Blood Diamond (2006) + Apocalypto (2006)

December 8, 2006Posted in2000s, 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

Bloodapocalyptoby 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, 2006Posted in2000s, 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, 2006Posted in2000s, 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, 2006Posted in2000s, 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

Devilwearspradacapby 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.

DIFF ’06: The Architect

December 2, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, ZERO STARS
ZERO STARS/****starring Anthony LaPaglia, Viola Davis, Isabella Rossellini, Hayden Panettierewritten and directed by Matt Tauber by Walter Chaw I am sick to death of pieces of shit like Matt Tauber's The Architect--sick of the White Guilt Trip, which here finds architect Leo (Anthony LaPaglia) the boogeyman behind all the cultural evils housed in the Cabrini-Green tenement he designed. When he protests to neo-Alfre Woodard Neely (Viola Davis) that he's just the mastermind behind the building's outline and thus unaccountable for the collapse of urban civilization housed therein, the effect is one of outrage not at the arrogance of The Man,…

The Nativity Story (2006) + 3 Needles (2006)

December 1, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Family, Theatrical

THE NATIVITY STORY
*/****
starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, Oscar Isaac, Hiam Abbass, Shaun Toub
screenplay by Mike Rich
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

3 NEEDLES
½*/****
starring Shaun Ashmore, Stockard Channing, Olympa Dukakis, Lucy Liu
written and directed by Thom Fitzgerald

Nativityby Walter Chaw The nativity, consigned primarily in my imagination to bad children's pageants and gaudy lawn displays, gets a third image in my own private trinity with Catherine Hardwicke's The Nativity Story: a thunderously boring film so circumscribed in scope and crippled in execution that it's destined to be a minor hit fuelled by the line of buses stretching from your local bible chapel. It's another teen melodrama from Hardwicke, complete with disapproving adults and pregnant little girls batting doe-eyes at rough-and-tumble shepherds; you see Hardwicke occasionally attempting an anachronistic Fast Times at Golan Heights à la Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, but Coppola, for all her dips into self-pity, is a filmmaker of note, while Hardwicke is just beating someone else's drum on someone else's dime. (Proof positive is that despite the uniformity of Hardwicke's output across three identically-non-descript flicks, there is still no sense that decisions are being made, or that anything more than a sickly colony from a thin scrape across the John Hughes petri dish has been born.) Mary is played by young Maori actress Keisha Castle-Hughes–her race of note because if there's something important about the instantly forgotten pic, it's that its cast is comprised of people who look like people might have looked in Nazareth around two thousand years ago and not like Andy Gibb. A shame that Castle-Hughes is dreadful (and not helped a bit by another dreadful, pop-eyed screenplay courtesy Mike Rich of Radio and Finding Forrester fame) and that Oscar Isaac (as Joseph)–who is not dreadful–is trapped in this prosaic sinkhole. Tempting to use terms like "sanctimonious" and "smug," but The Nativity Story is more accurately dissected with the observation that it's a faithful telling of a story that has as its only purpose the drumming up of ecstatic anticipation for a foregone conclusion.

DIFF ’06: Breaking and Entering

November 30, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, UK
*½/****starring Jude Law, Juliette Binoche, Robin Wright Penn, Ray Winstonewritten and directed by Anthony Minghella by Walter Chaw Carefully modulated for maximum inoffensiveness and awards-season consideration, Anthony Minghella's King's Cross diary Breaking and Entering plays less like a London native's Crash than like Woody Allen's solipsistic version of the same. Find the Aryan faction led by architect Will (Jude Law) and girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn) and the foreigners by Croatian single-mom Amira (the increasingly one-note Juliette Binoche) and, in another star-making turn by Vera Farmiga, a Polish hooker named Oana. A weary detective (Ray Winstone) verbalizes the social schism…

DIFF ’06: The Lives of Others

November 24, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller
Das Leben der Anderen***/****starring Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Mühe, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukurwritten and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck by Walter Chaw Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck makes his hyphenate debut with The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), a picture revolving around the days leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall as experienced by prominent playwright Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), his actress girlfriend Christa (Martina Gedeck), and the Stasi investigator Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) assigned to listen in on their conversations for evidence of dissent. The premise--monster grows a soul in the presence of humanity--is tired,…

