Sundance ’07: It is Fine! Everything is Fine.

February 1, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE.**/****starring Margit Carstensen, Steven C. Stewart, Carrie Szlasa, Lauren Germanscreenplay by Steven C. Stewartdirected by David Brothers & Crispin Hellion Glover by Alex Jackson An unlikely figurehead of Salt Lake's independent film scene, Crispin Glover shot portions of his directorial debut What is It? in the city and cast local native Steven C. Stewart in the role of "Duelling Demi-God Auteur and the young man's inner ego" against his own "Duelling Demi-God Auteur and the young man's inner psyche." (A great deal of the affection the townies seem to harbour for Glover and his films…

Sundance ’07: Hounddog

January 31, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Sundance

Sundancehounddog*/****
starring Dakota Fanning, Robin Wright Penn, David Morse, Piper Laurie
written and directed by Deborah Kampmeier

by Alex Jackson Deborah Kampmeier's Hounddog is even worse than its pre-emptive objectors assume it is. The film is offensive in precisely the way you think it's going to be but surprises you by becoming offensive on a whole new level. Everything in the film revolves around a scene where Dakota Fanning is raped, which, far from "gratuitous," is the film's entire raison d'être. Before The Rape, Hounddog plays like one big striptease leading up to it: in the very first scene, Fanning promises her playmate a kiss if he shows her his penis, and throughout the picture, Kampmeier has her prancing around in her panties, gyrating in her rendition of Elvis Presley's "Hounddog," and going swimming in an undershirt. Naysayers are calling the picture "a pedophile's dream," and though I maintain that you would have to be a pedophile of particularly low self-esteem to whack off to this, they do have a point. Up until The Rape, the film is just plain exploitive and cynical. It starts to seem like Kampmeier knows why we're here and is going to draw out our dread/anticipation past the breaking point before delivering "the goods." Then little Dakota gets popped. The scene is simultaneously cowardly, leering, and utterly tasteless: we see close-ups of her limbs flailing and her playmate staring on, fascinated and horrified. Her demonic rapist, who had been hiding in the shadows, grunts a couple of times, comes inside her, and very audibly zips up as she lies on the ground, bawling and defeated. The pre-rape portion of the film was sweating with sex, but all that heat dissipates out during and after the rape.

The Addams Family: Volume One (1964-1965) + Bones: Season One (2005-2006) – DVDs

January 31, 2007Posted in1960s, 2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Television

THE ADDAMS FAMILY: VOLUME ONE
Image B Sound B- Extras B+
"The Addams Family Goes to School," "Morticia and the Psychiatrist," "Fester's Punctured Romance," "Gomez, the Politician," "The Addams Family Tree," "Morticia Joins the Ladies League," "Halloween with the Addams Family," "Green-Eyed Gomez," "New Neighbors Meet the Addams Family," "The Addams Family Meets the V.I.P.s," "Morticia, the Matchmaker," "Lurch Learns to Dance," "Art and the Addams Family," "The Addams Family Meets a Beatnik," "The Addams Family Meets the Undercover Man," "Mother Lurch Visits the Addams Family," "Uncle Fester's Illness," "The Addams Family Splurges," "Cousin Itt Visits the Addams Family," "The Addams Family in Court," "Amnesia in the Addams Family"

BONES: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound A+ Extras C-
"Pilot," "The Man in the S.U.V.," "A Boy in a Tree," "The Man in the Bear," "A Boy in a Bush," "The Man in the Wall," "The Man on Death Row," "The Girl in the Fridge," "The Man in the Fallout Shelter," "The Woman in the Airport," "The Woman in the Car," "The Superhero in the Alley," "The Woman in the Garden," "The Man on the Fairway," "Two Bodies in the Lab," "The Woman in the Tunnel," "The Skull in the Desert," "The Man with the Bone," "The Man in the Morgue," "The Graft in the Girl," "The Soldier in the Grave," "The Woman in Limbo"

by Ian Pugh Charles Addams's darkest cartoons for THE NEW YORKER were routinely hilarious, not just for their brazen denial of the nuclear family unit, but also because, unlike so many of the publication's other strips, they take their one-panel restrictions to heart without coming off as smarmy. Moreover, Addams's scenarios were simple without being stupid, e.g., family of ghouls about to dump boiling oil on Christmas carollers. The problem in turning these characters into a half-hour sitcom, namely "The Addams Family", should be self-evident: it bloats the brisk silliness into a particularly tiresome game of "Opposite Day"–thirty minutes of a family that cheerfully approves of the macabre and homicidal while despising normalcy and respectability.

Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton: The Film Collection – DVD

January 30, 2007Posted in****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bermuda, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Romance, UK

THE V.I.P.S (1963)
½*/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Elsa Martinelli, Margaret Rutheford
screenplay by Terence Rattigan
directed by Anthony Asquith

THE SANDPIPER (1965)
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie Saint, Morgan Mason
screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson
directed by Vincente Minnelli

MustownWHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)
****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, Sandy Dennis
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the play by Edward Albee
directed by Mike Nichols

THE COMEDIANS (1967)
*½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov
screenplay by Graham Greene, based on his novel
directed by Peter Glenville

by Walter Chaw Also called International Hotel, The V.I.P.s–the first chronologically-released vehicle for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor following the initiation of their legendary infidelities on the set of Cleopatra–is unwatchable dreck of the Old Hollywood variety. When people say "They don't make 'em like they used to," it's a good corrective to start listing off dusty artifacts like this one. As it was something of a financial windfall at the time (though not enough of one to offset the impending disaster of Cleopatra), one assumes that audiences flocked to theatres to sniff the musky odour of Burton/Taylor's forbidden l'amour that had dominated the world's lascivious imagination as production on an epic failure (or failed epic) dragged on for months and years. For me, the curiosity about The V.I.P.s, currently available in Warner's freshly-minted box set of Burton/Taylor pictures made during the height of their notoriety, has a lot more to do with Richard Burton, who was, to my mind, his generation's Russell Crowe. Like Crowe, Burton is thick with virility and gravitas and the ability, by himself, to carry a picture on his broad shoulders; I wonder if his seduction by a relic of Old Hollywood glamour hasn't tainted his legacy irrevocably. My voyeuristic impulse ultimately isn't so different from that of contemporary viewers, in fact, though I do offer the slight caveat that I'm in it to see how touching a match to Burton's already-boundless explosiveness would infect, for good or for ill, what are essentially vanity pieces for a couple drunk on the cult of themselves.

Looker (1981) – DVD

January 29, 2007Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras B-
starring Albert Finney, James Coburn, Susan Dey, Leigh Taylor-Young
written and directed by Michael Crichton

Lookercap

by Bill Chambers Michael Crichton's Looker is a kinky paranoia thriller in which an unlikely sleuth teams up with the nearest bimbo to solve a murder mystery. It is, in other words, vintage De Palma, and if he'd actually helmed it, legions of cinephiles would've flameproofed it by now. At the risk of further estranging myself from De Palma geeks, I must admit I rather enjoyed watching a Body Double without Armond White guilt-tripping my subconscious–which is not to say that Looker circumvents an auteurist reading altogether, but the idiosyncrasies that betray it as 'Crichtonian' (like a novelistic conceit that starts off each new act with a placard indicating the day of the week*) are less than venerable and thus hardly lend themselves to an apologia.

Fiddler on the Roof (1971) [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD

January 29, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Topol, Norma Crane, Leonard Frey, Molly Picon
screenplay by Joseph Stein, based on his play
directed by Norman Jewison

Fiddlerontheroofcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Fiddler on the Roof is sort of the transition point between the late-'60s Twilight of Old Hollywood and the American Renaissance of the '70s. In one sense, it's the very last of the king-sized Broadway adaptations the industry kept churning out to no avail before the advent of Easy Rider, and there's no denying that the film is over-scaled and over-orchestrated in that manner. Yet there's a genuine sensibility going on here beyond masonry and screeching violins: incredibly, director Norman Jewison has managed to infuse the expensive proceedings with a certain emotional honesty–enough to keep you rapt in fascination without sending your blood-sugar level through the roof, if not enough to make Fiddler on the Roof the masterpiece its status as a home-video perennial would suggest.

