Cinderella Man (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 5, 2005Posted in2000s, 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.

The Buddy Holly Story/La Bamba – DVD

November 21, 2005Posted in1960s, 1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Music

THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY (1978)
***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras A
starring Gary Busey, Don Stroud, Charles Martin Smith, Conrad Janis
screenplay by Robert Gittler
directed by Steve Rash

LA BAMBA (1987)
**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Esai Morales, Lou Diamond Phillips, Rosana DeSoto, Elizabeth Peña
written and directed by Luis Valdez

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I don't know enough about music to pass judgment on the legacies of Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. Everybody knows they had their mutual rendezvous with destiny (and Don McLean) in a plane crash that helped end the first phase of rock-and-roll, but their legends are the distorted shotgun marriage of crazy fame and early death that makes totalling their actual achievements a tad difficult. Strangely, their movie biopics (now available on DVD in a two-pack) don't really try. The Buddy Holly Story is really an ode to people sitting in rooms playing music regardless of anyone's relative fame, while La Bamba is a family story hinged on the rise of a credit to his community. The real pleasures of these films are strangely incidental to hero worship, and passing judgment on them is a matter of aesthetics: where Buddy triumphs by attempting something modest and nailing it with a vengeance, La Bamba bites off more than it can chew and sails into the waters of respectable mediocrity.

DIFF ’05: The World’s Fastest Indian

November 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Japan, New Zealand, Sports
*/****starring Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Kennedy Lawford, Chris Williams, Annie Whittlewritten and directed by Roger Donaldson by Walter Chaw Kiwi filmmaker Roger Donaldson follows up his intensely impersonal The Recruit with the intensely personal The World's Fastest Indian, a fictionalization of a documentary he shot some thirty years ago about dotty old coot Burt Munro, who in 1967 set a land speed record for motorcycles under 1000ccs on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. Funny how the results of both are sanded down almost beyond recognition: so baptized are they in the scouring attentions of high-grade clichés that they're inhumanly frictionless. See Burt…

A Farewell to Arms (1957) + Francis of Assisi (1961) – DVDs

November 8, 2005Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Romance, War

A FAREWELL TO ARMS
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Rock Hudson, Jennifer Jones, Vittorio De Sica, Mercedes McCambridge
screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Charles Vidor

FRANCIS OF ASSISI
*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Bradford Dillman, Dolores Hart, Stuart Whitman, Pedro Armendariz
screenplay by Eugene Vale, James Forsyth and Jack Thomas
directed by Michael Curtiz

by Walter Chaw One of David O. Selznick's many attempts to shape the largely immutable mug of lady-love Jennifer Jones into the face that launched a thousand cinematic ships, the badly-fumbled Hemingway adaptation A Farewell to Arms finds Jones, about two decades past the age of her Red Cross nightingale Catherine, paired opposite the not-quite-long-in-the-tooth-but-almost Rock Hudson as her doomed love Lt. Henry. The setting is Italy during The Great War; playboy Lt. Henry falls for mad "Cat," who, as written by the legendary Ben Hecht (himself a decade removed from his best work and well on his way to becoming king of cheese epics), comes off as an entirely inappropriate nod to Blanche Dubois. Selznick served John Huston–the right man for this picture–his walking papers early on for correctly identifying the love story in Hemingway's novel as just a metaphor for the tragedy and irony of WWI's carnage, subbing Huston with second-stringer Charles Vidor, who meekly agreed to amplify the alleged love between Lt. Henry and Cat while pushing all manner of hysterical spectacle to the wings of the proscenium.

Capote (2005)

October 21, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Canada, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins, Jr., Chris Cooper
screenplay by Dan Futterman, based on the novel by Gerald Clarke
directed by Bennett Miller

