Drama Archives - Page 58 of 119 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

10,000 BC (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

June 22, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, South Africa, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Steven Strait, Camilla Belle, Cliff Curtis, Joel Virgel
screenplay by Roland Emmerich & Harald Kloser
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Walter Chaw Gather 'round, younglings, pull up a rock. Comfortable? Good. Roland Emmerich's 10,000 BC is about a young warrior named "D'Leh" (Steven Strait) who has the bad judgment to fall in love with doll-eyed Evolet (Camilla Belle)–who herself has the bad judgment to be kidnapped by slave traders. The movie starts in the Himalayas, I think, and ends there following an interminable foray in a rainforest as well as an Egyptian detour. I know it's Egypt because we see them building Pyramids in the desert, though I confess to being a little confused by the revelation that mammoths are beasts of burden in 10,000 BC, forced to participate in the construction of said pyramids. I had time to wonder aloud about how this is the second film after Jumper in 2008's deadly winter-doldrums sweepstakes to go to Egypt's Valley of Kings, and about how D'Leh and his mentor Tic'Tic (Cliff Curtis) could not only make the hike from Nepal (or somewhere) to Egypt wearing sandals and standard-issue Tarzan gear, but also why they were dressed like that on an exposed, snow-covered mountain in the first place. 10,000 BC's first mistake is giving the audience time to think at all, seeing as how the same courtesy was not afforded to anyone on the production side of things–thus allowing for domesticated sabre-toothed tigers and mammoths to decorate this epic™ quest in pursuit of a damsel so under-developed that when it's revealed she has scars in the shape of the constellation Orion, I genuinely had no idea why it mattered. Still don't.

Mandingo (1975) – DVD

June 18, 20081970s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring James Mason, Susan George, Perry King, Ken Norton
screenplay by Norman Wexler, based on the novel by Kyle Onstott
directed by Richard Fleischer

by Alex Jackson I was just about to say that I wish Mandingo were better than it is, but then I realized it wouldn't be nearly as good as it is if it weren't also "flawed." Some snarky hipster (Mitch Lovell of the LiveJournal blog (?!) THE VIDEO VACUUM, if you must know) rather brilliantly and concisely summarized the problem of the film in saying, "If you ever wanted to see Mr. Bentley from 'The Jeffersons' check a muscle-bound slave for hemorrhoids, this is the flick for you." Indeed, we get this image in the first ten minutes of the film. The checking of the muscle-bound slave for hemorrhoids, well, that I guess I can…appreciate, for lack of a better word. We all understand that slavery was "evil" on a purely intellectual level, but I don't think we have a terribly substantial visual database of the horrors and humiliations of it–and so I feel there's a real need for a disgusting and sensationalistic exploitation film about the subject. On those terms, let it be said that Mandingo does not disappoint. This has to be the most emotionally ugly film I've seen since Brian Robbins's Norbit.

There Will Be Blood (2007) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

June 15, 2008****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

****/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A Extras B+
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Kevin J. O'Connor, Ciarán Hinds
screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel OIL! by Upton Sinclair
directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw The jarring, discordant first notes of Jonny Greenwood's score announce that Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood will realize the promise shown by the auteur's closest analog, Punch-Drunk Love. Almost experimental in its marriage of noise and vision, it's reminiscent in that regard of a Sergio Leone epic about the foundation of a specific aspect of the American character. Pithy that such a thing plays like watching an insect under glass: There Will Be Blood is accurately described as a piece of existential entomology–Kafka somehow married to Upton Sinclair (on whose OIL! the film is formally based). It's a modern, and modernist, take on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring an actor who may be the best of his generation turning in a performance destined for legend, though I'd offer that when Daniel Day-Lewis actually does go off the rails in making a mad catchphrase out of "I drink your milkshake!", it's proof that the rest of his work here is really rather restrained. The best movie of the year if not for No Country For Old Men, it shares with that masterpiece this idea that money corrupts absolutely, its venom catalyzing on contact. Choosing to open with a silent 16-minute introduction that sees Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis)–digging for riches by himself in what could be an outtake from Sierra Madre–discovering his share of silver and parlaying it into an oil empire that will eventually leave him alone, misanthropic, and finally insane, Anderson is clearly implying that material pursuits mine the humanity from mortal loam. While he has disdained political reads of the picture, the philosophical ramifications of Anderson's barren exteriors held up against Plainview's barren interiors–the both of them with endless potential, it would appear, for bottomless wells of bubbling black–are subtext enough, if not, of course, inextricable from politics.

