Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 83 of 146

Nacho Libre (2006)

June 26, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sports, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Jack Black, Ana de la Reguera, Héctor Jiménez, Peter Stormare
screenplay by Jared Hess & Jerusha Hess & Mike White
directed by Jared Hess

by Walter Chaw Nearly unwatchable from an aesthetic perspective, Nacho Libre is also invasively offensive and cheap-feeling in its gags, its performances, and its targets. Lampooning Mexican professional wrestling seems an onanistic pursuit at best insomuch as, clearly, the sport is already busily in the process of self-parody–but letting Jared Hess (single-handedly bringing the Special Olympics to Wes Anderson) tackle it along with Jack Black doing an "oh Ceeesco" accent in skin-tight tights is a particular kind of torture. The film's going to have its defenders (Uwe Boll has his defenders, too, I hasten to add, as does Hess's Napoleon Dynamite), and I'm thinking that it's going to be along the lines of "Well, sure, it's not Citizen Kane." But does anyone go to anything expecting it to be Citizen Kane? Moreover, have people who like this bullshit actually seen Citizen Kane? It's germane to talk about this because sooner or later it has to be pointed out that pictures like Nacho Libre exist because pictures like Napoleon Dynamite were popular: mean pictures about small-minded folks picking fun for no profit at slow-witted caricatures of racial groups and social classes. Pictures like this exist because people are used to lowering their expectations so much that they're actually irked when someone doesn't. It's most instructive to take a minute to look at how low we go now to construct the straw dogs we mock.

Basic Instinct 2 (2006) [Unrated Extended Cut] – DVD

June 19, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sharon Stone, David Morrissey, Charlotte Rampling, David Thewlis
screenplay by Leora Barish & Henry Bean
directed by Michael Caton-Jones

by Walter Chaw Picture Chappaquiddick re-imagined as a Kylie Minogue video. Thus, auspiciously, begins Michael Caton-Jones's will-breaking Basic Instinct 2, a picture so magnificently awful that it demonstrates a special, indefinable kind of genius en route to being just another of the worst films in history. Schlock writer Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), who publishes under the nom de plume of "Woolf" (because she is one, get it?), is behind the wheel of a sporty little number as a drugged-up soccer hero fingers her snatch, climaxing at the moment she runs her racer through a glass crash barrier (?!) into an icy drink. (Perhaps the Thames–we're in Jolly Old England this time around.) Catherine then finds herself on the wrong side of the law again, ordered to undergo sessions with brilliant British shrink Michael Glass (David Morrissey, who has Liam Neeson's face down pat) on behalf of Scotland Yard's finest, Washburn (David Thewlis). Washburn calls Tramell a "cunt" and a "bitch" and accuses Glass at one point of being beguiled by the "smell of her pussy," which is the sort of elderly banter the knitting cotillion might still find shocking–though it's light years more appalling than Tramell's pleased reference to Masters & Johnson and her constant litany of "cum" [sic] declarations. "He was alive, he was making me cum," she says, and, "I think of you when I cum," and so on and so forth, marking her vampy, thumb-on-the-turntable performance as the most hideous bit of creaky past-prime tarting-about since Mae West was dropping the same dusty come-ons in support hose and pancake makeup. All that's missing are references to Kinsey and "bloomers."

The Lake House (2006)

June 16, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical, Time Travel

*/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dylan Walsh, Christopher Plummer
screenplay by David Auburn
directed by Alejandro Agresti

