se, so much as they're the tools of his auteur canon, of his absolute gold-standard grasp of what it is that prepubescent boys are into and his desire to, as fast as he can, create undercover hardcore porn to gratify those desires. What else to make of the weird girl issues--the entire co-ed Michael Bay U campus populated with hot bimbo chattel, Bay's camera leering obligingly? It's tough to make someone feel sorry for Megan Fox, yet the extent to which she's objectified in this flick has you looking for track marks, smeared mascara, and other evidence of bus-stop porn-star exploitation.

Kill Bill, Volume 2 (2004) - Blu-ray Disc

Kill Bill, Vol. 2
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Genre poetry from B-movies' poet laureate, Quentin Tarantino's conclusion to Kill Bill is marked by the filmmaker's carefully-calibrated celluloid insanity, as well as a deceptive maturity that allows a few powerfully-struck grace notes for the cult of femininity and the sanctity of motherhood. Its first portion overwhelming for its craft before lodging in the craw with its ever-present but tantalizingly difficult-to-nail moral code, Tarantino's epic whole clarifies a dedication to a sort of low, Samuel Fuller/Nicholas Ray tabloid cosmology, grounding itself eventually in the bold, lovely, curiously old-fashioned declaration that the last best reward is to be true to the primal clay of an idea of innate gender roles. The Bride (Uma Thurman) is so named not merely for camp grandeur's sake, but also to highlight the power of cultural archetypes and their roots in biology.

Kill Bill, Volume 1 (2003) - Blu-ray Disc

Kill Bill, Vol. 1
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, David Carradine
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw There is a palpable, undeniable perversity to Quentin Tarantino's fourth feature film, a taste for the extreme so gleeful and smart that its references are homage and its puerility virtue. I seem to find a reason between every Tarantino film to dislike him, to cast aspersions on my memories of his films, but I'm starting to think the source of my dislike is jealousy. Tarantino is the director Spielberg is too timid to be: a gifted visual craftsman unafraid of the contents of his psychic closet, and a film brat whose teachers happen to be blaxploitation, samurai epics, and Shaw Brothers chop-socky instead of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. And it isn't that I have aspirations of becoming a filmmaker, it's just that I want to be as good at something as Tarantino is at making movies.

Dirty Harry [Ultimate Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

DIRTY HARRY (1971)
****/**** IMAGE A- SOUND A- EXTRAS A
starring Clint Eastwood, Harry Guardino, Reni Santoni, Andy Robinson
screenplay by Julian Fink & R.M. Fink and Dean Riesner
directed by Don Siegel

MAGNUM FORCE (1973)
***/**** IMAGE A SOUND A- EXTRAS B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Hal Holbrook, Mitchell Ryan, David Soul
screenplay by John Milius and Michael Cimino
directed by Ted Post

THE ENFORCER (1976)
**/**** IMAGE A- SOUND A EXTRAS B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Tyne Daly, Harry Guardino, Bradford Dillman
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant and Dean Riesner
directed by James Fargo

SUDDEN IMPACT (1983)
*½/**** IMAGE C+ SOUND A- EXTRAS B
starring Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Pat Hingle, Bradford Dillman
screenplay by Joseph C. Stinson
directed by Clint Eastwood

THE DEAD POOL (1988)
***/**** IMAGE A+ SOUND A- EXTRAS B-
starring Clint Eastwood, Patricia Clarkson, Liam Neeson, Evan C. Kim
screenplay by Steve Sharon
directed by Buddy Van Horn

