Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 79 of 146

Man of the Year (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 19, 20072000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Robin Williams, Christopher Walken, Laura Linney, Jeff Goldblum
written and directed by Barry Levinson

by Walter Chaw Notorious dullard Barry Levinson's second try at Wag the Dog, the Robin Williams vehicle Man of the Year is a limp wrist waved weakly at no more pathetic a target than new voting technology. The story, such as it is, involves a late-night political comedian/talk show pundit (in the Jon Stewart mold, I guess, if Jon Stewart were stupid, unfunny, and irritating) named Tom Dobbs (Williams) who carries his antiquated shtick all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue on the back of a faulty computerized voting system. Frail egghead techie Eleanor (Laura Linney, too good for this shit) discovers her company's HAL-like flaw (hardly godlike in her erudition, she puzzles out that the digital voting booths choose winners alphabetically), and then promptly goes on the lam after an inexplicable and out-of-tune assault hays her wires and inspires her to seek out the freshly-minted POTUS-elect to inform him of the error. Meanwhile, Dobbs keeps acting like that asshole Robin Williams, desperately in need of a strong hand at his reins lest he run roughshod over his co-stars, the script, sense, respectability, plausibility, and so on down the line.

The Last Kiss (2006) [Widescreen] + Trust the Man (2006) – DVDs

February 14, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

THE LAST KISS
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras D
starring Zach Braff, Jacinda Barrett, Casey Affleck, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on the screenplay for L'Ultimo Bacio by Gabriele Muccino
directed by Tony Goldwyn

TRUST THE MAN
½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras D
starring Billy Crudup, David Duchovny, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Julianne Moore
written and directed by Bart Freundlich

by Walter Chaw Zach Braff's auto-elevation into the rarefied air of Ed Burnsian self-satisfaction has required a fraction of the smarmcoms, if a meaningful assist from an obscenely-popular TV show that's running on fumes at this point. Garden State is dreadful, of course, swarming with awkward, overwritten, creepy alt-folk montages and pocket epiphanies (just like "Scrubs", albeit with half the rage and exploitation of frailty), but team up former "The Facts of Life" scribe (and Oscar-winning screenwriter) Paul Haggis with instant-brand Braff–he's like sea monkeys: just add grease–for The Last Kiss and discover in the alchemy a more pungent, twice-as-stale vintage of a type of picture that used to be done with grace and wit by people like Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley, cheapened by noxious voice-overs and skeezy dialogues obsessed with the female orgasm without having the honesty to actually show one. What we get instead is the idea that this shit sells to a privileged "indie"-craving hipster demographic oblivious to the fact that "indie" films are as homogenous a ghetto as any other now. (Independent of what? Alternative to what?) There's nothing genuine about these "relationshit" flicks (thanks to blogger John Landis for the term); they're a sloppily-baited hook dangling in a waitlisted stucco bistro.

Cry-Baby (1990) [Director’s Cut] – DVD

February 7, 20071990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Musical

***½/**** Image A- Sound C+ Extras A+
starring Johnny Depp, Amy Locane, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop
written and directed by John Waters

by Walter Chaw Cry-Baby, John Waters's brilliant, ebullient satire of 1950s teensploitation, finds Johnny Depp and Amy Locane immaculately cast opposite one another as the ne plus ultra "He" and "She" of the Golden Age's doomed-youth pictures. One part Elvis musical calamity, one part queer camp exhibition, it's a cult classic for a reason: The second part of Waters's Hairspray nostalgia trip, Cry-Baby is a jubilant send-up of the lie of atomic-age perfection fixed broadly to the lie of modern sophistication that Waters would confront for the rest of his "legit" career. It's exactly what I imagine a David Lynch rockabilly rebel flick would be like–and indeed, when you get down to it, I don't know whether Lynch and Waters are really all that different.

