CONTAGION (2011). An entertaining if unwieldy cross between a PSA and one of those all-star idiocies from the 1970s — those disaster flicks involving hijacked planes, hurtling meteors or towering infernos — Steven Soderbergh's Contagion tracks the entire cycle of a disease that begins with one person and ends with the deaths of millions of people worldwide. Episodic in the extreme, the picture mostly follows the scientists and health officials tasked with finding a cure — considering that Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet and Jennifer Ehle are cast in these roles, one gets the impression that being a physical beauty is a requisite to landing these sorts of jobs. Representing Everyman, meanwhile, is Matt Damon, an ordinary joe whose wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) is the first victim of the disease (that's no spoiler, as she dies within the film's first 10 minutes and is sporadically seen in flashback thereafter). And then there's the online activist (Jude Law) who believes that it's all some government conspiracy and states that he possesses a tried and true antidote. While it's comforting to see all these fine actors gathered in one place (the cast also includes Laurence Fishburne, Elliott Gould and Winter's Bone Oscar nominee John Hawkes), the film simply doesn't have enough time to properly devote to each of these characters, meaning we only get broad strokes rather than emotional investment (one likable character dies off-screen without our knowing it, with his/her passing barely mentioned). Where the film works best is in its condemnation of the all-mighty power of the Internet and its self-proclaimed prophets, as repped by Law's opportunistic and misleading blogger. If nothing else, Contagion will at least be remembered for the great line uttered by one of its brainiac characters: "Blogging isn't writing; it's graffiti with punctuation!"
Extras in the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack (which also contains an UltraViolet digital copy) include a making-of featurette and a piece on the real science of global viruses.
Movie: **1/2
THE EXPENDABLES (2010). The Truth In Advertising award for 2010 went to The Expendables, which employs (however unintentionally) its own title to push the fact that this is a disposable action film that will dissipate from memory almost immediately. Its primary — make that only — selling point is its large cast of macho action stars ... but the truth only goes as far as the DVD box cover. As the leader of a group of mercenaries hired to take down a South American dictator, Sylvester Stallone is almost always front and center, but those expecting him to share significant screen time with fellow Big Boys Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger will be disappointed that the other two are only in one scene. And really, is it that big a deal to have a cast that includes Steve Austin, Randy Couture and Terry Crews? These guys would line up for a straight-to-DVD American Pie sequel if asked. Nobody goes to this type of movie for the acting, but given the lack of excitement in most of the action scenes (more mano-a-mano skirmishes would have better served the film rather than the ceaseless gunfire and explosions), there's little else to discuss. Faring best are Jason Statham and Mickey Rourke; delivering the worst performance is Dolph Lundgren, who apparently hasn't learned a single thing after 25 years in the business.
The Expendables is being re-released in an Extended Director's Cut that runs 11 minutes longer than the original version. Blu-ray extras include an introduction by Stallone; a feature-length making-of documentary; the featurette Sylvester Stallone: A Director in Action; and the music video for Sully Erna's "Sinner's Prayer."
Movie: **
THE GUARD (2011). Nobody can curse like the Irish, and that's proven again in The Guard, in which the various characters turn profanity into an art form. But this delightful endeavor, written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, doesn't just provide an amusing workout for the R-rating; instead, it's a savagely clever yarn that manages to tweak genre staples before burying them completely. In Sergeant Gerry Boyle, Brendan Gleeson (recently earning a Golden Globe nomination for this performance) finds a great character to inhabit, and he's dynamic as the rural cop who doesn't let much ruffle his feathers — not even murder. When FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) appears on the scene to investigate drug smuggling, the two engage in a testy relationship made strenuous by Boyle's mock-racist cracks ("Did you grow up in the projects?") and Everett's big-city-superiority routine. Meanwhile, the villains (Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong and David Wilmot) conduct their business as usual, taking time out to philosophize, criticize, and grow exasperated at the weaker minds surrounding them. Naturally, it all leads to a final showdown, but most viewers won't be prepared for the capper. The Guard is terrific entertainment — in fact, look for it on my 10 Best Films of 2011 list in next week's issue of Creative Loafing.
Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by McDonagh, Gleeson and Cheadle; a making-of featurette; deleted and extended scenes; and McDonagh's 2000 short film, The Second Death (starring Cunningham and Wilmot). Added bonus: the English-language subtitles, which allow US audiences to read the handful of lines they couldn't locate under those thick brogues.
Movie: ***1/2
HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994). After helming three low-budget gore flicks that rather quickly earned cult followings, New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson made his bid for the big time with Heavenly Creatures, a resounding success that, after his ill-advised stop in Hollywood for The Frighteners, led to him hitting the jackpot with The Lord of the Rings. Co-writing the script with wife and frequent collaborator Fran Walsh (the pair earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay), Jackson focuses on the true-life tale of a grisly murder that occurred in 1950s New Zealand, when two teenage girls, the frumpy and lower-class Pauline Parker and the extroverted and wealthy Juliet Hulme, ended up killing Pauline's mother. As Juliet and Pauline respectively, Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey made their motion picture debuts — Winslet had already appeared in a few TV shows, but Lynskey was plucked straight out of a high school by the filmmakers searching for the perfect Pauline — and both are excellent, demonstrating how two seemingly opposite people could become the best of friends through their shared flights of fancy (Jackson's staging of their fantasies is spot-on) but could also turn dangerous when they feel their special kinship threatened by uncomprehending adults.
