Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 76 of 146

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

October 19, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola & Jason Schwartzman
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw If there's a Wes Anderson cult, I guess you should sign me up. His latest, The Darjeeling Limited, represents to me a maturing artist grappling with the stagnation of the relationship between fathers and sons. This notion that the relationship's reconciliation can only be arrived at posthumously is devastating–not because it's bleak, but because more often than not it holds true. Accordingly, Anderson's picture only has the suggestion of a father (unlike the surrogate father of The Life Aquatic or the redeemable father of The Royal Tenenbaums) at its beginning and maybe a spectre of a father played in cameo by Bill Murray, chasing down the titular train in the film's already-emotional prologue. I've offered that my appreciation of Anderson's work in the past has necessitated multiple viewings (if I'd had a second look at The Royal Tenenbaums prior to composing my year-end list in 2001, it wouldn't have had much competition for the top spot), but found The Darjeeling Limited to be affecting from the start. Something to do with a familiarity with Anderson, perhaps, or with Anderson growing up from the precocious scamp of Rushmore into the ravaged visage of Francis Whitman (Owen Wilson), the eldest of the three Whitman brothers, called to India after a year's estrangement on a quest for spiritual discovery in Satyajit Ray country. (Indeed, the film's score is cobbled together from snippets of Ray's music as well as a few choice cuts from The Kinks–the use of "This Time Tomorrow" from Lola vs. the Powerman & the Money-Go-Round, Pt. 1 is nearly as exquisite as the use of the Rolling Stones' "Play With Fire" late in the picture.) More probably, I connected instantly with The Darjeeling Limited, a film about mourning the death of a father, because I've been doing the same thing–imperfectly, badly–for almost exactly four years now.

The Reaping (2007) – DVD

October 15, 20072000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Thriller

*/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Hilary Swank, David Morrissey, Idris Elba, Stephen Rea
screenplay by Carey W. Hayes & Chad Hayes
directed by Stephen Hopkins

by Walter Chaw Brave enough to show a few kid corpses hanging up in a basement but not brave enough to actually be about a tormented woman murdering an adorable antichrist, Stephen Hopkins's The Reaping harvests its share of not-startling jump scares and not-interesting scripture for a frugal repast of mainstream diddle. Neither bad in the way of End of Days nor good in the way of Stigmata, it is instead another millennial picture about sacrificing our children to questionable causes and Old Testament vengeance wrought upon the unholy. I understand why we get films like this in 2007, films full of dead kids and religious wrath, but understanding why isn't the same thing as valuing the picture. Its confusion between being neo-conservative while believing that it's ultra-liberal muddies the final "twist" of the picture, posing the interesting conundrum of whether or not abortion is okay if the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Though it's pretty clear where the film has led its audience, that doesn't make the question any less thorny. (What it does do is make The Reaping's consummate, dedicated emptiness its only lingering aftertaste.) Count as its scattershot sources Rosemary's Baby, The Bad Seed, The Amityville Horror, Alien, I Walked with a Zombie, The Skeleton Key, Exorcist: The Beginning, and so on–the only purpose of composing such a list to point out how much the film allows for masturbatory skylarking, harking back to genre pictures better and worse.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

October 12, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, France, Germany, UK, War

½*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen, Samantha Morton
screenplay by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst
directed by Shekhar Kapur

by Walter Chaw I don't mind historical pictures that aren't historically accurate until that historical inaccuracy–like in U-571, for instance–becomes so fucking retarded that it lowers the temperature of the room. Elizabeth: The Golden Age is just that fucking stupid. Should being dumb not be reason enough to avoid this movie, know that it's also unintentionally hilarious, appears to have had its screenplay ghost-written by Bob Dylan, and casts Catholics and Spaniards as Skeksis in some perverse re-imagining of The Dark Crystal as a psychodrama about the cherry-busting beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton, dreadfully wasted) and penile conjugation-by-double-proxy of rapscallion Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) into the hallowed womb (and womb-like cathedral interiors of this England). Cate Blanchett reprises her role from director Shekhar Kapur's first Bollywoodization of British history (he made one other, The Four Feathers, in between) as the Virgin Queen born fully-formed from the school of Arch and Tic. (I wonder if soon there'll be any actresses left who haven't played one Elizabeth or another–seems the distaff "Hamlet" proving ground of our time.) There's a Nostradamus character for whatever goddamned reason, a candlelit bath scene only because it's mandated in sub-BBC pieces of shit like this, and a thinly-veiled CIA spook, Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), who acts as Elizabeth's chief intelligence officer.

