tag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-99928295733106445 2013-05-20T19:37:52-05:00 TypePad tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017ee78f5094970d 2013-05-20T19:37:52-05:00 2013-05-20T19:37:52-05:00

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B- starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Forest Whitaker, Johnny Knoxville, Rodrigo Santoro screenplay by Andrew Knauer directed by Kim Jee-woon by Walter Chaw I think, and I don't say this lightly, that South Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-woon is a genius. His landmark A Tale of Two Sisters is lush and at times unbearably frightening; his A Bittersweet Life is an elegiac crime saga with the best, most innovative knife-fight in a movie until the naked scuffle in Eastern Promises; his The Good, the Bad, the Weird (which his latest most resembles) is a dizzy, hilarious take on the Spaghetti Western; and his I Saw the Devil is the slickest, and stickiest, exploitation serial-killer/torture flick I've ever seen. He's his country's Takashi Miike, its Quentin Tarantino. And his American-made, English-language debut, unceremoniously dumped in the middle of the deadly first quarter of 2013, is, I guess you could say, at least better than John Woo's Hollywood baptism, Hard Target. The tragedy of it all is that the picture will be more ballyhooed not for the arrival of Kim on our shores, but for the return to the action genre of one Arnold Schwarzenegger (Expendables cameos notwithstanding), here...

Bill Chambers tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c0192aa18859d970d 2013-05-19T20:33:02-05:00 2013-05-19T20:45:59-05:00

*½/****Image B- Sound C+ Extras A starring Louise Lasser, Paul L. Smith, Brion James, Reed Birney screenplay by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen & Sam Raimi directed by Sam Raimi by Walter Chaw Sam Raimi's sophomore picture Crimewave is a nightmare, a mess, a calamity of rare scope but also one possessed of a singular, maybe misguided but definitely committed, vision. It wants very badly to be a feature-length Three Stooges sketch or Warner Bros. cartoon (one of the early Tex Averys), and so the thing it most resembles is Joe Dante's segment of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, stretched to a truly sadistic length (a deceptively scant-sounding 83 minutes) and thrown together by misadventure, studio interference, and a lot of talented people who didn't know what they didn't know. It's so consistently and dedicatedly cross-eyed badger spit, in fact, that it eventually takes on the surreality of a Max Ernst gallery, or an acid trip in a travelling funhouse. It's deeply unpleasant, even as fans of Raimi and the Coen Brothers (who co-wrote the screenplay with Raimi) busily trainspot all the auteur signatures in double time. What Crimewave represents is that peculiar artifact of a film that should have...

Bill Chambers tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01901c475bb7970b 2013-05-17T10:29:20-05:00 2013-05-17T10:35:03-05:00

**½/**** starring Michael Brodie, Teresa Lynn, Raymond Delgado, Jonathan Ortiz screenplay by Michel Gondry, Paul Proch, Jeff Grimshaw directed by Michel Gondry by Angelo Muredda The We and the I opens with a throwback, an image that wouldn't be out of place in Michel Gondry's distinctive music videos from the late-1990s, which were themselves full of backward glances to the more rough-hewn early days of MTV and old-school hip hop. Over the credits, a boombox modified into a miniature bus rolls along the streets of the Bronx pulsing out Young MC's "Bust A Move," until it's crushed by what's ostensibly the real thing, a city bus packed with urban teens who make up Gondry's boisterous, gossiping, and privately wounded nonprofessional cast. That's an interesting start, insofar as it suggests that Gondry's obsession with whimsical props tinged with nostalgia are about to be traded in for something more authentic, even as it implies a bit cheekily that the "real" bus, taking a bunch of high-schoolers home on the last day of school, is itself a roaming set on which to stage semi-scripted exchanges between proper teens doubling as actors and artistic partners. Both intimations turn out to be true, in a...

Bill Chambers tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c019102249b89970c 2013-05-15T16:11:26-05:00 2013-05-15T16:19:54-05:00

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Roy Scheider screenplay by David Cronenberg, based on the book by William S. Burroughs directed by David Cronenberg "A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony." --William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch by Walter Chaw "Sexual ambulance, did you say?" asks Bill Lee (Peter Weller), erstwhile exterminator of rational thought (and cockroaches) and stand-in for William S. Burroughs (who used the nom de guerre himself in Junkie) in David Cronenberg's impenetrable, impossibly complex, surprisingly funny, curiously pleasurable Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch. Bill is responding to a statement--an introduction, really--to a creature called a "Mugwump," named after a political group that split from the Republican party in 1884 to support Grover Cleveland in protest of their own candidate James Blaine's financial corruption. Those Mugwumps were members of a social elite; these Mugwumps, Cronenberg's, are reptiles or insects (or should I say "also reptiles or insects"?), each voiced by Peter Boretski in his insistent, Columbo-esque...

