Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 114 of 149

Bruce Almighty (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

November 25, 20032000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Fantasy

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Jim Carrey, Jennifer Aniston, Morgan Freeman, Lisa Ann Walter
screenplay by Steve Koren & Mark O'Keefe and Steve Oedekerk
directed by Tom Shadyac

by Walter Chaw There's something blissfully broken about the state of our self-esteem when first The Emperor's Club and now Bruce Almighty come shambling onto the silver screen wearing candy-coloured clothes while stumping subversive messages apropos to never being able to overcome one's shortcomings. And there's something blissfully broken about popular Christianity when within two weeks comes a high profile film about a wooden surfer unifier of nature and machine (Blake's Old and New Testament in The Matrix Reloaded) and this malignant high profile stillbirth, which answers Job's question with, "Let's see if you can do any better"–the one a politically-correct gloss on Christianity as survey movie spirituality, the other a politically-correct–and facile–view of the Christian walk with an entirely unredeemable (and unredeemed) protagonist who plays into our current theocratic leadership's belief that the imitation of Christ includes vengeance and greed.

X2: X-Men United (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

November 23, 20032000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Thriller

X2
**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry
screenplay by Michael Dougherty & Dan Harris
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw Where the first film opened with a Holocaust backstory, the second instalment begins in the White House with a quote from Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address and a cool doubling of Aaron Shikler's pensive portrait of John F. Kennedy. X-Men is setting itself up as a high-minded comic book franchise, one unusually committed to relating its empowerment panel soap-opera with solid performances, decent scripting, and direction from a filmmaker, Bryan Singer, interested in the sanctity of narrative. The problems with X2's (a.k.a. X-Men 2 and X2: X-Men United) premise and its wrangling of so large an ensemble are fairly obvious: there are no real limits placed on the powers of the "X-Men" mutants and there is little time afforded to the proper establishment of relational conflict.

Macy’s Day: FFC Interviews William H. Macy

November 23, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

November 23, 2003|Backstage at the Auraria Campus of the University of Colorado's newly refurbished King Center is a network of hallways and dressing rooms that remind a little of that part in This is Spinal Tap where the boys get lost on their way to the stage. William H. Macy, taller than I expected and with a force of personality at odds with his milquetoast screen persona, makes a comment about this in a dead-on Nigel Tufnel ("We've got armadillos in our trousers") as we usher the actor to a clips show and awards ceremony at the 26^th Denver International Film Festival, which is honouring him with the event's John Cassavetes Award for contributions to independent cinema. Gracious, humble, genuinely gratified by the tribute, Macy, in a light mood, tells a story about an actor friend who got lost in the tunnels backstage en route to his entrance in a play, erupting triumphantly at last stage left, but alas in the wrong production. "But how was the performance?" I asked. "Compromised," Macy deadpanned.

The Missing (2003)

November 21, 20032000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

*½/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Cate Blanchett, Evan Rachel Wood, Jenna Boyd
screenplay by Ken Kaufman, based on the novel The Last Ride by Thomas Edison
directed by Ron Howard

Lookee what we have here--one-a them frontier elves by Walter Chaw Probably best described as Ron Howard’s The Searchers, the really quite awful The Missing (the first clue is a James Horner score) and its tale of bad Indians vs. sacrificial Indians vs. white settlers unfolds during a frontier period that, the last time Howard dabbled, unleashed Far and Away. With Horner’s help, Howard proves with The Missing that there’s no source material too bleak (not schizophrenia, not reality television, not space mishaps) for him to shine his dimwitted, beatific smile upon. He transforms Thomas Eidson’s bleak frontier western (The Last Ride) into a curious sort of faux-feminist uplift melodrama (“Mildred Pierce, Medicine Woman”), demonstrating, along the way, that he has no idea what issues he’s raising, much less any idea how to honour them.

Bubba Ho-Tep (2003)

November 21, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

***/****
starring Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Reggie Bannister, Bob Ivy
screenplay by Don Coscarelli, based on the novel by Joe R. Lansdale
directed by Don Coscarelli

by Walter Chaw Joe R. Lansdale is best known for his tales of the “weird west,” a genre mixing splatterpunk with alternate-history western almost entirely defined by the author in the early-Nineties. His work reads a little like the sort of folklore in which Mark Twain dabbled (or the gothic in which Flannery O’Connor was involved), but with zombies and gore, while Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho-Tep, an adaptation of a Lansdale short story, is steeped in the same sort of bent sensibility that informs the author’s work, performing something like a masterstroke in casting Bruce Campbell as Elvis and Ossie Davis as JFK–if ultimately falling a little short of the astonishing audacity of Lansdale’s prose. (That very ballsiness what has kept any film prior to this one being made from Lansdale’s work, methinks.) What distinguishes the picture, however, is what feels like a genuine concern for the difficulties of aging and the aged, a melancholy tone to the proceedings that, fascinatingly, equates a mummy unquiet for being buried nameless with a pair of American folk heroes declining, also anonymous, in a retirement facility in East Texas.

