Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 75 of 146

Eran’s Visit: FFC Interviews Eran Kolirin

February 10, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Israel

February 10, 2008|Eran Kolirin strikes a modest figure. Maybe it was the illness: exhausted from a cross-country junket to promote the stateside release of his ebullient and in many ways extraordinary feature debut The Band's Visit (and sick besides), Mr. Kolirin met with me at Cherry Creek's Zaidy's Restaurant–home to the best matzo ball soup in Denver–over a bowl of what he referred to as a little Jewish remedy for the bug he'd been fighting on his tour. As we ate, I realized that what preparatory notes I'd made were all but useless. Though The Band's Visit is almost the definition of a political film (Israelis and Egyptians, oh my), Mr. Kolirin steadfastly avoided a discussion of his new role as focal point for the Middle East conversation–and when I asked him who he was rooting for in the upcoming American election (this was the day after Super Tuesday in the U.S. and I was fresh from listening to an NPR report on how Israel and Egypt were viewing the festivities), he said, "I don't have any idea." I began to wonder if this reticence wasn't more reluctance than indifference: as an aside, almost, at one pointed he volunteered that "Bush, yes, is quite fucked up."

In Bruges (2008)

February 8, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*½/****
starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Clémence Poésy
written and directed by Martin McDonagh

by Walter Chaw An ugly piece of work, writer-director Martin McDonagh's feature debut In Bruges has about it an unshakeable air of unleavened unpleasantness. It starts with the framing conceit of little boys with their heads blown off: the first victim unlikely because, hey, you'd at least turn your head if shooting started in the next room, right?; the second unsavoury because it caps a running joke about little people that isn't funny in the least. (No small accomplishment for running jokes about midgets, I don't have to tell you.) Between, find Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as hitmen Ray and Ken, respectively, exiled to Bruges, Belgium after a London hit goes bad and forced to excrete witticisms in one another's company like Juno-spawned Pez dispensers. McDonagh's idea of profound profanity consists of Ray being very amused by midgets, fat Americans, and effete Canadians and Ken being sucked in by the medieval, touristy charms of sleepy Bruges; both await some word from their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes), himself busy doing a real convincing impersonation of Ben Kingsley's insane mobster from Sexy Beast. Funny how something can be both overwritten and underwritten, but there you have it. In Bruges posits the idea that our boys are in God's waiting room–not Florida, but some enchanted backwater, waiting for judgment on high for their sins while sightseeing ancient churches and contemplating Bosch. Ken takes the communion, Ray takes a piss, and Harry surfaces like a Cockney shark in a third act remarkable for its feckless cupidity.

The Band’s Visit (2007)

February 8, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Israel, Music, Romance, Theatrical

Bikur Ha-Tizmoret
***½/****
starring Shlomi Avraham, Saleh Bakri, Ronit Elkabetz, Sasson Gabai
written and directed by Eran Kolirin

by Walter Chaw I've been reading a lot of Thomas Friedman lately, mostly because I have glaring, embarrassing gaps in my education and popular, contemporary scholarship about our Middle East imbroglio is chief among them. I've read a good bit on The Crusades and on the wars we've waged during the two Bush administrations; what I haven't read is any extensive insight into the psyche of the Arab Street. Where better to start than through the erudition of a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner? I approached Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit in a different way, I realize, than I would have prior to my dip into Friedman's headspace–and was gratified, as I seldom have been, by how a juncture in my interests resulted in what could only be a richer film experience. The Band's Visit is already remarkable for its sensitivity and patience, but knowing a little of the tragic intractability of Israeli/Arab relations lends it an implacable weight of sorrow. I'm convinced that there's already a latent melancholy in the picture, but armed with just a gloss of Camp David, the Israeli/Egyptian conflict, suddenly all of the picture's travails–being shut out of the Cairo film festival and, at the last minute, the Abu Dhabi fest as well–take on this terrible weight of irony and hopelessness. Without showing anybody coming over to "the other side," as it were, The Band's Visit is about communication, understanding, and acceptance, its characters united in their difference in the quest for the indefinable sublime. It's the best kind of political film in that it's a work, without pretension, of essential humanity–and the best kind of sentimental film in that it earns its sentiment.

