Fat Albert (2004) – DVD

March 23, 2005Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Kenan Thompson, Kyla Pratt, Dania Ramirez, Bill Cosby
screenplay by William H. Cosby, Jr. & Charles Kipps
directed by Joel Zwick

by Bill Chambers The memory I have of watching Bill Cosby's "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" as a wee lad is that it always left me a little bit depressed, like listening to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" or dining at the Ponderosa restaurant. (Doesn't "ponderosa" mean "weighty" in English?) Subtext is a kind of phantom presence when you're five or six years old: you're too young to be able to read it but also young enough that you've not yet been blinded by anti-intellectualism to everything below the surface. I realize now that it was probably through the Saturday-morning buzzkill of "Fat Albert…" that I became cognizant of poverty, and just the fact that the show was populated with an all-black cast of ragamuffins (almost all of whom suffered from learning disabilities) took the patronizing sting out of its NBC Life Lessons–it was less pious than it was possessed of an old soul. I'm happy to report that Fat Albert, an anachronism of a live-action feature film based on the long-running (and long-cancelled) cartoon, captures a lot of its source's melancholy appeal. Moreover, its ideas are provocative verging on profound, although they're shackled to a sketchy screenplay (by Cosby and Charles Kipps) and an aesthetic that is as paint-by-numbers as the animation that inspired it. No surprise that director Joel Zwick hails from television–multi-camera sitcoms, to be precise.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) – DVD

March 21, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Ellen Burstyn, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Green Bush, Diane Ladd
screenplay by Robert Getchell
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers The zeitgeist made Martin Scorsese and his mentor John Cassavetes artistically simpatico in 1974, when the two helmed "women's pictures" independent of each other's counsel. It was the beginning of women's lib, and Warner hoped to corner the market via Ellen Burstyn and her pet project Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, while it would seem that with his brilliant A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes just wanted to say something hopeful about marriage to counter the prevailing propaganda. Both pictures were demonized in certain feminist circles for yoking their heroines to knights in tarnished armour, but in the case of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, they were preaching to the compromised.

The Ring (2003) [2-Disc Collector’s Set] – DVD

March 16, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, David Dorfman, Brian Cox
screenplay by Ehren Kruger, based on the novel Ringu by Kôji Suzuki and the screenplay Ringu by Hiroshi Takahashi
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Handsomely mounted and undeniably disconcerting, Gore Verbinski's The Ring, the American remake of the first of Japanese horror auteur Hideo Nakata's "Ring Trilogy" (itself based on a series of novels by Kôji Suzuki), lacks a good deal of the original's subtlety but makes up for it with the kind of electronic paranoia that is Yankee stock and trade. The ideas of an unfolding technical mystery, of a protagonist perhaps gifted with second sight, of being a cog at the will of a malignant machine, are borrowed with intelligence and profit from Coppola's masterpiece, The Conversation. The picture even lifts part of that film's dream sequence, a setting within a warehouse before a bank of media equipment, and a quiet tableau of individuals dwarfed by identical apartment units in the sterile honeycomb of modern inner-city housing.

Toolbox Murders (2004) – DVD

March 14, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror

*½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Angela Bettis, Brent Roam, Juliet Landau, Greg Travis
screenplay by Jace Anderson & Adam Gierasch
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Bill Chambers I suppose I'm a hypocrite, because one of the reasons I don't like the Marcus Nispel remake of Tobe Hooper's 1974 masterpiece The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is that it's basically the Young Guns version, a fun-size snuff film with a reductively commercial aesthetic that literalizes the Grant Wood underpinnings of the original. If that's not enough, its typecasting of ubiquitous B-listers R. Lee Ermey, David Dorfman, Jessica Biel, Eric Balfour, and, arguably, apple-cheeked goddess Erica Leerhsen (because she didn't survive Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2) makes the movie feel reassuring in a way that runs philosophically counter to its grindhouse roots, thus negating any street cred it gained from hiring the earlier film's DP, Daniel Pearl. But Tobe Hooper's reimagining of Dennis Donnelly's splatter flick The Toolbox Murders has confirmed for me that I really disagree with a redux of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in principle, irrespective of practice. For the record, I don't want to see cover versions of the same year's The Godfather Part II, A Woman Under the Influence, The Conversation, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Parallax View, or Chinatown, either.