National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) [Double Secret Probation Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

November 20, 20031970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring John Belushi, Tim Matheson, John Vernon, Verna Bloom
screenplay by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenny & Chris Miller
directed by John Landis

by Walter Chaw Films that spawn genres are unusual, and if twenty-five years and dozens of imitators have diluted the sex and scatology formula of John Landis’s National Lampoon’s Animal House a bit, nothing touches the tightness of an enterprise that finds a golf ball hit into cafeteria stew in one scene and John Belushi casually eating that golf ball a few minutes later. The picture doesn’t so much cover the bases as draw the diamond, casting the evil dean of a small college, Wormer (John Vernon), against a band of fun-loving frat boys led by smooth Otter (Tim Matheson), animalistic Bluto (Belushi), hapless Flounder (Stephen Furst), and audience surrogate Pinto (Tom Hulce). What distinguishes Animal House‘s irreverence from feckless anarchy is the same thing that distinguishes the films of the Farrelly Brothers, the true inheritors of the picture’s legacy: a strong feeling for character and a congenial willingness to transgress that rings as honest even as it tickles at inappropriate.

The Santa Clause 2 (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

November 18, 20032000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A- Extras D+
starring Tim Allen, Elizabeth Mitchell, Eric Lloyd, David Krumholtz
screenplay by Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul and Steve Rudnick and Ed Decter & John J. Strauss
directed by Michael Lembeck

by Walter Chaw There is a scene about midway through Tim Allen's latest genuinely bad movie in which Allen and his screen family gather for dinner wielding McDonald's food in perfect bags, held in such a way so as not to obscure the golden arches for the duration of the shot. A 90-second commercial embedded in what passes for entertainment too often nowadays, it's driven home by the disconcerting realization that this picture's animatronic reindeer talk like The Hamburglar. (Warble blarble warble.) In addition to being misogynistic, racist, and apparently trying to plumb the humour of fascist regimes, The Santa Clause 2, then, is also home to one of the most sinister marketing ploys since Pokémon.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

November 14, 20032000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, War

***½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, James D’Arcy, Edward Woodall
screenplay by Peter Weir & John Collee, based on the novel by Patrick O’Brian
directed by Peter Weir

by Walter Chaw By turns brutal and majestic, Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (hereafter Master and Commander) reunites the antipodean director with Russell Boyd, the cinematographer with whom he shot The Last Wave, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously, and the two have produced a picture on par with those films: historically aware, but more notable for its epic beauty and scope. The effect of Master and Commander is rapture–it engulfs with its detail, finding time to flirt with the secrets of the Galapagos as parallel to the unfolding mystery of technology that finds the HMS Surprise outclassed by the French Acheron, stealthy and peerless enough to inspire speculations of supernatural origin. Issues of the old at war with the new (superstition vs. science, instinct vs. calculation) are nothing new for Weir, who is, after all, at his best when examining the dangers of individuals at odds with tradition, and the rewards for modern men able to assimilate the ancient into the new.

Dragonslayer (1981) – DVD

November 13, 20031980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy

***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Peter MacNicol, Caitlin Clarke, Ralph Richardson, Chloe Salaman
screenplay by Hal Barwood & Matthew Robbins
directed by Matthew Robbins

WATCH IN iTUNES – USA|CANADA

by Walter Chaw Dragonslayer is epoch-slaying, a final salvo for the courageously nihilistic films of the Seventies that is surprisingly literal about the changing of the guard from the filmmaker-driven individualism of the American new wave to the banality of the big-budget formula mentality. Its tale is best taken in the context of the idea that an individual artist–a practitioner of arcane magics that have fallen out of favour in a contemporary environment–can still affect change even if credit of the work will ultimately be hijacked by monolithic organizations. The thread of melancholy that runs through the picture springs from the idea that what we witness is an end to dragons and wizards, the battle between apprentice and beast unfolding with a doomed resignation (something like the wild stallion wrangling in The Misfits) as compared against the neutering of the individual voice within the studio system. (Dragons and warriors, the death of Robert Evans and Francis Ford Coppola alike.) With The Empire Strikes Back and Raging Bull, Dragonslayer completes a troika of early-Eighties tales of unimaginable losses and swiftly tilting identities–pictures poised tremulously at the moment of decline and, as it happens, horribly self-aware.

