2007 Archives - Page 13 of 13 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Sundance ’07: Crazy Love

January 25, 20072000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance

***½/****
directed by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens

by Alex Jackson Dan Klores’s Crazy Love is essentially just another talking-head documentary, but my goodness what talking heads they are! At first, it seems that Klores–to echo that oft-repeated charge against pop-doc filmmakers like Errol Morris, Michael Moore, and Chris Smith–is condescending to his subjects by laying their distinctly Jewish tackiness out to be skewered. But as the picture soldiers on, any emotional detachment dissolves away: these people aren’t tactless so much as they’re simply candid. They have absolutely nothing to hide, and that openness makes it extremely difficult to categorize anybody in the film as a monster or a victim. Burt Pugach was a prominent negligence lawyer in the East Bronx; in the fall of 1957, he spotted secretary Linda Riss, fell in love with her, and successfully seduced her. When he couldn’t divorce his wife, Riss left him and got engaged to somebody else. Enraged and deeply depressed, Pugach hired some goons to rough her up. They threw acid in her face, eventually blinding her. Pugach served a stint in prison, and when he got out he proposed to Riss. She accepted–the way she figures it, she’s blind and nobody wants her or is willing to be with her except Pugach, who was the one who blinded her in the first place, explicitly so that nobody else would want her. He “wins.”

Sundance ’07: Fido

January 24, 20072000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Sundance, Zombie

*/**** starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, Dylan Baker, Tim Blake Nelson screenplay by Dennis Heaton, Robert Chomiak, Andrew Currie directed by Andrew Currie by Alex Jackson The first five or ten minutes of Fido are pretty terrific. Therein, an educational film depicts the "zombie wars," a time during the Forties in which space-dust turned our dead into zombies. The living won the ensuing conflict; and with the invention of the domestication collar by mega-corporation Zomcom, the zombies could be made to serve man. This movie-within-the-movie is in Academy ratio and grainy black-and-white, and when it finishes, a grade-school teacher turns…

Sundance ’07: Teeth

January 24, 20072000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Film Festivals, Horror, Sundance, Thriller

*½/**** starring Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Josh Pais, Hale Appleman written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein by Alex Jackson I was very excited when I first stumbled upon the notion of the vagina dentata, as it provides for a distinctly female version of sexual aggression: Unlike the male rape drive, it's not about power, it's about taking power away from men--cannibalism and castration. I should have known that Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth would not be the film to really explore this notion as soon as I learned that it's literally about a teenage girl who discovers she has teeth in her…

Running with Scissors (2006) – DVD

January 22, 20072000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Annette Bening, Joseph Cross, Brian Cox, Evan Rachel Wood
screenplay by Ryan Murphy, based on the novel by Augusten Burroughs
directed by Ryan Murphy

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It would be hard not to be a little moved by the traumatic goings-on of Running with Scissors. The film is based on Augusten Burroughs’s best-selling memoir, and the author has plenty to forget: not merely the failure of his real family, consisting of a distant alcoholic father and a self-righteous, failed-poet mother, but also the nightmare of moving out of that home and into that of Mommy’s quack psychiatrist. Yet as the horrors pile up, one wonders what’s being learned in the midst of all this unburdening. I haven’t read Burroughs’s book, but Ryan Murphy’s screen translation fails completely to draw conclusions from the facts–we’re simply dropped in the midst of some seriously unhappy people and left to fend for ourselves. Perhaps the memoirist felt the same way, but without any generalizations drawn it seems rather like that money-grubbing head-shrinker, making hay with other people’s depression.

The Promise (2005) – DVD (U.S. version)

January 19, 20072000s, 2007, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Martial Arts, South Korea

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Hiroyuki Sanada, Jang Dong Gun, Cecilia Cheung, Nicholas Tse
screenplay by Chen Kaige and Zhang Tan
directed by Chen Kaige

by Walter Chaw Any fad reaches its nadir in due time, and the Western wuxia infatuation, which started somewhere around Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and more or less peaked with Zhang Yimou’s exceptional Hero, has found its basement in the truncated version of Chen Kaige’s already-pretty-embarrassing The Promise. Somewhere, King Hu is spinning in his grave. An abomination just about any way you slice it, this ultra-expensive, CGI’d-to-exhaustion wire-fu epic–especially as sanitized for North America’s consumption–suggests the world’s saddest public display of penis envy. Chen, hailing from the same Fifth Generation school as Zhang, produces a show-offy, self-indulgent bit of flamboyant one-upsmanship destined to become a queer camp classic. When the Crimson General (Hiroyuki Sanada) trades in his fabulous duds for a lavender muumuu in which to trade barbs with archenemy Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse, suspended somewhere between pretty girl and Japanese anime hero), a bad guy garbed in white feathers who wields a gold staff topped with a bronze hand, index finger extended in proctological menace, the homoeroticism of the piece–already distracting in the subtext–suddenly becomes the main event. It’s probably this unfathomable cut of the film’s Rosetta Stone, in fact, pared down to some half-assed companion piece to Chen’s own Farewell My Concubine. Without much strain, you can see The Promise being transformed, in all its kitsch excess, into a Broadway pop-opera: Memoirs of a Geisha: The Musical.