Because I Said So (2007)

February 2, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Diane Keaton, Mandy Moore, Gabriel Macht, Stephen Collins
screenplay by Karen Leigh Hopkins & Jessie Nelson
directed by Michael Lehmann

by Walter Chaw From the guy who once upon a time made Heathers–a film that remains the pithiest commentary on school violence and the sea of troubles faced by adolescents lost in the blackboard jungle–comes a fearsome rampage against mankind and art, the excrescent Because I Said So. The best that can be said about this early contender for the worst film of 2007 is that it’s properly keystone’d by Diane Keaton, who, between this and The Family Stone, cements her position as the most smug, insufferable, unwatchable persona in a long and tumescent line of such personae. She embodies the absolute worst of every single stereotype of the domineering mother: dotty, ditzy, Luddite, sexless/oversexed, cruel, racist, otherwise intolerant, and above all hysterical. Throw her psychotic mommy dearest from The Other Sister into the stew and it’s hard to find a more stalwart movie monster in the last ten years than Keaton, who’s gone from a charming neurotic to a cobwebbed, cell-phone-wielding vagina dentata.

Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton: The Film Collection – DVD

January 30, 2007****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bermuda, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Romance, UK

THE V.I.P.S (1963)
½*/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Elsa Martinelli, Margaret Rutheford
screenplay by Terence Rattigan
directed by Anthony Asquith

THE SANDPIPER (1965)
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie Saint, Morgan Mason
screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson
directed by Vincente Minnelli

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)
****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, Sandy Dennis
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the play by Edward Albee
directed by Mike Nichols

THE COMEDIANS (1967)
*½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov
screenplay by Graham Greene, based on his novel
directed by Peter Glenville

by Walter Chaw Also called International Hotel, The V.I.P.s–the first chronologically-released vehicle for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor following the initiation of their legendary infidelities on the set of Cleopatra–is unwatchable dreck of the Old Hollywood variety. When people say "They don't make 'em like they used to," it's a good corrective to start listing off dusty artifacts like this one. As it was something of a financial windfall at the time (though not enough of one to offset the impending disaster of Cleopatra), one assumes that audiences flocked to theatres to sniff the musky odour of Burton/Taylor's forbidden l'amour that had dominated the world's lascivious imagination as production on an epic failure (or failed epic) dragged on for months and years. For me, the curiosity about The V.I.P.s, currently available in Warner's freshly-minted box set of Burton/Taylor pictures made during the height of their notoriety, has a lot more to do with Richard Burton, who was, to my mind, his generation's Russell Crowe. Like Crowe, Burton is thick with virility and gravitas and the ability, by himself, to carry a picture on his broad shoulders; I wonder if his seduction by a relic of Old Hollywood glamour hasn't tainted his legacy irrevocably. My voyeuristic impulse ultimately isn't so different from that of contemporary viewers, in fact, though I do offer the slight caveat that I'm in it to see how touching a match to Burton's already-boundless explosiveness would infect, for good or for ill, what are essentially vanity pieces for a couple drunk on the cult of themselves.

Smokin’ Aces (2007) + Seraphim Falls (2007)

January 26, 20072000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War, Western

SMOKIN' ACES
½*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Common, Andy Garcia
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

SERAPHIM FALLS
*/****
starring Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, Angie Harmon, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Abby Everett Jaques & David Von Ancken
directed by David Von Ancken

by Walter Chaw Director Joe Carnahan replicates a heart attack in the prologue of Narc, and David Von Ancken, in the action-packed opening to his feature debut Seraphim Falls, simulates a mildly hysterical bout of narcolepsy–but more on that later. Carnahan's third film, Smokin' Aces, is drawing a lot of unfavourable comparisons to Guy Ritchie's gangster sagas, but the real lineage can be traced to whatever strain of viral ADD infected Tony Scott. The film is so like Scott's Domino in its visual affectations and uniform incompetence that the two pictures could exchange scenes willy-nilly without losing a step. (Compare it to Wayne Kramer's similarly canted Running Scared for a mini-primer on when lawless misanthropy and the coked-up editor aesthetic can be wielded with delighted, visceral purpose as opposed to simply wielded.) Ultimately, Smokin' Aces is little more than a parade of sad "didn't you used to be…" stunt cameos installed for the missing "edge" that buckets of blood, rains of bullets, and a few power tools seem incapable of manifesting. With Narc, Carnahan showed real growth from his directorial debut (Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane, which is actually not unlike the new one at all). Now he's just showing off.

