****/**** Archives - Page 20 of 27

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

October 19, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola & Jason Schwartzman
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw If there's a Wes Anderson cult, I guess you should sign me up. His latest, The Darjeeling Limited, represents to me a maturing artist grappling with the stagnation of the relationship between fathers and sons. This notion that the relationship's reconciliation can only be arrived at posthumously is devastating–not because it's bleak, but because more often than not it holds true. Accordingly, Anderson's picture only has the suggestion of a father (unlike the surrogate father of The Life Aquatic or the redeemable father of The Royal Tenenbaums) at its beginning and maybe a spectre of a father played in cameo by Bill Murray, chasing down the titular train in the film's already-emotional prologue. I've offered that my appreciation of Anderson's work in the past has necessitated multiple viewings (if I'd had a second look at The Royal Tenenbaums prior to composing my year-end list in 2001, it wouldn't have had much competition for the top spot), but found The Darjeeling Limited to be affecting from the start. Something to do with a familiarity with Anderson, perhaps, or with Anderson growing up from the precocious scamp of Rushmore into the ravaged visage of Francis Whitman (Owen Wilson), the eldest of the three Whitman brothers, called to India after a year's estrangement on a quest for spiritual discovery in Satyajit Ray country. (Indeed, the film's score is cobbled together from snippets of Ray's music as well as a few choice cuts from The Kinks–the use of "This Time Tomorrow" from Lola vs. the Powerman & the Money-Go-Round, Pt. 1 is nearly as exquisite as the use of the Rolling Stones' "Play With Fire" late in the picture.) More probably, I connected instantly with The Darjeeling Limited, a film about mourning the death of a father, because I've been doing the same thing–imperfectly, badly–for almost exactly four years now.

28 Weeks Later (2007) – DVD

October 8, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Zombie

****/**** Image N/A Sound A Extras B
starring Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Idris Elba
screenplay by Rowan Joffe, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, E.L. Lavigne, Jesús Olmo
directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

Walter Chaw It's phenomenal. Where 28 Days Later… was saddled with ambition that exceeded its reach and, in Danny Boyle, a director who not only disdained the genre but has otherwise proven himself a grade-A tool as well, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's sequel 28 Weeks Later is brutally graceful in its vision of a nuclear family's dissolution as the metaphor for a broader, collective unrest. The triumph of the picture, though, is that it's as succinct and eloquent as a heart attack; as a parable of the Iraq War (popularly called "The War in Iraq," a subtle semantic distancing technique particularly trenchant to this discussion), it's all about aftermath and occupation. It's impossible to not compare it to the years and tens of thousands of fatalities since the declaration of "mission accomplished" when the picture begins with the reassurance that everything's peachy in dead-as-a-doornail England. Repatriation and reconstruction have begun six months after the outbreak of the first film's "rage virus," reuniting two kids, Tammy (future superstar Imogen Poots) and Andy (Harry Potter-named Mackintosh Muggleton), with their tightly-wound da', Don (Robert Carlyle). In an end-of-the-world opening in what only appears to be night (it's the first of several brilliant reversals), we see how a fissure develops in Don's marriage to wife Alice (Catherine McCormack), and of how that stress fracture becomes the foundation for the rest of the picture's relationships and politics.

Eastern Promises (2007)

September 26, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Viggo Moretensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl
screenplay by Steve Knight
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw As executed by our pre-eminent insect anthropologist, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is more fairytale than thriller, one that finds new muse Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the rising star of an émigré Russian mob family taken root in the heart of London within the red velvet-lined walls of a restaurant innocuously-/romantically-named “Trans-Siberian.” Self-described as “wolfish,” this pack is led by grandfatherly Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who’s disappointed with his ineffectual son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and looking to replace him with a surrogate heir. The rot of that familial discord throws its roots back to ferocious opening minutes that see first a vicious throat-slashing, then a fourteen-year-old, pregnant prostitute haemorrhaging on the floor of a drugstore after she’s told that, for Methadone, the pharmacist will need a prescription. Cronenberg’s London is a cess seething beneath a veneer of “normalcy”; regarded as a toxic tabernacle in Spider, the city is transformed here into a garish, meticulously theatrical wonderland. The central problem of the picture has a lot to do with the idea that Cronenberg has again taken a pre-existing script and reordered it along distinctly Cronenbergian lines–that what must have read initially as a sociological text on another facet of the immigrant experience (much like screenwriter Steve Knight’s Dirty Pretty Things) now plays like one of Cronenberg’s investigations into the difficulty of parsing concepts like “normal” and “family” in the crushing crucible of bugs pretending to be human among humans.