DIFF ’06: Americanese

November 24, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance
**½/****starring Chris Tashima, Allison Sie, Sab Shimono, Munda Razookiscreenplay by Eric Byler, based on the novel by Shawn Wongdirected by Eric Byler by Walter Chaw Eric Byler's follow-up to his haunted, blue Charlotte Sometimes is this adaptation of Shawn Wong's American Knees, which, like Charlotte Sometimes, follows the day-to-day of Asian-Americans--though unlike that film, it fails to find that buried thrum to tie together the little glimpses comprising the whole. It's not for lack of trying, as Byler (over)uses the dissolve as his primary editing tactic in what tracks as an attempt to poeticize the essentially mundane and to literalize what, in the novel,…

DIFF ’06: Rescue Dawn

November 22, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, Film Festivals, Luxembourg, Thriller, War
**½/****starring Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies, Marshall Bellwritten and directed by Werner Herzog by Walter Chaw Though a perfectly serviceable actioner, one that avoids almost every pitfall and cliché of the POW genre while supporting a singularly eccentric performance, Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, sadly, could have been directed by any one of a dozen directors. Gripping but not especially memorable, it lacks the mad Bavarian's insanity: his belief that nature is obscene, as well as his ability to make a trance from the mendacity of routine. (Because Herzog is a rare talent, his films butt up against greater expectations.) The…

Déjà Vu (2006)

November 22, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Val Kilmer, Paula Patton, Jim Caviezel
screenplay by Bill Marsilii & Terry Rossio
directed by Tony Scott

Dejavuby Walter Chaw Who woulda thunk that crap-meister Tony Scott could be so in tune with the spirit of the times? Scott follows up Man on Fire–a vile piece of revenge-on-foreign-soil wish-fulfillment schlock–and Domino (another slice of the vigilante kind) with Déjà Vu, a time-travel fantasy complete with a horrifying act of domestic terrorism that noble ATF agent Carlin (Denzel Washington) is offered the chance, through the providence of limited time travel, to prevent. It’s one of those questions, right? Would you smother infant Hitler in his cradle to prevent the tears that will follow–and, if you did, would it change the course of history or just substitute that Adolf for another? Alas, Scott ultimately degrades this fun cocktail party conundrum into an action-movie finale involving heartbreakingly beautiful love interest Claire (Paula Patton), clean-Marine grassroots sicko Carroll (Jim Caviezel, doing High Crimes all over again), and a ferryboat full of people crossing over from Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. Working in the picture’s favour is that it’s thick with national calamity, making one wonder if Scott would even get a movie made anymore were he not so quick to jab a needle into the collective jugular. The pall of our recent history hangs over the proceedings like a borrowed mourning veil, but Scott muse Washington is so good–and the film’s premise so loopy–that en route to touching the steadily more tiresome post-9/11 bases of illegal/omniscient surveillance and sour regret, Déjà Vu actually breathes a little. It’s the best Tony Scott film since the underestimated, unofficial The Conversation sequel Enemy of the State, which ran over on the same technophobic ground. Call it another science-fiction romance to join this season’s already-bursting slate of Children of Men, Stranger Than Fiction, and The Fountain.

The Fountain (2006)

November 22, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz, Ellen Burstyn, Mark Margolis
written and directed by Darren Aronofsky

Fountainby Walter Chaw As deeply emotional and damnably frustrating as any work of pure individual vision must be, Darren Aronofsky's long-gestating The Fountain is officially devastating from about thirty-minutes in and buoyed by its singular vision for the remainder. A film that defines the fatigued term "ambitious," it's the story of Man's need to transcend the physical, to defeat mortality, to address the divine that takes the form of what the director has called "science-fiction for the new millennium." Is it arrogant to seek to redefine an entire genre? No doubt–but it's that exact genus of hubris under the microscope in The Fountain, with its three interwoven storylines concerning the courage to explore new worlds armed and shielded only (and enough) by dogged, ragged faith, and so Aronofsky's arrogance becomes, only as it should be, the connective fibre that binds his film together. The Fountain is philosophy, posing questions about the nature of art, of communication, of the truly big questions of existence. And because it's good philosophy, it doesn't seek to answer the mysteries of our intellectual life, but rather offers as the only humanist answer another mystery: love. It's oblique to the point of opaque for long stretches of its "future" passage (involving the voyage to a nebula wrapped around a dying star in what appears to be a bubble housing a hilltop and a tree) and verges on the brink of camp in "past" segments set during the Age of Discovery and the Spanish Inquisition, yet it finds its core–its thematic and emotional anchor–in the "present" with a research scientist's race against his wife's voracious cancer.

