Hollywoodland (2006); The Black Dahlia (2006); Factotum (2006)

September 15, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Brian De Palma, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Mystery, Norway, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical, Thriller

HOLLYWOODLAND
*/****
starring Adrien Brody, Diane Lane, Ben Affleck, Bob Hoskins
screenplay by Paul Bernbaum
directed by Allen Coulter

THE BLACK DAHLIA
**½/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank
screenplay by Josh Friedman, based on the novel by James Ellroy
directed by Brian De Palma

FACTOTUM
**½/****
starring Matt Dillon, Lili Taylor, Marisa Tomei, Didier Flamand
screenplay by Bent Hamer and Jim Stark, based on the novel by Charles Bukowski
directed by Bent Hamer

Hollywooddahliafactby Walter Chaw Deadening, dull, sepia-drenched faux-noir period hokum of a suddenly popular stripe, Allen Coulter's Hollywoodland casts lantern-jawed, wooden-countenanced Ben Affleck as his way-back literal and metaphorical doppelgänger George Reeves. An apparent suicide that has fostered a small measure of conspiracy theories, Reeves, television's original Superman, is shot in the head, naked in bed, on a summer night in 1959, briefly throwing a generation of kids into minor existential turmoil. But casting Reeves's death into suspicion is a far stickier wicket: Even with the introduction of a woefully-underwritten fictional gumshoe (Adrien Brody) with his own crew-cut, wayward boy, and ice queen ex (Molly Parker) to match, the suggestion that someone in the portly statue's coterie (including his wife-of-a-studio-bigwig-mistress, played by the ageless Diane Lane) might have had a motive for slaying him is given a quick spin and then stabled without a whimper. What's left is the typical and unsurprising Hollywood fable of the high price of fame and the dreadful cost of its pursuit. The central irony that drives Hollywoodland is that, in its desperate attempt to make a mystery of Reeves's death, the only thing it succeeds in doing is cataloguing the myriad reasons Reeves had to justifiably cap himself.

The Protector (2005) + The Covenant (2006)

September 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Thailand, Thriller

Tom yum goong
***/****
starring Tony Jaa, Petchtai Wongkamlao, Bongkoj Khongmalai, Xing Jing
screenplay by Kongdej Jaturanrasamee & Napalee & Piyaros Thongdee and Joe Wannapin
directed by Prachya Pinkaew

THE COVENANT
½*/****
starring Steven Strait, Sebastian Stan, Laura Ramsey, Taylor Kitsch
screenplay by J.S. Cardone
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw Tony Jaa is a bad motherfucker. There's a moment in his latest export The Protector where it appears as though he's killed someone with his penis (lo, how I would love to avoid that epitaph), and in the meantime, he dispatches foes with the heedless joy of obvious predecessor Jackie Chan (who has a cameo in the film shot so ineptly that it suggests a Jackie Chan impersonator smeared with Vaseline). Alas, there's a plot (something about the kidnapping of two elephants, one of which is turned into a gaudy tchotcke in an evil dragon lady's den of inequity), too, told through a lot of howlingly incompetent narrative chunks you could seemingly rearrange in any order with no tangible disruption of sense. (The Butchers Weinstein may of course be partly to blame.) The film is easily the funniest, most exhilaratingly ridiculous picture in a year in which Snakes on a Plane aspired to the same camp/cult heights, and it does it the only way that you can: by being deadly serious.

Lucky Number Slevin (2006) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

September 5, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Josh Hartnett, Morgan Freeman, Sir Ben Kingsley, Lucy Liu
screenplay by Jason Smilovic
directed by Paul McGuigan

Luckynumberslevincapby Walter Chaw I wonder if it's not ultimately a little too pat for its own good, but Paul McGuigan's Lucky Number Slevin is another slick, Guy Ritchie crime-manqué to pair with the director's breakthrough Gangster No. 1. It stars his muse Josh Hartnett (great in McGuigan's underestimated Hitchcock shrine Wicker Park) as the handsome Roger O. Thornhill/Wrong Man archetype–and it finds for Lucy Liu the first role that didn't make me sort of want to punch her mother. But the real star of a film that finds supporting roles for Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Stanley Tucci, and Sir Ben Kingsley is McGuigan's restless camerawork: an intricate lattice of matching shots and glittering surfaces that becomes almost an impressionistic projection of the mad, labyrinthine interiority of a mind bent on vengeance. Flashbacks and CGI-aided swoops and zooms are woven into the picture's visual tapestry, so that Lucky Number Slevin is read best as a lurid, comic-book send-up of a genre–every scene is played with a good-natured nudge, and when it overstays its welcome with a round-up that verges on sickly, its only real crime is that it's less a grotesque than a screwball romance. Hitchcock did it like that sometimes, too.

