Offside (2006) – DVD

August 27, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Iran, Sports

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Sima Mobarak Shahi, Safar Samandar, Shayesteh Irani, M. Kheyrabadi
screenplay by Jafar Panahi and Shadmehr Rastin
directed by Jafar Panahi

Offsidecapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Offside finds Jafar Panahi in a light mood. At least, in a lighter mood than when he made The Circle, his previous dissertation on the depressing state of women's rights in Iran, which painted the nation as a Kafka-esque hell full of paranoia and punishment for any woman with the fatal courage to get out of line. That movie is a brilliant sucker-punch you don't easily forget, though its huis clos mentality leads one more to despair than to hope that something can be done. His latest film is the flipside to The Circle: a tribute to the resourcefulness of young women who will get their football fix any way they can while still pledging allegiance to the idea of their nationality–even when the reality is a hostile force bent on keeping them at home. It is, against all odds, funny, mischievous, and brazenly positive; and it'll send you out soaring, your faith in humanity restored under conditions you never thought possible.

TIFF ’07: Just Buried

August 27, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF
*½/****starring Jay Baruchel, Rose Byrne, Graham Greene, Nigel Bennettwritten and directed by Chaz Thorne by Bill Chambers Just Buried (formerly Pushing Up Daisies) stars Jay Baruchel as Oliver Whynacht (get it? "Why not?" Me neither), a neurotic with a really annoying affection (his nose bleeds when he's nervous) who inherits a small-town funeral parlour from his estranged father. He's ready to hand over the reins of the money-hemorrhaging business to a competitor when he falls under the spell of the Lady Macbeth-like mortician, Roberta (Rose Byrne), whereupon the two hatch a scheme to drum up business that rather rapidly transforms them…

TIFF ’07: Angel

August 27, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Romance, TIFF, UK
**/****starring Romola Garai, Michael Fassbender, Sam Neill, Charlotte Ramplingscreenplay by François Ozon & Martin Crimp, based on the novel by Elizabeth Taylordirected by François Ozon by Bill Chambers François Ozon is what David Bordwell might call a "polystylist," though his eclecticism has mostly yielded diminishing returns. His latest finds him suiting up for yet another genre, and although it could be considered something of a throwback to his early features Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women (if by virtue of its roots in someone else's material), he's too tony now for the vaguely subversive pastiches with which he…

Year of the Dog (2007) – DVD

August 20, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Molly Shannon, Laura Dern, Regina King, Tom McCarthy
written and directed by Mike White

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A sea change has happened in cinematic irony. Where the well-dressed snarky bastard of the Eighties would scapegoat the consumer mentality of the expendable poor, the ironist of the new century knows the landscape is manufactured and that he or she is implicated in an artificiality nigh impossible to avoid. Thoughtful Wes Anderson occupies the high end of this movement, oblivious Jared Hess its nadir; Year of the Dog resides somewhere in the low-middle. It's intriguing to see Mike White–author of scripts for more naturalistic filmmakers Miguel Arteta and Richard Linklater–resort to this tactic for his directorial debut, and it certainly adds a layer of meaning that could've helped his screenplay for Arteta's The Good Girl. Though I fear the approach goes for instant recognition instead of entering deeper and pretty much says that resistance is futile, Year of the Dog still manages to wring a little moisture out of the damp rag of the style.

Stardust (2007) + Interview (2007)

August 14, 2007Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Netherlands, Robert De Niro, Romance, Theatrical, UK

STARDUST
***½/****
starring Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Sienna Miller, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman
directed by Matthew Vaughn

INTERVIEW
*/****
starring Sienna Miller, Steve Buscemi
screenplay by David Schecter and Steve Buscemi, based on the film by Theo Van Gogh
directed by Steve Buscemi