Boxcar Bertha (1972) [The Martin Scorsese Film Collection] – DVD

March 7, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Barbara Hershey, David Carradine, Barry Primus, Bernie Casey
screenplay by Joyce H. Corrington & John William Corrington, based on Sisters of the Road by Bertha Thompson, as told to Ben L. Reitman
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers Although a Martin Scorsese retrospective could easily survive the absence of Boxcar Bertha, the film is a cornerstone of the director's filmography: Without it, there is conceivably no The Last Temptation of Christ–Bertha herself, Barbara Hershey, introduced Scorsese to the Nikos Kazantzakis source novel during production–and no Mean Streets. Because he'd been toiling away on the Hollywood fringe after getting fired from his would-be sophomore effort, 1970's The Honeymoon Killers, for shooting everything in master (an experiment he would repeat to great acclaim with The King of Comedy), Scorsese agreed to helm AIP's umpteenth Bonnie and Clyde wannabe, an in-name-only sequel to the drive-in sensation Bloody Mama (which incidentally starred his future muse, Robert De Niro). "You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit," went John Cassavetes's immortal response to the results, a critique not so much of the work itself as of Scorsese's decision to play the hired gun. Thus aborted his mission to position himself as one of the California film brats conquering the industry, as Cassavetes's tough-love approach spurred him to return to New York and resurrect the idea for Season of the Witch, a thematic follow-up to Who's That Knocking At My Door that eventually became Mean Streets.

Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

March 1, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Stellan Skarsgård, Izabella Scorupco, James D'Arcy, Remy Sweeney
screenplay by Alexi Hawley
directed by Renny Harlin

Exorcistbeginningcap

by Walter Chaw Beginning with a kinky apocalypse that Ken Russell would surely have created had ever he the budget and equipment, Renny Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning is good, old-timey drive-in exploitation garbage. It hates children with a unique fury, boasting the highest dead-kid count since Schindler's List, and sure enough, somehow Harlin manages to work in an uncomfortable subplot about exorcising Holocaust demons as our happy Catholics exorcise a literal one. I don't know if Paul Schrader, the man who helmed the first run at this troubled production (the very first director attached was the late John Frankenheimer)–ostensibly scrapped because it wasn't scary enough (and frankly, the guy who did the Nastassja Kinski Cat People should probably not be going near horror movies in the first place)–included a Holocaust subplot in his version of the flick, but I'm hoping not. Mainly because when you introduce a Holocaust subplot into a movie that also features hyenas ripping apart a little boy in protracted, excruciating detail, a woman giving birth to a maggot-infested infant, and another Holocaust survivor bleeding gallons from her Nazi-ruined vagina, you're wandering into the territory of cinema as audience punishment.

Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1968) – DVD

February 28, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Zina Bethune, Harvey Keitel, Anne Collette, Lennard Kuras
written and directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers All of the scenes that constitute the plot of Martin Scorsese's directorial debut Who's That Knocking at My Door look washed-out and indistinct in comparison to the rest of the feature. This is because the project began life as Bring on the Dancing Girls, a 35mm, hour-long thesis short so poorly received that Scorsese went back to the drawing board, but with only enough money to shoot fresh material in 16mm. And yet the disconnect seems oddly premeditated, especially since almost every 16mm passage is a veritable non sequitur. An extended riff on the mores of youth raised in Little Italy, Who's That Knocking at My Door charts a parallel course for Scorsese avatar J.R. (Harvey Keitel), a practising Catholic who, when not clowning around with punks from the neighbourhood, spends lazy afternoons in the company of a secular, middle-class blonde (soap star Zina Bethune, her character billed only as "the girl") he meets on the Staten Island ferry by striking up a conversation about a Scorsese touchstone, John Ford's The Searchers. As wishful thinking goes, it's cute.

The Green Butchers (2003)

February 18, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Denmark, Theatrical, Thriller

De Grønne slagtere
**½/****
starring Line Kruse, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Mads Mikkelsen, Nicolas Bro
written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen

Greenbutchersby Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There’s nothing groundbreaking about Anders Thomas Jensen’s blessedly non-Dogme The Green Butchers, the latest movie to mine the consumption of human flesh for laughs (even the title suggests a cheeky allusion to Soylent Green)–but for a comedy, that most culturally specific of genres, the Danish production travels remarkably well. Credit a skillful subtitle translation that preserves the wit of Jensen’s repartee, not to mention the chemistry between stars Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas, who, as chronic perspirer Svend and pothead Bjarne, respectively, transcend language like some nouveau Ren and Stimpy. (That being said, they’re occasionally too redolent of Napoleon Dynamite and Pedro for this writer’s comfort.) Proprietors of the new butcher shop in town, Svend and Bjarne face early foreclosure until an electrician accidentally freezes to death in their meat locker, inspiring a desperate Svend to turn the corpse’s thigh into fillets he promptly dubs “chickie-wickies.” These cutlets catch on with the locals, natch, and the desire to stay popular transforms Svend into a serial killer, with Bjarne acting as his reluctant but too-stuporous-to-resist accomplice.

