Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

May 6, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Spain, Theatrical, UK, War

**/****
starring Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson, David Thewlis, Eva Green
screenplay by William Monahan
directed by Ridley Scott

Kingdomofheavenby Walter Chaw The hero of Ridley Scott’s film about the Crusades would rather not discuss that whole “God” thing. It’s a stance that renders Kingdom of Heaven the second such impotent “prestige” picture to grace the early-summer screens after Sydney Pollack’s simpering, stance-less The Interpreter, as well as another wondrously bland example of the toll that small minds and political correctness have taken on our popular culture. In The Interpreter‘s defense, it only slaughtered a few hundred thousand imaginary black people to get its white heroes making doe-eyes at one another–to get Kingdom of Heaven‘s cuties batting eyelashes, it takes tens of millions of real dead infidels. French Balian (Orlando Bloom) is a 12th century blacksmith who has just lost his wife and child when his long lost father Godfrey (Liam Neeson) rides in with a small band of merry Crusaders to offer Balian lordship of a little town in the Middle East. Balian accepts, has run-ins with religious fanatic Templars Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas) and his henchman Reynald (Brendan Gleeson), and gains the trust of leper king Baldwin IV (Edward Norton) and ideological martyr Tiberias (Jeremy Irons).

xXx: State of the Union (2005)

April 29, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ice Cube, Willem Dafoe, Scott Speedman, Peter Strauss
screenplay by Simon Kinberg
directed by Lee Tamahori

Xxxstateoftheunionby Walter Chaw Just a total waste of life no matter how you slice it, xXx: State of the Union is cinema as penance. Forget the rosary–watch this colossal turdbath a couple of times and short of actually being responsible for it, you're instantly absolved of most any sin. The screenplay, by the suddenly-ubiquitous Simon Kinberg (also the scribe behind the upcoming X-Men 3, Fantastic Four, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith–let me go on record first saying that this film does not bode well), is a foul compost of flaccid catchphrases and boggle-eyed declarations, squeezed like old cheese between action sequences so poorly conceptualized and executed that not only is it impossible to ever tell for a moment what the hell's going on, but the film also actually reminded me in its over-processed way of outtakes from Tron. Ice Cube is awful, Samuel L. Jackson (who used to claim he would never work with a rapper) is awful, Scott Speedman is awful, Sunny Mabrey is awful–everyone is awful. Everything about xXx: State of the Union is awful, from its stupid prologue on some dairy farm to its stupid epilogue, in which another sequel is set up in as many words. It's possible to see the entire exercise as a postmodern smirk, but being aware that you're stupid doesn't always make you meta–sometimes it just means you're tragically self-aware and no less stupid.

The Manson Family: Unrated Version (2004) [2-Disc Special Edition] + 99 Women (1969) – DVDs

April 25, 2005Posted in1960s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Horror, Italy, Liechtenstein, Prison, Thriller, UK, West Germany

THE MANSON FAMILY
***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Marcello Games, Marc Pitman, Leslie Orr, Maureen Alisse
written and directed by Jim VanBebber

Der heiße Tod
**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Maria Schell, Mercedes McCambridge, Maria Rohm, Rosalda Neri
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

by Walter Chaw Attempting exactly the same thing as Mel Gibson's bloodier and no less exploitive telling of a hippie religious leader whose teachings produced immediately sanguine results (with Gibson's martyr going on to establish what is possibly the bloodiest nation in the history of the planet), Jim VanBebber's laudably disquieting The Manson Family is distinguished by its self-awareness as a document of hate rather than one of hosanna on high. Fifteen years in the making, it demonstrates a commensurate level of passion in its creation, the same obsession with recreating the period in the mode of its predominant artform (static representation for the one, drive-in cinema for the other), culminating in an orgy of violence that's gotten a bad rap precisely because there's no prurient thrill to be gained from it. Close examination reveals, in fact, that the deeds of Manson's merry men and women aren't shown in as much detail as they could have been–the chief excision being the fate of Sharon Tate and her in utero baby. The madness of King VanBebber, then, seems to have a method: not to, like Gibson's blood-soaked reverie, revel in every minute detail of flayed viscera and spilled humours, but to recreate the uncomfortable viciousness of loose ideology set free in the schizophrenic fin de siècle sandwiched between free love and its Vietnam War bloodletting counterweight. The Manson Family is about how tragic is the loss of mind and life; The Passion of the Christ is about how tragic it is, for their sake, that the Jews and the Romans didn't know what a bad motherfucker they were messing with. Context is everything.

