Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 88 of 150

Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) – DVD

April 25, 20062000s, 2005, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan

*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki (American adaptation by Cindy Davis Hewitt & Donald H. Hewitt), based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones
directed by Hayao Miyazaki

by Walter Chaw I’ve never liked it much when the Japanese are drawn to Victoriana, finding parallels as they sometimes seem to between that reserved, sexually repressive culture and their own, because it most often results in garbage like Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s exhausting Steamboy and now master Hayao Miyazaki’s disappointing Howl’s Moving Castle. Slow, not terribly interested in lore or internal logic, and fatally hamstrung by the choice of actors like Billy Crystal and a zombified Emily Mortimer to voice its American dub, it’s a regression for Miyazaki from his last two films (Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away) in almost every sense, starting with his decision to have a lonely young woman as the central character in place of the prepubescent little girls front and centre in most of his masterpieces (the last two films, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and My Neighbor Totoro) and ending with a gross simplification of his usually complex themes of confidence and actualization into a colourless, flavourless drone about the hard-to-dispute badness of war.

Rescue Me: The Complete Second Season (2005) – DVD

April 24, 20062000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A Extras C
“Voicemail,” “Harmony,” “Balls,” “Twat,” “Sensitivity,” “Reunion,” “Shame,” “Believe,” “Rebirth,” “Brains,” “Bitch,” “Happy,” “Justice”

by Walter Chaw If we proceed from the premise that the first season of FX’s firefighter series “Rescue Me” is an overt metaphor for the reconfiguration of society post-9/11 along tribal/machismo lines, the second season sees the rules established, leaving only the playing-out of über-civilization’s system of justice. It’s post-apocalyptic in the same manner as Walter Hill’s The Warriors: a diary of urban demolition and the erosion of decorum; the crude, reductive barbarism of its survivors is worn as a badge of honour. They’re martyrs in uniform flying the banner of the underpaid and overworked–credit the series for acknowledging their position on the cross a time or two through the firefighter’s natural archenemy, the bulls. The world as we knew it ended one day, and from its ashes rose cowboys, cowboy crusades, and a “bring it on” attitude towards loss of life and the dealing of death. If the show gets progressively more unpleasant and hard to justify, it also charts the same arc in our culture and society. And it makes perfect sense in this way (if in no other) that Season Two’s cliffhanger revolves around the senseless death of a child enlisted in a war not of his making and certainly beyond his comprehension.

The New World (2005) – DVD

April 23, 2006****/****, 2000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, Q’Orianka Kilcher
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick opens The New World with “come spirit, help us,” invoking the muse before embarking on a spoken history part rapturous, part hallucinogenic, all speculative, reverent, and sanctified hearsay. Malick is the post-modern American epic poet of the division ploughed through the middle of America, telling our history with one voice, painting it in golden shades of romance and poesy. It’s the only viable approach to the Captain John Smith/Pocahontas story in a minefield of debris strewn by not only our Western genre tradition, but also our newer guilt at how American Indians have been (and continue to be) portrayed in our culture: the most bestial, savage notions of the Natural have come around to their personification as an unsullied, Edenic embodiment of an impossibly harmonious nature. It’s an organic progression from bigotry to paternalism, and Malick charts these dangerous waters with the audacity of an artist well and truly in the centre of his craft. He makes the doomed love between Smith and the much younger Pocahontas function as a metaphor for the decimation of the Native American population–and in so doing suggests the possibility that all human interaction can be analyzed along the lines of love and misunderstanding. Routinely described as inscrutable or remote, Malick’s The New World presents history as something as simple as two people who come together, fall in love, and betray one another because their cultures are too different, too intolerant, to coexist with one another. It’s history as a progression of human tragedy.

Whisper of the Heart (1995) – DVD

April 20, 20061990s, 2006, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Japan, Music, Romance