The Quiet (2006)

August 25, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Elisha Cuthbert, Camilla Belle, Martin Donovan, Edie Falco
screenplay by Micah Schraft and Abdi Nazemian
directed by Jamie Babbit

Quietby Walter Chaw Laden (leaden?) with melo-tragedy, Jamie Babbit's The Quiet is a burlesque of high school and incest, and though I don't doubt that there's a great movie in the intersection of the two, this ain't it. The film stars Elisha Cuthbert as the wounded "Heather," Nina, whose reputation as the perfect girl (read: the head cheerleader) is stained by a home life dominated by a zombie mom Olivia (Edie Falco) and an all-too-loving pedophile nice guy dad Paul (Martin Donovan). It wanders into the mind listlessly a time or two that Nina's backstory is identical to something the crazed Christian Slater character from Heathers would manufacture to justify the "suicide" of some teenage girl he's just murdered. The only way to really up the ante in The Quiet is through the introduction of deaf-mute orphan Dot (Camilla Belle), taken in by Paul and Olivia to act as the shadow/doppelgänger to our damaged-goods protagonist–and sure enough. But Dot can play Beethoven's "Appassionata" and "Moonlight" as the situation demands, and she provides treacly narration throughout in her piping, irritating lilt. She even goes so far as to attract chronic masturbator Connor (Shawn Ashmore) away from Nina's cartoon of a queen bitch pal Michelle (Katy Mixon).

Mildred Pierce (1945) – DVD

August 21, 2006Posted in1940s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Joan Crawford, Jack Carson, Zachary Scott, Eve Arden
screenplay by Ranald MacDougall, based on the novel by James M. Cain
directed by Michael Curtiz

by Alex Jackson The difference between Joan Crawford and her inextricably-linked contemporary Bette Davis is the difference between an icon and a mere actress. Davis was always acting and, in her lesser moments, downright hammy; Crawford simply was. A finished product, all she has to do is walk out and exude “Crawfordness.” If it’s not her best film, Mildred Pierce is certainly Crawford’s best-known film, and one of the fascinating things about it is how it illustrates her screen persona blending together with her personal one. I’m fascinated with the idea of transforming from an inferior being into a superior one–the leap from ape to Star Child in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, to put it in its purest form. This is mankind’s most pressing drive, is it not–that is, to escape the banality of our mortal existence? Perhaps such philosophical musings are a function of my still living in young adulthood: I’m a year away from beginning a career in which I expect to spend the next forty years, and there is the persistent fear of this being “all there is.” That there’s nothing left; I’m going to spend the rest of my life attempting to maintain a constant state of security. The iconology of Crawford achieves such escape. She’s embraced the cinema in a way Davis never did. She’s drunk from the proverbial cup and is now immortal. Prick her, she doesn’t bleed; tickle her, she doesn’t laugh. She is beyond the flesh now, a creature of light and celluloid.

Miami Vice (2006)

July 27, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Gong Li, Naomie Harris
written and directed by Michael Mann

Miamiviceby Walter Chaw Slot Michael Mann's Miami Vice in there alongside other millennial films about the disintegration of society and its subsequent renewal along tribal, exclusively masculine lines. It's a film from whose nihilism I would've recoiled just a few years ago, but now I see that as perhaps the definitive trend of the first six years of this brave new world (first five after 9/11, the inciting event of this love affair with apocalyptic cultural reset) and not entirely divorced from our reality besides. The best illustration of how we've gone from the voodoo of self-esteem of the Reagan '80s (for which the Mann-produced "Miami Vice" television show has become something of a cultural roadmark) to the blasted, self-abnegating, divided wasteland of Bush 2's America might be the difference between the white suits and socks-less loafers of the previous incarnation to the flak-jackets and high-velocity splatter head-shots of this one. WWI introduced irony into our lexicon with the advent of long-range, impersonal murder–and 9/11 deepened it in the popular culture in the United States with an existential fatalism borne of the idea that not only is sudden, arbitrary destruction from above a possibility, but most likely an unavoidable eventuality.

