Film Freak Central

Superman: Unbound (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

***/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras C+
screenplay by Bob Goodman, based on the graphic novel Superman: Braniac by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank
directed by James Tucker

click any image to enlarge

by Jefferson Robbins With Superman: Unbound, DC Universe's appropriation of anime elements for its superhero cartoons reaches its logical endpoint: tentacle rape. Our first glimpse of longstanding Superman nemesis Brainiac, a semi-organic humanoid computer, features his natural eye getting plucked out by a pincered appendage to be replaced with an upgraded model. Later, a bound and helpless Superman will have terabytes of deadly information pumped straight into his cortex by other such squidlike injectors. The last five years of direct-to-video DC Comics adaptations, many engineered by Korean production house MOI Animation, have all gone East for key sequences--the lonely drift of a Gotham cityscape, robot foes ripped from the comics to be redesigned as mechas. So I guess it was only a matter of time before weird snaky appendages tried to skull-fuck the Man of Steel.

Man of Steel (2013)

**/****
starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Russell Crowe
screenplay by David S. Goyer
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw Zack Snyder's Man of Steel is 44 beautifully-constructed trailers strung together in the world's most expensive promo reel; at this point in his career, it's fair to wonder who it is Snyder's still trying to impress. Shapeless, structure-less, the movie aspires towards nostalgic, grandiloquent, patriotic pastiche but succeeds only in being disjointed, muted, and frustrating. Take the casting of Kevin Costner as Superman's terrestrial dad, Jonathan Kent. Perfect, right? But he's reduced to a fantastic scene where he reveals his adopted son's alien origin that is fantastic solely because Costner is not only magnificent when he's allowed to be in his wheelhouse (baseball player, cowboy, farmer), but also because there's a certain weight in the wrinkles on Costner's face and the grey at his temples. He's the embodiment of a specific brand of nostalgia all by himself, and the potential for him to be the spiritual centre of a soulless film isn't merely squandered, it's aggressively squandered. The Superman mythos at its best is about fathers and sons--the hero (Henry Cavill, playing Supes as Wolverine) has, after all, lost two fathers, orphaned twice in a strange land and compared visually and thematically to Christ in every incarnation. ("The last son of Krypton," n'est-ce pas?) It's a powerful theme, one that explains the enduring popularity of the character when wags have correctly identified that there are no real, viable external threats to someone who's essentially all-powerful. The Jesus story is meaningless if Jesus never thought of Himself as merely a man carrying a terrible burden. Consider the elevation of Watchmen's Dr. Manhattan to inscrutable WMD, or The Incredibles' Mr. Incredible's near-ruin in the role of family man. No, Superman's weakness is existential. I fear that Snyder--a director who seems to abhor difference and adore surfaces in his pictures--is exactly the wrong person to explore the irony of an immaculate conception tortured in the role of outsider.

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

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

click any image to enlarge

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

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 (2012) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Bob Goodman, based upon the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson
directed by Jay Oliva

by Jefferson Robbins There's nothing left. Batman: Year One is so last year, The Killing Joke basically got turned into The Dark Knight, and "Watchmen" has become both a big-movie flopola and a prequel comics series. With Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 on shelves now and its concluding Part 2 due on direct-to-video disc this winter, the DC Universe has basically wrung itself dry of compelling product from the '80s comics revolution that it can repurpose into features and animated editions. The bones remain for new stories, but the cost-benefit on original work vs. revivified fan favourites ever tilts towards the latter. Those of us who discovered or returned to superhero comics as a result of Frank Miller's and Alan Moore's mature deconstructions are seeing their final fruits. The only burning question is how many shmoes bought this package from Amazon thinking they were getting The Dark Knight Rises in half of a special two-disc edition.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

**/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Sally Field
screenplay by James Vanderbilt
directed by Marc Webb

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The only reason for choosing (500) Days of Summer helmer Marc Webb to steer the Spider-Man property in a new direction is the hope that Webb would somehow inject into it a twee, precious, emo-romantic pheromone irresistible to Zooey Deschanel-brand nerd-chicks. Think: Twilight for girls who aren't illiterate. It's not a bad movie in and of itself, but I'm ambivalent about its nominal success, just because rebooting a franchise that's still so fresh (Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 was a mere five years ago) proves a terrible distraction. As much as I like Andrew Garfield, the new Peter Parker, I spent a lot of time comparing his performance to Tobey Maguire's in the same role (ditto Emma Stone (the new Gwen Stacey) and Kirsten Dunst (the former Mary Jane)) and wondering what Raimi would have done with a Lizard (Rhys Ifans) voiced/motion-captured by Dylan Baker, had he been allowed to finally pay off that thread. I spent a lot of time, too, distracted by cool emo touches, like having Peter decorate his room with a lovely, vintage Rear Window poster, ostensibly because this Parker is soulful enough a 17-year-old to not only have seen the film but also perhaps modeled his own photography jones after that film's shutterbug protagonist. But what about Rear Window's hero being a voyeur? A scene early on in The Amazing Spider-Man where Parker snaps a surreptitious photo of Gwen hints at a draft of the screenplay that maybe wanted to deal with Parker as a real, honest-to-goodness fucked-up kid. Sad that only moments now and again suggest any kind of depth or greater purpose. Sad, too, that the movie's not otherwise exciting or innovative.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Benjamin Walker, Dominic Cooper, Anthony Mackie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith and Simon Kinberg, based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith
directed Timur Bekmambetov

by Walter Chaw That idiot Timur Bekmambetov continues his reign of terror with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, an adaptation of a Seth Grahame-Smith novel co-written by Grahame-Smith himself that tries to walk the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies line between reverence and camp but only manages to be ugly and stupid. Abe's (Benjamin Walker) superpower is honesty, natch--and a silver-coated axe. One night, as a child, after witnessing a vampire kill his mother but somehow not turn her into a vampire (vampires don't fear the sunlight in this one, either, or at least fear it only as much as Edgar Winter does), Abe embarks on a vengeance-crusade aided by vampire hunter-trainer Henry (Dominic Cooper). Henry has a secret! It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter inspires a sense of absolute despair and hopelessness in the viewer, as it's not just bad, it's misguided in every way a film can be misguided, from conception to execution. There's a horse-stampede fight, a burning bridge and a train, grotesque misuse of slow-motion and CGI, and nary a naked Angelina Jolie anywhere to leaven the stew. I want to muster up some outrage at the portrayal of Confederate soldiers as bloodsucking legions of the damned, but that actually strikes me as the least offensive of the film's myriad offenses.

Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods (2010) [Deluxe 2-Disc Special Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C
directed by Patrick Meaney

by Jefferson Robbins Patrick Meaney's Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods is an excellent documentary if you like being told how cool comics writer Grant Morrison is for an hour and twenty minutes. That's too bad, because Meaney knows comics,¹ knows his way around documentary structure, and might have been able to tease out the drama in Morrison's rise from artsy Glaswegian youth to anointed guru of the weird for the most iconic funnybook publisher in the world. He has a charismatic polymath storyteller as his subject, as well as influential collaborators who profess their love for Morrison unabashedly. But offscreen, Morrison draws criticism like a Catwoman cosplayer draws fanboys--none of which rises into the babble of Talking With Gods.

