2000s Archives - Page 2 of 88 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

In the Mood for Love (2000) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 13, 2012****/****, 2000s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Hong Kong, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk
written and directed by Wong Kar-wai

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw The middle film in a loose trilogy by
Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar-wai (the others are Days of Being Wild and 2046), In the Mood for Love is a love-drunk ode to the confusion,
the intoxication, the magic, and the tragedy of being in love. It speaks in
terms proximate and eternal, presenting lovers cast in various roles across
years and alien geographies, placing some objects in the position of totem and
memento and others in historical dustbins to be abandoned, forgotten. It links
the act of watching a film to the act of seduction (Days of Being Wild
might be even better at this), and there's a
strong sense in In the Mood for Love that Wong is playing the artifactor of both sign and
signifier: He's doing the T.S. Eliot two-step of authoring Prufrock while simultaneously providing the distance to criticize it.

Indiana Jones: The Complete Adventures – Blu-ray Disc

October 15, 2012****/****, 1980s, 2000s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)
****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984)
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri
screenplay by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C
starring Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Denholm Elliot, Alison Doody
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (2008)
**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C-
starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Shia LaBeouf
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Let’s talk about hats–fedoras, in particular, and how they evolved from the image of the hard-boiled detective in the American noir cycle into the chapeau-of-choice for Coppola’s gangsters in the anti-hero ’70s. How Harrison Ford’s Deckard from Blade Runner was originally conceived with one of the hats to go with his trench coat before Raiders of the Lost Ark made an American icon out of Ford’s swashbuckling archaeologist Indiana Jones, and how that didn’t stop child-killing child-molester Freddy Krueger from getting a fedora (singed and blood-stained, but so was Indy’s) in 1984–the same year, as it happens, that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas turned their American icon into the star of his own horror movie with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The relationship between Americans and the hats their heroes wear is a complicated one. A Freudian would offer that hats are tumescent–the loci of masculine power, a metaphor for the penis/head–and that losing a hat is the equivalent of castration. My favourite example of that theory in practice is Joel McCrea losing his in a field of windmills to the trilling, mocking laughter of ladylove Laraine Day in Foreign Correspondent. The Coen Brothers make it a throughline in Miller’s Crossing, too, as Tom loses and reclaims his hat in cycles of power and powerlessness. I think it means something in the fourth Indiana Jones flick that evil Russkie Spalko tips the brim of Indy’s hat in an attempt to read his mind instead of knocking it off entirely.

Child’s Play (1988) [Chucky’s 20th Birthday Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc + Chucky: The Killer DVD Collection

October 1, 20121980s, 1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Romania, Satire, Thriller, UK

CHILD'S PLAY
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon, Alex Vincent, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Don Mancini and John Lafia and Tom Holland
directed by Tom Holland

CHILD'S PLAY 2 (1990)
**/**** Image C+ Sound A-
starring Alex Vincent, Jenny Agutter, Gerrit Graham, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Don Mancini
directed by John Lafia

CHILD'S PLAY 3 (1991)
*/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Justin Whalin, Perrey Reeves, Jeremy Sylvers, Brad Dourif
screenplay by Don Mancini
directed by Jack Bender

BRIDE OF CHUCKY (1998)
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jennifer Tilly, Brad Dourif, Katherine Heigl, Nick Stabile
screenplay by Don Mancini
directed by Ronny Yu

SEED OF CHUCKY (2004)
*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C-
starring Jennifer Tilly, Brad Dourif, Billy Boyd, Redman
written and directed by Don Mancini

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Twenty years and four sequels later, it's obviously pointless to try to conceal that Child's Play is about a serial killer (Brad Dourif) who transfers his soul into an innocuous doll, but watching it today–more than a decade after it thoroughly traumatized me as an impressionable preteen–I was surprised to learn that the film itself didn't do much to hide that fact from the start. Oh, sure, when you first approach Child's Play, you're ostensibly supposed to wonder whether little Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent) is responsible for the murders peppered throughout, despite his loud protestations that Chucky did it. But no, it never really tries to pretend that these horrible acts are being committed by anyone other than that godawful doll. In taking that perspective, Child's Play preys upon the irrational fears we all harbour–that sting of dread we get at the sight of an unintentionally unsettling toy, immediately wished away by safe, immutable reason: that's impossible–a doll can't hurt you.

