Authors: Bill Chambers Archives - Page 39 of 68

The New World (2005) – DVD

April 23, 2006****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, Q'Orianka Kilcher
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick opens The New World with "come spirit, help us," invoking the muse before embarking on a spoken history part rapturous, part hallucinogenic, all speculative, reverent, and sanctified hearsay. Malick is the post-modern American epic poet of the division ploughed through the middle of America, telling our history with one voice, painting it in golden shades of romance and poesy. It's the only viable approach to the Captain John Smith/Pocahontas story in a minefield of debris strewn by not only our Western genre tradition, but also our newer guilt at how American Indians have been (and continue to be) portrayed in our culture: the most bestial, savage notions of the Natural have come around to their personification as an unsullied, Edenic embodiment of an impossibly harmonious nature. It's an organic progression from bigotry to paternalism, and Malick charts these dangerous waters with the audacity of an artist well and truly in the centre of his craft. He makes the doomed love between Smith and the much younger Pocahontas function as a metaphor for the decimation of the Native American population–and in so doing suggests the possibility that all human interaction can be analyzed along the lines of love and misunderstanding. Routinely described as inscrutable or remote, Malick's The New World presents history as something as simple as two people who come together, fall in love, and betray one another because their cultures are too different, too intolerant, to coexist with one another. It's history as a progression of human tragedy.

High Anxiety (1977) – DVD

April 17, 20061970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Mystery, Satire, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman
screenplay by Mel Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, Barry Levinson
directed by Mel Brooks

by Bill Chambers There are three clever sight gags in Mel Brooks's disingenuous love letter to Alfred Hitchcock High Anxiety, all of which poke fun at Hitchcock's invasive camera. As far as I can tell, the remaining laughs have no real precedent in the Master's work, while riffs on signature moments from Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds elicit nary a titter. (It doesn't help that filmmakers straight-faced and tongue-in-cheek alike had plundered those pictures long before Brooks came along; the movie was destined to be impotent in a Brian DePalma world.) Choosing the misbegotten Spellbound, oddly, as its jumping-off point, High Anxiety stars Brooks as acrophobic Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke, the new Chief of Staff at "The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous." After stumbling upon some corrupt bookkeeping, Thorndyke is hustled off to a psychiatric convention by the scheming Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman, perhaps doing Rebecca's Mrs. Danvers) and her S&M-craving toady Dr. Charles Montague (Harvey Korman), where he meets the requisite blonde bombshell (Madeline Kahn) and becomes a murder suspect.

Derailed (2005) [Widescreen Edition (Unrated)] – DVD

April 6, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Clive Owen, Jennifer Aniston, Vincent Cassel, Melissa George
screenplay by Stuart Beattie
directed by Mikael Håfström

by Walter Chaw Okay, here's the deal: if I tell you that Derailed has a big plot twist, you're going to figure it out from the trailers; and if I don't, you're going to figure it out at around the ten-minute mark–it's just that stupid. So I'm simply going to say that Jennifer Aniston is like an old studio starlet trying on her ill-fitting acting shoes in a thriller that wants to turn her into a bad girl done wrong but quails at every moment of truth. The ultimate effect of her "metamorphosis" from America's sweetheart is the uncomfortable feeling that you just saw Donna Reed (or your best friend's mom) in an S&M outfit. It makes the already-spoiled rape scene (unless ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY is an underground publication nowadays) a non-event because as you're watching it, tickling at the back of your head is the knowledge that they'd never rape Rachel in a mainstream middlebrow thriller (even if professional creep Vincent Cassel is the rapist). More, because the whole thing unfolds from the point of view of a very groggy paramour Charles (Clive Owen), the rape becomes something that's only very inconvenient for our married white male adulterer. It's despicable is what it is–compounded by a lie later on and ultimately invalidated by our tired twist, which finds at the end our Charles the spitting image of Travis Bickle but without any trace of irony.

