Cimarron (1931) [Special Edition] – DVD

February 28, 2006Posted in1930s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, Music, Western

**½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras A-
starring Richard Dix, Irene Dunne, Estelle Taylor, Nance O'Neil
screenplay by Howard Estabrook, based on the novel by Edna Ferber
directed by Wesley Ruggles

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Not exactly a proper western (but not exactly any other kind of genre piece), Cimarron is sort of a thesis-statement historical melodrama, establishing the greatness of the West's upswing while capping off with distinct dissatisfaction over its levelling off. Like its male lead, Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix), the film is beguiled by the idea of rising American "civilization" to the detriment of the idea of permanent settlement. Still, it's quick to note the silent suffering of Yancey's wife, Sabra (Irene Dunne), who naturally has to stay behind as he follows his wanderlust once the initial stake grows gentrified. But though the pull between conservative home and wild, liberal prairie doesn't add up to killer cinema (and is further hobbled by this being an early sound production), as a symptomatic powder keg, Cimarron is endlessly fascinating.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005) – DVD

February 27, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Halle Berry, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Michael Ealy, Terrence Howard
screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks and Bobby Smith, Jr., based on the novel by Zora Neale Hurston
directed by Darnell Martin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Their Eyes Were Watching God is so much better than it had to be that you wish it were better than it actually is. There's nothing slapdash or careless about its rendering of Zora Neale Hurston's famous novel–clearly, the book meant enough to executive producer Oprah Winfrey that she and her creative team tried to pull out all the stops. Alas, it's professional and pleasant but never actually hits any high notes, forming a straight-line narrative without many stylistic digressions or visual curlicues. After a while, you want a little more from it than the best that small-screen discipline can provide. Still, it's not slapped-together or careless, and it manages to hold your attention fervently enough to pass the time, if not astound you.

Ryan’s Daughter (1970) [Two-Disc Special Edition] + Dune (1984) [Extended Edition] – DVDs

February 23, 2006Posted in1970s, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: David Lynch, Disability, Drama, DVD, Mexico, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

RYAN’S DAUGHTER
***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard, Christopher Jones, Sarah Miles
screenplay by Robert Bolt
directed by David Lean

DUNE
***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Francesca Annis, Leonardo Cimino, Brad Dourif, José Ferrer
screenplay by David Lynch, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by David Lynch

DUNE (Extended Edition)
*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Francesca Annis, Leonardo Cimino, Brad Dourif, José Ferrer
screenplay by Judas Booth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Alan Smithee

by Bill Chambers The common charge levelled at Ryan’s Daughter when it was released in 1970 was that it seemed anachronistic within contemporary film culture. Indeed, what so infuriated the New York critics, in particular, was not just that Lean had strayed from his roots (thematically, Ryan’s Daughter in fact represents a throwback for the Brief Encounter director), but that he had lost all trace of humility in the bargain. One might say the English were finally getting a taste of their own medicine, as Lean had essentially become a Hollywood imperialist, intruding on cinema’s evolution towards minimalism by treating a rather insular love triangle–catnip to the infidelity-obsessed British realists–like a theme-park attraction, subjecting it to both hyperbole and an incongruous perfectionism.1 (“In general the only way for artists to work in the medium is frugality,” wrote Pauline Kael, thereby consigning Lean to the realm of not-artists.) This violation of an unspoken Prime Directive resonates in the current trend of giving A-list makeovers to grindhouse fare.

Making Love (1982) – DVD

February 22, 2006Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Michael Ontkean, Kate Jackson, Harry Hamlin, Wendy Hiller
screenplay by Barry Sandler
directed by Arthur Hiller

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's regrettably easy to mock Arthur Hiller's Making Love from a contemporary vantage point. Made long before the queer revolution of the early '90s (but not long after Cruising, its evil opposite number), the film is at once brave and cowardly, daring to utter the word "gay" while refusing to say it in a context where it might actually mean something. So much effort has been expended to be "tasteful," "mature," and "adult" that the filmmakers take out any real threat to the status quo–Making Love is contained to the kind of dull bourgeoisies as far removed from the front lines as possible. The comedy lies in watching these sitcom creations try to enunciate ideas that are entirely beyond their ken, speaking the name of the love but not the particulars that might quicken the blood.

