Shutter Island ( 2010 )

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, & Max Von Sydow

Directed by Martin Scorsese


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1130884/


Martin Scorsese is sometimes accused of being cooped up in a finite set of subjects:  gangsters and cops and violence and sin and redemption and such.  But, in fact, the great director’s long resume is actually quite varied, including a boxing movie (“Raging Bull”), a biblical epic (“The Last Temptation of Christ”), a costume drama (“The Age of Innocence”), a biopic (“The Aviator”), a musical (“New York, New York”), two concert films (“The Last Waltz,” “Shine a Light”), a biographical documentary (“No Direction Home”), a melodrama (“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More”) and even an outright comedy (“After Hours”).

With the creepy and atmospheric “Shutter Island,” the 67-year-old Scorsese cuts a few new notches into his belt:  not only is it an adaptation of a bestseller (by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone”), a first for the director, but it’s a mystery-laced-with-psychiatry film, in the vein of “Spellbound,” “The Snake Pit,” “Shock Corridor,” “The Green Mile” or even “The Silence of the Lambs.”  And while a story about a mystery at a maximum security facility for the criminally insane would seem like familiar Scorsese fare on the face of it, “Shutter Island” allows the director and his (now four-time) star Leonardo DiCaprio to explore new areas of creativity and expression and take their audience on a bracing ride.

They do so, by and large, with relish and muscle and within the confines of Lehane’s clever and taut plot.  DiCaprio is Teddy Daniels, a U. S. Marshal sent in 1956 to a forbidding spot off the coast of Massachusetts to discover how a child murderess has, apparently, vanished from the place.  Accompanied by a new partner (Mark Ruffalo) and running into walls of interference placed before him by a haughty team of doctors (Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow), Daniels is drawn deeper and deeper into sweat and paranoia and confusion and, ultimately, certainty that the island hospital is a deeply nefarious place, as bad, he thinks, as the concentration camp he liberated in Germany a decade previously.

Daniels is a clenched fellow, a reformed alcoholic haunted by nightmares of his war experience and of his beloved wife (Michelle Williams), who died in an arson fire.  His personal ghosts drive him terribly forward, despite the resistance of hospital officials and guards, despite the warnings of his partner, despite, even, a raging hurricane and the island’s often impassable terrain.  As per the genre, the deeper he probes, the greater the danger in which he finds himself, the more frightening the truths that seem to be emerging, and the less he can truly be sure about what is really happening to him and what is not.

DiCaprio is in intense mettle here and carries the film handily even as Scorsese piles on chilling and gruesome stuff for him to cut through.  I can’t think of another current actor who has managed to hold on to his boyishness (the one-time child star is now 35) while accruing a legitimate patina of mature discernment and pain and rue.  Among the supporting players, Kingsley is nicely contained and stern, Williams has a fitting spookiness, and there are memorable one-scene turns by Patricia Clarkson and Jackie Earle Haley as island inhabitants who help Daniels find his path.

The grisliness of “Shutter Island” -- corpses and bloodshed and truly nightmarish nightmares -- seems to have sparked Scorsese.  The movie has a pep that was lacking in the Oscar-winner “The Departed,” perhaps because it has a literary source and not, as that film did, a filmic one.  The modern music adds jarring but apt notes, Robert Richardson’s cinematography and Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing are predictably masterful and potent, and the special effects sequences are modulated to serve the plot and not dazzle superficially.  But it is chiefly the director’s show -- or, more exactly, his and his star’s, which is how Scorsese seems happiest to work.

There’s a slowness to the film that can feel like strain, and now and then the scenes of Daniels’ inner torments can run toward the long and arbitrary.  But “Shutter Island” is atmospheric, absorbing and completely in the control of the man who made it -- unlike, especially, “Bringing Out the Dead,” which it sometimes resembles.  If it only tangentially seems like a Scorsese film, that’s because we’ve incorrectly pigeonholed a director who has almost always pursued a career of shifts and gambits and new paths.

Overall Rating ( * * * 1/2 )

Mr. What?

Crazy Heart (2009)

Director: Scott Cooper

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1263670/


 I'm going to keep this review short and sweet. It's about an aging whiskey drinkin' outlaw country music singer down on his luck and failing at his career. His protege has gone on to big fame and sold out arenas while he's stuck playing bowling alleys. I can re-hash the whole story, but what's the point. It's a damn fine drama with an amazing soundtrack. Jeff Bridges is the best I've seen him in years, Colin Farrell doesn't come off like a cartoon as usual. Robert Duval has a bit part and is also the producer. Which is funny... The movie totally reminded me of Tender Mercies, and is probably the best of it's type I've seen since TM came out. Anyway, this is definitely worth going out to see or picking up when it hits dvd. If you like a good drama or you're a country music fan be sure to check it out.

