Lions for Lambs (2007)

November 9, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, War

½*/****
starring Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Derek Luke
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan
directed by Robert Redford

Lionsforlambsby Walter Chaw Stilted, awkward, an Ayn Rand screed complete with straw men and pontiffs poised to burn them down, Robert Redford's smug, self-satisfied liberal weltschmerz anthem Lions for Lambs is tailor-made for festival-season standing ovations. It's the prime example of why a lot of Republicans get away with calling Hollywood–the single highest concentration of Big Business and corporate interest outside the Beltway–a lefty hotbed of pinko nonsense carried on a cloud of flatulent hot air. It's a prime example, too, of why it's so hard to vote for Democrats even when the alternative is the GOP. Put this one on the shelf between Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe and this year's deplorable Rendition–movies so earnest in their chest-pounding pontification that it's impossible to imagine on the one hand who could be converted by them and on the other who could resist changing their party affiliation out of sheer embarrassment. In this one, the call is for activism in whatever form said activism might take just for the sake of doing something, damnit. To quote a guy writing in the 1920s, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Man Push Cart (2006) – DVD

November 7, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Ahmad Razvi, Leticia Dolera, Charles Daniel Sandoval, Ali Reza
written and directed by Ramin Bahrani

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover As far as subject matter goes, Man Push Cart couldn't be more needed. A movie about an immigrant Pakistani coffee-stand operator is just what the doctor ordered in an American film culture devoted to the bourgeois angst of Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach (when it's not padding Tom Cruise's wallet, that is), and it could have been a real antidote to the same's anti-political "Crisis? What Crisis?" mentality. Unfortunately, writer-director Ramin Bahrani's feature debut falls into the most obvious pitfall of social realism by treating its central character, Ahmad (Ahmad Razmi), like a lost puppy. There's no real dimension to Ahmad beyond his social-pariah status and the many indignities he suffers–and things only get worse when he gets a sort-of girlfriend named Noemi (Leticia Dolera), who makes him seem more a bashful teenager than a grown man stripped of his dignity. Though Bahrani doubtless understands the invisibility that Ahmad and co. endure, his idea of a credible hero is a protagonist treading water.

Martian Child (2007) + Bee Movie (2007)

November 1, 2007Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Theatrical

MARTIAN CHILD
½*/****
starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Sophie Okonedo, Joan Cusack
screenplay by Seth E. Bass & Jonathan Tolins, based on the novel The Martian Child by David Gerrold
directed by Menno Meyjes

BEE MOVIE
*/****
screenplay by Jerry Seinfeld and Spike Feresten & Barry Marder & Andy Robin
directed by Simon J. Smith, Steve Hickner

Martianbeeby Walter Chaw If not for a moment where John Cusack delivers in his Cusack Patter™ a speech about the beauty of love in a temporary world, there would be nothing at all to recommend Martian Child. It's a heartless bit of heartfelt pap wherein widower and sci-fi author David (Cusack™) decides on an apparent whim to adopt crazy-ass little boy Dennis (Bobby Coleman) from a day-care/orphanage that should have its license revoked. The little kid looks and acts like Michael Jackson, complete with DayGlo complexion, parasol, and breathy squeak-talk from the Jennifer Lopez school of urgency, turning Coleman's into the most irritating performance since the last time Lopez was in anything. Closer to the point, the screenplay is a series of non-reactive statements expected to be taken at face value: that this dude would adopt a quirkily-disabled kleptomaniac freakshow and feel the sting of parental devotion, for instance, or that the two of them would teach each other to, gulp, love again. It all plays like an Oliver Sacks case study by the end, a Paul Simon adult-contemporary story-song–The Boy on the Specimen Tray and the Dog Reaction Shot.

The Invisible (2007) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

October 29, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, South Africa, Sweden, Thriller

*½/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Justin Chatwin, Margarita Levieva, Chris Marquette, Marcia Gay Harden
screenplay by Mick Davis and Christine Roum, based on the novel Den Osynlige by Mats Wahl
directed by David S. Goyer

Invisiblecapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover I never thought I'd find myself comparing a movie unfavourably to Disturbia, but the technical success of that hormonal-teenagers-in-peril flick bears directly on the failure of The Invisible, which aspires to the same kind of hooky teen angst without really understanding it. Say what you like about Disturbia (and I frequently do), it both completely understood and refused to condescend to the power fantasies and frustrated desires of its adolescent audience. The Invisible doesn't get that constituency–it's just cynically and transparently aimed at it. It goes through the motions of depicting the agonies of adolescence without ever seeming credible, as if the filmmakers knew they wanted to grab the teen market but had no desire to learn what that demographic actually cared about. When it throws in its supernatural device, it registers as exactly that: there's no metaphor, just a high concept in search of a purpose. The disparity between the two movies, Disturbia and The Invisible, shows why one was a surprise hit while the other sank without a trace.

