Hot Fuzz (2007)

April 20, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, France, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg
directed by Edgar Wright

Hotfuzzby Walter Chaw Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost return after the triumph of Shaun of the Dead with the nominal success of Hot Fuzz: the one a dead-on skewering of/homage to the zombie genre, the latter an equally-dead-on skewering of/homage to the buddy-cop genre that leads one to conclude that the zombie genre is infinitely more fulsome a target than the buddy-cop genre. Though it's clearly the product of smart guys who care about the films they lampoon, there's obviously a difference between making a movie that can stand proudly alongside George Romero's body of work and making one that could keep good company with Michael Bay's. (There's a lot of meat to be mined in a clever dissection of the zombie genre, in other words, whereas most action flicks of this type are already self-parodying exercises in excessive hetero-affirmation amidst much piece-fondling and weeping.) What works best about Hot Fuzz isn't its admirable respect for and similarly keen understanding of films like Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man and Richard Rush's fondly-remembered Freebie and the Bean, but that it, like Shaun of the Dead, functions remarkably well as an example of the genre–something of which most parodies (i.e. arbitrary garbage like Shrek) are completely incapable.

Philadelphia Film Festival ’07: Princess

April 19, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Thriller
***½/****screenplay by Anders Morgenthaler & Mette Heenodirected by Anders Morgenthaler by Ian Pugh Existing in a disturbing crevice between live-action and animation, children's and adult entertainment, pop and exploitation, Anders Morgenthaler's animated opus Princess understands the darkest impulses that drive holier-than-thou crusades. With his porn-queen sister (Stine Fischer Christensen) dead and her sexually-abused daughter Mia (Mira Hilli Møller Hallund) now in his care, missionary priest August (Thure Lindhardt) goes on a one-man war against the sex industry, starting things off by beating the shit out of a random john and planning a firebombing campaign against video-rental joints. It all reeks…

Grindhouse (2007)

April 5, 2007Posted in****/****, 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

Grindhouseby 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.

Thunder in the Pines (1948)/Jungle Goddess (1948) [George Reeves Double Feature] – DVD

March 19, 2007Posted in1940s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD

THUNDER IN THE PINES
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring George Reeves, Ralph Byrd, Greg McClure, Michael Whalen
screenplay by Maurice Tombragel
directed by Robert Edwards

JUNGLE GODDESS
*/**** Image C- Sound B Extras C
starring George Reeves, Ralph Byrd, Wanda McKay, Armida
screenplay by Jo Pagano
directed by Lewis D. Collins

by Alex Jackson Was George Reeves a talented or interesting enough actor to merit VCI digging up a couple of his 1948 demi-features and releasing them on DVD? Without the novelty of him later becoming television’s Superman and the rumours of conspiracy surrounding his suicide, there’s nothing particularly engaging about the actor. In Thunder in the Pines, it looks like Reeves might be the poor man’s Kirk Douglas (whose star was rising at around the same time). The Douglas persona is jovial and heroic, sensitive but manly–essentially, for me at least, he’s an idealized father figure. This seems to be what Reeves is going for, but he’s only operating at half the wattage. He isn’t a star and hasn’t the confidence of Douglas, that audacity to dominate the picture whenever he’s on-screen. He’s just a small fry.

Casino Royale (2006) [2-Disc Widescreen] – DVD

March 12, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bahamas, Czech Republic, DVD, Espionage, Germany, James Bond, Thriller, UK