The Happening (2008)

June 12, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, Horror, India, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Betty Buckley
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw The number one, indisputable, biggest surprise of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening is that it doesn't entirely suck–followed fast by the stunner that the director-writer-producer-demiurge doesn't appear anywhere in the film as Christ on a chariot. After his self-aggrandizing cameos in Signs (as catalyst to the story's existence and outcome), The Village (as star of the "twist" in the film's most complicated lighting/camera set-up), and Lady in the Water (as author of the Bible), it seemed that was the next logical step. Instead, The Happening is a Larry Cohen-esque thriller along the lines of God Told Me To, delivered with a heavy hand, to be sure, but full of some of the most delicious misanthropy to hit screens since Julia Roberts was making romantic comedies. Shyamalan, if we follow the auteur theory as closely as he claims to, hates his fellow man enough so that a coda revealing a blessed pregnancy is framed in such a way as to suggest that mankind is spelling its own doom with this urge to procreate. By extension, it's tempting to see it as a criticism of pictures that end in Spielberg town, with marriages and babies and a cabin in the woods for the precogs. If Shyamalan is to the point where he's actively flipping the bird to audiences and expectations, eschewing his life-support systems for twists and protracted takes in favour of ugly, flat, uninspired action sequences and blighted implications, then I might actually at this point be looking forward to his next one. Meaning, at the end of the day, that's the biggest surprise of The Happening.

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

June 12, 20082000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Scarlett Johansson

**/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Eric Bana, Kristin Scott Thomas
screenplay by Peter Morgan, based on the novel by Philippa Gregory
directed by Justin Chadwick

by Bryant Frazer Pop culture works in mysterious ways. I suppose the Tudor dynasty never really goes out of style, but it's interesting to see two completely different takes on the tale of Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, reach audiences more or less simultaneously. The second season of Showtime's lavish series "The Tudors" just concluded with the (spoiler?!) beheading of Boleyn, followed by a close-up of a beautiful little girl who would become Queen Elizabeth I. The Other Boleyn Girl, produced in part by BBC Films, ends much the same way, with that same act of reprisal followed by a beaming young face representing that same incipient monarch.

Youth Without Youth (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

June 9, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Italy, Mystery, Romance, Romania, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz, André M. Hennicke
screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novella by Mircea Eliade
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

by Walter Chaw Set in just-antebellum Europe, Francis Ford Coppola’s Golden Age superhero fantasy Youth Without Youth finds mild-mannered ancients professor Dominic (Tim Roth) transmogrified by a bolt of lightning into a being who appears to not only have regained his youthful appearance, but also developed the ability to alter physical objects with his mind. Dominic is in 1938 Romania when 1.21 gigawatts of electricity send him back to the future, able to absorb entire volumes with a single touch, learn dead languages in his sleep, and have contentious conversations with himself reflected in mirrors literal and figurative. It’s a superhero movie in the same sense as Kasi Lemmons’s sorely underestimated The Caveman’s Valentine: based on a literary source, it’s itself intensely literate, sprinkling Mandarin and Sanskrit in with, late in the game, a language of our hero’s own devising to which he devotes reels of obsessive notes. All that’s missing is a purpose for our hero–something remedied as the picture moves forward past WWII and Dominic encounters Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara) en route to her own collision with cosmic destiny.