28 Weeks Later (2007) – DVD

October 8, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Spain, Thriller, UK, Zombie

****/**** Image N/A Sound A Extras B
starring Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Idris Elba
screenplay by Rowan Joffe, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, E.L. Lavigne, Jesús Olmo
directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

Walter Chaw It’s phenomenal. Where 28 Days Later… was saddled with ambition that exceeded its reach and, in Danny Boyle, a director who not only disdained the genre but has otherwise proven himself a grade-A tool as well, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s sequel 28 Weeks Later is brutally graceful in its vision of a nuclear family’s dissolution as the metaphor for a broader, collective unrest. The triumph of the picture, though, is that it’s as succinct and eloquent as a heart attack; as a parable of the Iraq War (popularly called “The War in Iraq,” a subtle semantic distancing technique particularly trenchant to this discussion), it’s all about aftermath and occupation. It’s impossible not to compare it to the years and tens of thousands of fatalities since the declaration of “mission accomplished” when the picture begins with the reassurance that everything’s peachy in dead-as-a-doornail England. Repatriation and reconstruction have begun six months after the outbreak of the first film’s “rage virus,” reuniting two kids, Tammy (future superstar Imogen Poots) and Andy (Harry Potter-named Mackintosh Muggleton), with their tightly-wound da’, Don (Robert Carlyle). In an end-of-the-world opening in what only appears to be night (it’s the first of several brilliant reversals), we see how a fissure develops in Don’s marriage to wife Alice (Catherine McCormack), and of how that stress fracture becomes the foundation for the rest of the picture’s relationships and politics.

Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007) – DVD

October 2, 20072000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, Germany, Horror

*½/**** Image N/A Sound C+ Extras C
starring Erica Leerhsen, Henry Rollins, Texas Battle, Aleksa Palladino
screenplay by Turi Meyer & Al Septien
directed by Joe Lynch

by Walter Chaw As the first half is so abominable, colour me surprised that the second half of Joe Lynch's DTV sequel Wrong Turn 2 is actually good in a nominal way, dipping into the backwoods family well in a wonderfully derivative banquet sequence (borrowing from the first and third Texas Chain Saw Massacre pictures) and offering up bits of inventive, comic-book gore along the way. It's never scary and never tense, but it does feature scream queen Erica Leerhsen in another performance that's leagues better than the film she's in deserves. What's missing is that sense of pathos that defines the horror pictures of the '70s: Where the first film replaced it with glib ugliness, this one replaces it with smirking self-consciousness–neither tactic doing much to honour the idea that the family that slays together, etc., making the late-game sparks of brilliance ring suspiciously like glad-handing, happy horseshit. I appreciate that the cannibal hillbillies are given a family structure by the end of the piece–I just wish that that family wasn't the Cosbys. It's not really supposed to feel like a sitcom, is it?

Eastern Promises (2007)

September 26, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Viggo Moretensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl
screenplay by Steve Knight
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw As executed by our pre-eminent insect anthropologist, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is more fairytale than thriller, one that finds new muse Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the rising star of an émigré Russian mob family taken root in the heart of London within the red velvet-lined walls of a restaurant innocuously-/romantically-named “Trans-Siberian.” Self-described as “wolfish,” this pack is led by grandfatherly Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who’s disappointed with his ineffectual son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and looking to replace him with a surrogate heir. The rot of that familial discord throws its roots back to ferocious opening minutes that see first a vicious throat-slashing, then a fourteen-year-old, pregnant prostitute haemorrhaging on the floor of a drugstore after she’s told that, for Methadone, the pharmacist will need a prescription. Cronenberg’s London is a cess seething beneath a veneer of “normalcy”; regarded as a toxic tabernacle in Spider, the city is transformed here into a garish, meticulously theatrical wonderland. The central problem of the picture has a lot to do with the idea that Cronenberg has again taken a pre-existing script and reordered it along distinctly Cronenbergian lines–that what must have read initially as a sociological text on another facet of the immigrant experience (much like screenwriter Steve Knight’s Dirty Pretty Things) now plays like one of Cronenberg’s investigations into the difficulty of parsing concepts like “normal” and “family” in the crushing crucible of bugs pretending to be human among humans.