Casinoroyalecap

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Paul Haggis, based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw A genuinely good updating of the James Bond mythos from plastic, moldering relic to bloody, sweaty sociopath drunk on his own virility and general misanthropy, Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale–though the umpteenth chapter in a decades-old testosterone fever dream–is very much a part of this day and age. It’s a film that makes sense of the franchise using a modern vernacular of vengeance, terrorism, Texas Hold ‘Em, and paranoia. It’s unnecessarily padded by at least fifteen minutes, but when it switches into gear it announces itself a worthy peer to the Jason Bourne films with action that’s fantastically choreographed and alive with weight and violence. Most importantly, it finally has a protagonist who is, if not already, well on his way to becoming a serious psycho–post-modern man. What Daniel Craig brings to the role is a feral intelligence, this self-awareness that he’s a bad person. Any good that he does is tainted by the knowledge that this Bond’s only in it for the cheap thrills (drugs and murder, in particular) that lube his insect brain. Casino Royale summarizes the trend of detached, savage pictures from the last couple of years (Miami Vice, in particular, another bleak updating of a camp curio); when we talk about good action films now, we seem to be talking about the degree to which we have, as a culture, regressed to the Old Testament in matters of the heart and the hand. Call it “caveman vérité.”

Crank (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 27, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Esoterica

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Dwight Yoakam
written and directed by Neveldine/Taylor

by Walter Chaw Consider the moment where French-fu schlockmeister Jason Statham marches through downtown traffic clad in a hospital smock, black socks, and boots while sporting a giant erection and ask yourself what more you could want from a dumb action movie called Crank. Seriously. A crotch-first fusion of Rudolph Maté's D.O.A. and "Grand Theft Auto", it defines that genre of video game-inspired non-sequitur mayhem indicated by epileptic edits, CGI-aided wire-fu, and John Woo gunplay by offering a high concept (hero is dying of a rare Chinese toxin that can be held in abeyance only with a steady infusion of adrenaline) as its narrative/excuse to exist.

Looker (1981) – DVD

January 29, 2007Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras B-
starring Albert Finney, James Coburn, Susan Dey, Leigh Taylor-Young
written and directed by Michael Crichton

Lookercap

by Bill Chambers Michael Crichton's Looker is a kinky paranoia thriller in which an unlikely sleuth teams up with the nearest bimbo to solve a murder mystery. It is, in other words, vintage De Palma, and if he'd actually helmed it, legions of cinephiles would've flameproofed it by now. At the risk of further estranging myself from De Palma geeks, I must admit I rather enjoyed watching a Body Double without Armond White guilt-tripping my subconscious–which is not to say that Looker circumvents an auteurist reading altogether, but the idiosyncrasies that betray it as 'Crichtonian' (like a novelistic conceit that starts off each new act with a placard indicating the day of the week*) are less than venerable and thus hardly lend themselves to an apologia.

Sundance ’07: We Are the Strange

January 26, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Alex Jackson, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Sundance

Sundancestrange½*/****
starring David Choe, Stuart Mahoney, Halleh Seddighzadeh, M dot Strange
written and directed by M dot Strange

by Alex Jackson

"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
-Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic Park

While it is perfectly normal for a student filmmaker to be preoccupied with the "could" questions over the "should," the "should" questions need be asked and answered to at least some extent before one attempts to make something for display to a general audience. I suppose I could say that We Are the Strange is an exercise in style over substance, or that it breaks away from traditional forms of narrative, but that would imply that writer/producer/director/animator/composer M dot Strange had actually made choices with regards to substance, narrative, and the lack thereof. The film is an artistic failure on the most rudimentary level; it seems that Strange never got past the idea that it would be cool to make an animated feature. We Are the Strange has something to do with a beautiful woman named Blue who is kicked out of a brothel by her pimp for being "ugly." She then meets the living Buddy doll Emmm, who asks her out for ice cream. Soon they discover that the ice cream shop has been taken over by "evil forces." All of this is set in a video game or an alternate universe composed of video game graphics or something.