Dark Victory (1939) – DVD

February 21, 2006Posted in1930s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Bette Davis, George Brent, Humphrey Bogart, Geraldine Fitzgerald
screenplay by Casey Robinson
directed by Edmund Goulding

by Walter Chaw There’s been almost as much written about the life of Bette Davis as there has about her work, and I must confess that, with few exceptions, I consider her life to be far more interesting than her films. The best Davis picture from start to finish is probably The Letter–and the most honoured of her superfluity of clunkers is Edmund Goulding’s really quite dreadful Dark Victory, released in the annus mirabilis of 1939. Fanatics point to La Davis’s performance in this one as her most stirring, but all I see is a terminal ham pretending to have a brain tumor and cinematic blindness. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, I suppose, but then there’s the vomitous condescension of the hero doctor, the woeful miscasting of Humphrey Bogart as an Irish stable hand, and the wish unfulfilled that the great Geraldine Fitzgerald, in her screen debut, would take centre stage. The picture is also horribly dated, playing today like some weird, contrived burlesque of common sense as a terminally ill patient isn’t told of her condition, has to ask someone what “negative” means, and doesn’t inform her husband that she has about three hours to live. It’s not to say that there isn’t material of interest here, just that the material of interest doesn’t live organically with the narrative. Thus there exists on the one hand the possibility of appreciating the picture in an aloof way, and, on the other, a situation where respect and conventional enjoyment veers into something as ugly as camp appreciation.

Bambi II (2006) – DVD

February 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Romance

Bambi 2: The Great Prince of the Forest
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Alicia Kirk
directed by Brian Pimental

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It would be faintly disingenuous to cry bloody murder over a straight-to-video Bambi sequel: given Uncle Walt's own propensity for denaturing children's classics (and milking the new "classics" for cash), it's only fitting that the cream of his own canon would be whored out for what the market will bear. Still, Bambi is no ordinary Disney movie, but one whose awesome craft is matched only by its singular horror of the adult world. It's ludicrous, then, to pick up the story after the deer-kid has learned to talk and show him that being a grown-up isn't so bad. Not only does it generally contradict the original, but it also blows off the primal fear and sadness that make Bambi as potent as it is.

Walk the Line (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Germany, Music, Romance

**½/**** Image B Sound A- (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick
screenplay by Gill Dennis & James Mangold
directed by James Mangold

Walkthelinecap

by Walter Chaw I'm no longer certain what kind of currency there is in producing a biography of an iconoclast whose life is an exact simulacrum of every other iconoclast's life. Here's an entirely respectable film about Johnny Cash that begins in his childhood, proceeds into the Big Break, then segues from there into the euphoria of fame; the drug abuse and the groupies; the "Come to Jesus"; the rehabilitation; and the closing obituary. (It's like Denis Leary said about Oliver Stone's The Doors: "I'm drunk. I'm nobody. I'm drunk. I'm famous. I'm drunk. I'm fucking dead.") Though it claims not to be a hagiography, Walk the Line (like last year's Ray) featured the freshly-dead legends as advisors up until their untimely demises, a kind of personal involvement (and Cash's son John Carter is one of Walk the Line's executive producers, just as Ray Robinson Charles Jr. was for Ray) that precludes, methinks, most controversy in the telling. That's fine, I guess, this new vogue for these modern Gene Krupa Storys and Eddy Duchin Storys and Glenn Miller Storys–I mean, really, who does it hurt? But after praising the almost supernatural channelling of very public figures by talented actors, the only thing left is the drive home, a hot bath, dreamless sleep, and maybe the impulse purchase of the soundtrack at Starbucks in a couple of weeks.

Freedomland (2006)

February 17, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore, Edie Falco, Ron Eldard
screenplay by Richard Price, based on his novel
directed by Joe Roth

Freedomlandby Walter Chaw Given that Joe Roth (America's Sweethearts, Christmas with the Kranks) directed it, Freedomland's first and biggest surprise is that it's not worse than it is. Maybe that has something to do with Samuel L. Jackson delivering his best performance since Changing Lanes, or a Richard Price screenplay (adapted from his own novel) that, while overwritten throughout and unforgivably histrionic by its end, manages to present its tensions with topicality and a passing familiarity, at least, with the complexities of race relations. It's deliberately set in 1999, just a few years after South Carolina mommy Susan Smith drowned her two children in a lake and blamed a non-descript "black man" in a knit cap for their carjacking/abduction, and the similarities to the Smith story continue through to incredulity in the black community and the involvement of activist parental groups. (Freedomland meanwhile takes place a decade after another case it seems to be based on: Bostonian Charles Stuart killing his pregnant wife and blaming a black guy, stirring nearby black suburb Roxbury to outrage.) Marc Klaas to the film's Susan Smith is child-safety advocate Karen Collucci (Edie Falco), while the New Jersey barrens–and, in its narrative fulcrum, a burned-out children's asylum called "Freedomland"–stand in for the wilds of the Deep South. The picture abounds with such similes and ironies, existing in a bizarre, terrifying version of the United States where iron-willed armies of the bereaved march through the blighted wastes of urban decay with sticks and resignation, looking for lost children they know, more likely than not, to be dead and, more, victims of their own parents.

