****/**** Archives - Page 23 of 27

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2004) + Uncovered: The War on Iraq (2004)

October 6, 2004****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Theatrical

OUTFOXED: RUPERT MURDOCH'S WAR ON JOURNALISM
*½/****
directed by Robert Greenwald

UNCOVERED: THE WAR IN IRAQ
****/****
directed by Robert Greenwald

by Walter Chaw A poll was recently conducted: 20,000 people were asked what news show they rely upon for their campaign information, and then they were asked six questions about the respective campaign platforms of each candidate. The sector of the population scoring the lowest (also the sector, according to the Nielsens, least likely to have attended college) consisted of people who watch insane person Bill O'Reilly's "The O'Reilly Factor" over on Fox News, while the population scoring the highest (and most likely to have been to college–something like a 3:1 ratio compared to O'Reilly's audience) preferred Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart". Tied in with that stat–the revelation of which is only surprising to the GED nation flocking to Fox, 80% of whom still believe that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks–is an article in the sharp THE ONION that described liberals in a state of "outrage fatigue." See, satire is a difficult concept, but once grasped it's the quickest, truest way to get at the heart of any absurd situation. Without satire and irony, the issues of the day become reductive and deadening.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) – (Off Color Films) DVD

October 5, 2004****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, Horror, Zombie

****/**** Image F (colorized)/C- (b&w) Sound C Extras F
starring Judith O'Dea, Duane Jones, Marilyn Eastman, Karl Hardman
screenplay by John A. Russo
directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw George A. Romero's drive-in shocker is not only one of the most important independent and genre films of all-time, but also a dead brilliant civil rights metaphor featuring an unfortunately enduring rarity: a strong, virile, uncommented-upon African-American lead. The casting of Duane Jones came about, according to legend, mainly because Jones was the best actor any of the filmmakers knew. Say what you will of Night of the Living Dead, if you see no other ways that this seminal picture casts a long shadow, it casts a long one by just this merit-based example. The culmination of a lot of themes and trends in the American cinema at that time, the film features neighbour-suspicion, fear of children, fear of provincial National Guardsmen, and the creeping dread that the world may be ending because our government is run by assclowns and nepotists. It's a testament to the undertow of this text (or a testament to how short-sighted we are as a nation) that it still works in the same way over thirty-five years later. But Night of the Living Dead is more than just a devastating metaphor for the class struggle, for the rising tide of suspicion and corruption that tore a chasm through the middle of the United States: it's a tightly-edited, claustrophobically-framed horror film that retains, along with its relevance, its ability to startle and appall.

The Osterman Weekend (1983) [Sam Peckinpah Commemorative 2-Disc Edition] – DVD

August 31, 2004****/****, 1980s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Thriller

****/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Rutger Hauer, John Hurt, Craig T. Nelson, Dennis Hopper
screenplay by Alan Sharp, adaptation by Ian Masters, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
directed by Sam Peckinpah

by Walter Chaw

"We rely too much on sight, don't you think? Appearances being what they are."

And so encapsulates the genius and the madness of Sam Peckinpah's final film, the contentious, still-relevant The Osterman Weekend. Serving as a bridge of sorts between the psychosexual circus of Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980) and the technology/media fear of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), the film strikes a balance between the paranoia cinema of the 1970s and the technophilic sci-fi wonderland of the 1980s. It's brilliant–mark the ways that Peckinpah implies that every shot in the film is taken from a hidden camera for the pleasure of the audience. (A picture hasn't been this successful in indicting the criminal aspect of watching a movie since Hitchcock's heyday.) More than brilliant, like the best of Peckinpah's films, it gets under your skin with scalpel-grace. He made films of intimate violation–of rape, essentially; when you stare into the abyss of Peckinpah's pictures, Peckinpah stares into you.

Hero (2002)

August 27, 2004****/****, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Theatrical

****/****
starring Jet Li, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Maggie Cheung, Ziyi Zhang
screenplay by Li Feng, Zhang Yimou, Wang Bin
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw Zhang Yimou's Hero is perhaps the most ravishing, most seductively alien fantasy since a pair of 1964 releases: Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert and Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman of the Dunes. It is a telling of the oft-told (in Chinese cinema) story of how the first emperor of China, Qin (an imperious Daoming Chen), was targeted by an assassin on the eve of uniting all the warring city-states of China into a kingdom, the centre of the world that calls itself to this day the "Middle Kingdom." To bridge the prescribed physical gap between commoner and emperor, X (Jet Li) tells the story of how he vanquished three of the realm's greatest killers in the function of a low-ranking magistrate–earning proximity as a result of his service to Qin with each tall tale. The body of Hero is the stories told by X, with Qin the rapt, but skeptical audience, taking his sense of manifest purpose as aegis against any attacker.