Capoteby Walter Chaw You hear him before you see him: Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman), raconteur, socialite, showman, standing at the centre of the kind of swinging party immortalized in the glossy, offensive film version of his Breakfast at Tiffany's. He's telling a story in a claustrophobic storm of admirers, his reedy, almost-falsetto voice broken now and again by his wheezing, self-conscious laugh. He's flirting with his own persona, I think (Hoffman, not Capote), and the tiny moments I'm able to see through the barrage of misdirection thrown up by screenwriter Dan Futterman and director Bennett Miller (all three old friends–the film plays smug like an exclusive reunion) to strike at the heart of Hoffman's own situation as a sensitive soul trapped in the body of a second fiddle (Kevin Smith syndrome–or, more flatteringly, Charles Laughton), are the moments Capote means something to me beyond another exhumation of the Clutter Family murders already chronicled (and exploited twice already by Capote's In Cold Blood and Richard Brooks's magnificent film treatment of the same) and mythologized. It's as Americana as Grant Wood, marking this tiny Kansas landscape with the same brush as Ed Gein's Wisconsin–and making Capote sexy in a ghoulish way when it fails to be sexy in a revelatory way.

TIFF ’05: Capote

September 11, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Canada, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF
**/****starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins, Jr., Chris Cooperscreenplay by Dan Futterman, based on the novel by Gerald Clarkedirected by Bennett Miller Editor's note: I was so wrong about this film it's almost funny. It probably should've won Best Picture that year. by Bill Chambers Richard Brooks's masterful screen translation of Truman Capote's true-crime (Tru-crime?) novel In Cold Blood is full of indelible imagery that at first seems to seep into the fabric of Capote beyond director Bennett Miller's control. But as the homages--most notably, both pictures postpone the pivotal slaying of the ominously-named Clutter family until showing…

Dillinger (1945) – DVD

September 5, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Biopic, Crime, DVD, Gangster

**/**** Image B Sound B- Commentary C+
starring Lawrence Tierney, Edmund Lowe, Anne Jeffreys, Eduardo Ciannelli
screenplay by Philip Yordan
directed by Max Nosseck

by Alex Jackson You have got to be shitting me. This is Lawrence Tierney? The guy who played Joe in Reservoir Dogs and Elaine’s dad on “Seinfeld”–that Lawrence Tierney? The Lawrence Tierney with whom modern audiences had come to be acquainted was a goat-munching ogre; in Reservoir Dogs Mr. Orange characterized him as the real-life Thing, and indeed the only way to describe late-period Tierney is as a superhuman being. Lawrence Tierney is to heavies as Marilyn Monroe is to bombshells and Casablanca is to the movies themselves–that is to say, a conglomerate of all that have ever existed. Like Marilyn Monroe and Casablanca, Tierney is essentially an impersonal and even rather cornball artificial construction, but along those same lines, he’s also a deeply iconic one. Caricature is, after all, a kissing cousin to archetype–and archetype is one of the essential ingredients of pure cinema.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005); Hustle & Flow (2005); Last Days (2005)

July 21, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, France, Music, Theatrical, Thriller

De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté
***/****
starring Romain Duris, Niels Arestrup, Jonathan Zaccaï, Gilles Cohen
screenplay by Jacques Audiard, Tonino Benacquista, based on the screenplay for Fingers by James Toback
directed by Jacques Audiard

HUSTLE & FLOW
*/****
starring Terrence Howard, Anthony Anderson, Taryn Manning, Taraji P. Henson
written and directed by Craig Brewer

LAST DAYS
****/****
starring Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Green
written and directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw On my better days, I still think of film as the quintessential artform of the last century–a medium for expression uniquely suited to our Modernist Yeatsian decomposition, what with its malleability beneath the knife, as it were, cut and spliced back together again as the un-spooling literalization of some patchwork Prometheus. Likewise, in its 24 flickers a second, it's an illusion of life, teased from the amber of still photography, drawing, painting; mixed with symphonies; blended with dance and movement; enslaved to the syncopation of words and imaginary drum beats. It's a miracle, a golem, capable of illuminating the rawest humanity in one stroke and of exhuming the most abject failure of human impulse in the very next. Its tractability is astonishing–protean, not too much to say magical; in describing his first film experience as a visit to "the kingdom of shadows," Maxim Gorky brushes up against the ineffable sublimity of a medium that mimics the eye, stimulates the ear, and has as one of the key elements of its academic study a concept that suggests the moment a viewer finds himself "sutured" into the text. Like all fine art, then, when it's right, its "rightness" is indescribable–Frank Zappa's "dancing about architecture." And like the stratification of art imposed by some in varying orders to describe the proximity of each to the inexpressibility of their souls (prose to dance to painting to poesy to music, for me), when film aspires to combine the more abstract elements of human expression in its mélange, the results, always mixed, at least have the potential to be grand.