The Graduate (1967) [40th Anniversary Edition] – DVD

October 26, 2007Posted in1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, William Daniels
screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, based on the novel by Charles Webb
directed by Mike Nichols

WATCH IN iTUNES – USA|CANADA

Graduatecapby Walter Chaw Bonnie and Clyde's counter-cultural bridesmaid, Mike Nichols's The Graduate is the "easy" version of Arthur Penn's American nouvelle vague classic. It's too "straight," too deadpan–a safer Harold & Maude (think of it as doing for cradle-robbing what Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? did for miscegenation) with a similarly "hip" period soundtrack of previously-released hits (there Cat Stevens, here Simon & Garfunkel). 'Nuff said that the film failed to offend Bosley Crowther. Bonnie and Clyde is the blueprint for Quentin Tarantino–The Graduate is the blueprint for Wes Anderson; and while both 1967 pictures find a goodly portion of their bedrock in images mined from Truffaut, Godard, Antonioni, and the rest of the film-brat arthouse pantheon, it's only Bonnie and Clyde that speaks at all to the culture in revolt at the close of the Flower Power generation. By the climax of Penn's picture, the rebellious youth, contemplating integration into the society at large, are betrayed by The Father, gunned down in cold blood by The Law. By The Graduate's finale, there's just that old, one-second reconsideration of the wisdom of vowing to spend the rest of your life with an unbelievably beautiful, fresh-faced starlet in the full bloom of her attractiveness.

Rendition (2007)

October 19, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Peter Sarsgaard, Meryl Streep
screenplay by Kelley Sane
directed by Gavin Hood

Renditionby Walter Chaw It plays the right political/philosophical card for my money, this idea that torture is morally wrong and suspect as an interrogation tool, but it does it in such a patronizing way that by the end I felt as though I'd had a nice, leisurely blow-job. By a toothless whore, to boot. Here I was thinking it was the Neo-Conservatives who believe their constituency to be composed of dim-witted children in desperate need of fables with moral resolutions. Reese Witherspoon is plucky Izzy, the very pregnant mother of an adorable 6-year-old whose movie-star handsome husband Anwar (Omar Metwally), the whitest-looking Arab on God's green Earth, is spirited away by the evil C.I.A. and stashed in a secret prison in North Africa. There, he's tortured for a week while observer/novice analyst Douglas–I shit you not–FREE-MAN (Jake Gyllenhaal) develops an audience-surrogate conscience and James Bond's brass balls. Izzy uses her resources, namely senatorial aide Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), to try to figure out what happened to hubby, while the Evilest Person In The World, Corrinne Whitman (Meryl Streep), plays M to Freeman's Bond. As a native corrective, Gavin Hood's tedious, childish Rendition also offers the Muslim side of things with the soap-opera saga of little girl lost Fatima (Zineb Oukach) falling in with a plucky lad (Moa Khouas) who happens to have lost a brother to the tender interrogation ministrations of evil CIA collaborator Fawal (Yigal Naor), who happens to be the little girl's…wait for it…father. In defense of Hood and his follow-up to Oscar-winner Tsotsi, at least Rendition is just exactly as bad as his first, critically-beloved picture. I predict a different reception for this one, however, because there aren't any black people to feel superior to in this film and thus forgive it its fervent jerking-off.

Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)

October 19, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Halle Berry, Benicio Del Toro, David Duchovny, Omar Benson Miller
screenplay by Allan Loeb
directed by Susanne Bier

Thingswelostby Walter Chaw I love Danish director Susanne Bier's Open Hearts, the second Dogme95 picture by a woman and one of the most affecting tragic romances I've ever seen. (Much of its power is attributable to a scene where a man, newly paralyzed, dreams of reaching across a small space to touch his lover's hand.) I thought, even given the middling quality of her follow-ups Brothers and After the Wedding, that we'd found in Bier a distinct, exciting talent, an artist interested in charting the course of grief described in the coming-apart of complementary halves and doing so with minimal fanfare or melodrama. It usually would take more than one picture for me to lose the religion, but Bier's done it in brilliant fashion with her English-language debut, Things We Lost in the Fire. Blame her screenwriter Allan Loeb for a goodly portion of this glorious debacle, one that features an early exchange in which a father defines "fluorescent" for his six-year-old son as "lit from within," leading the boy, of course, to pipe up with, "Do you think that I'm lit from within?" Not that Bier escapes accountability: Refusing to let go of her Dogme flirtation, she shoots most of this gas-trap in total silence and extreme close-up, marking this boilerplate tearjerker as uniquely, unwatchably pretentious. It's also maudlin, mawkish, unintentionally hilarious, and utterly devoid of human emotion. The word I'm searching for, I guess, is "alien." After the extraordinary humanism of Open Hearts, to see Bier at the wheel of this infernal exercise in clearing off the mantle is nothing short of horrible.

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

October 19, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola & Jason Schwartzman
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw If there's a Wes Anderson cult, I guess you should sign me up. His latest, The Darjeeling Limited, represents to me a maturing artist grappling with the stagnation of the relationship between fathers and sons. This notion that the relationship's reconciliation can only be arrived at posthumously is devastating–not because it's bleak, but because more often than not it holds true. Accordingly, Anderson's picture only has the suggestion of a father (unlike the surrogate father of The Life Aquatic or the redeemable father of The Royal Tenenbaums) at its beginning and maybe a spectre of a father played in cameo by Bill Murray, chasing down the titular train in the film's already-emotional prologue. I've offered that my appreciation of Anderson's work in the past has necessitated multiple viewings (if I'd had a second look at The Royal Tenenbaums prior to composing my year-end list in 2001, it wouldn't have had much competition for the top spot), but found The Darjeeling Limited to be affecting from the start. Something to do with a familiarity with Anderson, perhaps, or with Anderson growing up from the precocious scamp of Rushmore into the ravaged visage of Francis Whitman (Owen Wilson), the eldest of the three Whitman brothers, called to India after a year's estrangement on a quest for spiritual discovery in Satyajit Ray country. (Indeed, the film's score is cobbled together from snippets of Ray's music as well as a few choice cuts from The Kinks–the use of "This Time Tomorrow" from Lola vs. the Powerman & the Money-Go-Round, Pt. 1 is nearly as exquisite as the use of the Rolling Stones' "Play With Fire" late in the picture.) More probably, I connected instantly with The Darjeeling Limited, a film about mourning the death of a father, because I've been doing the same thing–imperfectly, badly–for almost exactly four years now.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

October 12, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, France, Germany, UK, War

½*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen, Samantha Morton
screenplay by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst
directed by Shekhar Kapur

Elizabeth2by Walter Chaw I don't mind historical pictures that aren't historically accurate until that historical inaccuracy–like in U-571, for instance–becomes so fucking retarded that it lowers the temperature of the room. Elizabeth: The Golden Age is just that fucking stupid. Should being dumb not be reason enough to avoid this movie, know that it's also unintentionally hilarious, appears to have had its screenplay ghost-written by Bob Dylan, and casts Catholics and Spaniards as Skeksis in some perverse re-imagining of The Dark Crystal as a psychodrama about the cherry-busting beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton, dreadfully wasted) and penile conjugation-by-double-proxy of rapscallion Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) into the hallowed womb (and womb-like cathedral interiors of this England). Cate Blanchett reprises her role from director Shekhar Kapur's first Bollywoodization of British history (he made one other, The Four Feathers, in between) as the Virgin Queen born fully-formed from the school of Arch and Tic. (I wonder if soon there'll be any actresses left who haven't played one Elizabeth or another–seems the distaff "Hamlet" proving ground of our time.) There's a Nostradamus character for whatever goddamned reason, a candlelit bath scene only because it's mandated in sub-BBC pieces of shit like this, and a thinly-veiled CIA spook, Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), who acts as Elizabeth's chief intelligence officer.