***/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki
directed by Yoshifumi Kondo

by Walter Chaw Three years after directing Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki-scripted Whisper of the Heart, and before he was able to complete a second picture for the venerable Japanese institution, ace animator and Miyazaki protégé Yoshifumi Kondo passed away of an aneurysm at the age of 47. Knowledge of Kondo’s fate colours the already wistful Whisper of the Heart with another layer of blue (especially if you’re a fan of Kondo’s behind-the-scenes work on landmark anime like Grave of the Fireflies and Princess Mononoke), but it doesn’t completely rescue its remarkable humanity from frequent descents into culturally alien specificity. The obsession with reworking John Denver’s hilljack schmaltz classic “Country Road” into an un-ironic ode to the “concrete roads” of the picture’s Tokyo-bound little girl protagonist (Shizuku (Youko Honna)), for instance, almost by itself renders Whisper of the Heart a Hello Kitty! for that particular brand of Japanese, Yank-ophile, cross-eyed badger shit. It’s a better film if you’re Japanese–kind of an amazing thing to say, I know, but the moments that don’t reconstitute American “popular” culture through a Nipponese filter manage a fair-to-amazing job of evoking the overwhelming rush of first love. Shame, then, that John Denver appears at regular intervals to remind us of how peculiar a beast cultural diffusion can be.

Wet Asphalt (1958) – DVD

April 12, 20061950s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller, West Germany, ZERO STARS

Nasser Asphalt
ZERO STARS/**** Image D+ Sound C-
starring Horst Buccholz, Martin Held, Maria Perschv, Gert Frobe
screenplay by Will Tremper
directed by Frank Wisbar

by Walter Chaw Unbearably padded with stock footage and stilted segues around the alleged intrigue of newspaper ethics, Frank Wisbar’s abominable Wet Asphalt might discover contemporary relevance for the conceit that a lie about war becomes the biggest story in the world–but probably only if you’re so blinded by rage that the picture’s shortcomings are secondary. Directed by the obscure Frank Wisbar and starring the recalcitrant punk (Horst Buchholz) from The Magnificent Seven and One, Two, Three, the film follows the trials of a ghostwritten young reporter who gets his name attached to a bit of nonsense about Germans living underground after the war. Maybe it’s an offshoot of the apocryphal tales of Japanese soldiers crawling out of the Pacific bush years after VJ-Day; more likely, it’s the product of a belief that cheapo genre horseshit like this would earn its investment back before people got wise and stayed away in droves. Oh, and there’s also some claptrap revolving around a perfunctory love story with wallpaper Bettina (Maria Perschy), to say nothing of the sitting room moralizations with smarmy boss Cesar (Martin Held).

Edward Scissorhands (1990) [Anniversary Edition] – DVD

April 11, 20061990s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, Fantasy, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder, Dianne Wiest, Anthony Michael Hall
screenplay by Caroline Thompson
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw Edward (Johnny Depp), all of Edward Gorey blacks and angles, is the product of a variation on the Frankenstein myth, his mad scientist creator (Vincent Price) dying before he can replace Edward’s scissor-hands with wax appendages. Marooned at a child’s emotional development, he’s thus unburdened by the sort of rage for usurpation of Mary Shelly’s creation; when he kills his “father” by neither accident nor design, find in Edward an adolescent’s existential angst in an Oedipal split interrupted at the moment he was to be given the instruments of his ascension into “humanity” by his creator. The irony of his condition is expressed by the Stan Winston-designed shears with which he’s burdened, lost on the edges of civilization (Tim Burton’s twisted view of suburbia), cutting out articles from scavenged magazines and junk mail flyers and arranging them in a collage that includes a story about a boy without eyes, an ad for the kind of prefab-furniture favoured by Burton’s suburbanites, and a Madonna-and-child. Our introduction to Edward, facilitated by chirpy Avon sales lady and housewife Peg (Dianne Wiest), is the film’s signature set-piece, allowing as it does this twisted, tragic figure to emerge as both effrontery and holy effigy. For Burton, Edward glows with the romance of an eternal child–Peter Pan in love with a memory of Wendy for eternity, adrift with the Lost Boys and working with ice.

Derailed (2005) [Widescreen Edition (Unrated)] – DVD

April 6, 20062000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Clive Owen, Jennifer Aniston, Vincent Cassel, Melissa George
screenplay by Stuart Beattie
directed by Mikael Håfström

by Walter Chaw Okay, here’s the deal: if I tell you that Derailed has a big plot twist, you’re going to figure it out from the trailers; and if I don’t, you’re going to figure it out at around the ten-minute mark–it’s just that stupid. So I’m simply going to say that Jennifer Aniston is like an old studio starlet trying on her ill-fitting acting shoes in a thriller that wants to turn her into a bad girl done wrong but quails at every moment of truth. The ultimate effect of her “metamorphosis” from America’s sweetheart is the uncomfortable feeling that you just saw Donna Reed (or your best friend’s mom) in an S&M outfit. It makes the already-spoiled rape scene (unless ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY is an underground publication nowadays) a non-event because as you’re watching it, tickling at the back of your head is the knowledge that they’d never rape Rachel in a mainstream middlebrow thriller (even if professional creep Vincent Cassel is the rapist). More, because the whole thing unfolds from the point of view of a very groggy paramour Charles (Clive Owen), the rape becomes something that’s only very inconvenient for our married white male adulterer. It’s despicable, is what it is–compounded by a lie later on and ultimately invalidated by our tired twist, which finds at the end our Charles the spitting image of Travis Bickle but without any trace of irony.