Ratatouille (2007)

June 29, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Pixar, Theatrical

****/****
written and directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Brad Bird’s latest film Ratatouille is the auteur’s affirmation that it’s possible, no matter the station, to find genius among the rabble. It’s charmingly egalitarian, this idea that any class or creed can produce the next Einstein or Baryshnikov, and it seems a direct response to the critics of his The Incredibles who would say that that superhero film’s mantra of “if everyone is super, no one is” is an embodiment of intolerance and classism. Ratatouille‘s answer is a lot like the one offered by Bird’s feature debut, The Iron Giant: that not only is it possible to overcome one’s basic programming, but also that choice supersedes predestination and, moreover, that a basic morality governs the actions of all things. A lot to put on the doorstep of a film about a rat, Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), who wishes he could be a chef in the kitchen of idol Gasteau (Brad Garrett)–but Bird, in the course of just three films (and stints with “The Simpsons” and “The Critic”), has forged a pretty formidable ideology based on, of all alien things, the sociology of common sense. Some people are more gifted than others, some people are assholes, and most people are idiots; just as an understanding of race and gender comes with the acceptance of basic differences, so, too, does understanding within a culture only come through a similar acceptance that some people are super and others are simply background.

The Twilight Samurai (2002) – DVD

May 28, 2007****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Japan, Martial Arts, Romance

****/**** Image D Sound D Extras B
starring Hiroyuki Sanada, Rie Miyazawa, Nenji Kobayashi, Ren Osugi
screenplay by Yôji Yamada, Yoshitaka Asama, based on the story of Shuuhei Fujisawa
directed by Yôji Yamada

by Walter Chaw Unforgiven for veteran director Yôji Yamada and the jidai-geki genre of samurai pictures, The Twilight Samurai is quiet, assured, a masterpiece of contemplative understatement. Its connection to Eastwood's film is more than just cosmetic, though, more than just another "Old West" film about an aging, widowed warrior called into action for something so quaint as the honour of a woman. No, The Twilight Samurai seems an apologia for the romanticization of violence and, moreover, for the elevation of the cult of masculinity out of the mud of bestial muck–where it at least in some measure belongs–and into realms of ritualistic divinity. There's a scene in The Twilight Samurai more powerful than its commensurate moment in Unforgiven that emphasizes this point as unassuming hero Seibei (Hiroyuki Sanada), without comment, steps over the flyblown corpse of a rival assassin in silent pursuit of his own quarry. The romance of end-of-era pictures like this (and literature as well; The Twilight Samurai and Unforgiven heavily remind of Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing) is that they can be pulled into a discussion of the passing away of youth as a man goes from early manhood's heady intoxication with the concept of chivalry to the more sober appreciation that true grit comes with providing constancy for your children in a world forever tilting towards alien territory. Though Seibei's nickname, "Tasogare" ("Twilight"), is a jab at his rushing home after clerk-work to tend to his demented mother and two young daughters, there's poetry in it as a description of a liminal magic hour where change looks not only more possible, but weighted with a lovely, gilded melancholy besides.

Manufactured Landscapes (2006) – DVD

May 3, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, DVD, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
directed by Jennifer Baichwal

by Walter Chaw There's something about Jennifer Baichwal's profiles of artists. After debuting with a nicely-modulated piece on writer Paul Bowles, Baichwal heard her muse with The True Meaning of Pictures, a profile of Appalachian portrait photog Shelby Lee Adams that, without overtly politicizing the subject, digs gratifyingly deep into the question of where representation becomes exploitation and, trickier still, how the audience might have as much to do with that difficult equation as the essayist himself. With Manufactured Landscapes, Baichwal looks at the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, an artist who shoots landscapes of industrial wastelands that reveal men to be astonishingly productive beasts–and destructive, too, in the same procreative stroke. It's hard to imagine the industry necessary to manufacture the scale of the freighters getting dismantled in the ship-breaking yards to which Baichwal travels with Burtynsky (I've heard a similar sense of awe attends a visit to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA)–hard to assimilate the amount of Nietzschian will-to-power necessary to even contemplate the construction of titans.

