Drama Archives - Page 77 of 119 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Million Dollar Baby (2004) [2-Disc Widescreen Edition] – DVD

July 28, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, Sports

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, Jay Baruchel
screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on stories from Rope Burns by F.X. Toole
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw As a fighter, Clint Eastwood's boxing flick Million Dollar Baby telegraphs its punches, demonstrates some muddy footwork, and, when all's said and done, doesn't pack much of a wallop no matter how many roundhouses it throws to the rafters. It stretches for timelessness, which Eastwood seems to equate with poor lighting and a lack of coverage, and it casts Morgan Freeman in another one of those Morgan Freeman roles where he contextualizes, in his homey, lightly-accented basso profundo warmth, the life and times of the white iconoclast for whom he is the catalyzing agent and confidante (The Shawshank Redemption, Driving Miss Daisy, Bruce Almighty, Clean and Sober). The picture has a framing story and a movie-long narration, two more ingredients in the neo-noir/American Gothic stew that Eastwood has continued to perpetuate long after his twin Americana triumphs A Perfect World and Unforgiven rendered the conversation–at least inasmuch as Eastwood is capable of carrying it–moot. Not to say that Million Dollar Baby is a total mutt, just that it's an obvious, self-important, overwritten thing designed to appeal to specific, stodgy, awards-season prestige audiences that love film so much, this will be the first movie they see this year.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005); Hustle & Flow (2005); Last Days (2005)

July 21, 2005****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, France, Music, Theatrical, Thriller

De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté
***/****
starring Romain Duris, Niels Arestrup, Jonathan Zaccaï, Gilles Cohen
screenplay by Jacques Audiard, Tonino Benacquista, based on the screenplay for Fingers by James Toback
directed by Jacques Audiard

HUSTLE & FLOW
*/****
starring Terrence Howard, Anthony Anderson, Taryn Manning, Taraji P. Henson
written and directed by Craig Brewer

LAST DAYS
****/****
starring Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Green
written and directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw On my better days, I still think of film as the quintessential artform of the last century–a medium for expression uniquely suited to our Modernist Yeatsian decomposition, what with its malleability beneath the knife, as it were, cut and spliced back together again as the un-spooling literalization of some patchwork Prometheus. Likewise, in its 24 flickers a second, it's an illusion of life, teased from the amber of still photography, drawing, painting; mixed with symphonies; blended with dance and movement; enslaved to the syncopation of words and imaginary drum beats. It's a miracle, a golem, capable of illuminating the rawest humanity in one stroke and of exhuming the most abject failure of human impulse in the very next. Its tractability is astonishing–protean, not too much to say magical; in describing his first film experience as a visit to "the kingdom of shadows," Maxim Gorky brushes up against the ineffable sublimity of a medium that mimics the eye, stimulates the ear, and has as one of the key elements of its academic study a concept that suggests the moment a viewer finds himself "sutured" into the text. Like all fine art, then, when it's right, its "rightness" is indescribable–Frank Zappa's "dancing about architecture." And like the stratification of art imposed by some in varying orders to describe the proximity of each to the inexpressibility of their souls (prose to dance to painting to poesy to music, for me), when film aspires to combine the more abstract elements of human expression in its mélange, the results, always mixed, at least have the potential to be grand.

Hustle (1975) – DVD

July 20, 20051970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Burt Reynolds, Catherine Deneuve, Ben Johnson, Paul Winfield
screenplay by Steve Shagan
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In 1955, Robert Aldrich directed Kiss Me Deadly. Ending in a fiery conflagration that suggested the end of civilization, its chief selling point was the chance to watch a bunch of degenerates lose their last shred of decency. And because it transgressed norms that would not be fully shattered until a decade-plus later, it had a nasty kick that was hard to shake. Flash forward twenty years to 1975, and the director is in a bit of a bind: with norms everywhere falling like a stripper's pasties, it's clear that civilization has, indeed, come to an end–not with the bang of Kiss Me Deadly, but with the whimper of Hustle, a film that flaunts its creep credentials with such pathetic stridency that you can't even raise the enthusiasm to take offense. You're merely bored with a director whose raison d'être had been rendered obsolete.

