Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 90 of 149

Match Point (2005)

January 13, 20062000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Luxembourg, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Walter Chaw Match Point is a quasi-Patricia Highsmith flick about a rudderless Ripley cruising like a shark amongst England’s polite society, and the extent to which it works has to do with the degree to which its philosophy of chance and living with ghosts attaches itself to the zeitgeist. The picture opens with a shot of a tennis ball lobbed low and in slow-motion into the top of a net, an image that has as its echo a key moment where a wedding ring tossed towards a river rebounds against a fence into the street. The voiceover talks about the common fear that our lives are governed by happenstance and entropy, transforming the ball going forward into a metaphor for winning–and back into one for losing. Using this as gospel, it’s interesting to wonder what it means that, when push comes to shove, our hero’s victory is defined by his defeat. Match Point is Woody Allen’s best film in some time, which is a left-handed compliment at best; better to say that it’s another decent millennial fable about class, the vicissitudes of fate, the reptilian hunger of infiltrating the social strata, and living with ghosts.

Tristan + Isolde (2006)

January 13, 20062000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, Germany, Ireland, Romance, Switzerland, Theatrical, UK, War

*/****
starring James Franco, Sophia Myles, Rufus Sewell, David O’Hara
screenplay by Dean Georgaris
directed by Kevin Reynolds

by Walter Chaw After bravely transforming the Robin Hood legend into a case of thirtysomething love jones with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner’s well-known ex-best friend Kevin Reynolds turns the Tristan + Isolde legend into a WB/TIGER BEAT-friendly, mouth-breathing bodice-ripper indicated by lots of backlighting, orgasmic slow-mo, and dialogue purple enough to blind a Brontë sister. It’s shot like a perfume commercial and written like a florid creative-writing exercise, one packed with such AM Gold, Luther Ingram treasures as: “Why does loving you feel so wrong?” Well, it might have something to do with said love being the basis for the Guinevere/Lancelot adultery story in which a woman comes between a king and his most trusted knight, leading to the ideological and literal collapse of a kingdom. Or it might have something to do with the fact that the actors playing the lovers in question never for a moment manage to spark the soggy tinder packed beneath the story. This allows a great deal of time for the sentient beings left in the audience after the ten-minute-mark exodus to suss out why this thing was delayed, then dumped in the middle of the January dead zone. It also, incidentally, caused me to fantasize about somehow harnessing the ability of films like this to make 125 minutes feel like six days for youth-giving effects and racing box scores.

Glory Road (2006) + Last Holiday (2006)

January 13, 20062000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

GLORY ROAD
½*/****
starring Josh Lucas, Derek Luke, Emily Deschanel, Jon Voight
screenplay by Christopher Cleveland & Bettina Gilois and Gregory Allen Howard
directed by James Gartner

LAST HOLIDAY
*/****
starring Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman, based on the screenplay by J.B. Priestley
directed by Wayne Wang

by Walter Chaw There are two big laughs in Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer’s African-American Hoosiers, Glory Road. The first comes when some white guy says derisively, “Can you imagine what basketball dominated by Negroes would look like?”, while the sight of defeated Kentucky coaching legend Adolph Rupp (Jon Voight), vilified by history perhaps unfairly (though there’s no question that he’s vilified unfairly by this film), mourning the loss of the National Championship Game to an upstart team prompts the second. Both moments speak to the biggest problems in a film riddled with little ones: the former because it makes the audience complicit in–and comfortable with–the picture’s callousness and casual blanket racism, and the latter because everything that happens in the film is already a foregone conclusion. The only appeal left is rooted in seeing the black players put on exactly the kind of degrading sideshow the picture suggests they’re too human for. Glory Road is smug, offensive, and ignorant in the way that films with no self-awareness are ignorant–wrapped in a story designed specifically to make people cheer and believe that this one game in 1966 changed peoples’ attitudes towards African-Americans in sports instead of simply bolstering the idea that the black athlete was advantageous and alien rather than just merely alien.

