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.

Breach (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

June 11, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Crime, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Thriller

***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Chris Cooper, Ryan Phillippe, Laura Linney, Dennis Haysbert
screenplay by Adam Mazer & William Rotko and Billy Ray
directed by Billy Ray

Breachcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Breach is so good, you want it to be better; it's a tense, relentless, Alan-Pakula-in-marble chiller that sketches the schizoid ways of its real-life subject so effectively that you're eager to know more than the genre trappings can accommodate. This would be of greater cause for concern were Breach not already, as it is, much better written and light-years better directed than most of its brethren in the Washington-intrigue sub-genre. Make no mistake: it has an iron grip on the spine, and its refreshingly quiet approach eschews rapid montage for unnerving negative space. You hear every line instead of noticing the pictures, even as the pictures work overtime–and the aggregate is sweetly enthralling, if somewhat incomplete.

The Caine Mutiny (1954) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

June 11, 2007Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, War

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Humphrey Bogart, José Ferrer, Van Johnson, Fred MacMurray
screenplay by Stanley Roberts, based on the novel by Herman Wouk
directed by Edward Dmytryk

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Caine Mutiny is appallingly enjoyable. Stuffed full of two-bit psychology and capped by a hilarious pontificating monologue from José Ferrer, it shouldn't really hold you the way it does; the movie is pure bull, yet the more of it you watch, the more you want to see. Herman Wouk's Pulitzer-winning novel serves as the basis for a lovely exercise in self-righteous man-talk, and for those who can sate themselves on such things, it's a guaranteed good time. Although The Caine Mutiny is the Ur-text of the vastly inferior A Few Good Men, it's no contest: where that more recent film comes off as smug and conceited in its slam-dunk moralizing and courtroom grandstanding, this one seems rather humbly concerned with the fate of the crew of the Caine, doggedly buying into cheesy but gripping didacticism right down to the ludicrous "twist" near the finish line.

Overlord (1975) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

June 7, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, The Criterion Collection, UK, War

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Brian Stirner, Davyd Harries, Nicholas Ball, Julie Neesam
written and directed by Stuart Cooper

Overlordcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover If nothing else, Overlord has the distinction of inventing its own genre. A bold combination of fictional drama and found-footage assembly, it grimly blends the real and the imaginary to the point where you can't help but be a little affected by the actors' proximity to the real devastation of WWII. Long undistributed in North America and roundly-unseen on these shores except by those fortunate few who caught it on the late, lamented Z Channel, Overlord has acquired a cult mystique slightly disproportionate to its merit. Director Stuart Cooper and his co-scenarist Christopher Hudson only hint at the inner life of their hapless deer-in-the-headlights lead and don't quite sell the impending doom for which they so desperately reach. But make no mistake: this is a one-of-a-kind movie that should've opened new avenues for narrative filmmaking instead of dropping into the big black hole that it did.

Norbit (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

June 4, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Eddie Murphy, Esoterica, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B-
starring Eddie Murphy, Eddie Murphy, Thandie Newton, Cuba Gooding, Jr.
screenplay by Eddie Murphy & Charles Murphy and Jay Scherick & David Ronn
directed by Brian Robbins

by Walter Chaw I looked up George Carlin’s seven dirty words that you can’t say on television and, sure enough, there was the outline for the gags, narrative, reason for being, you name it, of Eddie Murphy’s Norbit: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits. Marvin the Martian-talking geek pastiche Norbit (Murphy) is an orphan abandoned on the doorstep of Golden Wonton Restaurant and Orphanage by unkind kindly Asian caricature Mr. Wong (Murphy again), who, in a moment that doesn’t feel like a joke but definitely feels full of rage, confesses that he traded his two-year-old daughter for a yak (in another, he reveals his dream to be a whaler, making him more Japanese than Chinese, but hey, a slant’s a slant). Not connected to anything like atonement or social/racial satire, Mr. Wong hovers there in the background as occasional wise commentary while Norbit loses his childhood sweetheart Kate (Thandie Newton) and marries the monstrous Rasputia (yes, Murphy). Norbit loathes fat people, Asians, women (note the two girls who really, really want to get turned out by Eddie Griffin’s pimp archetype), and black people most of all. I guess this is meant to soften the misanthropy, except it doesn’t really matter that the perpetrators of the screenplay are Murphy and his out-of-work brother Charlie–catching this coattail now after Dave Chappelle rolled up his–if the director is a white guy.