Heights (2005); Mysterious Skin (2005); It’s All Gone Pete Tong (2005)

June 22, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Music, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical, UK

HEIGHTS
**½/****
starring Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, Jesse Bradford, James Marsden
screenplay by Amy Fox, based on her play
directed by Chris Terrio

MYSTERIOUS SKIN
*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Elisabeth Shue, Michelle Trachtenberg
screenplay by Gregg Araki, based on the novel by Scott Heim
directed by Gregg Araki

IT’S ALL GONE, PETE TONG
**½/****
starring Paul Kaye, Beatriz Batarda, Kate Magowan, Mike Wilmot
written and directed by Michael Dowse

by Walter Chaw Obsessed with doors and passages, façades and captured images, Chris Terrio’s Heights takes on the dour, dark, and twisted interpersonal machinations of The Scottish Play its diva Diana (Glenn Close) rehearses for some of the 24-hour period covered therein. Heights is a sexual film steeped in betrayals and unmaskings at its root, clothed in symbols for discovery and disguise that are almost literary in their uniform complexity. It’s therefore through a cloud of signs that its insular roundelay emerges. Wedding photographer Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), daughter of Diana and fiancée of Jonathan (James Marsden), is fired from her job on the day–on the hour, almost–that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cover a foreign war is offered her by an ex-boyfriend. Jonathan, meanwhile, has an ex-boyfriend of his own to suppress as pretty young actor Alec (Jesse Bradford) catches Diana’s eye in the hours before she discovers her husband is honouring their open marriage with her understudy. Questions of female sexual jealousy abound, hand in hand with the ruthless barbs of ambition (the price of success weighed against the cost of failure), tied into a messy bow by big ugly truths and the inescapability of our pasts.

Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

June 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, Music

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Terrence Howard, Joy Bryant, Bill Duke
screenplay by Terence Winter
directed by Jim Sheridan

by Walter Chaw Another in the recent cycle of slick biopics overseen in whole or part by either the subjects themselves or relatives of the same, Jim Sheridan's Get Rich or Die Tryin', the peculiarly flaccid hagiography of two-bit rapper 50 Cent, is an overlong, overly-familiar, wholly sentimental look at a nobody who became a somebody primarily known for getting shot a few times. It's a companion piece of sorts to the also-white-guy-directed Hustle & Flow, a means through which the majority culture tries to reconfigure the minority culture into comfortable terms (minstrel/criminal) that are so entrenched they've been assimilated by the offended. Assimilated to the point, in fact, that it's hard to know if these images, words, and messages are even offensive anymore. Bill Cosby has taken a lot of heat over the past couple of years for his comments about African-American culture losing its mind, but, shocker, he's right. For that matter, arguably no one in popular culture has earned the right to speak out about blacks in the American mainstream more than Cosby.

The Reivers (1969) + Tom Horn (1980) – DVDs

June 14, 2005Posted in1960s, 1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Western

THE REIVERS
*½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Steve McQueen, Sharon Farrell, Will Geer, Michael Constantine
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the novel by William Faulkner
directed by Mark Rydell

TOM HORN
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steve McQueen, Linda Evans, Richard Farnsworth, Billy Green Bush
screenplay by Thomas McGuane and Bud Shrake
directed by William Wiard

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The oldest, most tired story to beguile the male artist is the Moment at Which Innocence is Irretrievably Lost. Most writers try their hand at it at some point, and I really wish they wouldn't: it suggests they'd rather be stupidly oblivious to not just the pains but also the rewards of adulthood. It's a boring default trauma, but at least when William Faulkner did it (in The Reivers), it was a boring default trauma with genius digressions that occasionally distracted from the emptiness of the narrative line. Not so Mark Rydell's big-screen adaptation of The Reivers, from which all of Faulkner's background about the landscape and the history and his characters' desperate lives has been excised, leaving the innocence-losing adventures to hog the spotlight and make you wish you were watching something that aspired to dissipation for a change.