My Mother (2004) + Exiles (2004)

July 14, 20052000s, Adventure, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, France, Japan, Music, Portugal, Spain, Theatrical

Ma mère
*½/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Emma de Caunes, Joana Preis
screenplay by Christopher Honoré, based on the novel by Georges Bataille
directed by Christopher Honoré

Exils
***/****
starring Romain Duris, Lubna Azabal, Leila Makhlouf, Habib Cheik
written and directed by Tony Gatlif

by Bill Chambers Even after the Hays Office lost its stranglehold on the screen trade, mainstream American erotica remained a largely intellectual affair. Rather than try to get you off, films like Paul Mazursky’s Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge were interested in examining the fallout from sex. Meanwhile, France was cranking out Sylvia Kristel movies, and the raincoat crowd could enjoy even such highbrow fare as Last Tango in Paris for long stretches. If the legit French sex cinema ultimately bore a closer resemblance to red-blooded American filth in the ’70s (and not just ethically: the ‘X aesthetic’ was like dumbed-down nouvelle vague), it makes sense that it would chart a course parallel with stateside porno’s gradual descent into the penetration abyss. But while the (d)evolution itself is an organic one born of desensitization, things have progressed along a more self-conscious path in recent years, with the incendiary work of Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, and Michael Haneke helping to foster the impression of contemporary Gallic life as a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah.

Happy Endings (2005)

July 14, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Music, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Tom Arnold, Jesse Bradford, Bobby Cannavale, Steve Coogan
written and directed by Don Roos

by Walter Chaw As abortion dramedies go, this year's already seen Todd Solondz's far superior Palindromes and will soon see the abhorrent right-wing stem cell flick The Island, and for bellwethers of such things, there's still Hal Hartley's timeless Trust from fifteen years back. (Not incidentally, Don Roos's best and first film as a director, the teen-pregnancy drama The Opposite of Sex, features Trust's Martin Donovan.) So Roos's Happy Endings isn't just irritating, it's superfluous, too: a gimmicky way to tackle the tired romantic roundelay format that should be viewed in a double feature with Miranda July's almost-as-irritating Me and You and Everyone We Know just so you can say you've done your time this year in the indie coal mine. Truth is, if you can suffer through Roos's device of insouciant half-screen captions that periodically comment on the action, critique his characters, broadly clarify his themes, and make predictions about their futures (a lot like the video for Van Halen's "Right Now") without punching the person in front of you, you're made of sterner stuff than I. They've honestly handed out Purple Hearts for less.

Dad (1989) – DVD

July 12, 20051980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Spielberg

**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Jack Lemmon, Ted Danson, Olympia Dukakis, Ethan Hawke
screenplay by Gary David Goldberg, based on the novel by William Wharton
directed by Gary David Goldberg

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover When we talk about family dramas, we inevitably mean male-oriented family dramas. I can't remember the last time I saw a film in which three generations of women strengthened bonds and sought solace in each other, nor can I recall the last time a family of men and women interacted onscreen in a way that didn't toe the patriarchal line. In one sense, Dad is a reasonably decent member of the genus, relatively low-key and only marginally giving in to soap-opera fantasy. But its total erasure of anything that gets in the way of fathers relating to sons blows its credibility in a big way. It's as though half the human race either did not exist, or does so to bolster men–and God help you narratively if you dare to cross that divide.

House Calls (1978) – DVD

July 7, 20051970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Art Carney, Richard Benjamin
screenplay by Max Shulman & Julius J. Epstein and Alan Mandell & Charles Shyer
directed by Howard Zieff

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover House Calls is an unusually sharp entry in the normally anemic romantic comedy genre. Standard rom-com procedure is to be as inoffensive as possible, or at least sniggeringly condescending towards whatever is potentially offensive: that famous faux-orgasm in When Harry Met Sally… is a reminder to the audience that they're racy and adventurous, thus releasing them to be as uptight and cowardly as they really are. Not so House Calls, which possesses a surprising level of maturity while managing to take a few good shots at capitalist medicine. None of this is enough to help the film amount to more than a solid romantic comedy, but with such weak competition in the field, it can't help but look sparkling by comparison.