Verdict: * * * *

- Xtoph

The Wolfman ( 2010 )

Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, & David Stern

Directed By Joe Johnston

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780653/


There ought to be mystery, heat, torment, doom, longing, rue, and, yes, blood in a film about a werewolf, but “The Wolfman” has almost none of these -- or at least not enough of any of them to impart them to an audience.

Deeply phony, strangely static, disengaged, flaccid and, quite often, silly, it’s a film that tries to bully you into emotions with flourishes of music, contorted camera angles, screams of special effects, smears of gore, and earnest close-ups of its woefully miscast star.  But very little of it compels, frightens, absorbs or convinces.  Werewolves have perennially taken something of a back seat to vampires, ghosts, aliens, and, recently, zombies in the imaginations of horror filmmakers and fans, and this dreary effort will do nothing to change that.

Benicio Del Toro, so wrong for the material that he seems almost desperate to express his discomfort with his body and eyes, plays Lawrence Talbot, an English stage actor raised in America and returned to his ancestral mansion to help find his brother, who has gone missing.  Upon arrival, he learns from his estranged father (Anthony Hopkins) that his poor bro is dead, apparently at the claws of something very savage.

Lawrence determines to find out what happened, as does his brother’s grieving fiancé (Emily Blunt).  He encounters gypsies, gets chewed on by a wild beast, and is presently assumed by one and sundry to be cursed as a werewolf himself -- an assumption which proves true on the next full moon.  Enter Scotland Yard in the presence of a sarcastic inspector (Hugo Weaving) and everyone makes off to London and a series of increasingly implausible action sequences and plot turns.

Hopkins and Weaving seem to be fully aware that they’re involved in hokum, and they milk several key moments each with agreeable impunity.  Blunt, though, could be almost anyone, truly -- which says less about what she does with her role than about how paltry a part it is.  And Del Toro can only make his character come alive by revealing the depths of his eyes; the regret you feel him express when he does so surely has as much to do with his thoughts about making the film as with his character’s plight.

Obviously director Joe Johnston (“The Rocketeer,” “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” “Jumanji”) is responsible for a lot of what’s wrong.  Time and again his efforts to invigorate the material or probe into it are vulgar, lifeless, trite, and, especially when computer-generated, laughably fraudulent.

But, then, screenwriters David Self and Andrew Kevin Walker managed to improve not one whit on Curt Siodmak’s 1941 original script, not to mention those of such films as “The Company of Wolves,” “Wolfen,” “An American Werewolf in London,” “Wolf,” and “Brotherhood of the Wolf” all of which found sparks of energy and interest in lycanthropy.

Still, while Johnston may not be guilty of ruining a gem, he does nothing to polish the materials he’s been given, either.  Like Del Toro -- and, too, like viewers of this mishmash -- he’s likely doomed to feel a shudder whenever he spies a full moon in the sky from now on.

Overall Rating ( * * )

Mr. What?

Worlds Greatest Dad (2009) Blu-ray Review

Director: Bobcat Goldthwait

Starring: Robin Williams, Daryl Sabara and Morgan Murphy

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1262981/

As of the last few years, it seems that Robin Williams, a once unstoppable comedian and actor, has been losing his magic. If not necessarily his acting magic, then definitely the magic that chooses good roles.

Well, fear not, because Robin Williams makes a triumphant return in "World's Greatest Dad," written and directed by Williams' good friend and fellow stand-up comedian Bobcat Goldthwait (no, my computer doesn't have a lisp, that's how you spell his name).

"World's Greatest Dad" has Robin Williams as a high school poetry teacher and unsuccessful novelist Lance Clayton. Lance has written several novels, but the only thing he's ever been able to get published are a couple of lame greeting cards. But Lance, like all failing writers, wants to reach an audience. Something that connects with people as they "suffer through the Human Condition. Also, something that makes a shit load of cash."