by Walter Chaw I couldn't help but conjecture, while watching the trailer for Alejandro Agresti's inexplicable The Lake House, that when Keanu Reeves's character is poring over a letter, a little thought bubble above his head would say, "Dude, I totally can't read." Continuing to think that is the only thing providing much of a distraction during the laggardly-paced, sloppily-scripted, hilariously-acted proceedings, which, as that same preview gives away, concern the romance of two people separated by two years, exchanging letters through the providence of a magic mailbox. Argentinean director Agresti's visual compositions are meticulous and his eye for architecture is almost as good as that of his protagonist, Alex Wyler (Reeves), but it's cold comfort against the raging inferno of illogic attending this scenic, stupid, Nicholas Sparks-ian shipwreck. Not helping things is Agresti's lamentable penchant for cornpone, exhibiting itself most stridently in the piano-tinkle, magical-elf-opening-a-treasure-chest score and a series of whimsical wipe-edits and dog reaction shots. Among its dedicated sub-genre of time-warp kiss-face (Somewhere in Time, Happy Accidents), The Lake House is a dud, too, frustrating first because its big gushy epiphany is solved by everyone with a working pre-frontal within a second of it happening, and second because Wyler, lagging two years behind his beloved Kate (Sandra Bullock), never once thinks to ask for a lotto number or a World Series winner.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic (2005) – DVD

June 11, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Concert Doc, DVD, Music

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Liam Lynch

by Walter Chaw It starts off on the wrong foot and never recovers, this first showcase for the brilliant Sarah Silverman to strut her aggressively, pointedly offensive stuff. Something about the deadpan seriousness of her delivery sells jokes about being raped by her doctor ("A very bittersweet experience for a Jewish girl"), about the "alleged" Holocaust, about how the best time to have a baby is "when you're a black teenager," or about how she'll always remember 9/11 as the day she discovered how many calories were in a soy chai latte. And that you're never meant to know with absolute certainty if she's aware exactly how horrible are the things she's saying could be part of the schtick.

Cars (2006)

June 9, 20062000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Pixar, Sports

*½/****
screenplay by John Lasseter & Philip Loren & Kiel Murray
directed by John Lasseter

by Walter Chaw Soulless and anchorless, Pixar's Cars is the company's first all-around failure. It's got something to do with the lack of a human grounding: the only other time Pixar stumbled was with its similarly bleak A Bug's Life (that picture resorting, like Cars, to racial caricature as its primary tentpole), which is also the only other time the company has neglected to ground its story with homo sapien ballast. It's telling that a company pioneering machine-tooled animation so relies on that hint of humanity for its effectiveness; in its place, Cars resorts to cheap name-games (all the cities are car-parts except, dubiously, Los Angeles) as its primary gag and relies on a string of racing in-jokes (Darrell Cartrip, get it? Yeah, me neither) to lubricate its worn-down gears. It's the product of the "Larry the Cable Guy" school of redneck effacement tacked onto a tired redemption romantic comedy, even more tired fish-out-of-water malarkey, and finally an inexplicable blanket criticism of all things urban. Sub-vaudeville gags with weak payoffs and rudderless execution are the things one would rightly expect from a DreamWorks flick–pity that their strain of high-concept lack of inspiration seems to respect no host.

Firewall (2006) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

June 4, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Harrison Ford, Paul Bettany, Virginia Madsen, Mary Lynn Rajskub
screenplay by Joe Forte
directed by Richard Loncraine

by Walter Chaw Because 63-year-old Harrison Ford is pushing mandatory retirement age in most industries, his new movie Firewall is aimed squarely at an older, more affluent, less savvy demographic. Casting the aging demigod as a greying bank executive extorted by the usual band of eurotrash techno-terrorists holding his perfect family hostage, it's a fable of paranoia that finds evil in not only the modern cell phone bogey, but other mysterious beasts like iPods, phone cameras, GPS devices, fax machines, and online banking, too. Its never-explained title, in fact, refers to a technology that protects against malignant computer codes floating around the World Wide Web–but rather than try to define this for an audience that's ideally long-resistant to such cogent explanations, it makes the "firewall" a literal thing by devolving into another homeland security allegory, with the craggy paterfamilias meting out sweet vengeance against a gaggle of interlopers. Better to have called it "Antivirus"–but Michael Bay's probably reserved that title for his kick-ass foreign terrorist/avian flu metaphor.