Fun with Dick and Jane (2005) – DVD

April 2, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

½*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Jim Carrey, Téa Leoni, Alec Baldwin, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Judd Apatow & Nicholas Stoller
directed by Dean Parisot

by Walter Chaw Dean Parisot's remake of Ted Kotcheff's 1977 Fun with Dick and Jane is simultaneously lifeless and desperate, a collection of horrid eleventh-hour edits that result in jokes without punchlines and Carrey's old physical-comedy riffs trotted out in the service of a half-assed redux of a half-assed original. The one nod to freshening up the original's full-frontal assault on capitalism as a means towards happiness (a satirical slot machine tugged to better effect by the act and allure of playing "The Sims") is that it's set in the year 2000 and deals with corporate malfeasance of the kind most conspicuously indulged in by Enron. (In case you don't get that, the last rimshot of the film is taken at Enron's expense, while the first closing credit is a "special thanks" to Ken Lay and his lieutenants.) The fictional big bad fiscal wolf of the piece is Globodyne, presided over by Jack McAllister (Alec Baldwin, in his second corporate bigwig turn after Elizabethtown), a southerner mainly because "southerner" is one of the last cultural groups (along with, say, Asians and gays) you can mock without much fear of backlash. On the day before it's revealed that "Big Jack" has stripped the corporate coffers (including pensions), Dick (Carrey) is promoted to VP of something or another, inspiring wife Jane (Leoni) to quit her job and pushing Dick before the cameras on some Lou Dobbs's "Moneyline" show, where he discovers, in a very public way, that his steed is a paper tiger.

Elizabethtown (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

March 28, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras D+
starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Walter Chaw Casting about wildly for that elusive "Lubitsch Touch" so prized by his hero Billy Wilder, underdog-uplift auteur Cameron Crowe has patched together Elizabethtown: an awkward, shambling, Frankenstein's monster of a romantic screwball farce that, for all its slickness, shows off every one of its bolts and stitches in monstrous bas relief. Crowe piles on the pathos in this tale of fallen shoe designer Drew (Orlando Bloom), who travels from the West Coast to the semi-Deep South (the titular Elizabethtown, KY) to collect the ashes of his freshly-dead father for the purposes of a maudlin (and interminable) eleventh-hour road trip. "We should have done this years ago," says Drew to his dad's earthly remains, wiping away a brave tear, but for as machine-calibrated as the scene is to pluck at the heartstrings, there isn't–as there isn't at any moment in this film–a hint of authenticity to the sentiment. It's hard to question Crowe's earnestness, but it's easy to point at the alien remove of this picture and speculate as to whether the mom-dependent Crowe (has anyone checked to see if he's still attached to her umbilically?) has ever had a genuinely examined emotion regarding his pop.

Bee Season (2005) – DVD

March 27, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Germany

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, Flora Cross, Max Minghella
screenplay by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, based on the novel by Myla Goldberg
directed by Scott McGehee & David Siegel

by Walter Chaw A lot of mortal liberties were taken with Myla Goldberg's Bee Season on its way to the big screen under the pen of Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and direction of Scott McGehee and David Siegel, most of them having to do with softening the suffocating fanaticism and sensuality of the novel in favour of the soothing neutral tones of the fearful doorstop demographic. It's not that the book is better, it's that the book is entirely different: the one has a point of view while the other mainly boasts an air of pusillanimous equivocation that turns a vaguely threatening story concerning Kaballah and Hebrew mysticism into Searching for Bobby Fischer. The problem might be that Richard Gere's Saul is a hotshot college professor in this version, and completely reasonable and charming to boot. The problem might be, in other words, that Gere is too good for this movie.

Chicken Little (2005) – DVD

March 27, 20062000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
screenplay by Ron Anderson, Steve Bencich and Ron J.Friedman
directed by Mark Dindal

by Walter Chaw Frantic, frenetic, anxious, obnoxious: the ideal audience for Chicken Little should be in bed by seven, and Disney's umpteenth cry of "sure-fire comeback project" looks, appropriately, like another convulsive episode of corporate crying-wolf. Chicken Little, for instance, makes pop culture references that don't mean anything in the context of a film whose sole purpose appears to be instructing your children to be fearful and hyper. They're just there to give parents, alternately stunned and bored, a little rootless pleasure in the middle of epileptic flash; what's left isn't clever (or kinetic) enough for us to ignore its essential emptiness. What Chicken Little is more than anything else is exhausting. You could by rights hope that it's is a send-up of the Fifties cycle of Martian invasion pictures (it name-checks War of the Worlds for no good reason) as The Incredibles was a send-up of Golden Age superhero comics, but even a cursory comparison between the two films shows that Disney's desperation to make Pixar's looming secession a non-issue is as limp and impotent as the Nevada State Boxing Commission.