Lance's son, Kyle, who attends the same school Lance teaches at, is played by Daryl Sabara (Spy Kids) and is the worst son a parent could possibly have. Kyle is obsessed with pornography and speaks the filthiest language possible, his only friend being a quiet and repressed kid named Andrew who has an alcoholic mother. Don't make any mistake about this ladies and gentlemen, this REALLY IS THE WORST KID IN THE WORLD. This child lives dangerously on the edge of being truly worthless, and that's no exaggeration. Whenever you see the film, you'll know what I mean.

Lance has a secret relationship with a younger, better-looking teacher at school named Claire (Alexie Gilmore) but even that isn't going well, as she seems more interested in the popular creative writing teacher.

Lance's life seems to be heading nowhere, until one day a horrific and hilarious freak accident occurs which gives him the perfect opportunity to get everything he's ever dreamed about. I won't ruin the twist, but it's pretty dark and pretty hilarious, although I don't think everyone will find it as funny as others.

"World's Greatest Dad" is a breath of fresh air in terms of recent comedies. I for one have grown a bit tired of the constant onslaught of dick jokes that have plagued the Judd Apatow films, so a movie like "Dad" that can be edgy and still funny without resorting to a bunch of man-children talking about their cocks is quite refreshing.

The film deals with the romanticism often attributed to dead-too-soon people and the cults of praise that follow them (remember after Michael Jackson and Heath Ledger died?). The film is a hilarious satire of what happens when people often get the wrong idea about people who die tragically, and is geared more towards adults than it is to teenagers, although I do think teens should see the film just to give them a wake up call.

To say much more about the film would be to give away some of its best parts, so I'll just let you watch it and experience the surprises for yourself. No, it's not "The Sixth Sense" or anything, but the less you know about this film going into it, the better.

 

The Video:

"World's Greatest Dad" comes to us on Blu-ray in a VC-1 coded 1080p 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The colors seem vibrant without bleeding, and the blacks are incredibly deep (and there are a couple of dimly lit scenes in here that add to the gut-wrenching feelings of a couple of the scenes). Textures also seem very well defined.

If I have any problem with the transfer though it'd have to be with skin tones, which seem a little inconsistent at times. Some scenes faces look very natural, and other times faces seem a bit too red, though skin detail looks very good.

But this is hardly a complaint, as Magnolia Pictures has given us a very nice transfer overall that is quite impressive for a comedy.

The Audio:

Yes, I know, this is a comedy, so why bother reviewing the sound? There aren't any robot fights or superheroes saving buildings from being destroyed, but the well-selected, 5.1 DTS-Master Audio soundtrack really fills up the speakers. Dialogue is well balanced and the few "important" musical moments really sound nice.

Unfortunately I was only able to view the film using two lame stereo speakers instead of a surround sound system, but I could still tell that the sounds were all very well separated, particularly the "Under Pressure" climax at the end of the film.

Supplements:

First up on the disc special features is a commentary track by writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait which is among the better commentaries I've heard. His voice can get a little grating at times (it's Bobcat, what'd you expect?) but for the most part he's very restrained. There are some good stories he tells. This one's definitely worth a listen.

Also are about 4 minutes worth of deleted scenes, which I still haven't had the opportunity to view yet. The only one I really heard about is a scene involving Lance's son getting it on with his girlfriend. Ick...

There are also about 2 minutes of outtakes, which are really just four separate takes. They're okay I guess, but with someone like Robin Williams starring in your movie I'd expect a lot more outrageousness, but I guess that's what "Live on Broadway" is for.

There's also a 20 minute documentary called WWBCD? which director Goldthwait's daughter produced herself. It's pretty good, better than your standard EPK ass-kiss fest that plagues home video these days. It's definitely worth a look.

There's also a music video by The Deadly Syndrome that I didn't bother checking out. There's also some trailers on the disc, but who really gives a shit about those.

And rounding out the supplements is an EPK (dammit, guess you can't have your cake and eat it too) which basically just has the director rambling about the movies release date (it came out last year on August 21st, the same day as "Inglourious Basterds"). You can definitely skip this fluff piece.

Overall:

With a good sound mix and video transfer, "World's Greatest Dad" is a fantastic little indie gem that unfortunately got horrendously overlooked last year. Why abortions like Transformers 2 get wide releases but films like "World's Greatest Dad" get overlooked is just a statement to the stupidity of modern society. But if you're in the mood for an incredibly dark comedy, then definitely pick up "World's Greatest Dad." It was, after all, my second favorite film of last year.

* * * *

-Whiskey Dick.