Film Freak Central does “The Art of Silent Film” series

April 19, 2005Posted in****/****, 1920s, 1930s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Charles Chaplin, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Soviet Union, Thriller

Silentfesttitleby Walter Chaw Denver Art Museum curator Tom Delapa is a one-man production. He books the prints, rents the space, does the research, and twice annually puts on a show consisting of possibly the most historically vital revivals in the Mile High City. Past years have seen screenings of pictures as varied as The Fountainhead and It Came From Outer Space in its original 3-D form–and now, over the course of seven consecutive Tuesdays at Denver's Starz Filmcenter beginning April 5, Mr. Delapa brings us "The Art of Silent Film." It's an ambitious program consisting of lesser-known pieces or rare prints from well-regarded artists of the silent era, giving cineastes the opportunity to see King Vidor's The Crowd (as yet unreleased on DVD) in 16mm with live accompaniment from pianist Hank Troy, as well as 35mm prints of both Buster Keaton's The Navigator and Charlie Chaplin's defiant Modern Times. These share the bill with 16mm presentations of Sergei Eisenstein's Strike, F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh, Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives, and G.W. Pabst's bleak, profound Diary of a Lost Girl. While the audience has grown for the Denver Art Museum film series, the truism remains that for as much lip service as is paid to the dearth of quality cinema in the heartland, if you don't get out and support essential institutions like this one, then they'll just go away.

House of Flying Daggers (2004) – DVD

April 17, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Romance

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, Ziyi Zhang, Song Dandan
screenplay by Li Feng & Zhang Yimou & Wang Bin
directed by Zhang Yimou

Mustownby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the dozen or so eye-bleedingly beautiful sequences in Zhang Yimou's new wuxia pian, the encapsulating image is that of the incandescent Ziyi Zhang prostrate beneath a would-be paramour, her delicate, ivory hand pressed against his lips in an eloquently ineffective ward. It's a tableau introduced in a more overt attempted rape in a brothel and revisited in a stream where a quartet of thugs nearly succeed in literally/metaphorically piercing Ziyi with their long spears. House of Flying Daggers (its title in Chinese the loaded "Ambush from Ten Directions"–essentially an ambush from everywhere) is at its essence an allegory for rape and the Chinese tradition of concubinage that Zhang has already explored to varying degrees in Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Shanghai Triad, and, of course, Red Sorghum, in which a young woman played by Gong Li (Ziyi's predecessor as Zhang's muse) is saved from rape by a young man with whom she later runs a winery. But the conceit of a young woman teaming with her knight in shining armour is complicated in House of Flying Daggers by the fact that she is more than capable of taking care of herself, except, fascinatingly, when the attacks against her are sexualized.

Sahara (2005)

April 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, France, Germany, Spain, Theatrical, UK, War
*½/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, Penélope Cruz, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and John C. Richards and James V. Hart, based on the novel by Clive Cussler
directed by Breck Eisner
 
by Walter Chaw For as difficult as it is to read a Clive Cussler novel, it's no more or less difficult to read something by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Robert James Waller, Dean Koontz, or Nicholas Sparks. A Cussler book is exactly what it is: a bestseller written specifically for people who base their reading decisions on how many other people have bought and ostensibly read a given book–bad grammar, bad sense, and ridiculous narratives be damned. So Sahara, Breck "Spawn of Michael" Eisner's feature debut (and what star Matthew McConaughey hopes is a franchise starter despite Cussler disowning the picture and threatening to sue), is an utterly faithful adaptation of the source material in that it's destined to become one of those movies people see or avoid depending on how low their expectations are going in or how irresistible the Friday night peer-pressure gets. It's a soulless picture, a wisp of a whimsy layered across what wishes it were an epic adventure, playing fast and loose with character and charisma while slathering on the boom-crash opera. The result isn't something awful so much as a spectacle without a hint of a human centre: a blockbuster played by action figures and written by children.