Mimic: Sentinel (2003) – DVD

November 12, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Karl Geary, Amanda Plummer, Alexis Dziena, Rebecca Mader
written and directed by J.T. Petty

by Walter Chaw Written and directed by wunderkind J.T. Petty, the second sequel to Guillermo Del Toro's underestimated and, admittedly, somewhat botched Mimic is a self-confessed "Rear Window with giant man-eating cockroaches" marked by a strong sense of camp and a visual style humming with a cohesive, kinetic logic that indicates, possibly, the emergence of a major genre talent. Between Mimic 3: Sentinel ("Mimic: Sentinel" on its title card and hereafter "Sentinel") and his remarkable feature debut, the mostly silent NYU student film Soft for Digging, Petty betrays a genuine gift for cinematic storytelling, stripping down dialogue to a skeletal structure and relying on the force of his images for the bulk of the exposition. Accordingly, the parts of Sentinel that bog down are the parts that rely too much on the cast to provide backstory and motivation when the best, most poetic bits of the picture are the first ten minutes (including its credit sequence) that tells all one needs to know without a word of dialogue.

The Christopher Lee Collection – DVD

November 10, 20031960s, 1970s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blue Underground, Crime, DVD, Germany, Horror, Italy, Liechtenstein, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK

CIRCUS OF FEAR (1966)
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring Christopher Lee, Leo Genn, Anthony Newlands, Heinz Drache
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by John Moxey

THE BLOOD OF FU MANCHU (1968)
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Tsai Chin, Maria Rohm, Howard Marion Crawford
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU (1969)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Tsai Chin, Maria Perschy, Richard Greene
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

THE BLOODY JUDGE
Il trono di fuoco (1970)
**/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Maria Schell, Leo Genn, Maria Rohm
screenplay by Anthony Scott Veitch
directed by Jess Franco

by Walter Chaw The sort of box set that horror fans and film historians slaver over (though Sino-Western ambassadors probably aren't too pleased about), Blue Underground's exceptionally, reverently remastered four-disc "Christopher Lee Collection" gathers four obscure Lee pictures–The Blood of Fu Manchu, The Castle of Fu Manchu, Circus of Fear, and The Bloody Judge–in presentations so vibrant and beautiful that they're almost enough to distract from the uniform tediousness of the films themselves. A little like avant-garde cinema, these pictures–all but one (Circus of Fear) directed by the notoriously, appallingly untalented Jess Franco–function better as theory than fact, unfolding on staid soundstage environments with single camera set-ups, stock footage, and jump cuts, and squandering, for the most part, the magisterial presence and delivery of Lee. (For the record, a lethal drinking game could probably be devised around the number of times Franco zooms to different parts of the same shot to avoid the inconvenience of relighting or moving the camera around.)

The Piece Maker: FFC Interviews Peter Hedges

November 9, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

November 9, 2003|It's one of the horrible ironies of the profession that often the people I like the most during the interview process are the ones who have made the films I find significantly problematic. By writing a review before interviewing someone for the first time, I can safeguard against the tendency to reward, or punish, the film for my relationship with my subjects; if I had my druthers, after meeting Peter Hedges, writer-director of Pieces of April, I would have declined to comment on his film. See, with my wife going into false labour, I stood Mr. Hedges up, but he agreed to reschedule, greeting me with words of encouragement about my impending fatherhood and then, as we were packing up, commiserating with me about the pain of losing a parent. In between, I broached the topic of race in his film, the element of Pieces of April that causes me the most pause, knowing as I did so that Mr. Hedges was probably mistaking our affinity for one another for affection for his film. It's a hard job sometimes, and while I'm under no illusions that I'm friends with, or run in the same circles as, the people with whom I occasionally rub elbows, it still pains me to think that I might wound someone I genuinely like with a review that's more criticism than congratulation.

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

November 8, 20032000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Josh Lucas
screenplay by John Turman and Michael France and James Schamus, based on the Marvel comic
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw The first in a troika of films to focus on rage as the catalyst for physiological change (the others being Danny Boyle’s brilliant 28 Days Later… and Stephen Norrington’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which counts Mr. Hyde among its gentlemen) this past summer, Ang Lee’s Hulk is a plodding dirge about the sins of the fathers that struggles mightily between the requirement to awe and the desire to mean something. Its story of repressed memories of abuse and reconciliation amounts to not-much when the tortured protagonist seems supremely capable of suppressing his rage, only losing control when jolted with a cattle prod or when his girlfriend is menaced by a trio of mutant hounds. An oh-so-subtle suggestion–embedded in a dream within a flashback–that emotionally distant Bruce Banner (Eric Bana in full zombie mode) may have abused his ex-girlfriend Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) speaks to a canny chronicler of dysfunction in Lee (The Ice Storm) struggling with the demands of a film with a ridiculous budget and a level of expectation in the same stratosphere. When Betty nonsensically offers, “It must be a combination of the nanomeds and the gamma radiation,” Bruce responds: “No, it’s something deeper.” Alas, it’s not.