The Squid and the Whale (2005) + The Weather Man (2005)|The Squid and the Whale [Special Edition] – DVD

March 23, 2006****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
****/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring Laura Linney, Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

THE WEATHER MAN
½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis, Michael Rispoli
screenplay by Steven Conrad
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw The title refers to a New York Museum of Natural History diorama called "Clash of the Titans" that proposes what a tussle between a sperm whale and a giant squid would look like–and it functions as the final, stirring tableaux of a 16mm film self-consciously shot in the manner of early Jim Jarmusch or Spike Lee joints. But The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach's fourth film as writer-director, has inspired more conversation about the degree to which it does or does not tell the story of his own childhood–more specifically, the divorce of his parents, novelist Jonathan Baumbach and former VILLAGE VOICE film critic Georgia Brown–than about the self-reflexive canniness of the filmmaking itself.

King Kong (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

March 20, 2006****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Germany, New Zealand, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the screenplay by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace
directed by Peter Jackson

by Walter Chaw Naomi Watts is absolutely adorable in King Kong. Good thing, too, because she has to convince that with a few vaudeville pratfalls and a strategically-wielded switch she can win the heart of one of the most venerated monsters in movie history. The way Peter Jackson films her suggests that he’s found his own muse: she’s always set against impossible backlot sunsets, asked to feign love for a fake film before transforming herself–in the same, wonderful shot–into feigning real love for a man in this film when she spots her suitor, playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), author of a play (“Isolation”) for which she sees herself as perfect for the melancholy lead. (“You must be the saddest girl in New York.” She is.) In a lot of ways, Watts’s Ann Darrow is the logical extension of her Betty from Mulholland Drive: both are actresses with hidden elements to their personalities, both are asked to audition for us on an imaginary stage, and both, in the end, find themselves embroiled in a dark romance that ends in show-business betrayal. During the final third of King Kong, once the beast famously has Ann in his clutches while scaling the side of a mighty edifice in the Big Apple, it’s fair to be distracted by the rapture on her face–and to wonder if she knows that there’s only one eventuality possible to her quiescence.

Pride & Prejudice (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

March 14, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Romance, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Brenda Blethyn, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Deborah Moggach
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw There's fat to be trimmed from Joe Wright's noble go at Jane Austen's adapted-to-death Pride and Prejudice, which clocks in at a flabby 127 minutes (yet still seems somehow rushed at its conclusion), but when it works, it does for Austen what Kenneth Branagh's Henry V and Hamlet did for Shakespeare: it makes the trials of these iconic literary figures feel immediate and sensible–and it does so with a screenplay (by Deborah Moggach) that understands what parts of the text are timeless and what parts are not. This isn't to say that this Pride & Prejudice is more post-modern than the source, but that Wright understands where to prompt top-billed Keira Knightley to laugh sardonically and thus crafts an illusion of an interior life for her Elizabeth Bennet beyond the usual impression of adolescent cattiness. Knightley may very well be headed for an Oscar nomination for what has become the chick-Hamlet (Austen being the crucible through which young British actors put themselves in preparation for, I guess, Domino and sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean), but I'm thinking if she gets one, she owes at least half of it to Wright for the amount of time he put into highlighting her script.

Everything is Illuminated (2005) + A History of Violence (2005)|A History of Violence [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

March 13, 2006****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, DVD, Theatrical, Thriller

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
**/****
starring Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin, Laryssa Lauret
screenplay by Liev Schreiber, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
directed by Liev Schreiber

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt
screenplay by Josh Olson, based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw A year after a glut of films about the past being wilfully stifled by the present, find Liev Schreiber's Everything is Illuminated and David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, literal calls to awake following the nightmare of the night before–or, better, avenues through which we might recognize that suppressing a collective shadow mainly serves to nourish it until it explodes, monstrous, back into our consciousness. The one is based on an Anthony Burgess-like book of great linguistic imagination by Jonathan Safran Foer, the other a spare graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke–and just the obliqueness of the respective source materials speaks to the primacy of their message: "Everything is illuminated by the past." The keystone line in Schreiber's picture, this serves as a mission statement of sorts for both films, locating in the middle of this first decade of the new millennium something that feels like a weary acceptance that not only are we products of our trauma and misdeeds, but also that our trauma and misdeeds are beyond redress and completely inescapable. To parse the best line in Kenneth Branagh's Dead Again, it's the karmic payment plan: buy now, pay forever.