The Invasion (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

February 5, 20082000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Jeffrey Wright
screenplay by David Kajganich
directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Jack Finney's 1955 novel The Body Snatchers has proven itself to be of durable stock. Over the course of its first three official adaptations, it's managed to tap the cultural vein–to distil the zeitgeist–in its tale of soulless pod-people replacing loved ones and figures of authority. Something about this specific fear has been an Aeolian harp, essaying the Red Menace of the Fifties (Don Siegel's original Invasion of the Body Snatchers), the new-age cultism and air of paranoia of the Seventies (Philip Kaufman's 1978 masterpiece), the modern military-industrial complex (Abel Ferrara's underestimated 1993 revamp), and now the over-medicated upper-middle classes in German director Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion. If it weren't for the inherent elasticity of the source material, in truth, there wouldn't be anything to recommend the new picture, what with its ridiculous screenplay (by first-timer David Kajganich), deadening proselytizing, and mawkish performances from an assembled cast of luminaries. The Invasion is hopelessly fucked-up in the only way you can fuck this story up: by having a bunch of halfwits impose themselves on it in the vain belief they can reinvent the wheel. It isn't the worst film of the year so far, just by far the most disappointing, and while I really admire Nicole Kidman in some of her independent film choices, her track record of picking real, bona fide stinkers in the mainstream continues with this, her widely-publicized entrée into the $17M/picture club. The irony being–and letting Kidman off the hook a little–that a well-publicized 17-day reshoot with none other than The Wachowski Brothers and their protégé James McTeigue at the rudder transformed what was reputedly a poor-testing, "documentary-like," low-key political thriller into this bullshit.

30 Days of Night (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

February 4, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, New Zealand, Thriller, Vampire

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston, Ben Foster
screenplay by Steve Niles and Stuart Beattie and Brian Nelson, based on the graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith
directed by David Slade

by Walter Chaw The dialogue is woeful and the scenario is stretched at feature-length, but there's a lot to like about David Slade's graphic-novel adaptation 30 Days of Night. As high concepts go, it's a pretty good one: What if a band of vampires was enterprising enough to head north to Alaska–where some towns experience the titular month-long blackout–to live it up in luxurious dark? It makes so much sense that it's a wonder it hasn't been done before, really, and a few glacial, arctic moments in the film gave me a thrill of anticipation as to what might be possible should Dan Simmons's The Terror ever receive a proper, big-budget treatment. The gore is good and plentiful–not explicit to the point of exploitative, but packed thick with unequivocal suggestions of child murder, cruelty, and the wholesome goodness of a satisfying, old-fashioned decapitation-by-hatchet. And in a fall that sees the flicker of resurrection of the early-Seventies/late-Sixties western, it's easy to place 30 Days of Night in the context of another revision of that hoary American genre, complete with exit music suggesting that the way to salvation lies in the assumption of the enemy's tactics and identity. Explanation at last of what our government is thinking when it tears up our Constitution to fight people wanting to tear up our Constitution.

The Assassination of Jesse James (2007) + Johnny Suede (1991) – DVDs

January 28, 2008****/****, 1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Music, Romance, Western

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepard, Sam Rockwell
screenplay by Andrew Dominik, based on the novel by Ron Hansen
directed by Andrew Dominik

by Walter Chaw Kiwi director Andrew Dominick's heroically pretentious The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (hereafter Jesse James) is a deflated anti-western in the tradition of Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand and Terrence Malick's Badlands. Broadly, it's a magnification of the Nixonian malaise that infected the early-Seventies, its suggestion that things aren't much worse now than they were then complicated by three decades of cynicism. As a piece, it's almost completely sapped of energy, though it isn't deadpan like Jarmusch's Dead Man. No, think of it as more of a dirge: not ironic, but post-modern; not a death march, but mournful. It's how J. Hoberman once (derisively) described Body Heat, a "remake without an original"–Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid corrupted by McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the whole of it shot through with an autumnal soft focus that looks exactly like the reunion sequence that pushes the third act of Bonnie and Clyde. It vaguely resembles an insect caught in an amber sepulchre. Yet despite its obvious pedigree, it is all of itself, infused with the spirit of the now, suffused with author Ron Hansen's transcendental prettiness (the film is based on his novel), and, as framed by DP Roger Deakins's painterly eye, overwhelmingly beautiful. Deakins is given the keys to the kingdom here and every moment of Jesse James looks like mythology pulled through a cinematic loom, often leaving the edges of the frame lanolin-indistinct as they trail off into history. I hadn't thought it possible to see our current crises of faith cast as romantic, but there it is.