Stardustby Walter Chaw I do wonder about films that don't seem to be about anything, but I'll say this at the outset: Matthew Vaughn's Stardust, based on a book by Neil Gaiman, isn't about anything at all–and it's wonderful. Far from empty-headed, though, Stardust is a deeply meaningful series of sweet-nothings, wholly apolitical even in a macho supporting character revealed as a cross-dresser and hair stylist; and by its end, it wins not in spite of being so exuberant in its indulgence of flamboyant clichés, but because it is. It's so much better than the trailers and Gaiman's track record as a novelist (his métier is decidedly rooted in the comics) would lead you to believe, while the inevitable comparisons to The Princess Bride are misleading because The Princess Bride is a piece of shit. A beloved piece of shit, but a piece of shit just the same. On the contrary, Stardust is extremely well-made despite an opening half-hour that boasts of a few too many long establishing shots, directed with real snap by Guy Ritchie's former producer Matthew Vaughn (who did the same with Layer Cake) and executed by a stellar cast that includes a literally incandescent Claire Danes as a fallen star named Yvaine and Michelle Pfeiffer as a hideous bitch goddess, which, given that Stardust follows on the heels of Hairspray, appears to be the vehicle of her late-career comeback. More difficult to embrace is Robert De Niro as the film's Dread Pirate Roberts, a fencing mentor who happens, in this incarnation, to be a ballroom-dancing guru as well. The instinct is to recoil, but damned if it isn't the first De Niro performance in his self-parodic period that's both spot-on in its auto-satire and funny to boot.

Disturbia (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

August 13, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A Extras C+
BD – Image B+ Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS) Extras C+
starring Shia LaBeouf, David Morse, Sarah Roemer, Carrie-Anne Moss
screenplay by Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth
directed by D.J. Caruso

Disturbiacapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover I’m not terribly upset that Disturbia directly steals from the infinitely superior Rear Window. If ever there was a time to resurrect the lesson in voyeurism that is Hitchcock’s masterpiece, it’s now, at the dawn of the closed-circuited twenty-first century. The problem with the newer film isn’t that it’s a rip-off, but that it fundamentally misunderstands its source. The terribly ambiguous stance on Jimmy Stewart’s Peeping Tom tendencies has become 100% gung-ho support of illegal surveillance, a development problematic for reasons that go beyond ethical considerations and political ramifications. I get that nobody involved means for Disturbia to champion creep behaviour–they’re merely fulfilling the hormonal wishes of the adolescents who made it a surprise hit last spring. It’s just that, stripped of any theme beyond catching a killer, Rear Window‘s not that interesting to watch.

Looking for Kitty (2006) – DVD

August 12, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Drama, DVD

*/**** Image C Sound C Extras C-
starring Edward Burns, David Krumholtz, Max Baker, Connie Britton
written and directed by Edward Burns

by Alex Jackson This is Edward Burns's fifth feature. Wouldn't you think he'd have learned a little something about filmmaking by now? If Burns were a complete unknown outside the margins of the industry and this were his directorial debut, maybe we could pat him on the head, tell him good job, and stick Looking for Kitty on the refrigerator door, all the while assuming that now that he's proven he can make a movie and get it seen, he'll move on to something he actually cares about. But this is his fifth film. Looking for Kitty feels like the first attempt at narrative storytelling by a young, inexperienced screenwriter who's just glad to have finished something. It's the kind of thing you write before you've found your voice. This is where you start out, not where you end up.

The Guns of Navarone (1961) [2-Disc DVD Set] – DVD

August 10, 2007Posted in1960s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, UK, War

*½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn, James Darren
screenplay by Carl Foreman, based on the novel by Alistair MacLean
directed by J. Lee Thompson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover My brother Oliver is fond of citing movies where you actually root for the Nazis. Not because you like what they stand for, of course, but because the cinematic alternative suddenly seems much worse: fact of the matter is those fucking Von Trapps will simply not shut up in The Sound of Music, while anyone who would voluntarily off Jon Bon Jovi, as the Nazis do in U-571, can't possibly be ALL bad. To this very short list we may add the inexplicably popular guy-movie staple The Guns of Navarone. Supposedly trading on the selfless heroism of a commando unit behind enemy lines, the film has such a hair up its ass about the virtue of grim determination that it manages to bore you into an early grave within the first five minutes. Nearly three hours of watching Gregory Peck and his group of he-men bicker over ethics and strategy would make any thinking adult pray for some kind of violent deliverance. Nazis, Italian Fascists, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir–I'm not choosy about who shoots these jerks dead, just as long as somebody does it.