The 5 Pre-"Avengers" Flicks In Order Of Quality

by Jefferson Robbins

5. Iron Man 2 (2010)

It's a messy casserole of Avengers promotion and crossover frippery, shoehorning in unnecessary supporting characters and dual archvillains, devolving its hero to the shallow dickweed he was at the start of the first movie just to generate some character conflict, throwing in a little slapstick martial arts so its director can have an onscreen star moment alongside a sexy A-lister…

Marvel's The Avengers (2012)

The Avengers
**½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Joss Whedon
directed by Joss Whedon

by Walter Chaw Joss Whedon delivers his definitive artistic statement with the completely inoffensive, agreeably stupid Marvel's The Avengers. It's a giant, loud, sloppy kiss planted right on the forehead of a fanboy contingent that will somehow find jealous dork solidarity in the largest product excreted this year by a Hollywood machinery that's the playground now of Whedons and Apatows and Farrellys, where it used to be the domain of John Fords and Sam Peckinpahs and Von Sternbergs. Not a full-grown man among them, they're drunk on power and nerd cred, making references to their references and amazed that someone like Scarlett Johansson returns their calls (or that they could be married to someone like Leslie Mann in a world not gone mad). The Avengers is a brilliant balance of indecipherable against crowd-pleasing, with bouncy fight scenes, one-liners as character development, and the absolute confidence that everyone in the audience has on purpose seen each of the films designed as a prequel to this one. As the pendulum swings back to pleasuring 18-year-old boys vs. 16-year-old girls (despite Titanic in 3D's attempts at swinging it back), take heart that if, at the end, it only reminds of the loudest, most expensive team-up episode of "Shazam!", it at least has the sense to deliver the best Hulk moments...ever.

Chronicle (2012)

***/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan, Michael Kelly
screenplay by Max Landis
directed by Josh Trank

Josh Trank and Max Landis's Chronicle is so good for so many extended stretches that its flaws are all the more frustrating. It's too smart for its own good, presenting a superhero origin story without allowing any of its characters to ever once even whisper the word (a lot like "The Walking Dead" making everyone look like assholes by avoiding the term "zombie") and spending too much time letting its teen titans drop names like Schopenhauer before making it clear that the character who most embraces the philosopher's theories of aesthetics and self-abnegation ultimately takes up the mantle of one of Schopenhauer's offshoots, Nietzsche. Boring, I know. And not smart enough, as meta-introspection goes, to bridge the gaps in Chronicle, like a badly under-developed "hero" and an equally under-developed "villain," their relationship to each other, and, at the end, an emotional coda that feels unearned and tacked-on. Compare Chronicle to what history is vetting out as the only good M. Night Shyamalan flick, Unbreakable: it's missing that film's sense of awe, sense of (what has come clear as exceedingly rare in Shyamalan's pursuits) respect for what the hero mythology of comics means, and has always meant, to 98lb. weaklings indulging a fantasy of largesse and empowerment and thus primed to order the Charles Atlas Workout off the ads on the back page.

The Rocketeer (1991) [20th Anniversary Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Bill Campbell, Alan Arkin, Jennifer Connelly, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Danny Bilson & Paul De Meo, based on the graphic novel by Dave Stevens
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw Joe Johnston's rousing Art Deco audition for Captain America, The Rocketeer is, twenty years on, as crisp and clean as laundry-line linen. It has a beautiful hero, his beautiful girl, and Alan Arkin as the crotchety old Q/Whistler/Lucius Fox to guarantee that no matter what our hero does to his gadgets, there'll always be more and better ones to take their place. The villain is modelled on Errol Flynn and works for the Nazis, and you don't have to squint very hard to figure out that a good portion of the picture's stickiness and cult accretion has to do with the idea that its 1938 setting allows for a measure of movie-history geekery. A sequence on a film set as bad guy Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton, chewing scenery like a champ) shoots a period swashbuckler is subversive not only for the way that it reflects the vehicle in which it finds itself, but also for suggesting that the Golden Age of Hollywood was, as we suspected all along, rife with miscreants and foreign agents. It allows for a greater connection to our working-class heroes, as well as the comparison the movie makes now again of The Rocketeer to Chuck Yeager. And at its best, it allows The Rocketeer to feel exactly like the best kind of aw-shucks patriotism: spic-and-span and "you got a stick of Beeman's?" and based on a love of our ideals instead of a hatred of an Other.

Justice League: Doom (2012) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
screenplay by Dwayne McDuffie, based on "Justice League: Tower of Babel" by Mark Waid
directed by Lauren Montgomery

by Jefferson Robbins I've figured out what Warner Premiere's DC Universe features need: music-only audio tracks. At least, as long as Christopher Drake stays on as in-house composer. His scores, from All-Star Superman to Batman: Year One to the new Justice League: Doom, are varied, adventurous, and attuned to character in a way that puts, say, Michael Giacchino to shame. His music has the same evocative power as the fables from which it springs, and at times it outclasses the direct-to-video animation it adorns. I'm not sure Drake could do "sprightly and happy," but as long as he's scoring the DCU projects, he won't get the chance. The non-sequential movies, overseen by long-time producer Bruce Timm, take their cues from DC Comics' big-screen live-action entries like Superman Returns and The Dark Knight. Punch, mope, punch some more, mope, punch really hard... Both the aforementioned theatrical fare and the DCU cartoons are firmly in PG to PG-13 territory, because why would any little kid want to watch a Batman movie, right? Right, guys...?

Batman: Year One (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Tab Murphy, from the comics story by Frank Miller
directed by Sam Liu and Lauren Montgomery

by Jefferson Robbins Before he was a grouchy and politically-nearsighted old man with enough clout to cast Scarlett Johansson in a $60M fetish video, Frank Miller truly did change the face of mainstream superhero comics. Doing so brought him fame as a visionary, a label that implies prophetic or pioneering concepts but--at least in comics art--is most commonly applied to artists fusing pre-existing styles into a successful hybrid, or distilling an old story to its barest elements. Miller did both. In fact, between 1986's "The Dark Knight Returns" and the 1987 "Batman: Year One" arc, his reengineering of the Batman mythos wasn't so much a thrusting of the character forward into the 1980s as a slingshotting back to the 1970s. The core fact of Batman, viewed in the light of Taxi Driver, is that he's Travis Bickle with a cape and lots of money. What is Travis's mohawk if not a costume to strike fear into the hearts of criminals? What is his trick pistol sling, fashioned from a typewriter carriage, but a blue-collar utility belt? And what is the hardboiled dialogue Miller puts in Bruce Wayne's mouth--better read than spoken--but Bicklean self-justification? No coincidence that Batman's first, badly-botched outing as a crimefighter in "Year One" involves the violent rescue of an underaged prostitute.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Chris Evans, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw Given the opportunity to finally do the sequel to his The Rocketeer that I've sort of been hoping to see for the last twenty years, Joe Johnston comes through with flying colours. The absolutely, unapologetically cornpone Captain America: The First Avenger achieves exactly the right tone of Greatest Generation wartime propaganda without any winking post-modern irony to befoul the stew. It's an earnest, genuine underdog story about a wimpy kid, Steve (Chris Evans, digitally reduced), who's beaten up for defending the sanctity of the movie theatre before finally, on his sixth try, being accepted into the army under the kind auspices of mad scientist Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci). Erskine sees an essential goodness in Steve, a decency born from the Great War heroism of his long-gone parents, it's suggested (in high-Fifties style), while crusty Col. Philips (Tommy Lee Jones) is persuaded by this twerp's willingness to dive on a grenade to save a platoon made up of the type of men who spent their childhood tormenting guys like Steve. Asked if he wants to kill Nazis, Steve replies that he doesn't want to kill anyone--he simply hates bullies. Steve, see, is an idealist. And any film that paints America's bedrock idealism as heroic is not just the right kind of patriotic (the kind that doesn't demean other cultures) and the right shade of nostalgia (i.e., in love with the essential purity of the hope behind the foundation of our country)--it's more than okay by me, too.

Thor (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins
screenplay by Ashley Edward Miller & Zack Stentz and Don Payne
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw An uneasy collision of the Henry V Kenneth Branagh and the Peter's Friends Kenneth Branagh, Branagh's foray into the long-form Avengers trailer sweepstakes Thor features a star-making turn from handsome Aussie soap actor Chris Hemsworth (whose star was actually made as James T. Kirk's dad in the Star Trek reboot), a lot of debt to the kitsch elements of Superman II, and another waste-of-life post-credits teaser starring everyone's favourite one-eyed motherfucker. It has the titular Norse God of Thunder deposited fish-out-of-water-style in bumfuck New Mexico (better than Arizona, I guess, where he'd be asked for his papers, denied an education, then probably shot), where he falls under the care of mousy (?) physicist Jane (Natalie Portman), her mentor Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård), and wacky alterna-intern Darcy (Kat Dennings). He's been banished, see, by daddy Odin (Anthony Hopkins); betrayed by tricky brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston); and separated from his beloved hammer until such time as he can prove himself a true Asgardian. Gibberish? You bet. Leave it at this: the movie's pretty decent in a Starman sort of way when Thor's tossing down coffee mugs at a local greasy spoon and demanding more drink and pretty horrible when it's depicting the war between the Norse and the Frost Giants on a massive CGI stage that triggers Tron: Legacy flashbacks like wet heat does Vietnam.

