2000s Archives - Page 6 of 88 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

How I Did It: FFC Interviews Vincenzo Natali

June 6, 20102000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Interviews

With Splice, director Vincenzo Natali's career comes alive. ALIVE!

June 6, 2010|I had been invited to interview Vincenzo Natali, and although I immediately acquainted myself with his previous work, nothing could prepare me for the film he was coming to Boston to promote. Indeed, anyone who's seen the trailers for Natali's latest, the Frankenstein-ian family drama Splice, is certain to be surprised by what the final product has in store. You didn't see that one comin', did ya? I know I didn't.

Dispatch from the 2010 WWSFF: Midnight Mania – Freaky

June 4, 20102000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Film Festivals, France, Israel, Japan, Norway, Short Films, Spain, Switzerland, UK

Click here to visit the Worldwide Short Film Festival‘s official website.

by Bill Chambers It’s tempting to say that pop already ate itself, leaving a vast wasteland of remakes and reboots that can’t possibly be fertile enough to cultivate imaginations; I sometimes lie awake worrying that one day all we’ll be left with is the vultures and their Jane Austen mashups, their homemade Lord of the Rings prequels and Sweded Rambo movies. Should such a Doomsday scenario come to pass, let’s hope it occasionally yields something as whimsical and obviously heartfelt as France’s The Little Dragon (Le petit dragon) (animated; d. Bruno Collet; 8 mins.; ***/****), in which a magical force brings a Bruce Lee action figure to life, seemingly with the legend’s identity, if not his soul, intact, as it is his impulse upon encountering a Chuck Norris cut-out to kick it down. (He also recognizes his name and image on other collectibles.) Decked out in his yellow Game of Death jumpsuit, he navigates a maze of cobweb-strewn movie memorabilia that appears to be some Harry Knowles type’s bedroom; in a moment of quintessentially French cinephilia, Bruce, having been passed the torch (the Statue of Liberty torch from a Planet of the Apes model kit, that is), stumbles on a makeshift crypt lined with dolls of Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Louise Brooks, Robert Mitchum, and, erm, Robert Taylor. The stop-motion animation is charming–this scrappy little guy may actually be the ne plus ultra of Lee imitators, who are of course legion–and the tone is deceptively irreverent. This is fan art, executed with gusto–but does it have a function? Collet could be the next Nick Park–but is he hurting for inspiration?

Splice (2010)

June 3, 20102000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Drama, France, Horror, Mexico, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***/****
starring Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chanéac, David Hewlett
screenplay by Vincenzo Natali & Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor
directed by Vincenzo Natali

by Ian Pugh Vincenzo Natali's Splice unavoidably lives in the shadow of countless sci-fi/horror properties that came before it–stories that have already taught us, as Splice teaches us, that tragedies occur when Man dabbles in God's domain. But dismiss the film as cliché at your own peril. While it provides numerous shocks to the system, the traumas themselves take a backseat to the horror of their implications and, moreover, what those tragedies say about the risks and ambitions of daily life. Indeed, while the movie consciously seeks to fashion a cautionary tale out of the stock phrase "What's the worst that could happen?," its ultimate goal is to tell that tale as a domestic drama.

Shutter Island (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

June 1, 20102000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw The first thirty minutes of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island left me breathless with delight. The rack-focus through mess-hall implements; swaying along a ceiling as we peer beyond the door to the head, where our hero, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), is losing his lunch; the way a ferry blows through a fog bank like Travis Bickle’s cab through the steam escaping a New York sewer cap. When it snows, it snows up like in the dream sequences from Bringing Out the Dead (there’s even a moment when the smoke from Teddy’s cigarette retreats into the butt)–and when a shadowy figure named Laeddis (Elias Koteas) finally materializes in the midst of Teddy’s fugue, he bears a striking resemblance to Travis Bickle. (It’s not until later that we understand the full extent of this self-reference.) Shutter Island is among the director’s handsomest films, and moments of it suggest there’s a masterpiece here–as a WWII Holocaust drama, or a ghost story, or a period Red Menace piece, or a 1960s Manchurian Candidate manqué, or a 1940s Freud clinic, or a G-Man noir, or a straight procedural, or a modernist existential piece–if he wants it. But it’s less than the sum of its tantalizing parts, providing instead a hackneyed climax that proves just another votive lit in Dennis Lehane’s church of dead children.