The Promise (2005) – DVD (U.S. version)

January 19, 20072000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Martial Arts, South Korea

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Hiroyuki Sanada, Jang Dong Gun, Cecilia Cheung, Nicholas Tse
screenplay by Chen Kaige and Zhang Tan
directed by Chen Kaige

by Walter Chaw Any fad reaches its nadir in due time and the Western wuxia infatuation, which started somewhere around Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and more or less peaked with Zhang Yimou's exceptional Hero, has found its basement in the truncated version of Chen Kaige's already-pretty-embarrassing The Promise. Somewhere, King Hu is spinning in his grave. An abomination just about any way you slice it, this ultra-expensive, CGI'd-to-exhaustion wire-fu epic–especially as sanitized for North America's consumption–suggests the world's saddest public display of penis envy. Chen, hailing from the same Fifth Generation school as Zhang, produces a show-offy, self-indulgent bit of flamboyant one-upsmanship destined to become a queer camp classic. When the Crimson General (Hiroyuki Sanada) trades in his fabulous duds for a lavender muumuu in which to trade barbs with archenemy Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse, suspended somewhere between pretty girl and Japanese anime hero), a bad guy garbed in white feathers who wields a gold staff topped with a bronze hand, index finger extended in proctological menace, the homoeroticism of the piece–already distracting in the subtext–suddenly becomes the main event. It's probably this unfathomable cut of the film's Rosetta Stone, in fact, pared down to some half-assed companion piece to Chen's own Farewell My Concubine. Without much strain you can see The Promise being transformed, in all its kitsch excess, into a Broadway pop-opera: Memoirs of a Geisha: The Musical.

Takeshis’ (2005) – DVD

January 8, 20072000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Japan, Satire

**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Takeshi Kitano, Kotomi Kyono, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano

by Walter Chaw Midway between Fellini's 8½ and Bob Fosse's All That Jazz is Japanese auteur Takeshi Kitano's Takeshis', a film that indicates with its possessive title that it belongs to both the director (Takeshi Kitano) and star ("Beat" Takeshi); acknowledging that they're one and the same (Kitano is billed as the former when he directs, the latter when he performs), they each have a function and persona unique unto themselves. The burden of that division, which Takeshi has taken on since midway through Violent Cop, is illustrated in the picture as a series of fractures that meld reality with televisual reality and filmic reality–nothing so ostentatious as Sven Nykvist and Ingmar Bergman reflected in a mirror in Persona, but going so far as to have "Beat" Takeshi, dressed as a clown, refer to Takeshi Kitano as "that asshole." The omniscience of the director is referred to often in the text as casting directors (rather, actors playing casting directors, or casting directors playing themselves) remark that Yakuza never look like Kitano (who has made something of a name for himself as a Yakuza: he's a little like the Japanese Robert De Niro)–and yet the central narrative of the picture then involves the slow evolution of the actor who looks like Kitano into Takeshi Kitano's Yakuza persona. Kitano is thus marking the difference between the devices of the director and the relatively passive objectification that is the primary definition of an actor–between the godhead inscrutable and the subject humiliated, as well as the eventual bleed-through between the roles actors assume and the mold into which perception forces them.

Children of Men (2006) + Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

January 5, 2007****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, War

CHILDREN OF MEN
****/****
starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Timothy J. Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby, based on the novel by P.D. James
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
***½/****
starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase
screenplay by Iris Yamashita, based on the book Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Tsuyoko Yoshido
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Stop on any single frame of Alfonso Cuarón's remarkable war idyll Children of Men–a film that's rarely in repose, sometimes seeming composed of one long, frantic shot–and I suspect the sharp-eyed, educated viewer would be able to cull a reference to modern art, most likely one about men reduced to their base animal nature. For me, the two visual landmarks come in the form of a cue to the cover design for Pink Floyd's 1977 "Animals" when hero Theo (Clive Owen) goes to see his industrialist cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) for help and a re-creation of Richard Misrach's remarkable series of 1987 photographs documenting, among other things, a dead-animal pit in Nevada purportedly used to dispose of victims of a plutonium "hot spot." Both share a space with surrealism in the positioning of animals (artificial or deceased) in industrial spaces (London's Battersea Power Station is the iconic backdrop of the "Animals" cover) as mute commentary, perhaps, on man's destructive relationship with his environment–a read that jibes comfortably with the thrust of Children of Men, in which we're told that one day in the not-too-distant future, humans suddenly stop reproducing. (Fertile ground for science-fiction, this obsession with progeny (see: everything from Frankenstein to I Am Legend).) The picture opens with a Fleet Street terrorist bombing, a little like Terry Gilliam's dystopic Brazil–though rather than take the easier route of satirizing our current state of instability and free-floating paranoia, Children of Men makes a serious attempt to allegorize it.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2006