DIRTY HARRY

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The barrel of a sniper rifle seeps through a memorial-wall dedication to San Francisco's finest, and Don Siegel's Dirty Harry establishes right off the bat that the war on crime is just that: a war; the real question is how to properly fight it when the only real motivators are fear and anger. The film already has its ready-made villain in a fictionalized version of the Bay Area's own Zodiac Killer, "Scorpio" (Andy Robinson, almost certainly the greatest madman in cinematic history), and the viewer encounters a terrifying golem personifying his frustrations with killers consistently eluding a seemingly-helpless police force and criminals who are caught and released back into society on mere technicalities. Dirty Harry only takes the next logical step by pandering to our basest desires with an equally frightening and chaotic icon: "Dirty Harry" Callahan (Clint Eastwood, at the top of his game), an inspector in the SFPD's Homicide department who lost his wife to a drunk driver a while back and now takes it out on the rest of criminal society with his .44 Magnum, blasting a hole through any motherfucker unfortunate enough to disturb the peace in his presence. The French Connection's Popeye Doyle impressed with his dogged determination, but Harry is the genuine realization of a dick-raising fantasy of the quintessential modern man (notice that the numbers of his radio call sign, "Inspector 71," reflect the film's year of release) in that he gives us everything we want without burdening us with the trauma of actually having to become him.

V for Vendetta (2006) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, John Hurt
screenplay by The Wachowski Brothers, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore & David Lloyd
directed by James McTeigue

by Walter Chaw As documents for the opposition go, V for Vendetta may be the ballsiest, angriest picture of the current administration, flashing without apology images of naked prisoners of the state, shackled in black hoods and held in clear acrylic boxes while a febrile talking head and his cloistered intimates (called "fingers") form a closed fist around them. It surmises a future where the government plants stories in centrally-owned media conglomerates, controlling groupthink by providing just one point of view. Woe be unto those with a critical mind because what, after all, is more dangerous to a dictatorial theocracy than a question? But more, the picture is an impassioned plea for alternative lifestyles, exposing the melodrama of Brokeback Mountain to be embarrassed, even polite, when the struggle for equal regard is something that should be undertaken with passion and brio--it's life and death, and V for Vendetta presents it as such. There are no half measures in a film that takes as its hero an eloquent monologist in a Guy Fawkes mask (Hugo Weaving), his erstwhile, reluctant sidekick a young woman, Evey (Natalie Portman), transformed through the government-sanctioned abduction of her parents and a period of torture and imprisonment into not an avenging angel, but a voice of reason. How fascinating that the reasonable solution in the picture is the destruction of Britain's Parliament on the Thames.

The Butcher Boy (1998) + The Brave One (2007) - DVDs

THE BUTCHER BOY
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Eammon Owens, Alan Boyle
screenplay by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe, based on the novel by McCabe
directed by Neil Jordan

THE BRAVE ONE
***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews, Nicky Katt
screenplay by Roderick Taylor & Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort
directed by Neil Jordan

THE BUTCHER BOY

by Walter Chaw Opening with a series of panels from Golden Age comics produced circa the era in which the film is set (i.e., 1962), The Butcher Boy identifies Neil Jordan as a director with a secret yen for superhero fantasies. It certainly jibes with the filmmaker's affection for protagonists who, for whatever reason, live in private worlds, in fairytale dreamscapes populated by emblems of good and emissaries of evil--worlds where the most colourful places are the interiors of churches, where the characters' fears and failings alike are assets. Jordan's films are unfailingly about transformation (though sometimes they're about the failure to transform adequately, or quickly enough) and heavy with the illness of existential introspection--the Judas strain with which the modern superhero pantheon is sick. His heroes are rendered simple by their duality, confronted by the idea that for as hollow as it is to change to fit the demands of a particular time and place, it's equally useless to try to stay the same as the world falls down. Jordan makes the movies Terry Gilliam never quite made until Tideland; far from the compassionate fare many label it, his oeuvre is comprised of harsh little ditties about the voraciousness of the social organism and the bites it takes out of individuals living perpendicular to the absolute mean. For me, all of his films, from The Crying Game to Mona Lisa, from The End of the Affair to Interview with the Vampire, are pointedly concerned with the futility of compensatory measures in the lives of deviants.