War of the Worlds (2005) – Blu-ray Disc

May 31, 20102000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Tom Cruise

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. A lot like Minority Report, the first 90% of War of the Worlds is among the best movies of the year and the last 10% is among the worst. Spielberg is the only one who can ruin his films and he does it over and over again because he's Peter Pan in a Captain Hook world. There has never been a more gifted visual storyteller than Steven Spielberg; in the five minutes of shorthand that opens his War of the Worlds, he creates three characters we care about, a world that we recognize, and a real hope that this time, this one time, he'll be courageous enough to follow a narrative through to its logical end instead of the one he thinks will least disturb his audience. His audience being one that he underestimates with such stunning regularity that it can be said with confidence at this point that he's not really underestimating anybody–that he knows for whom he's making movies, posterity be damned. War of the Worlds is a work of obvious genius that is about nothing, which is an amazing and disheartening thing to say because so much of the picture is composed of jaw-dropping–I mean it, it's astonishing–Holocaust tableaux mixed with 9/11 imagery.

Pontypool (2009) – DVD

May 22, 20102000s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller, Zombie

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

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

Shrek Forever After (2010)

May 20, 20102000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
screenplay by Josh Klausner & Darren Lemke
directed by Mike Mitchell

by Ian Pugh Because Shrek the Third tied things up pretty conclusively, what they're probably going to tell you is that Shrek Forever After (hereafter Shrek 4) is more of an epilogue than a sequel. What they won't tell you is that this "epilogue," co-written by the screenwriter of Date Night, is more of a toy than a feature film. But your money's just as green as it ever was. Now settled into a monotonous family life, Shrek (voice of Mike Myers) strikes a deal with Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn) for the chance to live one more day as a bachelor/terrifying ogre. Unfortunately, said deal transports Shrek into an alternate reality in which he never rescued Fiona (Cameron Diaz) from the dragon's lair, freeing Rumpelstiltskin to conquer the kingdom of Far Far Away. And despite much talk of being grateful for what you have, that's all there is to it, really. Sure, it's better than Shrek the Third, but lots of things are better than Shrek the Third–and even then, Shrek 4 is only an improvement in the sense that it isn't obsessed with scatological humour…and that it doesn't leave an especially terrible aftertaste. It doesn't leave the slightest impression at all, in fact. It's not merely a product, it wants you to see it as a product: It's a Wonderful Life as told by Mr. Potter. Oh, and it's in 3-D. I mean, of course it is.

The House of the Devil (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

May 18, 20102000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery

***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov, Dee Wallace
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw Her hair's a little longer, but she's a dead ringer for Karen Allen from Starman (with a touch of Brooke Adams from Invasion of the Body Snatchers thrown in), this girl dancing to The Fixx's classic "One Thing Leads to Another," Walkman clapped to her ears, in a creepy house in the middle of nowhere. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue, a real find) is there because she answered one of those tear-away babysitting ads posted outside her dorm, and who cares if it's not really a kid the guy, Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan), wants her to look after but instead a demented old mother-in-law socked away in the attic^*–he's giving her four hundred bucks so he and his wife (Mary Woronov) can enjoy the lunar eclipse. I know what you're thinking, but Ti West's gorgeous ode to '80s exploitation shockers comes off as more than mere pomo exercise or homage; The House of the Devil is a lovingly crafted little gem that owes as much to Roman Polanski's paranoia trilogy and Bob Clark's Black Christmas. (Come to think of it, Donahue also bears a resemblance to Margot Kidder around the time of the latter and DePalma's Sisters.) Smarter than hell about its sources, it employs all of them to a full seventy minutes of unbearable tension capped by twenty minutes of payoff. It's the same ratio of foreplay-to-climax as Rosemary's Baby, and lo, The House of the Devil would play wonderfully on a double-bill with the same.

Avatar (2009) – Blu-ray + DVD

May 17, 20102000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Sam Worthington, Zoë Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver
written and directed by James Cameron

by Walter Chaw A morally, historically, socially, and politically childish amalgam of Pocahontas and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, Avatar finds James Cameron–still the Cameron of Titanic (or the uncomfortably simpering T2, if we're honest with ourselves) rather than the Cameron of Aliens and The Terminator–trying his hand at being Kevin Costner: powerful, dim, and only relevant for a tiny window of time he doesn't realize has already closed. The more simple-minded liberal proselytizing he perpetrates like Avatar, the farther away he gets from the B-movie muscularity that indicated his early career. It's a bad thing, believe me, that the first set of movies people think to compare your latest to is first George Lucas's ridiculous prequel trilogy–then Dances with Wolves.