Friends with Money (2006)

April 6, 20062000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical Release

**/****
starring Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand
written and directed by Nicole Holofcener

by Walter Chaw Nicole Holofcener follows her marginal success Lovely and Amazing with the equally marginal failure Friends with Money, presenting a series of interpersonal apocalypses as awkward dinner parties and scenes made unwisely at Old Navy by super-successful fashion designers. It’s not subtle in its broad strokes, and once the layers of Angelino self-mortification and obfuscation are plumbed, it’s not subtle in its character strokes, either. What it is is a caesura in the middle of those pictures that don’t care about their characters that’s only interested in its characters–a film that might be shorthanded as “European” in that nothing much happens as words and glances billow in carefully ventriloquited clouds. It’s about how people talk to one another among friends and then lover/confidants on the drive home, and as such, it provides a clearer look at conversation in any single exchange than does the whole of Crash. Friends with Money is a comparison of our intimate and our open lives; in the comparison, it suggests a third persona, an interiority–though not entirely successfully, making it only as good, really, as the conversation that it may itself inspire on the ride home.

Fun with Dick and Jane (2005) – DVD

April 2, 20062000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

½*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Jim Carrey, Téa Leoni, Alec Baldwin, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Judd Apatow & Nicholas Stoller
directed by Dean Parisot

by Walter Chaw Dean Parisot’s remake of Ted Kotcheff’s 1977 Fun with Dick and Jane is simultaneously lifeless and desperate, a collection of horrid eleventh-hour edits that result in jokes without punchlines and Carrey’s old physical-comedy riffs trotted out in the service of a half-assed redux of a half-assed original. The one nod to freshening up the original’s full-frontal assault on capitalism as a means towards happiness (a satirical slot machine tugged to better effect by the act and allure of playing “The Sims”) is that it’s set in the year 2000 and deals with corporate malfeasance of the kind most conspicuously indulged in by Enron. (In case you don’t get that, the last rimshot of the film is taken at Enron’s expense, while the first closing credit is a “special thanks” to Ken Lay and his lieutenants.) The fictional big bad fiscal wolf of the piece is Globodyne, presided over by Jack McAllister (Alec Baldwin, in his second corporate bigwig turn after Elizabethtown), a southerner mainly because “southerner” is one of the last cultural groups (along with, say, Asians and gays) you can mock without much fear of backlash. On the day before it’s revealed that “Big Jack” has stripped the corporate coffers (including pensions), Dick (Carrey) is promoted to VP of something or another, inspiring wife Jane (Leoni) to quit her job and pushing Dick before the cameras on some Lou Dobbs’s “Moneyline” show, where he discovers, in a very public way, that his steed is a paper tiger.

W.W.: FFC Interviews Wim Wenders

April 2, 20062000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Interviews

April 2, 2006|It was my great honour to speak with Wim Wenders, one of the three principal architects of the German New Wave (along with the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the bulletproof Werner Herzog) on his recent swing through Denver. Sitting at a large, round, glass table (he at two o’clock, me at four), he reached over by way of introduction and examined my decrepit tape recorder, made sure it was on, and turned the built-in microphone towards his voice before folding his hands and looking at me expectantly. I took it as tacit approval of either my poverty or my Ludditism from a man whose mature work has consistently addressed the idea of spectatorship–leaving his late-American films (like The End of Violence and Million Dollar Hotel) essays on Modernism in the Eliot mold: the poet stranded between Rat’s Alley and the riverbank. His Dennis Hopper-as-Tom-Ripley The American Friend still the finest screen adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel (with work like Purple Noon, Strangers on a Train, and Ripley’s Game, versions of the same story, all hot on its heels), it is, like his best-known Paris, Texas and best-loved Wings of Desire, a transcendental odyssey through an existential wasteland, its blasted psychic landscape manifesting itself in the empty American dreaming Wenders has made his milieu.