Reign Over Me (2007) + TMNT (2007)|TMNT – DVD

August 5, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Hong Kong, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

REIGN OVER ME
**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Jada Pinkett Smith, Liv Tyler
written and directed by Mike Binder

TMNT
*/****
written and directed by Kevin Munroe

Reignovertmntby Walter Chaw In response to the charge that critics are "downers" because they're too judgmental, a colleague and friend said on a panel that I participated in that some films only deserve judgment. It's a wonderfully bleak declaration, and dead on–think of it as an expansion of Pauline Kael's belief that no one ever takes the time to bash terrible pictures. But there's more to it than simply that brittle shattering of cinema's impregnable mythic mystique. I think certain movies deflect even judgment–movies that are the exact equivalent of, say, Michael Bolton and Kenny G collaborating on a cover of a Richard Marx song. Rail against them if you must, but there's no sport in it, and definitely no swaying of the assembled masses. There are films that are what they are, deserving neither praise nor condemnation in providing precisely the comfort of a tattered terry cloth robe worn ritualistically until disintegration. It's possible to meticulously, ruthlessly, intellectually deconstruct the aesthetic and functional properties of a favourite pair of sneakers, you know, but it's masturbatory and redundant and like swatting a fly with a Buick. I suspect that deep down everyone knows films like Reign Over Me and TMNT are as worthless as a plug nickel, that their appeal lies entirely in the fact that they'll present no surprises along with their usual meek payload of cheap emotional prattle and pocket uplift. And I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with that, either–I'm just saying I feel like I don't have much more to say after reviewing the same fucking movie about a dozen times a year.

Shirley Temple: America’s Sweetheart Collection, Volume 5 – DVD

July 29, 2007Posted in1930s, 1940s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Musical

MAURICE MAETERLINCK’S THE BLUE BIRD (1940)
**½/**** Image C Sound B-
starring Shirley Temple, Spring Byington, Nigel Bruce, Gale Sondergaard
screenplay by Ernest Pascal
directed by Walter Lang

THE LITTLE PRINCESS (1939)
**½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Shirley Temple, Richard Greene, Anita Louise, Ian Hunter
screenplay by Ethel Hill and Walter Ferris, based on the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett
directed by Walter Lang

STAND UP AND CHEER! (1934)
***½/**** Image D+ Sound C+
starring Shirley Temple, Warner Baxter, James Dunn, Nigel Bruce
story by Will Rogers and Philip Klein, dialogue by Ralph Spence
directed by Hamilton MacFadden

Shirleytemplelpcapby Alex Jackson As you might know, Shirley Temple had been considered for the role of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz but was eventually passed over either because her singing voice was inadequate or because MGM and 20th Century Fox couldn’t come up with a satisfactory trade. In an attempt to beat MGM at their own game, Fox bought the rights to playwright Maurice Maeterlinck’s “L’Oiseau Bleu” (“The Blue Bird”) with an eye on Temple for the lead. Ironically, The Blue Bird became her very first box-office dud and signalled the end of her career as a child actress.

Mr. Skeffington (1944) + The Star (1952) – DVDs

July 25, 2007Posted in1940s, 1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

MR. SKEFFINGTON
½*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Bette Davis, Claude Rains, Walter Abel, Richard Waring
screenplay by Julius J. Epstein & Philip G. Epstein
directed by Vincent Sherman

THE STAR
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Bette Davis, Sterling Hayden, Natalie Wood, Warner Anderson
screenplay by Katherine Albert and Dale Eunson
directed by Stuart Heisler

by Walter Chaw Biographers and geeks would be right to point out that Bette Davis spent her late career–on screen and, abortively, on stage–getting in her own way, while cynics and realists would be right to point out that the one most probably led to the other, if we're to take "the other" as autobiographical. Even people resistant to the auteur theory tend to recognize that matinee idols shoulder at least a fair share of the blame for picking vanity pieces and assorted flaming trainwrecks from the piles of projects offered them. If there's a fair modern, distaff analogue to Bette Davis's embarrassing epilogue in self-abnegating camp artifacts, it's Burt Reynolds's own squandering of his status as the biggest thing on planet Hollywood for a series of vainglorious redneck "gorsh!" spectacles that tied him eternally with Dom DeLuise and, oh my, Hal Needham. Consider that both have earned a small, rabid band of indefatigable defenders of their late, self-inflicted careers (gay men for Bette, assholes for Burt) for nothing more than confirming their respective lifestyles of bitchy flamboyance on the one side and dimwitted macho rebellion on the other. They're cults of personality by the very definition of "cultism," founded on the shale of limited appeal and the arrested desire to emulate someone you admire. (See also: the army of SAHMs shuffling after Oprah.) I guess you could say that although I get it, I'm not down with the cult of Bette.

Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) – DVD

July 24, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Romance

**½/**** Image B Sound A Extras D
starring Chow Yun Fat, Gong Li, Jay Chou, Liu Ye
screenplay by Zhang Yimou, Wu Nan, Bian Zhihong
directed by Zhang Yimou

Curseofthegoldenflowercap

by Walter Chaw I recently had the opportunity to see for the first time the cut of Zhang Yimou's virtuoso Hero prepared for Yankee viewers, complete with the subtitles and framing cards slapped on by American distributors. Before now, the only contact I'd had with the film was through a region-free DVD from Hong Kong that preceded the U.S. theatrical release by a couple of years. (After buying the rights to it, Miramax, you'll recall, decided to sit on it until such time as its unleashing wouldn't somehow interfere with timeless masterpieces of misguided schlock like Cold Mountain.) Anyway, I was appalled. The extent to which Hero has been dumbed-down–the insertion of "our country" for a term that means, in Mandarin, "beneath the sky" drums up this weird nationalistic gumbo at the end where, before, it was sober and idealistic–manages to paint Zhang as the worst kind of toad. There's an animated map at the beginning now, I guess to show the great unwashed American moron that there is land outside the range of purple mountains majesty, while much mystical bullshit about "over two thousand years ago" mainly obscures the fact that Hero takes place well over two thousand years ago. I feel a lot of anger towards what's been done to one of the best films ever to come out of the Mainland to make it more suited for white consumption, both because of the sacrilege and because whoever's responsible has a lot of answering to do for how far they've undersold the intelligence of Western audiences. I finally understand why a lot of people in the United States didn't think much of Hero: the version I saw was a Zhang Yimou picture, whereas the version most in this country saw was a Miramax picture.

Hairspray (2007)

July 19, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Nikki Blonsky, John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Queen Latifah
screenplay by Leslie Dixon
directed by Adam Shankman

Hairsprayby Walter Chaw It's pretty easy to take the neo-hipster stance of having been there when Divine ate dog shit and, because of status conferred by said endurance of John Waters at his most insouciantly "fuck you," to denounce the Broadway-ification of his already-mainstream-courting Hairspray–now turned into a movie based on a musical based on the original movie–as "Waters-lite." Except that Waters's satire at its best has always been a gloss on cults of pop (this is a guy who made an iconic cameo on "The Simpsons", for God's sake)–and after Polyester, all of his movies run like book for the plastic-fantastic of the Great White Way anyway. Artificiality is actually the point, affectedness another; like Italian, the only way to speak the language is to exaggerate past the point of embarrassment. Still, the key to Waters is the requirement that by assembling a collection of misfits to play his assembly of misfits, not a one of them takes to their duty ironically. Waters is the same kind of archivist as Quentin Tarantino in that way: the casting can be interpreted as a post-modern joke, but the performances need to be true to the essential nostalgia driving the casting. John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, in other words, needed very much to play it as straight as John Travolta is capable of playing it.

The Cowboys (1972) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD

June 29, 2007Posted in1970s, Adventure, Drama, DVD, Western

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras C+
starring John Wayne, Roscoe Lee Browne, Bruce Dern, Colleen Dewhurst
screenplay by Irving Ravetch & Harriet Frank, Jr. and William Dale Jennings, based on the novel by William Dale Jennings
directed by Mark Rydell

by Walter Chaw Based on a novel and co-written by William Dale Jennings, one of the co-founders of the Mattachine Society (a group interested in furthering the rights of homosexuals in society), Mark Rydell's The Cowboys betrays at its best a crystalline throughline into what it means to be bullied. It's a chronicle of oppression, a western at the genre's terminus point that, beneath the wide open skies of Colorado and New Mexico, paints an ugly picture of what happens when innocence is directed into experience by cruel hands and angry truths. I think of The Cowboys as John Wayne's The Misfits; he'd go on to do six more films, but The Cowboys' insight into the end of the line, with its collection of mismatched parts driven to violence, locates this 1972 picture as very much a product of the American New Wave–and as Wayne's final coming to terms with the mythologizing of violence. It's fine work from Wayne, too, an actor who, like many of his generation and stature, is accused of being a personality but nevertheless gave a handful of truly great performances.