The Recruit (2003) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

June 1, 20082000s, Action, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Switzerland, Thriller

*½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Al Pacino, Colin Farrell, Bridget Moynahan, Gabriel Macht
screenplay by Roger Towne and Kurt Wimmer and Mitch Glazer
directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw Aussie director Roger Donaldson's No Way Out is one of the better Cold War paranoia films: sexy, tricky, and packed with the sort of performances (from Kevin Costner, Sean Young, Gene Hackman, and Will Patton) that spin gold from proverbial straw. Donaldson's The Recruit is another derivative post-Cold War knockoff: boring, predictable, and laden with the sort of hackneyed turns that are not only immanently forgettable, but also doomed to eventually be left off the resumé during those Academy clip retrospectives. What a difference sixteen years makes.

V for Vendetta (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

May 29, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Germany, Revenge, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, John Hurt
screenplay by The Wachowski Brothers, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore & David Lloyd
directed by James McTeigue

by Walter Chaw As documents for the opposition go, V for Vendetta may be the ballsiest, angriest picture of the current administration, flashing without apology images of naked prisoners of the state, shackled in black hoods and held in clear acrylic boxes while a febrile talking head and his cloistered intimates (called "fingers") form a closed fist around them. It surmises a future where the government plants stories in centrally-owned media conglomerates, controlling groupthink by providing just one point of view. Woe be unto those with a critical mind because what, after all, is more dangerous to a dictatorial theocracy than a question? But more, the picture is an impassioned plea for alternative lifestyles, exposing the melodrama of Brokeback Mountain to be embarrassed, even polite, when the struggle for equal regard is something that should be undertaken with passion and brio–it's life and death, and V for Vendetta presents it as such. There are no half measures in a film that takes as its hero an eloquent monologist in a Guy Fawkes mask (Hugo Weaving), his erstwhile, reluctant sidekick a young woman, Evey (Natalie Portman), transformed through the government-sanctioned abduction of her parents and a period of torture and imprisonment into not an avenging angel, but a voice of reason. How fascinating that the reasonable solution in the picture is the destruction of Britain's Parliament on the Thames.

Signs (2002) [VISTA Series] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

May 25, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw M. Night Shyamalan makes very specific films about very specific concerns in a very specific manner: long master shots; an unusual trust in silence; remarkably few edits for a modern picture; joy in the choice of garish topics; and a thing for failed fathers and their lost little boys. He reminds of Hitchcock in his elevation of pulp art into high art, but differs in that his concerns aren't so much about abnormal psychology, the nervy manipulation of the audience, and the voyeuristic implication of movie-watching as they are about personal demons and Shyamalan's increasingly obvious desire to be considered in the same breath as his idol.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut (1982/2007) [Four-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD

May 19, 2008****/****, 1980s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw The prototype for the modern science-fiction film, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, through its seemingly endless iterations, through its growing cult of personality and a production history that's become as familiar as a Herzog shooting mythology, retains its ability to astonish as–along with John Carpenter's contemporaneous The Thing–the last hurrah for the non-CGI, in-camera effects piece. Tron, The Last Starfighter, and Firefox were destined to be the rule of the day at the expense of matte painters and model-makers, here working out puzzles like how to make a futuristic, mechanized advertising blimp appear to be shooting strobes through the glassed ceiling of the Bradbury. Indeed, it's almost impossible to watch Blade Runner now without taking its technical brilliance for granted. It looks like it was made in 2007 (particularly in its newest, digitized incarnation); with its lack of the bluescreen artifacts that plague many of its contemporaries, it's easy to think of a mainframe as the movie's author.