Junebug (2005) – DVD

March 10, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Amy Adams, Embeth Davidtz, Ben McKenzie, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Angus MacLachlan
directed by Phil Morrison

by Walter Chaw Charting the vicissitudes of regional attitudes and the mercurial family dynamic, Phil Morrison's Junebug restores some of the lustre to the indie dysfunction genre (and to the Sundance imprint) with a beautifully performed drama about the cost of grace. If critics have a function anymore besides carving their own gravestones on the marble of modern cinema, it's to point a finger at films like Junebug, which sounds like a thousand other pictures but is actually something all its own: a Southern Gothic in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor that treats its characters as more than plot-movers or cardboard caricatures. More, it tackles an issue as delicate as outsider art with a deceptively sharp satirist's scalpel, understanding that the best weapon against paternalism is an affectionate portrayal of people just as mean, petty, and ruined by life as the rest of us. It can't hurt that its cast is uniformly fantastic, that its script, by Angus MacLachlan, is intuitive and smart, and that Morrison understands devalued things like mise-en-scène and visual metaphors, presenting them with a quiet, unobtrusive confidence. Junebug is a character study in every way that "character study" used to be the gold standard instead of an overworked catchphrase used to describe boring, predictable low-budget movies set in the 1970s. It's nasty and it's lovely, it's nuanced and complex.

Jarhead (2005) – DVD

March 6, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Germany, UK, War

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris Cooper, Jamie Foxx
screenplay by William Broyles, Jr., based on the novel by Anthony Swofford
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw I went to high school with a guy who fought in the first Gulf War. I remember him as a delicate, sensitive, beautiful boy who in retrospect looked a lot like Cillian Murphy. I directed him in a play–and though I haven't spoken to him since, I heard that when he returned home, he was not quite the same. I remember chortling about the first Gulf War, too, thinking how funny it was that our military pounded fourth-generation Chinese armour with bombs left over from Vietnam in a withering blitz that left Saddam Hussein's vaunted "million man army" of non-volunteer soldiers buried in their trenches and surrendering to the press. I've never been able to completely reconcile the two impressions of that war through the haze of my own youth–this introduction to modern warfare as complex and confusing to my adolescent mind as love and looming responsibility. War was either something frightening and mysterious that left you ineffably changed, or it was hilarious and chuff to a chest-pounding nationalistic ego. Whatever the case, you surmise that it involves the slaughter of hordes of faceless huns.

Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005) + Domino (2005) [New Line Platinum Series|Widescreen] – DVD

March 2, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
**½/****
starring David Strathairn, Patricia Clarkson, George Clooney, Jeff Daniels
screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

DOMINO
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo
screenplay by Richard Kelly
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw Rigorous and principled, George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. is a curiously slight film for more reasons than the fact that almost a third of it is comprised of archival footage integrated semi-successfully into the story. It's a recreation of a very specific battle in a very specific war that resonates with our Patriot Act/Guantanamo Bay situation, and indeed, that's the target Clooney seems most interested in striking. But without a larger context (the sort that would have weakened its allegorical usefulness), the picture sets itself up as something as obvious as it is minor and feather-light. It's a professional, high-minded, and staid biopic is what I'm saying, a film that says what it says with the stark B&W cinematography of a Dr. Strangelove, but in its icy, humourless way, it's the same stark B&W cinematography of a Fail-Safe, too. It's close and under-populated–and even with so insular and finely-focused a spotlight, it contains at least two completely superfluous characters.