Dark Water (2005) [Unrated Widescreen Edition] – DVD

January 12, 20062000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, Dougray Scott
screenplay by Rafael Yglesias, based on the novel by Koji Suzuki
directed by Walter Salles

by Walter Chaw Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) is having a nightmare. Dark water is flooding into the ramshackle apartment she’s been forced to rent with young daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade) now that husband Kyle (Dougray Scott) has left her for another woman, where she encounters the visage of her spiteful alcoholic mother. Connelly’s performance throughout, but especially within these few seconds, is so complex, so almost physically wrenching, that the knowledge that Dark Water was badly marketed, critically savaged, and largely ignored stings all the more. Specifically, the moment in question underscores how far from the usual supernatural thriller this picture aspires to be: a ghost story in which the hauntings are golems of the soul instead of ectoplasm, cold spots, and rattling chains. In many ways, Dark Water works as an update of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, another story of a single woman in a strange place, beset by children and other reptiles of the spirit. And in return, that image of corrupt water invading a woman’s place of sanctuary with her daughter, already laden with archetype, gets a bracing shot of genre smarts.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2005

January 9, 20062000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

January 9, 2006|After a year, 2004, wherein we indulged in the fantasy that we could forget our recent past in favour of better tomorrows, 2005 finds us obsessed with the things we’ve lost (especially children), the things we deny, and the difficulty of living with ghosts. It was a reflection of our political landscape split starkly into a Yeatsian twain between the worst, with their passionate intensity, and the best, lacking all conviction–the ultra-conservatives producing more of the same old tired, divisive hate (The Island showed that even Old Scratch could be predictable and boring) and the ultra-liberals producing high-minded garbage that either studiously avoided a point-of-view (The Interpreter, The Constant Gardener, Kingdom of Heaven, Syriana) or was so clearly left-wing proselytizing that it jettisoned context and energy in favour of bland political allegory (Good Night, and Good Luck.). The reason Bush Jr. won a second term is that he ran unopposed — and after the disastrous year the Grand Old Party had under him as their fearless leader, the real tragedy is that there’s still no strong message from any opposing party to fill the void. Which explains, I guess, why the most ambivalent, overtly politicized films of the year were not only ultimately mediocre, but also made by a guy who taught himself how to finally direct an almost-passable film on the trial-and-mostly-error backs of three of the most highly-anticipated films of all time (George Lucas and Revenge of the Sith) and the king of everything for everyone (Steven Spielberg and his War of the Worlds and Munich). The blatant exceptions were Christopher Nolan’s genre Munich (Batman Begins) and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, a film that says volumes about vengeance and the delusions of the righteous while trapped in the body of a good old American, sexy dames and guns-a-blazing, neo-noir.

Broken Lizard’s Puddle Cruiser (1996) + The Dukes of Hazzard (2005) [Unrated – Widescreen] – DVDs

January 9, 20062000s, 2005, 2006, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

Puddle Cruiser
½*/**** Image C- Sound C- Extras C
starring Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Stephen Lemme, Paul Soter
screenplay by Broken Lizard
directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

THE DUKES OF HAZZARD
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott, Jessica Simpson, Burt Reynolds
screenplay by John O’Brien
directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

by Walter Chaw The first film from what would become the comedy troupe Broken Lizard, Puddle Cruiser was completed and released in 1996 on a budget of a quarter of a million dollars and enjoys the dubious distinction of being irrefutable evidence that Jay Chandrasekhar and company are as funny now as they always were. Something about Chandrasekhar’s Adam Corolla-on-quaaludes persona rubs me exactly the wrong way: it isn’t the delivery, really, so much as the pervasive sense of smug superiority–not to mention the hostility and, while we’re at it, the fact that he’s just not funny. With Puddle Cruiser, he’s created a film best described as a carbon copy of Noah Baumbach’s debut pic Kicking and Screaming–the key difference between them that Chandrasekhar and co-writers Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske are woefully out of their element as scenarists, gag writers, actors, you name it. That Broken Lizard has attained a level of popularity now with garbage like Super Troopers, Club Dread, and The Dukes of Hazzard is astonishing, if not as astonishing as Chandrasekhar having helmed a handful of episodes from the brilliant “Arrested Development”‘s first season. Goes to show that even a glib asshole can’t ruin a gifted cast, pitch-perfect script, or ironclad premise.

Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (2005)

December 21, 20052000s, 2005, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Piper Perabo, Tom Welling
screenplay by Sam Harper
directed by Adam Shankman

by Walter Chaw I spent altogether too much time during Cheaper by the Dozen 2 anticipating the moment when Hilary Duff would snuffle some sugar cubes out of a little girl’s hand–but in my defense, what else was there to do? I feel strange saying that this film is unwatchable because, hey, I’m proof that, technically, it is watchable; I guess I should say that it’s highly inadvisable to watch this film. I want to be clever, to turn a phrase that better illustrates the point, but in cases like these it’s probably better to be straightforward. If you find yourself in a theatre with this film, leave. It’s awful. Director Adam Shankman is the Uwe Boll of family movies: he doesn’t know how to pace a picture, he has no idea what to do with a camera (check out an outdoor banquet sequence that looks like it was shot under muddy water), and his use of John Debney’s atrocious, hate-crime of a score should set off Amnesty International’s radar. This is film as punishment, I’m serious. It’s never funny, never insightful, never valuable in any way. Kids might like it in the way that kids like anything that’s short and kinetic, yet the film preys upon a consistent mass hunger for “family” entertainment, and children and idiots deserve better supervision. Family films in the United States seem defined only as having no “objectionable” content, such as non-cartoon violence, a whiff of poetry, or any hint of sexuality. At the risk of being a rebel, let me offer the heretical view that the only content that’s truly objectionable is witless sludge like Cheaper by the Dozen 2.

Must Love Dogs (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

December 20, 20052000s, 2005, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras D+
starring Diane Lane, John Cusack, Dermot Mulroney, Elizabeth Perkins
screenplay by Gary David Goldberg, based on the novel by Claire Cook
directed by Gary David Goldberg

by Walter Chaw There must be some kind of comfort in seeing a film that is a carbon copy with only minor variations of a bazillion other films exactly like it. Or maybe the champions of something like Must Love Dogs come equipped with a sensory mechanism that makes them more attuned to detecting nuance between what appear to my untrained eyes to be identical low-aspiring/low-achieving, plug-and-play clockworks. Or maybe, just maybe, the people who will love this movie just don’t expect that much from their movies and will, in fact, resent it mightily if you say something that falls out of line with their minuscule expectations. If that’s the case, the demographic that loves stuff like this (or anything by Garry Marshall or Nora Ephron) is as zombified and brainwashed into acceptance of communally-approved garbage as the demographic that loves stuff by George Lucas and Michael Bay. Dimwits, in other words–ones with a Y chromosome and ones without, but a dimwit by any other name would still spend their hard-earned money on feckless garbage masquerading as art. Must Love Dogs is more extruded, like an iron casting, than created–more a mold than a piece of art. Not everything needs to be art, of course, so here goes your proof.

The Family Stone (2005); Loggerheads (2005); The Dying Gaul (2005)

December 16, 20052000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

THE FAMILY STONE
*/****
starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Claire Danes, Diane Keaton, Rachel McAdams
written and directed by Thomas Bezucha

LOGGERHEADS
*½/****
starring Tess Harper, Bonnie Hunt, Michael Kelly, Michael Learned
written and directed by Tim Kirkman

THE DYING GAUL
**/****
starring Patricia Clarkson, Campbell Scott, Peter Sarsgaard, Ryan Miller
written and directed by Craig Lucas

by Walter Chaw An absolute freakin’ nightmare: Imagine spending the holidays with Diane Keaton in full-smirk, full-chuffing, shit-eating laughter mode, then magnify that with a screenplay by hyphenate and former fashion executive Thomas Bezucha that never misses an opportunity to excrete a little dollop of quirk where silence would have spoken volumes. The Family Stone is an intensely middlebrow bath, dipped in warm sentiments and institutionalized ugliness–one half slapstick fish-out-of-water, one half chestnut-lit holiday perennial-hopeful. (The marriage works about as well as it does in other pieces of Yuletide garbage like Christmas with the Kranks and Home Alone.) Therein, eldest Stone boy Everett (professional piece of wood Dermot Mulroney) is home for the holidays (it’s not as good, obviously, as Jodie Foster’s film of the same name, but it’s cut from the same cloth) to introduce his girlfriend Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) to his quirky tribe. Chief antagonist for the first hour is mousy (yeah, right) Amy (Rachel McAdams), who has an NPR duffel bag in a brief introductory shot, establishing her character as much as it’s ever going to be established. She doesn’t like Meredith because I don’t know why but proceeds to brand her a racist and a boor when it seems that, mostly, Meredith is intensely uncomfortable and self-conscious. Maybe she has social anxiety disorder, or the more common stick-up-her-ass-ism. That’s how appropriately-named evil mother Sybil (Diane Keaton) diagnoses her, except she calls Meredith a monkey and replaces the ass-stick with a silver spoon.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004) – DVD