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

June 29, 2004****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Sam Raimi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

****/****
starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Alfred Molina
screenplay by Alvin Sargent
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Just as the best parts of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies evoked the lo-fi ingenuity of Jackson’s splatter flicks (Braindead, Bad Taste), a surgery scene in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 reminds a lot of Raimi’s Evil Dead days–probably something to do with the chainsaw. Still, it’s uncomfortable, inappropriate, violent, the Three Stooges gone really, really wrong, and it’s stuck right smack dab in the middle of what is arguably the most anticipated film of the summer. Raimi’s tutelage in the school of zero-budget exploitation has taught him the importance of narrative and subtext, of internal logic and thematic coherence. You can buy limitless razzle-dazzle; you can’t buy a strong foundation in fun and at least a rudiment of sense. And as Raimi’s budget has soared from the rumoured twenty grand for The Evil Dead to somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ireland’s GNP for Spider-Man 2, his foundation in economical thrills anchors his blockbusters in humanity.

Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) + Control Room (2004)

June 24, 2004****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Palme d'Or Winner, Theatrical, War

FAHRENHEIT 9/11
*½/****
directed by Michael Moore

CONTROL ROOM
****/*****
directed by Jehane Noujaim

by Walter Chaw Shame on Michael Moore for the sloppy, sprawling Fahrenheit 9/11, and shame on President George W. Bush for being such a reprehensible dimwit target that the existence of such a film is possible. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a long, strident preach to the choir full of misleading juxtapositions and sarcastic asides that weaken what should be die-cast condemnations. A better film would have been two hours of just letting W. talk: drivelling his unique drivel that not only makes him sound stupid, for sure (and that's no crime), but is also dangerous and offensive to the 90% of the world (including 52% of the United States) who think he's a Gatsby with a great big sword. Bush describes going into the Middle East as a "crusade," he talks about leaving decisions to a higher power (something that Ron Reagan chose to address in the eulogy for his father), he rationalizes war by saying, "Hey, they tried to kill my daddy."

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

June 4, 2004****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, Theatrical, Time Travel, UK

****/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Gary Oldman
screenplay by Steven Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

by Walter Chaw There's real poetry in Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (hereafter Harry Potter 3), encapsulated in a moment where Harry mistakes a vision of himself for the phantom of his dead father. It's another of the Mexican director's magic-realism conversations about children coming of age emotionally and sexually, marking the picture as a lovely companion piece to his A Little Princess and identifying Cuarón as a gifted, eloquent voice for the rage and the rapture of adolescence. Opening with the 13-year-old Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) fiddling with his wand beneath a blanket, the theme of self-discovery unfolds along jagged, de-romanticized lines like the rough rhythms of an Irish lyric or, more to the heart of the matter, a Mexican folk tale, all of blood, dirt, and heroic fervour.

The Company (2003) – DVD

May 30, 2004****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Robert Altman, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Germany, Music, Romance, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Neve Campbell, Malcolm McDowell, James Franco, Barbara Robertson
screenplay by Barbara Turner
directed by Robert Altman

by Walter Chaw There is a moment in Robert Altman's beautifully metered The Company where we're introduced to a cook played by James Franco through a low angle shot hovering over the green, smoke-haloed expanse of a gin-joint pool table. Wordless, the sequence plays out as Ry (Neve Campbell, never better) shoots a rack to the cool blues slinking out of a corner jukebox, glancing up now and again to meet Josh's (Franco) frank interest with gradually thawing humour and heat. Discretely, the film cuts to the next morning as Josh cooks an omelette with what's available in the kitchen of Ry's artist's loft.