Inland Empire (2006)

April 27, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Lynch, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Grace Zabriskie
written and directed by David Lynch

by Walter Chaw Nikki (Laura Dern) is an actress landing her dream role opposite Devon (Justin Theroux) in a film directed by the great Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons). Alas the project, "On High in Blue Tomorrows", has a history in which a previous, doomed production ended as reality seeped into its fiction and the film's onscreen/offscreen lovers were killed. For a moment, it seems as though David Lynch's Inland Empire might be as straightforward as a haunted Hollywood genre exercise–but time slips, it's suddenly the next day, and as one character says to another, you're sitting over there. Displaced, distracted, the picture is a masterpiece that, for the patient, the active, and the curious, may be the most literal definition of "dread" captured on film. That feeling you get when Henry Spencer contemplates his feral baby in Eraserhead is the same species of disgusted, familiar fascination that infects this film like a murder of maggots.

Philadelphia Film Festival ’07: Zoo

April 16, 2007****/****, Authors: Ian Pugh, Documentary, Film Festivals

****/****directed by Robinson Devor by Ian Pugh Constructed as a series of dream-like, blue-tinted re-enactments anonymously narrated (and sometimes acted out in silhouette) by the people involved, Zoo--so named for an apparently in-crowd nickname for "zoophile"--documents a small group of individuals gathered together on a ranch in Washington, one of the few states in the union where bestiality is "not illegal," to hang out and share their love for animals; their illusions of solitude are shattered, however, when one of them dies from a perforated colon after having sex with a horse. The zoophiles are portrayed here as fairly "normal,"…

Grindhouse (2007)

April 5, 2007****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Esoterica, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
Planet Terror (**/****): starring Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Michael Biehn, Jeff Fahey
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez
Death Proof (****/****): starring Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Zoe Bell
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Robert Rodriguez is better at making an old exploitation movie and Quentin Tarantino is better at capturing the joy of watching old exploitation movies, meaning that the Rodriguez half of Grindhouse is exuberant, post-modern camp and the Tarantino half is, as Tarantino's films usually are, pure delight. Rodriguez winks and tries maybe too hard; Tarantino, being the sui generis of a very specific kind of film, proceeds to create something that resembles Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop while steering clear of irony, self-indulgence, and post-modernism in its reverence. The mistake is in seeing some of Tarantino's casting choices as ironic: what's wrong with the careers of the world's Travoltas and Pam Griers and even De Niros is that they started cashing in on the ironic value of their brand. No, what Tarantino does is remember why they became a brand in the first place. A moment where Kurt Russell, as Tarantino's bogey Stuntman Mike, flashes a giant, shit-eating grin right through the fourth wall doesn't come off as self-congratulatory so much as it shows an old genre vet excited to be back in the saddle. While Rodriguez's Planet Terror is fun in a back-clapping way, Tarantino's Death Proof is a profound insight into the sort of dick-raising entertainments that made Tarantino who he is as fanboy artist. Rodriguez likes to show off–Tarantino can only make the movies he makes: it's not the pulpiness of the subject matter that feels like the true faith in Tarantino's films, it's the sense that for all the artificiality of his aesthetic, there's not an ounce of pretense in his decisions. In short, Rodriguez is the Salieri to Tarantino's Mozart.

The Rodgers & Hammerstein Collection (1934-1965) – DVD

March 12, 2007****/****, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, War, Western

THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Richard Haydn, Eleanor Parker
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Robert Wise

THE KING AND I (1956)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner, Rita Moreno, Martin Benson
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on Margaret Landon’s play “Anna and the King of Siam”
directed by Walter Lang

SOUTH PACIFIC (1958)
*½/**** Image A+ (Theatrical) A (Roadshow) Sound B Extras C+
starring Rossano Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor, John Kerr, Ray Walston
screenplay by Paul Osborn, based on Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
directed by Joshua Logan

CAROUSEL (1956)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Cameron Mitchell, Barbara Ruick
screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based on the Ferenc Molnár’s play “Liliom”
directed by Henry King

LILIOM (1934)
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Charles Boyer, Madeleine Ozeray, Robert Arnoux, Roland Toutain
screenplay by Robert Liebmann, dialogue by Bernard Zimmer, based on the play by Franz (a.k.a. Ferenc) Molnár
directed by Fritz Lang