December 15, 20052000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Robert De Niro, Romance, Spain, UK

½*/**** Image A Sound A
starring F. Murray Abraham, Gabriel Byrne, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Mary McGuckian, based on the novel by Thornton Wilder
directed by Mary McGuckian

by Walter Chaw Given its cast as well as its presumption to chart the hazy intersection between predestination and circumstance, Mary McGuckian’s excruciatingly dull The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the third adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, might be the biggest miscalculation of the year. Start with Robert De Niro as the corrupt Archbishop of Lima, presiding over the inquisition of Brother Juniper (Gabriel Byrne). Six years previous, Juniper witnessed the unceremonious snapping of the titular bridge, which sent five random people to their howling doom. Had they known how boring our good brown-robed pilgrim would make them out to be, I wouldn’t wonder why they didn’t try to float. No, Brother Juniper has decided that he’s going to write the world’s dullest book about this quintet of unfortunates so as to perhaps accidentally ken the mysterious workings of the Almighty in the small lives of small people.

Syriana (2005)

December 14, 20052000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Espionage, Theatrical, Thriller, United Arab Emirates

**/****
starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper
written and directed by Stephen Gaghan

by Walter Chaw An omnibus of shorthand outrage standing in place of actual information, Stephen Gaghan’s perfectly respectable–principled, even–Syriana reassures us with its glut of disconnected pop-up liberal soundbites that it’s weary and wise enough for the both of us should it be the case, most likely, that we’re just weary. But on the off chance there’s nothing to connect to here despite all the grandstanding, it makes clear that at the end of the day, it’s really about something as simple as not taking your family for granted. Call it the secular Magnolia, itself a similarly longish, flashy film that was also about being kind to your children. There isn’t anything for us to do with the dry intellectualizing of Syriana: once we’re told that the CIA sends assassins around the world, that sometimes Arab kids are turned into suicide bombers by wackos, that the oil industry is a nepotistic disaster, and that as soon as the oil runs out in the Middle East, the emirs of Saudi Arabia will be back “in tents, chopping each other’s heads off,” what are we left with but justification for our under-informed fears and lazy superiority?

Valiant (2005) – DVD

December 13, 20052000s, 2005, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, War

½*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras D
screenplay by Jordan Katz, George Webster, George Melrod
directed by Gary Chapman

by Walter Chaw The animation is flat, the screenplay is insipid, the pacing is mortally off, and the voice acting is the mixed bag you generally get when you hire movie stars instead of professional voice talent (this is already the second animated film Ewan McGregor’s tackled this year–third if you count Lucas’s folly) to breathe life into your pixellated creations. But other than that, Valiant‘s fantastic. Its setting (WWII, circa D-Day) isn’t as imaginative as that of Robots (this year’s other glaring animated failure), and its CGI housefly sidekicks don’t talk, as they did in Racing Stripes (this year’s other glaring made-for-kids animal-related failure), but if you can overlook its obvious and subtle and inescapable deficiencies, well, what you have here is a blockbuster simply waiting to have its destiny fulfilled by the same group that flocked to the inexplicably popular Shrek films. Valiant‘s central marketing point is that it’s from the same producer, John H. Williams, as the Shrek franchise, which, while technically true, ignores the movie’s ten other producers.

Serenity (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 12, 20052000s, 2005, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Adam Baldwin, Summer Glau
written and directed by Joss Whedon

by Walter Chaw A key speech arrives towards the end of Joss Whedon’s freewheeling space opera Serenity. The captain of an incongruous hunk of interplanetary junk–dubbed “Serenity” for said captain’s transformative moment during a civil war in a valley of the same, ironic name–stands in a shaft of light and asks his disciples if, in essence, they’re willing to follow him into Hell for a belief that their martyrdom will be in the cause of a greater glory. He’s asking his crew, but he’s also asking a slavering fanboy audience that has followed the good ship Serenity here to the big screen after the braintrust at Fox (“We’d rather focus on ‘Stacked’–I’m sure you understand”) cancelled Whedon’s “Firefly” just eleven episodes into its run. The show found new life as a bestseller on DVD, of course, and this feature-length treatment acts as both the series finale it never got and a hopeful audition for a movie franchise. If it’s still laden with such Whedonisms as thick, sometimes-inscrutable (certainly unspeakable) dialogue and a political cant worn, bleeding, on its sleeve, Serenity is also home to the kind of passion and belief in a cause worth fighting for with which the good ship’s crew is infused at the bitter end.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