The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

November 5, 20032000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving
written and directed by Lana Wachowski & Lilly Wachowski

by Walter Chaw Where The Matrix Reloaded works best as a kitschy send-up of West Side Story, The Matrix Revolutions is the funniest, most overblown re-telling of The Old Testament since The Ten Commandments. It should have been called "Revelations," truth be told, and indeed a sly wink to covenants and the Apocalypse comprises its final scenes. The film comes complete with martyred saints, crucified saviours, and enough murder and fireworks to keep Philistines attentive during the extended lore sequences, less boring here than in the last instalment, though those looking for mortal doses of faux philosophical pretension will find their goblets full to brimming. What saves this chapter, as it did the previous, is the idea that the arrogance required to pull off something this ponderous, this glowering and self-important, is in fact a valuable thing in a mainstream movie climate more interested in the comfortable affirmation of formula. Though it's likely that box office history will interpret the last two parts of The Matrix unkindly, it's all too possible that the trilogy may come to be seen as something like a classic of ambitious, hysterical overreaching. And why not? That's exactly what it is.

Film Freak Central Does the 2003 New York City Horror Film Festival

November 5, 2003****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Horror, Short Films, Thriller, UK, Zombie

November 5, 2003|Held at the Tribeca Theater for the second year in a row, the New York City Horror Film Festival (NYCHFF) is a collection of low-budget feature and short genre films that, like the San Francisco Film Society's lamented Dark Wave festival (after two amazing years, there is no third instalment pending), gives weight to a much-deserved critical re-evaluation of horror film as an important artistic, sociological, academic endeavour. With special awards this year honouring Troma's Lloyd Kaufman, underestimated horror director Stuart Gordon, drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, my favourite independent horror director Larry Fessenden, and special effects legend Tom Savini, the 2^nd NYCHFF is an emerging niche festival run by folks who care about the genre and, better, have an idea about how to present the material in a way as enthusiastic as it is savvy.

Dark Angel: The Complete First Season (2000-2001) – DVD

November 4, 20032000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television

Image B+ Sound A Extras C
“Pilot,” “Heat,” “Flushed,” “C.R.E.A.M.,” “411 on the DL,” “Prodigy,” “Cold Comfort,” “Blah Blah Woof Woof,” “Out,” “Red,” “Art Attack,” “Rising,” “The Kidz Are Aiight,” “Female Trouble,” “Haven,” “Shorties in Love,” “Pollo Loco,” “I and I Am a Camera,” “Hit a Sista Back,” “Meow,” “…And Jesus Brought a Casserole”

by Walter Chaw Ah, the Apocalypse. Terrorists set off a nuclear bomb in orbit, and the resultant electromagnetic pulse cripples the mighty United States’ information highway, plunging Seattle 2019 into what the morose voiceover introduction proclaims is the Third World. The mean streets of the Emerald City are teeming with grungy, coffee-addled youth culture, aggressive panhandlers, and Russian gangsters milling beneath a constant drizzle while bike messengers zip around with insouciant wet flying off their natty dreadlocks–and then the catastrophic energy pulse, after which we meet Max (Jessica Alba). With a beauty-mark bespecked-chin, a pouting leer, and a penchant for delivering every line with a head wobbling “oh no you did-ent” undead inner-city spunk (which not only gets tired, but also dates the piece almost instantly–recall the airless jingo-ese of “What’s Happenin'”), Alba struts into and out of her fifteen minutes as lead terminator in the James Cameron-conceived (and occasionally scripted) series “Dark Angel”.

Finding Nemo (2003) [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD

November 3, 2003****/****, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disability, DVD, Family, FFC Must-Own, Pixar

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Bob Peterson & David Reynolds
directed by Andrew Stanton

by Walter Chaw The perfect American parable for an anxious new millennium, Andrew Stanton's Finding Nemo is riddled with nightmares and weighted by the existential smallness of its heroic pair, finding a certain immutable gravity in the fear and hope represented by children, rekindled, both, by the spate of child-on-child violence ending our last thousand years. Following hot on horror films that, like the horror films of the late-'60s/early-'70s, focus on unapologetically evil children (then: Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's Baby, Don't Look Now, The Exorcist, now: The Ring, Identity, Soft for Digging), what Finding Nemo does is present generational paranoia from a parent's point of view, opening as it does with an act of senseless, heartbreaking violence in the middle of an idyllic suburbia. It's not the horror (at this point) of a child facing social ostracism in the school environment, but the horror of making a choice to escape a bad environment only to find oneself in the middle of an upper middle-class tinder pile about to light.