Lost: The Complete Fourth Season (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

May 17, 20102000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
"The Beginning of the End," "Confirmed Dead," "The Economist," "Eggtown," "The Constant," "The Other Woman," "Ji Yeon," "Meet Kevin Johnson," "The Shape of Things to Come," "Something Nice Back Home," "Cabin Fever," "There's No Place Like Home: Part 1," "There's No Place Like Home: Part 2"

by Walter Chaw Four years into its run, "Lost" appears to have hit something of a stride–at least it does until it falls completely off the rails, maybe for good. Blame the most recent Writer's Strike, which happened in the middle of this truncated season, or better yet, blame the fact that the series can't seem to leave well enough alone. It has a chance to be transcendent, see, and resigns itself to being ordinary. The best episode of the run so far happens early in the season with episode 4.5, "The Constant." A clear homage to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, it replaces Billy Pilgrim with our Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), who becomes "unstuck" in time and struggles during the course of things to find a "constant" with which to anchor his consciousness in one fixed timeline. Ingeniously executed and manufacturing the first real suspense "Lost" has managed since possibly the first episode of the first season (or since the first hatch was opened), "The Constant" suggests that there are separate Oceanic Flight 815s, that reality is slippery, and that there might be a struggle somewhere, between some things, for control over a dominant reality. "The Constant" marks the moment I became a "Lost" fan. And then, in the very next episode, "The Other Woman," everything goes to shit: "Lost" scrambles to demystify all these philosophies in favour of a vast conspiracy masterminded by an evil billionaire who, apparently, has filled a fake plane with exhumed corpses and planted it in the ocean so as to prevent his daughter Penelope–named for Odysseus's wife, right?–from reuniting with a boy of whom he doesn't approve. The problem is mainly that after three-and-a-half years of this garbage, anything the creators could come up with in terms of an Answer would not be equal to the investment the show's loyal viewers have already made in it.

Robin Hood (2010)

May 14, 20102000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, William Hurt, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Brian Helgeland
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw Predictably, achingly, perfectly okay, Ridley Scott into his dotage has produced a string of absolutely unsurprising, overlong, uninspiring-if-occasionally-visually-striking films, of which Robin Hood is only the latest. An attempt to “reboot” the Robin Hood legend with a “prequel” that shows how a middle-aged Robin (Russell Crowe) meets his Merry Mystery, Alaska Men, woos freshly-widowed “maid” Marion (Cate Blanchett), sort of composes the “Declaration of Independence,” directly influences–it’s implied–the signing of the Magna Carta (in the completion of which the film’s real hero, William Marshal (William Hurt), was instrumental) not long after the events of the movie, and enters into a life of sylvan banditry at the prodding injustice of ineffectual King John (Oscar Isaac, doing his best Russell Brand). It also suggests that Marion is a Maid of Orléans figure who rides into battle alongside the menfolk to repulse an inexplicable French invasion shot in such a way as to suggest a Gallic D-Day landing (or an attack on Northern England by the New Orleans Saints)^*–marking the second time Blanchett’s done this exact scene after the admittedly-worse Elizabeth: The Golden Age. All of which is portrayed in so exacting and expository a way in that inimitably stately Ridley Scott style that the picture’s bumfuddling 140-minute runtime feels like a couple of torturous days spent at a Renaissance Fair. Maybe it’s the complete lack of stakes that hamstrings the production–the surety that no compelling issues will be broached, despite all the posturing about Robin Hood being Thoreau over six centuries before Thoreau (or Thomas Jefferson five centuries before Jefferson) in a deeply stupid town-centre meeting that more closely resembles the Endor council in Return of the Jedi than it does the requisite stirring centrepiece monologue in this prestige epic lost without an awards season.

Edge of Darkness (2010) + When in Rome (2010)|Edge of Darkness – Blu-ray Disc

May 9, 20102000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

EDGE OF DARKNESS
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, Bojana Novakovic
screenplay by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell, based on the television series by Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by Martin Campbell

WHEN IN ROME
*/****
starring Kristen Bell, Josh Duhamel, Will Arnett, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by David Diamond & David Weissman
directed by Mark Steven Johnson

by Ian Pugh Allegedly a radical departure from the BBC miniseries upon which it's based, Martin Campbell's Edge of Darkness works because there's nothing typical about it. Boston PD detective Tom Craven (Mel Gibson) naturally blames himself when his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) is gunned down by a masked man with a shotgun, but his private inquiry into the matter reveals that Emma herself was the more likely target: it had something to do with her job at a nuclear R&D lab run by sadistic creepshow Jack Bennett (an almost-ridiculously slimy Danny Huston). The trick to Tom's subsequent trip down the rabbit hole is that he never stops blaming himself, even once his quest is validated by the trail of bodies left by both him and the mysterious conspirators pulling the strings. This is Gibson's first starring role in eight years following a lengthy trek through Crazytown, and he might be the only actor who could have pulled it off so flawlessly–simply because there's always been something slightly terrified about his specific brand of martyrdom, something that points to it all being painfully unnecessary.

