Biopic Archives - Page 7 of 10 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005) + Domino (2005) [New Line Platinum Series|Widescreen] – DVD

March 2, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
**½/****
starring David Strathairn, Patricia Clarkson, George Clooney, Jeff Daniels
screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

DOMINO
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo
screenplay by Richard Kelly
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw Rigorous and principled, George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. is a curiously slight film for more reasons than the fact that almost a third of it is comprised of archival footage integrated semi-successfully into the story. It's a recreation of a very specific battle in a very specific war that resonates with our Patriot Act/Guantanamo Bay situation, and indeed, that's the target Clooney seems most interested in striking. But without a larger context (the sort that would have weakened its allegorical usefulness), the picture sets itself up as something as obvious as it is minor and feather-light. It's a professional, high-minded, and staid biopic is what I'm saying, a film that says what it says with the stark B&W cinematography of a Dr. Strangelove, but in its icy, humourless way, it's the same stark B&W cinematography of a Fail-Safe, too. It's close and under-populated–and even with so insular and finely-focused a spotlight, it contains at least two completely superfluous characters.

Walk the Line (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 20, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Germany, Music, Romance

**½/**** Image B Sound A- (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick
screenplay by Gill Dennis & James Mangold
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw I'm no longer certain what kind of currency there is in producing a biography of an iconoclast whose life is an exact simulacrum of every other iconoclast's life. Here's an entirely respectable film about Johnny Cash that begins in his childhood, proceeds into the Big Break, then segues from there into the euphoria of fame; the drug abuse and the groupies; the "Come to Jesus"; the rehabilitation; and the closing obituary. (It's like Denis Leary said about Oliver Stone's The Doors: "I'm drunk. I'm nobody. I'm drunk. I'm famous. I'm drunk. I'm fucking dead.") Though it claims not to be a hagiography, Walk the Line (like last year's Ray) featured the freshly-dead legends as advisors up until their untimely demises, a kind of personal involvement (and Cash's son John Carter is one of Walk the Line's executive producers, just as Ray Robinson Charles Jr. was for Ray) that precludes, methinks, most controversy in the telling. That's fine, I guess, this new vogue for these modern Gene Krupa Storys and Eddy Duchin Storys and Glenn Miller Storys–I mean, really, who does it hurt? But after praising the almost supernatural channelling of very public figures by talented actors, the only thing left is the drive home, a hot bath, dreamless sleep, and maybe the impulse purchase of the soundtrack at Starbucks in a couple of weeks.

Glory Road (2006) + Last Holiday (2006)

January 13, 20062000s, 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.

Lady Sings the Blues (1972) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

January 10, 20061970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams, Richard Pryor, James T. Callahan
screenplay by Terence McCloy and Chris Clark and Suzanne De Passe
directed by Sidney J. Furie

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Billie Holliday never really surfaces in her ostensible biopic, Lady Sings the Blues. There's somebody using her name, of course, somebody who pouts and shrieks and cries copious tears–but no matter how much Diana Ross knocks herself out "emoting," she doesn't do justice to her predecessor. Nor, for that matter, does the movie she's in. The supremely jaundiced Sidney J. Furie has seen fit to jettison any real mention of either Holliday's music or her convictions, replacing them with a blackface Valley of the Dolls–the story of not one of jazz's premier vocalists, but a sad little girl hooked on heroin. Ross is a solid junkie, all right, yet she and everybody else connected with the production are wrong to impose this on someone who should be remembered for a few things beyond sordid melodrama.

Cinderella Man (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 5, 20052000s, 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, 20051960s, 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, 20052000s, 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, 20051950s, 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, 20052000s, 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

by 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, 20052000s, 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, 20051940s, 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, 2005****/****, 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, 20052000s, 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, 20052000s, 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, 20051960s, 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, 20052000s, 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

by 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, 20051970s, 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, 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.

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.

Coach Carter (2005)

January 14, 20052000s, 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

by 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?