Green Lantern: Emerald Knights (2011) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
Emerald Knights
screenplay by Alan Burnett and Todd Casey
directed by Lauren Montgomery
The First Lantern
screenplay by Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim
directed by Christopher Berkeley
Kilowog
screenplay by Peter J. Tomasi, based on "New Blood" by Peter J. Tomasi and Chris Samnee
directed by Lauren Montgomery
Mogo Doesn't Socialize
screenplay by Dave Gibbons, based on the story by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
directed by Jay Oliva
Laira
screenplay by Eddie Berganza, based on "What Price Honor?" by Ruben Diaz and Travis Charest
directed by Jay Oliva
Abin Sur
screenplay by Geoff Johns, based on "Tyger" by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill
directed by Christopher Berkeley

by Jefferson Robbins The DC Universe direct-to-video animation series continues to earn its reputation, for good or ill, as a by-fans/for-fans endeavour. Producer Bruce Timm and company pump out Green Lantern: Emerald Knights as a kind of B-side to Martin Campbell's disappointing Green Lantern feature film--a supporting document, the sort of thing valued mostly by collectors and fetishists. DC Comics fanboys will thrill to a flashback glimpse of planetary invasions carried out by back-issue bad-guy species the Dominators; casual viewers will likely just think it's cool how the guys with the rings blow shit up with giant green energy swords in outer space.

Green Lantern (2011)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Greg Berlanti & Michael Green & Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg
directed by Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw Martin Campbell's Green Lantern is just awful. It's a mess, a boring mess, featuring boring Ryan Reynolds in a skin-tight green super suit (and not-boring Blake Lively, not) trying to "grow up" and accept the responsibility of becoming an intergalactic Dudley Do-Right--a titular "Green Lantern," which in the DC UNIVERSE parlance apparently means that you say crap about will being stronger than fear and manifest a giant Matchbox race set as the best way to save a crashing helicopter. Cool? Cool if your concept of cool is The Last Starfighter as written by Tony Robbins. There's just so much empowerment going on in this thing, and unresolved daddy issues that are raised without any clue as to how to parallel the dysfunction in the characters or honour what is fast turning out to be this year's driving thematic force. It's no wonder, really, that the bad guy in this one is a giant mess of cosmic goo called "Parallax": the picture jumps around from one point-of-view to another with no sense to bridge the turbid gulfs between them. Worse, Green Lantern's threat to go the ambiguous, Dark Knight, fight-fear-with-fear route fails to materialize in the loudest possible way with an unintentionally-hilarious nonsense soliloquy delivered before a council of detached Kuato. I didn't think I'd see a movie this bad before Transformers: Euphemism for Asshole docks next month.

X-Men: First Class (2011)

**/****
starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, Kevin Bacon
screenplay by Ashley Edward Miller & Zack Stentz and Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn
directed by Matthew Vaughn 

by Walter Chaw The half of Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class (hereafter X-Men 4) involving Erik "Magneto" Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) and Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) is spellbinding pulp; the other half is puerile bullshit. The starkness of that division is evidence of a screenplay with six credited authors, expectations of a franchise that went astray when it abandoned Bryan Singer (as all potentially great franchises seem to abandon Bryan Singer, to their detriment), and a director who's capable of giving good genre (Kick-Ass) saddled with material that's at least fifty-percent garbage. Start with the good in an Auschwitz prologue that handily reclaims Magneto's origin story from that idiot Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand while introducing energy-absorbing supervillain Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), the future-leader of the Hellfire Club, which includes among its members Emma Frost (January Jones, eternally in lingerie--not that I'm complaining) and teleporting Azazel (Jason Flemyng). Shaw plans in the present day (1962) to engineer nuclear war via the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it's up to an avenging Magneto and bookish Professor X to stop him. Unfortunately, the team they assemble is composed of a few non-descript punks with stupid mutant powers (the one who "adapts"; the one who screams; the one with little fairy wings; oh, and Beast (Nicholas Hoult), the one who's smart and has prehensile feet) whom Vaughn puts through the paces of frat/sorority shenanigans. CIA agent Moira McTaggert finds another way to waste Rose Byrne, and then there's a young, image-tortured Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), who carries the load of the "mutant and proud" trope Singer pulled off so intimately and effortlessly.

The Incredibles (2004) - [2-Disc Collector's Edition - Widescreen] DVD + 2-Disc Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

****/****
DVD - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
BD - Image A Sound A Extras A+
written and directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw The first hint that there's something at work in The Incredibles far beyond the pale is the casting of Sarah Vowell as the voice of wilting Violet, the wallflower older sister in the Incredibles' nuclear family. Vowell herself is a brilliant satirist, a gifted writer, and in her heart o' hearts, a bona fide autobiographical anthropologist. She mines the tragedies of her life for insight into the thinness of the onionskin separating our ability to function with the iron undertow of self-doubt and disappointment that comprises all of our paralyzed yesterdays. The Incredibles does a lot of things well--a lot of the same things, as it happens, that Sarah Vowell does well. Through two Toy Story films and last year's fantastically topical Finding Nemo, Pixar has provided the new gold standard in children's entertainment, and it has consistently done so by injecting an amazing amount of insight and depth into the foundation of its bells and whistles.

Real Questions: FFC Interviews James Gunn

April 3, 2011|James Gunn has spent most of his career rewriting icons of decades past (Tromeo and Juliet, Dawn of the Dead, the big-screen Scooby-Doo pictures), and while I share many of my editor's misgivings about Gunn's latest post-modern exercise, Super, I was looking forward to interviewing him when his PA tour came around to Boston. Gunn had fifteen years on me, but it seemed apparent that our genre obsessions had sprung from similar sources. (Fresh out of college, I relished in the insanity of Gunn's then-recent Slither.) Still, despite our common lexicon, it took us a few minutes to get a bead on each other. "Just don't be like that last guy," Gunn told me with a laugh as I turned on my tape recorder. "He had two recording devices. He turned off the first one, and then I said some stuff that I shouldn't have said, and the thing was still recording. And I'm like, 'oh, fuck'--'cause he got me to say exactly what he was trying to get me to say."

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.

The Green Hornet (2011)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christoph Waltz, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
directed by Michel Gondry

by Walter Chaw Lenore Case (Cameron Diaz) asks chauffer Kato (Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou) out on a date in Michel Gondry's excrescent The Green Hornet, and then, once on that date, acts surprised when Kato makes a pass at her whilst tickling the ivories. It's the only thing of mild interest in a film that's otherwise the obvious front-runner for a few worst-of-2011 lists--a fate it'll probably avoid only because no one will remember the benighted thing an hour or two after screening it. Give The Green Hornet this, though: it's the first mainstream American film to even flirt with the idea of Yellow/White miscegenation since maybe the 18-year-old Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Rob Cohen's biopic about Chou's hero and the true antecedent to the Kato role. It's funny to me that men from one of the most populated places on the planet have, in the American cinema, been reduced to hilarious, impotent sidekicks or wise old men who know kung fu--or is there some kind of Little Richard image-castration going on here to protect delicate Caucasian egos from bedroom Yellow Peril? No, more likely the instinct that makes it funny to cast someone like Jackie Chan as Chris Tucker's bitch in the United States is the same one that fuels Chou's eventual rescue in this piece of shit by the titular lummox, played by Seth Rogen (make that rescues--the first coming when The Green Hornet tosses poor, dumb Kato a lobster-shaped inflatable to save his drowning ass). It's the same one that casts Mexicans as chulo drug-dealers hanging out on the East Side and poor Christoph Waltz, Oscar still warm, as an insecure crime lord given to monologues and bemoaning his mid-life crisis. The Green Hornet is bad stand-up, all improvisation and flop sweat you get to endure for over two full, agonizing, distended hours.