300 (2007) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

September 24, 20072000s, Action, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Bulgaria, Canada, Drama, DVD, War

*/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Dominic West
screenplay by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw There's an idea in the ancient world about a "beautiful death," achievable for the warrior only in mortal, one-on-one wartime combat–an idea that may have contributed to the length of the Trojan siege, and an idea vocalized by one of the captains serving under Spartan King Leonides (Gerard Butler) in Zack Snyder's 300. Based on Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same name, the film betrays a lot of the same macho aesthetic as Robert Rodriguez's adaptation of Miller's Sin City–but rather than content itself with the literally bestial terms of glory in the masculine psyche, it makes a play for allegory and equivocal morality (of all things) in the valorization of Sparta and the romanticization of a crushing military defeat. It's not that Leonides is seen martyred in the end in a tableau explicitly meant to evoke the passion of St. Sebastian, but that he goes out pining for his wife like a lovesick hamster, thus completing 300's devolution from remorseless Spartan militarism into gushy democratic idealism and all manner of liberal maladies. There's little profit in establishing the rules of this universe as uncompromising and brutal (it opens on a field of infant skulls–victims of a Spartan culling ritual of its own kind) if its intentions split time between justifying, in non-chest-beating terms, the decision to pit three-hundred against thousands while denying the Spartans their individual moments of "beautiful death" in favour of some collective date with pyrrhic immortality. History suggests that the Spartans, having exhausted their arms, died scratching and clawing with their bare hands; 300 suggests they died calling for their mothers and wives.

Dexter: The First Season (2006) – DVD

September 18, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
"Dexter," "Crocodile," "The Popping Cherry," "Let's Give the Boy a Hand," "Love American Style," "Return to Sender," "Circle of Friends," "Shrink Wrap," "Father Knows Best," "Seeing Red," "Truth Be Told," "Born Free"

by Walter Chaw "Dexter" sucks in that special Showtime way. It has nothing for the soul–not because it's nihilistic, but because it isn't. It's "The Facts of Life" crossed with "Matlock" starring a good-hearted serial killer; a superhero melodrama along the lines of "The Incredible Hulk" whose self-contained mysteries are held together ever so loosely by a season-long thread involving a manhunt. What I'm trying to say is that it's unbelievably patronizing. It's not nuanced, not laden with depth–it's a quirk machine, facile and shallow. See, a serial killer with heart isn't "deep," it's a sketch. It's the black guy who thinks he's white, the horny old lady, the hooker with a heart of gold. What begins as a really fun-seeming premise is undone utterly by a succession of weak scripts and, with the exception of Michael C. Hall's virtuoso turn as a sociopath working as a blood-spatter expert in Miami, slack performances. He's a lot better than the material deserves, it goes without saying, but like Mary-Louise Parker in the similarly pandering, similarly terrible Showtime series "Weeds", he's just good enough to prolong the show's already-lamentable existence. Maybe the real argument pertains to the wisdom of creating a series about something so heinous in such a way that it trips no sensitivity meters. It's a time bomb hidden in a teddy bear–and then the bomb doesn't go off.

Lucky You (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

September 17, 20072000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Sports

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore, Robert Duvall, Debra Messing
screenplay by Eric Roth & Curtis Hanson
directed by Curtis Hanson

by Walter Chaw Trapped in the doldrums between Robert Duvall doing his elderly, patting people on the hand while he's talking bit and Drew Barrymore enunciating every word as though she's trying not to let the marble fall out, Eric Bana struggles against stardom once again but states a case for it just the same. The vehicle this time is Curtis Hanson's Lucky You, a mainstream poker picture that re-establishes Hanson as a less ambitious James L. Brooks (which isn't altogether a bad thing). Bana is compulsive gambler Huck Cheever, named after an American writer and an antiquated term for a wheeler/dealer, thus neatly encapsulating his character as not only a con-man and a bit of an asshole but also moony and eloquent. There's nothing at all surprising about the way the film moves towards its conclusion, and even its twist loses its lustre beneath the steady drone of its interiors. It's an un-ironic love story featuring a problem gambler, a girl fresh off the bus, and a father/son subplot packing all the subtlety of a heart attack–which makes it, of course, suddenly Pollyannaish when it yearns so mightily for world-weary. Lucky You looks like a gambler, but it acts like a diagram instead of a train accident.