Shortbus (2006) [Unrated] – DVD

May 30, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Sook-Yin Lee, Paul Dawson, Lindsay Beamish, Justin Bond
written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I put John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus on my Top Ten for 2006. This was perhaps more for intent than for execution: ’06 was a pretty lousy year for cinema, and I was just happy to see something from this continent that wasn’t completely asleep at the switch. Still, I think it’s too easy to write the movie off (as many commentators have) as pie-in-the-sky warm-fuzzies. What impressed me most about Shortbus was that its famous nudity and hardcore sex had not been severed from the rest of human experience. Mitchell may not be an aesthetic master, but he’s onto something that few of the would-be indie rebels are: that there is no separating the person from the body, and that sex is as much a social and personal experience as it is a physical one. As the social/personal body is very likely to be a morass of guilt, doubt, confusion, and fatigue, the upbeat ending suggests a covering for a core of despair.

The Twilight Samurai (2002) – DVD

May 28, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Japan, Martial Arts, Romance

****/**** Image D Sound D Extras B
starring Hiroyuki Sanada, Rie Miyazawa, Nenji Kobayashi, Ren Osugi
screenplay by Yôji Yamada, Yoshitaka Asama, based on the story of Shuuhei Fujisawa
directed by Yôji Yamada

by Walter Chaw Unforgiven for veteran director Yôji Yamada and the jidai-geki genre of samurai pictures, The Twilight Samurai is quiet, assured, a masterpiece of contemplative understatement. Its connection to Eastwood's film is more than just cosmetic, though, more than just another "Old West" film about an aging, widowed warrior called into action for something so quaint as the honour of a woman. No, The Twilight Samurai seems an apologia for the romanticization of violence and, moreover, for the elevation of the cult of masculinity out of the mud of bestial muck–where it at least in some measure belongs–and into realms of ritualistic divinity. There's a scene in The Twilight Samurai more powerful than its commensurate moment in Unforgiven that emphasizes this point as unassuming hero Seibei (Hiroyuki Sanada), without comment, steps over the flyblown corpse of a rival assassin in silent pursuit of his own quarry. The romance of end-of-era pictures like this (and literature as well; The Twilight Samurai and Unforgiven heavily remind of Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing) is that they can be pulled into a discussion of the passing away of youth as a man goes from early manhood's heady intoxication with the concept of chivalry to the more sober appreciation that true grit comes with providing constancy for your children in a world forever tilting towards alien territory. Though Seibei's nickname, "Tasogare" ("Twilight"), is a jab at his rushing home after clerk-work to tend to his demented mother and two young daughters, there's poetry in it as a description of a liminal magic hour where change looks not only more possible, but weighted with a lovely, gilded melancholy besides.

Comedy of Power (2006) – DVD

May 23, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Germany

L'Ivresse du pouvoir
**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Isabelle Huppert, François Berléand, Patrick Bruel, Robin Renucci
screenplay by Odile Barski and Claude Chabrol
directed by Claude Chabrol

Comedyofpowercapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Things were going great. Two Claude Chabrols (The Bridesmaid and Violette Nozière) had made their way into my FFC goodie bag, both of them entirely worthy entries in his oeuvre. Maybe they aren't masterpieces, but they're nonetheless solid pieces of filmmaking that don't disappoint. So when Comedy of Power (L'Ivresse du pouvoir) arrived on my doorstep, I clasped it to my chest just knowing that the third time's a charm. Alas, no. Turns out the movie is the most routine Chabrol I can remember: smug, lacking in ambiguity, and possessed of some of the feeblest writing in the director's career. It's an obvious movie by the master of misdirection, a blunt knee to the groin by someone you can usually count on to go for the throat. Even as satire, it's nothing you couldn't get any day from Jon Stewart (with twice the panache and funny to boot).

The Bridesmaid (2004) – DVD

May 22, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Romance, Thriller

La Demoiselle d'honneur
***/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras A-
starring Benoît Magimel, Laura Smet, Aurore Clément, Bernard Le Coq
screenplay by Pierre Leccia and Claude Chabrol, based on the novel by Ruth Rendell
directed by Claude Chabrol

Bridesmaidcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Comparisons of The Bridesmaid (La Demoiselle d'honneur) to Hitchcock are almost inevitable, not only because such assessments are the lazy default position of critics when referencing suspense yarns, but also because The Bridesmaid's director, Claude Chabrol, has carved out a career as the French heir apparent to the master's title. That said, the distinctions between the two filmmakers are probably more interesting than the similarities: Chabrol's overall style is considerably more relaxed than Hitchcock's, and his approach to character is finally less judgmental. Here, for instance, in lieu of assigning blame to the damaged femme fatale of the title, he notes the thrilling nature of her transgression and the unappetizing prospect of returning to normalcy after succumbing to her lethal charms. Chabrol has always put women in the driver's seat of perversity and sexual wilfulness–something Hitch never quite had either the guts or the sympathy to pull off.