Ryan’s Daughter (1970) [Two-Disc Special Edition] + Dune (1984) [Extended Edition] – DVDs

February 23, 20061970s, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: David Lynch, Disability, Drama, DVD, Mexico, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

RYAN’S DAUGHTER
***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard, Christopher Jones, Sarah Miles
screenplay by Robert Bolt
directed by David Lean

DUNE
***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Francesca Annis, Leonardo Cimino, Brad Dourif, José Ferrer
screenplay by David Lynch, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by David Lynch

DUNE (Extended Edition)
*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Francesca Annis, Leonardo Cimino, Brad Dourif, José Ferrer
screenplay by Judas Booth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Alan Smithee

by Bill Chambers The common charge levelled at Ryan’s Daughter when it was released in 1970 was that it seemed anachronistic within contemporary film culture. Indeed, what so infuriated the New York critics, in particular, was not just that Lean had strayed from his roots (thematically, Ryan’s Daughter in fact represents a throwback for the Brief Encounter director), but that he had lost all trace of humility in the bargain. One might say the English were finally getting a taste of their own medicine, as Lean had essentially become a Hollywood imperialist, intruding on cinema’s evolution towards minimalism by treating a rather insular love triangle–catnip to the infidelity-obsessed British realists–like a theme-park attraction, subjecting it to both hyperbole and an incongruous perfectionism.¹ (“In general the only way for artists to work in the medium is frugality,” wrote Pauline Kael, thereby consigning Lean to the realm of not-artists.) This violation of an unspoken Prime Directive resonates in the current trend of giving A-list makeovers to grindhouse fare.

Walk the Line (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 20, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Germany, Music, Romance

**½/**** Image B Sound A- (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick
screenplay by Gill Dennis & James Mangold
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw I'm no longer certain what kind of currency there is in producing a biography of an iconoclast whose life is an exact simulacrum of every other iconoclast's life. Here's an entirely respectable film about Johnny Cash that begins in his childhood, proceeds into the Big Break, then segues from there into the euphoria of fame; the drug abuse and the groupies; the "Come to Jesus"; the rehabilitation; and the closing obituary. (It's like Denis Leary said about Oliver Stone's The Doors: "I'm drunk. I'm nobody. I'm drunk. I'm famous. I'm drunk. I'm fucking dead.") Though it claims not to be a hagiography, Walk the Line (like last year's Ray) featured the freshly-dead legends as advisors up until their untimely demises, a kind of personal involvement (and Cash's son John Carter is one of Walk the Line's executive producers, just as Ray Robinson Charles Jr. was for Ray) that precludes, methinks, most controversy in the telling. That's fine, I guess, this new vogue for these modern Gene Krupa Storys and Eddy Duchin Storys and Glenn Miller Storys–I mean, really, who does it hurt? But after praising the almost supernatural channelling of very public figures by talented actors, the only thing left is the drive home, a hot bath, dreamless sleep, and maybe the impulse purchase of the soundtrack at Starbucks in a couple of weeks.

Red Eye (2005) [Widescreen] + Four Brothers (2005) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVDs

February 15, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Revenge, Thriller, Wes Craven

RED EYE
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox, Jack Scalia
screenplay by Carl Ellsworth
directed by Wes Craven

FOUR BROTHERS
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese, André 3000, Garrett Hedlund
screenplay by David Elliot & Paul Lovett
directed by John Singleton

by Walter Chaw If it barely registers at under ninety minutes, Wes Craven's high-concept thriller Red-Eye is carried along by a couple of excellent lead performances (from Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams) and a revenge subtext that lends surprising gravity to the lingering sensitivity of a sexual assault victim's scars. Red-Eye plays its 9/11 hand–and what else would you expect from a film about an assassination attempt on the Director of Homeland Security that takes place mostly on an airplane–as a metaphor for rape, because rape, after all, is as good a metaphor as any for a terrorist attack on native soil. Look to the glut of home invasion films (of which this is also one) in 2005 as further clarification of that connection–aliens of an inscrutable nature and purpose (and morality, it goes without saying) have come into the places we thought most sacred and taken what they wanted of our innocence: our once inviolate sense of security. Heady stuff for a film that is essentially Nick of Time on a plane, and indeed it may ultimately be too slight a framework to support the amount of topical sociology I'm tempted to ask it to bear, but there are moments now and again weighted with so much proverbial baggage that Red-Eye, with its melancholy regret, sucks the air right out of the theatre.