Eight Below (2006)

February 17, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Antarctica, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, Family, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Paul Walker, Bruce Greenwood, Moon Bloodgood, Jason Biggs
screenplay by David DeGilio
directed by Frank Marshall

by Walter Chaw There are situations and statements, questions and propositions, that are so stupid by their nature that they actually approach Zen. And then there’s Frank Marshall’s arctic dogs-and-dude melodrama Eight Below, which plays for all the world like not only the world’s most unwelcome sequel (to Snow Dogs), but also a companion piece to March of the Penguins. It is, in simplest terms, a pandering blight–a straight line (nay, flatline) from unsurprising set-up to unsurprising resolution, every bit the equivalent of a line of footprints in the snow between two known points. Opening with one of film history’s most wooden leading men, Paul Walker, and “nice Jewish boy” comic relief Jason Biggs sitting in a hundred-degree steam room before running out into a 30-below autumn day in Antarctica, Eight Below immediately teaches us that human beings heated to a toasty 110 degrees do not steam when exposed to sub-zero temperatures and, more, that if you should ever visit the South Pole, your breath will never, ever show. It’s full of fun facts like that, but it saves its most fascinating revelations for the intricacies of canine interactions, including their complex gift-giving behaviours, advanced speech, abstract philosophical concepts, and eerie ability to go for at least fifteen days at a time without food or water. It even wrests an explanation from the universal loam as to what Walker was put on this earth for: to be upstaged by eight dogs, someone named Moon Bloodgood, Jason Biggs, and miles of white. It goes without saying that those scenes Walker plays against Bruce Greenwood have the queasy, guilty fascination of a baby seal getting mauled by a polar bear.

Red Eye (2005) [Widescreen] + Four Brothers (2005) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVDs

February 15, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Revenge, Thriller, Wes Craven

RED EYE
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox, Jack Scalia
screenplay by Carl Ellsworth
directed by Wes Craven

FOUR BROTHERS
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese, André 3000, Garrett Hedlund
screenplay by David Elliot & Paul Lovett
directed by John Singleton

by Walter Chaw If it barely registers at under ninety minutes, Wes Craven's high-concept thriller Red-Eye is carried along by a couple of excellent lead performances (from Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams) and a revenge subtext that lends surprising gravity to the lingering sensitivity of a sexual assault victim's scars. Red-Eye plays its 9/11 hand–and what else would you expect from a film about an assassination attempt on the Director of Homeland Security that takes place mostly on an airplane–as a metaphor for rape, because rape, after all, is as good a metaphor as any for a terrorist attack on native soil. Look to the glut of home invasion films (of which this is also one) in 2005 as further clarification of that connection–aliens of an inscrutable nature and purpose (and morality, it goes without saying) have come into the places we thought most sacred and taken what they wanted of our innocence: our once inviolate sense of security. Heady stuff for a film that is essentially Nick of Time on a plane, and indeed it may ultimately be too slight a framework to support the amount of topical sociology I'm tempted to ask it to bear, but there are moments now and again weighted with so much proverbial baggage that Red-Eye, with its melancholy regret, sucks the air right out of the theatre.

La scorta (1993) – DVD

February 14, 2006Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Italy, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Claudio Amendola, Enrico Lo Verso, Carlo Cecchi, Ricky Memphis
screenplay by Graziano Diana and Simona Izzo
directed by Ricky Tognazzi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's no way to put a fine point on this: La scorta is Backdraft with bodyguards. That is to say, it's one of those unsung-hero movies that: a) takes its subject very seriously; b) tries to give voice to a voiceless few; and c) fails to avoid every pitfall of the genre. The film is perhaps less heinous in its cinematic crimes than that Ron Howard schlockfest, but it's relentlessly mediocre, full of scenes that telegraph their significance and constantly reduce the characters to shorthand or macho clichés. Though La scorta does a good job of running down the outrageous risks faced by police bodyguards of judges, it doesn't bring their plight alive, choosing to make a gift of "white-knuckle tension" instead of dealing with the very real fear our heroes face. It's a smiley-faced version of pure, screaming terror–which, unfortunately, most people would probably prefer to something more free-form.