Violette (1978) – DVD

May 21, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Thriller

Violette Nozière
***/**** Image C- Sound C+
starring Isabelle Huppert, Stephane Audran, Jean Carmet, Jean-François Garreaud
screenplay by Odile Barski, Herve Bromberger, Frederic Grendel, based on the novel Presses de la Cité by Jean-Marie Fitere
directed by Claude Chabrol

Violettecapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Violette Nozière (or Violette, as inexplicably shortened by some cretinous American distributor) isn't highly ranked in the canon of Claude Chabrol. Reviews range from the mildly indulgent to Leonard Maltin's assertion that "Chabrol lacks his usual directorial flair"–a strange thing to say about a man whose style is famously relaxed. While I wouldn't place it in the company of Les bonnes femmes or La femme infidèle, I would say that Violette Nozière returns Chabrol to his preoccupations with women and class with lethal accuracy. Its tale of an amoral 14-year-old who robs, sleeps around, and attempts to murder both of her parents is perceptively half-in, half-out of her desire to escape the confines of a small world and a smaller bankroll. The protagonist is completely horrible, and yet we're just as completely trapped in her point-of-view. The film's total commitment to her awful behaviour subsequently makes the audience both judge of and accomplice to Violette's terrible, terrible misdeeds.

The Painted Veil (2006) – DVD; The Good Shepherd (2006); The Good German (2006) – DVD

May 21, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, China, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Romance, Thriller, War

THE PAINTED VEIL
***/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Diana Rigg
screenplay by Ron Nyswaner, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by John Curran

THE GOOD SHEPHERD
**/****
starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Eric Roth
directed by Robert De Niro

THE GOOD GERMAN
*½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Paul Attanasio, based on the novel by Joseph Kanon
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw PaintedgermanshepherdOne of seemingly dozens of pretentious, self-produced vanity pieces from the Edward Norton grist mill, The Painted Veil, John Curran's adaptation of Somerset Maugham's story of colonial malaise, is a pleasant surprise. Naomi Watts and Toby Jones are fabulous (and Norton is steady); it's not terribly paternalistically racist despite being another Western film in which white people exert their magical influence in foreign lands; and even though it's all about prestige and hedonism, it manages now and again to actually be about prestige and hedonism. But like the simultaneously-opening Soderbergh noir The Good German, it's mostly interesting in the meta. What keeps this updating of the old Greta Garbo weeper from being literally better is the lack of immediacy in its tale of emotionally distant scientists and their flapper wives, adrift in the boiler pot of 1920s Shanghai. Not timeless in its remove but instead ineffably dated by it, it's an Old Hollywood production in both epic scale and lack of subtext, making the picture a lovely trifle not unlike other well-done bits of instantly-forgotten prestige (see: Philip Noyce's The Quiet American).

The Messengers (2007) – DVD

May 14, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Kristen Stewart, Dylan McDermott, Penelope Ann Miller, John Corbett
screenplay by Mark Wheaton
directed by Danny Pang & Oxide Pang

Messengerscapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Horror is not my area of expertise, but I'm fairly certain that The Messengers barely qualifies for the category. A two-bit riff on Ju-On and The Sixth Sense (themselves worth four bits at best), it's professionally shot and cleanly designed but fails completely to be at all scary or even marginally resonant. Those who recognize and revere the social relevance of genre entries from the '70s will be tearing their hair out at the film's hermetic sealing-away from anything beyond teen angst, with references to no less than the high foreclosure rate in farm country used purely as a plot convenience. (Inexcusable when you consider what sort of eldritch imagery might be wrung from a devastated agricultural wasteland.) What you get from The Messengers are some by-the-book jump-scares, "creepy" imagery that wouldn't damage the average eight-year-old, and a "surprise" ending that any thinking adult will see coming from miles away.

Philadelphia Film Festival ’07: Waitress

May 4, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance
**½/****starring Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Jeremy Sisto, Adrienne Shellywritten and directed by Adrienne Shelly by Ian Pugh It takes place in a Mayberry-like Southern landscape and features Andy Griffith himself as a sweet old man with a grumpy façade, so it probably goes without saying that Waitress has the tendency to be a little too syrupy for its own good. But Adrienne Shelly's final film as writer, director, and actress collects its down-home '50s romantic comedy stylings and silly pie-recipe jokes into something that can be genuinely affecting when it tries--and if, through its mawkishness, it reveals Nathan Fillion as…

You Are Alone (2007) – DVD

May 4, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Jessica Bohl, Richard Brundage
written and directed by Gorman Bechard

Youarealonecapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Sometimes skill doesn't count for much. Coming in the next issue of iViews is a review of Mike Reilly's Road to Victory, which by most technical standards qualifies as inept but still manages to get by on a raw rage that can't possibly be faked. Its commitment to its subject matter is so complete that it (sort of) makes up for a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium. You Are Alone is an altogether different beast: it's reasonably well-shot (by DV indie standards), has a decent understanding of structure and foreshadowing, is consciously plugged into its subject matter–and through sheer force of prurience turns all of those plusses into a big minus. I have no idea what brought writer-director Gorman Bechard to the subject of a teenage prostitute and her next-door neighbour, but the end product is less compassionate than creepy and certainly less insightful than risible by the time of its wannabe-shock climax.