Separate Lies (2005) – DVD

February 13, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Emily Watson, Tom Wilkinson, Rupert Everett, John Neville
screenplay by Julian Fellowes, based on the novel A Way Through the Wood by Nigel Balchin
directed by Julian Fellowes

by Walter Chaw You could call Separate Lies either a second pass at Asylum or just another drop in the English prestige bucket that finds the stuffy upper-crust married to silly women who bring down their country estates of cards. It hinges on performances when it can no longer surprise with its domestic meltdowns, and because its stable of English actors is stocked with more thoroughbreds than the Kentucky Derby, it gains a lot of currency in doing so. But Julian Fellowes's very British symphony of "sorry"s is extraordinarily familiar–an Adrian Lyne film without slickness or sex about what happens when a desperate housewife dabbles in the dangerous and the commensurate desperation with which her stiff-upper-lip husband scrambles to keep his dignity and status intact. It'd make a bigger impression if we learned more about the class struggle in Britain, I think, but without experience in the whys and wherefores of that caste system, what we're left with is a superbly-performed melodrama with a strained premise dissected in airless, suffocating situations.

Just Like Heaven (2005) – DVD

February 6, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Reese Witherspoon, Mark Ruffalo, Donal Logue, Dina Waters
screenplay by Peter Tolan and Leslie Dixon, based on the novel If Only It Were True by Marc Levy
directed by Mark Waters

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I’m reminded of another magic-realist romantic comedy named after a song: Emile Ardolino’s sweet, all-but-forgotten Chances Are, starring Robert Downey Jr. as the reincarnate of a man killed en route to meeting his sweetie Cybill Shepherd. He falls in love with Shepherd’s daughter Mary Stuart Masterson, then falls back in love with Shepherd. This is a circuitous, distressingly disinteresting route towards expressing that Mark Waters’s Just Like Heaven is not only a movie I really hate, but also a movie that’s been done so many times before that instead of needing to follow along with the rigid requirements of the picture, you have time to comb the memory banks for obscure films that are better variations on this theme. (Stuff like Ghost, natch, but even relentlessly creepy garbage like Return to Me (also titled after a song) or Heart Condition or Always–or Truly, Madly, Deeply or The Bishop’s Wife. Or the pinnacles of the ghost-love genre, Laura and Rebecca.) Just the fact that it turns The Cure‘s titular tune into a big sloppy glob of Lilith Fair saliva is enough to turn this child of the ’80s right off, sure, but Just Like Heaven is also exactly the kind of piss that uses pop songs to narrate the action.

In Her Shoes (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 30, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, Shirley MacLaine, Mark Feuerstein
screenplay by Susannah Grant, based on the novel by Jennifer Weiner
directed by Curtis Hanson

by Walter Chaw It looks like exactly the kind of formula chick-lit/chick-flick I detest, and not just because, for the most part, when you call something a "chick-" anything, you're doing it at the expense of the "Sex and the City" bimbos you imagine flock to this garbage like a swarm of Jimmy Choo shoe-flies. But Curtis Hanson, with In Her Shoes, overcomes (for an hour or so) that pigeonholing the same way he survived working with Eminem and Brittany Murphy–the same way he brought an adaptation of James Ellroy's un-adaptable L.A. Confidential to the screen and managed to tremor the delicate, carefully-sheathed grace nerve of Michael Chabon in Wonder Boys. His protagonists are worried about their weight, their bank account, and their shoes, of course, but Hanson (whose biggest accomplishment may be in disguising screenwriter Susannah Grant's propensity to pander to her audience in nasty, hypocritical strokes) makes those worries seem important in dissecting the psychology and interpersonal dynamics of his feuding sisters and wizened grandmamma. He shoots Philadelphia as though it were a blight and Florida like a shimmering summer daydream (or a Coppertone commercial)–and I thought that the moment that I would lose respect for it would come around the corner of every single epiphany, but it didn't arrive until admirably late in the game. It's a chick-flick, no question, but it's one with half a brain. Not much, but half a brain is half more than expected.