An Inconvenient Truth (2006) + Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006)|An Inconvenient Truth – DVD

November 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, DVD

AN INCOVENIENT TRUTH
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B+
directed by Davis Guggenheim

WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR?
*½/****
directed by Chris Paine

by Walter Chaw Spend much time mining the cultural divorce in these delightfully divided United States and you'll discover that the stereotypes governing our perceptions of either side (bellicose vs. pussified) tend to be by and large accurate. Given the choice between violent and dogmatic or simpering and equivocal, the American electorate has erred badly on the side of a unified message, no matter how dangerous–and who can blame them? I mean, shit, whatever the leadership qualities, Custer didn't die alone. The mess of our national politics (and the mess that it's made of our standing in the international community) inevitably must inspire a spate of left-wing documentaries and, judging by last year's Clooney-fest, a handful of well-intentioned (if simpering and scattershot) partisan fictions. It's a strange world out there, and in it find Al Gore (did he lose office to a coup d'état?) as the breakthrough star of the non-fiction summer, following the path ploughed by Michael Moore and Penguins before him. It's not strange because he's uncharismatic; it's strange because in An Inconvenient Truth, he's both charismatic and on-topic. He's become that rarest of beasts: a democrat in the public eye who's not afraid to make strong statements and take his shots at obvious targets without indulging in self-abnegating ambiguities.

Bobby (2006) + Fast Food Nation (2006)

November 17, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Mexico, Theatrical, UK

BOBBY
½*/****
starring Harry Belafonte, Joy Bryant, Nick Cannon, Emilio Estevez
written and directed by Emilio Estevez

FAST FOOD NATION
*/****
starring Patricia Arquette, Luis Guzman, Ethan Hawke, Ashley Johnson
screenplay by Eric Schlosser & Richard Linklater
directed by Richard Linklater

Bobbyfastfoodby Walter Chaw A completely pointless exercise in winsome, pathetic hand-wringing, the navel-gazing Bobby is just one of this year's inevitable examples of the power of nepotism in dictating who gets to continue churning out the worst films anyone's ever seen. Triple-threat Emilio Estevez (doing duties here as bad actor, bad director, and bad writer) continues his reign of terror unabated on the back of poor Bobby Kennedy, and those clips from RFK's speeches littering the picture are the only things remotely of interest. Bobby itself is a Crash-like roundelay of desperately manufactured bathos, covering the entire spectrum of miserable plotting and characterization from the old battleaxe (Sharon Stone) to the youngsters tripping on acid (to the tune of Jefferson Airplane and images of Vietnam carpet-bombing, natch) to the buttermilk-scrubbed ingénue (Lindsay Lohan) marrying her gay schoolmate (Elijah Wood–that casting admittedly the only hint that the schoolmate is gay) to save him from the draft to the non-drama of an Ambassador Hotel manager (William H. Macy) and his firing of a mildly-racist kitchen manager (Christian Slater). Is there any doubt that each and every one of these folks (and more: best to forget Martin Sheen and the still-execrable Helen Hunt pillow-talking until well-past the point of audience tolerance) will find themselves in the kitchen where/when Bobby meets his end? I imagine them as the cardboard cut-out "friends" Steve Martin's Lonely Guy uses to simulate a kickin' cocktail party, here repurposed to simulate "characters" in a movie that's supposed to mean something.

