Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 78 of 149

Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! (2008)

March 14, 20082000s, 2008, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Theatrical

***/****
screenplay by Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul, based on the book by Dr. Seuss
directed by Jimmy Hayward & Steve Martino

by Walter Chaw Surprised as anyone to be saying it, but Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! is actually pretty good. It’s a climate-change kind of flick, as you might imagine, or at least that’s the prism du jour through which one must view a world afflicted by weird weather patterns on the brink of complete annihilation. Likewise, when the residents of microbial Whoville are enlisted to participate in their own salvation (despite a feckless, flat-earther ruling party urging them to fiddle while Rome melts), it points a rather stern, Seussian finger at the fringe holdouts who still feel that evolution and global warming are theories in dispute. (I personally like the argument that because things are getting colder, it proves that global warming isn’t happening–which is, let’s face it, almost as ignorant as the idea that someone buried dinosaur bones to fool us into thinking there was a world before Man.) Not so much in dispute is this idea that films–especially genre films like this–are often the first indicators in popular culture of the things that infect us, that make us worried for ourselves and for our children. Heartening to find entertainment directed at kids that applies the cautionary warning of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to our heritage of instantly Oprah-fying atrocity–and that provides a CGI context for Dr. Seuss’s sometimes-terrifyingly surreal imagery to spend no time gawping at its own invention.

Nancy Drew (2007) – DVD

March 9, 20082000s, 2007, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Family, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Emma Roberts, Josh Flitter, Max Thieriot, Tate Donovan
screenplay by Andrew Fleming and Tiffany Paulsen
directed by Andrew Fleming

by Walter Chaw Andrew Fleming’s Nancy Drew isn’t just bad, it’s fascinatingly bad. From minute one, it’s an example of what happens when nobody knows what the hell is going on and doesn’t have the wit to hide it. It suffers from the same malady as Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End in that it’s only confusing if you walk into it believing there’s something to figure out–but unlike that picture, this one has so little in the way of internal coherence that it’s almost a work of surrealism. When teen sleuth Nancy (a fetching yet robotic Emma Roberts) awakens to find herself abducted in an old projection booth, she doesn’t panic and search for exits, she stands up, collects her compass (why does anyone need a compass in the middle of Los Angeles? Dunno), and heads straight for a little window that she promptly opens onto a scaffolding, thus enabling her snickersnack escape. It mirrors an earlier scene in which Nancy discovers a letter pivotal to the picture’s central mystery stuck in an old book that, as executed, has all the weight and import of every other indecipherable, non-linear, Dada scene in the piece. I’m not suggesting, even, that there’s no tension in the film, as there’s tension galore in trying to follow, much less predict, its astonishing leaps of baffling, shit-headed incongruity. There are no impulses that make sense, no characters with either a toehold in our reality or a justification for their existence (and the only people who might give a damn about Nancy Drew as an institution are too old to see the film on their own and unlikely to take their baffled children, anyway). As a mystery, in the most literal sense, it’s possibly the most mysterious film of the year.

Honeydripper (2008) + Married Life (2008)

March 7, 20082000s, 2008, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, Music, Romance, Theatrical

HONEYDRIPPER
*/****
starring Danny Glover, Charles S. Dutton, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Stacy Keach
written and directed by John Sayles

MARRIED LIFE
***/****
starring Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Ira Sachs & Oren Moverman, based on the novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven by John Bingham
directed by Ira Sachs

by Walter Chaw As a huge admirer of John Sayles’s middle-period body of work–a period marked by such pictures as Matewan, Eight Men Out, and Lone Star (still my pick for the best American film of the Nineties)–it pains me to look at something like Honeydripper and recognize in it everything I like about Sayles side-by-side with everything that’s fast making him irrelevant. He’s got a common touch, no question, something forged in the time he spent rolling up his sleeves, joining labour unions, hitchhiking across the country, and writing vital, committed novels about it all. Was a time his gift for how ordinary people talked and thought translated into definitive statements about the United States; now it seems that all he uses it for is passing, fleeting music in otherwise earthbound productions. Passion Fish is extraordinary in its effortlessness; Honeydripper is likewise effortless, but it lacks brio, and, more so than any of Sayles’s films before it, it doesn’t have one single reason for existing. Even flat, incontestable disasters like Silver City had going for it that Sayles-ian liberal dementia, and it boasted a performance in which long-time collaborator Chris Cooper hilariously channelled George W.’s reptilian, dangerous/dull political vacuum. Hold up Honeydripper to the least of Sayles’s pictures and discover that what he’s learned about craft remains while that indigent fire has apparently guttered to wax and ash. Pointedly, at a period in our country where it seems that some of the activism Sayles has spent much of his art trying to drum up has finally begun to manifest itself in voter-turnout among the young, Sayles has produced his most flaccid, middling film. Maybe this is the contented corncob pipe after a hard day in the fields.

