Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 92 of 145

The Phantom of the Opera (2004) [2-Disc Special Widescreen Edition] – DVD

June 2, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Musical, Romance, Thriller, UK

Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera
*½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum, Patrick Wilson, Miranda Richardson
screenplay by Andrew Lloyd Webber & Joel Schumacher
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw At last, the moment where the stars align and professional bad filmmaker Joel Schumacher teams up with ace bad musical spectacle maven Andrew Lloyd Webber to create something that looks for all the world like Batman meets Liberace. There's never been a swooping crane shot Schumacher didn't like and there's never been a scale sung in falsetto to simulate ardour that Webber hasn't massaged; together, the two men give us a guided funhouse tour through a gaudy musical so bereft of real feeling and musicality that its inspiration has obviously run on Broadway for sixteen years now. (Offer a little hosanna that Sarah Brightman isn't in the film.) It's extraordinarily condescending to say so, but Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera is the perfect bracer for fans of "The Phantom of the Opera"–no button goes un-popped, no corset goes un-strained, and but for Minnie Driver as jilted diva Carlotta, not a one of the nicely-outfitted cast seems clued-in to the fact that there but for the grace of John Waters does the whole damned thing become The Rocky Horror Picture Show Redux. In fact, the only thing that could save this shambling monstrosity would be a few transvestites mirroring the action at the front of the cinema to the choral approval of the raincoat brigade.

Mac and Me (1988) – DVD

May 30, 20051980s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Family, Satire, Sci-Fi, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image D Sound D
starring Christine Ebersole, Jonathan Ward, Katrina Caspary, Lauren Stanley
screenplay by Stewart Raffill and Steve Feke
directed by Stewart Raffill

by Walter Chaw One of the most woeful and dispiriting films ever made, Stewart Raffill's Mac and Me qualifies as a hate crime. It's a feature-length commercial for McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Skittles, and Sears masquerading as a rip-off of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ("MAC" = "Mysterious Alien Creature") that, what with Alan Silvestri's awful score, indicates that it's also ripping off Back to the Future during a key scene in which our wheelchair-bound hero, Eric (Jade Calegory), grabs the fender of a passing car and hitches his way to relative safety. Chips it might earn for casting an actual disabled kid in the role are cashed in when it's revealed that Eric's wrinkled-flesh puppet alien pal can only be sustained on this island earth by a combination of Coke and Skittles. It's enough to put you off not only junk food, but movies altogether. There's a place in Hell reserved for the clowns who peddle stuff like this (Ronald McDonald makes a cameo in the picture, and an even longer one in the trailer)–the movie is so venal and grasping in its conception, so astonishingly inept in its execution, that upon death, Raffill and writing partner Steve Feke should have this piece of crap projected onto their caskets to counter the pain of their passing. I'm serious. Mac and Me lowers the conversation for everyone, to the extent that it's almost a satire of greed and corporate malfeasance. Show it in a double-bill with Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room for an example of what corporations think they can get away with–and what they do.

Tall Order: FFC Interviews Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath

May 28, 20052000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

The co-directors of MADAGASCAR have an animated dialogue

May 29, 2005|As far as I'm concerned, by and large, when the conversation turns to animation, you have Brad Bird and Pixar in the United States and Satoshi Kon, Hayao Miyazaki, and Yoshiaki Kawajiri in Japan. Animation has a long way to go in the U.S., not in terms of technology but in terms of a willingness to see it as a medium for mature storytelling rather than as a ghetto for sub-par children's entertainment. Stuff like Shark Tale and Shrek make overtures to an "adult" audience with sexual innuendo, disturbing violence, and pop cultural riffs that may raise unsettling questions about existential substance (does any of this stuff exist outside of its own reflectivity?), yet do little to stimulate real excitement. They're failures, sometimes outrageously popular ones, trapped in amber.