Iron Man 2 (2010)

May 7, 20102000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Superhero, Theatrical

*/****
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.

K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

May 3, 20102000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller, UK, War

*½/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson, Sam Spruell, Peter Stebbins
screenplay by Christopher Kyle
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw The film opens with a false alarm because drills are how all cookie-cutter closed-vehicle thrillers begin. Screenwriters free of the limiting bonds of imagination call it "foreshadowing"; critics forced to watch at least one film that begins this way per year prefer "tedious." K-19: The Widowmaker (hereafter K-19) has a tedious narrative married to vein-swelling performances presented in that frank gracelessness indicative of director Kathryn Bigelow's sledgehammer-chic since long about Point Break, brought together under the steady hand of a legendary editor (Walter Murch) that only just guides this behemoth of conflicting ideas and wet (and drunken) Russian submariners into the dry dock of coherence.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

April 29, 20102000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Wes Craven

½*/****
starring Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy
screenplay by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer
directed by Samuel Bayer

by Walter Chaw Listen, I like remakes. I think that for the same reason no one complains about a new production of "Hamlet", no one should complain about the umpteenth iteration of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I like the new Dawn of the Dead better than the original, the new The Manchurian Candidate almost as much; I'm not trying to start an argument, I'm simply saying that I don't hate the new A Nightmare on Elm Street on principle. I hate the new A Nightmare on Elm Street because it really sucks. Samuel Bayer's ridiculously amateurish take on the franchise earns the only nod it deserves by going all the way with the loathsomeness of its Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley). Otherwise, it's strictly jump-scare theatre, a geek leaping from the bushes, clashing cymbals, in the very imitation of a jack-in-the-box for ninety soul-sucking minutes. For what it's worth, it drags its claw along the text of the Wes Craven original pretty faithfully, down to recreating a few of the kills and resurrecting the iconic body-bag sequence, all to drastically diminished returns. To say the movie's not scary in the slightest is both a surprise and not at all a surprise. But it is a shame, considering that Craven's oneiric A Nightmare on Elm Street is an inventive, nasty little low-budget chiller with enough of a thought in its head to germinate a beloved franchise and a proud member of the bogey pantheon.

The Losers (2010) + The Back-up Plan (2010)

April 22, 20102000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

THE LOSERS
*½/****
starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoë Saldana, Chris Evans, Jason Patric
screenplay by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt, based on the comic book series by Andy Diggle and Jock
directed by Sylvain White

THE BACK-UP PLAN
½*/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Alex O'Loughlin, Eric Christian Olsen, Linda Lavin
screenplay by Kate Angelo
directed by Alan Poul

by Ian Pugh We've got a long summer ahead of us, full of remakes and spoofs straight out of the '80s, and The Losers celebrates its imminent arrival by taking a dump on the action flicks of the era. Blinkered hostility is as much a mood-killer as uncritical nostalgia, and The Losers never misses an opportunity to remind you that its characters have one-note personalities defined by terse nicknames. The film begins, as it must, in the Bolivian jungle, where the titular team of U.S. soldiers (led by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is forced to go underground after an errant missile–intended for them–kills twenty-five Bolivian children they'd just saved from an evil drug lord. At first glance, that opening raid points to a toned-down Predator reference, but it's really just a paint-by-numbers scenario meant to demonstrate how pretty much everything from that decade is stilted, corny, and hopelessly dated. So it goes for the rest of the film–how else to explain a brief chase sequence set to "Don't Stop Believin'"? It's not merely junk, it's self-conscious, wilfully-misinterpretive junk.