Sundance '08: Red

*/****
starring Brian Cox, Tom Sizemore, Kim Dickens, Amanda Plummer
screenplay by Stephen Susco
directed by Trygve Allister Diesen and Lucky McKee

by Alex Jackson Hilariously bad. See it with somebody you love just so you have it in your mutual lexicon. The titular Red, a 14-year-old dog, belongs to Avery (Brian Cox), a small-town store owner. Avery and Red are fishing one lazy afternoon when they are approached by a trio of delinquent teens, who rob them at gunpoint. When Avery is unable to produce a satisfactory amount of money, the leader shoots Red in the head. Avery goes to the boy's wealthy father (Tom Sizemore) to get an apology only to see his accusations dismissed. He can't let this go, however--Red wasn't only his best friend, he was the last remnant of his family. And so he pursues the three boys himself, his rage at this injustice increasingly mounting. A typical scene in the film shows Avery walking into the local gun shop to suss out who bought the shotgun that killed Red. The clerk refuses to divulge the information until Avery tells him, "They shot my dog," at which point the proprietor tells the clerk to give Avery whatever he asks for. He has a dog, too, you see. On a hunting trip he accidentally shot his foot off and the dog started barking for help. That was the last time the little guy ate Alpo, it's been top sirloin ever since. I am not making any of this up. Red is, without irony, a straightforward revenge tale centred on Man's bond with Canine. There is no attempt to explore this material from some kind of sane perspective. Lightly, it suggests that Avery never got over the death of his wife, thus preventing him from forming a romantic bond with other women; and he finds a parental relationship with his adult son (admittedly pretty rotten, we learn through a hilariously melodramatic monologue) too complicated to pursue. He prefers the company of dogs because they're endlessly loyal, loving, and simple--much unlike human beings. The film takes this at face value, never pushing Avery to see that attitude as a crutch and grow as a person. I suppose Red deserves praise for never condescending to the material or copping a superior attitude, but it needs to be a lot more sophisticated if it is to survive even the most rudimentary analysis.

Lady in the Water (2006) + Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)|Lady in the Water [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

LADY IN THE WATER
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bob Balaban, Jeffrey Wright
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Chinjeolhan geumjassi
****/****
starring Lee Yeong-ae, Choi Min-sik, Kim Shi-hoo, Kwon Yea-young
written and directed by Park Chanwook

by Walter Chaw The creeping, inescapable feeling is that M. Night Shyamalan would like to be known as "M. Christ Shyamalan": a guy who wants you to drink the Kool-Aid; a messiah with a shrinking flock preaching a platform that his increasingly deluded, astonishingly arrogant fables are actually themselves the secret to world peace. He claims to hear voices--the first couple of times he did so (here in the stray interview, there in The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, that abhorrent mock-documentary he did for the Sci-Fi Channel), I thought he was kidding. Hell, the first couple of times he did it, he probably was kidding. But I don't think he's kidding anymore. And there's no longer any currency in playing this ethereal shaman card. Prancing about like a mystic while shitting away millions of other people's money isn't a pastime with longevity: it's something only a zealot would do. I think he's gone off the deep end, hubris first, overfed to bloating on a steady diet of his own press and the tender ministrations of yes-men too afraid to set off Shyamalan's diseased persecution complex by telling him that while he might be good at a few things, Lady in the Water was unsalvageable. When Disney executives did approximately that, Shyamalan took his ball and went across the street to Warner Brothers.

Orca: The Killer Whale (1977) - DVD

Orca
***/**** Image B Sound B
starring Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, Will Sampson, Bo Derek
screenplay by Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati
directed by Michael Anderson

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I was scared off of Orca, widely considered to be one of the worst films of all-time. The movie had a reputation as a bad Jaws rip-off and my last viewing of a bad Jaws rip-off was Lamberto Bava's Devilfish on "Mystery Science Theater 3000", which was awful enough to make me question what I was doing spending my Saturday mornings watching "Mystery Science Theater 3000". Well, I'm pleased to report that Orca's reputation is completely unwarranted. Critics and audiences were wrong, they just didn't get it. They labelled it a "Jaws rip-off" before setting foot in the theatre and watched it on autopilot.