The Break-Up (2006)

June 2, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Aniston, Joey Lauren Adams, Ann-Margret
screenplay by Jeremy Garelick & Jay Lavender
directed by Peyton Reed

by Walter Chaw Vince Vaughn can never seem sincere, only dazed and slack, making his proto-slob Gary in Peyton Reed’s infernal The Break-Up an odd object of desire for art gallery receptionist Brooke–or he would be if Brooke weren’t played by vanilla pudding Jennifer Aniston. The problem with the picture is that it’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (or the more-often-invoked Scenes from a Marriage)–with healthy doses of Swingers and The 40 Year Old Virgin to confuse the rancour–played by one-note actors who demonstrate not a soupçon of chemistry, thereby engendering zero rooting interest in their counterparts’ reunion. (The fact that the two stars appear to have found love off camera regardless suggests the Proof of Life Effect for the anti-romcom set.) You have to respect a picture that sports at least three or four scenes straight out of Hell and has the good sense at one point to mention it in so many words, like when Brooke comes home to find Gary engaged in some weird bacchanal, the two exchanging a long wordless look across the wasteland as the world comes to an end. But there’s so little presence demonstrated by either of the principals that the movie finally feels disconnected and inconsequential.

Darwin’s Nightmare (2005) – DVD

May 31, 20062000s, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Documentary, DVD, France, Germany

***/**** Image C+ Sound C+
directed by Hubert Sauper

by Walter Chaw Told almost completely in extended wordless sequences, Darwin's Nightmare covers how the introduction of feral perch to Tanzania's Lake Victoria to sate a ravenous European market has spelled doom for locals enlisted ("enslaved," director Hubert Sauper would insist) to harvest it at subsistence levels, forcing them to scavenge among the discards for sustenance. Even worse, Sauper suggests that arms traffickers use the incoming cargo planes–the very ones entrusted with the export of the perch–to smuggle their own illicit wares and thus further exploit stricken Africa. We learn that the perch were introduced into the lake as a means of supplementing an over-fished native supply to ironically-fantastic results–a perch boom that on-message factory owners and government officials proclaim as an economic miracle.

Tennessee Williams Film Collection – DVD

May 30, 2006****/****, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Elia Kazan, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Romance

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden
screenplay by Tennessee Williams, based on his play
directed by Elia Kazan

BABY DOLL (1956)
****/**** Image B Sound A Extras B+
starring Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach, Mildred Dunnock
screenplay by Tennessee Williams
directed by Elia Kazan

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Burl Ives, Jack Carson
screenplay by Richard Brooks and James Poe, based on the play by Tennessee Williams
directed by Richard Brooks

THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (1961)
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Vivien Leigh, Warren Beatty, Lotte Lenya, Jill St. John
screenplay by Gavin Lambert, based on the novel by Tennessee Williams
directed by José Quintero

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962)
***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A
starring Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Shirley Knight, Ed Begley
screenplay by Richard Brooks, based on the play by Tennessee Williams
directed by Richard Brooks

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964)
****/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A
starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon
screenplay by Anthony Veiller and John Huston, based on the play by Tennessee Williams
directed by John Huston

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ SOUTH (1973)
**½*/**** Image C Sound D
directed by Harry Rasky