Deadwood: The Complete Third Season (2006) + Rome: The Complete First Season (2005) – DVDs

September 8, 20072000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Television, Western

DEADWOOD: THE COMPLETE THIRD SEASON
Image A Sound A Extras A+
"Tell Your God to Ready for Blood," "I Am Not The Fine Man You Take Me For," "True Colors," "Full Faith And Credit," "A Two-Headed Beast," "A Rich Find," "Unauthorized Cinnamon," "Leviathan Smiles," "Amateur Night," "A Constant Throb," "The Catbird Seat," "Tell Him Something Pretty"

ROME: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image A Sound A Extras C
"The Stolen Eagle," "How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Republic," "An Owl in a Thornbush," "Stealing From Saturn," "The Ram Has Touched The Wall," "Egeria," "Pharsalus," "Caesarion," "Utica," "Triumph," "The Spoils," "Kalends of February"

by Walter Chaw HBO is the watermark for televised drama, no question. With "The Sopranos"–which began like high-concept and ended like avant-garde–as their flagship, they've progressed through the psychic devastation of "Six Feet Under" (was there ever a final episode of any series so steeped in existential terror?), the insouciance of "Entourage", the social nihilism of "Curb Your Enthusiasm", and the repugnant popular deviance of "Sex in the City", only to find as their bedrock circa 2007 something so slight (if so brilliant) as "Flight of the Conchords". Two contenders for that crown, "Rome" and "Deadwood", alas received their walking papers, victims of too high a budget, too heavy a burden of viewer investment (can I confess that I didn't like "Deadwood" until I started it from the first episode?), and too niche a viewership. I hesitate to compare even the extraordinarily-similar-feeling "Rome" to the channel's short-lived (equally short-lived, in fact: two seasons) "Carnivàle", but I do wonder whether "Deadwood" and "Rome" weren't nixed because they weren't interested in seducing new lovers and may have seemed, from the outside, like so much dry coming and going, talking of Michelangelo.

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

September 7, 20072000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Western

***/****
starring Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Peter Fonda, Gretchen Mol
screenplay by Halsted Welles and Michael Brandt & Derek Haas, based on the short story by Elmore Leonard
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw The distance–chronologically, ideologically–between the release of James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma and Andrew Dominick's looming The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford strikes me as identical to the space that connects Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch with Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand. The exhaustion in our popular culture feels the same; the nihilism feels the same; the fatalism with which a lot of us look at our political prospects (the incumbents are bums, the insurgents are morons) feels the same. You compare Peckinpah's criminal heroes, burnt by the sun into animated saddle bags, motivated by gold and orgies to go to their doom in blasted, godless places south of some metaphorical border, to Fonda's retinue of burnt-out, disillusioned, disenfranchised yippies and graceless lugs, and you're able to crystallize somehow a picture of how, even in the space of a single administration, the coarse diving bell of our basest natures is collapsed by too much terrible knowledge. (Compare Fonda in his own film to Fonda's wonderful cameo in this one–the dream is dead, indeed.) You can only fall back on how natural it is to be a bastard for so long before philosophical reflection rears its ugly head. The internal progression of Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde provides the template of this motion all by itself: The midpoint of that film, as Bonnie visits her mother on a soft-focus, sepia-smeared dirt farm, represents the generational gulf, sure, but also the turning point between the innocent bloodshed of that picture's celebratory first half and the strive towards domestic "normalcy" of its doomed second. I wonder if what lingers (and what initially so offended) about Bonnie & Clyde wasn't the gore and the sex but instead the suggestion that the way things are, just the act of growing old murders the spirit.

The Warriors (1979) [Ultimate Director’s Cut] + A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006) – DVDs

September 4, 20071970s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

THE WARRIORS
***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
starring Michael Beck, James Remar, David Patrick Kelly, Deborah Van Valkenburgh
screenplay by David Shaber and Walter Hill, based on the novel by Sol Yurick
directed by Walter Hill