Smokin’ Aces (2007) + Seraphim Falls (2007)

January 26, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War, Western

SMOKIN' ACES
½*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Common, Andy Garcia
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

SERAPHIM FALLS
*/****
starring Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, Angie Harmon, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Abby Everett Jaques & David Von Ancken
directed by David Von Ancken

by Walter Chaw Director Joe Carnahan replicates a heart attack in the prologue of Narc, and David Von Ancken, in the action-packed opening to his feature debut Seraphim Falls, simulates a mildly hysterical bout of narcolepsy–but more on that later. Carnahan's third film, Smokin' Aces, is drawing a lot of unfavourable comparisons to Guy Ritchie's gangster sagas, but the real lineage can be traced to whatever strain of viral ADD infected Tony Scott. The film is so like Scott's Domino in its visual affectations and uniform incompetence that the two pictures could exchange scenes willy-nilly without losing a step. (Compare it to Wayne Kramer's similarly canted Running Scared for a mini-primer on when lawless misanthropy and the coked-up editor aesthetic can be wielded with delighted, visceral purpose as opposed to simply wielded.) Ultimately, Smokin' Aces is little more than a parade of sad "didn't you used to be…" stunt cameos installed for the missing "edge" that buckets of blood, rains of bullets, and a few power tools seem incapable of manifesting. With Narc, Carnahan showed real growth from his directorial debut (Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane, which is actually not unlike the new one at all). Now he's just showing off.

Sundance ’07: Fido

January 24, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Sundance, Zombie
*/****starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, Dylan Baker, Tim Blake Nelsonscreenplay by Dennis Heaton, Robert Chomiak, Andrew Curriedirected by Andrew Currie by Alex Jackson The first five or ten minutes of Fido are pretty terrific. Therein, an educational film depicts the "zombie wars," a time during the Forties in which space-dust turned our dead into zombies. The living won the ensuing conflict; and with the invention of the domestication collar by mega-corporation Zomcom, the zombies could be made to serve man. This movie-within-the-movie is in Academy ratio and grainy black-and-white, and when it finishes a grade-school teacher turns on the lights…

Running with Scissors (2006) – DVD

January 22, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Annette Bening, Joseph Cross, Brian Cox, Evan Rachel Wood
screenplay by Ryan Murphy, based on the novel by Augusten Burroughs
directed by Ryan Murphy

Runningwithscissorscapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover It would be hard to not be a little moved by the traumatic goings-on of Running with Scissors. The film is based on Augusten Burroughs's best-selling memoir, and the author has plenty to forget: not merely the failure of his real family, consisting of a distant alcoholic father and a self-righteous failed-poet mother, but also the nightmare of moving out of that home and into that of Mommy's quack psychiatrist. Yet as the horrors pile up, one wonders what's being learned in the midst of all this unburdening. I haven't read Burroughs's book, but Ryan Murphy's screen translation fails completely to draw conclusions from the facts–we're simply dropped in the midst of some seriously unhappy people and left to fend for ourselves. Perhaps the memoirist felt the same way, but without any generalizations drawn it seems rather like that money-grubbing head-shrinker, making hay with other people's depression.

The Promise (2005) – DVD (U.S. version)

January 19, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Martial Arts, South Korea

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Hiroyuki Sanada, Jang Dong Gun, Cecilia Cheung, Nicholas Tse
screenplay by Chen Kaige and Zhang Tan
directed by Chen Kaige

Promisecapby Walter Chaw Any fad reaches its nadir in due time and the Western wuxia infatuation, which started somewhere around Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and more or less peaked with Zhang Yimou's exceptional Hero, has found its basement in the truncated version of Chen Kaige's already-pretty-embarrassing The Promise. Somewhere, King Hu is spinning in his grave. An abomination just about any way you slice it, this ultra-expensive, CGI'd-to-exhaustion wire-fu epic–especially as sanitized for North America's consumption–suggests the world's saddest public display of penis envy. Chen, hailing from the same Fifth Generation school as Zhang, produces a show-offy, self-indulgent bit of flamboyant one-upsmanship destined to become a queer camp classic. When the Crimson General (Hiroyuki Sanada) trades in his fabulous duds for a lavender muumuu in which to trade barbs with archenemy Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse, suspended somewhere between pretty girl and Japanese anime hero), a bad guy garbed in white feathers who wields a gold staff topped with a bronze hand, index finger extended in proctological menace, the homoeroticism of the piece–already distracting in the subtext–suddenly becomes the main event. It's probably this unfathomable cut of the film's Rosetta Stone, in fact, pared down to some half-assed companion piece to Chen's own Farewell My Concubine. Without much strain you can see The Promise being transformed, in all its kitsch excess, into a Broadway pop-opera: Memoirs of a Geisha: The Musical.