Invincible (2002) – DVD

July 6, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, DVD, Germany, Ireland, UK, War

***/**** Image A Sound A+
starring Tim Roth, Jouko Ahola, Anna Gourari, Jacob Wein
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw With casting, in true Herzog fashion, being the lion’s portion of performance, Finnish strongman Jouka Ahola starring as legendary Jewish strongman Zishe Breitbart in Herzog’s Invincible is a stroke of inspired madness. Herzog fashions Ahola’s total lack of experience and guile into something like an ecstatic holiness. He’s done this before, of course, with madmen Bruno S. in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek and the certifiable Klaus Kinski in some five astonishing pictures (astonishing not only for their quality, but also for the fact that there were five), so although extratextual complexity ever-threatens to become a distraction in Herzog’s films, it’s the sort of distraction that edifies Herzog’s preoccupation with blurring the distinction between performance and naturalism, fiction and documentary. No less so than in Invincible: The first time Herzog has returned to the pre-Bellum Nazi period in Germany since his directorial debut, Signs of Life, it pits one of Herzog’s classic social naïfs against a creature of pure manipulative malevolence, Hanussen (Tim Roth), who is, naturally, the kind of master showman/entertainer Herzog has always mistrusted.

The Machinist (2004) [Widescreen] + Enduring Love (2004) [Widescreen] – DVDs

July 4, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Romance, Spain, Thriller, UK

THE MACHINIST
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, Michael Ironside
screenplay by Scott Kosar
directed by Brad Anderson

ENDURING LOVE
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Daniel Craig, Rhys Ifans, Samantha Morton, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Ian McEwan
directed by Roger Michell

by Walter Chaw Sickness sweats out of every pore of Brad Anderson's The Machinist. It's leprous green, corpse flesh lit by sulphur light, marking the end of a progression that took Anderson from the sunny Happy Accidents to the sepia-inflected Session 9 to the bleak and subterranean–Plutonian, really–The Machinist. But like all of Anderson's work, the current film seems best described as coitus interruptus–congress interrupted at the moment of climax by the director's peculiar fixation on mendacity in favour of the supernatural. It's all about the tease for Anderson's genre explorations: time travel in Happy Accidents, haunted asylums in Session 9, and now–what, possession? Murderous blackouts? By plumbing the depths of human failings in a literal-minded fashion, one after the other (obsession, then greed, and finally guilt), Anderson ignores the possibility that genre is sharpest when wielded as metaphor for the same. Even the profession of machining speaks to the idea of precision and craftsmanship over flights of fancy or suspicions of otherness. It's a shame that The Machinist isn't ultimately more than an elaborate Rubik's Cube: not that hard to solve, not high on replay value.

The Pacifier (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

July 3, 20052000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Thriller

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Vin Diesel, Lauren Graham, Faith Ford, Brittany Snow
screenplay by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant
directed by Adam Shankman

by Bill Chambers Three months after failing to return kidnapped professor Howard Plummer (Tate Donovan) to safety, Special Ops lieutenant Shane Wolfe (Vin Diesel) is assigned to stay with the late scientist's family while their mother (Faith Ford) visits Switzerland with Shane's superior (Chris Potter) to claim the contents of Howard's safety deposit box. Professor Plummer was killed over a piece of software named G.H.O.S.T. (though not in the pantry with a candlestick) now believed to have been stashed somewhere in his home; when the snot-nosed kids–vain Zoe (Brittany Snow), surly Seth (Max Thieriot), precocious Lulu (Morgan York, also one of the Cheaper by the Dozen brats), and reaction-shot fodder Peter (Keegan & Logan Hoover) and Baby Tyler (Bo & Luke Vink (and with "The Dukes of Hazzard"'s impending renaissance, boy are those two in for a rude awakening at the start of school))–grease the stairwell to take out Shane, they end up driving away their German nanny (a typically misused Carol Kane) instead, forcing Shane into a more maternal role and leaving him little time to search for the computer program.