Lords of Dogtown (2005)

June 2, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Sports, Teen, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Emile Hirsch, Victor Rasuk, John Robinson, Michael Angarano
screenplay by Stacy Peralta
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

Lordsofdogtownby Walter Chaw Because Catherine Hardwicke never met a rack zoom she didn't massage or a hard-luck adolescent's lament she didn't exploit, seeing her as a match for Stacy Peralta's semi-autobiographical account of the Zephyr skateboard team's halcyon days doesn't require that much of a squint. Directed like a heart attack and edited in such a way that most every scene ends with something breaking or someone running away, the picture is what baseball folks would call a "loud out"–a ball hit with pepper that peters out on the warning track; it doesn't even get an asterisk on the scorecard. Lords of Dogtown is the fictionalization of Peralta's interesting if overlong documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which detailed how the skateboard fad evolved from a combination of a lack of good surfing, the invention of urethane wheels, and a drought that created backyard terror-domes of skater-bliss in forcing California residents to drain their swimming pools. And what Lords of Dogtown lacks in characterization and narrative meat it makes up for in epileptic flash-edits, jittery camera work, and two interpretive dance sequences that drag on for long enough to point a long finger at the silliness of the whole endeavour. Call it S.E. Hinton for the new millennium, the romanticization of bad behaviour in a frantic stew turgid enough to embalm instead of bronze. Between this and her hysteria opus thirteen, Hardwicke is making a name for herself as the world's coolest aunt: arrested development in one hand, shot of Jack in the other, bail money in her back pocket.

My Brilliant Career (1979) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

May 29, 2005Posted in1970s, Australia, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Blue Underground, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B
starring Judy Davis, Sam Neill, Wendy Hughes, Robert Grubb
screenplay by Eleanor Witcombe, based on the novel by Miles Franklin
directed by Gillian Armstrong

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Miles Franklin is ready. Australia is ready. Judy Davis is very ready. But My Brilliant Career never seems to leave the starting gate. There's no denying the care, craft, and skill that have gone into realizing this crucial international moment for the Australian New Wave, but it's all been funnelled into the externals: the trappings are beautiful, but their omnipresence makes for quite the claustrophobic experience. Stuffy Leslie Halliwell managed to find My Brilliant Career a "pleasing but very slow picture of a time gone by," ignoring the fact that the "time gone by" was brutally stifling its indomitable lead character, and while part of this can be chalked up to Halliwell's general thickness, it's hard to deny that you notice the décor long before the struggle that it frames.

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

May 25, 2005Posted in2000s, 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

Merchantnixonby 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.

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

May 22, 2005Posted in****/****, 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.

Coach Carter (2005)

January 14, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Sports, Theatrical

**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Ryan B. Adams, Ashanti, Adrienne Bailon
screenplay by Mark Schwahn and John Gatins
directed by Thomas Carter

Coachcarterby Walter Chaw Coach Carter is Dangerous Minds giving the gas good to Hoosiers. It's Stand and Deliver and Bad News Bears in flagrante delecto. The offspring of these dread unions is a trundling spawn so familiar, so much like its collection of moronically agreeable parents, that it's impossible not to sort of like it even as you're definitely sick of it. As is usually the case for movies like this, Coach Carter was inspired by a true story, which generally means that the events that instigated this project are not consequently saccharine and predictable enough to satisfy the imaginary demands of its imaginary audience. So there will be the athlete/students broken down into types to save time and energy on fleshing out the extended supporting cast, and there will be the valiant Dead Poets Society teacher who so rouses his/her hangdog students that they will eventually mass in a public show of support (standing on desks, running after ambulances, biking after cabs) when The Man (the school administration, the angry backwoods community) inevitably cracks down. What's not to like?

Beyond the Sea (2004)

December 29, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Music, Musical, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, John Goodman, Bob Hoskins
screenplay by Lewis Colick and Kevin Spacey
directed by Kevin Spacey

Beyondtheseaby Walter Chaw In Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin talks to the ghost of his kid self, a pint-sized Virgil leading Spacey's decrepit Dante into the hell of vanity projects. It's a flick that apes All that Jazz the way De-Lovely aped All that Jazz (that is: sickly, with a bad limp), with an aged Darin looking back on his life as though it were all a giant movie set. "Ain't he too old to play Bobby Darin?" a reporter in the film asks while Bobby Darin directs his own fictional auto-biopic. "He was born to play Bobby Darin!" responds an angry Bob Hoskins as Bobby Darin's father, who, one part Brooklyn hood and one part Russian bear, acts as the artist surrogate trying to pre-empt the chief criticism most will have of this creepy exercise in flaccid masturbation. Truth is, Beyond the Sea is the Kevin Spacey story without as much closeted homosexuality and just the same amount of delusions of grandeur and aspirations towards artistic martyrdom. It lacks passion and joy, replacing them both with something that smells a lot like mid-life crisis.