STATE FAIR (1945)
½*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A
starring Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews, Dick Haymes, Vivian Blaine
screenplay by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the novel by Philip Strong
directed by Walter Lang

STATE FAIR (1962)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, Pamela Tiffin, Alice Faye
screenplay by Richard Breen; adaptation by Oscar Hammerstein II, Sonya Levien, Paul Green
directed by José Ferrer

OKLAHOMA! (1955)
***/**** Image A (CinemaScope) C (Todd-AO) Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Gordon MacRae, Gloria Grahame, Shirley Jones, Gene Nelson
screenplay by Sonya Levien and William Ludwig
directed by Fred Zinnemann

by Walter Chaw God, The Sound of Music is so freakin’ nice. Nazis are the bad guys, no controversy there; raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens–have you no heart, man? But when I like Rodgers & Hammerstein–and I like them quite a lot, truth be wrenched–I like their ambiguity, their irony, their goddamned fatalism in the face of eternal romantic verities. Consider the animal (jungle?) heat of “Shall We Dance,” cut off like a faucet by the fascistic abortion of The King and I‘s secondary love story; or the persistence of love despite abuse and abandonment in Carousel; or the slapdash kangaroo court that justifies love in Oklahoma!. This is all so much more than the slightly shady (and ultimately redeemed) shyster of The Music Man–this is reality in the midst of the un-, sur-, hyper-reality of the musical form. Yet what The Sound of Music offers up is a military man shtupping an ex-nun with no corresponding sense of fetishistic eroticism. How is it that the two most popular adult Halloween costumes engaged in naughty Alpine sexcapades could be totally free of va-va-va-voom? It’s so relentlessly wholesome that of course it’s the most beloved artifact of its kind in the short history of the movie musical: If you’re of a certain age, the plot of the thing is almost family mythology, resurrected every holiday like a dusty corpse at a decades-long Irish wake gone tragically awry. That ain’t a grin, baby, it’s a rictus.

The Up Series [Five Disk Collector’s Edition] – DVD

February 11, 2007****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Documentary, DVD, FFC Must-Own, UK

by Ian Pugh "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."

So goes the Jesuit maxim, and, as it happens, so begins almost every review you'll find of Michael Apted's "Up" documentary series. Of course, you can't really fault someone for falling back on that warhorse (or this would be a very ironic paragraph indeed), because it's the concept that brought the original television production Seven Up! to life, intended as it was as "a glimpse into Britain's future." That is to say, into the lives of fourteen seven-year-olds, chosen from all walks of life (though mostly from polar opposites of the class divide) and asked about the world, their ambitions, and just generally how they're doing; they've been revisited for the same purpose every seven years hence.

Sundance ’07: Chapter 27

February 1, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Biopic, Canada, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

****/****starring Jared Leto, Lindsay Lohan, Judah Friedlander, Ursula Abbottwritten and directed by Jarrett Schaefer by Alex Jackson Chapter 27 is creepy and possibly even unhealthy. I've been wondering for a couple of days now just how long writer-director Jarrett Schaefer stared into the Nietzsche abyss in researching and helming this aggressively subjective look into the mind of Beatle assassin Mark David Chapman. He purports to share Chapman's adoration of The Catcher in the Rye, The Beatles, and The Wizard of Oz and in person comes off as shy and somewhat withdrawn. What I find particularly disturbing is how he praised…

Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton: The Film Collection – DVD

January 30, 2007****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bermuda, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Romance, UK

THE V.I.P.S (1963)
½*/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Elsa Martinelli, Margaret Rutheford
screenplay by Terence Rattigan
directed by Anthony Asquith

THE SANDPIPER (1965)
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie Saint, Morgan Mason
screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson
directed by Vincente Minnelli

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)
****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, Sandy Dennis
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the play by Edward Albee
directed by Mike Nichols