January 2, 20072000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

I think the start of 2006 held so much promise mainly because it heralded the end of 2005. Not a doomsayer by any stretch, I find myself, at least in my own head, defending the state of film against facile diagnoses. "Books are always better than the movies based on them" and "They don't make good movies anymore" are the common phrases trotted out to simulate critical thought–better yet is the carrying around of the cross of "You just don't like anything." The truth is that books are only superior to the movies made from them about half the time (consider that almost all of Hitchcock's films are based on shitty literature); that good movies are no rarer than usual; and that disliking Blood Diamond, Dreamgirls, and The Holiday doesn't mean I don't like anything. Still, I admit to taking short rides with those facile phrases over the years, trying them on for size, seeing if and how far they will fly.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

December 29, 2006****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Mexico, Spain, Theatrical, War

****/****
starring Ariadna Gil, Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú
written and directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw Brutal and ignoble, the antithesis of romantic, the violence in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth slaps metal against flesh like the flat of a hand against a steel table. It's the only element of the picture that isn't lush, that isn't laden with the burnished archetype of Catholic superstition as it exists in eternal suspension with the pagan mythologies it cannibalized. By itself, this seems a metaphor for the pain and the magic of how fable turns the inevitability of coming-of-age into ritual. An early scene where hero girl Ofelia (Ivana Baquero)–a storyteller equal parts experientially innocent and allegorically savvy, making her the manifestation of del Toro's ideal avatar–tells her prenatal brother a story about a rose that blooms nightly on a mountain of thorns touches in one ineffably graceful movement all the picture's themes of immortality, aspiration, isolation, and the promise of escape held, sadistically, just out of reach. There's something of the myth of Tantalus in Ofelia's tale, as much as there is of Lewis Carroll's Alice and the sagas of parental absence by the Brothers Grimm, which surface in the premise of a young girl traveling, as the film opens, with her pregnant mother into the war-torn Spanish countryside during Franco's rule to join her wicked stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi López) at his remote outpost. Ofelia will be reminded repeatedly throughout the film that there's no such thing as justice or innocence left in the world, and that the best intentions are crushed by cynicism and rage. The question left as the picture closes has to do with whether Ofelia's taken the lesson to heart, to say nothing of del Toro–or us.

Dreamgirls (2006)

December 20, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Eddie Murphy, Musical, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé Knowles, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover
screenplay by Bill Condon, based on the play by Tom Eyen
directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Hailed as one of the more innovatively-staged musicals in the modern pantheon of such entertainments, Dreamgirls, transferred to the big screen, is nothing special in the way of something trying way too hard to dazzle. It’s the plain girl swathed in a gallon of makeup: there’s so much misdirection that you actually try harder to dig up a foundation that can’t bear the scrutiny. Said base for Dreamgirls is of course one of the most successful Broadway musicals (6 Tonys, 1,522 performances) from an era that counts “Les Miz”, Andrew Lloyd Weber’s dreadful operettas, and, what, “A Chorus Line”(?), among its chief rivals. You want to attribute its Broadway success to its spinning stage, choreographed and motorized $3.2M tower set, and coy deconstruction of bitch-goddess Diana Ross and her Supremes, but it’s hard not to wonder if it merely benefits from the relative quality of its competition. Then again, its success is likely the by-product of a fairly consistent mass appetite for cookie-cutter musical biopics, which have been self-satirized to near-total inconsequence first by VH1’s “Behind the Music” series, then to quickly-diminishing returns at the multiplex by Ray and Walk the Line.

Lady in the Water (2006) + Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)|Lady in the Water [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

December 18, 2006****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Revenge, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