TIFF 2010: Wrap It Up

originally published September 27, 2010

• The films are fading fast in the rearview for me (no reflection on them, necessarily), but before they become too vestigial I want to at least highlight the rest of what I saw at this year's TIFF, starting with a movie called White Irish Drinkers (*/****). How I wound up catching this flick is fairly embarrassing: the director is "John Gray," which I misread in my bleary, end-of-festival state as "James Gray." I was severely late for the flick, so I don't want to pummel it (or even officially rate it), but keen auteurist that I am, I figured out my mistake pretty quickly: James Gray just wouldn't have a naked girl (the maddeningly familiar Leslie Murphy) run around a cemetery with "free spirit" music cued up on the soundtrack--he's not a de facto film student anymore. Though it turns out that John Gray has an extensive TV-movie resume, having done everything from The Marla Hanson Story to the remake of Brian's Song, this feels very much the work of a novice, not a little for its pretensions to be the next Mean Streets. Because Stephen Lang salvaged Public Enemies virtually single-handedly, I was hopeful when he turned up here, but his character may be even more one-note than the one he played in Avatar. As his put-upon wife, Karen Allen has seemingly recovered from the stupefying euphoria of getting to resurrect her iconic Marion in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Strangely, I missed said goofy grin, yet she makes the most of a thankless role that indirectly references her previous brush with this genre, Philip Kaufman's The Wanderers. The rest of the cast is made up of baby-faced thugs who have to be given black eyes at regular intervals in order to pass for tough. On a related note, I never could shake the feeling that this is exactly the sort of project Vinnie Chase would be hot for on "Entourage".

Jonah Hex (2010)

*/****
starring Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Shannon
screenplay by Neveldine & Taylor
directed by Jimmy Hayward

by Walter Chaw Distilling a fairly popular Weird West comic series down to a tight little 80-minute ball that plays like another adaptation of the Max Payne videogame, ex-Pixar animator Jimmy Hayward's Jonah Hex is a whole lotta boom-boom executed in a borrowed, curiously flat style that has one pining for the days when Sam Raimi was making stuff like Darkman and The Quick and the Dead--those two films, incidentally, the ones Jonah Hex most wants to be. The eponymous Jonah (Josh Brolin) is a disfigured Confederate hero gifted--through hatred, a near-death experience, and healing from mysterious Injuns--with the ability to withstand point-blank shotgun blasts, briefly reanimate the dearly departed, and suffer Megan Fox's typecast performance as a really popular whore. Her Lilah keeps weapons all over creation, natch, because she might be an oft-visited saloon girl but she ain't nobody's bitch. Well, except Jonah's, I guess. But Jonah is too busy trying to kill evil Col. Quentin Trumbull (John Malkovich) to make an honest woman out of her. Jonah Hex may not know much, but he knows he's no fucking magician.

Iron Man 2 (2010)

*/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Scarlett Johansson
screenplay by Justin Theroux
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw A multi-million-dollar machine carefully engineered to generate the ridiculous amount of money it's about to, Iron Man 2 is kept from total, instant obsolescence by its "too good for this shit" cast, which cleverly manages to distract from the fact that this flick is a tone-deaf, laborious mess. Front and centre is Mickey Rourke as wronged Russian physicist Ivan Vanko, an amalgam of two Iron Man villains and so enigmatic a presence that although the dumbass screenplay (by actor Justin Theroux) takes pains to make Vanko's angst father-based, it's hard not to be distracted by the more mysterious depths of Rourke's performance. Similarly good are Gwyneth Paltrow, whose Girl Friday Pepper Potts is given the keys to her boss's Stark Industries and burdened instantly by expectation and cable-news notoriety; Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, again playing himself as a tech billionaire; and Sam Rockwell as an unctuous, fake-baked rival defense contractor. Not so great are the bland set-pieces, the misguided attempt to parallel Vanko's avenge-daddy motivation with Tony's make-dead-daddy-proud motivation into one legacy-based leitmotif, and a series of convoluted plot mechanisms (Tony's dying! Tony loves Pepper! No, he loves dead-eyed, one-note-but-hot Natasha (Scarlett Johansson)! Tony's company is in trouble! Tony's in trouble with the government! Tony likes to get drunk!) that grind the whole enterprise to a standstill at short intervals. If you can maintain your interest during an extended sequence in which our Tony plays with a bunch of virtual computer screens while building a long tube, you either drank the Kool-Aid that makes you care whether Tony lives or dies, or you've slipped blissfully into a coma.

Kick-Ass (2010)

****/****
starring Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Mark Strong, Nicolas Cage
screenplay by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, based on the comic book by Mark Millar & John Romita Jr.
directed by Matthew Vaughn

by Walter Chaw A wonderfully unlikely amalgam of Hong Kong-era John Woo and Shaolin Soccer/Kung Fu Hustle-era Stephen Chow, Matthew Vaughn's ebullient, often-unconscionable Kick-Ass reimagines Woo's iconic Tequila as an 11-year-old girl with a purple bob, an incredible potty mouth (she uses the "C" word correctly in a sentence, cunts), and absolutely no remorse in crushing a defenseless douchebag in a car cuber. Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) is destined to be an icon, a more popular tattoo-parlour fave than Calvin in evoking the cheerful, insouciant lawlessness of misdirected youth. Far from truly groundbreaking, though, sober minds could only identify her as a continuation of that quintessentially American, Huck Finn tradition of children as collective, societal Id and trickster gods. She's even employed in the picture as a punitive, apolitical, unapologetic champion of order who limits her victims to drug-dealers and gangsters, those disturbers of civilization. As her father (Nicolas Cage) clarifies in response to her unconventional upbringing, it's not his blame to shoulder, but arch-baddie Frank D'Amico's.

Watchmen: Director's Cut (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino
screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse, based on the graphic novel by ALAN MOORE and Dave Gibbons
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw It knows the notes but doesn't hear the music. Watchmen, Zach Snyder's long-awaited, over-hyped adaptation of Alan Moore's venerated graphic novel, is technically proficient and occasionally beautiful-looking but also flat and nerveless. It has no heart and, more damning, no real understanding of the irony of itself, save for a title sequence set to the tune of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" that's bound to be the best five minutes I'm going to see in any movie this year. In this stirring montage, a travelogue through the three ages of comics against the backdrop of American history, Snyder captures the idea that what Moore accomplished in casting a conversation about idol-making through the most populist medium of pop culture is in fact translatable through film, this other most populist medium of pop culture. Where the picture missteps is in restoring the superhero group Watchmen to the heavens, resurrecting pop icons in impossible, perfect, virtual tableaux: the character designs are impeccable, the suits are clean, and the violence is obscene, yes, but glossy enough that when things stop for a moment to delve into one character's appalling creation story, it feels unearned and exploitive--so much so that the question that fast follows of why the rest of it feels removed and inhuman almost derails the entire enterprise. Coming from a guy who more admires the Moore source than loves it, it occurs to me that Watchmen is a movie made by Dr. Manhattan; it should've been made by Rorschach.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Liev Schrieber, Danny Huston, Ryan Reynolds
screenplay by David Benioff and Skip Woods
directed by Gavin Hood

by Walter Chaw The action sequences are bad, the plot is bad... Hugh Jackman? He's fine. Everything you might expect, in other words, from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, wherein that most popular of muties (although I always preferred Gambit, marking me as about 42% gay) receives his first official vehicle with shaky Gavin Hood at the wheel. Was it the deadening piece of shit Tsotsi or the gravid piece of shit Rendition that convinced them Hood was the right person for this gravid, deadening piece of shit? True to form, the movie is laden with misplaced gravitas, magic-hour tableaux, and awkward drivel that makes me think that of the film's two credited writers, it's Hitman/Swordfish scribe Skip Woods and not 25^th Hour scribe David Benioff who took the final run at the screenplay. ("Now I know why the moon is lonely," says our macho man of action Wolvie (Jackman) at one point--and the audience howls.) It has a Watchmen opening montage following Wolvie and brother Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) through history's most picturesque battles (Trenches! Beaches! Paddies!) before they're finally enlisted by mysterious government stooge Stryker (Danny Huston), who has a plan for these and other genetic misfits. Think of it as "X-Men: Episode One", as dorks are encouraged to trainspot famous mutants in the background while the foreground gets cluttered with lots of bad dialogue, grammar-school sentimentality, and oodles of special effects.