THE COMEDIANS (1967)
*½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov
screenplay by Graham Greene, based on his novel
directed by Peter Glenville

by Walter Chaw Also called International Hotel, The V.I.P.s–the first chronologically-released vehicle for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor following the initiation of their legendary infidelities on the set of Cleopatra–is unwatchable dreck of the Old Hollywood variety. When people say "They don't make 'em like they used to," it's a good corrective to start listing off dusty artifacts like this one. As it was something of a financial windfall at the time (though not enough of one to offset the impending disaster of Cleopatra), one assumes that audiences flocked to theatres to sniff the musky odour of Burton/Taylor's forbidden l'amour that had dominated the world's lascivious imagination as production on an epic failure (or failed epic) dragged on for months and years. For me, the curiosity about The V.I.P.s, currently available in Warner's freshly-minted box set of Burton/Taylor pictures made during the height of their notoriety, has a lot more to do with Richard Burton, who was, to my mind, his generation's Russell Crowe. Like Crowe, Burton is thick with virility and gravitas and the ability, by himself, to carry a picture on his broad shoulders; I wonder if his seduction by a relic of Old Hollywood glamour hasn't tainted his legacy irrevocably. My voyeuristic impulse ultimately isn't so different from that of contemporary viewers, in fact, though I do offer the slight caveat that I'm in it to see how touching a match to Burton's already-boundless explosiveness would infect, for good or for ill, what are essentially vanity pieces for a couple drunk on the cult of themselves.

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

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

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

December 29, 2006****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Mexico, Spain, Theatrical, War

****/****
starring Ariadna Gil, Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú
written and directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw Brutal and ignoble, the antithesis of romantic, the violence in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth slaps metal against flesh like the flat of a hand against a steel table. It's the only element of the picture that isn't lush, that isn't laden with the burnished archetype of Catholic superstition as it exists in eternal suspension with the pagan mythologies it cannibalized. By itself, this seems a metaphor for the pain and the magic of how fable turns the inevitability of coming-of-age into ritual. An early scene where hero girl Ofelia (Ivana Baquero)–a storyteller equal parts experientially innocent and allegorically savvy, making her the manifestation of del Toro's ideal avatar–tells her prenatal brother a story about a rose that blooms nightly on a mountain of thorns touches in one ineffably graceful movement all the picture's themes of immortality, aspiration, isolation, and the promise of escape held, sadistically, just out of reach. There's something of the myth of Tantalus in Ofelia's tale, as much as there is of Lewis Carroll's Alice and the sagas of parental absence by the Brothers Grimm, which surface in the premise of a young girl traveling, as the film opens, with her pregnant mother into the war-torn Spanish countryside during Franco's rule to join her wicked stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi López) at his remote outpost. Ofelia will be reminded repeatedly throughout the film that there's no such thing as justice or innocence left in the world, and that the best intentions are crushed by cynicism and rage. The question left as the picture closes has to do with whether Ofelia's taken the lesson to heart, to say nothing of del Toro–or us.

1900 (1976) [Two-Disc Collector’s Edition] + La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) – DVDs

December 18, 2006****/****, 1970s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, France, Italy, Pseudo-Documentary, Robert De Niro, War, West Germany

1900
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Francesca Bertini
screenplay by Franco Arcalli, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Bernardo Bertolucci
directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871)
****/**** Image B- Sound C+ Extras C+
directed by Peter Watkins

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In this corner, Bernardo Bertolucci, weighing in with a massive budget courtesy of Alberto Grimaldi and a cast that includes De Niro, Depardieu, Sutherland, Lancaster, Hayden, and Sanda. Over here we have Peter Watkins, working for peanuts on a single soundstage with a cast of nobodies recruited from Paris and its environs. The fight, as it turns out, is more than one over who can make the longest movie (5hrs15mins for Bertolucci, 5hrs45mins for Watkins) or grab the most attention. The issue is: what are the conditions necessary for a revolutionary epic–moreover, what conditions get in the way? This is the real purpose of comparing 1900 and La Commune (Paris, 1871) (hereafter La Commune), for each film throws down for the Communist cause but only one is conscious of the nuances. Where Watkins and his troupe constantly reframe the idea of what it means to foment revolution, Bertolucci thinks he's got the idea–and proves, through mindless repetition, that he really doesn't.