by Walter Chaw Marlon Brando is liquid sex in A Streetcar Named Desire, molten and mercurial. He’s said that he modeled his Stanley Kowalski after a gorilla, and the manner in which Stanley eats, wrist bent at an almost fey angle, picking at fruit and leftovers in the sweltering heat of Elia Kazan’s flophouse New Orleans, you can really see the primate in him. (Imagine a gorilla smelling a flower.) Brando’s Stanley is cunning, too: he sees through the careful artifice of his sister-in-law Blanche (Vivien Leigh, Old Hollywood), and every second he’s on screen, everything else wilts in the face of him. It’s said that Tennessee Williams used to buy front-row seats to his plays and then laugh like a loon at his rural atrocities; he’s something like the Shakespeare of sexual politics, the poet laureate of repression, and in his eyes, he’s only ever written comedies. In Kazan’s and Brando’s too, I’d hazard, as A Streetcar Named Desire elicits volumes of delighted laughter. The way that Stanley’s “acquaintances” are lined up in his mind to appraise the contents of Blanche’s suitcase. The way he invokes “Napoleonic Law” with beady-eyed fervour. And the way, finally, that he’s right about Blanche and all her hysterical machinations. The moment Stanley introduces himself to Blanche is of the shivers-causing variety (like the moment John Ford zooms up to John Wayne in Stagecoach), but my favourite parts of the film–aside from his torn-shirt “STELLA!”–are when Stanley screeches like a cat, and when he threatens violence on the jabbering Blanche by screaming, “Hey, why don’t you cut the re-bop!”

The Producers (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

May 29, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Musical, Satire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman, Will Ferrell
screenplay by Mel Brooks & Thomas Meehan
directed by Susan Stroman

by Walter Chaw Max Bialystock (Nathan Lane) is responsible for exactly the kind of garbage that runs for years on the Great White Way, except that for the purposes of The Producers, his plays close in a couple of days, leaving Bialystock constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and at the mercy of a long, horny line of elderly widows and rich spinsters. I don't think old women in pillbox hats renting Nathan Lane by the hour for a few dry humps is particularly funny (or realistic)–but some people, especially those reared on vaudeville, think it's hysterical. When auditor Leo Bloom (Matthew Broderick) casually mentions that it might actually be more profitable to stage a very expensive flop, Max hatches a plan in which the two will mount the worst stage production in history, thus bilking their investors out of a coupla million. After finding the worst playwright (Will Ferrell), the worst director (Gary Beach), and the worst actress (Ulla (Uma Thurman)), they proceed to stage a musical that celebrates the Third Reich called "Springtime for Hitler". Lo and behold, it's taken as tongue-in-cheek and becomes the talk of the town. You'd call it "irony" except that this eventuality is not at all unexpected–and wasn't even when it happened the first time, in 1968.

The Ringer (2005) – DVD

May 23, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Sports

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Johnny Knoxville, Brian Cox, Katherine Heigl, Jed Rees
screenplay by Ricky Blitt
directed by Barry W. Blaustein

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of fascinating things embedded in the premise and execution of Barry W. Blaustein’s Farrelly Brothers-produced The Ringer, the story of Steve Barker, a broke cubicle monkey who tries to do the right thing and ends up trying to rig the Special Olympics by impersonating a mentally-challenged athlete. One is the notion that it’s easier to feign retardation to the non-challenged than it is to the challenged; and the other is that, in taking Barker’s “Jeffy” at face value, there’s actually less offense in this broad play for sentimental, slapstick chuckles than in the Oscar-winning/aspiring pieces (Forrest Gump, I Am Sam, Rain Man) Steve uses as research. “There’s the secret,” a habit-clad Kate Winslet confides to Ricky Gervais in the brilliant debut of his new show, “Extras”. “If you want an Oscar you have to play a mental.”

The Da Vinci Code (2006)