Crimson Gold (2003)

May 27, 2004****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Iran, Theatrical, Thriller

Talaye sorkh
****/****
starring Hussein Emadeddin, Kamyar Sheissi, Azita Rayeji, Shahram Vaziri
screenplay by Abbas Kiarostami
directed by Jafar Panahi

by Bill Chambers Those planning on taking in Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow this weekend solely to judge the credibility of its disaster-movie hijinks would be better off buying a ticket to its competition in several North American markets, Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold (Talaye sorkh), in which a scenario of inevitable, cyclical doom unfolds with astonishing veracity. The shooting of a jewellery-store owner by a thief who turned the gun on himself inspired master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami to reverse-engineer the thief's motives in a screenplay written specifically for his former assistant director Panahi, fresh from the bittersweet triumph of The Circle. (Widely acclaimed everywhere, it was banned in his native Iran.) Some details specific to Iran's theocracy notwithstanding (a party is raided by police because men and women are dancing together), Crimson Gold is arguably a more globally inclusive film than The Circle, as it deals with the insidious threat of classism that on some level affects us all.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) [Studio Classics] – DVD

May 13, 2004****/****, 1940s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Charley Grapewin
screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, based on the book by John Steinbeck
directed by John Ford

by Bill Chambers John Steinbeck wrote a, if not the, great American novel with The Grapes of Wrath, but John Ford's emotionally devastating film version, I say without a trace of anti-intellectualism, supplants Steinbeck's prose in memory. In the hands of Ford and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (peaking early), Steinbeck's Dust Bowl evokes Nazi Germany played out on American soil. Though this was a metaphor nascent in Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning book (whose publication preceded the film's release by approximately one year), with The Grapes of Wrath landing in theatres a month after Germany's deportation of Jews into occupied Poland, with those gaunt faces registering far less innocuously than Steinbeck's descriptions of them, it became a full-fledged allegory in its transition to the big screen. (That Ford was initially drawn to the project because it recalled ancestral tales of the Irish potato famine points to themes that camouflage with each new epoch. Is Steinbeck the last mythmaker?) Johnson may streamline Steinbeck to a degree that softens his guarded optimism, but his script is of tonal fidelity; Ford, revolutionizing talkies by revisiting the techniques of silent-era Expressionism with world-class cinematographer Gregg Toland, gives the picture the glaze of a thriller, as though recognizing a new urgency in old rhymes.

The Return (2003) + Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (2003)

May 6, 2004****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Russia, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller

Vozvrashcheniye
****/****
starring Vladimir Garin, Ivan Dobronravov, Konstantin Lavronenko, Natalya Vdovina
screenplay by Vladimir Moiseyenko & Aleksandr Novototsky
directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev

SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER… AND SPRING
****/****
starring Yeong-su Oh, Ki-duk Kim, Young-min Kim, Jae-kyeong Seo
written and directed by Ki-duk Kim

by Walter Chaw Andrei Tarkovsky by way of Terrence Malick, Andrei Zvyagintsev's shockingly assured debut The Return (Vozvrashcheniye) approaches the primitive through the sublime, finding the first testament of human existence in the bland, devouring indifference of the natural and providing the moribund Russian film industry its first real voice in a generation. While it's impeccably acted and scripted with a respect for the spaces before, after, and between, what astounds about the picture is Zvyagintsev's patient, painterly eye, which fills the void in world cinema left by Takeshi Kitano since the first half of Brother and offers a voice of simple, audacious purity that fashions of the cinema something like a cold blue rapier. The Return is as good a film debut (and in almost the same way) as Malick's Badlands: an intimate character study and an archetypical road trip that fashions a crystalline portrait of a very specific time and place that, nonetheless, shines a light on the landmarks of a collective interior. Zvyagintsev talks about boys needing their father and couches it in terms poetic and mesmerizing.

The Triplets of Belleville (2003) – DVD

May 4, 2004****/****, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Latvia, Music, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
written and directed by Sylvain Chomet

by Walter Chaw An extraordinary, melancholy ode to the endless, mercurial peculiarity of life, Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville (Les Triplettes de Belleville) finds as its existential constant the persistence of art, the familial ties that bind, and the echoing green of synchronicity. It is the finest film of its kind since Babe: Pig in the City, Gallic in the best implications of the term: self-conscious, intelligent, envelope-pushing. Its scope is immense both literally and philosophically, a series of dog dreams within providing a bit of core disquiet that work at you like the best poetry can. It's easy to forget the power of metaphor when it's bandied about like so much corrupt currency in sub-par product aching for subtext–in fact, The Triplets of Belleville is so close to poetry, something by William Carlos Williams, perhaps, that it touches something pure in art and archetype, reminding in the process of what symbolic language can do when wielded with a skilled, steady hand.