Batbabe: The Dark Nightie (2009) + The Stewardesses (1971) [2-DVD Set] - DVDs

BATBABE: THE DARK NIGHTIE
*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Darian Caine, Molly Heartbreaker, Jackie Stevens, Smoke Williams
written and directed by John Bacchus

THE STEWARDESSES
*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A
starring Michael Garrett, Christina Hart, William Basil
written and directed by Al Silliman Jr.

by Ian Pugh It may seem ridiculous to call a softcore porno spoof of The Dark Knight a disappointment, but I've been aching to see any sort of comedic critical response to Christopher Nolan's masterpiece since it stole my heart last summer. We should always be willing to throw our sacred cows onto the fire to test their mettle, and we're woefully lacking in the right forums to do so: MAD MAGAZINE lost its currency a while back (or maybe I just turned 16) and Internet satire is too scattershot. Where else are we to turn for our defiant, independent parodies of the instant classics of modern culture? Porn, of course. Leave it to some clever guy in the adult industry to come up with the Jerker (Rob Mendara), a devious clown/agent of chaos/chronic masturbator out to prove that everyone is capable of descending to his level of depravity--by stealing all the precious pornography in Bacchum City! Meanwhile, strip-club owner/dancer Wendy Wane (Darian Caine) believes that Bacchum's new D.A. Henrietta Bent (Molly Heartbreaker) will afford her the opportunity to retire her Batbabe persona and settle down with old flame Rachel Balls (Jackie Stevens).

Push (2009)

**/****
starring Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Camilla Belle, Djimon Hounsou
screenplay by David Bourla
directed by Paul McGuigan

by Walter Chaw Here's the thing: I like Paul McGuigan's movies. They're facile, it's true, eye candy--if, on occasion (Wicker Park), brilliant eye candy--and slick genre pieces that aren't really about anything in the sense that they aren't at all resonant in any meaningful way. He's done a Hitchcock (Wicker Park again) and a gangster flick (Gangster No. 1) and a costume epic (The Reckoning) and a caper (Lucky Number Slevin), and now with Push he's done his superhero flick; and not a one of them has something to say outside itself. They're post-modern in that sense, pure genre pieces reliant entirely on our conversance with the medium to provide their form and function. They're feature-length music videos--and I mean this as a compliment--that hum along with a kick-ass soundtrack, sexy imagery, and the ghost of a narrative to string it all together. They go down easy and there's not much of an aftertaste. That being said, Push doesn't benefit from familiarity: the craft is excellent, there are moments in it that harbour tremendous potential, but at the end of the day it's just another superhero movie that suffers from not having Bryan Singer's alienation issues or Christopher Nolan's existential identity crisis. What works in McGuigan's other work as a nice corrective to genres burdened by too much close scholarship washes out in Push as either too late or, more likely, too soon. In any case, what plagues the film is that it lacks much in the way of difference.

The Dark Knight (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw It's the best American film of the year so far and likely to remain that way. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is revelatory, visceral, grim stuff--a vision of the failure of our idealism before the inexorable tide of entropy, another masterpiece after last year's No Country for Old Men that as much as says that the only morality in the midst of chaos is chance. No coincidence that both films feature villains who let a coin-flip act as judge and jury. But what's adjudicated? What shape does the court take? The failure of reason is the great bogey of this modern day--and the inability to properly frame questions, much less ken answers, feeds this feeling of hopelessness. That widening gyre, it turns out, is a labyrinth, or an Escher print, illuminating a Sartrean paranoia of no hope for escape, no possibly of exit. Nolan's Gotham City is a beatification of Chicago: the city's glass and metal elevated into holy relic and presented in such grand, panoramic vistas that the little things done in spite of it or on its behalf seem like so many futile pittances--the dreamlife of mice in their sterile maze that is this sprawling microcosm of all of the miseries and suffering of the world.

Birds of Prey: The Complete Series (2002-2003) - DVD

Image C+ Sound B- Extras C+

BIRDS OF PREY: THE COMPLETE SERIES
"Pilot," "Slick," "Prey for the Hunter," "Three Birds and a Baby," "Sins of the Mother," "Primal Scream," "Split," "Lady Shiva," "Nature of the Beast," "Gladiatrix," "Reunion," "Feat of Clay," "Devil's Eyes"

GOTHAM GIRLS: THE COMPLETE SERIES
"The Vault," "Lap Bat," "Trick or Trick, Part 1," "Trick or Trick, Part 2," "A Little Night Magic," "More Than One Way," "Precious Birthstones," "Pave Paradise," "The Three Babies," "Gardener's Apprentice," "Lady-X," "Hold That Tiger," "Miss Un-Congeniality," "Strategery," "Baby Boom," "Cat-n-Mouse," "Bat'ing Cleanup," "Catsitter," "Gotham Noir," "Scout's Dishonor," "I'm Badgirl," "Ms.-ing in Action," "Gotham in Pink," "Hear Me Roar," "Gotham in Blue," "A Cat in the Hand," "Jailhouse Wreck," "Honor Among Thieves," "No, I'm Batgirl," "Signal Fires," "Cold Hands, Cold Heart"

by Ian Pugh The most that can be said for the execrable "Birds of Prey" is that, five years beforehand, it predicted the disaster of David Eick's unfortunate "Bionic Woman" remake: owing its creation to the popularity of a similarly-themed show ("Smallville" being the analog for "Battlestar Galactica" in this instance), it transforms an already-overblown superhero premise into an ill-conceived soapbox to peddle some artificial feminist claptrap. And, like "Bionic Woman", it attempts to capture the atmosphere of its forebears while betraying zero understanding of what made them successful in the first place. Unlike many of the show's detractors, I don't really care that "Birds of Prey" is a Batman series without Batman's literal presence; I do, however, care that it basically removes any hint of pathos from the setting and, in the classic tradition of the now-defunct WB television network, replaces it with the superficial whininess that teenagers frequently use to get attention. It's The Dark Knight Returns without the nostalgic melancholy. The Killing Joke without the sick, mind-bending tragedy. No Man's Land without the goddamned earthquake.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

****/****
starring Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, John Hurt
written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro

by Walter Chaw It's at the forefront of one's mind during Hellboy II: The Golden Army (hereafter Hellboy II), Guillermo Del Toro's brilliant dance along an ephemeral tightrope between pop and Puccini, that David Cronenberg and Howard Shore recently converted their remake of The Fly into a full-fledged opera: I can see the same thing happening with a lot of Del Toro's pictures. The director's said that after his Pan's Labyrinth "something popped" in regards to his restraint in allowing the menagerie of monsters in his brain free rein over his imagination--and that he endeavoured to bring all the madness of Mike Mignola's "Hellboy" universe to the big screen with or without a commensurately giant budget. (Of Summer '08's blockbusters, Hellboy II, costing around 85 million dollars, might be the most frugal.) The result is a film so crammed to the gills with invention that a bit of background business in a scene set at a bazaar hidden beneath the Brooklyn Bridge (this is the second great genre film this year after Cloverfield to make a pit stop at that particular locale) wherein a creature plays a pipe made out of a tanned human corpse is left uncommented-upon and is somehow ultimately unremarkable. The wonders of Hellboy II as experienced through our avatars Hellboy (Ron Perlman), Liz (Selma Blair), and Abe (Doug Jones, this time vocalizing the character as well)--team members for a covert government agency that deals with supernatural intrusions--are the way the world is, and it's fascinatingly left for the normals in the audience to crane for a better look.