Separate Lies (2005) – DVD

February 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Emily Watson, Tom Wilkinson, Rupert Everett, John Neville
screenplay by Julian Fellowes, based on the novel A Way Through the Wood by Nigel Balchin
directed by Julian Fellowes

Separateliescap

by Walter Chaw You could call Separate Lies either a second pass at Asylum or just another drop in the English prestige bucket that finds the stuffy upper-crust married to silly women who bring down their country estates of cards. It hinges on performances when it can no longer surprise with its domestic meltdowns, and because its stable of English actors is stocked with more thoroughbreds than the Kentucky Derby, it gains a lot of currency in doing so. But Julian Fellowes's very British symphony of "sorry"s is extraordinarily familiar–an Adrian Lyne film without slickness or sex about what happens when a desperate housewife dabbles in the dangerous and the commensurate desperation with which her stiff-upper-lip husband scrambles to keep his dignity and status intact. It'd make a bigger impression if we learned more about the class struggle in Britain, I think, but without experience in the whys and wherefores of that caste system, what we're left with is a superbly-performed melodrama with a strained premise dissected in airless, suffocating situations.

The X Files: Black Oil; The X Files: Colonization; The X Files: Super Soldiers [Four-Disc Mythology Collection] – DVDs

February 13, 2006Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

THE X FILES: BLACK OIL – FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (1995-1997)
"Nisei," "731," "Piper Maru," "Apocrypha," "Talitha Cumi," "Herrenvolk," "Tunguska," "Terma," "Memento Mori," "Tempus Fugit," "Max," "Zero-Sum," "Gethsemane," "Redux," "Redux II"

THE X FILES: COLONIZATION – FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (1998-2000)
"Patient X," "The Red and the Black," "The End," "The Beginning," "S.R. 819," "Two Fathers, One Son," "Biogenesis," "The Sixth Extinction," "The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati," "Sein Und Zeit," "Closure," "En Ami," "Requiem," "Within," "Without"

THE X FILES: SUPER SOLDIERS – FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (2001-2002)
"Par Manum," "This is Not Happening," "Deadalive," "Three Words," "Vienen," "Essence," "Existence," "Nothing Important Happened Today," "Trust No 1," "Provenance," "Providence," "William," "The Truth"

Image A Sound A Extras B

by Walter Chaw Even if you're curious, you're probably not curious enough to wade through the sixteen DVDs that constitute "The X Files"' "mythology" (a.k.a. "Oh, no, not another one of these episodes"), compiled by creator Chris Carter in a quartet of four-disc collections that chronologically recap the ostensible "Truth" in the series' "The Truth is Out There" tagline. After the first set, "Abduction", comes "Black Oil", then "Colonization", then "Super Soldiers", the four of them parceling out the vital information that our government's struck a deal with aliens to turn us into human-alien hybrids; that most of the universe has been colonized by a virus that moves around in (or as) a black, oily substance; that some people are transformed by said alien entity into super-beings; and that there are other aliens out there hoping to prevent the spread of this contagion in the universe. That's it. Oh yeah, Scully and Mulder kiss–and it's dreamy. Happy?

Sundance ’06: Punching at the Sun

February 8, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
*½/****starring Misu Khan, Nina Edmonds, Hassan El-Gendi, Ferdusy Diawritten and directed by Tanuj Chopra by Alex Jackson Punching at the Sun follows the life of South Asian Queens teenager Mameet Nayak (Misu Khan). Mameet: (1) Lives in the shadow of his older brother, who was gunned down in his family's convenience store; (2) Falls in love with the neighbourhood sneaker salesgirl, Shawni (Nina Edmonds); (3) Identifies deeply with hip-hop culture; and (4) Feels that South Asians, due to their physical similarity to Arabs, are being unfairly mistreated in the aftermath of 9/11. The chief problem with Punching at the Sun…

In America (2003) + Big Fish (2003)|Big Fish [“Fairy Tale for a Grown-Up” Edition] – DVD

February 7, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Theatrical

IN AMERICA
***½/****
starring Paddy Considine, Samantha Morton, Sarah Bolger, Emma Bolger
screenplay by Jim Sheridan & Naomi Sheridan
directed by Jim Sheridan

BIG FISH
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange
screenplay by John August, based on the novel by Daniel Wallace
directed by Tim Burton

Bigfishcap

by Walter Chaw Jim Sheridan's In America sees the nation's shores as the limits of a grand, dilapidated moviehouse, introduced at the border with The Lovin' Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic?" and sustained by the ideas that all deaths are dimpled with nobility, and that all life is instilled with the fever dream of an insomniac's carnival. Sheridan's all-night ice cream parlors are, of course, Edward Hopper paintings populated by pink-clad waitresses, while screaming men haunt his rundown tenement brownstones ("This house isn't haunted, it's a magic house"–referring to the domicile, then America), artists and mystics marooned on emotional floes by some seismic existential divorce. And his heroes are a family, aliens in America illegally who discover that their only ward against life's necessary evils is a faith in imagination and a fingernail declaration of hope.