Fracture (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

October 11, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound A Extras D+
starring Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling, David Strathairn, Rosamund Pike
screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers
directed by Gregory Hoblit

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Although the term "cat-and-mouse" has already become synonymous with Gregory Hoblit's Fracture, it's something of a misnomer in that it implies a clever battle of wits. The film actually hinges on precisely two turnarounds of one-upsmanship between the designated cat and mouse: the revelation of the convoluted, coincidence-dependent plan to commit the perfect murder, and the fatal flaw in said plan (the "fracture," get it?) that eventually brings its perpetrator to justice–and as both are telegraphed far in advance, it's impossible to play along with the expectation for surprise. So inevitable are these conclusions, in fact, that I just gave up and accepted the ending, which sidesteps a first-glance case of double jeopardy with such vague dialogue, recited in such a bland tone of sotto voce, that I only got the basic gist of how we got from Point A to Point B. With Point B such a shrug-worthy certainty, I wasn't nearly confused enough to care besides.

Heroes: Season 1 (2006-2007) + Superman: Doomsday (2007) – DVDs

October 7, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

HEROES: SEASON 1
Image A Sound A Extras C
"Genesis," "Don't Look Back," "One Giant Leap," "Collision," "Hiros," "Better Halves," "Nothing to Hide," "Seven Minutes to Midnight," "Six Months Ago," "Fallout," "Godsend," "The Fix," "Distractions," "Run!," "Unexpected," "Company Man," "Parasite," ".07%," "Five Years Gone," "The Hard Part," "Landslide," "How to Stop an Exploding Man"

Superman/Doomsday
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
screenplay by Duane Capizzi
directed by Bruce Timm, Lauren Montgomery & Brandon Vietti

by Ian Pugh "Heroes" is perhaps best described as a network-television attempt to recast Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's seminal Watchmen for the mainstream market. It actively reworks that masterpiece's major plot points for mass consumption, yes, but more to the point, it tries to bring superheroes into real-life situations–all the while harbouring, very much unlike Watchmen, an uneducated contempt for comic books. Offering lame turn-arounds and mocking references to superhero clichés without any apparent knowledge of comics published after 1960, "Heroes" believes that the medium is, now and forever, uniformly steeped in silly costumes, fatuous storylines, and unambiguous divisions between good and evil. This contrarian attitude towards its perceived progenitors leads it to pawn off its own superficial characters, scenarios, and rambling diatribes about fate and destiny as infinitely-superior and more complex alternatives. The fact that the final episode of the first season gives us a slightly-tinkered version of Evil Dead II's hilariously downbeat ending should leave no doubt as to the essential falseness of "Heroes" and its pretense of originality: the desire to move what is seen as a cartoonish enterprise into a more mature arena has already been explored countless times by countless artists over the last few decades, often from within the medium itself.

Day Night Day Night (2007) – DVD

October 3, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Commentary B+
starring Luisa Williams, Josh P. Weinstein, Gareth Saxe, Nyambi Nyambi
written and directed by Julia Loktev

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Somehow, Day Night Day Night proposes the logical impossibility of content-free terrorists. Normally such persons come armed to the teeth with ideological baggage (to say nothing of emotional baggage), yet writer-director Julia Loktev has decided to take one suicide bomber (Luisa Williams, billed as "The Girl"), drain her of any sort of political objective or personal motive, and just sort of follow her as she confirms everything with her superiors in a motel and moves on to her Times Square site of terror. The idea, I think, is to watch her do all sorts of mundane, quotidian things, then marvel at how they coincide with that ultimate act of violence. Perhaps inevitably, by about twenty minutes in you start to crave a little more than Williams playing with her cell phone–to yearn for a fuller understanding of her as a person. No such luck: Loktev is so committed to her minuscule hook that she empties her film of interest beyond crisp visuals, streamlined action, and tedious emptiness.

Under the Cherry Moon (1986); Graffiti Bridge (1990); Purple Rain (1984) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVDs|Purple Rain – Blu-ray Disc

September 27, 2007Posted in1980s, 1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

UNDER THE CHERRY MOON
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Prince, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jerome Benton, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Becky Johnston
directed by Prince

GRAFFITI BRIDGE
*/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Prince, Morris Day, Jerome Benton & The Time, Jill Jones
written and directed by Prince

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's something cinematic about the artist known as Prince, and it's not just his effeminate charisma (though there's that) or his flair for theatre (though there's that, too): The whole sensual package that is his deliciously weird sensibility–a blend of satin-laced fetishism and self-loving exhibitionism–all but cries out to be photographed. The question is, was The Artist himself filmmaker enough to bring that to the screen? Making for a split decision are the two films that bear his directorial stamp, both of which have finally hit DVD. In one corner stands Under the Cherry Moon, a savagely-underrated romance that suggests that with someone else's script, he's got the right stuff; in the other corner sits Graffiti Bridge, a grotesque white elephant that suggests Prince left to his own devices turns from funk idol into sadly inebriated schoolgirl.