Street Law (1974) + The Big Racket (1976) + The Heroin Busters (1977) – DVDs

July 26, 2006Posted in1970s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, DVD, Italy, Thriller

STREET LAW
Il cittadino si ribella
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Franco Nero, Giancarlo Prete, Barbara Bach, Renzo Palmer
screenplay by Massimo de Rita and Dino Maiuri
directed by Enzo G. Castellari

THE BIG RACKET
Il grande racket
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Fabio Testi, Vincent Gardenia, Renzo Palmer
screenplay by Arduino Maiuri, Massimo de Rita, Enzo G. Castellari
directed by Enzo G. Castellari

THE HEROIN BUSTERS
La via della droga
*½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Fabio Testi, David Hemmings, Sherry Buchanan
screenplay by Massimo de Rita and Enzo G. Castellari
directed by Enzo G. Castellari

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There comes a point in every man's life when he finds himself pushed too far. By "too far," I naturally mean the moment where a) criminal thugs are roaming the streets, and b) innocent bystanders are completely expendable in their apprehension and/or bloody death. And if Blue Underground is to be believed, Enzo G. Castellari long ago reached that point. The champagne of exploitation labels has lavished infinite care on three of the master's most lurid exploits: the Death Wish precursor Street Law; the police-vigilante epic The Big Racket; and the relatively routine drug drama The Heroin Busters. Each of these films does away with such nuisances as due process and respect for public safety. Castellari's oeuvre reveals the dark underbelly of '70s permissiveness, which on one hand extended the hippie mandate to less shaggy extremes but on the other encouraged right-wingers to embrace police-brutality extravaganzas.

L’Enfant (2005) + The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006)|L’Enfant (2005) – DVD

July 23, 2006Posted in2000s, Belgium, Crime, Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Documentary, Drama, DVD, France, Music, Palme d'Or Winner, Romance, Theatrical

The Child
**½/****
starring Jérémie Renier, Déborah François, Jérémie Segard, Fabrizio Rongione
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON
**/****
directed by Jeff Feuerzeig

Lenfantcapby Walter Chaw I believe the title is meant to indicate the arrested protagonist more than it is the baby he tries to sell on the black market, thus The Child (L'Enfant)–another of Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's mild, allegorical subversions of Robert Bresson and incrementally more violent subversions of the French New Wave–takes on Pickpocket via Breathless. In so doing, it conjures up this odd chimera of a stylistically backward-looking, formalist deconstruction, the first film of the Brothers (after La Promesse, Rosetta, and The Son) to feel this much like a knowing satire, to come so perilously close to being smug and post-modern that its style begins to become confused with its message. It could be a product of overfamiliarity with a fine and distinct sensibility (the last thing this kind of innovation can afford is to be outrun and second-guessed), or it could be that the Brothers are getting either bored of their shtick or fond of their reputation.

Running Scared (2006) – DVD

July 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Paul Walker, Cameron Bright, Vera Farmiga, Chazz Palminteri
written and directed by Wayne Kramer

by Walter Chaw I liked Wayne Kramer's Running Scared because Running Scared isn't ashamed of itself. It's not terribly audacious (in direct contradiction to the consensus opinion that the film is "over-the-top," I found it to be sort of tame in its sexuality, violence, and atrocity) and it's not witty or smart or loaded with the archetype that a direct homage to the Brothers Grimm (the picture is set in the fictitious hamlet of "Grimley") would imply. Its prologue's cliffhanger, for instance, is paid off at the end in absolutely the most spineless way possible, betraying the dark fairytale template of which the film is so proud. (Fairytales were never this squeamish about strangers actually injuring–sometimes killing–children.) Besides, there's nothing terribly subversive about suggesting that the world is a dangerous place for kids. And yet, there is embedded in Running Scared's clueless schizophrenia (it wants to be edgy even as it's spending the majority of its energy on slick editing tricks, comic-book CGI effects, and a restless camera that doesn't hold still long enough for a fly to land on it) a nasty, seductive class of real cinematic infatuation and a knowledge, idiot savant-like or otherwise, of how to implicate a viewer in the things unfolding onscreen. A neat trick. Neater because the protagonist with which we suture, as it were, is played by one Paul Walker: possibly the worst actor the United States has ever produced, no matter what Armond White says.