A Mighty Heart (2007)

June 27, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Irrfan Khan, Archie Panjabi
screenplay by John Orloff, based on the book by Mariane Pearl
directed by Michael Winterbottom

Mightyheartby Walter Chaw An avowed Michael Winterbottom fan, I think he's amazing even when he fails. I marvel at his Thomas Hardy adaptations–the devastating Jude and the redemptive The Claim (his take on The Mayor of Casterbridge)–and I hadn't thought, before I actually saw him do it, that anyone but Charlie Kaufman would have a shot at turning Tristram Shandy into a viable film. When the extremely prolific Winterbottom decided to explore how music and sex evolve sympathetically in culture, he turned out a little unofficial trilogy (24 Hour Party People, Code 46, 9 Songs) in the span of two years. And now that he's become politicized–something he would say he always was, with 1997's vérité Welcome to Sarajevo as evidence–he's turned out, in the same span, In This World, The Road to Guantanamo, and now A Mighty Heart. This is the story of Mariane Pearl, widow of WALL STREET JOURNAL reporter Daniel Pearl, who was infamously beheaded while covering Al-Qaeda in Pakistan in the early days leading up to our current boondoggle. As that fan of Winterbottom's, I'm inclined to give the picture a benefit of a doubt I nevertheless wonder if it deserves. First run through my head, A Mighty Heart strikes me as pointless and unsurprising; Winterbottom is of course a better anthropologist than he is a political philosopher: if he's trying to apply Donald Symons's models of cultural evolution to ethics instead of more immediately compatible pursuits (music, or literature), then what's emerged from the experiment is the revelation that ethics and morality appear to have nothing to do with the base nature of man–and, moreover, that Angelina Jolie will never be Nicole Kidman in her ability to be both herself and someone else.

Ivanhoe (1952) – DVD

June 26, 2007Posted in1950s, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders
screenplay by Noel Langley, based on the novel by Sir Walter Scott
directed by Richard Thorpe

by Alex Jackson Think of Ivanhoe as the 1952 version of Wolfgang Petersen's Troy: a big-budget historical epic designed to garner prestigious Oscar buzz as well as blockbuster box-office results. Like Troy, the film's fatal flaw is in favouring superficial fidelities over a meaningful interpretation of the subject matter. This is a masochistic and defensively middlebrow idea of art, not to mention naïve. Consider, for example, that there are no gods in Troy. Yes, this is perfectly reasonable when you consider what today's filmgoers are likely to take seriously and what they are likely to laugh at; Laurence Olivier in Clash of the Titans is most definitely a camp object. Then, of course, there are the wiseasses who populate Sam Raimi's dedicatedly silly TV series "Hercules" and "Xena".

Rescue Me: The Complete Third Season (2006) – DVD

June 25, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A Extras C
"Devil," "Discovery," "Torture," "Sparks," "Chlamydia," "Zombies," "Satisfaction," "Karate," "Pieces," "Retards," "Twilight," "Hell," "Beached"

Rescuemes3capby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As much a product of our post-apocalypse as "Deadwood", "Rescue Me", like that David Milch masterpiece, is about the flattening of society and the reconstruction of it according to masculine, animal logic. Indeed, it's a good argument that society has never been constructed any other way. As such, the series, Denis Leary and writing partner Peter Tolan's brainchild and baby, demonstrates a wonderful insight into the male psyche: how it deals with grief, as well as its caveman attitude towards women. The two things are compatible, after all, and authors no less than Faulkner and Freud eventually gave up trying to write women. The only sensible thing is to let the nightmare of "Rescue Me"'s exuberant misogyny wash over like a warm tide; why fight it? I've had a hard time watching Leary without wishing that they'd cast him as Garth Ennis's John Constantine, but it occurred to me some time in the middle of "Rescue Me"'s third season that Leary's firefighter Tommy Gavin is as close to a consort of the devil as Constantine ever was. Perhaps closer. Tommy's infernal, even demonic (I see that now), and the show he haunts is a very specific vision of a very personal hell. Women are bitch goddesses here: temptresses of mysterious purpose who reward misdeeds, punish valour, and steal children. They're succubae that distribute venereal diseases and, worse, get pregnant. I wonder if the premise of the whole shebang is that nobody survived 9/11–that no matter the misdeed, Tommy is rewarded with gardens of earthly delight, the price being that he lives with ghosts in an empty city that periodically bursts into flame.