Gray’s Anatomy (1996) [The Criterion Collection] + And Everything is Going Fine (2010) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Discs

September 4, 2012****/****, 1990s, 2000s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Documentary, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

GRAY'S ANATOMY
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
directed by Steven Soderbergh

A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN THEATER
***½/****
directed by Skip Blumberg

AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE
****/**** Image N/A Sound B Extras A
directed by Steven Soderbergh

SEX AND DEATH TO THE AGE 14
***/****
directed by Dan Weissman and Brad Ricker

by Walter Chaw The first ten minutes of Steven Soderbergh's Gray's Anatomy are
obnoxious, and though there are few artists as interesting to me or as influential in my own life as Spalding Gray, the last 109 don't exactly blow my
skirt up, either. Let me back up. I tripped over Swimming to Cambodia in
English class, Freshman year, then procured my own copy at Boulder's invaluable
The Video Station so that I could go back to it and, sure, impress Liberal Arts
girls with it on a double-bill with Stop Making Sense. You might say
that Gray and David Byrne were my wing-men for a couple of years there; it's
fitting that my VHS copies of both those pieces are now and forever in the
possession of ex-girlfriends and love interests. I wonder if I would ask for the tapes back were I to run into them again. I know that one of them, after I
was married, tried to return Swimming to Cambodia, and I asked her to
please keep it. If you don't know what Swimming to Cambodia is, it's
Spalding Gray's unbelievably great performance-"monolog" about his time on set,
on location, shooting Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields. I've never
heard Joffe speak, but I have Gray's impersonation of Joffe–calling out to a
tripping-balls Gray, floating in shark-infested surf in the South China Sea–lodged in my brain. I pull it out once in a while at a party, just as a
sonar ping to see if anyone could possibly identify the echo of the echo.

Romeo Must Die (2000) + Cradle 2 the Grave (2003) – Blu-ray Discs

September 2, 20122000s, 2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Martial Arts, ZERO STARS

ROMEO MUST DIE
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jet Li, Aaliyah, Isaiah Washington, Delroy Lindo
screenplay by Eric Bernt and John Jarrell
directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak

CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras D
starring Jet Li, DMX, Anthony Anderson, Gabrielle Union
screenplay by John O'Brien and Channing Gibson
directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak

by Walter Chaw There are a lot of interesting things about Jet Li's sad run
through Hollywood, among them the fairly simple question of why, in Romeo
Must Die, this particular yellow Romeo must die. But then he doesn't die,
and he also doesn't get to kiss the girl, who isn't white but Aaliyah
(black)–mitigating, I would have thought, the taboo against Asian men in
American cinema having any kind of sexuality that isn't ridiculous (see: Long Duk
Dong) or that involves a white lady. In his next film, Kiss of the Dragon,
Jet teams up with a white prostitute (Bridget Fonda) and, belying the sly
Orientalist promise of the title, doesn't get to kiss her, either–and
she's a fucking hooker. It's a cultural ban so stringent that there's a
specific category of porn, deeply perverse, that is not only interracial, but
specifically Asian man on white woman. Not long after 2003's Cradle 2 the
Grave, Li played an Asian man kept on a leash who, at a word, is made to
perform martial arts for his white master's favour. Danny the Dog
(retitled Unleashed in the United States…why, again? Because of
Hollywood's sensitivity?) is probably the most poignant expression of the
plight of the Asian action hero in the United States: castrated, humiliated,
valued for the single trait of knowing kung fu–even if, as it was for Jackie
Chan in the Karate Kid reboot, Chinese "kung fu" is reconfigured
as Japanese "karate." Chris Tucker's favourite joke in the Rush
Hour movies, after all, is to mistake the two cultures–a favour to neither
and funny, probably, only to Tucker.