Hancock (2008)

***/****
starring Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman, Jae Head
screenplay by Vy Vincent Ngo & Vince Gilligan
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw I'm an unabashed Peter Berg fan. I think that his Very Bad Things is naughty and transgressive in ways that Judd Apatow could only pretend; that his The Rundown is the first film since Herzog's Even Dwarfs Started Small to use little people correctly in a rollicking, rousing sentence; and that his Friday Night Lights did a very fine job of essaying the insular madness of Texas high-school football. Berg's last picture, The Kingdom, is the finest pop explication of the brief history of (and our relationship with) the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and now his superhero epic Hancock has the temerity to try to address the colour barrier in comics as it relates, uneasily, to these United States. Talking about it tells everything so beware the major spoiler, but Hancock has at its centre an indestructible, airborne, super-strong black man with a white wife who, should he spend too much time near her, renders him completely, utterly mortal and thus subject to the world that would see them apart. Consider that this is a mega-budget, 4^th of July blockbuster starring Will Smith, the black guy all America can agree on, doing the old miscegenation tango with the whitest white girl on the planet, South African lovely Charlize Theron, which should have aged white Republicans twisted up in their Confederate-flag panties. We're only really forty years removed from Selma, Alabama, and here's forty-year-old Will Smith planting a big wet one on Theron's lips in a tentpole flick the summer that Barack Obama became the first black man chosen as the Democratic nominee for the President of the United States. God bless America, free(r) at last.

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

½*/****
starring Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, Tim Roth, William Hurt
screenplay by Zak Penn and Edward Harrison
directed by Louis Leterrier

by Walter Chaw Pretty much the unmitigated disaster its trailers predicted it to be, Louis Leterrier's noisome The Incredible Hulk is a cacophony of bad CGI, bad acting, and gravid serio-melodramatics that leaves only the disturbing image of Liv Tyler's acres of bangs standing in the aftermath of its absurd wreckage. It's a vanity piece for Edward Norton (as if Norton is ever in anything else these days) that washes out as one of the more puzzling examples of such, in that the only thing anyone's there to see is Hulk smash. Maybe not so puzzling upon further reflection; I heard someone describe Jim Carrey at a certain point in his career as the six-hundred pound gorilla--find Norton at the apogee of his own ego bloat in The Incredible Hulk. Rumoured to have rewritten wide patches of Zak Penn's script (and credited here as, tee hee, Edward Harrison), Norton strikes me as a player/coach in the mold of Sylvester Stallone but unburdened with Stallone's sense of temporal place and popular self-awareness. Norton's acts of persona-construction are involved with painting himself as more romantic and smarter (The Illusionist), more romantic and moral (The Painted Veil), or more romantic and mysterious (Down in the Valley) than the average bear (tragic Monsieur Curie Bruce Banner the amalgam of all three, of course), with little room in his Nietzschian self-regard for human frailty or much complexity. He's an actor capable of astonishing nuance, making it doubly frustrating that he seems to resent that in the Fight Club food chain, he's Edward Norton and not Brad Pitt. The Incredible Hulk is the hundred-pound weakling flexing in the mirror and answering the ad on the back of the comic book.

Iron Man (2008)

**/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow
screenplay by Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw Iron Man is garden-variety pop heroism/wish-fulfillment that, marinated in Robert Downey Jr.'s effortless insouciant sauce, speaks volumes about the psychology of our nation at this disgusted, exhausted moment in our history. The plot's only casualties save its grand fiend are nameless Afghanis: terrorists on the one side, collateral damage on the other--few of them receiving the nobility of an individual death. Even the chief Al-Qaeda baddie is blown-up discreetly in the wings after a white guy first dazzles him with technology, then paralyzes him with the same. (Call it awe and shock.) The film's politics are easy and its racism similarly cavalier: Better dead than red (er, brown); when historians look back at this era in popular culture, it won't be terribly difficult to pick out that which forms the backbone of contemporary "Why We Fight" propaganda. What recommends the picture are sterling performances by Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow as Iron Man's Girl Friday, Jeff Bridges as the mentor-cum-baddie, and wonderful, reserved, dignified Shaun Toub in a too-brief cameo as the sole voice of moral "otherness." What's unfortunate about the flick is that it takes an awful long time to get to the good stuff, and that good stuff--almost entirely CGI-rendered--falls curiously flat. Not quite boring, Iron Man just seems sprung. There's no forward momentum, no impetus, no real gravity. With all that firepower at its fingertips, it has no idea where to point itself.

Justice League: The New Frontier (2008) [Two Disc Special Edition] + The Adventures of Aquaman: The Complete Collection (1967-1970) - DVDs|Justice League: The New Frontier - Blu-ray Disc

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW FRONTIER
*½/****
DVD - Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
BD - Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
written by Stan Berkowitz with additional material by Darwyn Cooke, based on the graphic novel DC: The New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke
directed by David Bullock

THE ADVENTURES OF AQUAMAN: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION
Image C- Sound C Extras D+
"Menace of the Black Manta/The Rampaging Reptile Men," "The Return of Nepto/The Fiery Invaders," "Sea Raiders/War of the Water Worlds," "The Volcanic Monster/The Crimson Monster from the Pink Pool," "The Ice Dragon/The Deadly Drillers," "Vassa, Queen of the Mermen/The Microscopic Monsters," "The Onslaugh of the Octomen/Treacherous is the Torpedoman," "The Satanic Saturnians/The Brain, the Brave and the Bold," "Where Lurks the Fisherman!/Mephisto's Marine Marauders," "Trio of Terror/The Torp, the Magneto and the Claw," "Goliaths of the Deep-Sea Gorge/The Sinister Sea Scamp," "The Devil Fish/The Sea Scavengers," "In Captain Cuda's Clutches/The Mirror-Man from Planet Imago," "The Sea Sorcerer/The Sea-Snares of Captain Sly," "The Undersea Trojan Horse/The Vicious Villainy of Vassa," "Programmed for Destruction/The War of the Quatix and the Bimphars," "The Stickmen of Stygia/Three Wishes to Trouble," "The Silver Sphere/To Catch a Fisherman"

by Ian Pugh Utterly incomprehensible thanks to a deadly combination of rigid adherence to its source material and a discernible lack of vision, the DC Animated Universe's latest stab at the direct-to-video market can only be described as a complete embarrassment for everyone involved. Adapting a graphic novel by Darwyn Cooke that isn't that great to begin with (it's basically a portable art gallery of Fifties-era superheroes, too long by half and tied together by a belaboured treatise on why the decade wasn't all it's cracked up to be), Justice League: The New Frontier doesn't attempt to build on the kernel of an idea therein. Instead, apparently weighing time constraints against the most exploitable elements, it pays lip service to the plot and reduces everything else to a series of biff!pow! pin-ups. I've been a steadfast defender of comic books for years now, but sometimes I wonder if artists and fans really know what has to be done to make them viable as an adult medium. Their long-suffering quest for legitimacy has seen a pronounced downturn since the introspective melancholy of Superman Returns suffered wholesale rejection for not featuring enough people punching each other in the face--and it appears that Bruce Timm and his crew won't be the ones to try to change minds. There's an awful moment in their last animated opus, Superman: Doomsday, in which the Man of Steel laments that he has saved the world a hundred times over but still hasn't cured cancer--shortly before the film pounds its audience with nearly a full hour of mind-numbing violence. The New Frontier contains a similar moment, except that it replaces social issues with political analogies so simplistic and heavy-handed they would make Emilio Estevez cringe. When Lois Lane (Kyra Sedgwick) says, circa 1954, that "whatever party, whatever administration, there'll always be bogeymen like [Joe McCarthy]" in summarizing that "we need a leader"--and then stares directly at the viewer--it's difficult not to see this entire enterprise as just a bunch of kids playing dress-up.

