Drama Archives - Page 75 of 123 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Big Bad Mama (1974) [Roger Corman: Early Films] – DVD

March 14, 20061970s, 2006, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B-
starring Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, Tom Skerritt, Susan Sennett
screenplay by William Norton and Frances Doel
directed by Steve Carver

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Has Molly Haskell written on Big Bad Mama? The title of her seminal feminist study on American film–From Reverence to Rape—fits the movie and its two-faced approach to women perfectly. Under any other circumstances, completely implacable mother Wilma McClatchie (Angie Dickinson) would be a feminist superhero for her ability to go on the lam and do what's best for her daughters, all while swindling the system. But Wilma's will-to-power is largely played for laughs: not only is she way in denial about her offspring's abilities (both of whom turn out to be brain-dead sex objects), but her whole mission is perceived as transgressive in the wrong ways, opening her up to ridicule and, in her nude scenes, degradation. One doesn't expect feminism from Roger Corman, but the handling of the women in Big Bad Mama is telling about a time and place far beyond its diegetic moment.

Pride & Prejudice (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

March 14, 20062000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Romance, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Brenda Blethyn, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Deborah Moggach
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw There’s fat to be trimmed from Joe Wright’s noble go at Jane Austen’s adapted-to-death Pride and Prejudice, which clocks in at a flabby 127 minutes (yet still seems somehow rushed at its conclusion), but when it works, it does for Austen what Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V and Hamlet did for Shakespeare: it makes the trials of these iconic literary figures feel immediate and sensible–and it does so with a screenplay (by Deborah Moggach) that understands what parts of the text are timeless and what parts are not. This isn’t to say that this Pride & Prejudice is more post-modern than the source, but that Wright understands where to prompt top-billed Keira Knightley to laugh sardonically and thus crafts an illusion of an interior life for her Elizabeth Bennet beyond the usual impression of adolescent cattiness. Knightley may very well be headed for an Oscar nomination for what has become the chick-Hamlet (Austen being the crucible through which young British actors put themselves in preparation for, I guess, Domino and sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean), but I’m thinking if she gets one, she owes at least half of it to Wright for the amount of time he put into highlighting her script.

Everything is Illuminated (2005) + A History of Violence (2005)|A History of Violence [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

March 13, 2006****/****, 2000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, DVD, Theatrical, Thriller

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
**/****
starring Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin, Laryssa Lauret
screenplay by Liev Schreiber, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
directed by Liev Schreiber

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt
screenplay by Josh Olson, based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw A year after a glut of films about the past being wilfully stifled by the present, find Liev Schreiber’s Everything is Illuminated and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, literal calls to awake following the nightmare of the night before–or, better, avenues through which we might recognize that suppressing a collective shadow mainly serves to nourish it until it explodes, monstrous, back into our consciousness. The one is based on an Anthony Burgess-like book of great linguistic imagination by Jonathan Safran Foer, the other a spare graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke–and just the obliqueness of the respective source materials speaks to the primacy of their message: “Everything is illuminated by the past.” The keystone line in Schreiber’s picture, this serves as a mission statement of sorts for both films, locating in the middle of this first decade of the new millennium something that feels like a weary acceptance that not only are we products of our trauma and misdeeds, but also that our trauma and misdeeds are beyond redress and completely inescapable. To parse the best line in Kenneth Branagh’s Dead Again, it’s the karmic payment plan: buy now, pay forever.

Junebug (2005) – DVD

March 10, 20062000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Amy Adams, Embeth Davidtz, Ben McKenzie, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Angus MacLachlan
directed by Phil Morrison