Man on Fire (2004) – Blu-ray Disc

January 11, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Drama, Mexico, Switzerland, Thriller, UK

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Denzel Washington, Dakota Fanning, Marc Anthony, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by A.J. Quinnell
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. What used to be the province of the Times Square grindhouse and drive-in movie theatres is now star-vehicle blockbuster fodder, making the revenge sub-genre's subversive qualities and carefully-cultivated atmosphere of frustrated rage suddenly a reflection of the demons plaguing mainstream culture. Though certainly more substantive than the hit-and-run remake of Walking Tall, Tony Scott's Man on Fire falls far below the redemptive qualities of Kill Bill, Vol. 2, offering the world the logical end result of a nation operating under the twin godheads of fear and Old Testament vengeance: a slickefied, iconographic, racist, sexist, huckster version of the grimy, low rent, pleasantly exploitative The Punisher.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2007

January 1, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

Well the road is out before me
and the moon is shining bright
what I want you to remember
as I disappear tonight
today is grey skies
tomorrow is tears
you'll have to wait 'til yesterday is here.

-Tom Waits, "Yesterday Is Here"

Break it down: 2007 resets the early days of the New American Cinema–the last years of the Apollo space program (and sure enough, we have a documentary about the remaining Apollo astronauts in David Sington's In the Shadow of the Moon) and Watergate, the death twitches of the 1960s gradually revealing themselves in pictures. Whether this leads to another Golden Age or merely another stutter-step on the road of our grief remains to be seen, but past the halfway point of the first decade of the new millennium (and six years after 9/11 hit its own reset button), the 2000s have already established themselves with the usual single-minded purpose. At the least, celebrate the resurgence of American cinema–the mainstream re-establishing itself as not just a dream factory, but a garden of auteur delights as well. 2007, above anything else, heralds a banner year for the auteur theory (Paul Thomas Anderson, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Coens, Tarantino, Sean Penn, Cronenberg, Brad Bird, Kim Ki-duk, David Fincher, Ken Loach, Ang Lee, Brian DePalma–and flicks I didn't catch by guys like Paul Schrader, Francis Ford Coppola, Tsai Ming-liang, John Sayles, and so on), with the films, like Sweeney's razors, functioning as extensions of the directors' biological selves.

Atonement (2007) + The Kite Runner (2007)

December 25, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, France, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, UK, War

ATONEMENT
*½/****
starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Ian McEwan
directed by Joe Wright

THE KITE RUNNER
½*/****
starring Khalid Abdalla, Homayoun Ershadi, Shaun Toub, Saïd Taghmaoui
screenplay by David Benioff, based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw No end-of-year sweepstakes would be complete without the requisite bushel of awards-baiting pabulum, rich with a nice, thick vein of glossy pandering. They're movies you're supposed to love: can't-miss, sure-fire formula flicks that bank on their sparkly casts and borrowed prestige the way blockbuster action flicks rely on special effects and the promise of mayhem. Reduce it down enough and the dreg at the bottom of the stew pot is still just making money–you don't reinvent the wheel by following a recipe, and indeed, a good 99% of movies in any given year don't boast of anything new. To say that you like something like August Rush is to say that you hate to be challenged by a film–that escapism is the first and last reason you go to the movies. Where something like Transformers wants to inspire a car- or girl-related boner, something like Atonement wants to ennoble the cineplex arthouse crowd into paroxysms of self-congratulation. It's the same feeling that compels awards bodies to vote for this stuff: mainstream passing as estimable while the real deal flies for the most part under the radar. The more assembly line chunder like Atonement and The Kite Runner gets chosen for Academy recognition, the fewer slots there are available for big studio pics that actually deliver the goods, like No Country for Old Men, The Darjeeling Limited, There Will Be Blood, and Sweeney Todd (presuming, of course, that an impressive number of remarkable studio flicks released earlier this calendar year are already lost causes).