The Longest Yard (2005) + Madagascar (2005)

May 27, 20052000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Family, Sports, Theatrical

THE LONGEST YARD
*½/****
starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, James Cromwell, Nelly
screenplay by Sheldon Turner, based on the screenplay by Tracy Keenan Wynn
directed by Peter Segal

MADAGASCAR
**/****
screenplay by Mark Burton & Billy Frolick and Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath
directed by Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath

by Walter Chaw Chris Rock seems like a smart dude. His stand-up is sharp and perceptive and his now-defunct pay-cable talk show broke some ice in the traditionally chilly national race conversation. So know that I say this respecting Rock’s abilities in certain areas: Chris Rock is not now, nor will he ever be, a viable presence in film. He has no charisma that translates to the silver screen, none of that “it” factor that draws the eye to him, and when he’s forced to follow a script, whether he’s written it or not, he sounds desperate and pinched, as though he were being pulled through a garden hose. He joins giants like Richard Pryor in that no matter what you thought of Stir Crazy, it’s a far cry from his seminal work on stage. That Chris Rock is now in two major motion pictures seeing release on the same day both bolsters the suspicion that Rock is a smart dude and provides two new examples of Rock not only not possessing that movie star quality, but also lacking the potential to be movie star material. With the inevitable success of these films, however (none of which will have anything to do with Rock), put your money on the man making a few more sad attempts at headlining a picture before Hollywood discovers what most of us already know.

Saving Face (2005) + High Tension (2003)

May 26, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Romance, Romania, Theatrical, Thriller, Will Smith

SAVING FACE
**/****
starring Joan Chen, Lynn Chen, Jin Wang, Guang Lan Koh
written and directed by Alice Wu

Haute tension
***/****
starring Cécile De France, Maïwenn Le Besco, Philippe Nahon, Franck Khalfoun
screenplay by Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur
directed by Alexandre Aja

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Lesbians are pretty much invisible in American culture–banished, actually, to the ghetto that gay men tend to complain about even though, in truth, gay men were never more visible than they are now that they've been gifted with the lofty honour of being the only minority everyone can agree to hate with hilarious impunity. A couple of programs on Showtime notwithstanding, lesbians in the popular conversation are still either flannel-wearing she-males, the other daughter, or male fantasies of the voracious woman desperate for a good therapeutic dick to set her back on the straight and narrow. When a lesbian appears in a Western film (like in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason), the audience, myself included, regards her appearance as a kind of alien visitation. For a while, it's possible to forget that she's a sexual creature at all, so foreign are her Sapphic ways in our cultural conversation. Thus a pair of films featuring lesbian heroes front and centre happening upon these strange shores almost simultaneously is cause for some sort of modest celebration despite that one of them, Alice Wu's Saving Face, is a lot like an ethnic sitcom and the other, Alexandre Aja's High Tension, appears to hate lesbians with an unusual ugliness.

William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (2004) + The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004) – DVDs

May 25, 20052000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Drama, DVD, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, Romance, Shakespeare, Thriller, UK

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes, Lynn Collins
screenplay by Michael Radford, based on the play by William Shakespeare
directed by Michael Radford

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Don Cheadle, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Niels Mueller & Kevin Kennedy
directed by Niels Mueller

by Walter Chaw As we comb through the continuing fallout of the Bush Jr. administration's first term, themes begin to assert themselves on our movie screens as clear as the words of prophets written on tenement halls. Colorized misogyny and race-baiting spectacles share time with protest pictures that are oftentimes more strident and dogmatic than the party line–it's the Eighties neo-Cleavers at war with postmodern B-pulpers, which many moons ago manifested themselves as one of the most fertile periods in the history of science-fiction and now resurface as part of a new wave of existential science-fiction. We're all about Blade Runner these days, deep into Philip K. Dick territory where memories and dreams are manipulated and franchised for you dirt-cheap. Images have become the jealous currency traded in the underground of a land where one sad breast was flashed in the middle of our annual orgy of violence, sex (sometimes incestual, lesbian sex as sold by primogenetic neocon Pete Coors–"And twins!"), and unrestrained plea for/rewarding of mass consumption. It was enough to send my beloved nation's vocal demographic of selectively pious idiots into paroxysms of…what? Outrage? Righteousness? I don't know. What I do know is that in the United States, it ain't the suggestion of sex, it's the actual, pale, flaccid appendage that feeds the sometimes-joyous result of sex that offends. Women need to be protected from showing the outsides of their bodies in the same way they need to be protected from having a say in what happens to the insides of their bodies in the same way they need to be prevented from reading, voting, or holding a job. When a society gets really frightened, see, we must protect people from themselves. Let's start at the girls and the darkies and work our way up.