Eastern Promises (2007)

September 26, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Viggo Moretensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl
screenplay by Steve Knight
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw As executed by our pre-eminent insect anthropologist, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is more fairytale than thriller, one that finds new muse Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the rising star of an émigré Russian mob family taken root in the heart of London within the red velvet-lined walls of a restaurant innocuously-/romantically-named “Trans-Siberian.” Self-described as “wolfish,” this pack is led by grandfatherly Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who’s disappointed with his ineffectual son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and looking to replace him with a surrogate heir. The rot of that familial discord throws its roots back to ferocious opening minutes that see first a vicious throat-slashing, then a fourteen-year-old, pregnant prostitute haemorrhaging on the floor of a drugstore after she’s told that, for Methadone, the pharmacist will need a prescription. Cronenberg’s London is a cess seething beneath a veneer of “normalcy”; regarded as a toxic tabernacle in Spider, the city is transformed here into a garish, meticulously theatrical wonderland. The central problem of the picture has a lot to do with the idea that Cronenberg has again taken a pre-existing script and reordered it along distinctly Cronenbergian lines–that what must have read initially as a sociological text on another facet of the immigrant experience (much like screenwriter Steve Knight’s Dirty Pretty Things) now plays like one of Cronenberg’s investigations into the difficulty of parsing concepts like “normal” and “family” in the crushing crucible of bugs pretending to be human among humans.

Private Fears in Public Places (2006) – DVD

September 25, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Italy

Couers
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Sabine Azéma, Isabelle Carré, Laura Morante, Claude Rich
screenplay by Jean-Michel Ribes, based on the play by Alan Ayckbourn
directed by Alain Resnais

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Some time ago, there was a contretemps in the pages of another writing venue of mine, REVERSE SHOT. The estimable Nick Pinkerton had written a rather tepid assessment of Alain Resnais’s Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs): he claimed that its inclusion in the New York Film Festival was an “obligatory slot-filling by one of the ‘Old Masters of the Sixties’ art-house.” NYFF programmer Kent Jones shot back with a dryly-hilarious note confirming such selection criteria, which enthused that the film “had exactly the lack of urgency, the unexceptionable hominess, and the scanty charm we were looking for.” The whole thing was pretty funny, but it illustrated the pitfalls of playing certain critical lines. While Pinkerton is mostly correct that Private Fears in Public Places is a disappointingly inconsequential film by someone who had previously defined styles and moved mountains, this is punishing Resnais unduly: just because you’re not making a masterpiece doesn’t mean you lack any point at all.

300 (2007) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

September 24, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Bulgaria, Canada, Drama, DVD, War

*/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Dominic West
screenplay by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller
directed by Zack Snyder

300capby Walter Chaw There's an idea in the ancient world about a "beautiful death," achievable for the warrior only in mortal, one-on-one wartime combat–an idea that may have contributed to the length of the Trojan siege, and an idea vocalized by one of the captains serving under Spartan King Leonides (Gerard Butler) in Zack Snyder's 300. Based on Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same name, the film betrays a lot of the same macho aesthetic as Robert Rodriguez's adaptation of Miller's Sin City–but rather than content itself with the literally bestial terms of glory in the masculine psyche, it makes a play for allegory and equivocal morality (of all things) in the valorization of Sparta and the romanticization of a crushing military defeat. It's not that Leonides is seen martyred in the end in a tableau explicitly meant to evoke the passion of St. Sebastian, but that he goes out pining for his wife like a lovesick hamster, thus completing 300's devolution from remorseless Spartan militarism into gushy democratic idealism and all manner of liberal maladies. There's little profit in establishing the rules of this universe as uncompromising and brutal (it opens on a field of infant skulls–victims of a Spartan culling ritual of its own kind) if its intentions split time between justifying, in non-chest-beating terms, the decision to pit three-hundred against thousands while denying the Spartans their individual moments of "beautiful death" in favour of some collective date with pyrrhic immortality. History suggests that the Spartans, having exhausted their arms, died scratching and clawing with their bare hands; 300 suggests they died calling for their mothers and wives.