Unstoppable (2010) – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

August 27, 20122000s, 2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tony Scott, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson, Ethan Suplee
screenplay by Mark Bomback
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw It's strange to be writing this review a couple of days after Tony Scott ended his life by walking off a bridge in California–an event that inspired me to revisit my favourite of his films (Enemy of the State and Déjà Vu) and one that spurred me, too, to finally give Scott's Unstoppable another look after finding I had little use for it upon initial release. I have an aversion to Scott's movies in general; I don't have the muscle or sensitivity to distinguish between them and other stuttering, grandiloquent pictures that have resulted in things like Michael Bay. Believe me, the temptation is high to present a critical re-evaluation of his work immediately upon his passing. Positioning oneself as the guy who knew that Chris Farley was John Belushi is one of those vantages every critic wishes he had, if only for the brief respite from charges of elitism it might bring. But listen, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Domino, Spy Game, The Fan, Days of Thunder, and Beverly Hills Cop 2–there's really no defense for any of it. And when I say that I like stuff like The Hunger, True Romance, The Last Boy Scout, or even Scott's Jim Harrison adaptation Revenge, I'm not saying I love them. Tony Scott's an auteur, sure–proof that "auteur" doesn't by itself confer a positive or a pejorative connotation. I'll give him this, though: He shot a Tarantino script as a remake of Badlands and produced a sneaky sequel to The Conversation, so, yeah, I'll miss the bastard, too.

Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) [15th Anniversary Edition] + High Fidelity (2000) – Blu-ray Discs

August 26, 20121990s, 2000s, 2012, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Music, Romance, Thriller, UK

GROSSE POINTE BLANK
***½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras D
starring John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Alan Arkin, Dan Aykroyd
screenplay by Tom Jankiewicz and D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & John Cusack
directed by George Armitage

HIGH FIDELITY
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring John Cusack, Jack Black, Lisa Bonet, Joelle Carter
screenplay by D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & John Cusack and Scott Rosenberg, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Stephen Frears

click any image to enlarge

by Jefferson Robbins John Cusack spent much of the 1990s stubbornly trying to dodge his high-school reunion. Barely present in Sixteen Candles, he nevertheless may have suffered a bit of the curse that pursued John Hughes's other players: We wouldn't let them grow up for quite a while, and careers were hampered. Cusack navigated this impasse better than most, netting late-'80s leads both romantic (Say Anything…) and dramatic (The Grifters) that unpack and showcase his mature dimensions. Cusack has, if it's not too oxymoronic, a vulnerable edge–his characters are deeply attuned to others, but only out of self-defense. Lloyd Dobler, Roy Dillon, and, in the two films under discussion, Martin Blank and Rob Gordon constantly assess input to learn how the prevailing emotional currents of a scene affect them, not others. "You think I'm a dick," Lloyd determines when Diane (Ione Skye) gives him a Pen of Friendship as a parting gift. His feelings, dependent on hers, are paramount. Cusack's heroes are sensitive but far from selfless, yet the actor somehow convinces us otherwise.

Blood Work (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 20122000s, 2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
starring Clint Eastwood, Wanda De Jesús, Jeff Daniels, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Michael Connelly
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw You can figure out the pivotal clue in Blood Work if not by the title alone–which gives altogether too much away–then surely come the thirty-minute mark. You can deduce the identity of the murderer as soon as he saunters on screen, and you can predict the love story almost before it happens just by dint of the kind of movie that Blood Work is. The only thing you can't figure out is why Clint Eastwood, who sometimes makes interesting movies like Bird, A Perfect World, White Hunter, Black Heart, and Unforgiven, almost as often makes boring, predictable, prosaic movies like The Rookie (1990), Absolute Power, True Crime, and now Blood Work.

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

June 4, 20122000s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Documentary, DVD, Superhero

**/**** 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 Expendables (2010) [Extended Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray + Digital Copy

January 9, 20122000s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain, Thriller