An Education (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

April 21, 20102000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Carey Mulligan
screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber
directed by Lone Scherfig

by Walter Chaw Director Lone Scherfig is perhaps notoriously the first woman to direct a Dogme95 picture (Italian for Beginners) and preserves her effortlessness with actors and light romantic imbroglios with An Education. Yet it shows little maturation, particularly after her scabrous, delicately balanced, Hal Ashby-esque Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, instead regressing into the ghetto of only-adequate BBC coming-of-age story. If An Education is remembered at all, it will be for raising the profile of the immensely appealing Carey Mulligan. She's Jenny, a sharp, sensitive sixteen-year-old schoolgirl with a promising future in letters and eyes on Oxford until she's distracted by the allure of a bohemian lifestyle with pretentious friends, who pretend at the civilization she would rightfully earn in time. Leader of said bohemians is creepy/suave David (Peter Sarsgaard), whose courtship of Jenny is a laudable contrast to Twilight in showing a worldly older man using all the benefits of his experience to impress, and eventually deflower, an easily-exploited high-schooler with stars in her eyes.

The Age of Unintended Consequences: FFC Interviews David Russo

April 20, 20102000s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Interviews, Theatrical

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minority Report (2002) – Blu-ray Disc

April 19, 20102000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller, Tom Cruise

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, based on the short story by Philip K. Dick
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Despite a remarkable first hour, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report washes out as an overlong retread of tired thriller/mystery elements capped by the director's trademark propensity for moralizing epilogues. It suffers from mainstream cinema's squeamishness in regards to true ambiguity of character and character motivation, and for all its claims to a faithful reproduction of Philip K. Dick's dark dystopian future, the picture is ultimately about Spielberg's itch for restoration of order rather than Dick's entropic dissolution of it. Distracting and unforgivable plot holes yaw beneath the narrative, making it clear that Minority Report is just another failed attempt by Spielberg to tell an adult tale. Here is an attractively packaged summer bonbon with an essentially hollow, nutritionally empty centre.

The Wolfman (2010)

April 17, 20102000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, Werewolf

***/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving
screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw Gloriously, exuberantly awful, Joe Johnston's tone-perfect, imperfect-perfect update of Universal's horror legacy begs at any moment for grieving Gwen (Emily Blunt) to cry out, "He. Vas. My. BOYfriend!" It's easily the funniest movie I've seen in what seems forever–a comedy of imitation that clarifies, if anything, the extent to which our condescension to films from the '40s allows us to enjoy the Universal monster movies without irony. Not so lucky is this product of the post-modern era in which absolutely the only way to enjoy the film in any defensible way is to profess a deep knowledge and affection for the works of James Whale, Lon Chaney, and all the boys at the old studio who found themselves, not long into their run, making movie-mashups and Abbott & Costello vehicles. At the least, this redux demonstrates some respect for its source material, from its retro effects (credited to ace werewolf guy Rick Baker) to its joyful inability to assemble anything like a coherent narrative from the various bits and pieces Johnston and company have thrown into a bucket and then onto the screen. Consider the transition from a bloody, fountain-side flashback of dead mommy to prodigal son Lawrence (Benicio Del Toro) descending a few steps into a mysterious torture chamber beneath some kind of estate-bound cemetery, where his dad (Anthony Hopkins), eyes glowing mysteriously, advises that the beast "will out." It's really just a collection of non-sequiturs, of scenes that don't fit together in a landscape with no scale (Lawrence takes a full month to walk sixteen miles from London to his house and still manages to beat his carriage-riding pursuers there), strung together willy-nilly by Oedipal suggestions the film is clearly incapable, and uninterested, in exploring. The Wolfman is a big, giant, dumb movie made with such breathtaking stupidity that it actually ends with a "wolf-out" battle royale like the one in Mike Nichols's Wolf–the difference being that The Wolfman doesn't appear to take itself the tiniest bit seriously.

Kick-Ass (2010)

April 16, 2010****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Nicolas Cage, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
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.

Big Love: The Complete Second Season (2007) – DVD

April 7, 20102000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A Extras C+
"Damage Control," "The Writing on the Wall," "Reunion," "Rock and a Hard Place," "Vision Thing," "Dating Game," "Good Guys and Bad Guys," "Kingdom Come," "Circle the Wagons," "The Happiest Girl," "Take Me As I Am," "Oh, Pioneers"

by Alex Jackson There's definitely something cheeky and slyly subversive at the core of HBO's "Big Love". The show is the brainchild of Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, an openly-gay couple who've been together since the early-'90s. That single fact opens up some interesting connections when it comes to polygamy. The standard argument religious groups have against homosexuality is that it's unnatural: Two men or two women cannot naturally procreate and therefore it's deviant, godless behaviour. By contrast, polygamy is possibly more natural than monogamy–you could argue that males are hardwired to spread their seed with as many females as possible and it is not cost efficient, evolutionarily speaking, to restrict yourself to one woman. And if the ability to procreate is what makes heterosexuality more moral than homosexuality, then we have to admit that polygamists are able to procreate "better" than monogamists and so polygamy should be embraced as the morally superior lifestyle.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