7 Men from Now (1956) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

January 17, 20071950s, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Western

Seven Men from Now
***½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, Lee Marvin, Walter Reed
screenplay by Burt Kennedy
directed by Budd Boetticher

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like most Budd Boetticher movies, Seven Men from Now is supremely modest. Despite my high star rating, I fear overselling its virtues–it’s not a searing, world-shattering masterpiece that leaves you devastated. But for a sort of chamber western, it’s lovely and uncommonly sensitive. The film doesn’t dig on the adventure and violence that are the major selling points of the genre: it’s about an ex-lawman’s guilty torment; a failed husband’s obliviousness to the trials of his wife; and a kind-of outlaw who’s sort of a friend but also sort of not. There is of course a revenge plot and the occasional incursion of marauding Indians, but you barely notice them over the nuances of the characters and their various sadnesses. It’s less than genius but somehow more than the action oater you know the studio wanted.

The Girls Next Door: Season One (2005) + Stacked: The Complete Series (2005-2006) – DVDs

January 15, 20072000s, 2007, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Television

THE GIRLS NEXT DOOR: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound A Extras D+
“Meet the Girls,” “New Girls in Town,” “Happy Birthday, Kendra,” “What Happens in Vegas,” “Fight Night,” “Operation Playmate,” “Just Shoot Me,” “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Under the Covers,” “Ghostbusted,” “Grape Expectations,” “I’ll Take Manhattan,” “My Kind of Town,” “Clue-Less,” “It’s Vegas Baby!”

STACKED: THE COMPLETE SERIES
Image B+ Sound C Extras D
“Pilot,” “Beat the Candidate,” “A Fan for All Seasons,” “Gavin’s Pipe Dream,” “The Ex-Appeal,” “Nobody Says I Love You,” “Two Faces of Eve,” “Darling Nikki,” “Crazy Ray,” “iPod,” “Heavy Meddle,” “Goodwizzle Hunting,” “After Party,” “Romancing the Stones,” “You’re Getting Sleepy,” “The Third Date,” “The Day the Music Died,” “Poker,” “The Headmaster”

by Ian Pugh I’m pretty sure it was Jon Stewart who described “lad mags” like MAXIM and STUFF as “porn for people too timid to buy porn,” and under that category we could probably also file PLAYBOY reality series “The Girls Next Door” and the Pamela Anderson sitcom “Stacked”: softcore pap for those too afraid to have God’s honest filth appear on their rental history or cable bill. I’m inclined to believe those same people are apt to use the phrase “turn your brain off” while justifying their love of these silicone parades–which in this case means, what, “shut up and masturbate”? PLAYBOY and Anderson are both cultural artifacts and thus demand scrutiny; protest, however, and you’ll just be dismissed as a double-plus-bad thought cop bringing intelligence to a discussion where it isn’t wanted. You know, the brainiac killjoy who has to say, “Why are you watching this garbage?” The programs themselves shout you down, in fact, before you have a chance to complain: each invokes Shakespeare on a whim (“Girls” in a party and episode named for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “Stacked” in one of its sarcastic faux-intellectual quotations)–not for any genuine comparison, but as a surrogate for intelligence, introduced for the sole purpose of deriding it as impertinent. You’re the idiot, apparently, for harbouring the desire for something substantial out of one of the most widespread and influential media of the last century.

See No Evil (2006) – DVD

January 12, 20072000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Kane, Christina Vidal, Luke Pegler, Samantha Noble
screenplay by Dan Madigan
directed by Gregory Dark

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gregory Dark started out directing adult films–I’ve been told that his award-winning Let Me Tell Ya ‘Bout White Chicks is a classic of the miscegenation genre–and had moved up to music videos when he was offered See No Evil, his first feature film (as well as the first film produced under the WWE banner). The idea that Dark sees this movie as his ticket to the big leagues is as good an explanation as any for its smarmy tone. Still embarrassed about making a slasher picture (and, by extension, his stigmatic beginnings), he distances himself from the material by condescending to it: If he’s better than B-movie claptrap, then that means he’s an A-list filmmaker, right? I have no idea where Dark wants to be near the end of his career, but the attitude he brings to See No Evil is that of a climber and not a serious artist who happens to be relegated to the periphery of the mainstream.