The only Blu-ray extra is the theatrical trailer.
Movie: ***
HIGHER GROUND (2011). Based on the memoir by Carolyn S. Briggs (with the author sharing screenplay duties with Tim Metcalfe), Higher Ground is an honest and probing look at Christianity, a stance that makes it an anomaly in an industry that tends to paint all members of the faith as little more than Bible-thumping rednecks. Up in the Air Oscar nominee Vera Farmiga, here also making her directorial debut, plays Corinne Walker, part of a close-knit Protestant sect that also includes her husband Ethan (Joshua Leonard) and her best friend Annika (Dagmara Dominczyk). As a young child, Corinne listened to her minister when he insisted that she accept Jesus Christ into her heart, but as an adult, she has occasional doubts that aren't being addressed. She envies those around her who truly seem gripped by a holy spirit. She bristles when subtly reminded that it's the men who lead their group and that when she expresses her opinions, it sounds too much like she's "preaching." And she witnesses a tragedy that leaves her wondering just exactly how the result could be the will of God. While the film gently pokes fun at the community members' occasional closed-mindedness or outright naivety — one amusing scene finds the men dumbfoundedly listening to a cassette on how to pleasure their wives as God would desire — it never patronizes its characters nor paints them as one-dimensional foils (you would never see these people picketing soldiers' funerals). Instead, it chooses to show how their brand of automatic yet sincere acceptance might be what they need but isn't necessarily right for Corinne, who longs for a comfort she can't quite grasp, as if it were a blanket that's fallen just out of reach off a bed. Higher Ground grapples with weighty issues in a mature and pensive manner, reinstating a measure of faith in the way Hollywood's disciples are willing to tackle this thorny subject.
Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by Farmiga, co-star Joshua Leonard and producer Renn Hawkey; a making-of featurette; and deleted scenes.
Movie: ***
MARGIN CALL (2011). This absorbing drama focuses on the first rumblings of the 2008 financial crisis, but unlike many movies based in the historical past, it doesn't go overboard in grand declarations or broad indictments or anything that trumpets a smug sense of 20/20 hindsight. Instead, debuting writer-director J.C. Chandor plays much of it low-key and close to the vest, so that the overwhelming feeling is one of nauseating inevitability, akin to watching a speeding car barreling toward that deer in the road and knowing there's no way the driver can stop in time. Focusing on a fictional Wall Street investment firm, the film details how bright greenhorn Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto, the new Star Trek's Spock) takes some data handed to him by a recently laid-off employee (Stanley Tucci) and quickly figures out that the bottom is about to fall out not just for the company but for the industry as a whole. This sets in motion a series of after-hours meetings in which company employees of all stripes, from the new kids on the block (Quinto and Penn Badgley) right up to ruthless CEO John Tuld (a chilling Jeremy Irons), work to save their company, forcing them to make some moral decisions along the way. Of course, given these sharks, morality doesn't come into play often, but it can be spotted here and there, particularly in the character of Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), a trading-floor honcho who's uneasy about his role in the whole mess. Compromised values seem to be the order of the day, since many of these characters find themselves tempering their ideals or opinions in order to simply survive on this eve of destruction. Eschewing the fairly straightforward characterizations (not to mention the slick stylistics and peacock posturing) seen in other like-minded films such as Wall Street and Boiler Room, Margin Call opts instead to show us that there are no heroes and villains, only villains and victims and poor souls weighing the merits of a Faustian bargain.
Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by Chandor and producer Neal Dodson; a making-of piece; deleted scenes; and a photo gallery.
Movie: ***
MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000: VOLUME XXII (2011). Of the 22 original MST3K episodes specifically created for the Minneapolis station and never to be seen nationally, nine of them featured films that were reused in later seasons. Two of those are included in this latest box set.
Time of the Apes (movie made in 1987; featured on MST3K in 1991) and Mighty Jack (movie made in 1968; featured on MST3K in 1991) were actually Japanese TV series later cobbled together as movies and brought stateside (in dubbed versions) by producer Sandy Frank, who had a whopping 10 titles showcased on MST3K (including five Gamera titles). Time of the Apes is, natch, a Planet of the Apes rip-off while Mighty Jack stole mightily from the James Bond franchise. The former allows Joel, Crow and Servo to reference all manner of monkey business (Lancelot Link, BJ and the Bear, and, groan, The Monkees), while the absolute incoherence and general wretchedness of the latter seems to flummox even our hosts (in The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, Frank Conniff, aka TV's Frank, notes, "At the time there was a general feeling around the MST3K writing room that Mighty Jack was the worst one we had done yet").