Takeshis’ (2005) – DVD

January 8, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Japan, Satire

**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Takeshi Kitano, Kotomi Kyono, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano

Takeshiscap

by Walter Chaw Midway between Fellini's 8½ and Bob Fosse's All That Jazz is Japanese auteur Takeshi Kitano's Takeshis', a film that indicates with its possessive title that it belongs to both the director (Takeshi Kitano) and star ("Beat" Takeshi); acknowledging that they're one and the same (Kitano is billed as the former when he directs, the latter when he performs), they each have a function and persona unique unto themselves. The burden of that division, which Takeshi has taken on since midway through Violent Cop, is illustrated in the picture as a series of fractures that meld reality with televisual reality and filmic reality–nothing so ostentatious as Sven Nykvist and Ingmar Bergman reflected in a mirror in Persona, but going so far as to have "Beat" Takeshi, dressed as a clown, refer to Takeshi Kitano as "that asshole." The omniscience of the director is referred to often in the text as casting directors (rather, actors playing casting directors, or casting directors playing themselves) remark that Yakuza never look like Kitano (who has made something of a name for himself as a Yakuza: he's a little like the Japanese Robert De Niro)–and yet the central narrative of the picture then involves the slow evolution of the actor who looks like Kitano into Takeshi Kitano's Yakuza persona. Kitano is thus marking the difference between the devices of the director and the relatively passive objectification that is the primary definition of an actor–between the godhead inscrutable and the subject humiliated, as well as the eventual bleed-through between the roles actors assume and the mold into which perception forces them.

Children of Men (2006) + Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

January 5, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, War

CHILDREN OF MEN
****/****
starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Timothy J. Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby, based on the novel by P.D. James
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
***½/****
starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase
screenplay by Iris Yamashita, based on the book Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Tsuyoko Yoshido
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Stop on any single frame of Alfonso Cuarón's remarkable war idyll Children of Men–a film that's rarely in repose, sometimes seeming composed of one long, frantic shot–and I suspect the sharp-eyed, educated viewer would be able to cull a reference to modern art, most likely one about men reduced to their base animal nature. For me, the two visual landmarks come in the form of a cue to the cover design for Pink Floyd's 1977 "Animals" when hero Theo (Clive Owen) goes to see his industrialist cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) for help and a re-creation of Richard Misrach's remarkable series of 1987 photographs documenting, among other things, a dead-animal pit in Nevada purportedly used to dispose of victims of a plutonium "hot spot." Both share a space with surrealism in the positioning of animals (artificial or deceased) in industrial spaces (London's Battersea Power Station is the iconic backdrop of the "Animals" cover) as mute commentary, perhaps, on man's destructive relationship with his environment–a read that jibes comfortably with the thrust of Children of Men, in which we're told that one day in the not-too-distant future, humans suddenly stop reproducing. (Fertile ground for science-fiction, this obsession with progeny (see: everything from Frankenstein to I Am Legend).) The picture opens with a Fleet Street terrorist bombing, a little like Terry Gilliam's dystopic Brazil–though rather than take the easier route of satirizing our current state of instability and free-floating paranoia, Children of Men makes a serious attempt to allegorize it.

A Star is Born (1976) – DVD

January 3, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Busey, Oliver Clark
screenplay by John Gregory Dunne & Joan Didion and Frank Pierson
directed by Frank Pierson

Starisborn76capby Travis Mackenzie Hoover It was no doubt celestially preordained that Barbra Streisand would unleash herself on some cherished Old Hollywood warhorse. But while the Janet Gaynor/Judy Garland hand-me-downs that ultimately felt her musical wrath were nobody's idea of untouchable masterpieces, they at least played their cards right in terms of credulity towards celebrity and damaged spouses. The Streisand/Kristofferson A Star is Born lacks genuine investment in its central relationship between alcoholic rock star John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson) and his protégé/lover Esther Hoffmann (Streisand). We're supposed to take their epic love on faith, to say nothing of the burned-out cynicism of the descendant rocker; there's a lot of talk about disaffection and anguish, but Frank Pierson's camera never catches it and the actors never quite express it.