Pulp (1972) – DVD

May 3, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Michael Caine, Mickey Rooney, Lionel Stander, Lizabeth Scott
written and directed by Mike Hodges

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Pulp is so determined to not work on any level that you almost admire it in light of the effort. It's neither a parody of nor a tribute to the pulp genre, neither comedy-thriller nor thrilling comedy–it's just a freak that repeatedly falls flat on its face, leaving you with no choice but to grasp it close like an idiot child. The first time I saw this film, I was mostly annoyed by its determination to short-circuit the fun that might have come from genre trappings, not to mention its refusal to offer genuine alternatives. With a second viewing, it looks a little better, and though not a success, it earned my admiration for being so far out of its depth that a bit of pleasure at its expense was unavoidable. It may have earned an extra half-star were it not also sexist and homophobic in dated ways that have risen to the surface like yeast.

Free Zone (2005) + The Secret Life of Words (2005) – DVDs

May 3, 2007Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Drama, France, Ireland, Israel, Road Movie, Romance, Spain

FREE ZONE
*/**** Image C- Sound B Extras F
starring Natalie Portman, Hanna Laslo, Hiam Abbass
written and directed by Amos Gitai

THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins, Javier Cámara, Julie Christie
written and directed by Isabel Coixet

Freezonecapby Walter Chaw The not-at-all-hamfisted allegory of an Israeli woman and a Palestinian woman trekking across the disputed land to find an American who will settle some non-specific debt, Amos Gitai's tediously strident Free Zone opens with ten minutes, uninterrupted, of Natalie Portman weeping over what we discover to be the end of a love affair. It's showy and about as subtle as a kidney-punch–ditto the conception of Portman's passive Rebecca (Portman), the American on the sidelines, a matinee-beautiful beacon who stands by as impassively as Milton's God. That said, the device of a long, car-bound road trip narrated by flashbacks of the protagonists' separate journeys to this journey is, at least for a while, intoxicating. The problem–and it's a doozy–is that Gitai's picture is so blatant an allegory that nothing any of the characters say comes free of dramatic distance or irony, making it impossible to take the film seriously as anything other than ventriloquism for Gitai's, let's face it, unsurprising politics. Nothing wrong with Wailing Wall lamentations about the state of the world, but watching someone shake a fist at a dead horse, long past the hope of resurrection, for upwards of two hours, is tiring and futile. Is there traction in proposing that the film merely mirrors the hopelessness of the Middle East conflict? I guess, but then how many people–specifically, how many people renting a film called Free Zone directed by Amos Gitai–are going to feel edified by that?

Inland Empire (2006)

April 27, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Lynch, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Grace Zabriskie
written and directed by David Lynch

Inlandempireby Walter Chaw Nikki (Laura Dern) is an actress landing her dream role opposite Devon (Justin Theroux) in a film directed by the great Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons). Alas the project, "On High in Blue Tomorrows", has a history in which a previous, doomed production ended as reality seeped into its fiction and the film's onscreen/offscreen lovers were killed. For a moment, it seems as though David Lynch's Inland Empire might be as straightforward as a haunted Hollywood genre exercise–but time slips, it's suddenly the next day, and as one character says to another, you're sitting over there. Displaced, distracted, the picture is a masterpiece that, for the patient, the active, and the curious, may be the most literal definition of "dread" captured on film. That feeling you get when Henry Spencer contemplates his feral baby in Eraserhead is the same species of disgusted, familiar fascination that infects this film like a murder of maggots.

Shogun Assassin 2: Lightning Swords of Death (1972) – DVD

April 23, 2007Posted in1970s, Action, Drama, DVD, Japan

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Tomisaburo Wakayama, Go Kato, Yuko Hama, Isao Yamagata
screenplay by Kazuo Koike
directed by Kenji Misumi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover "What is a samurai?" asks a disillusioned ronin in the blood-soaked nightmare of Shogun Assassin 2*. It's a good question in context. The feudal Japan of the film–actually the third entry in the Lone Wolf and Cub series, renamed to capitalize on the famed English-language consolidation of the first two–is a lost world of corruption and brutality that makes the idea of a noble samurai seem outdated, if not ridiculous. This lends its swords-and-shooting saga an unexpected gravitas. The film is exploitation all the way, with some pleasingly ludicrous fight scenes and a leering tone that's hard to shake off, but it's also involved in its story on the script level and shot with immaculate care. It's proof that even a glorified serial can leap from the screen when the people involved invest in what's going on.