Bill Chambers tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01901c238d26970b 2013-05-13T21:48:08-05:00 2013-05-14T10:42:22-05:00

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B- starring Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Megan Charpentier, Isabelle Nélisse screenplay by Neil Cross and Andy Muschietti & Barbara Muschietti directed by Andy Muschietti click any image to enlarge by Bill Chambers Mama is about a woman who doesn't want kids being forced into motherhood by her pigheaded boyfriend. Yes, it's a horror movie, but that's ostensibly the not-scary part--that would be the titular ghost who challenges our heroine to a mom-off for the souls of two little girls. Mama has watched over them since their crazed father Jeffrey (the suddenly omnipresent Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), still smarting from a bad day on Wall Street that saw him going postal, tried to execute them in a remote cabin in the woods. Five years later, Jeffrey's brother Lucas (Coster-Waldau again) finally hits pay dirt in his obsessive search for his nieces when a routine check turns up the cabin with the girls inside, now feral and living on cherries.1 Not that I'm asking for a prequel, but I'd love to--and would perhaps rather--see those lost years, the gradual breakdown of these kids' language, hygiene, decorum. Alas, the Western cinema is preoccupied with domestication, which is where this...

Bill Chambers tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017eeb0e661d970d 2013-05-12T15:12:15-05:00 2013-05-13T09:52:09-05:00

***½/**** Image B+Sound B+ Extras B- starring Charles Chaplin, Martha Raye, Marilyn Nash, Isobel Elsom screenplay by Charles Chaplin, based on an idea by Orson Welles directed by Charles Chaplin click any image to enlarge by Bryant Frazer Charles Chaplin augmented his trademark mix of physical comedy, sweetness, and lefty politics with a dose of suspense (borrowed, probably, from Hitchcock) and a sardonic worldview (informed, maybe, by film noir) in the playful, funny, but ultimately downbeat Monsieur Verdoux. In a scenario that originated with Orson Welles, who receives an "idea" credit, Henri Verdoux is a serial killer based on Henri Landru, a French Bluebeard who seduced, married, and then murdered a string of Parisian women in order to liberate their assets. Chaplin plays Verdoux as a charming fiend whose demeanour incorporates the barest echo of the Little Tramp, but whose murderous M.O. recalled the director's own reputation as a womanizer. RUNNING TIME 124 minutes MPAA Not Rated ASPECT RATIO(S) 1.33:1 (1080p/MPEG-4) LANGUAGES English 1.0 LPCM SUBTITLES English REGION A DISC TYPE BD-50 STUDIO Criterion In retrospect, it's hard to believe that Chaplin thought Verdoux would be a net positive in terms of PR. He may have overestimated the will of...

Bill Chambers tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017eeaee00aa970d 2013-05-08T14:59:23-05:00 2013-05-08T15:18:11-05:00

*/**** starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald directed by Baz Luhrmann by Walter Chaw The great irony of Baz Luhrmann's unwatchable farrago The Great Gatsby is that it's not so much an interpretation of its titular hero's self-aggrandizing fandangos as a literalization of one. It's all surface, all façade, and not coincidentally, the most successful thing about it is Luhrmann's shooting of Gatsby's legendary parties as infernal bacchanalia. But that bit of useful critique is clearly a fluke, an accident of Luhrmann's one-trick pony kicking over the single element in Fitzgerald's book that is remotely compatible with Luhrmann's style. The marriage of Baz with Fitzgerald, in fact, is a little like asking Michael Bay to adapt The Brothers Karamazov--it's Timur Bekmambetov's A Farewell to Arms. It's showing off in the loudest, most obnoxious way possible, without any kind of critical, nay, useful, rationale for all the bread and circus--an asshole at play with Welles's "best train set a boy could ever want," with the casualty only what's possibly the best American novel ever written. It's an effrontery to taste, the sole consolation...

Bill Chambers