LADY IN THE WATER
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bob Balaban, Jeffrey Wright
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Chinjeolhan geumjassi
****/****
starring Lee Yeong-ae, Choi Min-sik, Kim Shi-hoo, Kwon Yea-young
written and directed by Park Chanwook

by Walter Chaw The creeping, inescapable feeling is that M. Night Shyamalan would like to be known as “M. Christ Shyamalan”: a guy who wants you to drink the Kool-Aid; a messiah with a shrinking flock preaching a platform that his increasingly deluded, astonishingly arrogant fables are actually themselves the secret to world peace. He claims to hear voices–the first couple of times he did so (here in the stray interview, there in The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, that abhorrent mock-documentary he did for the Sci-Fi Channel), I thought he was kidding. Hell, the first couple of times he did it, he probably was kidding. But I don’t think he’s kidding anymore. And there’s no longer any currency in playing this ethereal shaman card. Prancing about like a mystic while shitting away millions of other people’s money isn’t a pastime with longevity: it’s something only a zealot would do. I think he’s gone off the deep end, hubris first, overfed to bloating on a steady diet of his own press and the tender ministrations of yes-men too afraid to set off Shyamalan’s diseased persecution complex by telling him that while he might be good at a few things, Lady in the Water was unsalvageable. When Disney executives did approximately that, Shyamalan took his ball and went across the street to Warner Brothers.

The Holiday (2006)

December 13, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Jack Black
written and directed by Nancy Meyers

by Walter Chaw There are bad movies, and then there are Nancy Meyers movies (first What Women Want, followed by the similarly excrescent Something’s Gotta Give): chick flicks in the most damning, insulting sense of the patronizing term and reason enough to question the wisdom of ever spending money to see a movie. If you go to Meyers’s latest, not only are you about to watch what is easily the worst movie of the year–you’re most likely going to do it in the company of people who’ll actually like it. The Holiday is appallingly written and icky besides in that familiar way of this brand of Love Actually/The Family Stone yuletide romantic refuse, casting Cameron Diaz and Jude Law as lovers fucking away the hours inside a Thomas Kincaid painting while Diaz’s frumpy house-swap buddy, played by Kate Winslet, finds meaning in Santa Monica by propping up a fossil (Eli Wallach) and falling for a James Horner-esque composer of horrible soundtracks (Jack Black). Parliament on the Thames is featured as prominently as the Pacific Coast Highway to underscore either how vacuous the filmmakers are or how stupid they think the audience is while Hans Zimmer’s soul-sucking, teddy bears-humping score saps away the last hints of credibility anyone has after participating in this gingerbread death march. If the opening voiceover narration by Winslet’s lovelorn Iris isn’t warning enough, consider that the narrative crutch used by Diaz’s emetic movie trailer editor Amanda is a series of fake movie trailers about Amanda’s romantic imbroglios.

Eragon (2006)

December 13, 20062000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Hungary, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Edward Speleers, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Guillory, John Malkovich
screenplay by Peter Buchman and Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal, based on the novel by Christopher Paolini
directed by Stefen Fangmeier

by Walter Chaw Fears that veteran F/X man Stefen Fangmeier's directorial debut Eragon, a feature-length adaptation of a fifteen-year-old trying on Anne McCaffrey's jodhpurs, would be the sequel to Dragonheart nobody wanted prove unwarranted, as Eragon is actually the sequel to BloodRayne that nobody wanted. It's ugly as sin, with the much-vaunted dragon at its centre (voiced by Rachel Weisz), designed by skilled craftspeople from both Peter Jackson's WETA workshop and Industrial Light and Magic, looking fatally inorganic to its environment. Not helping matters, the titular rider (Edward Speleers) resembles a younger, equally rubbery David Lee Roth and sports the acting chops of the same. Eragon is the towheaded farmboy who heeds a call to glory to save Sienna Guillory's beautiful Princess Arya ("Help me Eragon, you're my only hope") while gaining a mysterious old hermit mentor (Jeremy Irons–the poor sod should've learned his lesson with Dungeons & Dragons) who dies during a daring raid on the Death Star–er, on the castle keep of Darth Vader, er, King Galbatorix (John Malkovich). Alas, this Luke Skywalker also has an Uncle Owen (Uncle Garrow (Alun Armstrong)), and his Darth Vader has a henchman (Robert Carlyle) who at one point kills an underling general and declares the second-in-command "promoted." Eragon is a rip-off and a bad one, a carbon copy made on one of those old mimeograph machines: washed out, juvenile (even weighed against the not-exactly-mature example of Star Wars), and nigh unbearable for anyone so much as cursorily familiar with genre fare.