Speed Racer (2008)

May 8, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Germany, Japan, Sci-Fi, Sports, Theatrical

*/****
starring Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, John Goodman, Matthew Fox
written and directed by The Wachowski Brothers

by Walter Chaw This generation’s Tron lands with unsurprisingly little fanfare early in the 2008 blockbuster sweepstakes, the victim of niche nostalgia and bottomless kitsch as well as the theory that total indulgence from all involved will prevent The Wachowski Brothers’ Speed Racer from turning out to be their Spruce Goose. I’ve seen just enough “Speed Racer” cartoons to recognize when people like John Goodman are impersonating badly-drawn ’60s television anime (as opposed to Goodman impersonating badly-drawn ’60s Hanna-Barbera)–and just enough, too, to futilely hope against hope that there wouldn’t be a chimp and a chubby tyke who stow away in a racecar’s trunk now and again. But I haven’t seen nearly enough of the TV series to want to see more of it, and after enduring the Cool World live-action version of “Speed Racer”, I confess I’ve sort of lost the will to live. In other words, I was never a fan of the cartoon and was mainly interested in this trainwreck on the strength of Bound and The Matrix. Still, I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t take a moment to laud the brothers on their audacity–the very quality I appreciated in the two Matrix sequels, which were, by most analysis, disasters. It seems like sour grapes to knock the picture besides–or at least it seems futile, because the Wachowskis don’t appear to care what people think of them along their road to wearing Kleenex boxes on their feet and saving their pee in mason jars. Speed Racer is exhibit one in the case that the Wachowskis aren’t in it for praise (they’re not going to get any credible praise here) or money (they’re already loaded), but rather to luxuriate in the contents of their den’s shelves: first Alan Moore comics with V for Vendetta, now this excruciatingly faithful reproduction of an inexplicable camp artifact. Perhaps we should count our blessings that they weren’t huge fans of “Voltron.”

Then She Found Me (2008)

May 8, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

½*/****
starring Matthew Broderick, Colin Firth, Helen Hunt, Bette Midler
screenplay by Alice Arlen and Victor Levin & Helen Hunt and Helen Hunt (<–not a typo)
directed by Helen Hunt

by Walter Chaw Mamet-lite–which is to say "garbage-lite"–for the most part, the dialogue in Helen Hunt's hyphenate debut is repetitive and deeply irritating, especially as delivered by Hunt in that perpetually whinging, laconic fashion of hers. Marry it to a directing style that could gently be called "self-aggrandizing" and generally be called "static" and Then She Found Me thuds into place as one of the most atrocious things to collapse on the silver screen in months. Here Hunt is Barbra Streisand without the singing, optimistically cast as a woman "about to turn forty" while asking poor, mortgage-needing Colin Firth to twice opine that her increasingly cadaverous-looking self is "beautiful" and "gorgeous." To each his own, of course, but Hunt the director/prime mover (she co-wrote and produced the benighted thing) sticking herself in front of a conservative gross of close-ups and pushing others to compliment her appearance is so far beyond distasteful that it's boring. Adoption, artificial insemination, infertility, miscarriage, infidelity, lumpen milquetoast Matthew Broderick as the really, really obscure object of desire, and stereotypes about East Coast Jews pollute this godawful mess like Union Carbide in some unfortunate, populous third-world nation. Call said ghetto the "arthouse" (its citizens, what the hell, "festivalgoers") and point to it whenever the random, ossified, effete intellectuals offer that they prefer to watch "indies" in the "arthouse," eschewing "mainstream" cinema with a sniff, a wave of a hanky, and a puff of talcum.

Jack Ketchum’s The Lost (2008) – DVD

May 6, 20082000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD, Horror, Teen

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Marc Senter, Shay Astar, Alex Frost, Ed Lauter
screenplay by Chris Sivertson, based on the novel by Jack Ketchum
directed by Chris Sivertson

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Lost is simultaneously polished and crude. For all intents and purposes, it's a direct-to-video release^*, and it has a "direct-to-video" vibe to it. There's a broadness to the acting, to put it delicately. It's not that these are bad actors, exactly, it's just that their performances are superficial. I want to say that they lack the nuance of what you'd get in a theatrical feature, but I'm beginning to wonder if there is something about the very nature of the "theatrical film" that is more accommodating of excess. That perhaps the very size of a theatrically-released film can dwarf an over-actor and make the severity of his or her offense somewhat less significant, whereas if a film goes straight-to-DVD, it becomes more performance-oriented. It seems that it's really hard to find camp in a theatrical release and it's really hard to avoid it in dtv product. I don't know whether this is me the viewer projecting something from outside the film–I guess it must be, as I wouldn't imagine that most filmmakers actually intend their movies to bypass the big screen altogether. But wherever it comes from, it's there.