Oldboy (2003) + The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005)

April 7, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Revenge, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller

OLDBOY
****/****
starring Choi Min-sik, Yu Ji-tae, Kang Hye-jeong, Ji Dae-han
screenplay by Hwang Jo-yun, Lim Chun-hyeong, Park Chan-wook
directed by Park Chan-wook

THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE
**½/****
starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Catherine Keener, Camilla Belle, Paul Dano
written and directed by Rebecca Miller

by Walter Chaw

Oldboyballad"I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter, and with her I will found the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen." -Aguirre, Aguirre: The Wrath of God

A Greek tragedy, an opera, a showcase for South Korean cinema, and one exhilaratingly sick piece of cinema, Park Chan-wook's Oldboy is like the three plays of the "Oresteia" distilled into one pure, malevolent, volatile essence. It's vengeance served hot and perverse like a Medeaen stew, a story of settling scores old enough to be archetype married to sounds and images so invasively intimate that the process of working through the film is a little like getting physically violated. It's vital stuff, this Oldboy, its very title suggesting an ironic superhero alter ego–sketching anti-hero Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) as a fright-mask of arrested development, a child raging against its prematurely-aged body. We meet him one drunken night as he's bailed out of a night in the tank only to spend the next fifteen years in a solitary-confinement prison cell masquerading as a chintzy backwater motor inn room. He watches TV there, mostly cable news and its horrorshow of buildings and bridges falling, with periodic gassings allowing his anonymous captors to stitch up his wrists and gather biological mementos to leave at the scenes of crimes he didn't commit. When he's finally released, it's not clear if he's been falsely led to believe that he's free, if he's escaped by the graces of an ingenious plan involving a chopstick and a lot of time, or if he's died and this is his demented brain's oxygen-starved fantasy of what he woulda done to the lousy sons o'bitches if only he'd lived.

Miss Congeniality (2000) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD

March 30, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Sandra Bullock, Michael Caine, Benjamin Bratt, Candice Bergen
screenplay by Marc Lawrence & Katie Ford & Caryn Lucas
directed by Donald Petrie

by Walter Chaw It starts pretty early on when a waitress at a Russian restaurant stands in front of a surveillance camera, causing the boys in the van to exclaim that "this broad has two asses!" (hey, if it's good enough for Porky's, right?)–and it's all downhill from there. Donald Petrie's Miss Congeniality has something to do with an ugly, bitter, uncouth woman discovering true happiness (love, career success, respect) by waxing her area and strutting down a runway. Confused? At least. Especially when the ugly woman in question is Sandra Bullock, who has made a career, more or less, out of being the beauty queen you think you have a shot at. The girl who binge eats like a hot dog eating contestant, records SportsCenter, and can still shimmy into her size 4 nightgown becomes a different kind of pornographic fantasy when you need a quick reminder of who has a real penis and who just has a gun–think There's Something About Mary without the irony. A scene before mutt becomes mah-vellous, in which she's watching past beauty queens for tips on how best to go undercover as a pageant contestant and offers a litany of comments on the women's intelligence, isn't so much hilarious as it is mean. And it's made worse by the end of the film, when all of the convenient bimbo stereotypes are bolstered and magnified rather than shown to be unkind shorthand.

After the Sunset (2004) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

March 30, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Pierce Brosnan, Salma Hayek, Woody Harrelson, Don Cheadle
screenplay by Paul Zbyszewski and Craig Rosenberg
directed by Brett Ratner

Afterthesunsetdvdcapby Walter Chaw Hard to know by their films whether Michael Bay or Brett Ratner is the bigger asshole, but when cold reaches a certain level it's just cold, so I'm comfortable calling it a draw. Ratner's latest, After the Sunset, is Trouble in Paradise by way of the Pierce Brosnan version of The Thomas Crown Affair: a joyless exercise in the sex-play heist genre featuring a plastic couple for whom, when they first met, it was grand larceny. Along the way, there's enough leering misogyny to satisfy a legion of folks either too young or too afraid of God to go rent some good old-fashioned, red-blooded porn. Audiences for this garbage choose instead to slake their venal lusts, to for a moment calm the roil of inadequacy and self-doubt at the public trough of screaming homophobia, queer gun-fondling, and enough women making bad decisions in front of a camera-wielding man to fill a "Girls Gone Wild" video.

Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (2005)

March 30, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Sandra Bullock, Regina King, Enrique Murciano, William Shatner
screenplay by Marc Lawrence
directed by John Pasquin

Misscongeniality2by Walter Chaw Where the first Miss Congeniality bravely took on three formulas (fish out of water, rogue cop, Cinderella), Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous takes on at least six (fishes out of water, rogue cops, vanilla race tension, buddy movie, Beverly Hills Cop 3-/Bird on a Wire-style glossy big-budget cop procedural, nerd-makes-good underdog intrigue)–all with a black sidekick, which is a genre unto itself. It's a joyless, lifeless machine that can't even delight when it gets William Shatner to whine "there's a cannon in my porthole" in one of what seems like thousands of missed opportunities in the script or the scenario to do something bawdy or, failing that, something that doesn't have the texture and stink of week-old fish. Deafening silence is the only appropriate response to the picture. Guided this time around by John Pasquin, the genius behind Joe Somebody, The Santa Clause, and Jungle 2 Jungle (last time it was Donald Petrie, the genius behind Richie Rich and Welcome to Mooseport), producer/star Sandra Bullock demonstrates that for as problematical as her appeal may be to the non-clinically gaffed, harder still to understand are the choices Bullock makes of whom to entrust with her cash and career. I guess Jon Turtletaub and Garry Marshall were busy that week.

Firewalker (1986) – DVD

March 24, 2005Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Chuck Norris, Lou Gossett, Melody Anderson, Will Sampson
screenplay by Robert Gosnell
directed by J. Lee Thompson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Of the many right-wing cinematic fantasies of the 1980s, by far the most flagrant and shameless were those of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. The Cannon Pictures magnates specialized in white folk dropped in the middle of jungles urban and outback: they gave us freedom fighters in Vietnam (Missing in Action), vigilante crime-fighters (the later entries in the Death Wish saga), and Indiana Jones cross-referenced with his colonial ancestors (King Solomon's Mines, et al). But though they were naked and blatant in their retrograde daydreams, they were also impossible to take seriously: Golan-Globus weren't just jerks, they were inept jerks–slovenly to the point of awe and stupefaction. Firewalker doesn't find them in top ludicrous form, but its childlike belief in both outdated stereotypes and papier-mâché sets facilitates a drinking game quite nicely.

Hostage (2005)

March 11, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller
½*/****starring Bruce Willis, Kevin Pollak, Jonathan Tucker, Ben Fosterscreenplay by Doug Richardson, based on the novel by Robert Craisdirected by Florent Emilio Siri by Walter Chaw A film about child endangerment that is not otherwise about child endangerment, videogame director Florent Siri's Hostage is a package advertised by its trailers as being about a terror cell when it is, in fact, about three juvenile delinquents looking for a car to jack who accidentally find themselves the heavies in a hostage situation. Maybe "terror cell" applies to the filmmakers, as "hostage situation" pretty accurately describes the experience of being trapped in…

The Iron Giant (1999) [Special Edition] – DVD

March 7, 2005Posted in****/****, 1990s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Family, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by Tim McCanlies, based on The Iron Man by Ted Hughes
directed by Brad Bird

Mustownby Walter Chaw Brad Bird's The Iron Giant, based on a children's book, The Iron Man, that British poet laureate (and Mr. Sylvia Plath) Ted Hughes wrote after his wife's suicide, is improbably transformed from the dark and Anglocentric source into a throughline pure and sweet to the rapturous Americana of Richard Donner's Superman. It captures an impossible period existing between the idealism of Rockwell and the lonely realist decompositions of Edward Hopper in a flurry of animated cels, telling the tale of a boy and his robot in the month or so when Sputnik was scaring the bejesus out of a suddenly-humbled, suddenly-Luddite United States. Accordingly, the Colour from Outer Space that was the monstrous bad guy in the book is transformed in the film into the paranoia of a country taught to fear an invisible (or barely visible) foe–marking The Iron Giant as something of a timeless picture particularly topical for a country embroiled in a war on foreign soil, a war with an invisible enemy, and the makings of a cold war with a country that has decided the only way to combat American aggression is with nuclear weapons. Tellingly, it's the appearance of nukes at the end of The Iron Giant that coaxes out the heart of the titular tin man–the last word that he has in the picture–"Superman"–whispered with something like awe that has never failed to bring a tear to my secretly-patriotic eye.