A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Robert Downey Jr., Shia LaBeouf, Chazz Palminteri, Rosario Dawson
written and directed by Dito Montiel

by Walter Chaw Walter Hill's The Warriors adapts a Sol Yurick novel which was, in turn, inspired by Greek soldier Xenophon's Anabasis, the account of a mercenary army stranded in the heart of Mesopotamia circa 400 B.C. that fought its way north to the coast of the Black Sea and then to safety. Accordingly, The Warriors is about the titular New York street gang–based in Coney Island, naturally–fighting its way through enemy territory from The Bronx back to the coast. That they've ventured so far from home has to do with a giant gathering of the city's gangs to a rally/riot called by charismatic kingpin Cyrus (Roger Hill) in the hope of uniting the Big Apple's diverse miscreants under a common flag. Shades of Abbie Hoffman's Chicago Democratic Convention Yippie movement if you squint hard enough, but closer to the truth to locate the shard of revolution eternally sharpened against the promise that if all the minorities were to rise up collectively, they'd be the majority. Luckily for the majority, much of the minority is what it is because of its total inability to stand behind a common cause. Sure enough, once Cyrus is assassinated and the Warriors blamed, our heroes face a midnight odyssey through badlands patrolled by harlequin-painted baseball goons, Amazon/succubi, and overalls-wearing neo-hillbillies.

Halloween (2007)

August 30, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Malcolm McDowell, Sherri Moon Zombie, Scout Taylor-Compton, William Forsythe
screenplay by Rob Zombie, based on the screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw If Rob Zombie ever decides to direct a horror movie, watch out. To date, up to and including his remake of John Carpenter's legendary Halloween, he's presented us a series of family melodramas peppered with modest genre references and exploitation flourishes. His best film, The Devil's Rejects, is widely misread and underestimated, the most common complaint being that it isn't scary. It's a lot like complaining that Ordinary People isn't scary. But I'd challenge anyone to come up with many more ebullient, honest moments of uplift than the conclusion of that film (set to "Free Bird" of all things), as Zombie's miscreant clan makes a bid to let their freak flag fly in the middle of the American desert. His pictures are throwbacks to the Seventies in more ways than their relationship to drive-in and grindhouse fare: they're lovely odes to a sense of frustrated possibilities in a United States suffering the first throes of post-Sixties culture shock. It goes hand-in-hand with the Nixonian westerns littering the popular culture in the new millennium; no surprise to me that this administration–and the attendant feeling of paranoia and cynicism befouling our air–encourages this kind of revisionism, and really, who better than Zombie to helm an update of Carpenter's seminal slasher?

Unaccompanied Minors (2006) – DVD

August 20, 20072000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image D+ Sound B- Extras D+
starring Lewis Black, Wilmer Valderrama, Tyler James Williams, Dyllan Christopher
screenplay by Jacob Meszaros & Mya Stark
directed by Paul Feig

by Walter Chaw The bare bones of it–misfit kids stranded, The Breakfast Club-like, in a relationship pressure-cooker–seems tailor-made for "Freaks and Geeks" co-creator Paul Feig, but the fact that it plays out in a series of deadening, eternally-unspooling pratfalls and Catskills set-ups and payoffs proves that it's possible for good artists to produce bad art. Feig getting work at all (ditto erstwhile partner-in-crime Judd Apatow, who's sadly already used up a good bit of good will) in Hollywood suggests that the same blindness that finds consistent employment for Michael Bay and Brett Ratner will sometimes smile on good, smart people like Feig. That being said, Unaccompanied Minors is appalling. If it's not offensive in any substantive sense, it's bad by almost every measure of quality. People defending things like this children-running-amuck slapstick piece–which demonstrates precious little in the way of focus or restraint (think Baby's Day Out or any Home Alone sequel, but without the depth)–because their children like it would have their kids taken away from them were they to apply this rationale to food, toys, friends, schools, car seats, and so on. The reason we don't let youngsters vote and sign contracts is that their judgment is for shit, and if we want to keep them from setting themselves on fire we ought to be protecting them from this stuff, too, not indulging their affinity for it.

The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007) [Unrated] – DVD

August 15, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Thriller, Wes Craven, ZERO STARS

The Hills Have Eyes II
ZERO STARS/**** Image N/A Sound A Extras D
starring Michael McMillian, Jessica Stroup, Daniella Alonso, Jacob Vargas
screenplay by Wes Craven & Jonathan Craven
directed by Martin Weisz

by Walter Chaw I don't have any real objection to anything depicted in The Hills Have Eyes II: not to the live-birth prologue that ends with the grisly murder of the mother; not to the greenstick demise of one National Guardsman or the death-by-feces of another; not even to the brutal rape of still another enlistee whose very existence opens the door for an ugly sequel. No: testament to the howling ineptitude of the enterprise is that its every desperate attempt to offend fails miserably. It's so poorly directed and edited, in fact, that not only is nothing frightening (which is to be expected, frankly)–nothing's surprising, either. Every jump scare is completely telegraphed, the nigh-invulnerability of the bad guys is totally predictable, and every fatality of every alleged hero is delivered sans pathos or, really, consequence. It doesn't matter who dies because who lives has already been decided within the first few minutes. What's more, it's already been divined by the dullest member of the audience–said dull member the only one who gives enough of a shit to try to figure it out in the first place and stick it out through to the end. The sole reason why anyone would watch the whole thing would be if they were paid to do so, and even then, it's only money. Let me stress, though, that you're not leaving because the movie is horrific, appalling, and a moral vacuum–you're leaving because it sucks balls.

