Spartan (2004) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Commentary C+
starring Val Kilmer, Derek Luke, William H. Macy, Ed O'Neill
written and directed by David Mamet

by Walter Chaw Because we hate Arabs (and women almost as much as we think that Arabs hate women, those hateful Arabs), there are films like David Mamet's patently ridiculous, relentlessly offensive, unintentionally hilarious Spartan. A brilliant theatre man, the very definition of a keen cultural philosopher (his book of essays Some Freaks is must-reading), Mamet as film auteur has grown increasingly esoteric to the point now that his exclusive playpens of linguistic masturbation are so alien and self-conscious that they begin instantly to function as satires of themselves. His action is action as imagined by an egghead, all awkward movement and frustrated invective. His is the school of anti-casual cool, the drama club suiting up for the Friday night football game, and his supporters are cut from the same cloth, believing that there's a point to be made in Beckett for the brute while ignoring that Beckett is best staged with Spartan minimalism and left in the theatre besides. The films Mamet has directed range from sophomoric (House of Games) to grating (State and Main) to just incompetent (Heist), though Spartan reminds the most of one he only wrote: the wilderness howler The Edge, with its machismo over-examined and placed in a context that isn't allegorical as it must be, but hardboiled realism as it can't be. It's P.G. Wodehouse adapted for the screen by John Milius, and predictably awful.

Reality Bites (1994) [10th Anniversary Edition] – DVD

Reality Bites (1994) [10th Anniversary Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo
screenplay by Helen Childress
directed by Ben Stiller

by Bill Chambers If Some Kind of Wonderful is just an inverted Pretty in Pink, then Reality Bites is Some Kind of Wonderful inverted back again, with a proud young woman positioned at the apex of a love triangle and flanked by suitors from opposite poles of class who share a sincere affection for their mutual inamorata. More than conceivable that screenwriter Helen Childress was influenced by these John Hughes productions (whether or not she consciously chose to emulate them), it’s probable: Childress was of breakfast-club age when they were released, and as any child of the ’80s will tell you, they were too reverent of teenage travails to inspire much in the way of hipster backlash. (While some have speculated that Ferris Bueller is Hughes through the looking glass, the speech from that eponymous film in which a secretary canonizes Ferris–“The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads…they all adore him: they think he’s a righteous dude”–suggests that Ferris is nothing less than the personification of Hughes’s cottage industry.) What’s interesting is that Reality Bites‘ loyalty to a proven formula only traps it in the same adolescent mindset it purports to preach against (“grow up” is a major refrain): If it were about the consequences of our heroine’s choice of mate instead of about the choice itself once more, it might’ve satisfied Hughes’s maturing constituency on a deeper level.

Barbershop 2: Back in Business (2004) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Ice Cube, Cedric the Entertainer, Sean Patrick Thomas, Eve
screenplay by Don D. Scott
directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan

by Walter Chaw If not for a cringe-worthy conclusion and the awkwardness of an entire Queen Latifah subplot too clearly an embedded trailer for the upcoming Beauty Shop, Barbershop 2: Back in Business would not only be better than the first film, but also almost worthy of consideration as a lighthearted version of Do the Right Thing. Firmly rooted in politics, the opening credit sequence–which charts black history through the evolution of the afro haircut, with each image group ending, incisively, with a shot that demonstrates how white culture invariably hijacks black trends–is alone worth the price of admission. It summarizes a sticky, Ouroborosian circle of self-consumption, owing to the fact that hip-hop culture itself takes elements of white culture and redefines them through its own prism. What's the explanation for Vanilla Ice's ski-slope pompadour in the bigger picture of race relations and cultural diffusion? A look at the progression of Michael Jackson would seem the cheap shot, and it would have been out of this context, but while no mention of Wacko Jacko fails to inspire reflexive groans anymore, Barbershop 2 actually, wordlessly, scores a poignant, precise, eloquent point about the state of our state. Taking a swipe at the King of Pop is easy–having it score in a way fresh with insight is invaluable.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, Fantasy, New Zealand

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

Returnofthekingeecap2

by Walter Chaw For the uninitiated few, Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) are diminutive hobbits making their way, with the treacherous Gollum (Andy Serkis) as their guide, through perilous lands on a quest to destroy the One Ring of power, forged by evil Sauron in a volcano called Mount Doom. Their story is set against a series of epic military manoeuvres and intimate Machiavellian machinations engaged in by elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom), dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), and the once and future human king, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen).