Clarifying the Image: FFC Interviews Sally Potter|Yes (2005)

July 2, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Interviews, Romance, Theatrical, UK

Spotterinterviewtitle Sally Potter reflects on her films

YES
*½/****

A loaded word, "pretentious," and one that I think is overused, but whatever its dictionary definition, to me the idea of "pretentious" has a lot to do with the ratio of intent to teach vs. what's actually taught. From The Tango Lesson to The Man Who Cried to Orlando, Sally Potter's films have generally been admirably high on ambition if lamentably low on insight: You can make a film about how cinema is protean and existentially thorny, but unless there's a greater purpose to that insight, it's just first-year film school mixed with a little first-year biology. Take Yes, a picture concerned with lenses and reflective surfaces–written in the high style, The Bard's own iambic, but not so much in play form as in couplets (call it "playful" playwriting)–featuring not only an agile (and game) cast, but also a boatload of pretensions that lead the viewer to the conclusion that what Potter believes is very interesting is only very interesting to her. Trapped in a loveless marriage with Anthony (Sam Neill), "She" (Joan Allen) is having a torrid affair with "He" (Simon Akbarian); she's people are from Belfast, He's are from Beirut, and throughout the tension of He/She is set against the three-R archetypes of polarity: race, religion, and region. Potter uses different film stocks to express disconnection, Antonioni's framing tactics to express the same, and a handful of soliloquies delivered on the so-called fourth-wall-breaking proscenium by a taciturn maid (Shirley Henderson) that explain the Brownian motion of the motes that open the piece, the microbes She examines in her day job, and the ultimate deconstructionalist rationalization that for all this talk of difference, it's just a matter of semantics. Yes is thus film about language and communication at mortal war with true emotion and protean thought, boasting a lot of arresting images and briefly interesting ideas that unfortunately deflate when it becomes clear that a pretty picture and a clever turn mask subterranean drafts of aimless, circular comings and goings and talk of Michelangelo.–WC

July 3, 2005|A chat in the basement of Denver's Hotel Monaco with the loquacious, eloquent Sally Potter wrapped three interviews in three days, not counting the one with Gregg Araki conducted via e-mail, which was apparently pre-screened by someone (a first in my experience, as I've never interviewed Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie) at tiny distributor Tartan and has not, since a minor blow-up on my end, been completed as promised by the "maverick" director. Whether he was offended, put-off, or frightened by the questions, if they even got to him, I'm not sure (maybe he's just too busy with his alien-abduction comedy to honour his commitment), but I'll be honest, I'm finding it hard to give a shit. Less to transcribe. I ask them all and filmmakers, to a one, complain about how far the art of film criticism has fallen in the United States, about how it's consumer reportage nowadays instead of an invitation to a conversation and those tentative early steps towards immortality. But a mouth has two corners, and you talk out of one in righteousness and the other in insecurity; although I provide an outlet for the outrage of the artist jilted at the hands of one too many clever wordsmiths, I also get the sense that most of these film professionals would prefer getting the junket line to any actual serious inquiry into their work.