April 5, 2010****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Max Records, Catherine Keener, Lauren Ambrose, Mark Ruffalo
screenplay by Spike Jonze & Dave Eggers, based on the book by Maurice Sendak
directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are is the product of an artist who may only be able to assimilate art and the creation of it through the filter of celluloid and the music that animates its flickers. More, there’s the suggestion in its depth of emotion that this may be the only way Jonze knows to communicate at all, and so he tasks it to capture the breadth of human experience. If the “film brats” of the New American Cinema were the first reared on a diet of the French New Wave and critical theory, this new post-modernism to which Jonze belongs consists of artists reared on the entire panoply of popular culture…and maybe nothing else. What other explanation is there for the elasticity and strangeness of films by people like Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino? They create works that strive towards the ineffable, seemingly unaware of film’s limitations and therefore undaunted by ideas of what’s possible.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

April 1, 20102000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Norway, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller

Män som hatar kvinnor
*/****
starring Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Peter Haber
screenplay by Nikolaj Arcel, Rasmus Heisterberg, based on a novel by Stieg Larsson
directed by Niels Arden Oplev

by Walter Chaw Slick and overproduced and poised for a David Fincher-helmed American redux, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor), Niels Arden Oplev’s adaptation of the first of the late Steig Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy,” falls off the exploitation tightrope. The titular flicka may be insane in the mainframe, but when she gets naked and straddles, cowgirl-style, an old guy while resisting even the notion of a committed relationship, it is only what it is. It doesn’t matter what her issues are, in other words, because she’s a hot twentysomething Goth-chick fantasy into computers and casual sex–and when I’m watching a representation of same, I’m not growing a conscience, I’m getting a hard-on. Imagine Elisha Cuthbert playing this role in the United States: on the one hand, it’s theoretically harrowing to see her tied up and raped; on the other hand, I’m not complaining about seeing a hot twentysomething actress tied to a bed, completely prone and naked, pretending to be raped. It’s the kind of playacting porn is discouraged from engaging in because it’s actually too illicit for porn–but it’s not too illicit for an arthouse import that’s allegedly trying to have a conversation about what happens to little girls who are sexually abused.

Clash of the Titans (2010)

April 1, 20102000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

½*/****
starring Sam Worthington, Gemma Arterton, Mads Mikkelsen, Liam Neeson
screenplay by Travis Beacham and Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi, based on the screenplay by Beverley Cross
directed by Louis Leterrier

by Walter Chaw Absolutely awful in absolutely the most boring way possible, Louis Leterrier's update of Ray Harryhausen's swan song is made several degrees worse by the decision to blur and dim everything via the exhaustively-touted wonder of 3-D. Why anyone would pay 15 cents much less 15 bucks for the privilege of watching this turgid mess is beyond me, but if you go you'll find exhaustively-touted wonder Sam Worthington mashing together his last two roles as Terminator and blue cat to embody Greek demigod Perseus, who's on an incomprehensible quest to, um, get into the pants of immortal slut Io (Gemma Arterton), I think. Familiarity with the source mythology actually a terrible impediment, better to take this Clash of the Titans at face value as Perseus sees his adopted family murdered by Hades (Ralph Fiennes) and petulantly rejects his newly-discovered status as the Son of Zeus (Liam Neeson). Hades, meanwhile, hatches a half-assed plan to freak out the good people of Argos in order to steal followers away from Zeus, making one pine in the process for not only the better-than-you-remember original, but also a couple of hours in front of any "God of War". All of which results in Perseus traveling a long way to somewhere ill-defined so as to encounter giant, domesticated scorpions, people covered in bad wood makeup who remind a lot of the Cyclops from zero-budgeted craptavaganza Krull (which also featured Liam Neeson in a bit part), and a CGI Medusa that makes Uma Thurman's recent snake-haired turn in The Lightning Thief seem, erm, deep. For my part, I kept waiting for the moment Perseus shoves his black Pegasus's tail up his ass before he can ride it. Fear not, the Kraken is released and revealed to be an aquatic Cloverfield that spends a lot of time sort of flailing around waiting for Perseus to kill him. Spoiler alert: he does.