Sky Blue (2003)

February 18, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, South Korea

Wonderful Days
**/****
screenplay by Kim Moon-saeng & Park Sun-min & Park Yong-jun
directed by Kim Moon-saeng & Park Sun-min


by Walter Chaw Pretty much your standard anime post-apocalyptic master plot, what distinguishes Kim Moon-saeng and Park Sun-min's Korean contribution Sky Blue is the oppressive weight of its visual accomplishment. Blending the character animations of, say, a Satoshi Kon with the environmental concerns of an early Miyazaki, the movie is beautiful. But at the same time, it slathers on such a thick layer of obfuscating dialogue and glowering plot complications that it's hard to muster up much enthusiasm beyond the initial "wow" factor. Still, that "wow" factor: I don't know that I've ever seen a better blend of CGI and traditional cel animation–in terms of how it looks, Sky Blue even trumps last year's astonishing Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. A shame that a person can only really be dazzled for a few minutes before becoming something closer to "stunned."

Friday Night Lights (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Sports

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Derek Luke, Jay Hernandez, Lucas Black
screenplay by David Aaron Cohen and Peter Berg, based on the book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H.G. Bissinger
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw Turning the microscope on the reptile hearts and minds of small-town sports culture, Peter Berg's Friday Night Lights is so alive with seething energy and meanness that it emerges as one of the better sports films on the short list of good sports films. It's what the Omaha Beach sequence in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is to Oliver Stone's Platoon: an evolution by way of devolution that erases the veneer, such as there is, prettifying violent confrontation, becoming in the process the unadorned engine to which Stone's ultimately featherweight Any Given Sunday aspired. It finds Lucas Black (as star quarterback Mike Winchell) reunited with Sling Blade co-star Billy Bob Thornton (playing his coach, Gary Gaines), with the mental disability roles reversed ("There's something wrong with my head," Winchell complains) but the peek under the Rockwell covers at insular, provincial psychosis transplanted intact. Friday Night Lights is a work of sociology, a film that not only understands the all-American obsession with packaged violence and the cult of machismo, but is also a clearer barometer of the kind of sublimation of fear and loathing in these United States than any gross of pre-election political documentaries. Our country's in trouble because these brutal idiots can vote–and there are more of them than there are the rest of us.

Alone in the Dark (2005); Hide and Seek (2005); In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger (2005)

January 28, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ALONE IN THE DARK
ZERO STARS/****
starring Christian Slater, Tara Reid, Stephen Dorff, Frank C. Turner
screenplay by Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch and Peter Scheerer
directed by Uwe Boll

HIDE AND SEEK
**/****
starring Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Famke Janssen, Elisabeth Shue
screenplay by Ari Schlossberg
directed by John Polson

Alonehideby Walter Chaw Edward Carnby (Christian Slater) is a "paranormal investigator," which in Uwe Boll's visual vernacular means that he dresses like Highlander Duncan MacLeod and lives in MacLeod's apartment, too. Chip through the film's hard veneer of unsightly stupidity (it looks a lot like a Jess Franco film shot on a smaller budget) and you'll begin to unearth a narrative of sorts concerning an ancient Indian tribe that opened a gateway between the light and dark worlds; most of this is imparted by an interminable opening scrawl that's read aloud because director Uwe Boll, himself illiterate, is sympathetic with his target audience, though we get other clues to a plot from an orphan in flashback who, unlike his twenty peers, escapes possession from, um, some bad thing, and a mad scientist Professor Hudgins (Mathew Walker) and his brilliant (snicker) assistant Aline (Tara Reid) trying to collect a bunch of relics so that they can, what, open the gateway between dark and light? I don't know. Casting Reid as a smart person is, by the way, the biggest miscalculation since casting Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist and Kevin Costner as a doctor, although it is admittedly amusing watching her struggle through phrases like "molecular composition."