The Butcher Boy (1998) + The Brave One (2007) – DVDs

March 6, 2008****/****, 1990s, 2000s, 2007, 2008, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Ireland, Revenge, Thriller

THE BUTCHER BOY
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Eammon Owens, Alan Boyle
screenplay by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe, based on the novel by McCabe
directed by Neil Jordan

THE BRAVE ONE
***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews, Nicky Katt
screenplay by Roderick Taylor & Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort
directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw Opening with a series of panels from Golden Age comics produced circa the era in which the film is set (i.e., 1962), The Butcher Boy identifies Neil Jordan as a director with a secret yen for superhero fantasies. It certainly jibes with the filmmaker’s affection for protagonists who, for whatever reason, live in private worlds, in fairytale dreamscapes populated by emblems of good and emissaries of evil–worlds where the most colourful places are the interiors of churches, where the characters’ fears and failings alike are assets. Jordan’s films are unfailingly about transformation (though sometimes they’re about the failure to transform adequately, or quickly enough) and heavy with the illness of existential introspection–the Judas strain with which the modern superhero pantheon is sick. His heroes are rendered simple by their duality, confronted by the idea that, for as hollow as it is to change to fit the demands of a particular time and place, it’s equally useless to try to stay the same as the world falls down. Jordan makes the movies Terry Gilliam never quite made until Tideland; far from the compassionate fare many label it, his oeuvre is comprised of harsh little ditties about the voraciousness of the social organism and the bites it takes out of individuals living perpendicular to the absolute mean. For me, all of his films, from The Crying Game to Mona Lisa, from The End of the Affair to Interview with the Vampire, are pointedly concerned with the futility of compensatory measures in the lives of deviants.

We Own the Night (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

February 15, 20082000s, 2007, 2008, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Robert Duvall
written and directed by James Gray

by Walter Chaw A cop is gunned down on the street in front of his own house, prompting his brother to don a uniform and hunt down the dirty foreign dog who did it in a field of smoke and grass. To accomplish this, he has to betray one father for the legacy of another and take sides in a war with no possible resolution. If American Gangster is the finest American New Wave cop procedural since The French Connection/Prince of the City/Serpico, James Gray’s We Own the Night is a revenge flick mired in Reagan-era morality (even the baddies are Russian) that assumes Dirty Harry’s squinty-eyed psychopathic zeal, setting itself explicitly in 1988 New York while consoling itself with a cozy middlebrow outcome. What’s doleful about the picture to me is that, philosophically, it suggests a certain reductive fatalism about masculinity-as-destiny in all this Sturm und Drang concerning vengeance, honour, and the thickness of blood. Yet it’s not about ripping up social contracts to better heed the insect-like call to violent response, or restructuring society along bestial lines–rather, it’s about sucking succour from the vein of traditional ideas of justice and law. At another time, perhaps, this State of Grace brand of serio-mythic gravitas would ring with a clearer tone (like, say, during the Eighties in which it’s set)–but as a 2007 release, We Own the Night is dangerously, pretentiously, wilfully naïve. The pitfall of using weathered genre conventions as a springboard is that although it will occasionally lead to things like Jules Dassin’s Night and the City and the French New Wave, it more often leads to things that don’t understand they’re only good when they’re reinventing the wheel and not just peddling around it pathetically (à la Romeo Is Bleeding or We Own the Night) like some leashed circus bear.

Gone Baby Gone (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

February 11, 2008****/****, 2000s, 2007, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris
screenplay by Ben Affleck & Aaron Stockard, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
directed by Ben Affleck

by Walter Chaw It hurts a little to watch Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone, making the experience tricky because so much of it is so pleasurable. There’s a moment in particular when amateur gumshoes Patrick (Casey Affleck) and Angie (Michelle Monaghan) are flanked by veteran homicide dicks Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton) at the beginning of an interrogation sequence that made my heart leap with joy. 2007 is shaping up to be the year that saw the best of the early New American Cinema genres resurrected through the prism of our national nightmare of paranoia and discontent; Gone Baby Gone slots in as the doppelgänger-in-spirit to that period’s empty films noir: hard-boiled detectives left knowing less at journey’s end than they did at the start. (Compare the way this picture uses genre as a launching pad instead of as a straitjacket.) The final image is an enduring one–in the days since I’ve seen Gone Baby Gone, it’s hardly left my mind–and where bits of jingoistic garbage like Rendition are rattling bleeding heart sabres with patronizing, simpleminded zeal, here’s a movie that takes the sobering, mature stance that even things that are black-and-white are never black-and-white. Light years ahead of the last adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel (Mystic River), Gone Baby Gone is about the insanity of agreeing to be absolutely in love in a temporary, capricious universe. It’s about parenthood and, a recurring theme in Lehane’s books, the cult of manhood, too: what defines loyalty and how those tenets are the tenterhooks to which we’re attached to each other in the bedlam of everything else. It’s hollow comfort to discover that once the dust settles, the only thing that makes us men is the handshake agreement to perceive ourselves as something other than animals–if nothing more than animals.

Eran’s Visit: FFC Interviews Eran Kolirin

February 10, 20082000s, 2008, 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 point he volunteered that “Bush, yes, is quite fucked up.”

In Bruges (2008)

February 8, 20082000s, 2008, 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, 2007, 2008, 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, 2007, 2008, 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 distill 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, 2007, 2008, 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, 2007, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Music, Romance, UK, 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, 2008, 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, 2007, 2008, 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, 2007, 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, 2007, 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, 2007, 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, like 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, 2007, 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, 2007, 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, 2007, 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 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.