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.

The Notebook (2004) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

February 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, James Garner, Gena Rowlands
screenplay by Jeremy Leven, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks
directed by Nick Cassavetes

by Walter Chaw Ah, Nicholas Sparks. I once saw an interview with Nicholas Sparks in which he accused literary critics of envying his success, thus shedding light on the consistently bad reviews he's gotten throughout his career while failing to explain why he got terrible reviews for his debut novel as well. Nor does this explain how it is that someone who's barely literate himself could have understood his critics enough to feel offended–after all, Sparks's admirers certainly aren't reading the reviews. In fact, that movie executives appear to be among Sparks's biggest fans (The Notebook is the third faithfully awful adaptation of a Sparks opus–two more to go) says a lot about both movie executives and Sparks's books.

Mean Creek (2004) – DVD

February 9, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Teen

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Rory Culkin, Ryan Kelley, Scott Mechlowicz, Trevor Morgan
written and directed by Jacob Aaron Estes

Mustownby Walter Chaw Mean Creek is poised at the magic hour of the death of innocence. It deals in corruption like a maggot will, burrowing and gnawing its way through true fauna to take its sustenance in its blithe, indifferent way from the dying of the light. The film represents in its existence and function a transitional vehicle between the end of life and rebirth. In Mean Creek, a slug crawls across cold flesh in a quiet, crepuscular moment; a snail (similar/different) is punished an instant later by a clear-eyed little girl, completing her exile from Paradise in a stroke remarkably brutal not necessarily for the act, but for the freshness of the stain on the perpetrator. The picture's title refers not to malevolence, but to a nature metaphor that works as the centre-point–the protean "mean"–between two extremes. It is that ever-tilting line that marks childhood's end: mercurial, sure, yet as substantial and rude as a brick wall.

The American Astronaut (2001) – DVD

February 8, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Cory McAbee, Rocco Sisto, Gregory Russell Cook, Annie Golden
written and directed by Cory McAbee

by Walter Chaw Opening with a mordant prologue that reminds of the expressionless absurdist sensibility of the late Douglas Adams and proceeding through something somewhere between Six-String Samurai and Dead Man (but a science-fiction musical), Cory McAbee’s The American Astronaut is dead brilliant. Demonstrating a truly dazzling level of technical proficiency (despite or due to what must have been a non-budget) and a breathless creativity fecund and macabre, the picture reminds of Harlan Ellison, Dr. Strangelove, and Dark Star in equal measure. Ultimately, The American Astronaut is something all its own, a film that sets itself up as an old-fashioned serial and goes on to explore cinematic and literary theory with a keen eye for composition and an ear for mad scenario and perverse dialogue. The reasoning is Beckett, the execution is Brecht and Weill, and the results are best described as an educational reel directed by David Lynch circa Eraserhead: self-aware and hallucinatory.

The Grudge (2004) – DVD

February 1, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Thriller

*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A-
starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, KaDee Strickland, Clea DuVall
screenplay by Stephen Susco, based on a screenplay by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Takashi Shimizu

Grudgecapby Walter Chaw Fans of Takashi Shimizu's Japanese horror franchise Ju-On, rest assured that his English-language but still Tokyo-set version of The Grudge is laudably faithful to the source material. So faithful, in fact, that The Grudge is completely free of those tedious drags character development, tension, scenario, narrative, plot, intelligence, point, sociological relevance, technical aptitude, and scares, really, since it leaves "pacing" somewhere back where the rest of that stuff was jettisoned. What The Grudge has a lot of, though, are "jump scares," the cats-through-windows thing where somebody crawls around in an attic with a lighter because they've heard an ominous knocking and then a face appears in the gloom accompanied by a sting note on the soundtrack.

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.