Smokin’ Aces (2007) + Seraphim Falls (2007)

January 26, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War, Western

SMOKIN' ACES
½*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Common, Andy Garcia
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

SERAPHIM FALLS
*/****
starring Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, Angie Harmon, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Abby Everett Jaques & David Von Ancken
directed by David Von Ancken

by Walter Chaw Director Joe Carnahan replicates a heart attack in the prologue of Narc, and David Von Ancken, in the action-packed opening to his feature debut Seraphim Falls, simulates a mildly hysterical bout of narcolepsy–but more on that later. Carnahan's third film, Smokin' Aces, is drawing a lot of unfavourable comparisons to Guy Ritchie's gangster sagas, but the real lineage can be traced to whatever strain of viral ADD infected Tony Scott. The film is so like Scott's Domino in its visual affectations and uniform incompetence that the two pictures could exchange scenes willy-nilly without losing a step. (Compare it to Wayne Kramer's similarly canted Running Scared for a mini-primer on when lawless misanthropy and the coked-up editor aesthetic can be wielded with delighted, visceral purpose as opposed to simply wielded.) Ultimately, Smokin' Aces is little more than a parade of sad "didn't you used to be…" stunt cameos installed for the missing "edge" that buckets of blood, rains of bullets, and a few power tools seem incapable of manifesting. With Narc, Carnahan showed real growth from his directorial debut (Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane, which is actually not unlike the new one at all). Now he's just showing off.

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

January 19, 2007Posted in2000s, 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

Promisecapby 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.

Takeshis’ (2005) – DVD

January 8, 2007Posted in2000s, 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

Takeshiscap

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.

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

January 5, 2007Posted in****/****, 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.

The Venture Bros.: Season One (2003-2004) – DVD

December 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Satire, Television

Image B Sound A- Extras C
"Dia de los Dangerous!," "Careers in Science," "Mid-Life Chrysalis," "Eeney, Meeney, Miney… Magic!," "The Incredible Mr. Brisby," "Tag Sale–You're It!," "Home Insecurity," "Ghosts of the Sargasso," "Ice Station–Impossible!," "Are You There, God? It's Me, Dean.," "Past Tense," "The Trial of the Monarch," "Return to Spider-Skull Island"

by Ian Pugh Lengthy postmodern discussions about the drug use in "Scooby-Doo" and the sexual habits of the Smurfs dominated the public mind long before TimeWarner acquired the Hanna-Barbera catalogue. It was only a logical move, then, that TimeWarner's Cartoon Network would devote much of its late-night Adult Swim programming block ("Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law", "Sealab 2021", and, to a lesser degree, "Robot Chicken") to taking the old H-B anti-classics and filtering them through the fine mesh screen of a contemporary ironic eye. Look here, we've got an old superhero, he's an attorney now, that's pretty wacky! Check it out, we've turned the straightforward drama of "Sealab 2020" into angry surrealism! It works to varying degrees of success, primarily depending upon the individual show's (or individual episode's) willingness to move beyond the inherent ridiculousness of its premise. What can we say, then, when "The Venture Bros." represents the kids-on-adventures serial "Jonny Quest", a series centred on a family whose surname is a literal synonym for the characters being parodied? Are we meant to gasp when brilliant über-dad Dr. Benton Quest becomes Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture (voiced by Henry Fool's James Urbaniak), an ignorant pill-popper, negligent of his teenage sons Hank (co-creator Jackson Publick) and Dean (Michael Sinterniklaas)? Or when bodyguard/second father figure Race Bannon becomes Brock Samson (Patrick Warburton), an emotionally-detached psychopath?

Eragon (2006)

December 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Hungary, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Edward Speleers, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Guillory, John Malkovich
screenplay by Peter Buchman and Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal, based on the novel by Christopher Paolini
directed by Stefen Fangmeier