Sunshine (2007) + The Simpsons Movie (2007)

December 17, 20072000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

SUNSHINE
***/****
starring Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Chris Evans, Troy Garity
screenplay by Alex Garland
directed by Danny Boyle

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
screenplay by James L. Brooks & Matt Groening & Al Jean & Ian Maxtone-Graham & George Meyer & David Mirkin & Mike Reiss & Mike Scully & Matt Selman & John Swartzwelder & Jon Vitti
directed by David Silverman

by Walter Chaw I had the great fortune to revisit Michael Almereyda's astounding Hamlet the other night with a smart, engaged audience, and more than once during Danny Boyle's Sunshine it occurred to me that Almereyda should've directed it. Almereyda, after all, would've made the movie beautiful and intelligent–wouldn't have leaned on genre conventions like a late picture boogeyman too much like Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty (and Blade Runner's just one of the dozens of pictures the film cribs from). He would've had sufficient faith in the premise to not muck it up with one metaphor for the fall of man too many. Sunshine is gorgeous for much of its run, however, good enough to merit comparison to Soderbergh's Solaris (though not Tarkovsky's, mind you–it's never that introspective) in its careful juxtaposition of human frailty against the awesome, insensate inscrutability of the universe. Set in a not-too-distant future where the sun is suffering from the need for a little jump-start, the picture opens seven years after the first expedition to save the world, the badly-/poignantly-named "Icarus I", has disappeared and a second expedition carrying the last of Earth's fissionable material ("Icarus II", natch) has been dispatched. Once they've encountered the rescue beacon of their predecessor, the ship's crew of seven–three of them Asian, which is really kind of amazing (a fourth is Maori)–gradually comes to realize that they're on a mission to touch the face of God.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

December 10, 2007****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Family, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Michael Goldenberg, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw It's a blasted earth, this green that holds Hogwarts now, and during a scene where our hero wizard is being tortured into forgetfulness for his own good, director David Yates cues a blanket of forgetful snow to fall. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (hereafter Harry Potter 5) is, likes its title suggests, a startling return to form for the series after Alfonso Cuarón's exceptional Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was followed by the insipid contribution of rom-com specialist Mike Newell. Gratifyingly complex and deliciously Freudian, a moment where Harry loses the last of his family–mirroring a moment in the third film where, on the banks of a lake, he almost loses himself–is preceded by an identical progression from the third film in which he's mistaken for his own father. Alas this time, Harry's not able to affect positive change in the guise of his dad; it's the boy becoming the man, frustrated and folded into a world of dread and doom. As drawn in the film, Potter's universe is like Potter's Field, a place where strangers and orphans are buried on the eve of war and a child's unavoidable matriculation into corruption. Harry Potter 5 is dark as pitch: unsettling, unsettled, unresolved, and utterly remarkable.

The Golden Compass (2007)

December 7, 20072000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Sam Elliott, Eva Green, Daniel Craig
screenplay by Chris Weitz, based on the novel by Philip Pullman
directed by Chris Weitz

by Walter Chaw The newest entry in the "what the fuck" hall of fame is Chris Weitz's deplorable, dull, nonsensical, unwatchable The Golden Compass, which comes packed to the gills with meaningless terms, arcane concepts, stupid names, and a narrative patchwork that plays like a game of "make-up" improvised by a hyperactive child. Arriving on a wave of controversy as right-wing hard-ons decry its anti-Christian tendencies (where were they for Beowulf?), the picture's full-on attack on good taste and coherent filmmaking are what they really should be protesting. Adherents will thrill, I suppose, although I doubt that atheists are as natively stupid as born-agains–but without a good working knowledge of the Pullman books upon which the film is based, I can't imagine anyone having a chance with this stuff. Impenetrable ain't the least of it. Weitz is completely outmatched by the material, trying too hard to cram all the gobbledygook about daemons and dust and witches and armoured bears he possibly can into every crevice available between the CGI sequences while leaving out huge, gaping expanses of necessary exposition in the process. If this wasn't bad enough, consider the sequence that begins with a 900 lb. polar bear wisely suggesting that a thin ice shelf can't support both his weight and that of his 80 lb. rider (sage, indeed)–thus necessitating their splitting up–and ends with said 900 lb. bear materializing out of nowhere to somehow surprise a bad guy from the front. Even with full knowledge of the Pullman books, the way the movie's put together is plodding, non-sequitous, inept.