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

December 13, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Will Smith, Thandie Newton, Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, Brian Howe
screenplay by Steven Conrad
directed by Gabriele Muccino

by Walter Chaw They should pass out insulin plungers with the purchase of a ticket to the new Will Smith vehicle The Pursuit of Happyness, which sports a subtle tickle of plantation politics that's overwhelmed by a sense of smug entitlement and ugly elitism. Inspired by the true story of Eighties Wall Street bootstrap wizard Chris Gardner, it's a telling in a way of the Hercules legend, complete with insurmountable, fickle tasks and divine inheritance. Our mythological hero solves the Rubik's Cube in the back of a taxi for the bemused delight of potential employer Jay Twistle (Brian Howe); deals with the abandonment of his frustrated wife (Thandie Newton); and figures out a way to retrieve a pair of the bone-density scanners (the sale of which were his profession pre-Dean Witter) stolen by the homeless peers he disdains. It's true: the picture–even with its ghetto-cred misspelled title and restroom-to-boardroom fable–is intolerant of people consigned to the impoverishment the film contorts to assure us will be Chris' plight for only the time it takes his uplift to ripen.

Blood Diamond (2006) + Apocalypto (2006)

December 8, 20062000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, Mexico, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

BLOOD DIAMOND
*/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly, Djimon Hounsou, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Charles Leavitt
directed by Edward Zwick

APOCALYPTO
***/****
starring Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez, Jonathan Brewer, Morris Birdyellowhead
screenplay by Mel Gibson & Farhad Safinia
directed by Mel Gibson

by Walter Chaw After sending Matthew Broderick to head a Negro battalion in the Civil War and Tom Cruise to witness–and survive–the end of Feudal Japan, director Edward Zwick dispatches Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly to Sierra Leone and its own diamond-fuelled Civil War to moralize endlessly from the superior ethical vantage afforded by time and privilege. (That they also lend a much-needed nougat centre to Blood Diamond's thin chocolate coating goes without saying.) The Denzel Washington/Ken Watanabe token this time around is the oft-similarly-abused Djimon Hounsou: as the DC Comics-sounding Solomon Vandy, Hounsou seeks to trade a rare pink diamond for the life of his son, who's been molded by the evil Sierra Leonians into a soulless murdering/raping machine.

DIFF ’06: The Aura

December 6, 20062000s, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Spain, Thriller

El aura***½/****starring Ricardo Darín, Dolores Fonzi, Pablo Cedrón, Nahuel Pérez Biscayartwritten and directed by Fabián Bielinsky by Walter Chaw The late Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky's swan song, The Aura (El Aura) is a throwback in spirit and execution to the grim, inward-gazing paranoia dramas of the 1970s. Hero Esteban (Ricardo Darin) is an epileptic taxidermist who wakes up, as the film opens, in a bank vestibule; we proceed to follow him into a credits sequence that sees him resurrecting, in his meticulous craft, a fox for a museum panorama. The title The Aura might refer to that illusion of life…

DIFF ’06: Starfish Hotel

December 4, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan

*½/****starring Kôichi Satô, Kiki, Tae Kimura, Akira Emotowritten and directed by John Williams by Walter Chaw Stylishly shot, enough so that the neophyte might mistake it for a sparkling example of J-horror, Starfish Hotel addresses that old saw of a character wondering if he's a "character" as mysterious events unfold around him. Handled with more care and intelligence by the first 4/5ths of Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction, Starfish Hotel acts as a survey of other pictures (most notably the mascot motifs of Donnie Darko and Kontroll) as it goes on its merry non-horror, In the Mouth of Madness way.…

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

December 4, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France

*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci, Simon Baker
screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna, based on the novel by Lauren Weisberger
directed by David Frankel

by Walter Chaw "Sex and the City" fashion porn married to The Princess Diaries 'tween ugly-duckling uplift, David Frankel's facile sitcom The Devil Wears Prada allows Meryl Streep free reign to craft the titular, nattily-attired hellspawn. Her presence here gives the film the kind of starfuck quotient tied to Jack Nicholson genre vehicles once upon a time; without much effort, one can imagine a carnival barker pulling the wide-eyed bumpkins into the freak tent with the promise of blue-chip capering. Alas, Streep disappoints by turning in a human performance as an Anna Wintour manqué, drifting about as "Miranda Priestly" in Cruella DeVil mane and couture, operating a publishing empire (fictional RUNWAY MAGAZINE substituting for VOGUE, though Madonna's "Vogue" features prominently in the soundtrack for the terminally dim) with a soft voice and a sibilant brittleness.