Takeshis’ (2005) – DVD

January 8, 20072000s, 2007, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Japan, Satire

**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Takeshi Kitano, Kotomi Kyono, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano

by Walter Chaw Midway between Fellini’s 8½ and Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz is Japanese auteur Takeshi Kitano’s Takeshis’, a film that indicates with its possessive title that it belongs to both the director (Takeshi Kitano) and star (“Beat” Takeshi); acknowledging that they’re one and the same (Kitano is billed as the former when he directs, the latter when he performs), they each have a function and persona unique unto themselves. The burden of that division, which Takeshi has taken on since midway through Violent Cop, is illustrated in the picture as a series of fractures that meld reality with televisual reality and filmic reality–nothing so ostentatious as Sven Nykvist and Ingmar Bergman reflected in a mirror in Persona, but going so far as to have “Beat” Takeshi, dressed as a clown, refer to Takeshi Kitano as “that asshole.” The omniscience of the director is referred to often in the text as casting directors (rather, actors playing casting directors, or casting directors playing themselves) remark that Yakuza never look like Kitano (who has made something of a name for himself as a Yakuza: he’s a little like the Japanese Robert De Niro)–and yet the central narrative of the picture then involves the slow evolution of the actor who looks like Kitano into Takeshi Kitano’s Yakuza persona. Kitano is thus marking the difference between the devices of the director and the relatively passive objectification that is the primary definition of an actor–between the godhead inscrutable and the subject humiliated, as well as the eventual bleed-through between the roles actors assume and the mold into which perception forces them.

Dane Cook’s Tourgasm (2006) – DVD

January 5, 20072000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Documentary, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A- Extras D
“The First Laugh,” “Working It Out,” “The United States of Insanity,” “It Was The Best of Times…,” “Determined and Injured,” “Competitively Speaking,” “Beginning of the End,” “Back in the Day,” “The Curtain Call”

by Ian Pugh It’s not that I don’t get Dane Cook. In fact, it’s difficult not to occasionally chuckle when looking over his repertoire, as in ruminating on the general inconvenience of having the Kool-Aid Man burst through your wall and the fact that no one can ever finish a game of Monopoly, or wondering who would write racial epithets while sitting on the toilet, he represents a strict literalization of that old sarcastic summation of stand-up comedy: “He’s sayin’ what we’re all thinkin’!” It’s not that funny, but we all laugh, anyway, partially for Cook’s enthusiasm, partially because he’s a reflection of us at our most vulnerable (that is, at our stalest creative moments), proudly transcribing the idle thoughts and half-attempts at wit that pass through our minds on a daily basis. We laugh, painfully, because we’ve all contemplated what Cook has to say.

Children of Men (2006) + Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

January 5, 2007****/****, 2000s, 2006, 2007, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Japan, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

CHILDREN OF MEN
****/****
starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Timothy J. Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby, based on the novel by P.D. James
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
***½/****
starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase
screenplay by Iris Yamashita, based on the book Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Tsuyoko Yoshido
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Stop on any single frame of Alfonso Cuarón’s remarkable war idyll Children of Men–a film that’s rarely in repose, sometimes seeming composed of one long, frantic shot–and I suspect the sharp-eyed, educated viewer would be able to cull a reference to modern art, most likely one about men reduced to their base animal nature. For me, the two visual landmarks come in the form of a cue to the cover design for Pink Floyd‘s 1977 “Animals” when hero Theo (Clive Owen) goes to see his industrialist cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) for help and a re-creation of Richard Misrach’s remarkable series of 1987 photographs documenting, among other things, a dead-animal pit in Nevada purportedly used to dispose of victims of a plutonium “hot spot.” Both share a space with surrealism in the positioning of animals (artificial or deceased) in industrial spaces (London’s Battersea Power Station is the iconic backdrop of the “Animals” cover) as mute commentary, perhaps, on man’s destructive relationship with his environment–a read that jibes comfortably with the thrust of Children of Men, in which we’re told that one day in the not-too-distant future, humans suddenly stop reproducing. (Fertile ground for science-fiction, this obsession with progeny (see: everything from Frankenstein to I Am Legend).) The picture opens with a Fleet Street terrorist bombing, a little like Terry Gilliam’s dystopic Brazil–though rather than take the easier route of satirizing our current state of instability and free-floating paranoia, Children of Men makes a serious attempt to allegorize it.