May 18, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Malta, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Dan Brown
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw The greatest threat that Dan Brown's novel, and now Ron Howard's film of the same, poses to spirituality is the same threat that any bad art presents the human soul. The Da Vinci Code is a retarded attempt to summarize painstaking scholarship and liturgy into broadly digestible gruel. In the eyes of many, it's what the Christian Bible is to centuries of pagan mythology and millennia of cultural anthropology: the greatest stories ever told, retold in a form that illiterates and the gullible can appreciate. It's nothing more and nothing less than The Celestine Prophecy (itself adapted for the silver screen this annus mirabilus) for fallen Catholics and armchair intellectuals: books so poorly-written, so bereft of poetry and grace, that they cannot offend (or repel) the unschooled and the indiscriminate with their oblique-ness, each about poetry and grace so brusquely raped and "decoded" that the "conspiracy"–the great mystery of great art–is laid bare as bad thriller material. It's skipping forward to read the last page of the book–and the wrong book at that. Is it really ironic that Ron Howard, who has never directed a graceful scene, has never had a film with a hint of a whiff or subtext (his version of "genius at work" is a holodeck (see: A Beautiful Mind and now The Da Vinci Code)) is the chosen one for the adaptation (along with partner in extreme, middlebrow-pleasing mendacity Akiva Goldsman) of an obscenely popular book (60-million copies sold and counting) that makes anyone with a half a brain crazy with grief for the plight of the sublime in our culture?

Laura (1944) [Fox Film Noir] + Pinky (1949) [Cinema Classics Collection] – DVDs

May 16, 20061940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance

LAURA
***/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Vincent Price, Judith Anderson
screenplay by Jay Dratler and Samuel Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt, based on the novel by Vera Caspary
directed by Otto Preminger

PINKY
*/**** Image C Sound B- Extras A+
starring Jeanne Crain, Ethel Barrymore, Ethel Waters, William Lundigan
screenplay by Philip Dunne and Dudley Nichols, from a novel by Cid Ricketts Sumner
directed by Elia Kazan

by Walter Chaw A camp classic of a very particular variety, Otto Preminger’s stylish, pedigreed Laura might best be read as a satire of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, reuniting that film’s Judith Anderson with another late, lamented mistress and acres more scenery to chew. It replaces George Sanders with Vincent Price, Laurence Olivier with stiff-as-a-board Boy Scout Dana Andrews, and a never-present heroine with Gene Tierney, she of the unspeakably gorgeous cheekbones. Laura easily laps most films for narrative complexity, the sheer number of audacious hairpins it negotiates on the road of logic dizzying for their arbitrary contortions. The character of a fey, fifty-ish critic, Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), who introduces himself to a detective investigating the murder of the titular Laura (Tierney) by stepping out of a bath like some hybrid of Smithers and Mr. Burns, acts as the piece’s unreliable narrator, stalking through his scenes like a dandy in honorary high collar and spats while providing the strangest contention in a strange film: that this aging, fey, homosexual lothario was passionately in love with his ward, Laura. The picture might be the most overt iteration of film noir as a genre about emasculation ever put to celluloid, and trying to puzzle out whether Waldo’s for real and chief gumshoe McPherson (Andrews) buys any of his honeyed hooey constitutes a good portion of what’s fun and maddening in equal measure about it. That tension between what’s ridiculous and what the characters take seriously makes Laura a mystery, for sure, but not for the obvious reasons.

Drawing Restraint 9 (2006)

May 12, 2006Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Esoterica, Japan, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Matthew Barney, Björk, Shigeru Akahori, Koji Maki
written and directed by Matthew Barney

by Walter Chaw Where Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 falls short of his brilliant, seminal Cremaster series is in its decision to focus on the exploitation of natural resources from whaling through to oil–as filtered through the prism of Japanese industry (using Shinto as the primary test)–rather than on, as in Cremaster, the process and scope of myth-making from the Celts to the Masons to Gary Gilmore. The focus is too discrete for the far-reaching archetypes Barney's disquieting, biomechanical surrealism suggests (he's somewhere at the fulcrum between Salvador Dali and David Cronenberg)–the attempt to articulate the perversity of man's exploitation of their natural resources seems a little like what it is: an artist too good and too provocative to waste his time on something that sells so trite.