Huff: The Complete First Season; Masters of Horror: Dreams in the Witch House; Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns – DVDs

March 30, 20062000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: John Carpenter, Drama, DVD, Horror

HUFF: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON (2004-2005)
Image A Sound B Extras C
“Pilot,” “Assault and Pepper,” “Lipstick on Your Panties,” “Control,” “Flashpants,” “Is She Dead?,” “That Fucking Cabin,” “Cold Day in Shanghai,” “Christmas Is Ruined,” “The Good Doctor,” “The Sample Closet,” “All the King’s Horses,” “Crazy Nuts & All Fucked Up”

MASTERS OF HORROR: H.P. LOVECRAFT’S DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE (2005)
Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Ezra Godden, Chelah Horsdal
teleplay by Dennis Paoli & Stuart Gordon, based on the story by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Stuart Gordon

MASTERS OF HORROR: CIGARETTE BURNS (2005)
Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Norman Reedus, Udo Kier
teleplay by Drew McWeeny & Scott Swan
directed by John Carpenter

by Walter Chaw In an effort to step out from the shadow of HBO’s remarkable run of original programming, Showtime contributes to the noise pollution with sub-par retreads like the inexplicably-lauded hour-longs “Weeds”, “The L Word”, and the puffed-up psychodrama “Huff”. I’m a big fan of Hank Azaria, for no good reason, I guess, beyond his long-term involvement with “The Simpsons”, but cast herein as the titular shrink (Craig “Huff” Huffstodt) who witnesses a gay patient (Noel Fisher) commit suicide in his office in the pilot episode, Azaria finds more than just his character neutered and ineffectual. The writing is the first problem with “Huff”, leaning hard as it does on the Dr. Phil Handbook for Fake Shrinks in its therapy sessions (leave out the dead gay kid, incidentally, and until episode four’s guy-who-refuses-to-shit Huff’s patients all appear to be beautiful women) and making the bad mistake of thinking that castrating bitch goddess mothers (Blythe Danner, playing Estelle Getty), nymphomaniac wives (Paget Brewster), and precious/precocious kids (Anton Yelchin) will write themselves out of narrative Bermuda Triangles. Its lack of originality and stultifying obviousness isn’t what I hate (it’s too boring to hate), though: what I hate is the intrusion of the supernatural in the character of a Hungarian panhandler (Jack Lauger) Huff helps in ways so astonishingly altruistic as to suggest religious mania–not to mention an aesthetic that applies edits and score with the feckless aggression of the genuinely clueless. It looks cool, it sounds sage, and it leaves characters stranded in the middle of a whole lot of slick, iMovie-crunched, amateurish bullshit.

Elizabethtown (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

March 28, 20062000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras D+
starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Walter Chaw Casting about wildly for that elusive “Lubitsch Touch” so prized by his hero Billy Wilder, underdog-uplift auteur Cameron Crowe has patched together Elizabethtown: an awkward, shambling, Frankenstein’s monster of a romantic screwball farce that, for all its slickness, shows off every one of its bolts and stitches in monstrous bas relief. Crowe piles on the pathos in this tale of fallen shoe designer Drew (Orlando Bloom), who travels from the West Coast to the semi-Deep South (the titular Elizabethtown, KY) to collect the ashes of his freshly-dead father for the purposes of a maudlin (and interminable) eleventh-hour road trip. “We should have done this years ago,” says Drew to his dad’s earthly remains, wiping away a brave tear, but for as machine-calibrated as the scene is to pluck at the heartstrings, there isn’t–as there isn’t at any moment in this film–a hint of authenticity to the sentiment. It’s hard to question Crowe’s earnestness, but it’s easy to point at the alien remove of this picture and speculate as to whether the mom-dependent Crowe (has anyone checked to see if he’s still attached to her umbilically?) has ever had a genuinely examined emotion regarding his pop.

Bee Season (2005) – DVD

March 27, 20062000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Germany

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, Flora Cross, Max Minghella
screenplay by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, based on the novel by Myla Goldberg
directed by Scott McGehee & David Siegel

by Walter Chaw A lot of mortal liberties were taken with Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season on its way to the big screen under the pen of Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and direction of Scott McGehee and David Siegel, most of them having to do with softening the suffocating fanaticism and sensuality of the novel in favour of the soothing neutral tones of the fearful doorstop demographic. It’s not that the book is better, it’s that the book is entirely different: the one has a point of view, while the other mainly boasts an air of pusillanimous equivocation that turns a vaguely threatening story concerning Kaballah and Hebrew mysticism into Searching for Bobby Fischer. The problem might be that Richard Gere’s Saul is a hotshot college professor in this version, and completely reasonable and charming to boot. The problem might be, in other words, that Gere is too good for this movie.