Juno (2007)

December 7, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Teen, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman
screenplay by Diablo Cody
directed by Jason Reitman

by Walter Chaw Brutally overwritten, smug, and self-indulgent to no discernible point, Jason Reitman’s disappointing Juno is an unfortunate attempt to marry Judd Apatow’s sleazy morality plays with a Kevin Smith pop-cultural gabber–the result being a ventriloquism tract in which virgin screenwriter (formerly blogger) Diablo Cody crams so many unlikely gluts of verbiage into so many sterile, undeveloped characters that the whole production is the ultimate act of masturbatory puppetry. The movie would be twice as funny with half as many wisecracks–it’s so stuffed that there are long moments of zero interplay as one person or another acts as mute sounding board to whoever’s reeling off a Dennis Miller-ism. Red-flag time when a film acts as both main attraction and audience. Ellen Page stars as the titular Juno McGuff, a Soupy Sales-referencing sixteen-year-old who finds herself pregnant by her nebbish boyfriend, Bleeker (Michael Cera). Exactly: What 16-year-old references Soupy Sales? What 66-year-old? Look to something like Heathers for how to write absurdist dialogue–that film along with Clerks the chief antecedent for Juno, which isn’t as good as either because it wears its hipster cred like a chip on its shoulder. It’s also not very good because even though it’s about teen pregnancy, abortion, and adoption, it’s about nothing so much as quirky teen romance, revealing itself to be inclined towards mining laughter from dorkiness and thus allaying itself, too (and in the worst possible way), with Napoleon Dynamite.

Margot at the Wedding (2007) + The Savages (2007)

November 30, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING
***½/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Black, John Turturro
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

THE SAVAGES
**½/****
starring Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco
written and directed by Tamara Jenkins

by Walter Chaw As a big fan of Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming and The Squid and the Whale, I find myself jarred by his Rohmer-shrine Margot at the Wedding–not so much by its prickliness, but by how much that prickliness brings into harsh relief the clothed knife-blades in his previous work. It's easy to forget the young son in Squid telling his mother that she's ugly; I wonder if it isn't the lightness that tempers his first two pictures that's led Baumbach to craft a film full of the kind of stuff that elicits only the blackest laughter. There aren't any safety nets in Margot at the Wedding: though structurally (and a character's named "Pauline" to boot) it's Rohmer, in execution it's more than a bit Fassbinder, which is to say that it's a comedy of manners written with mean, acerbic precision, excoriating the educated bourgeois as intellectual leather freaks–sadomasochism as withering remarks and arch ripostes, a Dorothy Parker poem come to life. The Margot of the title, as played to alien, frostbitten perfection by Nicole Kidman, is a NEW YORKER contributor (and Jennifer Jason Leigh, as Margot's sister Pauline, played Mrs. Parker herself once upon a time) who's ventured out to wintry Long Island to talk her sister out of marrying schlub Malcolm (Jack Black). A tree growing onto the property of their bestial neighbours gives the film its trope and underclass antagonist, but Margot at the Wedding isn't a satire of the gulf that divides the intelligentsia from the unwashed so much it's as an observation that psychological pissing contests are pissing contests by any other name. The interludes in the picture are moments where Margot's boy Claude (Zane Pais) and eventually Margot herself peep on a couple engaged in mysterious carnal rites–sex of some sort, the dressing of a pig–that speaks to the idea that these hyper-educated people are divorced entire from their physical and native moral intelligence.