Crimson Gold (2003)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Iran, Theatrical, Thriller

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

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

Chasing Liberty (2004) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Road Movie, Romance, Teen, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Mandy Moore, Matthew Goode, Jeremy Piven, Annabella Sciorra
screenplay by Derek Guiley & David Schneiderman
directed by Andy Cadiff

by Walter Chaw Giving a whole new meaning to the term "Grand Old Party," now that Jenna and Barbara Bush have made being the first daughter delinquent-delightful again after that stick-in-the-mud scholar/ambassador Chelsea (the "Family Values" party has a little 'splainin' to do), gird yourself for no fewer than three films featuring the exploits of the most powerful girl-child in the free world: David Mamet's Spartan, the Katie Holmes starrer First Daughter, and, first out of the block, Andy Cadiff's execrable Chasing Liberty.

Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003) + Monster (2003) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Crime, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Thriller, UK

AILEEN: LIFE AND DEATH OF A SERIAL KILLER
***/**** Image B Sound B
directed by Nick Broomfield & Joan Churchill

MONSTER
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern, Lee Tergesen
written and directed by Patty Jenkins

by Bill Chambers If the documentary's renaissance needed further confirmation, it's either the propagation of sequels to non-fiction films (nothing nestles a genre into the mainstream like second chapters), or the commercial synergy that has so flagrantly asserted itself in the marketing of Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill's Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer–a quasi-continuation, as it happens, of Broomfield's own 1992 Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Of course, it was one thing for Lantern Lane Entertainment to time the theatrical release of Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (henceforth Aileen 2) so that it surfed the ripples of hype generated by the splash-landing of Newmarket's Monster, and it's another thing for Sony, their common home video distributor, to unleash the two films on DVD simultaneously. But for NY MAGAZINE to print "Aileen Wuornos, the subject of Charlize Theron's Monster, distills absolutely terrifying interviews with the late serial killer," and for Columbia TriStar to then splatter that quote on the back of the Aileen 2 disc, signifies a blurring of divides more critical than ever in this age of reality-TV. Neither Theron nor Wuornos deserves to become inextricably associated with the other's (mis)deeds over a marketing crutch; Monster probably should've been called Aileen Wuornos for Dummies, but it wasn't, and that's the point.

Saving Private Ryan (1998) [D-Day 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Spielberg, War

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore
screenplay by Robert Rodat
directed by Steven Spielberg

Savingprivateryancap

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One is tempted to speculate that, perhaps even more than his father's tour of duty, something that inspired the teenaged Steven Spielberg to shoot a succession of WWII docudramas on 8mm (since he had authentic props–Dad's medals–at his disposal), lingering guilt over his dismissal from the U.S. Army after a military shrink deemed him unfit for the battlefield accounts for Spielberg's frequent digressions into the war genre. As reductive, nay, Freudian as this may seem, for one thing, it has the potential to dilute the vitriol commonly reserved for the bookends of Saving Private Ryan by bringing them into autobiographical relief. Certainly ignoring the picture's prologue and epilogue altogether doesn't help: I once programmed my DVD player to do just that and the result felt surprisingly incomplete, as the context for a WWII narrative with a conspicuously anecdotal quality had all of a sudden disappeared.