Poseidon (2006)

May 11, 20062000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kurt Russell, Josh Lucas, Jacinda Barrett, Richard Dreyfuss
screenplay by Mark Protosevich, based on the novel The Poseidon Adventure by Paul Gallico
directed by Wolfgang Petersen

by Walter Chaw Sort of like Ghost Ship without the gore (and it promptly loses the points it earns for being sans Julianna Marguiles by featuring Kevin Dillon), Wolfgang Petersen's soggy underwater soaper Poseidon starts with a theoretically exciting (but just unintentionally hilarious) set-piece and limps the rest of the way on the standard old slogging-through-wet-hallways bullroar that may be the very definition of "un-exciting." Kurt Russell is Robert, an ex-fireman/ex-New York mayor who appears to have a gambling problem and a contentious relationship with his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum), which will of course be resolved, Mark Twain-style, by a late-in-the-show heroic action. Josh Lucas is Dylan, the rogue ex-Navy man with a plan; Jimmy Bennett is the buck-toothed little idiot who wanders off a lot (and Jacinda Barrett is his long-suffering mom, Maggie); Richard Dreyfuss plays Richard, a suicidal queen planning on leaving his pals with a hefty bill by leaping from the mighty Poseidon luxury liner's galleria after dinner; and all people of colour are meatbags to be fed to the mill whenever someone needs an example of what could happen to the rich whiteys not unfortunate enough to be in steerage.

Munich (2005) – DVD

May 8, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Spielberg, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz
screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Violence begets violence, terrorism begets terrorism, corruption begets corruption, and on and on up and down the self-righteous homily scale. Some time during the third hour of Steven Spielberg's slapdash Munich, the small lessons of this huge picture begin to feel like a ten-penny nail pounded into the middle of your forehead. There's possibly no other director who could have brought this film to fruition with such speed (principal photography began on the day Spielberg's other 2005 release, War of the Worlds, opened in the United States), but for as remarkable as that accomplishment is from a brinkmanship standpoint (about $250M-worth of film in one calendar year? Priceless), the stress begins to show in Munich–the first Spielberg film in memory so hamstrung with amateurish thematic visual concepts that you begin to wonder whether an editor fresh off the bus took over the picture's composition. Still, credit is due Spielberg, almost as well-known for his inability to resist tacking on unearned happy endings as for his savant-like conversance with the medium, for crafting a picture that's morally ambiguous (if only fitfully, and then torturously, so) as well as for daring to whisper that as a direct result of the best intentions of the bloodlust of "civilization" and Old Testament logic employed by the "good guys," the world may actually be a more dangerous place now than it was thirty years ago.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

May 5, 20062000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Espionage, Germany, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

*/****
starring Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, Billy Crudup
screenplay by Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci & J.J. Abrams
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. That classic combination of a film that doesn't make any sense with one that doesn't inspire anyone to invest an iota of emotion in giving a crap, J.J. Abrams's Mission: Impossible III (hereafter M:i:III) isn't convoluted like the first two instalments so much as it's just incoherent and loud. It's the camera-in-a blender-school of action filmmaking: There's so little understanding of spatial relationships that the whole thing plays like that Naked Gun gag where the gunfight is taking place between two people within arm's reach of one another. An extended heist sequence set in Vatican City, for instance, features the four members of IMF ("Impossible Mission Force") hotshot Ethan Hunt's (Tom Cruise) team (Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and the requisite hot Asian chick (Maggie Q)) running around in completely anonymous locations, sticking doodads to walls, and confirming to one another that they're "ready" and "in place." But without knowledge of their plan, their location (respective to one another and their goal, whatever that might be), their peril, or the stakes, you're left with four people doing something for some reason, necessitating our willingness to play along with the charade that we know who these people are, what their goal is, and why we should care. Consider a helicopter chase through a wind farm, too, and the many lovely visuals that such an enticing premise suggests–then look to the end-product, which is a lot of tight shots of helicopters in the middle of the night, parts of giant windmills, a bad soundtrack, and multiple decibel screaming about "incoming" and "they've got a lock on us." Who does? And where are they going on that wind farm? And why does the promise of an instrument-factory explosion induce yawns?