Lady in the Water (2006) + Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)|Lady in the Water [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

December 18, 2006****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Revenge, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

LADY IN THE WATER
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bob Balaban, Jeffrey Wright
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Chinjeolhan geumjassi
****/****
starring Lee Yeong-ae, Choi Min-sik, Kim Shi-hoo, Kwon Yea-young
written and directed by Park Chanwook

by Walter Chaw The creeping, inescapable feeling is that M. Night Shyamalan would like to be known as “M. Christ Shyamalan”: a guy who wants you to drink the Kool-Aid; a messiah with a shrinking flock preaching a platform that his increasingly deluded, astonishingly arrogant fables are actually themselves the secret to world peace. He claims to hear voices–the first couple of times he did so (here in the stray interview, there in The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, that abhorrent mock-documentary he did for the Sci-Fi Channel), I thought he was kidding. Hell, the first couple of times he did it, he probably was kidding. But I don’t think he’s kidding anymore. And there’s no longer any currency in playing this ethereal shaman card. Prancing about like a mystic while shitting away millions of other people’s money isn’t a pastime with longevity: it’s something only a zealot would do. I think he’s gone off the deep end, hubris first, overfed to bloating on a steady diet of his own press and the tender ministrations of yes-men too afraid to set off Shyamalan’s diseased persecution complex by telling him that while he might be good at a few things, Lady in the Water was unsalvageable. When Disney executives did approximately that, Shyamalan took his ball and went across the street to Warner Brothers.

Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster (1965) – DVD

December 6, 2006****/****, 1960s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Marilyn Hanold, Jim Karen, Lou Cutell, Nancy Marshall
screenplay by R.H.W. Dillard, George Garrett and John Rodenbeck
directed by Robert Gaffney

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Now, I think we're allowed to define these terms for ourselves (fans of exploitation movies being a friendly and decidedly unpretentious bunch), but the way I see it, there's a sharp difference in style between B-movies and Z-movies. B-movies are your creature features. Their narratives are actually quite strongly defined and they tend to produce a rather primitive but potent and genuine emotional reaction from the audience. You can picture yourself seeing these films at a drive-in double feature or maybe a Saturday matinee. In contrast, Z-movies are all jumbled noise. The audience does not exactly have an emotional reaction to Z-movies, they just watch them in a sort of dissociated daze. You could never imagine seeing Z-movies at an actual movie theatre or drive-in. The only place where they could possibly play is on a local unaffiliated television station at three in the morning.

The Fountain (2006)

November 22, 2006****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz, Ellen Burstyn, Mark Margolis
written and directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw As deeply emotional and damnably frustrating as any work of pure individual vision must be, Darren Aronofsky's long-gestating The Fountain is officially devastating from about thirty-minutes in and buoyed by its singular vision for the remainder. A film that defines the fatigued term "ambitious," it's the story of Man's need to transcend the physical, to defeat mortality, to address the divine that takes the form of what the director has called "science-fiction for the new millennium." Is it arrogant to seek to redefine an entire genre? No doubt–but it's that exact genus of hubris under the microscope in The Fountain, with its three interwoven storylines concerning the courage to explore new worlds armed and shielded only (and enough) by dogged, ragged faith, and so Aronofsky's arrogance becomes, only as it should be, the connective fibre that binds his film together. The Fountain is philosophy, posing questions about the nature of art, of communication, of the truly big questions of existence. And because it's good philosophy, it doesn't seek to answer the mysteries of our intellectual life, but rather offers as the only humanist answer another mystery: love. It's oblique to the point of opaque for long stretches of its "future" passage (involving the voyage to a nebula wrapped around a dying star in what appears to be a bubble housing a hilltop and a tree) and verges on the brink of camp in "past" segments set during the Age of Discovery and the Spanish Inquisition, yet it finds its core–its thematic and emotional anchor–in the "present" with a research scientist's race against his wife's voracious cancer.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] – DVD

October 30, 2006****/****, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow
screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw If we start from the position that Sally (Marilyn Burns) is burdened from the get-go by two misfit monsters, then we can look at Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as not only a keen autopsy of a particular moment in our country's history (circa 1974), but also a profoundly sensitive look at social prejudices and the toll said prejudices take on the human social organism. More than the typical rise-of-the-bumpkins horror conceit, it is, along with John Boorman's Deliverance from two years earlier, the classic example of a film that isn't about what it's ostensibly about. Look at the assiduous reduction of wheelchair-bound outcast Franklin (Paul A. Partain), a character who remains for the efforts of Hooper and Partain (apparently so irritating in real life that his cohorts were relieved by his on-screen demise) one of the most unapologetically irritating and pathetic figures in film and find noteworthy not that a handicapped person is allowed to be a self-pitying asshole, but that we're not let off the hook (as it were) for our own prejudices. Franklin is an anchor–and we're glad that he's dead, too.