Paycheck (2003) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: John Woo, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Michael C. Hall
screenplay by Dean Georgaris, based on the short story by Philip K. Dick
directed by John Woo

by Walter Chaw At the end of John Woo's latest Hollywood misstep, Ben Affleck, as brilliant "reverse engineer" Michael Jennings, hefts two bags of manure on his back and stumbles around with them for a while, effectively defusing anything cogent I could say about Paycheck. It is worth wondering, however, why people like Affleck and Keanu Reeves are so attractive in science-fiction premises (Reeves even had a turn with the memory-loss high-tech agent thing in Johnny Mnemonic)–probably something to do with the idea of robots and minds wiped clean. The problem with Paycheck isn't really that it's not well thought-out or that it's possibly the first Woo action film to be genuinely boring from start to finish, but that Woo seems to have replaced his joy of genre (and genius within the medium) with a scrabbling desperation to manufacture what used to come naturally.

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

Posted in****/****, 1940s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

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

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

We’re Not Married (1952) – DVD

Posted in1950s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Romance
We're Not Married!***/**** Image A- Sound B+starring Ginger Rogers, Fred Allen, Victor Moore, David Waynescreenplay by Nunnally Johnsondirected by Edmund Goulding by Bill Chambers With the advent of television, the movie business was suddenly floundering. While the long-term solution proved to be increasing the literal scale of motion pictures, the short-term fix found studios filching conceits tailored for the small screen. Like a number of Fox programmers from the early Fifties, We're Not Married! takes its cue from the anthology format of televised theatre; thanks to an agile Nunnally Johnson screenplay and the zesty direction of Dark Victory's Edmund Goulding,…

Miracle (2004) [Widescreen] + Club Dread (2004) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Canada, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Horror, Sports, Thriller

MIRACLE
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Kurt Russell, Patricia Clarkson, Noah Emmerich, Eddie Cahill
screenplay by Eric Guggenheim
directed by Gavin O'Connor

Broken Lizard's Club Dread
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Brittany Daniel, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Jordan Ladd
screenplay by Broken Lizard
directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

by Bill Chambers That it's well-cast, well-shot, and well-edited leads one to conclude that Miracle is, in fact, well-directed (by Tumbleweeds' Gavin O'Connor). It's therefore invaluable, really, as proof that nothing can save a hackneyed screenplay. The film, which recreates a rink-bound pissing contest between the U.S. and Soviet hockey teams at the 1980 Olympics that retroactively came to stand for a Seabiscuit-like national uplift, is so self-critiquing that watching it is purely a formality and only an occasional joy, not for its underdog intrigue, but for its technical proficiency and the ever-dependable Kurt Russell. (If there are better actors than Russell, there certainly aren't better movie stars.) Surmounting a number of aesthetic obstacles, including a moptop that looks scalped from his character in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Russell skillfully essays real-life coach Herb Brooks, a failed puck-slinger looking to live vicariously through a gold medal line-up.

The Triplets of Belleville (2003) – DVD

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

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

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

Elephant (2003) – DVD

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

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

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

Love Actually (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Romance, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson
written and directed by Richard Curtis

Loveactuallycap

by Walter Chaw I actively, aggressively dislike this film. Richard Curtis's Love Actually says something of its intentions in a subplot involving an aged rocker (Bill Nighy) who knows he's creating a reprehensible piece of garbage in an attempt to cash in on the gaffed demographic that champions boy bands as the pinnacle of the art. The picture is a sex comedy in the worst senses of the genre: It's puerile, misogynistic, and breathtakingly stupid, with a keen focus on pratfalls and serendipity–all the while hoping that you won't notice the inappropriateness of its plays for heart-warming uplift. Curtis, after scoring a couple of times in the genre as screenwriter with Notting Hill and The Tall Guy, chooses Love Actually as his directorial debut, and its hatefulness speaks to the source of the comprehensive misanthropy of Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean (Atkinson makes a cameo; Curtis is a writer for "Mr. Bean"). A shame that Curtis's hyphenate turn begins to betray the man as ugly and self-indulgent.

Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, DVD, France

*½/**** (60-minute version) **/**** (90-minute version)
Image A Sound A Extras B-
directed by James Cameron

by Bill Chambers Not often given enough credit for his speedy learning curve (how many filmmakers, metaphorically speaking, have gone straight from Piranha 2 to The Terminator?), it stands to reason that James Cameron's next documentary will be a gem. But for the time being there is only Ghosts of the Abyss to deal with, and it's a washout. A few minutes into the film, Bill Paxton finds out that the battery powering the MIR submersible in which he's exploring the wreckage of "R.M.S. Titanic" is worth $250,000; it was then that I realized I'm vastly more interested in expensive batteries than in the famously-drowned luxury liner, exhumed on film almost as many times now as Dracula. Maybe it's an issue of the arcane vs. the mundane: Ghosts of the Abyss dutifully oohs and aahs over every inch of the ship's rusticled décor, but it stops short of edifying the secondary observer, who suspects a show is being put on for the grumpy Russians piloting the hi-tech underwater explorers. I was that way every time my parents took me to the zoo.

Desk Set (1957) [Studio Classics] – DVD

Posted in1950s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras C+
starring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Gig Young, Joan Blondell
screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based on the play by William Marchant
directed by Walter Lang

by Bill Chambers One of the more effectively simple credits sequences opens Desk Set, with a telegraph situated on a Mondrian-inspired backdrop spitting out the names of cast and crew. This, it turns out, is the movie reduced to symbols. Modernities clash as Spencer Tracy's ironically oafish efficiency expert is deposited in the environment of Katharine Hepburn, who thinks and dresses geometrically but brings a splash of colour to the room. They're hip and as hip as each other, even if she's a Luddite and he pimps a supercomputer for IBM, because career comes first for both. Counterbalancing a general mistrust of the electronics revolution (and the typical politically-incorrect trappings of Fifties cinema), the movie embraces a progressive quality in its power-couple leads, who still seem remarkably contemporary because neither assumed aggressively gender-specific roles–they always played equals of different temperaments.

Stuck on You (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Eva Mendes, Wen Yann Shih
screenplay by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly
directed by Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly

by Walter Chaw It may not be funny in the slightest, but like Shallow Hal, the Farrelly Brothers' Stuck On You is often fascinating for the extent to which it seeks to dissect the exploitation of disability in film. The picture is surprisingly affecting when it's addressing the conjoined twins at its centre, pointing at once to where the Farrellys are headed with their art, and to the realization that where this picture really fails is in the fallacy that it needs to be a comedy at all. (The most glaring gaffe the casting of Cher as herself, a joke as out of tune as it is out of time.) What emerges from the film isn't the sort of scatological brinkmanship the brothers are credited with/derided for, but rather an often sharp examination of identity, the strength of familial bonds, and the courage to dream–elements each to be found woven in some fashion throughout the filmmakers' critically underestimated oeuvre.

Wild Things (1998) [Unrated Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Satire, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards
screenplay by Stephen Peters
directed by John McNaughton

by Bill Chambers I shepherded myself through puberty on a steady diet of Cinemax, and I’ve apologized for worse than this movie’s sins on behalf of director John McNaughton, whose Mad Dog and Glory almost sires a new genre: misogyny uplift. So I’ve always considered my indifference towards Wild Things to be something of an anomaly. A continuation of a theme that ran subtly through McNaughton’s powerful Normal Life, i.e., some inextricable link between carnal desire and pecuniary greed, Wild Things (originally titled Sex Crimes) opens with an aerial view of the ‘Glades that cleverly juxtaposes alligator-infested swampland with the grounds of a nearby high school. The implication is clear, but then again it’s too clear, and you can shut the movie off then and there without missing a beat.

Brother Bear (2003) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family

½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Tab Murphy and Lorne Cameron & David Hoselton and Steve Bencich & Ron J. Friedman
directed by Aaron Blaise & Bob Walker

by Walter Chaw Deeply unentertaining and, at its heart of hearts, a quintessential example of a dishonest picture, Disney's Brother Bear is rock-bottom entertainment destined to be Pixar's best bargaining chip. It plugs bears and moose into a formula already plumbed Disney-style with lions and meerkats (and once before again with Earth Children stereotypes of Native Americans), boiling an entire culture and mythology down to an insultingly reductive pastiche and taking swipes at women along the way to telling one of the most inapplicable codas in the history of fable: "The story of a boy who became a man by becoming a bear."