Swamp Thing: The Series (1990-1991) - DVD

Image B- Sound B Extras C
"The Emerald Heart," "Falco," "Treasure," "From Beyond the Grave," "Blood Wind," "Grotesquery," "New Acqaintance," "Natural Enemy," "Spirit of the Swamp," "Legend of the Swamp Maiden," "The Death of Dr. Arcane," "The Living Image," "The Shipment," "Birthmarks," "The Dark Side of the Mirror," "Silent Screams," "Walk a Mile in My Shoots," "The Watchers," "The Hunt," "Touch of Death," "Tremors of the Heart," "The Prometheus Parabola"

by Ian Pugh In many ways the anti-Darkman, Wes Craven's Swamp Thing also saw a comic-book scientist irrevocably transformed into a monster at the hands of hoodlum saboteurs. Alas, unlike Sam Raimi with his masterpiece, Craven is unable to strike a balance between seriousness and silliness, falling too far in the latter direction before the picture finally collapses under its own snarky weight. It is, however, the film that enlightened me as to why B-movie anti-appreciation is such a worthless endeavour, since Swamp Thing never bothers to pretend that it's anything more than a couple of dudes in rubber suits wailing on each other. When you're making a movie in the "MST3K" mindset, as Craven appears to be, you don't really have a movie in mind, per se--you're just positioning actors as they recite lines from a script.

Underdog (2007) - Blu-ray Disc

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jim Belushi, Peter Dinklage, John Slattery, Patrick Warburton
screenplay by Adam Rifkin and Joe Piscatella & Craig A. Williams
directed by Frederik Du Chau

by Bill Chambers Whereas the gigantic Underdog balloon that hovers over New York City during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade is at least conceptually interesting (American commerce's idea of a Stalin statue), Underdog, Disney's charmless live-action resurrection of the beloved super-mutt, has no subtext, just a bunch of mercenary actors and technicians who can barely disguise their contempt for the film's screenplay, which lazily embellishes the extraordinary-pet genre with scatology while weaving a maddeningly derelict patchwork of recycled tropes like the grieving widower/orphan, the unattainable hottie, and the disgraced cop. It's fair to say I hate Underdog, but I hate it because it doesn't even have the will to finish what it starts. Only two things about it are kind of fascinating, and only then from a largely extratextual standpoint. The first is that in taking the title character out of the cartoon realm, the digitally-manipulated slapstick pratfalls and clumsy landings look grotesquely painful for the beagle(s) playing Underdog. They should've gone the Scooby-Doo route and fashioned a 3-D likeness of the 2-D prototype, since the sight of man's best friend hurtling through panes of glass really has no intrinsic comic value.

Spider-Man 3 (2007) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church
screenplay by Sam Raimi & Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw It's hard for me at this point to look at the Spider-Man franchise literally. Literally, after all, it's riddled with inconsistencies, plot holes the size of Buicks, abrupt shifts in tone, important subplots given short shrift, and on and on. But as iconography, as allegory (who can forget the timeliness of the first film's 9/11 parable?), as an essentially self-aware product of our image-ravenous culture, it achieves a kind of spectral, magical grace. Though I prefer the personal evolution of the second picture (and the third Harry Potter film for the same reasons), the trying-on and jettisoning of father figures along the path of boy-into-man, there are moments in Spider-Man 3 so supremely well-crafted as visual poetry, so gloriously tangled and knotty, that they batter defenses raised against another Iraq War tale of unimaginable losses and the cold comfort of vengeance. The whole of the film is a case of rolling with the punches, really, of choosing early whether to hang with director Sam Raimi's sense of broad slapstick melodrama and greeting-card symbolism or reject it as incoherent, populist mugging. If you accept its roundhouse swings and Evil Dead-era zooms at face value, though, it has for you in return a moment where something struggles to be born, but can only finish its naissance with the help of an image of its sick daughter; a breathless action sequence that revolves around the recovery of a sentimental artifact; and, as a bonus, a "Three Stooges" bit where old pal Bruce Campbell plays an unctuous, over-eager maître d'.

Heroes: Season 1 (2006-2007) + Superman: Doomsday (2007) - DVDs

HEROES: SEASON 1
Image A Sound A Extras C
"Genesis," "Don't Look Back," "One Giant Leap," "Collision," "Hiros," "Better Halves," "Nothing to Hide," "Seven Minutes to Midnight," "Six Months Ago," "Fallout," "Godsend," "The Fix," "Distractions," "Run!," "Unexpected," "Company Man," "Parasite," ".07%," "Five Years Gone," "The Hard Part," "Landslide," "How to Stop an Exploding Man"

Superman/Doomsday
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
screenplay by Duane Capizzi
directed by Bruce Timm, Lauren Montgomery & Brandon Vietti

by Ian Pugh "Heroes" is perhaps best described as a network-television attempt to recast Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's seminal Watchmen for the mainstream market. It actively reworks that masterpiece's major plot points for mass consumption, yes, but more to the point, it tries to bring superheroes into real-life situations--all the while harbouring, very much unlike Watchmen, an uneducated contempt for comic books. Offering lame turn-arounds and mocking references to superhero clichés without any apparent knowledge of comics published after 1960, "Heroes" believes that the medium is, now and forever, uniformly steeped in silly costumes, fatuous storylines, and unambiguous divisions between good and evil. This contrarian attitude towards its perceived progenitors leads it to pawn off its own superficial characters, scenarios, and rambling diatribes about fate and destiny as infinitely-superior and more complex alternatives. The fact that the final episode of the first season gives us a slightly-tinkered version of Evil Dead II's hilariously downbeat ending should leave no doubt as to the essential falseness of "Heroes" and its pretense of originality: the desire to move what is seen as a cartoonish enterprise into a more mature arena has already been explored countless times by countless artists over the last few decades, often from within the medium itself.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) + Evan Almighty (2007)

Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer
4: Rise of the Silver Surfer
½*/****
starring Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis
screenplay by Don Payne
directed by Tim Story

EVAN ALMIGHTY
½*/****
starring Steve Carell, Morgan Freeman, Lauren Graham, John Goodman
screenplay by Steve Oedekerk
directed by Tom Shadyac

by Walter Chaw The question arises as to whether the choice for comic book adaptations has to be between "existentially tortured" and "dumb as a bag of hammers." It's a given on which extreme Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (hereafter FF2), already lauded for being blissfully free of gravitas and subtext, resides; what's troubling is the underlying inference of this philosophy: that people deserve and want entertainment that's beneath them. It's easier by far to condemn the audience as morons, forking over their cash like roughneck flyovers voting for Big Business, but I prefer to look at the situation as a tragedy--a by-product of a generation of fervent anti-intellectualism that's made smart people afraid to question their own judgment. Far from a malady unique to Hollywood, it's more a reflection of the culture that would elect someone most perceive to be, if not outright stupider, then certainly more thoughtless, than themselves to the highest office in the land. Discouraged to exercise the foundational, instinctively American inclination to criticize our leadership, we're left without enough of a nutsack to properly place a work of art in its social context. I'd offer that FF2 is a symptom of a potentially mortal illness, another being the ghettoizing of the idea of "nuance."

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (1980/2006) - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. A would-be victim of its own London After Midnight-esque mystique, the "Richard Donner Cut" of Superman II is marginally superior to Richard Lester's mutilation, but mitigating circumstances prevent it from being a totally viable alternative. Reconstructed from suppressed outtakes with due diligence (if a journeyman sensibility) according to pre-Lester drafts of the screenplay, the film follows the same basic storyline, though it's a little more efficiently plotted. (While a few Lester bits remain, there is almost certainly less Lester-generated footage here than there is Donner-generated footage in the theatrical version.) Gone is the Eiffel Tower set-piece, replaced by a charming sequence better allied--aesthetically speaking--with the previous Superman in which Lois tries to call Clark's bluff by jumping out a window of THE DAILY PLANET's headquarters; now the weapon of mass destruction responsible for freeing the three supervillains from the Phantom Zone is an errant missile from the climax of the original, which is clever but probably made more sense before they transposed the dopey turning-back-time conceit from the second film onto the first. (More on that later.)

