Fatso.co.nz - November DVD Reviews

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FRACTURE
* * * 1/2 (3.5 Stars)

With Fracture, director Gregory Hoblit returns to the hotshot- lawyer-versus-devious-criminal hook of his first pic Primal Fear, and turns in an engrossing, well-acted thriller featuring a fiendishly enjoyable turn by Anthony Hopkins. He plays a brainy engineer who kills his wife after finding out she's been having an affair. When he's arrested, he confesses to the crime, but that's just the start of the film's twisty-turny, things-are-not-what-they-seem narrative. There's a certain whiff of familiarity to the proceedings, but the battle-of-wits between Hopkins and Ryan Gosling, as the cocky young lawyer prosecuting him, gives the film its suspenseful charge. In a magnetic performance, Hopkins puts on his creepy Lecter-ian charm, except without all the flesh-eating, and unsurprisingly, the film feels a little lacking every time he's off-screen. Worth a look for courtroom drama buffs.  

Fracture

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ICEMAN
* * * * (4 Stars)

Superbly acted and directed, Fred Schepisi's Iceman is probably one of most underrated sci-fi films ever. Lindsay Crouse and Timothy Hutton play arctic anthropologists who dig up a caveman (John Lone) who's been preserved in ice for over 40,000 years. Hutton's attempt to communicate with the bewildered caveman, dubbed "Charlie", forms the centre of the film, and it opens up a stimulating conversation on such scientific discoveries: do we treat Charlie as a guinea pig to further our experimental interests, such as cryogenic freezing, or as a living, human being with feelings who may teach us something about our evolutionary past? Lone's performance is simply extraordinary, absolutely believable in its savage energy and primal vocal intonations, but underneath all that, conveying very human emotions. With its lovely score, striking snowbound photography and thoughtful writing that doesn't insult our intelligence, Iceman is the kind of science fiction that doesn't appear too much these days. Would make a great double feature with Quest for Fire.

Iceman

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ERASERHEAD
* * * * * (5 Stars)

Finally re-released in director approved-transfer that looks better than it has ever been, Eraserhead still puzzles, thrills and transfixes today as a highly influential low-budget surrealist masterpiece. Perhaps what strikes me most about it now is how much it seems like Lynch's best and most essential movie; the very definition of "Lynchian" starts and ends here. Pretty much everything he's made after are, in one way or another, revisitations of Eraserhead's aesthetic/thematic template. Except here his vision is at its most concise. No waffly 3-hour Inland Empire bloatedness. Best described by Lynch himself as a "dream of dark and troubling things", the film is the true stuff of nightmares. Plot synopsizing doesn't do it any justice; you just need to absorb the experience. All Lynch's trademarks - the dark art direction, the industrial soundtrack, the absurdist humour, the deliberate pacing, the eccentric characters - are all in place, creating a cinematic world unlike any other.

Eraserhead

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SLAP SHOT
* * * * (4 Stars)

Not only is Slap Shot the greatest ice hockey film ever made – it’s one of the best sports comedies period, its influence readily apparent in everything from Bull Durham to Dodgeball. The late Paul Newman is all irreverence and charm as Reg Dunlop, an aging coach whose minor league team Charleston Chiefs is going down the tube when he decides to inject a bit of ultra-violence into the game to win again. Michael Ontkean (Twin Peaks) is the Chiefs player who’d rather play straight, “old-time hockey”. Slap Shot didn’t exactly find love among the critics when it was first released, due to the high-level profanity and violence, but its stature as a top-notch sports flick has grown over the years. It’s a tad long, but boisterous fun all the way, with plenty of amusingly rowdy skirmishes, and great characters (the Hanson brothers!) and character actors (Andrew Duncan, Paul Dooley, Strother Martin).

Slap Shot

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THE HAPPENING
*1/2  (1.5 Stars)

Nearly impossible to tell it's from the same guy who made The Sixth Sense, The Happening may well be the most astoundingly and entertainingly awful piece of dreck to get a wide release this year. It's an embarrassingly schlocky eco-apocalyptic thriller about an airborne toxin that's causing people to kill themselves in New York. Evacuation is ordered, and one of the many fleeing is science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), who end up wandering in the countryside with a bunch of strangers running away from... the wind. The film's sheer ineptitude is mind-boggling. There's not a single moment in the film that doesn't feel like it was beamed in from another planet. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the film builds to absolutely NOTHING whatsoever. Wooden beyond belief, Wahlberg gives both a career-worst performance and the worst performance of any film of the past year.

The Happening

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