Suspect Zero (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

May 23, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Aaron Eckhart, Ben Kingsley, Carrie-Anne Moss, Harry J. Lennix
screenplay by Zak Penn and Billy Ray
directed by E. Elias Merhige

by Walter Chaw A metaphysical serial killer film, E. Elias Merhige's Suspect Zero is implications and shadows married to exploitation and shock: a queasy stew dredging the well of archetype that disturbs with the blasted nihilism of its vision. With its wastelands and its bloated, appallingly fertile cadavers reaching into their own wounds, it reminds of Merhige's own avant-garde silent film Begotten; and it reminds of Dario Argento's Deep Red, literally in the reveal of a wallpaper-palimpsest and figuratively in the intrusion of the supernatural into the mendacity of a crime story. This is the only kind of police procedural film possible after Se7en, one that doesn't go over the same theological ground but rather forges paths through more philological terrain–the serial killer genre as Thomas Harris tried to redefine it for the literary elite. Suspect Zero is smart and anxious.

The Aviator (2004) [Two-Disc Widescreen Edition] – DVD

May 22, 2005****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Germany, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale, John C. Reilly
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw About a third of the way into Martin Scorsese’s fabulous The Aviator, a young Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio), with ingénue Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani) on his arm, attends the premiere of his lavish WWI epic Hell’s Angels (1930)–a picture that burned a significant portion of Hughes’s millions before becoming a smash, and one that still contains some of the most daring, astonishing aerial sequences ever shot for a motion picture. As paparazzi throng, smothering Hughes with flashbulbs and red carpet questions, he looks dazzled, confused: a consequence of his deafness in some part, sure, but also, I’d suggest, a clue into this idea of Scorsese’s–which he’s had since at least Taxi Driver–that film is a waking dream, a kind of bad yet thrilling hallucinogenic dope trip; this Howard Hughes is a sleepwalker who is, at this moment, struggling to stay asleep. Later, Hughes takes his lover Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) up in his airplane where they cruise the sky above the Hollywood hills and share a (gulp) bottle of milk. (No small step for the pathologically germophobic Hughes.) The source for Hughes’s mental illness is traced to a haunted opening scene where as a child he is bathed by his mother (comparable in repressed eroticism to the notorious bathtub sequence in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth) and warned that the world outside can only hold for him the promise of abandonment and mortal contamination.

“The Sith Hits the Fan” – Reader Mail: May 22, 2005

May 22, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Star Wars

PREFACE

There's a lot of currency nowadays in suggesting that critics are out of touch when they brand a film a piece of shit and then the film goes on to make an ungodly amount of money anyway. It's a popular column topic (the sort of thing undertaken, for instance, by entertainment writers for major daily newspapers who have somehow been promoted into the second or third reviewer spot)–and it's as destructive and asinine as any popular trend in the field. The chance that esteem for film criticism will ever enjoy a renaissance in the United States is hobbled by hobbyists, junketeers, and idiots inclined to ask George Lucas if he anticipates a Best Picture nomination for Episode III, most likely before they've even seen the film. But worse are people who actually enjoy some level of credibility, such as Roger Ebert. He's written one of the most trenchant dissections of the film, one of the most ambivalent and disenchanted treatments of it from the popular press, only to gift it with the second-highest rating possible according to his paper's star system (3.5 stars out of four).

Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003-2004) [Volume One] – DVD

May 20, 20052000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Television

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras C-

by Walter Chaw Something tickled the back of my brain as I was watching Genndy Tartakovsky's "Star Wars: Clone Wars", a series comprising twenty vignettes clocking in at roughly three-minutes apiece (save the last, which runs close to eight minutes) meant to bridge George Lucas's Episode II and Episode III: I realized that even though the action rises and falls twenty-three times, that no characters are developed beyond a sketch and a pose, and that the show is essentially the connective tissue between programs on the Cartoon Network, "Star Wars: Clone Wars" is every bit as good as–and sometimes better than–Lucas's current trilogy. (Lucas himself recently admitted that his prequels are approximately 40% substance and 60% filler. I think he was being generous–the first two films combined with the first half of the third film have enough substance for maybe one passable 90-minute feature.) But with most of the sport taken out of pounding on mad King George for twenty-some years now (starting with Ewoks and letting Lando live and ending with midichlorians and the Jedi turning out to be pantywaists and hypocritical assholes), all that's really left to say is that Tartakovsky's "Star Wars: Clone Wars" is what it is. And what is that, exactly? Twenty three-minute vignettes from the creator of "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Samurai Jack" that, set in the new Star Wars universe, come off a lot like a "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Samurai Jack" hybrid.

In Good Company (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

May 18, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Scarlett Johansson

***/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Dennis Quaid, Scarlett Johansson, Topher Grace, Marg Helgenberger
written and directed by Paul Weitz

by Walter Chaw A film about what happens when Benjamin Braddock decides to pursue a career in plastics, Paul Weitz's flawed In Good Company (its title, formerly Synergy, may be the worst thing about it) boasts a distinct human quality that lends depth where there might not otherwise be any. It's bolstered by the central trio of performers: Topher Grace, continuing his winning streak; Dennis Quaid, affecting in the kind of role that Harrison Ford should be doing now instead of Indiana Jones; and Scarlett Johansson, rapidly growing into something like a national treasure. And though Weitz is too in love with the extreme close-up, his tactic of displacing his characters in various visual terrariums does a good job of suggesting just how isolating it can be to balance breaking your back for a job you don't particularly like with enjoying the people for whom you do it in the first place. At its heart, In Good Company is a love song to hoary old axioms concerning love, loyalty, and honour–its charms are old-fashioned and its bromides, if not entirely unexpected, are at least earned.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005)

May 18, 20052000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Revenge, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid
written and directed by George Lucas

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's not quite as bad as Episode I or Episode II, which is to say that it's not uniquely bad, just run-of-the-mill bad. The dialogue, ghost-written by Tom Stoppard, isn't always unspeakable, and the performances of Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman aren't nearly as wooden as they were the last time around. (Well, Christensen's isn't, anyway.) This lack of cheese presents its own set of problems, however, as Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (hereafter Episode III) is a lot like watching paint dry, with the manic light shows coming off at best as some slack particulate hustle. The picture's action sequences are chaotic, for sure, but just because everything is moving doesn't mean it's exciting, too. Though George Lucas may be a pretty good technician, he's still not a good director, and the pacing of Episode III is mortally, if predictably, off. Perhaps there's comfort in consistency.

Mindhunters (2005)

May 17, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Finland, Horror, Mystery, Netherlands, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring LL Cool J, Jonny Lee Miller, Kathryn Morris, Val Kilmer
screenplay by Wayne Kramer and Kevin Brodbin
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw Based ever so loosely on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Renny Harlin’s latest disasterpiece finds the Finnish fool at the helm of a slasher-cum-“CSI” episode, oiled-up and ready to apply a dangerous level of nihilism in the pursuit of cheap thrills and bad splatter effects. In Mindhunters, a few of the FBI’s finest criminal profilers-in-training congregate for one last test under the Al-Pacino-in-The Recruit tutelage of crackpot Harris (Val Kilmer) at a remote military facility that’s home to a phantom cinema where The Third Man plays on an eternal loop.