The Devil’s Own (1997) – Blu-ray Disc

May 5, 20081990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Margaret Colin, Ruben Blades
screenplay by David Aaron Cohen & Vincent Patrick and Kevin Jarre
directed by Alan J. Pakula

by Bill Chambers One of the intriguing consequences of a new home-video medium is that, whether due to a paucity of selection or, in my case, professional obligation, you wind up revisiting some marginal titles you never thought you'd have cause to see again. Case in point: the final film from the mercurial Alan J. Pakula, 1997's The Devil's Own, which docks on Blu-ray as part of Sony's suddenly-aggressive catalogue rollout. The kind of topical widescreen melodrama Hollywood trotted out pretty regularly in the CinemaScope era, as well as the kind of glib commentary on another nation's failures you'd expect from Edward Zwick or Sydney Pollack before Pakula, the picture began life as a typically-contentious Kevin Jarre script about a vicious, coke-snorting IRA terrorist who crosses paths with a "hair-bag"–i.e., a cop still walking the beat long past his prime–while on the lam in New York.

12 Angry Men (1957) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

May 1, 20081950s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, E.G. Marshall
screenplay by Reginald Rose
directed by Sidney Lumet

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men is centred around the notion that the guilt of an accused man must be established beyond a reasonable doubt if he is to be punished through the legal system. It’s a notion that most educated adults in this country have already accepted as a basic moral principle, yet 12 Angry Men manages to come off as surprisingly edgy for arguing sincerely in favour of it. The film never answers the fundamental question of whether or not the accused is indeed guilty. (We as an audience are never shown what actually happened on that fateful night, nor do we ever meet another potential suspect.) The possibility that he could have committed the murder and gotten away with it is left smugly unaddressed. Because it could not be proven in court, it simply doesn’t matter.

Coyote Ugly (2000) [The Unrated Extended Cut] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

April 24, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

*½/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ (DD)/A- (DTS) Extras C
BD – Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Piper Perabo, Adam Garcia, Maria Bello, Melanie Lynskey
screenplay by Gina Wendkos
directed by David McNally

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover J. Hoberman once nailed the work of '80s trash director Adrian Lyne by calling it "the spectacle of female self-actualization (as enacted for a male viewer)." This shrewd playing of both sides of the gender fence figures heavily into Coyote Ugly, which combines a cheesy uplift story with bounce-and-jiggle eye candy to maximize the number of potential ticket buyers. But though it was produced by former Lyne benefactor Jerry Bruckheimer and practically channels the director's empty-calorie flash, the his 'n' hers formula doesn't work this time around: whatever else could be said against the dissipated Brit, there was a hysterical urgency to Lyne that his substitute, David McNally, can't match. You see the flesh, you hear the pain, but aside from some very obvious body-double skin added to the film for DVD, none of it adds up to anything you can't get from Moses Znaimer on a Sunday night.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

April 23, 2008****/****, 1960s, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter
screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke & Stanley Kubrick, based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel"
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson Seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey as a film about evolution is natural but ultimately inaccurate, I think. The Darwinist views evolution as an external response to the world–a survival mechanism–while the Nietzschian views it as an internal, ethical one. Both are touched on in 2001 and both are misleading in that they fail to acknowledge that Man's evolution in this film is born out of destiny. Out of fate. More appropriate to view evolution here in terms of the lifespan of the butterfly or moth. Guided by a supreme alien intelligence, the species of 2001 evolves from the larva (ape) to the pupa (human) to the butterfly (star child).