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) [Widescreen] - DVD

½*/**** Image N/A Sound A Extras C+
starring Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellen, Famke Janssen
screenplay by Simon Kinberg & Zak Penn
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw As an example of what can happen when a homophobic, misogynistic, misanthropic moron wildly overcompensates in a franchise that had as its primary claim to eternity that it was sensitive to the plight of homosexuals, Brett Ratner's painfully queer X-Men: The Last Stand (hereafter "X3") manages to present its series of melodramatic vignettes in such a way as to completely negate any sense of peril, individuality, or struggle for the characters. Without a sense of weight, the references in the piece to genocide and The Holocaust ("Ink shall never again touch my skin!" says Ian McKellen's Magneto) become pure, laggard exploitation in the service of a sub-par superhero action film that shows its true colours time and again in its hatred of women ("Hell hath no fury!") and loathing of female sexuality, as well as in its flat-eyed regard of children trying to hasp off their wings while their fathers attempt to break down the bathroom door. It's Michael Bay's Schindler's List: a reptilian populist, at ease with the slick and facile, has been asked to take the reins of a project that, for whatever its crimes of pacing and exposition, had in its Bryan Singer-helmed episodes the good sense not to kick over ant piles it wasn't prepared to contain.

Superman Returns (2006)

****/****
starring Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, James Marsden, Kevin Spacey
screenplay by Michael Dougherty & Dan Harris
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw The saddest, most desperately lonesome and melancholy mainstream film in recent memory, Bryan Singer's Superman Returns is about loss and, as a Scrabble board early in the picture denotes, alienation. It's about fathers and sons and, by extension, why so many of our mythologies are about sons divorced from fathers who spend the rest of their lives, nay, the rest of eternity striving for impossible reunions. Prometheus is mentioned by name while Atlas, Christ, and Lucifer are referenced in image, Singer's transition from fallen Titans to fallen Angels an ineffably graceful symbolic examination of where, exactly, comic-book martyrs and gods (of which Superman is both) place in the modern spiritual pantheon. Superman is a figure at a juncture in the middle of pagan and Christian just as he's become something like a transitional icon bridging science and religion, classic comics and the modern superhero era, and Americana and the Wasteland. In the film, Superman is a character warring between what he wants and the destiny his father has charted for him--and aren't we all. When a child in Superman Returns takes a picture with his cell phone that we recognize as the cover for Superman's debut, 1938's "Action Comics" No. 1, it's at once bemused and in love with Richard Donner's original vision of the hero, but most of all it's eloquent in its assured, maybe even prickly, recognition of where we were and what we've become.

Sky High (2005) + Stealth (2005)|Sky High [Widescreen] - DVD

SKY HIGH
½*/****  Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Michael Angarano, Danielle Panabaker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kurt Russell
screenplay by Paul Hernandez and Robert Schooley & Mark McCorkle
directed by Mike Mitchell

STEALTH
**/****
starring Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Sam Shepard
screenplay by W.D. Richter
directed by Rob Cohen

by Walter Chaw A kids movie for the stupid ones and a guys movie for the stupid ones of those, Sky High and Stealth are lowest-common-denominator entertainments that throw sense out the window in favour of clumsy one-liners, bad special effects, and an eye focused keen on demographics and the bottom line, which those demographics promise to fork over on opening weekend. It doesn't matter if they're good, just that they rake in enough moolah before people get a whiff of the noisome rot and ennui wafting on air-conditioned currents out of the friendly neighbourhood cineplex and start staying home again in droves. The dreadfulness of Sky High and Stealth can be measured by the extent to which this nation's timid, gaffed, untrained, dispassionate film critics equivocate in their reviews that it's for kids, that it's an enjoyable film if you check your brain at the door, and/or that it's "finally" the family/action/blockbuster you've been waiting for all summer long.

The Adventures of the American Rabbit (1986) - DVD

*½/**** Image B Sound B+
screenplay by Norm Lenzer
directed by Fred Wolf and Nobutaka Nishizawa

"And you come up with images in [Invincible] that are so remarkable, including these countless red crabs in this one, that are so frightening to me--because they are life, yet they are mindless and they just keep going on and on despite whatever we think or whatever we hope."
-Roger Ebert to Werner Herzog

"The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life."
-Item 10 of Herzog's "Minnesota Declaration"

by Alex Jackson There are a few basics tenets I have followed during my initiation into the world of film criticism: 1. That art is made up of subject matter and a perspective; 2. Frivolousness is not a substitute for offering a perspective--rather it is a perspective in and of itself; 3. Artist intentionality is less than meaningless, as perspective is often constantly being informed by greater cultural, social, and subconsciously psychological forces; 4. In light of tenets 1,2, and 3, one should be careful of dismissing the film you are reviewing, in particular because most of those you will be tempted to dismiss are frivolous, and dismissing them only advances their mission to secularize and marginalize the cinema.

The Greatest American Hero: Season Three (1982-1983) - DVD

Image A Sound A Extras C
"The Price is Right," "30 Seconds Over Little Tokyo," "Divorce Venusian Style," "Live at Eleven," "The Resurrection of Carlini," "Wizards and Warlocks," "Heaven is in Your Genes," "This is the One the Suit Was Meant For," "The Newlywed Game," "Desperado," "Space Ranger," "It's Only Rock 'n Roll," "Vanity, Says the Preacher"

by Walter Chaw Aliens come to earth in a giant metal calamari ring and give a nebbish schoolteacher a red superhero outfit with the Chinese symbol for "centre" on the centre of its chest. They also give him an instruction booklet he promptly loses, leading to a couple of seasons of Ralph (William Katt) trying his best to figure out how to use his special jammies with the help of his attorney girlfriend Pam (Connie Selleca) and rogue FBI agent Bill (Robert Culp). It's on-the-job training, though, as the reluctant crime-fighting trio find themselves, weekly, pitted against a Saturday morning cartoon's rogue's gallery of two-bit hoodlums that reek, somehow simultaneously, of desperate invention and formula contrivance. (How else to explain the second-season search for a sea monster in the Caribbean?) But there's something that remains effective--sticky, even--about a show more at home in the Shazam! posture than in the prime time slot it was asked to fill. (Indeed, I discovered the show in syndication, seeing as I was too busy during its regular run watching "Knight Rider" and "The A-Team" on a rival network.) It's wish-fulfillment of the flavour towards which most superhero creations tend, sure, but it also speaks to what is essential in the American ethos: that the least of us believes we can be heroes under the right circumstances.

Fantastic Four: The Complete 1994-1995 Animated Television Series - DVD

Image C- Sound C- Extras D
"The Origin of the Fantastic Four, Part One," "The Origin of the Fantastic Four, Part Two," "Now Comes the Sub-Mariner," "Incursion of the Skrulls," "The Silver Surfer and the Coming of Galactus, Part One," "The Silver Surfer and the Coming of Galactus, Part Two," "Superskrull," "The Mask of Doom, Part One," "The Mask of Doom, Part Two," "The Mask of Doom, Part Three," "Mole Man," "Behold the Negative Zone," "The Silver Surfer and the Return of Galactus," "And a Blind Man Shall Lead Them," "And the Wind Cries Medusa," "The Inhumans Among Us," "Beware the Hidden Land," "Worlds Within Worlds," "To Battle the Living Planet," "Prey of the Black Panther," "When Calls Galactus," "Nightmare in Green," "Behold, a Distant Star," "Hopelessly Impossible," "The Sentry Sinister," "Doomsday"

by Walter Chaw Watching the short-lived "Fantastic Four" animated series from the mid-'90s is a lot like sticking forks in your eyes. It's terribly animated, terribly written, and generally uninspired. The only thing more depressing than hunkering down for a prolonged exposure to this mess is the prospect of actually having to write about it. People who think that what we do isn't a job haven't had the experience of not only being forced to endure something they never would have thought to endure on their own, ever, but also of later having to find the will to write something like an analysis of said experience for the appreciation of the handful of people in the world lonely and pathological enough to start hateful correspondence in defense of it. Think about it: by agreeing to review "Fantastic Four", I'm all but consenting to a conversation with the small tribe of Morlocks who consider this shit gold, mainly because a nine-year-old version of themselves used to like it when they watched it in their footed pyjamas and helmets. So, as a pre-emptive strike (as if it matters): yes, I was a child once; no, I don't hate happiness; no, I don't think that everything has to be Citizen Kane; and, oddly, thinking is not something I believe to be mutually exclusive from pleasure.