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke
written and directed by Sylvester Stallone

by Walter Chaw After the remarkably tough and uncompromising Rambo and the almost-unbearably poignant and transparent Rocky Balboa, it'd be fair to nurse a healthy anticipation for Sylvester Stallone's paean to the '80s blockbuster, The Expendables. Alas, what's on display owes more to Stallone's Rhinestone than to his venerable Rocky series. A redux of Wild Hogs as embarrassing, boring, and ineptly- shot and edited as the original, The Expendables even ends the same way, with geezers riding off into the sunset on the backs of their four-fifths-life-crisis choppers. Tattoos and plunging v-neck Ts the rule of the day, it's more Rogaine commercial than action movie, making fun of itself in the way that old guys who are genuinely insecure about their age make fun of themselves. It's awkward. It's also, in addition to being almost entirely free of excitement or a single line of dialogue that isn't some syncopated mix of grunting and tough-guy cliché, maybe a no-shit adaptation of Eugene Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano". That's the only way to explain how it is that a film tits-deep in dialogue could have not one exchange that makes any sense whatsoever. The way the movie's put together, too, is a model of the Theatre of the Absurd's occasional dabbling in non sequiturs–something The Expendables seems to address at one point when the horsey-looking, freshly-waterboarded damsel (Giselle Itié) wonders how Stallone's Barney has magically appeared as her saviour in a Caribbean (?) dictator's dungeon. "I just am!" mumbles Barney. Who am I to argue with that?

Elite Squad – The Enemy Within (2010)

November 25, 20112000s, 2011, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Brazil, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Tropa de Elite 2 – O Inimigo Agora É Outro
***/****
starring Wagner Moura, Irandhir Santos, Andre Ramiro, Milhelm Cortaz
screenplay by Bráulio Mantovani & José Padilha
directed by José Padilha

by Angelo Muredda Early in Elite Squad – The Enemy Within (hereafter The Enemy Within) José Padilha’s blustery follow-up to his 2007 hit Elite Squad, deluxe cop Lt. Colonel Nascimento (Wagner Moura, Brazil’s answer to Mark Ruffalo) promises to give us a history of Rio that happens to coincide with his life story. It’s a tall order, but Padilha and co-screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani are ambitious and foolish enough to undertake it, returning to the favelas they brought to boot-stomping life in the first Elite Squad while shifting focus this time from drug lords to corrupt cops. No one would call their work subtle, but they strike a surprisingly watchable balance between Goodfellas-type insider confessional and incendiary political exposé, ditching the tight timeframe and local scope of the original and going for a more sprawling survey of Rio as Hell on Earth. Yet as much as The Enemy Within deserves solemn back-pats for its anaesthetized, everybody’s-guilty project, it really takes off in brutally violent set-pieces that forgo neutrality. Cut loose from his earnest ambitions to tell an ambivalent political fable that clucks its tongue equally at anti-poverty activists and conservative law-and-order types, Padilha shows his directorial hand in testosterone-charged gunfights where either all the right people get shot or all the good ones go down as martyrs, and it’s the hand of a vigilante sympathizer drawn to the romance of man-to-man violence. Fascist? No doubt. But as ideologically suspect apologies for rogue justice go, this one’s pretty well-executed, and at times just plain more fun than the hemming and hawing of The Dark Knight.

Mysteries of Lisbon (2010)

November 11, 2011****/****, 2000s, 2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Mystery, Portugal, Romance, Theatrical

Mistérios de Lisboa
****/****
starring Adriano Luz, Maria João Bastos, Ricardo Pereira
screenplay by Carlos Saboga, based on the novel by Camilo Castelo Branco
directed by Raúl Ruiz

by Angelo Muredda "It would be long and tedious to explain," Adriano Luz's mysterious man of the cloth Father Dinis offers shortly before the intermission point of prolific Chilean director Raúl Ruiz's staggering Mysteries of Lisbon, the fleetest four-hour-plus spectacle you'll see this year. It's not the first time characters promise to explain things later (nor is it the last), their second favourite activity after explaining things now. As promised in an unattributed statement in the title credits, what follows is an amiably digressive "diary of suffering" stuffed with such deferrals and explanations. And a beautiful diary it is. Ruiz, who passed away earlier this year, is perhaps best-known stateside for his lyrical Proust adaptation Time Regained–a nice warm-up, in retrospect, for this even more sprawling and melancholy saga of childhood and loss, an adaptation of Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco's 1854 novel of the same name. The fruit of his labours this time is astonishing: an adaptation that's at once deeply reverent towards conventions of nineteenth-century fiction and attuned to their radical possibilities. Ruiz, in other words, finds nothing tedious about these stories, and sees in their mysterious doublings, crude disguises, generational secrets, and grand unmaskings an opportunity to dwell on the nature of storytelling, both its revelatory potential and its artifice.