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

April 17, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance

½*/****
starring Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand
screenplay by Jason Segel
directed by Nicholas Stoller

by Walter Chaw Listen, I have a family. There are so many places I'd rather be than in a theatre watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall, listening to the reaction elicited by three fleeting full-frontal shots of male nudity and trying for the life of me to understand how a comedy that clocks in at nearly two hours could elicit only one real laugh, maybe two. There's a potentially interesting discussion about the exploitation of the male form in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and how, in general, the reaction to male nudity is a hell of a lot different than the reaction to female nudity (there's a good reason that Colin Farrell's penis was excised from the already-unintentionally-funny A Home at the End of the World: male nudity is a threat you respond to with laughter; female nudity is an invitation you respond to with various levels of sexual discomfort)–but you can still have that discussion without actually enduring the picture. You could try to figure out how it is that Judd Apatow has parlayed his newfound hitmaker status into a cottage industry of filthy family-values flicks that fall lock-step behind one another while increasingly raising suspicions that what they're really preaching is ultra-conservative (chastity, pro-life, anti-fag) all the way down the line. If Forgetting Sarah Marshall doesn't end in a wedding, it's only because it ends before the hero and his prize get the chance. It's a romcom pretending to be a guy-flick, and I hope that's the kind of garbage we can all agree is garbage.

The Jane Austen Book Club (2007) – DVD

April 15, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Kathy Baker, Maria Bello, Marc Blucas, Lynn Redgrave
screenplay by Robin Swicord, based on the novel by Karen Joy Fowler
directed by Robin Swicord

by Walter Chaw I hate smug little pieces of masturbatory treacle like Robin Swicord's The Jane Austen Book Club, bits of piffle strutting around like peacocks on a parade ground, secure in the knowledge that it's pretentious in just the right way for the only demographic that it cares about at all. What kills me is that the idiots thronging to shit like this are the same ones who criticize "mainstream" Hollywood for its propensity to squeeze out cookie-cutter nuggets of worthless effluvium for the slavering approval of teenage boys. I wonder if young men and middle-aged women (the kind who watch "The View" and join Oprah's Book Club) aren't, in fact, natural ideological enemies: the former unaware of the evil stereotypes perpetrated by their favoured entertainment, the latter, you know, likewise. In our age of missing information, it makes perfect sense that mouth-breathing pundits find favourable spawning conditions. And in any age, it makes perfect sense that the stupid ones seek them out.

Street Kings (2008)

April 10, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans
screenplay by James Ellroy and Kurt Wimmer and Jamie Moss
directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw Keanu Reeves’s turn on the ring-around-the-mopey of skeezy LA crime dramas based on (or written by, or inspired by, or ripped-off from) James Ellroy’s hard-boiled noir prose is David Ayer’s second time around this track, Street Kings. No wonder it feels weary and worked-over, then, from the opening blare of an alarm clock to a gritty™ conclusion that suggests that the status quo is FUBAR–always has been, always will be, now with mas macho! Close your eyes and without any mental flexing replace Reeves with Ethan Hawke or Christian Bale or Scott Speedman or Joaquin Phoenix, or sub Reeves’s character’s commanding officer Wander (Forrest Whittaker) with similar wool-clad bogeys done not better but identically by Kurt Russell and James Cromwell. It’s never a question of who’s rotten in the force (everybody, stupid), never in question what the role of the anti-hero will be. Rather, it’s mainly a matter of what place vigilante justice will have in this moral quagmire of due process vs. capping the hoods and letting the legal vultures pick over the sticky wickets. It’s the Dirty Harry school of hanging judgment–the iconography of Eastwood and Bronson and Stallone in the ’80s (culminating for the latter in the ultimate state-sanctioned vigilante, Judge Dredd)–and it’s only really interesting for its popularity again amid the reign of a President who’s modelled his administration after Reagan’s. Why this concern about the breakdown of due process and the futility of real justice during terms that give lip-service loudest to a return to values? We only make films this ugly and futile when to a large extent we’ve abandoned any hope that our institutions of security will protect us from the night.