Stardust (2007) + Interview (2007)

August 14, 20072000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Netherlands, Robert De Niro, Romance, Theatrical, UK

STARDUST
***½/****
starring Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Sienna Miller, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman
directed by Matthew Vaughn

INTERVIEW
*/****
starring Sienna Miller, Steve Buscemi
screenplay by David Schecter and Steve Buscemi, based on the film by Theo Van Gogh
directed by Steve Buscemi

by Walter Chaw I do wonder about films that don't seem to be about anything, but I'll say this at the outset: Matthew Vaughn's Stardust, based on a book by Neil Gaiman, isn't about anything at all–and it's wonderful. Far from empty-headed, though, Stardust is a deeply meaningful series of sweet-nothings, wholly apolitical even in a macho supporting character revealed as a cross-dresser and hair stylist; and by its end, it wins not in spite of being so exuberant in its indulgence of flamboyant clichés, but because it is. It's so much better than the trailers and Gaiman's track record as a novelist (his métier is decidedly rooted in the comics) would lead you to believe, while the inevitable comparisons to The Princess Bride are misleading because The Princess Bride is a piece of shit. A beloved piece of shit, but a piece of shit just the same. On the contrary, Stardust is extremely well-made despite an opening half-hour that boasts of a few too many long establishing shots, directed with real snap by Guy Ritchie's former producer Matthew Vaughn (who did the same with Layer Cake) and executed by a stellar cast that includes a literally incandescent Claire Danes as a fallen star named Yvaine and Michelle Pfeiffer as a hideous bitch goddess, which, given that Stardust follows on the heels of Hairspray, appears to be the vehicle of her late-career comeback. More difficult to embrace is Robert De Niro as the film's Dread Pirate Roberts, a fencing mentor who happens, in this incarnation, to be a ballroom-dancing guru as well. The instinct is to recoil, but damned if it isn't the first De Niro performance in his self-parodic period that's both spot-on in its auto-satire and funny to boot.

Reign Over Me (2007) + TMNT (2007)|TMNT – DVD

August 5, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Hong Kong, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

REIGN OVER ME
**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Jada Pinkett Smith, Liv Tyler
written and directed by Mike Binder

TMNT
*/****
written and directed by Kevin Munroe

by Walter Chaw In response to the charge that critics are "downers" because they're too judgmental, a colleague and friend said on a panel that I participated in that some films only deserve judgment. It's a wonderfully bleak declaration, and dead on–think of it as an expansion of Pauline Kael's belief that no one ever takes the time to bash terrible pictures. But there's more to it than simply that brittle shattering of cinema's impregnable mythic mystique. I think certain movies deflect even judgment–movies that are the exact equivalent of, say, Michael Bolton and Kenny G collaborating on a cover of a Richard Marx song. Rail against them if you must, but there's no sport in it, and definitely no swaying of the assembled masses. There are films that are what they are, deserving neither praise nor condemnation in providing precisely the comfort of a tattered terry cloth robe worn ritualistically until disintegration. It's possible to meticulously, ruthlessly, intellectually deconstruct the aesthetic and functional properties of a favourite pair of sneakers, you know, but it's masturbatory and redundant and like swatting a fly with a Buick. I suspect that deep down everyone knows films like Reign Over Me and TMNT are as worthless as a plug nickel, that their appeal lies entirely in the fact that they'll present no surprises along with their usual meek payload of cheap emotional prattle and pocket uplift. And I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with that, either–I'm just saying I feel like I don't have much more to say after reviewing the same fucking movie about a dozen times a year.