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004); Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004); Time of the Wolf (2003)|Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

January 24, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

イノセンス
Innocence
Inosensu: Innocence
****/****
written and directed by Mamoru Oshii

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi
written and directed by Kerry Conran

Le Temps du loup
****/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Béatrice Dalle, Patrice Chéreau, Rona Hartner
written and directed by Michael Haneke

Skyghostwolfby Walter Chaw For me, the most intoxicating visions of the future are those in which we’re drowning in an ocean of our past–garbage, wreckage, Romes burned to a cinder and heaped against the new Meccas of our collective tomorrows. Star Wars proffered a kind of aesthetic of dirt that appealed: a wonderland where the spaceships looked like they’d been flown and there were places like Mos Eisley that reeked of stale liquor, sawdust, and cigarettes. (The distance that George Lucas has gone to disinfect his grubby vision of the future is the same distance that esteem for the franchise has fallen amongst all but the most die-hard chattel.) Among the spearhead of a group of artists who redefined the science-fiction genre in film the same way that Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah scuffed-up the western in the Sixties, Ridley Scott evolved the idea of a functional future, with his Alien and Blade Runner serving as visual echoes of T.S. Eliot’s broken stones and fragments shored against our ruins. Terry Gilliam defined the aesthetic when describing his rationale for the look of Brazil (1985): he wanted it to seem as though the whole century had been compacted into a single moment. The timeless “someday soon” that is always just around a corner that never comes.

Deep Impact (1998) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

January 20, 2005Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spielberg

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin
directed by Mimi Leder

by Walter Chaw Filthy as it is with TV stars past and present, it comes as no surprise that Deep Impact plays almost exactly like a movie-of-the-week grafted onto one of those stars-gone-to-seed-studded Seventies disaster flicks. Helmed by veteran TV director Mimi Leder in somehow small-screen-friendly Panavision (that she manages to make her panoramic establishing shots look like the stock transitions in any episode of "Hart to Hart" should be included in a textbook somewhere), the picture goes through the motions–from discovery of the peril by naïfs to the involvement of the Internet to the slow-in-coming participation of the powers that be–of a genre most recently (and faithfully) resurrected by The Day After Tomorrow. Both movies finding their way to DVD within a couple weeks of each other (Deep Impact in a freshly-minted "Special Collector's Edition") isn't, I'd wager, serendipity so much as an opportunity on the one side to capitalize on a semi-blockbuster.

Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) + Elektra (2005)

January 14, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, France, Superhero, Switzerland, Theatrical, Thriller

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
***/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, John Leguizamo, Maria Bello
screenplay by James DeMonaco, based on the screenplay by John Carpenter
directed by Jean-François Richet

ELEKTRA
½*/****
starring Jennifer Garner, Goran Visnjic, Will Yun Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
screenplay by Zak Penn and Stuart Zicherman & Raven Metzner
directed by Rob Bowman

by Walter Chaw Being under siege and obsessive-compulsive disorder have together wrought a weird parallel generation in the remake Assault on Precinct 13 and sequel/comic book adaptation Elektra. In each is not only a woman who uses numbers obsessively in stressful situations, but also some sort of predicament where a gang of bad guys traps a band of good guys only to be given the business end of heroic pluck. Both are unusually ugly films with a higher-than-expected body count, and, to various degrees of success, both traffic in a paranoid marshalling of forces that comes with a fear of invasion from without. When you’re panicked, drawing those you trust closer to the vest since the rest of the universe has murder in mind is the sanest recourse–even when you’re aware that you’re addicted, mad, or otherwise in desperate need of therapy. Early in 2005, trends are pointing to a year in which we champion isolationism, fear the marauding Hun, and start wondering if there’s a blue-stater playing sheep in the quilting cotillion. Unless, that is, the blue-stater is you, and the constant threat of lynching or crucifixion has caused you to lose your mind.

Circle of Iron (1978) – DVD

January 11, 2005Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, DVD, Fantasy, Martial Arts

The Silent Flute
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring David Carradine, Anthony De Longis, Carl Maynard, Erica Creer
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant and Stanley Mann
directed by Richard Moore

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You can't exactly call The Silent Flute a good movie. This "mystical" martial-arts extravaganza, an early pet project of Bruce Lee that he abandoned after becoming too famous to care, is pompous in its pretensions and shallow in its follow-through, which under normal circumstances would damn it to well-deserved ridicule. But there's something strangely poignant about its stumblebum view of Zen, filtered as it is through a bunch of well-meaning Hollywood westerners bending over backwards to honour something they don't understand. The sheer earnestness of the thing wins your begrudging respect–it's brave enough to be what it wants to be even if it doesn't really know what that is. Somewhere, Jack Smith is smiling.