The other two episodes in this set are mercifully Sandy Frank-free. The Violent Years (movie made in 1956; featured on MST3K in 1994) is the best show in the set, with the Satellite of Love crew letting loose with a rash of wisecracks at the expense of this dreadful "message movie" written by none other than the immortal Ed Wood. Dopey in the extreme, this centers on four privileged, teenage girls who go on a crime spree. The best moment is arguably when one of the women starts shooting at the police, who then return fire — this reaction somehow catches her by surprise, leading her to exclaim, "They're shooting back!" (to which Crow adds, "Bastards!"). The film is preceded by the hilariously earnest 1952 short A Young Man's Fancy, about a preppy dude who's more excited by electrical utensils than by women.
Finally, those of us familiar with the tragic story of Rondo Hatton might find that some of the laughs come uneasily in The Brute Man (movie made in 1946; featured on MST3K in 1996). Hatton was a high school football player and war veteran who later suffered from acromegaly, a degenerative disorder that enlarged and distorted his facial features. Ever so sensitive, Hollywood elected to use him as a monster in several horror yarns, including this one. Get past the gags centered around his physicality, though, and the episode offers plenty of laughs, including a flock of them directed at the 1946 short The Chicken of Tomorrow.
DVD extras include a new introduction by MST3K regular Mary Jo Pehl; 1997's behind-the-scenes special The Making of Mystery Science Theater 3000; the new half-hour documentary Trail of the Creeper: Making The Brute Man; and archival interviews with Kathy Wood (Ed's longtime wife) and Dolores Fuller (his girlfriend).
Collection: ***
RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2011). WETA-created and PETA-approved, this box office hit stood at the center of a campaign that boasted about how the film employed the Oscar-winning team behind Avatar and the Lord of the Rings trilogy to invent its photorealistic primates. Others have been prone to highlight the "realistic" part; I tend to accentuate the "photo" portion. In this outing, kindly scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) ends up "adopting" a baby chimp that's been made super-smart by a drug initially created by Will to combat Alzheimer's in humans. Named Caesar, the chimp goes from cuddly infant to questioning teen to, finally, betrayed and embittered adult. Along the way, Caesar crosses paths with a vicious zookeeper (Tom "Draco Malfoy" Felton, playing the anti-Kevin James), Will finds love with a vet (Freida Pinto) who's his match in dullness, and Caesar engages in risible sign-language conversations with an orangutan (suddenly, I had a real hankering for Every Which Way But Loose). Created by Peter Jackson's WETA Digital outfit and played (as it were) by Andy Serkis, Caesar is a CGI triumph, although there's still an artificiality about the look that keeps the figure at a distance (personally, I found Serkis's "performance" as the title character in Jackson's King Kong remake to be more effective). Still, the film proves to be a reasonably entertaining experience, culminating in an all-out battle between apes and humans on the Golden Gate Bridge. But for all of its technical prowess, the picture never stirs the soul like the classic 1968 original, which dovetailed its allusions to real-life civil unease with its muscular handling of a surefire sci-fi hook. When the original's Charlton Heston bellows, "Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" it's a clarion call to humanity; when a character in this new picture says it, it feels like an unearned co-option.
Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by director Rupert Wyatt and scripters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver; a dozen deleted scenes; a piece on Serkis; a featurette on motion-capture; a look at the film's music and sound designs; and facts about chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans.
Movie: **1/2
WARRIOR (2011). Perhaps because it was theatrically released less than a year after The Fighter, Warrior was relentlessly compared to that drama which likewise focused on two brothers involved with a pounding sport — boxing there, mixed martial arts here. I had problems with The Fighter (starting with Melissa Leo's canvas-chewing performance, which inexplicably won her an Oscar), but on balance, I have more with Warrior, which does a nice job of mostly subverting the inevitable genre clichés but has trouble coming up with anything new to fill the void. Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton play the slugging siblings: Hardy's Tommy Conlon is a former Marine who's battling all manner of personal demons, while Edgerton's Brendan is a teacher who's forced back into the ring in order to make money and prevent foreclosure on his home. Both have their eyes on winning the championship, but first, they need to undergo the proper training and then beat a formidable slate of opponents if they expect to make it to the final match. Director-cowriter Gavin O'Connor and team ably set up the dire circumstances that blanket these men's lives, particularly their relationship with their estranged father Paddy (Nick Nolte, simply superb). But because we know exactly which two characters will end up in the championship bout (despite the challenge of a hulking Russian straight out of Rocky IV), the home stretch occasionally becomes tedious, with the emphasis shifting from character development to repetitive slugfests. Worse, Hardy and Edgerton barely have any scenes together, which drains their climactic confrontation of much of its power. I suspect many men will nevertheless tear up at the end, but if this is supposed to be the successor to Brian's Song, it's slightly off-key.
Blu-ray extras include an interactive viewing mode with cast and crew participation; audio commentary by Edgerton, O'Connor and co-writer Anthony Tambakis; one deleted scene; a making-of piece; and a look at mixed martial arts strategies.
Movie: **1/2
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