The Sea Inside (2004) + Hotel Rwanda (2004)

December 24, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Spain, Theatrical, War

Mar adentro
*½/****
starring Javier Bardem, Belén Rueda, Lola Dueñas, Mabel Rivera
screenplay by Alejandro Amenábar, Mateo Gil
directed by Alejandro Amenábar

HOTEL RWANDA
**½/****
starring Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix
screenplay by Keir Pearson & Terry George
directed by Terry George

Seainsiderwandaby Walter Chaw Marking the second euthanasia melodrama of the 2004 awards season after Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, Alejandro Amenábar's peculiar follow-up to The Others is another ghost story of sorts documenting the last, sad days of Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem), made a quadriplegic by a distracted dive into a shallow tide pool. "Shallow pool" could also describe the film, a miserable little gimp-of-the-week exercise awash with clichés and platitudes that the real Sampedro would probably have found condescending and insulting. The Sea Inside (Mar adentro) is the very equivalent of an elementary school teacher taking your hand and helping you find a seat on the short ride to made-for-TV-dom. If not for its unromantic central performance from Bardem, the best actor in the world at this moment, this appallingly sentimental work would be a candidate for the most misguided movie of the year.

Alexander (2004)

November 24, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Netherlands, Romance, Thailand, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto
screenplay by Oliver Stone and Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis
directed by Oliver Stone

Alexanderby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Oliver Stone's Alexander is packed tight to the girders with catchphrases like "By the sweet breath of Aphrodite" and "By Apollo's eye" and "By Dionysus yours is the very soul of Prometheus!" It's stuffed to the gills with sword-and-sandal histrionics and props that become kitsch artifacts the instant they're rolled out for display in this awards season's gaudiest rummage sale. If it's not going to set anybody's codpiece on fire, Alexander at least lays claim to being one of the funniest movies of the year. It would have worn the title Oliver! more comfortably, opening as it does with Virgil's "fortune favours the bold" and ending, after a ridiculously long time, with the not-stunning revelation that what Stone has done is imagine the travails of a fourth-century B.C. Macedonian king as his very own. Conspiracies abound, popularity in the court of public opinion fades, bottomless campaign budgets are squandered in faraway lands for mysterious personal reasons, Oedipus rears his travel-worn head, and gay subtext begins to feel a little homophobic because it's subtext. Rosario Dawson in all her animalized glory? No problem. Colin Farrell giving Jared Leto a little peck on the cheek? Not in this house, buddy.

Finding Neverland (2004)

November 12, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Family, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by David Magee, based on the play "The Man Who Was Peter Pan" by Allan Knee
directed by Marc Forster

Findingneverlandby Walter Chaw Marc Forster's Finding Neverland is well-traveled territory: a historical melodrama that's been over-scored to the point of diabetes and overwritten to the point of retardation. The presumption isn't that we're unfamiliar with J.M. Barrie's play "Peter Pan", but that we're incapable of understanding that this adaptation of Alan Knee's play "The Man Who Was Peter Pan", now three degrees removed from history, lives and dies by its conveyance of the idea that the dagger of make-believe is mightier than the mundane sword of reality. How better, after all, to tell the tale of the man who created one of the darkest, most brilliantly subversive attacks on the status quo than to return him to the land of storytelling and mythmaking? Forster seems to get it–the film looks ravishing and the casting of sprightly, ethereal Johnny Depp as Barrie is a stroke of genius, but both actor and director are betrayed by a project that side-steps the disturbing issues at hand in its suggestion of this Barrie's suspected paedophilic tendencies and his inability to grow up. "Peter Pan" is the shadow; the tedious and evasive Finding Neverland is the candle. The J.M. Barrie estate is upset that the film isn't accurate. They should be upset that it isn't very good.