Elephant (2003) – DVD

May 3, 2004****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Palme d'Or Winner, Teen, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnell
written and directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw I live about five minutes from Columbine High School. In the year following the shootings, Littleton, a strange place already, got even stranger: a man killed himself in a crowded Burger King parking lot, a child was found in a dumpster behind a local strip mall, two kids were killed in a Subway, and so on. It was mass psychic fallout, and something that none of the inquiries into Columbine seem to address; in time, I'm sure, people will forget that there were aftershocks and tremors.

Young Adam (2003); Millennium Mambo (2001); Secret Things (2002)

April 23, 2004****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, France, Romance, Taiwan, Theatrical, UK

YOUNG ADAM
**½/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Peter Mullan, Emily Mortimer
screenplay by David Mackenzie, based on the novel by Alexander Trocchi
directed by David Mackenzie

Qian xi man po
****/****
starring Shu Qi, Jack Kao, Tuan Chun-hao, Chen Yi-Hsuan
screenplay by Chu T'ien-wen
directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Choses secrètes
***½/****
starring Coralie Revel, Sabrina Seyvecou, Roger Mirmont, Fabrice Deville
written and directed by Jean-Claude Brisseau

by Walter Chaw David Mackenzie's Young Adam opens with a shot from below of a duck paddling placidly along the surface of a lake that's replaced by a woman's corpse, then replaced by a filthy barge-worker and his mate fishing the cadaver out with a gaffing hook. Young Adam is a beautiful picture, really, its interiors sepia-tinged like a cameo photograph and its exteriors bleached and desperate, and as a film about surfaces, it marches to its own logic with the dyspeptic malaise, if not the consistent nihilistic poetry, of a Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Surfaces include skin, of course, and a scene where tattooed Les (Peter Mullan) washes his hired help Joe (Ewan McGregor) is as blandly erotic as a scene where Joe performs cunnilingus on Les's wife Ella (Tilda Swinton), an act that wins him the fried egg he was denied at breakfast. Consumption suggesting sustenance seeps into a scene where Joe covers his girlfriend, Cathie (Emily Mortimer), with custard, ketchup, and mustard before caning and raping her. Joe's furnace is unquenchable: as Biblical doppelganger, his carnal curiosity is constantly stoked by the invitation of moribund English housewives and widows–and his ire is only aroused when an appropriate mate choice threatens to free him from his fleshy fixations. Young Adam is about being trapped and listless, about the lost generation afflicted by a plague of ennui–paddling in a circle, floating between updrafts in the widening gyre.

Dogville (2003)

March 26, 2004****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany, Harriet Anderson, Lauren Bacall
written and directed by Lars von Trier

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Movie pop art is enjoying a renaissance (cf Elephant, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), of which Lars von Trier's savagely cathartic Dogville is the consummate centrepiece. This despite–and partly because of–outward appearances belying its status as a movie at all: Chalk outlines stand in for traditional sets, designating walls, fences, rosebushes, even the dog, Moses, of the titular locale, a pious community (is there any other kind in von Trierland?) situated in the Rocky Mountains circa Prohibition. A void surrounds the rectangle of pavement that constitutes Dogville–it turns white to indicate day and black to indicate night. One could be forgiven for momentarily mistaking Dogville for that fourth-wall-breaking production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town that aired on HBO last year; as Dogville's narrator, John Hurt is as thorough and intrusive a commentator as Our Town's own Stage Manager.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

March 19, 2004****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Michel Gondry

by Walter Chaw Manny Farber wrote this about Orson Welles over fifty years ago: “Welles bequeathed to Hollywood, which had grown fat and famous on hurtling action films, a movie (Citizen Kane) that broke up into a succession of fragments, each one popping with aggressive technique and loud, biased slanting of the materials of real life.” During that same period, Farber referred to Preston Sturges as a filmmaker working eternally within “the presence of Dada and surrealism”–and it’s taken over fifty years, it seems, for the United States to produce what is at its essence the product of a marriage between Welles’s self-conscious audacity and Sturges’s common touch: Charlie Kaufman–more specifically, the Charlie Kaufman Screenplay.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [Classic Double Feature] – DVD