A Star is Born (1976) – DVD

January 3, 20071970s, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Busey, Oliver Clark
screenplay by John Gregory Dunne & Joan Didion and Frank Pierson
directed by Frank Pierson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It was no doubt celestially preordained that Barbra Streisand would unleash herself on some cherished Old Hollywood warhorse. But while the Janet Gaynor/Judy Garland hand-me-downs that ultimately felt her musical wrath were nobody’s idea of untouchable masterpieces, they at least played their cards right in terms of credulity towards celebrity and damaged spouses. The Streisand/Kristofferson A Star is Born lacks genuine investment in its central relationship between alcoholic rock star John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson) and his protégé/lover Esther Hoffmann (Streisand). We’re supposed to take their epic love on faith, to say nothing of the burned-out cynicism of the descendant rocker; there’s a lot of talk about disaffection and anguish, but Frank Pierson’s camera never catches it and the actors never quite express it.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2006

January 2, 20072000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

by Walter Chaw I think the start of 2006 held so much promise mainly because it heralded the end of 2005. Not a doomsayer by any stretch, I find myself, at least in my own head, defending the state of film against facile diagnoses. “Books are always better than the movies based on them” and “They don’t make good movies anymore” are the common phrases trotted out to simulate critical thought–better yet is the carrying around of the cross of “You just don’t like anything.” The truth is that books are only superior to the movies made from them about half the time (consider that almost all of Hitchcock’s films are based on shitty literature); that good movies are no rarer than usual; and that disliking Blood Diamond, Dreamgirls, and The Holiday doesn’t mean I don’t like anything. Still, I admit to taking short rides with those facile phrases over the years, trying them on for size, seeing if and how far they will fly.

That’s My Bush! [The Definitive Collection] – DVD

January 2, 20072000s, 2007, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Satire, Television

Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
“An Aborted Dinner Date,” “A Poorly Executed Plan,” “Eenie Meenie Miney MURDER!,” “S.D.I.-AYE-AYE!,” “The First Lady’s Persqueeter,” “Mom ‘E’ D.E.A. Arrest,” “Trapped in a Small Environment,” “Fare Thee Welfare”

“What we’re sick of–and it’s getting even worse–is: You either like Michael Moore or you wanna fuckin’ go overseas and shoot Iraqis. There can’t be a middle ground. Basically, if you think Michael Moore’s full of shit, then you are a super-Christian right-wing whatever. And we’re both just pretty middle-ground guys. We find just as many things to rip on on the left as we do on the right. People on the far left and the far right are the same exact person to us.”
— Trey Parker, “Interview of the Meanest”; IN FOCUS, October 2004

by Ian Pugh I think “South Park” boasts the occasional flash of brilliance, but I resent that its more flagrantly political messages, particularly in the past few seasons, essentially boil down to ‘both sides are fucking crazy: here’s how it really is.’ Trey Parker and Matt Stone strike me less as philosophers than as contrarians who force their perceived sensible alternatives down our throats as the infallible Solution. It’s a shame, too, because Parker and Stone remain two of the most talented satirists of our generation, if not in terms of hot-button topics: The ending of the recent “South Park” episode “Stanley’s Cup,” for instance, attacked sports movies by reminding us that every game involves two teams with similar aspirations, and, of course, Team America: World Police‘s caustic parody of “Rent” is as concise and shocking a criticism of that musical as one will find. I’m not taking the stupidly dismissive “I like you better when you’re funny” position that Tucker Carlson had towards Jon Stewart on CNN’s “Crossfire”, but in the world of “South Park”, there are only three options when it comes to world events: left, right, and middle, the latter being invariably correct. Compared to the innumerable increments in the political spectrum of reality, three extremes are no better than two.

Conversations with Other Women (2005) – DVD

January 2, 20072000s, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Aaron Eckhart, Helena Bonham Carter, Nora Zehetner, Eric Eidem
screenplay by Gabrielle Zevin
directed by Hans Canosa

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's no real arguing with Conversations with Other Women–you either buy into its common program of relationship angst and mid-life crisis or you don't. Although director Hans Canosa tries to juice things up with a split-screen technique that's less unctuous than the description might suggest, it's still the same Woody Allen-ish trip through romantic failure via witty banter. There's an extent to which this can be entirely watchable, and at no point does the film grind to a halt and become a chore to sit through. Its concept is a tad far-fetched, however, and the insights gleaned from the chance encounter of two people at a wedding reception are nothing you can't find in the pages of any major glossy mag.