A Good Year (2006) + Harsh Times (2006)

November 10, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

A GOOD YEAR
½*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Albert Finney, Marion Cotillard, Freddie Highmore
screenplay by Marc Klein, based on the book by Peter Mayle
directed by Ridley Scott

HARSH TIMES
**/****
starring Christian Bale, Freddy Rodriguez, Eva Longoria, Terry Crews
written and directed by David Ayer

Goodyearharshby Walter Chaw The Fighting Temptations, The Family Man–the list of sappy redemption flicks about terrible assholes is as long and lamentable as Ridley Scott's interminable A Good Year. Masquerading as a man-opause version of Under the Tuscan Sun, it is instead an incredibly cynical play for exactly the kind of audience Scott and Russell Crowe don't reach and, apparently, shouldn't bother trying to seduce. Imagine a light, frothy romantic comedy written by Dostoevsky and directed by David Lean: every pratfall registers like a cattle stampede, every delightful romantic misunderstanding like a nuclear disarmament talk. Meanwhile, all around it, golden-drenched landscape shots of Provence play the part of the grinning idiot, dancing like crazy to distract the potentially-duped. (Scott at his best works in palettes drained of warmth and heat. Even the sunny Thelma & Louise plays like twenty miles of rough road compared to A Good Year's pretty postcards and stultifying stereotypes.) With the whole mess paying off in the most unlikely and irritating sequence of happy endings in a film not directed by Garry Marshall (or his Limey equivalent, Richard Curtis), the choices are either that you believe Scott and Crowe to have lost their minds or that A Good Year is smug and strident for the very reason that its creators are supercilious jackasses long since detached from any notion of the possible. Moreover, the picture demonstrates a marked disdain for those poor sods who aren't millionaire stockbrokers or possessed of dead uncles with a sprawling villa to will to their heirs.

Little Man (2006) [Loaded with Extra Crap Edition] – DVD

November 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

Littleman
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Kerry Washington, John Witherspoon
screenplay by Keenen Ivory Wayans & Shawn Wayans & Marlon Wayans
directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans

Littlemancapby Walter Chaw An adult male the size of a baby masquerades as a toddler in order to retrieve a diamond he's stolen and secreted in the purse of a young suburban wife (Kerry Washington) who happens to be contemplating starting a family. This sets the stage for man-baby mistaken for baby-baby jokes, man-baby resenting being mistaken for baby-baby jokes, man-baby trying to suck tits, man-baby raping his adopted mother, and getting-pissed-on gags. Meanwhile, a crotchety old man character (John Witherspoon) suspects foul play but, as he represents the other demographic no one listens to (besides black people), no one listens to him. That's it. Gut the Wayans machine's latest, Little Man, and all that slops out is a Möbius strip of high-concept sketch-comedy garbage that isn't really objectionable (save for the happy rape and the infantilization of a grown man and all that) in any way while actually managing to know itself as owing a debt to Baby Buggy Bunny en route to offering a few nightmarish, surreal images. Marlon and, I think, Shawn are the key instigators of this one, with Keenen (I bet) the man behind the flat, uninvolved camera set-ups and pacing. On the scale of such things, it's not as bad as Son of the Mask, Are We There Yet?, or Problem Child, though it's vastly inferior to Marci X.

Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) + This Film is Not Yet Rated (2006)

November 3, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Documentary, Pseudo-Documentary, Theatrical, UK

BORAT! CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN
***/****
directed by Larry Charles

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED
*½/****
directed by Kirby Dick

Boratby Walter Chaw British Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, as his Kazakhstani journalist alter ego Borat, tells former Georgia senator Bob Barr that the cheese Barr's just eaten was made from his wife's breast milk, and he does it in such a way as to suggest the naïf savage stereotype's unaffected innocence as it preys on the secret bigot in us all. Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan plays on America's belief that the rest of the world is run and populated by ridiculous children alternately in need of careful guidance and firm scolding. The Borat character, then, is very much a creation of the shortsightedness of a condescending American intolerance, while his ability to infiltrate America's living rooms speaks to a complex national desire to fold the aliens it abhors to its breast in some sort of misplaced act of missionary grace. If we reduce the aim of evangelical Christianity down to the twin compulsions of damnation and salvation, what Borat really does is reveal the hypocrisy at the root of our professed acceptance and, more troublingly, highlight how divorced we are from the guiding principles of this sea to shining sea. In a film that does this much to expose the ugly undercurrent of homophobia, racism, and xenophobia in this country, it's no great surprise when New York subway riders threaten to kill Borat for kissing them on the lips in exuberantly misguided greeting–and the reactions of these Big Apple commuters strike me as refreshingly honest.