Eragonby Walter Chaw Fears that veteran F/X man Stefen Fangmeier's directorial debut Eragon, a feature-length adaptation of a fifteen-year-old trying on Anne McCaffrey's jodhpurs, would be the sequel to Dragonheart nobody wanted prove unwarranted, as Eragon is actually the sequel to BloodRayne that nobody wanted. It's ugly as sin, with the much-vaunted dragon at its centre (voiced by Rachel Weisz), designed by skilled craftspeople from both Peter Jackson's WETA workshop and Industrial Light and Magic, looking fatally inorganic to its environment. Not helping matters, the titular rider (Edward Speleers) resembles a younger, equally rubbery David Lee Roth and sports the acting chops of the same. Eragon is the towheaded farmboy who heeds a call to glory to save Sienna Guillory's beautiful Princess Arya ("Help me Eragon, you're my only hope") while gaining a mysterious old hermit mentor (Jeremy Irons–the poor sod should've learned his lesson with Dungeons & Dragons) who dies during a daring raid on the Death Star–er, on the castle keep of Darth Vader, er, King Galbatorix (John Malkovich). Alas, this Luke Skywalker also has an Uncle Owen (Uncle Garrow (Alun Armstrong)), and his Darth Vader has a henchman (Robert Carlyle) who at one point kills an underling general and declares the second-in-command "promoted." Eragon is a rip-off and a bad one, a carbon copy made on one of those old mimeograph machines: washed out, juvenile (even weighed against the not-exactly-mature example of Star Wars), and nigh unbearable for anyone so much as cursorily familiar with genre fare.

Blood Diamond (2006) + Apocalypto (2006)

December 8, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, Mexico, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

BLOOD DIAMOND
*/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly, Djimon Hounsou, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Charles Leavitt
directed by Edward Zwick

APOCALYPTO
***/****
starring Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez, Jonathan Brewer, Morris Birdyellowhead
screenplay by Mel Gibson & Farhad Safinia
directed by Mel Gibson

Bloodapocalyptoby Walter Chaw After sending Matthew Broderick to head a Negro battalion in the Civil War and Tom Cruise to witness–and survive–the end of Feudal Japan, director Edward Zwick dispatches Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly to Sierra Leone and its own diamond-fuelled Civil War to moralize endlessly from the superior ethical vantage afforded by time and privilege. (That they also lend a much-needed nougat centre to Blood Diamond's thin chocolate coating goes without saying.) The Denzel Washington/Ken Watanabe token this time around is the oft-similarly-abused Djimon Hounsou: as the DC Comics-sounding Solomon Vandy, Hounsou seeks to trade a rare pink diamond for the life of his son, who's been molded by the evil Sierra Leonians into a soulless murdering/raping machine.

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (1981/2006) – DVD

November 27, 2006Posted in1980s, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Romance, Sci-Fi, Superhero, UK

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

Supermaniicapby Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. A would-be victim of its own London After Midnight-esque mystique, the "Richard Donner Cut" of Superman II is marginally superior to Richard Lester's mutilation, but mitigating circumstances prevent it from being a totally viable alternative. Reconstructed from suppressed outtakes with due diligence (if a journeyman sensibility) according to pre-Lester drafts of the screenplay, the film follows the same basic storyline, though it's a little more efficiently plotted. (While a few Lester bits remain, there is almost certainly less Lester-generated footage here than there is Donner-generated footage in the theatrical version.) Gone is the Eiffel Tower set-piece, replaced by a charming sequence better allied–aesthetically speaking–with the previous Superman in which Lois tries to call Clark's bluff by jumping out a window of THE DAILY PLANET's headquarters; now the weapon of mass destruction responsible for freeing the three supervillains from the Phantom Zone is an errant missile from the climax of the original, which is clever but probably made more sense before they transposed the dopey turning-back-time conceit from the second film onto the first. (More on that later.)