Boogeyman (2005) [Special Edition] – DVD

May 15, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Barry Watson, Emily Deschanel, Skye McCole Bartusiak, Lucy Lawless
screenplay by Eric Kripke and Juliet Snowden & Stiles White
directed by Stephen Kay

by Walter Chaw Unusually ambitious for a film that seems to have no intention other than to be the celluloid equivalent of Jokey Smurf, Boogeyman is tremendously dislocating at times, even existentially surreal. It posits that a child's worst fears are only conquerable if "faced," leading our hero through the loss of his parents, the rejection of his object choice, and the expulsion from his sanctuary in a children's asylum, until finally he's forced into a situation where he must destroy the totems of his youth to embrace the lonely demystification of his adulthood. There's something really sad going on in Boogeyman: It's about shining a light on the dark corners of the past and vanquishing ghosts, but in the hero's triumph over his nightmares, he casts himself adrift from some of the magic of being a kid.

Two Sides to Every Story: FFC Interviews Todd Solondz

May 14, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Interviews

May 15, 2005|There's a lot to say on the subject of Todd Solondz, but it's probably best to just let him speak for himself. Articulate, thoughtful (over the telephone and in his work), he reminds me the most of Errol Morris in that his unmistakable eccentricity is matched by a desire unquenchable to find truth in unconventional places. Solondz agreed to an interview upon the release of his fifth feature, Palindromes (he asks folks not to track down his directorial debut, Fear, Anxiety & Depression, which my editor, Bill, describes as something like a satire of Solondz films), another picture garnering an extreme amount of political fallout following the similarly-tumultuous receptions to his Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, and Storytelling. I was pleased to chat with Mr. Solondz about living life misunderstood.

Layer Cake (2004); 3-Iron (2004); Palindromes (2005)

May 12, 2005****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Japan, Romance, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

LAYER CAKE
***/****
starring Daniel Craig, Colm Meaney, Kenneth Cranham, Michael Gambon
screenplay by J.J. Connolly, based on his novel
directed by Matthew Vaughn

3-IRON
****/****
starring Lee Seung-yeon, Jae Hee
written and directed by Kim Ki-duk

PALINDROMES
***½/****
starring Ellen Barkin, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Richard Masur
written and directed by Todd Solondz

by Walter Chaw Producer Matthew Vaughn makes his directorial debut with the Brit underground gangster flick Layer Cake, and he does it with a sexy, cool savoir-faire that runs slick and smooth. It's softer than Jonathan Glazer's fabulously decadent Sexy Beast (most of that due, no doubt, to there being no baddie the equivalent of Ben Kingsley's Don Logan in Vaughn's film) and more coherent than Paul McGuigan's Gangster No. 1, but it slips snug into the same conversation. Now that Guy Ritchie's been gobbled whole by his very own vagina dentate, it stands to reason that Vaughn, Ritchie's producer on Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, would seek to fill the void left in the only U.K. pop genre with any sort of international currency all by his own self. Yet the product of Vaughn's hand isn't so much an imitation as it is a refinement: not better necessarily, but calmer–closer to the lounge lizard James Bond of the 1960s than to the feisty punk Michael Caine heisters from roughly the same period, though Layer Cake is infused, of course, with a healthy dose of nastiness and post-modern irony.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) [The Criterion Collection – Special Edition Two-Disc Set] – DVD

May 9, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw His idiosyncrasies are by now familiar, but it still takes more than one viewing to assimilate Wes Anderson’s quirk with the undercurrent of wisdom and emotionality that makes it sing. The excavation of the relationships between brothers that ultimately explains the longevity of his light debut Bottle Rocket, the exploration of loneliness and the connection between mentors and boys that buoys Rushmore, and, most affectingly, the rough bond between fathers and sons in The Royal Tenenbaums edify Anderson’s work like the unexpected pockets of tenderness in the Coen Brothers’ early stuff, or those flashes of intricacy that transform John Cassavetes’s vérité chuff into masterworks. With The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Anderson goes back to what’s familiar in his studiedly unfamiliar way: to mentors and boys, to fathers and sons, and to brothers incidentally if not in fact–casting them all adrift in a hermetic universe that is as influenced by Sixties lounge kitsch as it is by post-modern dissociative cool. And in retracing his steps, he manages to recreate a lot of the same surprising humanity of his first three films, but I do wonder about The Life Aquatic‘s lasting resonance.