December 9, 20052000s, 2005, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell
screenplay by Ann Peacock and Andrew Adamson and Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Andrew Adamson

by Walter Chaw I'm offended by the marketing for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (hereafter Narnia 1)–not the trailers (which are pedestrian) or the print ads, per se, but the campaign to pre-screen reels to churches and church groups, including Colorado's wildly divisive rightwing activist organization Focus on the Family. It's not something I'm terribly surprised to see from Walden Media–but it's something that strikes me as peculiar coming from the gay-friendly Walt Disney Pictures, a studio currently "suffering" a boycott from Focus on the Family that aims, in part, to force Disney to explain their "Jekyll and Hyde" products and policies. Of the two hypocrisies, fiduciary vs. ideological, I guess I'd favour one over the other, not being in the business of weighing sins, as it were.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

December 9, 20052000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Spielberg, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh, Kôji Yakusho
screenplay by Robin Swicord and Doug Wright, based on the novel by Arthur Golden
directed by Rob Marshall

by Walter Chaw The wounds that WWII opened between the Chinese and the Japanese are still fresh. Over the course of a twelve-year occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese regular army, at least nine million Chinese civilians were butchered–and though the Chinese, lacking a unified defense, bear the burden of poor organization, petty in-fighting, and a fair share of mortal Pollyannaism, the Japanese refuse to this day to apologize for what they have officially dismissed as the standard toll collected in conventional warfare. I believe it’s this–as opposed to the centuries of racial hatred–that has called down the normally quiescent Chinese activist contingent on the suddenly-thorned head of the Steven Spielberg-produced Memoirs of a Geisha, a film written, directed, and produced by Caucasians based on a book by a white author who was promptly sued by the geisha, Mineko Iwasaki, he interviewed for the book on the grounds that he not only betrayed their confidentiality agreement, but also fabricated the fate of her virginity, which she claims was never auctioned off in the way that the Arthur Golden novel describes. True or not, it’s the sort of thing that would be particularly attractive to a Western mind transfixed by the sexy Mystery of the Geisha.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

December 9, 20052000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway
screenplay by Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Ang Lee talks about Brokeback Mountain like it’s a break that he needed after the pressure-cooker of Hulk, and the way that the film slinks around the topics that have garnered it its share of awards-season attention suggests that the director of The Ice Storm was well and truly on vacation. It’s the most polite depiction of homosexuality you can imagine while still featuring passionate kisses and simulated doggy-style penetration; most of the ways that Lee chooses to illustrate his star-crossed lovers’ isolation in the middle of the most closeted American genre are parsed from sub-par situation-comedy scenarios. I like when Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) sees his lover Ennis (Heath Ledger) for the first time in years and the two lock in a passionate embrace, mainly because by the revving-up of Gustavo Santaolalla’s score and the look on Ennis’s wife Alma’s (Michelle Williams) face, it means we’re about to get one of those hilarious scenes where the girlfriend walks in on something she wasn’t supposed to see. It’s a moment unworthy of the picture, just like another where Ennis flips Alma over during sex to simulate his stolen time with Jack, or when Alma chooses Thanksgiving dinner with Ennis, their kids, and her new husband to accuse him, histrionically, of indulging in gay love. I can’t think of one good reason for Alma being made the straight man in an old gag, the victim humiliated, and the hysterical representative of society at large except that even at close to two-and-a-half hours, the film is so under-populated that Alma must serve triple duty to Jack and Ennis’s shorthand romance. It speaks to Williams’s burgeoning talent that she wears the burden well.