DIFF ’06: Rescue Dawn

November 22, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, Film Festivals, Luxembourg, Thriller, War
**½/****starring Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies, Marshall Bellwritten and directed by Werner Herzog by Walter Chaw Though a perfectly serviceable actioner, one that avoids almost every pitfall and cliché of the POW genre while supporting a singularly eccentric performance, Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, sadly, could have been directed by any one of a dozen directors. Gripping but not especially memorable, it lacks the mad Bavarian's insanity: his belief that nature is obscene, as well as his ability to make a trance from the mendacity of routine. (Because Herzog is a rare talent, his films butt up against greater expectations.) The…

Déjà Vu (2006)

November 22, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Val Kilmer, Paula Patton, Jim Caviezel
screenplay by Bill Marsilii & Terry Rossio
directed by Tony Scott

Dejavuby Walter Chaw Who woulda thunk that crap-meister Tony Scott could be so in tune with the spirit of the times? Scott follows up Man on Fire–a vile piece of revenge-on-foreign-soil wish-fulfillment schlock–and Domino (another slice of the vigilante kind) with Déjà Vu, a time-travel fantasy complete with a horrifying act of domestic terrorism that noble ATF agent Carlin (Denzel Washington) is offered the chance, through the providence of limited time travel, to prevent. It’s one of those questions, right? Would you smother infant Hitler in his cradle to prevent the tears that will follow–and, if you did, would it change the course of history or just substitute that Adolf for another? Alas, Scott ultimately degrades this fun cocktail party conundrum into an action-movie finale involving heartbreakingly beautiful love interest Claire (Paula Patton), clean-Marine grassroots sicko Carroll (Jim Caviezel, doing High Crimes all over again), and a ferryboat full of people crossing over from Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. Working in the picture’s favour is that it’s thick with national calamity, making one wonder if Scott would even get a movie made anymore were he not so quick to jab a needle into the collective jugular. The pall of our recent history hangs over the proceedings like a borrowed mourning veil, but Scott muse Washington is so good–and the film’s premise so loopy–that en route to touching the steadily more tiresome post-9/11 bases of illegal/omniscient surveillance and sour regret, Déjà Vu actually breathes a little. It’s the best Tony Scott film since the underestimated, unofficial The Conversation sequel Enemy of the State, which ran over on the same technophobic ground. Call it another science-fiction romance to join this season’s already-bursting slate of Children of Men, Stranger Than Fiction, and The Fountain.

A Good Year (2006) + Harsh Times (2006)

November 10, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

A GOOD YEAR
½*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Albert Finney, Marion Cotillard, Freddie Highmore
screenplay by Marc Klein, based on the book by Peter Mayle
directed by Ridley Scott

HARSH TIMES
**/****
starring Christian Bale, Freddy Rodriguez, Eva Longoria, Terry Crews
written and directed by David Ayer

Goodyearharshby Walter Chaw The Fighting Temptations, The Family Man–the list of sappy redemption flicks about terrible assholes is as long and lamentable as Ridley Scott's interminable A Good Year. Masquerading as a man-opause version of Under the Tuscan Sun, it is instead an incredibly cynical play for exactly the kind of audience Scott and Russell Crowe don't reach and, apparently, shouldn't bother trying to seduce. Imagine a light, frothy romantic comedy written by Dostoevsky and directed by David Lean: every pratfall registers like a cattle stampede, every delightful romantic misunderstanding like a nuclear disarmament talk. Meanwhile, all around it, golden-drenched landscape shots of Provence play the part of the grinning idiot, dancing like crazy to distract the potentially-duped. (Scott at his best works in palettes drained of warmth and heat. Even the sunny Thelma & Louise plays like twenty miles of rough road compared to A Good Year's pretty postcards and stultifying stereotypes.) With the whole mess paying off in the most unlikely and irritating sequence of happy endings in a film not directed by Garry Marshall (or his Limey equivalent, Richard Curtis), the choices are either that you believe Scott and Crowe to have lost their minds or that A Good Year is smug and strident for the very reason that its creators are supercilious jackasses long since detached from any notion of the possible. Moreover, the picture demonstrates a marked disdain for those poor sods who aren't millionaire stockbrokers or possessed of dead uncles with a sprawling villa to will to their heirs.