Cheech & Chong’s Nice Dreams (1981) – DVD

June 13, 2006Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD

Nice Dreams
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Cheech Marin, Tommy Chong, Stacy Keach, Evelyn Guerrero
screenplay by Thomas Chong & Richard "Cheech" Marin
directed by Thomas Chong

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover To say that Cheech & Chong's Nice Dreams is not a critic's picture would be putting it mildly. Its thick, aimless cloud of pot smoke clearly targets a demographic that is determined (or chemically primed) to laugh at the most formless of gags and sketchily-designed comic situations. Still, I found myself admiring Cheech and Chong's balls in crafting a film that would cause Syd Field and his devotees some serious hemorrhaging. A wafer-thin plot is contrived as the means of our pair indulging in what used to be disparagingly called "drug humour": nothing is about the completion of the narrative task except in the crudest sense of the term. Instead, the film is dogged in its recreation of nonsense talk on a night spent passing around a joint or two, where nobody reaches a conclusion and everybody laughs themselves silly.

Firewall (2006) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

June 4, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Harrison Ford, Paul Bettany, Virginia Madsen, Mary Lynn Rajskub
screenplay by Joe Forte
directed by Richard Loncraine

Firewallcapby Walter Chaw Because 63-year-old Harrison Ford is pushing mandatory retirement age in most industries, his new movie Firewall is aimed squarely at an older, more affluent, less savvy demographic. Casting the aging demigod as a greying bank executive extorted by the usual band of eurotrash techno-terrorists holding his perfect family hostage, it's a fable of paranoia that finds evil in not only the modern cell phone bogey, but other mysterious beasts like iPods, phone cameras, GPS devices, fax machines, and online banking, too. Its never-explained title, in fact, refers to a technology that protects against malignant computer codes floating around the World Wide Web–but rather than try to define this for an audience that's ideally long-resistant to such cogent explanations, it makes the "firewall" a literal thing by devolving into another homeland security allegory, with the craggy paterfamilias meting out sweet vengeance against a gaggle of interlopers. Better to have called it "Antivirus"–but Michael Bay's probably reserved that title for his kick-ass foreign terrorist/avian flu metaphor.

The Producers (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

May 29, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Musical, Satire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman, Will Ferrell
screenplay by Mel Brooks & Thomas Meehan
directed by Susan Stroman

Producers2005capby Walter Chaw Max Bialystock (Nathan Lane) is responsible for exactly the kind of garbage that runs for years on the Great White Way, except that for the purposes of The Producers, his plays close in a couple of days, leaving Bialystock constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and at the mercy of a long, horny line of elderly widows and rich spinsters. I don't think old women in pillbox hats renting Nathan Lane by the hour for a few dry humps is particularly funny (or realistic)–but some people, especially those reared on vaudeville, think it's hysterical. When auditor Leo Bloom (Matthew Broderick) casually mentions that it might actually be more profitable to stage a very expensive flop, Max hatches a plan in which the two will mount the worst stage production in history, thus bilking their investors out of a coupla million. After finding the worst playwright (Will Ferrell), the worst director (Gary Beach), and the worst actress (Ulla (Uma Thurman)), they proceed to stage a musical that celebrates the Third Reich called "Springtime for Hitler". Lo and behold, it's taken as tongue-in-cheek and becomes the talk of the town. You'd call it "irony" except that this eventuality is not at all unexpected–and wasn't even when it happened the first time, in 1968.