Miller’s Crossing: FFC Interviews Wentworth Miller

November 2, 20032000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

November 2, 2003|Over a thousand people packed into The Rise nightclub for the 26^th Starz Denver International Film Festival's opening-night gala reception. A cavernous space with booming music, the venue was a drastic departure from last year's sedate to-do at the DCPA's Temple Buell Theater, and it was in one of the upstairs rooms that I first met Wentworth Miller, the tall, handsome, calm, and extremely courteous young star of–and, lucky for me, the best thing about–Robert Benton's pretty awful The Human Stain. I met him again the next morning for official purposes at Denver's also surprisingly tall Mag Hotel, plopped in the middle of the busy intersection of 19^th and Stout along Banker's Row in lower downtown Denver. Best known for his guest appearances on television shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Popular" (and as an athlete with a literal bleeding heart in the seventh season premiere of "ER") as well as for the "Luke Skywalker" role in the unfortunate Dinotopia, Miller is receiving what could potentially be his big break, stealing the show from Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, and Gary Sinise playing a role that's surprisingly close to home.

Watchers/Watchers II [Double Feature] – DVD

October 31, 20031980s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, ZERO STARS

WATCHERS (1988)
*/**** Image C- Sound C
starring Corey Haim, Barbara Williams, Michael Ironside
screenplay by Bill Freed and Damian Lee, based on Watchers by Dean R. Koontz
directed by Jon Hess

WATCHERS II (2002)
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C
starring Marc Singer, Tracy Scoggins, Jonathan Farwell, Irene Miracle
screenplay by Henry Dominic
directed by Thierry Notz

by Walter Chaw Lassie vs. Link in what amounts to one of the stupidest films ever made: an adaptation of a Dean Koontz (one of the stupidest novelists ever made) novel, Watchers looks cheap, plays cheap, and stars Corey Haim as a Lita Ford-looking, ambiguously gay teen who’s upstaged by a dog yet again (see: The Lost Boys and, in a way, Silver Bullet). At least he’s not upstaged by Corey Feldman this time around, which, frankly, can’t be good for anyone’s career or self-respect. A tale of a genetically engineered orangutan warring with a genetically engineered golden retriever in the upscale suburbs of Anywhere, America that looks like Vancouver and boasts of the entire Mayberry police force, Watchers is aided now and again by a trademark ridiculous performance from Michael Ironside, the poor man’s Jack Nicholson, but is generally an unredeemable tale of military paranoia and dog love. As the mutt gazes intently off-screen at the commands of his invisible handler (and Haim the same), the film has as its only vaguely interesting moment one where a fat kid named “Piggy” and Jason Priestly try to out-bike the killer monkey, restaging The Lord of the Flies as a BMX downhill derby. Oh, the humanity.

In the Cut (2003) + Sylvia (2003)

October 31, 2003****/****, 2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

IN THE CUT
****/****
starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Damici
screenplay by Jane Campion & Susanna Moore, based on the novel by Moore
directed by Jane Campion

SYLVIA
*½/****
starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Blythe Danner
screenplay by John Brownlow
directed by Christine Jeffs

"Come at last to this point
I look back on my passion
And realize that I
Have been like a blind man
Who is unafraid of the dark"
-Yosana Akiko

by Walter Chaw Frances Avery (Meg Ryan) is in love with words. She moves through life obscuring herself in a nimbus of them, passing through the world with poetry as her guiding principle. Director Jane Campion is no stranger to a life lived in thrall to poesy–her films An Angel at My Table and The Piano detailed the life of poet Janet Frame and the life of the mind, respectively, and In the Cut finds its meaning and rhythm in the words that Frannie collects, fragments of poems cut from books and collected from subway walls. The New York through which Frannie walks is festooned with ghosts of American flags, tattered and blown after two years of constant display, losing their meaning along with their colours fading up to the sky. Likewise, Frannie sees herself a phantom of unmentioned tragedies, haunting her own life, retreating to the comfort of words when a half-sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), pillories her chaste existence, or when Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) interrogates her about a string of serial murders he's investigating. A scholar of words, Frannie is involved as the film opens in a project analyzing inner-city slang: language as organic and in transition.