The Champ (1931) – DVD

May 1, 20061930s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Sports

*/**** Image B Sound C Extras C
starring Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Irene Rich, Rosco Ates
screenplay by Francis Marion and Leonard Praskins
directed by King Vidor

by Walter Chaw So dated now as to seem nigh prehistoric, King Vidor's silent era-bound The Champ is broad melodrama of the underdog-uplift/precocious-kid variety, and though it's sorely tempting to condescend to it by placing it within its historical context, watching it now is like getting a screw drilled into your forehead. Doing road work with his lovable boy Dink (Jackie Cooper, more than a marionette, less than a creature of flesh and blood), The Champ (Wallace Beery) is a cartoon of a lush and a punch-drunk boxer who makes silly shadow-boxing gestures in long, unbroken takes, requiring Beery to ad-lib business that segues uneasily late in the film when the same Beery shtick must carry pathos. We can't think that a Vaudevillian's conception of a retarded drunk and a compulsive gambler is adorable and then reorient ourselves into thinking he's feeble without confronting the same conundrum the film itself presents a modern viewer. Either The Champ is fabulous–for a picture made in 1931, that is–or it's only accessible for a theoretical, contemporaneous audience, lacing any ascriptions of quality with that one major caveat and thus rendering them exactly as useless as that kind of equivocation always is.

United 93 (2006)

April 28, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Lewis Alsamari, JJ Johnson, Trish Gates, Polly Adams
written and directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw I guess when you talk about a movie like Paul Greengrass's United 93, you have to talk about the propriety of the project: Whether death, fear, and suffering at its most obscene is something we should try to know or gratefully shield ourselves from. Should 9/11 already be an Oprah special and a national holiday? It's an essential question, a defining one–and on either side of the question's divide, you'll find one person who thinks we should see our soldiers' caskets draped in American flags and another who feels that seeing war casualties is somehow bad for morale or, if our fearless leaders are to be believed, somehow unpatriotic. Ignorance is as blissful now as it ever was–it's one aphorism the film honours. Another is that you reap what you sow: The belief that our civil liberties, for which we eagerly fight and die to protect on foreign soil, are the first things we seem to sacrifice in times of peril (including a vocal rabble wondering if we're "ready" for a 9/11 film), is far stickier when the proposition before us is that Islamic extremists don't like us because of that which defines us as Americans. ("They hate our freedom" is the party line.) So when our government begins to infringe on our personal freedom after a meticulously organized and coordinated terrorist attack took us completely unawares (I still recall with a shudder how then-Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice claimed that no one could have imagined it) more than four years ago, that means–more than over twenty-one hundred military dead (and counting) does–that we've already lost.

RV (2006)

April 28, 20062000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Germany, Theatrical, UK

½*/****
starring Robin Williams, Jeff Daniels, Cheryl Hines, Kristin Chenowith
screenplay by Geoff Rodkey
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

by Walter Chaw Shit, feral raccoons, hillbillies, tits, white-boy Ebonics, more shit, and oodles of forced sentimentality to propel the septic stew down our collective throat as we strain towards it, baby bird-like. Or so the theory goes. In the interest of complete disclosure, the reason Barry Sonnenfeld's excrescent RV dodged a zero-star rating from me is that I actually laughed at a perversely perfect sewage geyser. It's one thing when you're all about the slapstick gross-out gag; another when, National Lampoon's Vacation-style (the film that, structurally, RV, Johnson Family Vacation, Are We There Yet?, and so on most resemble), your trip across the middle of the United States yields insights into the caste and racial strata of our expansive country. Then you have a feckless relic like this that pulls its punches even in regards to the bigotry it directs at rednecks. There's nothing to hold onto in RV, and it tries so hard to please that there's not much joy in taking it down. It's like kicking a puppy, with the puppy trying to lick your boot as you do it.