Conversations with Other Women (2005) – DVD

January 2, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Aaron Eckhart, Helena Bonham Carter, Nora Zehetner, Eric Eidem
screenplay by Gabrielle Zevin
directed by Hans Canosa

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's no real arguing with Conversations with Other Women–you either buy into its common program of relationship angst and mid-life crisis or you don't. Although director Hans Canosa tries to juice things up with a split-screen technique that's less unctuous than the description might suggest, it's still the same Woody Allen-ish trip through romantic failure via witty banter. There's an extent to which this can be entirely watchable, and at no point does the film grind to a halt and become a chore to sit through. Its concept is a tad far-fetched, however, and the insights gleaned from the chance encounter of two people at a wedding reception are nothing you can't find in the pages of any major glossy mag.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

December 29, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Mexico, Spain, Theatrical, War

****/****
starring Ariadna Gil, Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú
written and directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw Brutal and ignoble, the antithesis of romantic, the violence in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth slaps metal against flesh like the flat of a hand against a steel table. It's the only element of the picture that isn't lush, that isn't laden with the burnished archetype of Catholic superstition as it exists in eternal suspension with the pagan mythologies it cannibalized. By itself, this seems a metaphor for the pain and the magic of how fable turns the inevitability of coming-of-age into ritual. An early scene where hero girl Ofelia (Ivana Baquero)–a storyteller equal parts experientially innocent and allegorically savvy, making her the manifestation of del Toro's ideal avatar–tells her prenatal brother a story about a rose that blooms nightly on a mountain of thorns touches in one ineffably graceful movement all the picture's themes of immortality, aspiration, isolation, and the promise of escape held, sadistically, just out of reach. There's something of the myth of Tantalus in Ofelia's tale, as much as there is of Lewis Carroll's Alice and the sagas of parental absence by the Brothers Grimm, which surface in the premise of a young girl traveling, as the film opens, with her pregnant mother into the war-torn Spanish countryside during Franco's rule to join her wicked stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi López) at his remote outpost. Ofelia will be reminded repeatedly throughout the film that there's no such thing as justice or innocence left in the world, and that the best intentions are crushed by cynicism and rage. The question left as the picture closes has to do with whether Ofelia's taken the lesson to heart, to say nothing of del Toro–or us.

Dreamgirls (2006)

December 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Eddie Murphy, Musical, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé Knowles, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover
screenplay by Bill Condon, based on the play by Tom Eyen
directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Hailed as one of the more innovatively-staged musicals in the modern pantheon of such entertainments, Dreamgirls, transferred to the big screen, is nothing special in the way of something trying way too hard to dazzle. It’s the plain girl swathed in a gallon of makeup: there’s so much misdirection that you actually try harder to dig up a foundation that can’t bear the scrutiny. Said base for Dreamgirls is of course one of the most successful Broadway musicals (6 Tonys, 1,522 performances) from an era that counts “Les Miz”, Andrew Lloyd Weber’s dreadful operettas, and, what, “A Chorus Line”(?), among its chief rivals. You want to attribute its Broadway success to its spinning stage, choreographed and motorized $3.2M tower set, and coy deconstruction of bitch-goddess Diana Ross and her Supremes, but it’s hard not to wonder if it merely benefits from the relative quality of its competition. Then again, its success is likely the by-product of a fairly consistent mass appetite for cookie-cutter musical biopics, which have been self-satirized to near-total inconsequence first by VH1’s “Behind the Music” series, then to quickly-diminishing returns at the multiplex by Ray and Walk the Line.

Sergeant York (1941) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

December 19, 2006Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Romance, War

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Joan Leslie, George Tobias
screenplay by Abem Finkel & Harry Chandlee and Howard Koch & John Huston
directed by Howard Hawks

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Before it settles into the martial flag-waver it clearly wants to be, Sergeant York is a terrific movie. Its story of Tennessee-born WWI hero Alvin York, heavily supervised by the man himself, is one of not just a military coup, but an evolving conscience as well–and if that conscience eventually cons itself into supporting that most pointless of international conflicts, the film is nevertheless a moving story of personal growth. Though it barely betrays the hand of Howard Hawks (it lacks the team spirit that courses through his oeuvre), the director tells the tale with the kind of conviction and nuance a lesser director couldn’t provide. The movie feels York’s progress from alcoholic ne’er-do-well to industrious would-be farmer and prospective husband, and instead of taking his emotions for granted, it expresses them with a noted lack of condescension.