Chicken Little (2005) – DVD

March 27, 20062000s, 2005, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
screenplay by Ron Anderson, Steve Bencich and Ron J.Friedman
directed by Mark Dindal

by Walter Chaw Frantic, frenetic, anxious, obnoxious: the ideal audience for Chicken Little should be in bed by seven, and Disney’s umpteenth cry of “sure-fire comeback project” looks, appropriately, like another convulsive episode of corporate crying-wolf. Chicken Little, for instance, makes pop culture references that don’t mean anything in the context of a film whose sole purpose appears to be instructing your children to be fearful and hyper. They’re just there to give parents, alternately stunned and bored, a little rootless pleasure in the middle of epileptic flash; what’s left isn’t clever (or kinetic) enough for us to ignore its essential emptiness. What Chicken Little is more than anything else is exhausting. You could by rights hope that it’s is a send-up of the Fifties cycle of Martian invasion pictures (it name-checks War of the Worlds for no good reason) as The Incredibles was a send-up of Golden Age superhero comics, but even a cursory comparison between the two films shows that Disney’s desperation to make Pixar’s looming secession a non-issue is as limp and impotent as the Nevada State Boxing Commission.

Grey’s Anatomy: Season One (2005) + Arrested Development Season: Two (2004-2005) – DVDs

March 26, 20062000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Television

GREY’S ANATOMY: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound B Extras C
“A Hard Day’s Night,” “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” “Winning a Battle, Losing the War,” “No Man’s Land,” “Shake Your Groove Thing,” “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” “The Self Destruct Button,” “Save Me,” “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?”

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: SEASON TWO
Image A Sound B+ Extras B
“The One Where Michael Leaves,” “The One Where They Build a House,” “Amigos,” “Good Grief!,” “Sad Sack,” “Afternoon Delight,” “Switch Hitter,” “Queen for a Day,” “Burning Love,” “Ready, Aim, Marry Me,” “Out on a Limb,” “My Hand to God,” “Motherboy XXX,” “The Immaculate Election,” “The Sword of Destiny,” “Meet the Veals,” “Spring Breakout,” “Righteous Brothers”

by Walter Chaw A show so odious, so repugnant, that it’s impossible not to have predicted its newly-minted role as the most popular program in the land, Shonda Rhimes’s “Grey’s Anatomy” has the singular distinction of transforming the adorable Ellen Pompeo into a shallow, whorish version of Doogie Howser, practiced in the art of interspersing extraordinary, near-savant leaps of medical intuition with rolling in the hay with her boss, the hipster-dubbed Dr. McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey). When Dr. Meredith Grey meets a new patient, lay you even money that his/her pain and suffering will be used to augment Meredith’s face-swallowing, thirtysomething pout, which is one thing–making her brilliant ex-doctor mother a victim of prime time soap opera Alzheimer’s for the same ends is something else altogether. Other alternatives include Dr. Meredith babysitting a severed penis in a Coleman cooler and, better, her lingerie model-turned-MD cohort intervening on behalf of a man undergoing erection-threatening prostate surgery. What better way to end the season, then, but to do a whole episode about a syphilis epidemic sleazing like wildfire through the show’s Seattle Grace Hospital?

The Squid and the Whale (2005) + The Weather Man (2005)|The Squid and the Whale [Special Edition] – DVD

March 23, 2006****/****, 2000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical Release

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
****/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring Laura Linney, Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

THE WEATHER MAN
½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis, Michael Rispoli
screenplay by Steven Conrad
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw The title refers to a New York Museum of Natural History diorama called “Clash of the Titans” that proposes what a tussle between a sperm whale and a giant squid would look like–and it functions as the final, stirring tableaux of a 16mm film self-consciously shot in the manner of early Jim Jarmusch or Spike Lee joints. But The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach’s fourth film as writer-director, has inspired more conversation about the degree to which it does or does not tell the story of his own childhood–more specifically, the divorce of his parents, novelist Jonathan Baumbach and former VILLAGE VOICE film critic Georgia Brown–than about the self-reflexive canniness of the filmmaking itself.