February 16, 2004****/****, 1930s, 1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1931)
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Rose Hobart, Holmes Herbert
screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath, based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson
directed by Rouben Mamoulian

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941)
**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, Donald Crisp
screenplay by John Lee Mahin, based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson
directed by Victor Fleming

by Walter Chaw Owing a tremendous debt to German Expressionism and the silent era that the cinema had only recently left behind, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a surprisingly disturbing and enduring take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s dark tale of the id. Opening with a point-of-view shot, something that the director referred to as a first in the American cinema, the prologue’s build to a medical amphitheatre reveals the connection between this film and Mel Brooks’s classic satire Young Frankenstein, illustrating that it’s as important a headwater of the horror genre as the Universal monster features. Mamoulian and veteran cinematographer Karl Struss (the DP on F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise) themselves owe a great debt to Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, indulging in claustrophobic, expressionistic sets, long wipes, slow dissolves (in one case, extremely slow), extended floating takes, and matching shots that use statuary and illness to offset love and ecstasy. This Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is fever delirium; it’s stagy, no question, exhibiting a distinct discomfort with dialogue as well, but its images, including Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde (the first stage of which resembles Conrad Veidt from Caligari), remain powerful seven decades later.

The Outer Limits: The Original Series – The Entire Second Season (1964-1965) – DVD

February 3, 2004****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller, ZERO STARS

by Walter Chaw After a tumultuous first season plagued by short-sighted censors, tight budgets, and ever-diminishing production schedules, embattled producer Leslie Stevens was replaced by “nuts and bolts” man Ben Brady while Joseph Stefano, in something of a show of solidarity (and that he had other projects to attend to), likewise stepped down to be replaced by Seeleg Lester. (DP Conrad Hall had already parted ways with the show towards the end of season one.) The benefits and pitfalls of such a traumatic upheaval are difficult to compartmentalize, but to me, the series went along for its last seventeen episodes with a pioneering spirit (something that most veterans of the production owe to Lester) similar to that of the first thirty-two. The too-brief second season run includes not only a couple of the best episodes of “The Outer Limits”, the origin of a future blockbuster lawsuit, and the canny recruitment of Harlan Ellison as sometime scribe, but also one episode that stands as arguably the best hour of television ever broadcast.

The Outer Limits: The Original Series – The Entire First Season (1963-1964) – DVD

January 6, 2004****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller, ZERO STARS

by Walter Chaw In the hour or so past my bedtime in the endless dusk of UHF syndication, I used to watch Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” and Joseph Stefano’s “The Outer Limits” with my father. The previous fed the nightmares of my youth, the latter fed my fondest desires and deepest faith in the eternal verity, and nobility, of asking questions, of ambition, of being courageous enough to fail to change the world. “The Outer Limits”, I realize in these first months after my father’s death, represented the best things about him–and about me: that line pure that stretches between where we are and where we hope to go. “The Outer Limits” is, more so than “The Twilight Zone”, about how we never feel as though we are the men we ought to be because our fathers have set too difficult an example. Where Serling dazzled with O. Henry-like twists, “The Outer Limits” sobered with existential frustrations: one is the dove resolution, the other the hat forever emptying.

The Long, Hot Summer (1958) + Hud (1963) – DVD

December 31, 2003****/****, 1950s, 1960s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Western

THE LONG, HOT SUMMER
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Franciosa, Orson Welles
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the William Faulkner stories "Barn Burning" and "The Spotted Horses"
directed by Martin Ritt

by Walter Chaw The Long, Hot Summer is a classic example of Hollywood trying to have it both ways: it combines the seriousness of a literary property and some young Method talent with the lurid garishness of a dime-store novel. Seizing upon the exploitable elements–all that decadent behaviour and sexual dysfunction–of William Faulkner's work, the film pushes them to the fore, giving the cast the opportunity to sex things up in bare-shirted, post-Brando fashion. As a result, the film resembles soapy melodrama much more than Faulkner ("NOT SINCE PEYTON PLACE!" screams the trailer), but it's melodrama with the strength of its fetid convictions that makes for lively entertainment, whatever its shortcomings.