TIFF ’07: Lust, Caution

September 22, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, Taiwan, Thriller, TIFF, War
***/****starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Wang Leehomscreenplay by Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus, based on a short story by Eileen Changdirected by Ang Lee by Bill Chambers Blessed with an achingly beautiful score by Alexandre Desplat, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is a more tasteful Blackbook, which is odd considering how much more graphic it is in its depiction of not just sexuality but, thanks to a darkly-comic homage to Torn Curtain, violence as well. Where Blackbook director Paul Verhoeven is a vulgarian, though, Lee projects civility and cultivation. That's how he so often manages to…

TIFF ’07: The Tracey Fragments

September 20, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, TIFF
½*/****starring Ellen Page, Ari Cohen, Max McCabe-Lokos, Max Turnbullscreenplay by Maureen Medved, based on her noveldirected by Bruce McDonald by Bill Chambers When I say that The Tracey Fragments applies the Tarnation method to fiction filmmaking, I say it exasperated with the whole Pied Piper mentality that follows any aesthetic innovation. I admire Tarnation, don't misunderstand, but a big part of that admiration rests in the picture's total invention and definitive application of a form that fits its function. Unfortunately, for every E.T., there's a Mac and Me--and for every original like Jonathan Caouette there's a dilettante-in-waiting like Bruce McDonald.…

Dexter: The First Season (2006) – DVD

September 18, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
"Dexter," "Crocodile," "The Popping Cherry," "Let's Give the Boy a Hand," "Love American Style," "Return to Sender," "Circle of Friends," "Shrink Wrap," "Father Knows Best," "Seeing Red," "Truth Be Told," "Born Free"

by Walter Chaw "Dexter" sucks in that special Showtime way. It has nothing for the soul–not because it's nihilistic, but because it isn't. It's "The Facts of Life" crossed with "Matlock" starring a good-hearted serial killer; a superhero melodrama along the lines of "The Incredible Hulk" whose self-contained mysteries are held together ever so loosely by a season-long thread involving a manhunt. What I'm trying to say is that it's unbelievably patronizing. It's not nuanced, not laden with depth–it's a quirk machine, facile and shallow. See, a serial killer with heart isn't "deep," it's a sketch. It's the black guy who thinks he's white, the horny old lady, the hooker with a heart of gold. What begins as a really fun-seeming premise is undone utterly by a succession of weak scripts and, with the exception of Michael C. Hall's virtuoso turn as a sociopath working as a blood-spatter expert in Miami, slack performances. He's a lot better than the material deserves, it goes without saying, but like Mary-Louise Parker in the similarly pandering, similarly terrible Showtime series "Weeds", he's just good enough to prolong the show's already-lamentable existence. Maybe the real argument pertains to the wisdom of creating a series about something so heinous in such a way that it trips no sensitivity meters. It's a time bomb hidden in a teddy bear–and then the bomb doesn't go off.

Lucky You (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

September 17, 2007Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Sports

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore, Robert Duvall, Debra Messing
screenplay by Eric Roth & Curtis Hanson
directed by Curtis Hanson

Luckyyoucapby Walter Chaw Trapped in the doldrums between Robert Duvall doing his elderly, patting people on the hand while he's talking bit and Drew Barrymore enunciating every word as though she's trying not to let the marble fall out, Eric Bana struggles against stardom once again but states a case for it just the same. The vehicle this time is Curtis Hanson's Lucky You, a mainstream poker picture that re-establishes Hanson as a less ambitious James L. Brooks (which isn't altogether a bad thing). Bana is compulsive gambler Huck Cheever, named after an American writer and an antiquated term for a wheeler/dealer, thus neatly encapsulating his character as not only a con-man and a bit of an asshole but also moony and eloquent. There's nothing at all surprising about the way the film moves towards its conclusion, and even its twist loses its lustre beneath the steady drone of its interiors. It's an un-ironic love story featuring a problem gambler, a girl fresh off the bus, and a father/son subplot packing all the subtlety of a heart attack–which makes it, of course, suddenly Pollyannaish when it yearns so mightily for world-weary. Lucky You looks like a gambler, but it acts like a diagram instead of a train accident.