From Paris With Love ( 2010 )

Starring: John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Kasia Smutniak & Richard Durden

Directed By Pierre Morel


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1179034/

Stoopid fun, "From Paris With Love" doesn't do much for Paris or love, or your brain cells, but it flies like a crazed eagle on uppers and comes from the talented, propulsive schlocketeer Pierre Morel. A former cinematographer who learned to light brutality, stylishly, under the tutelage of international violence impresario Luc Besson, Morel turns his kinetic eye to a tale (story by Besson, script by Adi Hasak) of a low-level spy and Paris embassy functionary, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. He lives a fine life in Paris with his fiancee (Kasia Smutniak) but longs for more, jobwise.

Bammo! Fortune smiles, and he teams up for an anti-terrorist assignment with a visiting American intelligence ace named Charlie Wax, played by John Travolta. Half of Paris, mainly Asians and Arabs, is dead or dying 40 minutes into this 92-minute bleed-for-all, and when he's not executing, Wax is dallying with one of the locals or snorting cocaine atop the Eiffel Tower.

The Irish-born Rhys Meyers, cast wondrously against type, plays a guy from the Bronx (!) who seems like such a dissembling bugger in his initial scenes you assume it must be some sort of deception. He spends a good deal of the movie lugging around a vase full of blow (it's crime-scene evidence), and before long, "From Paris With Love" threatens to become a story of a miscast actor and his big blue prop.

But the melees! They are heinously destructive and rather good. "Talkin' ain't gonna do the job, man!" hollers Travolta's Wax to his partner, and before you can say "Rush Hour 3," it's clear that "From Paris With Love" is a whole lot better than anything Brett Ratner ever rushed out. A whole lot better. The mayhem is relentless, but the staging and editing make spatial and rhythmic sense. They're borderline-pure chaos, but on this side of the border.

Morel had a big hit with "Taken," the one with Liam Neeson wiping out sex-enslaving Albanians with low intentions toward his daughter. I found that film's mixture of "heart" and slaughter sort of galling. "From Paris With Love" has the advantage of not dealing too seriously with humans of any stripe. It's more about the crockery and the glass and the splintered wood. The chases remain visually coherent and often exciting, even when they're being guided by such sights as Travolta wielding a bazooka.
 

Or my favorite: the demise early on, orchestrated by Wax, of a string of anonymous gunmen who plummet down a very high stairwell, one at a time. Travolta sends up his insane-CIA-op role even as he serves it, efficiently and with a droll air of camp. I wish Travolta didn't have to pull a "royale with cheese" gag in honor of "Pulp Fiction." A little early for that stuff, isn't it? Makes me think of De Niro doing Travis Bickle jokes in "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle." Besides: This whole movie is a joke -- a delirious one. Inside jokes have a way of taking us out of it.

Overall Rating ( * * * )

Mr. What?

Until The Light Takes Us ( 2010 )

Directed By Aaron Aites & Audrey Ewell


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1014809/


"Until the Light Takes Us" is an icy, occasionally engaging look at the founding members, most of them Norwegian, of the "black metal" movement, an internationally known musical genre that might be Scandinavia's most significant cultural export of the past 20 years.

This is problematic for mainstream Scandinavia, since black metal is the abrasive music of a youth counterculture feeding off misanthropy, defiance and violent disdain for Christianity, globalization and anything else that might diminish old Viking beliefs and traditions. But whatever you think of them, don't call these guys Satanists. That really makes them mad.

Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's documentary has a feel for the place that produces this phenomenon: long stretches of cold and dusk, stilted and liberally conformist. The desire to shock in this setting is understandable. But it's trickier to know why some of these young men, some from idyllic upbringings, developed a taste for activities ranging from onstage mutilation to a gleeful photo shoot of a band member's gruesome suicide scene, all the way to murder and setting fire to centuries-old churches. Long on atmosphere and short on context, the film dances around whatever points it wants to make, sticking solely to the players' points of view.

Part of the problem is an over-reliance on two people. One, Gylve Nagell of the band Darkthrone, was there at black metal's beginnings and appears to be a spokesman of sorts today. But he's not very interesting and his significance is left unexplained. More interesting in a comically deluded way is Varg Vikernes of Burzum, an arsonist and murderer who from prison (he was recently released) indignantly and pompously bemoans how his principled acts of protest have been interpreted as merely the work of the devil. Poor guy.

Overall Rating ( * * * )

Mr. What?