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

May 6, 20052000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Spain, Theatrical, UK, War

**/****
starring Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson, David Thewlis, Eva Green
screenplay by William Monahan
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw The hero of Ridley Scott’s film about the Crusades would rather not discuss that whole “God” thing. It’s a stance that renders Kingdom of Heaven the second such impotent “prestige” picture to grace the early-summer screens after Sydney Pollack’s simpering, stance-less The Interpreter, as well as another wondrously bland example of the toll that small minds and political correctness have taken on our popular culture. In The Interpreter‘s defense, it only slaughtered a few hundred thousand imaginary black people to get its white heroes making doe-eyes at one another–to get Kingdom of Heaven‘s cuties batting eyelashes, it takes tens of millions of real dead infidels. French Balian (Orlando Bloom) is a 12^th century blacksmith who has just lost his wife and child when his long lost father Godfrey (Liam Neeson) rides in with a small band of merry Crusaders to offer Balian lordship of a little town in the Middle East. Balian accepts, has run-ins with religious fanatic Templars Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas) and his henchman Reynald (Brendan Gleeson), and gains the trust of leper king Baldwin IV (Edward Norton) and ideological martyr Tiberias (Jeremy Irons).

Criminal (2004) – DVD

May 4, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring John C. Reilly, Diego Luna, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Mullan
screenplay by Gregory Jacobs & Sam Lowry, based on the screenplay for Nueve reinas by Fabián Bielinsky
directed by Gregory Jacobs

by Walter Chaw As an assistant director, Gregory Jacobs has been involved in so many good projects (his resume includes Miller's Crossing, Hal Hartley's Amateur, and Steven Soderbergh's Solaris) that his directorial debut raises expectations. Too many, perhaps, as Criminal, an adaptation of Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky's Nine Queens, from just a couple of years ago, barely qualifies as something as cut-rate and devalued as one of those cookie-cutter, self-conscious, tedious David Mamet capers. It's badly miscast, with John C. Reilly in the lead as a well-travelled huckster on the prowl for that one Big Score that looms like El Dorado for the larcenous breed. (Reilly is fine as a cuckolded husband, nonplussed by a woman he doesn't deserve–not so fine as someone who lives by trip-hammer reflex and quicksilver wit.) And in place of the oil-derrick rhythms of a caper flick, there's something suspiciously like manners and formalism in Criminal–it's a jazz improvisation performed by robots and metered by a drum machine. All the elements are there, but there's no soul to it.

xXx: State of the Union (2005)

April 29, 20052000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ice Cube, Willem Dafoe, Scott Speedman, Peter Strauss
screenplay by Simon Kinberg
directed by Lee Tamahori

by Walter Chaw Just a total waste of life no matter how you slice it, xXx: State of the Union is cinema as penance. Forget the rosary–watch this colossal turdbath a couple of times and short of actually being responsible for it, you're instantly absolved of most any sin. The screenplay, by the suddenly-ubiquitous Simon Kinberg (also the scribe behind the upcoming X-Men 3, Fantastic Four, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith–let me go on record first saying that this film does not bode well), is a foul compost of flaccid catchphrases and boggle-eyed declarations, squeezed like old cheese between action sequences so poorly conceptualized and executed that not only is it impossible to ever tell for a moment what the hell's going on, but the film also actually reminded me in its over-processed way of outtakes from Tron. Ice Cube is awful, Samuel L. Jackson (who used to claim he would never work with a rapper) is awful, Scott Speedman is awful, Sunny Mabrey is awful–everyone is awful. Everything about xXx: State of the Union is awful, from its stupid prologue on some dairy farm to its stupid epilogue, in which another sequel is set up in as many words. It's possible to see the entire exercise as a postmodern smirk, but being aware that you're stupid doesn't always make you meta–sometimes it just means you're tragically self-aware and no less stupid.