The Tenants (2006) – DVD

April 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Dylan McDermott, Snoop Dogg, Rose Byrne, Seymour Cassel
screenplay by David Diamond, based on the novel by Bernard Malamud
directed by Danny Green

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Parts of The Tenants are very good indeed. Most of them involve the live-wire presence of Snoop Dogg, who, as an angry black writer named Willie Spearmint, acts as conscience/spur/romantic rival to Jewish novelist Harry Lesser (Dylan McDermott). While Snoop doesn't quite convince as a product of the film's '70s milieu, he's right on the money as a resentful, easily-provoked hard case seeking humiliating assistance from Lesser. Every time he has to flip-flop on some bit of respect or contempt for the cringing whitey, he shoots the movie straight through the ceiling–so much so that The Tenants often seems to have more to it than it actually does. As it stands, the film doesn't know what to do with source novelist Bernard Malamud's mash-up between a dithering Jew and a motor-mouthed black with nothing in common except their oblivious monomania for writing.

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

April 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

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

Derailed2005capby Walter Chaw Okay, here's the deal: if I tell you that Derailed has a big plot twist, you're going to figure it out from the trailers; and if I don't, you're going to figure it out at around the ten-minute mark–it's just that stupid. So I'm simply going to say that Jennifer Aniston is like an old studio starlet trying on her ill-fitting acting shoes in a thriller that wants to turn her into a bad girl done wrong but quails at every moment of truth. The ultimate effect of her "metamorphosis" from America's sweetheart is the uncomfortable feeling that you just saw Donna Reed (or your best friend's mom) in an S&M outfit. It makes the already-spoiled rape scene (unless ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY is an underground publication nowadays) a non-event because as you're watching it, tickling at the back of your head is the knowledge that they'd never rape Rachel in a mainstream middlebrow thriller (even if professional creep Vincent Cassel is the rapist). More, because the whole thing unfolds from the point of view of a very groggy paramour Charles (Clive Owen), the rape becomes something that's only very inconvenient for our married white male adulterer. It's despicable is what it is–compounded by a lie later on and ultimately invalidated by our tired twist, which finds at the end our Charles the spitting image of Travis Bickle but without any trace of irony.

How to Kill a Judge (1971) – DVD

April 3, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, DVD, Italy

Perché si uccide un magistrato?
***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Franco Nero, Françoise Fabian, Marco Guglielmi, Mico Cundari
screenplay by Damiano Damiani, Fulvio Gicca-Palli, Enrico Ribulsi
directed by Damiano Damiani

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's no way to discuss the thematic failure of How to Kill a Judge without discussing the tacky success that makes it possible. As either a political thriller or a social document, the movie doesn't fare terribly well, priming you for a massive exposé that never arrives and delivering a trickle of an ending that doesn't even begin to compensate. Yet I found myself enjoying the sight of Franco Nero in various clunky '70s outfits, sporting a massive orange caterpillar on his upper lip in a role that allows him to be dashing. The film basically facilitates opportunities for our hero to arrive at the scene of various terrible events looking horrified and then question people while looking swank–and the spectacle turns out to be big, cheesy fun in spite of itself.

Fun with Dick and Jane (2005) – DVD

April 2, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

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

Funwdickandjane2005capby Walter Chaw Dean Parisot's remake of Ted Kotcheff's 1977 Fun with Dick and Jane is simultaneously lifeless and desperate, a collection of horrid eleventh-hour edits that result in jokes without punchlines and Carrey's old physical-comedy riffs trotted out in the service of a half-assed redux of a half-assed original. The one nod to freshening up the original's full-frontal assault on capitalism as a means towards happiness (a satirical slot machine tugged to better effect by the act and allure of playing "The Sims") is that it's set in the year 2000 and deals with corporate malfeasance of the kind most conspicuously indulged in by Enron. (In case you don't get that, the last rimshot of the film is taken at Enron's expense, while the first closing credit is a "special thanks" to Ken Lay and his lieutenants.) The fictional big bad fiscal wolf of the piece is Globodyne, presided over by Jack McAllister (Alec Baldwin, in his second corporate bigwig turn after Elizabethtown), a southerner mainly because "southerner" is one of the last cultural groups (along with, say, Asians and gays) you can mock without much fear of backlash. On the day before it's revealed that "Big Jack" has stripped the corporate coffers (including pensions), Dick (Carrey) is promoted to VP of something or another, inspiring wife Jane (Leoni) to quit her job and pushing Dick before the cameras on some Lou Dobbs's "Moneyline" show, where he discovers, in a very public way, that his steed is a paper tiger.