Bad Santa (2003) [The Unrated Version and Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

November 27, 20072000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Germany

Badder Santa (The Unrated Version)
*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
Bad Santa (Director's Cut)
**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Cox, Lauren Graham, John Ritter
screenplay by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa
directed by Terry Zwigoff

by Walter Chaw With a premise and producing credit for the Coen Brothers and direction by Ghost World's Terry Zwigoff, the film with the best pedigree of the season is Bad Santa, making its failure particularly depressing. Its tale of ace safecracker and dangerous drunk Willie (Billy Bob Thornton), brought on board an annual mall Santa scam by criminal mastermind Marcus (Tony Cox), isn't all that inventive upon closer scrutiny, with Zwigoff's interest in the peculiarities of loneliness exhibiting themselves this time as caustic to no end and displeasingly bitter. Worse, there are two shots in the film that appear to be direct cribs of Coen Brothers shots–the first a crash zoom into an alarm clock, the second a collapse by Willie identical to a shot of Frances McDormand falling into bed in Blood Simple; what alarms isn't the instinct to borrow from innovative filmmakers, but rather the feeling of desperation that flashy camera movements in an otherwise statically shot film indicates.

Superbad (2007) [Unrated Extended Edition] – DVD

November 19, 20072000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Seth Rogen, Bill Hader
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
directed by Greg Mottola

by Walter Chaw Raunchy teensploitation, sexploitation, you-name-itsploitation–it is what it is, and for what it is, Superbad‘s a fairly decent entry into Judd Apatow’s crusade for moral monogamy. What’s good about it is unsurprising (Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s script is occasionally brilliant–like when one kid speaks of looking into a kind-hearted rival’s eyes as “like the first time I heard The Beatles“), and what’s bad about it is unsurprising, too, such as its determination to be beloved beneath the crassness and scatology. I’ve come to the conclusion that this warm-fuzziness suggests not a heart so much a pulled punch; you compare Superbad to something like Revenge of the Nerds and find the latter’s themes of fellowship and family are unobtrusive, whereas the former is pushy to the point of searching glances and lingering goodbyes between its best-chum protagonists Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera). It’s terribly insightful on that point, mind you, that boys of a certain age often hold as their truest and deepest love the friendship of another boy they’ve known through the war years of early adolescence and high school. When college, or marriage, or even serious girlfriends intrude, men are invited to grow old into their new roles as civilians in the civil sense of the word. If you don’t, you have Rogen’s character in Knocked Up, or Steve Carell’s in The 40 Year Old Virgin–but even if you begin there, it seems this cycle of films is mainly interested in pushing them forward into the realm of the conventional.

Beowulf (2007)

November 16, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
screenplay by Neil Gaiman & Roger Avary
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Walter Chaw The Old English epic gets what feels like its twentieth adaptation in the last couple of years alone with Robert Zemeckis's Polar Express-ized–which is to say, digitally rotoscoped to distraction and peopled with pixel phantoms that look like dead-eyed Toussaud versions of the actors voicing them–Beowulf. Not that there aren't a few pretty cool moments (especially in IMAX 3D, the six-story screen doing wonders for the masturbatory shazam interludes), but the whole thing is decidedly unthrilling and so technologically interesting that it overwhelms any connection we might otherwise have with the story. I spent a lot of energy admiring the whiz-bang and almost none giving much of a shit about anything else. What won me over at the end is that it's completely ballsy in its anti-Christian tactic, suggesting a few weeks before The Golden Compass debuts that the general sea change against the evangelicals, if not predicted by the cinema, is at least reflected by it. A scene where a bishop played by John Malkovich is carried on a cross from his dragon-levelled church, hissing about "sins of the fathers," is almost as tricky as another where good king Beowulf (Ray Winstone) announces that the "Christ God" has done away with all heroes, replacing them with "fear and shame." I prefer my heresy in the subtler vintage minted by stuff like Matthew Robbins's Dragonslayer, but what the hell: if Hollywood's going to fire a shot across the Conservative bow, I'd rather they do it this way than with something like Lions for Lambs. Also cool is the casting of Crispin Glover as evil troll Grendel.