Sundance ’06: A Darkness Swallowed

February 3, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, Sundance
***/****directed by Betzy Bromberg by Alex Jackson A Darkness Swallowed is an experimental film consisting entirely of extreme close-ups of fossils, skins, rocks, and water droplets. There is a brief passage of voiceover in the beginning and a full-length soundtrack, but that's it as far as narrative cues are concerned. The film is supposed to be about the "nature of cellular memory" and "the physical traces that memories leave behind on and inside our bodies, and on and inside the earth." I had a considerably more banal philosophical question on my mind while watching it: I saw things in these…

Sundance ’06: Adam’s Apples

January 31, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Sundance
Adams æbler*/****starring Ulrich Thomsen, Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Nicolas Browritten and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen by Alex Jackson Adam's Apples begins with a Danish skinhead (Ulrich Thomsen) getting off a bus at a halfway house out in the country and keying the vehicle as it drives away, immediately telling us that this isn't going to be a movie that seriously considers the economic origins and social ramifications of the Danish white-supremacist movement. The skinhead, whose name is Adam, meets the other inhabitants of the halfway house, which include an Arabic stickup-man (who speaks in adorably broken Danish and…

In Her Shoes (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 30, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, Shirley MacLaine, Mark Feuerstein
screenplay by Susannah Grant, based on the novel by Jennifer Weiner
directed by Curtis Hanson

Inhershoescapby Walter Chaw It looks like exactly the kind of formula chick-lit/chick-flick I detest, and not just because, for the most part, when you call something a "chick-" anything, you're doing it at the expense of the "Sex and the City" bimbos you imagine flock to this garbage like a swarm of Jimmy Choo shoe-flies. But Curtis Hanson, with In Her Shoes, overcomes (for an hour or so) that pigeonholing the same way he survived working with Eminem and Brittany Murphy–the same way he brought an adaptation of James Ellroy's un-adaptable L.A. Confidential to the screen and managed to tremor the delicate, carefully-sheathed grace nerve of Michael Chabon in Wonder Boys. His protagonists are worried about their weight, their bank account, and their shoes, of course, but Hanson (whose biggest accomplishment may be in disguising screenwriter Susannah Grant's propensity to pander to her audience in nasty, hypocritical strokes) makes those worries seem important in dissecting the psychology and interpersonal dynamics of his feuding sisters and wizened grandmamma. He shoots Philadelphia as though it were a blight and Florida like a shimmering summer daydream (or a Coppertone commercial)–and I thought that the moment that I would lose respect for it would come around the corner of every single epiphany, but it didn't arrive until admirably late in the game. It's a chick-flick, no question, but it's one with half a brain. Not much, but half a brain is half more than expected.

Pickpocket (1959) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

January 30, 2006Posted in****/****, 1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Martin La Salle, Marika Green, Jean Pelegri, Dolly Scal
written and directed by Robert Bresson

Pickpocketcapby Walter Chaw Manny Farber described the films of Robert Bresson as “crystalline,” and it’s hard to argue with the singular idea of purity represented by that word: they’re all of gesture and implication, reduced down to the purest grist so that the powder of dramatic movements, rubbed together, might hum in miniature perfection. Diderot, Tolstoy, and especially Dostoevsky are sent to the kiln in Bresson, emerging at the end as a distillation thick with the observation that human behaviour, winnowed down, is only as mysterious as the mechanical motions of insects. When you use a term like “crystalline,” you evoke clockwork–the inner workings of music boxes, say. It’s wilfully, damnably, emotionally inscrutable, of course, and if it also calls to mind a watchmaker and his intricate art, then find another explanation for Bresson’s fascination with, and eroticizing of, the secret life of hands.

Sundance ’06: Cinnamon

January 29, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
*½/****starring John Bowles, Erin Stewart, Ashley Bowles, Larry Bowleswritten and directed by Kevin Jerome Everson by Alex Jackson Taking my cue from the official description in the Sundance Film Festival Film Guide, I've been referring to Cinnamon as "the black race-car driver movie." Depiction of race in the movies is a real dilemma: being black is either meaningful or meaningless. If it's meaningful, that means that the black identity is distinguished from non-blacks and is more or less alien and incomprehensible to non-blacks. If being black is meaningless, well, then why make a racing movie with an all-black cast? You…