Henry II: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1998) + Tales from the Crypt Presents Ritual (2002)

November 1, 2006Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Horror, Thriller, ZERO STARS, Zombie

Henry Part 2
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part 2
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound D Extras D
starring Neil Giuntoli, Rich Komenich, Kate Walsh, Carri Levinson
written and directed by Chuck Parello

RITUAL
*½/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Jennifer Grey, Craig Sheffer, Daniel Lapaine, Kristen Wilson
screenplay by Rob Cohen and Avi Nesher, based on the screenplay for I Walked with a Zombie by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray
directed by Avi Nesher

by Walter Chaw John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is that rare exploitation film that at once transcends and wallows in the ugly strictures of its sub-genre. A commentary on itself by dint of its honesty and intelligence, it lives and dies by the irony that despite the extremes to which it goes in its imagining and depiction of atrocity, it succeeds mainly through the quality of its reserve. It's maybe the first realistic-seeming film about a serial killer in that any prurient satisfaction one derives from the events depicted therein one suspects is entirely due to the angle of twist to one's own shadow. It's both a personality and an endurance test–and at the end of it we're left feeling as though we've witnessed some kind of emotional documentary about the psychic toll of murder on the societal organism. At its heart, it's an experiment in collectivism where the individual is tested against the insurgent: the body politic challenged to cohere against an anarchist. The power of Henry is that it engenders something like hope–an almost naïve belief that the humanity represented by the audience will identify with the dregs of society because said dregs, likable in no other way, are being preyed upon by something other than human. And humans, no matter how irredeemable, are still the "home team," as it were.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] – DVD

October 30, 2006Posted in****/****, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow
screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
directed by Tobe Hooper

Texaschainsaw1974cap

Mustownby Walter Chaw If we start from the position that Sally (Marilyn Burns) is burdened from the get-go by two misfit monsters, then we can look at Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as not only a keen autopsy of a particular moment in our country's history (circa 1974), but also a profoundly sensitive look at social prejudices and the toll said prejudices take on the human social organism. More than the typical rise-of-the-bumpkins horror conceit, it is, along with John Boorman's Deliverance from two years earlier, the classic example of a film that isn't about what it's ostensibly about. Look at the assiduous reduction of wheelchair-bound outcast Franklin (Paul A. Partain), a character who remains for the efforts of Hooper and Partain (apparently so irritating in real life that his cohorts were relieved by his on-screen demise) one of the most unapologetically irritating and pathetic figures in film and find noteworthy not that a handicapped person is allowed to be a self-pitying asshole, but that we're not let off the hook (as it were) for our own prejudices. Franklin is an anchor–and we're glad that he's dead, too.

The Prestige (2006)

October 25, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, Mystery, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, based on the novel by Christopher Priest
directed by Christopher Nolan

Prestigeby Walter Chaw It's possible to say that Christopher Nolan's perplexing chimera of a film, The Prestige, has something on its mind about not only the nasty, zero-sum game of vengeance but also the belief that if you cut one head off a malevolent beast it will, hydra-like, sprout another. It's a costume drama that feels like the world's darkest, dour-est, most inappropriate thriller serial, placing a series of increasingly complicated and unpleasant revenge-scenarios in chronological order and reminding of, if anything, just how bad Nolan's Memento makes you feel. The Prestige shares a heart of darkness, after all, with that film: a belief that men are essentially callow opportunists and liars who will misuse the people in their lives in order to maintain an illusion of command, however tenuous, over entropy. The manipulation of illusion is arguably the auteur mark of Nolan, who played with the idea of the manipulation of fear as a weapon in Batman Begins, the practical purpose of dream sleep in his remake of Insomnia, and of course of identity as fluid, ephemeral, and dangerously malleable in Memento and Following. Matching this director with a strange, campy film about turn-of-the-century magicians engaged in mortal combat makes a lot of sense.