The Siege (1998) [Martial Law Edition] – DVD

June 22, 2007Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, Bruce Willis, Tony Shaloub
screenplay by Lawrence Wright and Menno Meyjes & Edward Zwick
directed by Edward Zwick

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Hollywood liberal is a strange beast. It has been known to speak pieties about the evils of racism, the horrors of war, and the value of freedom with what looks like conviction, if not authority–but when our backs our turned, it builds monuments to military hardware, sings praise to the power of the badge and gun, and subordinates non-whites, non-straights, and non-males to positions of zero control within even the most progressive dramas. The Siege captures this particular genus of liberal at its most confused and self-righteous. Firing in all directions at topics it can't begin to comprehend, it is in any event too in love with the rules of aesthetic engagement to commit to its 'issues' with anything approaching honesty. One hand gives, the other takes away–, and the result is a seething mass of contradictions that's almost too painful to bear.

The Untouchables: Season 1, Volume 1 (1959-1960) + The Scarface Mob (1959) – DVDs

June 20, 2007Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Drama, DVD, Gangster, Television

THE UNTOUCHABLES: SEASON 1, VOLUME 1
Image B+ Sound B Extras D+
“The Empty Chair,” “Ma Barker and Her Boys,” “The George ‘Bugs’ Moran Story,” “The Jake Lingle Killings,” “Ain’t We Got Fun,” “Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll,” “Mexican Stake-Out,” “The Artichoke King,” “The Tri-State Gang,” “The Dutch Schultz Story,” “You Can’t Pick the Number,” “The Underground Railway,” “Syndicate Sanctuary,” “The Noise of Death”

THE SCARFACE MOB
***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D+
starring Robert Stack, Keenan Wynn, Barbara Nichols, Pat Crowley
written by Paul Monash, based on the novel The Untouchables by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley
directed by Phil Karlson

by Ian Pugh I love Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables precisely for the self-consciously fictionalized varnish that curiously seems to have earned it disdain among the director’s devotees. Apart from its romantic, “pure cinema” thrills, however, its Hollywood gloss is the perfect complement to De Palma’s penchant for effortlessly transforming assaults on the body into assaults on the mind: an undercurrent of violence constantly threatens to erupt and destroy the gentle exterior of a make-believe 1930s Utopia dictated by fedoras and pinstripe suits. No such undercurrent exists in the original 1959-63 Robert Stack television series on which the 1987 film is ostensibly based–it, too, is pure romanticism, but of a sleazier, more straightforward breed. Corruption and greed are obvious and rampant in “The Untouchables”‘ world, and the violence that greets dissent is treated as an accepted fact of everyday life. Each episode of the series begins with a brief preview of the scene featuring the most gunfire (usually taking out some poor schmuck who crossed his superiors), which quickly establishes the down-and-dirty rules in play. The greatest aspect of “The Untouchables” lies in how these scenes incite both a visceral thrill and the soon-fulfilled desire to see justice served.

Shooter (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

June 19, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Mark Wahlberg, Michael Peña, Danny Glover, Ned Beatty
screenplay by Jonathan Lemkin, based on the novel Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter
directed by Antoine Fuqua

Shootercapby Walter Chaw Think of it as the latest in the proud tradition of Walking Tall hicksploitation: a redneck Bourne Identity with a bleeding heart tacked to its sleeve by barbed chicken wire. Or, better, think of Shooter as a noble attempt to win back the Kansan-Tennesseean-Montanan wingnut demographic from the arch-conservatives who've made men buggering one another of greater concern than their farms going under and their children fighting indefensible wars declared by an impossibly wealthy aristocracy-by-coup. Sound extreme? Shooter is all this and more: a nihilistic exercise in Old Testament revenge that has more in common with such cult classics as Next of Kin than with cult classics like the suddenly-reserved-seeming Sniper. It makes no bones about its politics, assembling talking heads in the form of a venerable Red State senator (Ned Beatty) and a too-old-for-this-shit Colonel (Danny Glover, too old for this shit almost twenty years ago) to spout on endlessly about the lack of WMDs, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, and, for shits and giggles, the conspiracy behind the JFK assassination. No The Parallax View, the film mines the complex machinations of good guys being good and bad guys being bad: bad guys being politicians and military guys drunk on power and good guys being hillbilly guardsmen with access to the Internet and too many guns.