The Devil’s Rejects (2005) [Two-Disc Director’s Cut] – DVD

December 7, 20052000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Horror

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+
starring Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie, William Forsythe
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw The Devil’s Rejects is a minor grindhouse classic that betrays writer-director Rob Zombie as a self-hating cinephile (he inserts a movie critic character only to abuse him) who saddles his villains with Marx Brothers aliases and cribs scenes from sources as varied as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Taxi Driver. His family of Ed Geins (Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), her brother Otis (Bill Moseley), their uncle Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig)) proceed to Petrified Forest a family of rodeo cowboys (Geoffrey Lewis and Priscilla Barnes and others) at a motor inn after a rousing break from a siege on their farmhouse of horrors, then get hunted down and tortured by avenging angel Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe). His tongue firmly in cheek, Zombie casts a couple of ’80s sitcom queens from TV shows worried about family dynamics (Barnes of “Three’s Company” and Deborah Van Valkenburgh of “Too Close for Comfort”) in meatbag roles while spinning southern rock classics like The Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider” over a virtuoso credit sequence (shades of Scott Caan’s exceptional debut Dallas 362) and Lynrd Skynrd’s “Free Bird” during its conclusion in a way that actually manages not to feel ironic or snarky. That’s the tightrope Zombie walks here, and he walks it with a surplus of style and skill: it’s an exploitation flick about audience culpability, a splatter flick about morality, and a post-modern film that actually cares about movies.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

December 7, 20052000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, Blake Lively, Alexis Bledel
screenplay by Delia Ephron and Elizabeth Chandler, based on the novel by Ann Brashares
directed by Ken Kwapis

by Walter Chaw The quartet of best pals portrayed in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants are, we’re told, complementary parts of one consciousness, which goes some way towards explaining why it is that individually they seem like machine-tooled fonts of tween didacticism. They’re Judy Blume-spawned pods: the fat, brassy one with speeches about the importance of being fat and brassy; the slut with mother issues and speeches about regret; the frigid one who lightens up; and the morose one who learns to set aside her barbed irony at the expense of a disease-of-the-week urchin with a message of her own. Although the whole thing’s too long as it is, there’s barely enough room in the picture for each of the girls to have a complete narrative arc, and so we’re given preachy shorthand speechifying in lieu of character complexity. It’s a TIGER BEAT quiz about puberty and it’s astonishingly irritating, even if you can spot glimmers of truth in there amid the weeping and screeching.

Cinderella Man (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 5, 20052000s, 2005, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Sports

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Russell Crowe, Renée Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Craig Bierko
screenplay by Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw Of the many ways that you can read the ending of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, the one I like is the suggestion that the artist will disappear when the masses decide to gratify themselves at the trough of empty spectacles and popular melodramas that do nothing to feed the soul. Ron Howard is at the forefront of greasing that along. Not entirely unexpectedly, his current work in television (he’s the producer and narrator of “Arrested Development”), where he got his start, is, at least for the medium, complex and sophisticated. Yet his philosophy for the silver screen seems to have something to do with those three no-evil monkeys: His films have all the edge and subtext of a greeting card. They’re handsome, big-budget productions with big, pretty, empty faces, and they’re Pollyannaish and generally awful, uniformly, with Splash still the lone bright spot in his career. It is, after all, the only one of his films to feature an ambiguous protagonist and an existentially disquieting conclusion. The only one that acknowledges a possibility for the guys in the white hats to have a shadow as black as coal.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan: FFC Interviews Neil Jordan

December 4, 20052000s, 2005, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Ireland

December 4, 2005|I expected Neil Jordan to be towering, imposing. From what I’d read, he was a taciturn interview given to long silences and confusing discursions–and from the intelligence of his films, I wondered if I’d be able to keep up with his sources and references. But for a man responsible for some of the most challenging, courageous, and beautiful films of the modern era (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, now Breakfast on Pluto), Mr. Jordan came off as an everyday Joe (with a light Irish brogue) still amazed by the possibilities of the medium and still feeling his way through the business. His pictures always seem to be fairytales: No matter their subject matter, there are princes and maidens, wolves and woods. (Jordan’s most underestimated work (and one of my favourites), In Dreams, is entirely an evocation of fugue states.) As he was on the verge of ordering an espresso, I assured him that this place–Denver’s four-star Panzano restaurant–knew how to brew tea properly (in a pot, on the table). Amused, he looked me over and said, “I suppose you’d know. Tea it is.”