Big Bad Mama (1974) [Roger Corman: Early Films] – DVD

March 14, 2006Posted in1970s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B-
starring Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, Tom Skerritt, Susan Sennett
screenplay by William Norton and Frances Doel
directed by Steve Carver

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Has Molly Haskell written on Big Bad Mama? The title of her seminal feminist study on American film–From Reverence to Rape—fits the movie and its two-faced approach to women perfectly. Under any other circumstances, completely implacable mother Wilma McClatchie (Angie Dickinson) would be a feminist superhero for her ability to go on the lam and do what's best for her daughters, all while swindling the system. But Wilma's will-to-power is largely played for laughs: not only is she way in denial about her offspring's abilities (both of whom turn out to be brain-dead sex objects), but her whole mission is perceived as transgressive in the wrong ways, opening her up to ridicule and, in her nude scenes, degradation. One doesn't expect feminism from Roger Corman, but the handling of the women in Big Bad Mama is telling about a time and place far beyond its diegetic moment.

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

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

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

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

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

Lord of War (2005) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

March 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Nicolas Cage, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto, Bridget Moynahan, Ethan Hawke
written and directed by Andrew Niccol

by Walter Chaw At times the film that Paul Brickman's brilliant screenplay for Deal of the Century promised, Aussie futurist Andrew Niccol crafts with Lord of War a sometimes transcendent, sometimes finger-wagging fable about a ridiculously successful gunrunner, Yuri (Nicolas Cage), prowling the hot spots of the Third World like a vampire in trenchcoat and shades. (I'm not convinced it wasn't the effect Niccol was going for, what with the obvious connection between spreading pestilence and feeding on death–and, of course, what with Cage's best role arguably being the quasi-vampire in Vampire's Kiss.) Without much of a narrative, even subplots concerning Yuri's mad, druggie brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) and model wife Ava (Bridget Moynahan) seem like way-stations along a dotted line. Too often, the picture lives and dies on its ability to keep the pace fluid–but just that need for momentum suggests something amiss at the heart of the piece, a certain surface tension that would pop should the rock-star protagonist we envy ever collide against the satire of the kind of colossal moral vacuity required of his vocation. It's the embedded problem of what Hitchcock observed as a character we like because he does his job well: what if that job is essentially reprehensible and, moreover, what if the ultimate desire of the film is that we experience righteous repugnance?

16 Blocks (2006)

March 3, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Bruce Willis, Mos Def, David Morse, Cylk Cozart
screenplay by Richard Wenk
directed by Richard Donner

16blocksby Walter Chaw There's a lot to like about Richard Donner's ultimately simpering retread of the long-dormant corrupt-cop/asphalt-jungle genre 16 Blocks. Among the highlights is Bruce Willis's drunken, crooked detective Jack, who–sporting a pot belly, a gimpy leg, bad facial hair, flop sweat, and breath you can practically smell through the screen–makes a decision early on to be the hero at odds with ex-partner Frank (David Morse) in transporting his charge Eddie (Mos Def) the titular sixteen city blocks so that Eddie can testify against New York's finest. Standing in their way: an arbitrary time limit and a whole department of collectors for the widows and orphans club, looking to exact a little Giuliani on the suddenly-vigilante pair. Comparisons to Firewall, that other picture buried in the first quarter 2006 starring an over-the-hill tough guy, are inevitable–and revealing, too, in charting the extent to which ego allows Ford and Willis to age as action heroes (Ford: not at all; Willis: a good bit) and, consequently, how successful these films are in crafting their respective scenarios. The standard against which 16 Blocks will be held, however, is one established by the likes of Prince of the City and Serpico (or even a later Sidney Lumet like Q&A)–it's they to which Donner clearly aspires, what with the picture's setting, its admittedly spurious exposé of bad apples on the force, and at least the first hour of Willis's performance, equal parts broken-down gunsel and brown-bagging wino.