O Lucky Man! (1973) [Two-Disc Special Edition] + Never Apologize: A Personal Visit with Lindsay Anderson (2008) – DVDs

October 17, 20111970s, 2000s, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Concert Doc, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Music, UK

O LUCKY MAN!
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Malcolm McDowell, Ralph Richardson, Rachel Roberts, Arthur Lowe
screenplay by David Sherwin
directed by Lindsay Anderson

NEVER APOLOGIZE: A PERSONAL VISIT WITH LINDSAY ANDERSON
**½/**** Image C Sound B-
directed by Mike Kaplan

by Jefferson Robbins As magnetic an actor as he is, Malcolm McDowell is often the acted-upon. Alex DeLarge of A Clockwork Orange seeks to master his chosen domains by force, but once he finds himself in the larger circuitry of the world, he's really just an implement of others' power. Is Caligula the prime mover of his vulgar Roman Empire, or merely its best expression? And so on. It was only in his later career that lazy filmmakers and casting agents made McDowell a shorthand for sinister worldliness; today, he arrives onscreen and you know who he is. Time was, he was a squirrelly, intense audience surrogate, Everymannish but beautiful in a way that was at once fragile and sharp. Asked to identify McDowell's essential quality as an actor, director Lindsay Anderson told him, "You're rather dangerous." For good or ill, the movie industry has looked no farther than that in the way it's handled McDowell for the last thirty years.

The Fox and the Hound (1981) [25th Anniversary] + The Little Mermaid (1989) [Platinum Edition] – DVDs|The Fox and the Hound/The Fox and the Hound II (2006) [2 Movie Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 22, 20111980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2011, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance, ZERO STARS

THE FOX AND THE HOUND
***½/**** Image C- Sound B Extras C
uncredited screenplay, based on the novel by Daniel P. Mannix
directed by Art Stevens, Ted Berman, Richard Rich

THE LITTLE MERMAID
*½/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A
written and directed by John Musker and Ron Clements

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. With The Fox and the Hound and The Little Mermaid bookending an especially turbulent decade for a studio mortally locked in a struggle to reconcile its animation pedigree with its crass commercial instincts, the former has come to be regarded in the Disney mythology as the Good Friday to the latter's Easter Sunday. It's therefore fitting that the two films they most emulate are 1942's Bambi and 1950's Cinderella, respectively, as the Forties marked the last time the Mouse House was on the brink of foreclosure. (The Fox and the Hound goes so far as to recycle cels from Bambi.) Much like The Little Mermaid represented a somewhat cynical reboot of the fairytale default, so, too, was Cinderella a glorified salvage operation following the money-/audience-hemorrhaging pro bono work Uncle Walt did on behalf of FDR's Good Neighbor policy. Alas, the Good Friday and Easter Sunday analogy applies to not just Disney's phoenix-like resurrection but also the tonal and moral disparity between the two pictures: one is the sad truth; the other is wishful thinking.

The Final Destination in 3-D (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

August 9, 20112000s, 2011, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror

The Final Destination
**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten, Nick Zano, Mykelti Williamson
screenplay by Eric Bess
directed by David R. Ellis

by Alex Jackson It's the summer of 2009. I arrive at the movie theatre, a multiplex twenty miles from home (making it the closest one), to discover that while Rob Zombie's Halloween II has already started, I'm just in time to catch The Final Destination in 3-D. Thinking that I didn't really care which one I saw, that's good enough for me, and so I buy a ticket for the fourth (and, we were led to believe, last) entry in the Final Destination franchise.

How Do You Know (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

August 3, 20112000s, 2011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Jack Nicholson, Romance

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A
starring Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, Jack Nicholson
written and directed by James L. Brooks

by Angelo Muredda “We’re all one small adjustment away from making our lives work,” Paul Rudd’s George chirps, a little too eagerly, in the interminable, banally titled, and curiously unpunctuated How Do You Know. It’s a strange thing for an indicted man on the verge of financial ruin to say, but then How Do You Know is a strange movie, less the tidy romantic comedy its trailer pitches than a monument to the incidental pleasures of narrative ungainliness and lax comic timing.