by Walter Chaw Charting the vicissitudes of regional attitudes and the mercurial family dynamic, Phil Morrison’s Junebug restores some of the lustre to the indie dysfunction genre (and to the Sundance imprint) with a beautifully performed drama about the cost of grace. If critics have a function anymore besides carving their own gravestones on the marble of modern cinema, it’s to point a finger at films like Junebug, which sounds like a thousand other pictures but is actually something all its own: a Southern Gothic in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor that treats its characters as more than plot-movers or cardboard caricatures. More, it tackles an issue as delicate as outsider art with a deceptively sharp satirist’s scalpel, understanding that the best weapon against paternalism is an affectionate portrayal of people just as mean, petty, and ruined by life as the rest of us. It can’t hurt that its cast is uniformly fantastic, that its script, by Angus MacLachlan, is intuitive and smart, and that Morrison understands devalued things like mise-en-scène and visual metaphors, presenting them with a quiet, unobtrusive confidence. Junebug is a character study in every way that “character study” used to be the gold standard instead of an overworked catchphrase used to describe boring, predictable low-budget movies set in the 1970s. It’s nasty and it’s lovely, it’s nuanced and complex.

Forbidden Games (1952) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

March 9, 20061950s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, War

Jeux interdits
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Brigitte Fossey, Georges Poujouly, Amédée, Laurence Badie
screenplay by Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, François Boyer, René Clément
directed by René Clément

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover René Clément’s Forbidden Games is perhaps the best place to begin when comparing the Nouvelle Vague to its nemesis, the Tradition of Quality. As the director (and co-scenarists Pierre Bost and Georges Aurenche, regular CAHIERS DU CINEMA whipping boys) came in for abuse under Truffaut, there’s no denying the film’s connection to the ToQ and how that tradition represses so much of its more disturbing content. Indeed, one wonders how a movie that revolves around a WWII orphan named Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) who nicks grave markers can be this matter-of-fact and cute. Despite the astonishing morbidity of the subject matter, the film goes about it like Wally and the Beav setting barrel hoops for Lumpy Rutherford. Still, its total lack of shame is something that would be lost in the ensuing New Wave revolution, and though big claims for it are hard to make, it’s remarkably fresh and open–if more than a little naïve.

Jarhead (2005) – DVD

March 6, 20062000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Germany, UK, War

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris Cooper, Jamie Foxx
screenplay by William Broyles, Jr., based on the novel by Anthony Swofford
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw I went to high school with a guy who fought in the first Gulf War. I remember him as a delicate, sensitive, beautiful boy who in retrospect looked a lot like Cillian Murphy. I directed him in a play–and though I haven’t spoken to him since, I heard that when he returned home, he was not quite the same. I remember chortling about the first Gulf War, too, thinking how funny it was that our military pounded fourth-generation Chinese armour with bombs left over from Vietnam in a withering blitz that left Saddam Hussein’s vaunted “million man army” of non-volunteer soldiers buried in their trenches and surrendering to the press. I’ve never been able to completely reconcile the two impressions of that war through the haze of my own youth–this introduction to modern warfare as complex and confusing to my adolescent mind as love and looming responsibility. War was either something frightening and mysterious that left you ineffably changed, or it was hilarious and chuff to a chest-pounding nationalistic ego. Whatever the case, you surmise that it involves the slaughter of hordes of faceless huns.

They Shoot Movies, Don’t They? …The Making of Mirage (2000) – DVD

March 6, 20062000s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Pseudo-Documentary

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C-
directed by Frank Gallagher

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover BIG-TIME SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There’s a deception driving They Shoot Movies, Don’t They? …The Making of Mirage that almost invalidates its considerable power. I can’t actually write an in-depth review without telling you that this doc-doppelgänger is, in fact, fiction–a detail conveniently omitted from the keepcase and promotional materials so as to drive home its point while you take it all at face value. I was furious once the commentary finally cemented that “subject” Tom Paulson wasn’t real and that his rise and fall never actually took place–but although I question the ethics of that sin of omission, there’s no denying that the film is totally convincing as the genuine article. Director Frank Gallagher and his collaborators have clearly lived at the foot of the Hollywood mountain long enough to note the kind of desperation that destroys perspective and inflates egos, and they’re painfully accurate in showing how an obsession with success can be a sure path to destruction.