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

August 2, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, France, Germany, Mystery, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Joan Allen
screenplay by Tony Gilroy and George Nolfi, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw I look at the first film in this very fine trilogy as Jason Bourne embodying Harrison Ford’s Deckard character from Blade Runner: someone with hidden potential and a certain confusion about his place in the world–and the kind of figure Matt Damon is best at portraying, as it happens. I see the second film as Bourne-as-Roy Batty: robotic, violent, inexorable, and at the end of his string, valuing life and looking to make what amends he can. This third film, The Bourne Ultimatum, directed again by Paul Greengrass and welcoming several key players (Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, Damon, screenwriter Tony Gilroy, DP Oliver Wood) back into the fold, ties both strings together: Bourne inhabiting his potential as something of an unparalleled killing machine while, simultaneously, becoming more human in his machine-like purposefulness. If there’s a feeling we’ve been here before, mark that down as the inevitable side-effect of staying just a little too long with a series that, to this point, had yet to make any missteps, minor or otherwise. Consequently this film, more than the other two, feels like a straight line: less improvisation, more inevitability, all of it leading to the moment where our hero, the merciless assassin, decides whether his training to be an instrument overrules his instinct to be a human. It can’t be a surprise anymore, so all that’s left is that it be true.

Mr. Skeffington (1944) + The Star (1952) – DVDs

July 25, 20071940s, 1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

MR. SKEFFINGTON
½*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Bette Davis, Claude Rains, Walter Abel, Richard Waring
screenplay by Julius J. Epstein & Philip G. Epstein
directed by Vincent Sherman

THE STAR
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Bette Davis, Sterling Hayden, Natalie Wood, Warner Anderson
screenplay by Katherine Albert and Dale Eunson
directed by Stuart Heisler

by Walter Chaw Biographers and geeks would be right to point out that Bette Davis spent her late career–on screen and, abortively, on stage–getting in her own way, while cynics and realists would be right to point out that the one most probably led to the other, if we're to take "the other" as autobiographical. Even people resistant to the auteur theory tend to recognize that matinee idols shoulder at least a fair share of the blame for picking vanity pieces and assorted flaming trainwrecks from the piles of projects offered them. If there's a fair modern, distaff analogue to Bette Davis's embarrassing epilogue in self-abnegating camp artifacts, it's Burt Reynolds's own squandering of his status as the biggest thing on planet Hollywood for a series of vainglorious redneck "gorsh!" spectacles that tied him eternally with Dom DeLuise and, oh my, Hal Needham. Consider that both have earned a small, rabid band of indefatigable defenders of their late, self-inflicted careers (gay men for Bette, assholes for Burt) for nothing more than confirming their respective lifestyles of bitchy flamboyance on the one side and dimwitted macho rebellion on the other. They're cults of personality by the very definition of "cultism," founded on the shale of limited appeal and the arrested desire to emulate someone you admire. (See also: the army of SAHMs shuffling after Oprah.) I guess you could say that although I get it, I'm not down with the cult of Bette.

Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) – DVD

July 24, 20072000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Romance

**½/**** Image B Sound A Extras D
starring Chow Yun Fat, Gong Li, Jay Chou, Liu Ye
screenplay by Zhang Yimou, Wu Nan, Bian Zhihong
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw I recently had the opportunity to see for the first time the cut of Zhang Yimou's virtuoso Hero prepared for Yankee viewers, complete with the subtitles and framing cards slapped on by American distributors. Before now, the only contact I'd had with the film was through a region-free DVD from Hong Kong that preceded the U.S. theatrical release by a couple of years. (After buying the rights to it, Miramax, you'll recall, decided to sit on it until such time as its unleashing wouldn't somehow interfere with timeless masterpieces of misguided schlock like Cold Mountain.) Anyway, I was appalled. The extent to which Hero has been dumbed-down–the insertion of "our country" for a term that means, in Mandarin, "beneath the sky" drums up this weird nationalistic gumbo at the end where, before, it was sober and idealistic–manages to paint Zhang as the worst kind of toad. There's an animated map at the beginning now, I guess to show the great unwashed American moron that there is land outside the range of purple mountains majesty, while much mystical bullshit about "over two thousand years ago" mainly obscures the fact that Hero takes place well over two thousand years ago. I feel a lot of anger towards what's been done to one of the best films ever to come out of the Mainland to make it more suited for white consumption, both because of the sacrilege and because whoever's responsible has a lot of answering to do for how far they've undersold the intelligence of Western audiences. I finally understand why a lot of people in the United States didn't think much of Hero: the version I saw was a Zhang Yimou picture, whereas the version most in this country saw was a Miramax picture.