RoboCop (1987) [20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition] – DVD

November 14, 20071980s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras A+
starring Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Daniel O'Herlihy, Ronny Cox
screenplay by Edward Neumeier & Michael Miner
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw I feel like I must've seen RoboCop, one of the key films slotted into my moviegoing sweet spot, at least two dozen times one summer on a shitty bootleg I made by hooking two VCRs together–the now-defunct Orion being one of those companies that apparently never adopted Macrovision to discourage such a thing. I watched it in regular rotation with the big movies of 1986¹ (Aliens, Big Trouble in Little China, Highlander, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Manhunter, Cronenberg's The Fly², Blue Velvet) and 1987 (Predator, The Untouchables, Evil Dead II, Angel Heart, Innerspace, Near Dark, The Hidden, Full Metal Jacket, The Princess Bride, Hellraiser, Raising Arizona, The Living Daylights, The Big Easy, and Lethal Weapon). Those years in which I went from thirteen-to-fourteen in a haze of hormonal delirium (9½ Weeks, No Way Out, and Fatal Attraction are in my onanistic hall of fame) I consumed more film than I ever would again until fashioning movie-watching into a pastime resembling a career. I developed the ability to distinguish between popular movies and movies I was supposed to like (Manon of the Spring–the medicine of it going down smoother thanks to the not-shy Emmanuelle Béart) and began keeping journals of my adventures at the cineplex (Union Square Six, Green Mountain Six, Westland Two, Lakeside Two, Cinderella Drive-In–all gone now), carefully stapling my ticket stubs to the page as some tithe to my flickering, twilit devotionals. Movies were the angel/devil at war on my shoulders: morality and venality; virtue and hedonism; good and evil; Apollo and Dionysus; the sun and the moon. I ebbed and flowed with them. It would be another five years before I fully understood the import of cinema in articulating a good portion of my worldview–not to mention almost all of the strategies with which I deconstructed other mediums. I was lulled by the popular opinion of my generation that movies were not worthwhile objects of devotion and so I channelled my attention in formal education into poetry and literature–but the space between mattress-and-box-spring was always stuffed with this secret totem.

Lions for Lambs (2007)

November 9, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, War

½*/****
starring Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Derek Luke
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan
directed by Robert Redford

by Walter Chaw Stilted, awkward, an Ayn Rand screed complete with straw men and pontiffs poised to burn them down, Robert Redford's smug, self-satisfied liberal weltschmerz anthem Lions for Lambs is tailor-made for festival-season standing ovations. It's the prime example of why a lot of Republicans get away with calling Hollywood–the single highest concentration of Big Business and corporate interest outside the Beltway–a lefty hotbed of pinko nonsense carried on a cloud of flatulent hot air. It's a prime example, too, of why it's so hard to vote for Democrats even when the alternative is the GOP. Put this one on the shelf between Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe and this year's deplorable Rendition–movies so earnest in their chest-pounding pontification that it's impossible to imagine on the one hand who could be converted by them and on the other who could resist changing their party affiliation out of sheer embarrassment. In this one, the call is for activism in whatever form said activism might take just for the sake of doing something, damnit. To quote a guy writing in the 1920s, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Martian Child (2007) + Bee Movie (2007)

November 1, 20072000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Theatrical

MARTIAN CHILD
½*/****
starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Sophie Okonedo, Joan Cusack
screenplay by Seth E. Bass & Jonathan Tolins, based on the novel The Martian Child by David Gerrold
directed by Menno Meyjes

BEE MOVIE
*/****
screenplay by Jerry Seinfeld and Spike Feresten & Barry Marder & Andy Robin
directed by Simon J. Smith, Steve Hickner

by Walter Chaw If not for a moment where John Cusack delivers in his Cusack Patter™ a speech about the beauty of love in a temporary world, there would be nothing at all to recommend Martian Child. It's a heartless bit of heartfelt pap wherein widower and sci-fi author David (Cusack™) decides on an apparent whim to adopt crazy-ass little boy Dennis (Bobby Coleman) from a day-care/orphanage that should have its license revoked. The little kid looks and acts like Michael Jackson, complete with DayGlo complexion, parasol, and breathy squeak-talk from the Jennifer Lopez school of urgency, turning Coleman's into the most irritating performance since the last time Lopez was in anything. Closer to the point, the screenplay is a series of non-reactive statements expected to be taken at face value: that this dude would adopt a quirkily-disabled kleptomaniac freakshow and feel the sting of parental devotion, for instance, or that the two of them would teach each other to, gulp, love again. It all plays like an Oliver Sacks case study by the end, a Paul Simon adult-contemporary story-song–The Boy on the Specimen Tray and the Dog Reaction Shot.