Lord of War (2005) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

March 6, 20062000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Nicolas Cage, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto, Bridget Moynahan, Ethan Hawke
written and directed by Andrew Niccol

by Walter Chaw At times the film that Paul Brickman’s brilliant screenplay for Deal of the Century promised, Aussie futurist Andrew Niccol crafts with Lord of War a sometimes transcendent, sometimes finger-wagging fable about a ridiculously successful gunrunner, Yuri (Nicolas Cage), prowling the hot spots of the Third World like a vampire in trenchcoat and shades. (I’m not convinced it wasn’t the effect Niccol was going for, what with the obvious connection between spreading pestilence and feeding on death–and, of course, what with Cage’s best role arguably being the quasi-vampire in Vampire’s Kiss.) Without much of a narrative, even subplots concerning Yuri’s mad, druggie brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) and model wife Ava (Bridget Moynahan) seem like way-stations along a dotted line. Too often, the picture lives and dies on its ability to keep the pace fluid–but just that need for momentum suggests something amiss at the heart of the piece, a certain surface tension that would pop should the rock-star protagonist we envy ever collide against the satire of the kind of colossal moral vacuity required of his vocation. It’s the embedded problem of what Hitchcock observed as a character we like because he does his job well: what if that job is essentially reprehensible and, moreover, what if the ultimate desire of the film is that we experience righteous repugnance?

16 Blocks (2006)

March 3, 20062000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*½/****
starring Bruce Willis, Mos Def, David Morse, Cylk Cozart
screenplay by Richard Wenk
directed by Richard Donner

by Walter Chaw There’s a lot to like about Richard Donner’s ultimately simpering retread of the long-dormant corrupt-cop/asphalt-jungle genre 16 Blocks. Among the highlights is Bruce Willis’s drunken, crooked detective Jack, who–sporting a pot belly, a gimpy leg, bad facial hair, flop sweat, and breath you can practically smell through the screen–makes a decision early on to be the hero at odds with ex-partner Frank (David Morse) in transporting his charge Eddie (Mos Def) the titular sixteen city blocks so that Eddie can testify against New York’s finest. Standing in their way: an arbitrary time limit and a whole department of collectors for the widows and orphans club, looking to exact a little Giuliani on the suddenly-vigilante pair. Comparisons to Firewall, that other picture buried in the first quarter 2006 starring an over-the-hill tough guy, are inevitable–and revealing, too, in charting the extent to which ego allows Ford and Willis to age as action heroes (Ford: not at all; Willis: a good bit) and, consequently, how successful these films are in crafting their respective scenarios. The standard against which 16 Blocks will be held, however, is one established by the likes of Prince of the City and Serpico (or even a later Sidney Lumet like Q&A)–it’s they to which Donner clearly aspires, what with the picture’s setting, its admittedly spurious exposé of bad apples on the force, and at least the first hour of Willis’s performance, equal parts broken-down gunsel and brown-bagging wino.

Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005) + Domino (2005) [New Line Platinum Series|Widescreen] – DVD

March 2, 20062000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
**½/****
starring David Strathairn, Patricia Clarkson, George Clooney, Jeff Daniels
screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

DOMINO
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo
screenplay by Richard Kelly
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw Rigorous and principled, George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck. is a curiously slight film for more reasons than the fact that almost a third of it is comprised of archival footage integrated semi-successfully into the story. It’s a recreation of a very specific battle in a very specific war that resonates with our Patriot Act/Guantanamo Bay situation, and indeed, that’s the target Clooney seems most interested in striking. But without a larger context (the sort that would have weakened its allegorical usefulness), the picture sets itself up as something as obvious as it is minor and feather-light. It’s a professional, high-minded, and staid biopic is what I’m saying, a film that says what it says with the stark B&W cinematography of a Dr. Strangelove, but in its icy, humourless way, it’s the same stark B&W cinematography of a Fail-Safe, too. It’s close and under-populated–and even with so insular and finely-focused a spotlight, it contains at least two completely superfluous characters.

Cimarron (1931) [Special Edition] – DVD

February 28, 20061930s, 2006, 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, 20062000s, 2006, 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, 20061970s, 1980s, 2006, 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, 20061980s, 2006, 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, 20061930s, 2006, 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, 20062000s, 2006, 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, 20062000s, 2006, 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

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, 20062000s, 2006, 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

by 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, 20062000s, 2006, 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, 20062000s, 2006, 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.