Red Eye (2005) [Widescreen] + Four Brothers (2005) [Special Collector's Edition - Widescreen] - DVDs

RED EYE
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox, Jack Scalia
screenplay by Carl Ellsworth
directed by Wes Craven

FOUR BROTHERS
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese, André 3000, Garrett Hedlund
screenplay by David Elliot & Paul Lovett
directed by John Singleton

by Walter Chaw If it barely registers at under ninety minutes, Wes Craven's high-concept thriller Red-Eye is carried along by a couple of excellent lead performances (from Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams) and a revenge subtext that lends surprising gravity to the lingering sensitivity of a sexual assault victim's scars. Red-Eye plays its 9/11 hand--and what else would you expect from a film about an assassination attempt on the Director of Homeland Security that takes place mostly on an airplane--as a metaphor for rape, because rape, after all, is as good a metaphor as any for a terrorist attack on native soil. Look to the glut of home invasion films (of which this is also one) in 2005 as further clarification of that connection--aliens of an inscrutable nature and purpose (and morality, it goes without saying) have come into the places we thought most sacred and taken what they wanted of our innocence: our once inviolate sense of security. Heady stuff for a film that is essentially Nick of Time on a plane, and indeed it may ultimately be too slight a framework to support the amount of topical sociology I'm tempted to ask it to bear, but there are moments now and again weighted with so much proverbial baggage that Red-Eye, with its melancholy regret, sucks the air right out of the theatre.

Dracula III: Legacy (2005); Hellraiser: Deader (2005); The Crow: Wicked Prayer (2005) - DVDs

DRACULA III: LEGACY
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jason Scott Lee, Jason London, Alexandra Westcourt, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Joel Soisson & Patrick Lussier
directed by Patrick Lussier

HELLRAISER: DEADER
*/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras B
starring Kari Wuhrer, Paul Rhys, Simon Kunz, Doug Bradley
screenplay by Neal Marshall Stevens and Tim Day
directed by Rick Bota

THE CROW: WICKED PRAYER
½*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Edward Furlong, Tara Reid, David Boreanaz, Emmanuelle Chriqui
screenplay by Lance Mungia & Jeff Most and Sean Hood
directed by Lance Mungia

by Walter Chaw This is the game plan if you're in the business of producing direct-to-video schlock for Dimension: go to Romania (the poor man's Czech Republic, itself the poor man's Toronto--itself the poor man's New York), show some tits, throw buckets of blood against the wall, and scrimp, wherever possible, on niceties like script and direction. It's sure-fire--particularly if you can skim a month or two off the shooting schedule and lure a few has-beens in serious decline. But the question with urgency is "Sure-fire what?" Not good art because they seldom have anything to say about the society that spawned them (and because the directors of these messes are generally assclowns) and not good travelogues, either, what these little straight-to-home penny dreadfuls tend to be are tired variations on the same quasi-Christian mythos, tarted up with surprisingly good production values and the kind of cheap thrills that kept EC Comics, then Hammer Films, then Italian giallos, in business.

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)

**/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid
written and directed by George Lucas

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's not quite as bad as Episode I or Episode II, which is to say that it's not uniquely bad, just run-of-the-mill bad. The dialogue, ghost-written by Tom Stoppard, isn't always unspeakable, and the performances of Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman aren't nearly as wooden as they were the last time around. (Well, Christensen's isn't, anyway.) This lack of cheese presents its own set of problems, however, as Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (hereafter Episode III) is a lot like watching paint dry, with the manic light shows coming off at best as some slack particulate hustle. The picture's action sequences are chaotic, for sure, but just because everything is moving doesn't mean it's exciting, too. Though George Lucas may be a pretty good technician, he's still not a good director, and the pacing of Episode III is mortally, if predictably, off. Perhaps there's comfort in consistency.