Paradise Found: FFC Interviews Steve James

January 16, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Interviews

SjamesinterviewtitlerevisedJanuary 16, 2005|I'm betting that a lot of people first heard about Steve James the same way I did, through "Siskel & Ebert"'s protocol-shattering review of his Hoop Dreams months in advance of the film landing a distributor, let alone a release date. Not to pay him the backhanded compliment that he's "colour blind" (doled out to virtually every white filmmaker who ever cast Denzel Washington), but I like to think it flatters Mr. James that until his mug started showing up on the awards circuit, I presumed the thumb-happy critics were referring to Michael Dudikoff's African-American co-star from American Ninja. There are, of course, few less concealed discussions of race on offer than Hoop Dreams or the epic, absorbing PBS documentary James co-produced, co-directed, and edited about the immigrant experience, "The New Americans", which recently beat out such higher-profile contenders as Ric Burns's "New York" and Martin Scorsese's "The Blues" for Best Limited Series at the International Documentary Association Awards.

The Village (2004) [VISTA Series – Widescreen] – DVD

January 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw M. Night Shyamalan’s films have become life support systems for his twists–empty, ponderous, self-righteous shells of ideas carried by cadaverous actors speaking in contraction-less sentences and spectral tones. He seems with Signs and now The Village to be espousing some kind of insane puritanical religion–call it the Church of Shyamalan, where the real world is too loutish a place for his gallery of close-mouthed martyrs, who exist in specially-created Hitchcockian microverses as airless as they are unlikely. It’s not too much of a stretch to begin to view his mission as one where he challenges his East Indian self to make his increasingly self-aggrandizing cameos as difficult as possible. Philadelphia? No problem. Hooterville, PA–a little tougher. Turn of the century Amish-town? Byzantine, to say the least.

The Forgotten (2004) – DVD

January 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Julianne Moore, Dominic West, Gary Sinise, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Gerald DiPego
directed by Joseph Ruben

Forgottendvdcapby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I couldn't really understand at the time why Dark City didn't arouse imaginations. I resented the following year's The Matrix for stealing some of Dark City's thunder; I blamed a lack of vision and a general disdain for genre. Now I wonder if it wasn't a matter of the film coming out a few years ahead of its time. Maybe it was just too light for the Age of Irony. Maybe it was too apocalyptic a vision for a people who had yet to experience an apocalypse in their own backyard. But there are certain prescient pictures that point north, films like The Truman Show that I underestimated like I thought everyone else underestimated Dark City, or films that remain underestimated, such as Strange Days and Twelve Monkeys, Terry Gilliam's most uncompromising film since Brazil. It's the duty of some movies to draw the outlines in chalk, set the groundwork, dig the foundation for the way that speculative fiction will seek to define this culture in the aftermath of an inflamed fault line even before the dime drops. Just before Y2K, we dug ourselves into cinematic bunkers in preparation for some kind of technological apocalypse. Who would have suspected that the shape of our crucible would be not faulty microchips and mainframes, but assault rifles, airplanes, leadership without vision, and children without protection from leadership without vision?

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2004

January 1, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

Top102004There's a wonderful, haunted Dan Simmons short story called "The River Styx Runs Upstream" in which technology has made the resurrection of beloved family members possible, though the resurrected are barely recognizable as human. It's an iteration of the W.W. Jacobs story "The Monkey's Paw", of course, a fictionalized platitude of watching what you wish for, and the tale's melancholic tone–its themes of surfacing and being unable to let go of the past–colour the best films of 2004.

First Daughter (2004) – DVD

December 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Katie Holmes, Marc Blucas, Amerie, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Jessica Bendinger and Kate Kondell
directed by Forest Whitaker

by Walter Chaw Forest Whitaker's First Daughter is so much better than the other two films this year dealing with the distaff fruit of the loins of the most powerful man in the free world (i.e., David Mamet's Spartan and Andy Cadiff's Chasing Liberty) that it's easy to make the mistake that the film is worth much of a damn. The sad fact of it is, there's nothing much at the centre of this babysitter's-club artifact. Saving it from the dustbin of total inconsequence, if only just, is its essential sense of decency and, of course, star Katie Holmes. She's not so much gifted, I think, as genuine-seeming–despite one's better judgment, you find yourself wishing her well. Holmes is able to batter defenses; the stratosphere isn't for her, but Anne Baxter had a pretty nice career, all things considered.