Arthur (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

July 25, 20112000s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Romance

*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C-
starring Russell Brand, Helen Mirren, Greta Gerwig, Jennifer Garner
screenplay by Peter Baynham, based on the film Arthur written and directed by Steve Gordon
directed by Jason Winer

by Ian Pugh Boy, that Russell Brand sure does talk a lot, doesn't he? Jason Winer's modernization of Steve Gordon's 1981 comedy Arthur serves as your latest reminder that Brand is turning his long-winded rambling into a full-blown comic empire–and it's a good thing it makes that point perfectly clear, because otherwise I can't think of any reason why this remake exists. Brand's slurring motormouth is on full display here, and he's such a suffocating presence that Arthur Bach's now-famous inebriety hardly plays a role. Who needs booze when you've got an immature dude who just won't shut up? Of course, the character is still nominally an alcoholic–and the film attempts to "fix" that problem in precisely the wrong way. Fearing it will be seen as an implicit endorsement of excessive drinking, Arthur launches into an overwritten screed about the attendant dangers of same, somehow assuming that Gordon's original didn't comprehend the seriousness of its own premise. Between that mistaken belief and its broad, bland humour, the picture might be more accurately considered a remake of the notorious Arthur 2: On the Rocks.

She’s Out of My League (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

July 6, 20112000s, Authors: Jon Thibault, Comedy, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve, T.J. Miller, Mike Vogel
screenplay by Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Jim Field Smith

by Jon Thibault

What happens when a beautiful, wealthy event planner meets a scrawny, socially maladroit, uneducated TSA security guard who's too uncoordinated to shave his own balls?

Love!

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

June 27, 20112000s, 2011, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Thriller

½*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sean Patrick Flannery, Norman Reedus, Clifton Collins Jr., Billy Connolly
written and directed by Troy Duffy

by Alex Jackson The first thing I did when I got a FACEBOOK account was look up Travis, my best friend from gradeschool, whom I hadn't seen or heard from in the last twenty years. Looking at his profile, I saw that he listed "extensive" under music and "way too many to list here" for books, but under movies he had just one title: The Boondock Saints. The bands and books he loves are too numerous to mention, but there is a film that, in his mind, towers above all others. There is only one film that bears mentioning. And that film is Troy Duffy's The Boondock Saints. Is it petty of me to not put in that "friend" request? This seems to be all the update I need. Twenty years is a long time. The only things we really had in common were that we both went to the same school and both liked Nintendo and The Monster Squad. That's hardly enough to inoculate a friendship against The Boondock Saints.

Barry Lyndon (1975) – Blu-ray Disc

May 30, 2011****/****, 2000s, 2011, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, War

****/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson If The Shining has dated the most of Kubrick's films, Barry Lyndon, which immediately preceded it, has dated the least. In 1976, Barry Lyndon was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award alongside Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, and Nashville. I have some reservations about a couple of those, but there's no arguing that these are a few of the most revered American movies of the last four decades. And yet, they're all inextricably linked to the year 1975. Certainly, they still work on their own terms, but today there's an unspoken contract that we will acknowledge and accept them as something produced thirty-five years ago. We don't have to make any such concessions with Barry Lyndon; there isn't anything vintage about it.

13 Assassins (2010)

May 13, 2011****/****, 2000s, 2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Japan, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Koji Yakusho, Takayuki Yamada, Yusuke Iseya, Ikki Sawamura
screenplay by Daisuke Tengan
directed by Takashi Miike

by Walter Chaw 13 Assassins, Takashi Miike's costume-period retro-cross-cultural updating of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (and more horizontal homage to obvious antecedents by countrymen Kurosawa, Kobayashi, and Chushingura), initially seems a surprise choice for someone who's made his name (80+ times in the last twenty years) with transgressive, flamboyantly outré Yakuza and horror pictures. But Miike hinted at this exact marriage of a specific Spaghetti Western tradition and the Samurai flicks that were its inspiration with his arch Sukiyaki Western Django–choosing this time around to present the material "straighter," allowing his cast the language and trappings of late-Feudal Japan. The result is possibly the best Samurai movie since Yoji Yamada's Twilight Samurai (and its unofficial sequel, Hidden Blade), a picture meticulous in its details that is nonetheless only possible to fully appreciate within a working conversation with the traditions (including those of Miike's own work) that inform it. It's like a Coen Brothers film in that respect: very much the post-modern artifact, very much the solipsistic auto-critical exercise in genre, but also so technically brilliant and thematically rich that it's possible to enjoy it without much of that prior knowledge.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD

May 9, 20112000s, 2011, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Nicolas Cage

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras D
starring Nicolas Cage, Jay Baruchel, Alfred Molina, Teresa Palmer
screenplay by Matt Lopez and Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard
directed by Jon Turteltaub

by Walter Chaw Disney was headed this way before The Little Mermaid–then Pixar–gave them the illusion of a new direction. But all along, the dirty little secret in the House of Mouse has been that, Eisner or not, the company's sensibilities lie in the exhumation and unnatural reanimation of their vault product, whether it be in repackaging the old grey mares or offering dtv sequels to the same, or mounting big-budget revamps of past "glories." Then, accidentally, they made a good film with the first Pirates of the Caribbean, which reminds of a certain thing with blind squirrels and nuts. So it comes as no surprise that Disney, dealing with a congenital paucity of imagination, has reached the point where it's actually making movies based on a portion of a movie. Next up? That Spaghetti Scene from Lady and the Tramp: The Movie. But first, there's Jon Turteltaub and Jerry Bruckheimer's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, hoping to conjure up (ha) the nominal success of their National Treasure franchise on the back of a specious premise cobbled together so they can repurpose part of Fantasia in live-action. Bad idea? Really bad idea.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 25, 20112000s, 2011, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, UK

***½/**** Image B- Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw David Yates's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I (hereafter Harry Potter 7a) is a coda for the end of a dark decade in film–a war journal, a diary of the apocalypse–and good enough to be this constant, niggling reminder that had J.K. Rowling the courage to do what it appears she intends to do at first, her Harry Potter series could have been nigh canonical instead of just pretty good. Alas, that's for the second part of this two-parter. For now, it's easy to see Harry sacrificed on the cross of his Chosen One eminence. With Yates back for his third go-round and Steve Kloves again adapting, it's a pair of newcomers to the franchise–DP Eduardo Serra and composer Alexandre Desplat (his work on Birth and Lust, Caution: tremendous)–who contribute most to the minimal, blasted feeling of Harry Potter 7a. It's empty, bleak, and stately for long stretches as our core triumvirate of Ron (Rupert Grint), Hermione (Emma Watson), and Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) search a Tennysonian wilderness for some essential part of themselves valuable enough to offer up for the sake of the world. When it opens with Hermione mournfully erasing the memory of her from her "muggle" parents, the film announces itself as a triumphant return to the broken wasteland promised by The Order of the Phoenix. This Harry Potter intends to do harm.

Robots (2005) – Blu-ray Disc

April 11, 20112000s, 2011, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Family, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C+
screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire and Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel
directed by Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha

by Walter Chaw Surprisingly, perhaps shockingly, Robots isn't terrible, even though it's a product of the same chowderheads behind Ice Age and even though it's your basic ramshackle kid's flick/self-esteem trope (complete with closing musical number) upon which the Shrek franchise has founded a scatological empire. What works in its favour is its attention to the little details of a world that, without explanation, is completely populated by robots that employ other robots in specialized, superfluous functions. What works against it is the lack of a firm grip on Robin Williams's bridle (resulting in a bunch of gay jokes that weren't funny when Milton Berle was doing them half a century ago), a weak reliance on pop cultural in-jokes that are already dated (Britney Spears? C'mon–why not Ricky Martin?), and the usual roster of fart and diarrhea jokes, which aren't exactly a calling card for immortality. The appropriately-named Blue Sky animation studio promises a lot with its giant mainframes, but it can't deliver anything beyond a brilliant opening sequence, a Tom Waits song (like Shrek 2), and then a lot of the same passionless, heartless idiotspeak that passes for children's fare nowadays.

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

April 5, 2011****/****, 2000s, 2011, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Espionage, Family, FFC Must-Own, Pixar, Superhero

****/****
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.