1900 (1976) [Two-Disc Collector’s Edition] + La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) – DVDs

December 18, 2006Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, France, Italy, Pseudo-Documentary, Robert De Niro, War, West Germany

1900
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Francesca Bertini
screenplay by Franco Arcalli, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Bernardo Bertolucci
directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871)
****/**** Image B- Sound C+ Extras C+
directed by Peter Watkins

1900capby Travis Mackenzie Hoover In this corner, Bernardo Bertolucci, weighing in with a massive budget courtesy of Alberto Grimaldi and a cast that includes De Niro, Depardieu, Sutherland, Lancaster, Hayden, and Sanda. Over here we have Peter Watkins, working for peanuts on a single soundstage with a cast of nobodies recruited from Paris and its environs. The fight, as it turns out, is more than one over who can make the longest movie (5hrs15mins for Bertolucci, 5hrs45mins for Watkins) or grab the most attention. The issue is: what are the conditions necessary for a revolutionary epic–moreover, what conditions get in the way? This is the real purpose of comparing 1900 and La Commune (Paris, 1871) (hereafter La Commune), for each film throws down for the Communist cause but only one is conscious of the nuances. Where Watkins and his troupe constantly reframe the idea of what it means to foment revolution, Bertolucci thinks he's got the idea–and proves, through mindless repetition, that he really doesn't.

Lady in the Water (2006) + Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)|Lady in the Water [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

December 18, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Revenge, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

LADY IN THE WATER
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bob Balaban, Jeffrey Wright
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Chinjeolhan geumjassi
****/****
starring Lee Yeong-ae, Choi Min-sik, Kim Shi-hoo, Kwon Yea-young
written and directed by Park Chanwook

by Walter Chaw The creeping, inescapable feeling is that M. Night Shyamalan would like to be known as “M. Christ Shyamalan”: a guy who wants you to drink the Kool-Aid; a messiah with a shrinking flock preaching a platform that his increasingly deluded, astonishingly arrogant fables are actually themselves the secret to world peace. He claims to hear voices–the first couple of times he did so (here in the stray interview, there in The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, that abhorrent mock-documentary he did for the Sci-Fi Channel), I thought he was kidding. Hell, the first couple of times he did it, he probably was kidding. But I don’t think he’s kidding anymore. And there’s no longer any currency in playing this ethereal shaman card. Prancing about like a mystic while shitting away millions of other people’s money isn’t a pastime with longevity: it’s something only a zealot would do. I think he’s gone off the deep end, hubris first, overfed to bloating on a steady diet of his own press and the tender ministrations of yes-men too afraid to set off Shyamalan’s diseased persecution complex by telling him that while he might be good at a few things, Lady in the Water was unsalvageable. When Disney executives did approximately that, Shyamalan took his ball and went across the street to Warner Brothers.

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

December 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Will Smith, Thandie Newton, Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, Brian Howe
screenplay by Steven Conrad
directed by Gabriele Muccino

Pursuitofhappynessby Walter Chaw They should pass out insulin plungers with the purchase of a ticket to the new Will Smith vehicle The Pursuit of Happyness, which sports a subtle tickle of plantation politics that's overwhelmed by a sense of smug entitlement and ugly elitism. Inspired by the true story of Eighties Wall Street bootstrap wizard Chris Gardner, it's a telling in a way of the Hercules legend, complete with insurmountable, fickle tasks and divine inheritance. Our mythological hero solves the Rubik's Cube in the back of a taxi for the bemused delight of potential employer Jay Twistle (Brian Howe); deals with the abandonment of his frustrated wife (Thandie Newton); and figures out a way to retrieve a pair of the bone-density scanners (the sale of which were his profession pre-Dean Witter) stolen by the homeless peers he disdains. It's true: the picture–even with its ghetto-cred misspelled title and restroom-to-boardroom fable–is intolerant of people consigned to the impoverishment the film contorts to assure us will be Chris' plight for only the time it takes his uplift to ripen.