King Kong (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

March 20, 2006****/****, 2000s, 2005, 2006, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Germany, New Zealand, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the screenplay by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace
directed by Peter Jackson

by Walter Chaw Naomi Watts is absolutely adorable in King Kong. Good thing, too, because she has to convince that with a few vaudeville pratfalls and a strategically-wielded switch she can win the heart of one of the most venerated monsters in movie history. The way Peter Jackson films her suggests that he’s found his own muse: she’s always set against impossible backlot sunsets, asked to feign love for a fake film before transforming herself–in the same, wonderful shot–into feigning real love for a man in this film when she spots her suitor, playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), author of a play (“Isolation”) for which she sees herself as perfect for the melancholy lead. (“You must be the saddest girl in New York.” She is.) In a lot of ways, Watts’s Ann Darrow is the logical extension of her Betty from Mulholland Drive: both are actresses with hidden elements to their personalities, both are asked to audition for us on an imaginary stage, and both, in the end, find themselves embroiled in a dark romance that ends in show-business betrayal. During the final third of King Kong, once the beast famously has Ann in his clutches while scaling the side of a mighty edifice in the Big Apple, it’s fair to be distracted by the rapture on her face–and to wonder if she knows that there’s only one eventuality possible to her quiescence.

Towne Country: FFC Interviews Robert Towne

March 19, 20062000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

March 19, 2006|Bill posed the question eloquently in his review of Robert Towne’s Without Limits of whether Towne actually deserves the “legend” label he’s sported since his remarkable trifecta of The Last Detail, Chinatown, and Shampoo. Script doctor extraordinaire, I’d buy (Towne presided over lengthy rewrites of personal faves The Parallax View and Night Moves while inserting key sequences into The Godfather), but doesn’t that only bolster the idea that he needs a great collaborator to create truly great work? Then there’s his penchant for attaching himself to matinee-idol types, which is fine when they’re Jack Nicholson or Warren Beatty, not so fine when it’s Tom Cruise. And it’s been Tom Cruise since long about Days of Thunder.

Pride & Prejudice (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

March 14, 20062000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Romance, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Brenda Blethyn, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Deborah Moggach
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw There’s fat to be trimmed from Joe Wright’s noble go at Jane Austen’s adapted-to-death Pride and Prejudice, which clocks in at a flabby 127 minutes (yet still seems somehow rushed at its conclusion), but when it works, it does for Austen what Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V and Hamlet did for Shakespeare: it makes the trials of these iconic literary figures feel immediate and sensible–and it does so with a screenplay (by Deborah Moggach) that understands what parts of the text are timeless and what parts are not. This isn’t to say that this Pride & Prejudice is more post-modern than the source, but that Wright understands where to prompt top-billed Keira Knightley to laugh sardonically and thus crafts an illusion of an interior life for her Elizabeth Bennet beyond the usual impression of adolescent cattiness. Knightley may very well be headed for an Oscar nomination for what has become the chick-Hamlet (Austen being the crucible through which young British actors put themselves in preparation for, I guess, Domino and sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean), but I’m thinking if she gets one, she owes at least half of it to Wright for the amount of time he put into highlighting her script.

Everything is Illuminated (2005) + A History of Violence (2005)|A History of Violence [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

March 13, 2006****/****, 2000s, 2005, 2006, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, DVD, Theatrical Release, Thriller

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
**/****
starring Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin, Laryssa Lauret
screenplay by Liev Schreiber, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
directed by Liev Schreiber

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt
screenplay by Josh Olson, based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw A year after a glut of films about the past being wilfully stifled by the present, find Liev Schreiber’s Everything is Illuminated and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, literal calls to awake following the nightmare of the night before–or, better, avenues through which we might recognize that suppressing a collective shadow mainly serves to nourish it until it explodes, monstrous, back into our consciousness. The one is based on an Anthony Burgess-like book of great linguistic imagination by Jonathan Safran Foer, the other a spare graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke–and just the obliqueness of the respective source materials speaks to the primacy of their message: “Everything is illuminated by the past.” The keystone line in Schreiber’s picture, this serves as a mission statement of sorts for both films, locating in the middle of this first decade of the new millennium something that feels like a weary acceptance that not only are we products of our trauma and misdeeds, but also that our trauma and misdeeds are beyond redress and completely inescapable. To parse the best line in Kenneth Branagh’s Dead Again, it’s the karmic payment plan: buy now, pay forever.