Credit Sally Potter, then, for having the guts to discuss what her work is actually about. They're pretentious, her films, they're always meaningful and they always strike me as trying too hard to impress an imaginary demographic. Ironically, Potter's pictures underline the truism that artist intentionality is a decent place to start an autopsy but a horrible place to end one. In her case, without the auteur theory, there's nothing to say, and so it is with her latest film, Yes, another of Potter's examinations of the meta-quality of film-within-film and the cinema as a medium of projection and inversion. Written in couplets of proto-Shakespearean iambic pentameter (done with more liquid realism–and fewer rhymes–on HBO's "Deadwood"), it's an intriguing experiment for a good half-hour before its usefulness as a glass held to language diminishes, leaving a soggy, vaguely orientalist romance to hold as its symbolic centre. Give her due for being courageous enough to make a picture so unapologetically rigorous in its intellectualism, particularly in an age when "nuance" is effete and the most minor critical analysis is seen as an unforgivable offense to God and country. Potter is articulate and gracious in explaining what she's getting at in an environment grown too comfortable with not getting at anything at all.

Paparazzi (2004) – DVD

June 30, 20052000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Cole Hauser, Robin Tunney, Dennis Farina, Tom Sizemore
screenplay by Forrest Smith
directed by Paul Abascal

by Walter Chaw Loathsome doesn't begin to describe it. How about "toxic"? View Paparazzi and producer Mel Gibson's own The Passion of the Christ together for a better perspective on where Gibson's coming from these days. Better, view the two together for some insight into the way that martyr complexes sometimes metastasize into a belief that feelings of rage and vengeance are justifiable responses to the indignities of a world whose sole focus is to torture the privileged with wealth, adoration, and extraordinarily high levels of creature comfort. Paparazzi are no angels, what with the recent spate of highly-publicized incidents culminating in the accusation that one of the adorable little shutterbugs slammed his car into Lindsay Lohan's in order for his compatriots to snap a few shots of the starlet vehicle-free. But rather than deal in a serious fashion with the toll the paparazzi take on any individual's right to a certain measure of personal space and safety, Paparazzi chooses to offer an unironic manifesto that forgives the vigilante-style abuse of Gibson's very own personal Sanhedrin. The film is suspect from the trailers, and its horrific morality grows more noxious with prolonged exposure.

The Women (1939) – DVD

June 23, 20051930s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Mary Boland
screenplay by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, based on the play by Clare Boothe
directed by George Cukor

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Few films fall on their swords so cheerfully and brilliantly as The Women. It's a masterpiece of rationalization that details the injustices men inflict on women until it suddenly shifts gears to explain why it's a woman's fault for giving up–an astounding about-face considering that it was written by women (Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, from Clare Boothe's play) and aims to completely banish men from the frame. But what sounds like a chance for actresses to shine turns into a world-famous bitch-a-thon in which men are a menacing, structuring absence rather than a lion tamed and women can be trusted to tear each other apart before doing any real damage to their master-tormentors. The film is compulsively watchable even as it does terrible things and holds its head high whilst simultaneously cutting it off.

Heights (2005); Mysterious Skin (2005); It’s All Gone Pete Tong (2005)

June 22, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Music, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical, UK

HEIGHTS
**½/****
starring Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, Jesse Bradford, James Marsden
screenplay by Amy Fox, based on her play
directed by Chris Terrio

MYSTERIOUS SKIN
*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Elisabeth Shue, Michelle Trachtenberg
screenplay by Gregg Araki, based on the novel by Scott Heim
directed by Gregg Araki

IT’S ALL GONE, PETE TONG
**½/****
starring Paul Kaye, Beatriz Batarda, Kate Magowan, Mike Wilmot
written and directed by Michael Dowse

by Walter Chaw Obsessed with doors and passages, façades and captured images, Chris Terrio’s Heights takes on the dour, dark, and twisted interpersonal machinations of The Scottish Play its diva Diana (Glenn Close) rehearses for some of the 24-hour period covered therein. Heights is a sexual film steeped in betrayals and unmaskings at its root, clothed in symbols for discovery and disguise that are almost literary in their uniform complexity. It’s therefore through a cloud of signs that its insular roundelay emerges. Wedding photographer Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), daughter of Diana and fiancée of Jonathan (James Marsden), is fired from her job on the day–on the hour, almost–that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cover a foreign war is offered her by an ex-boyfriend. Jonathan, meanwhile, has an ex-boyfriend of his own to suppress as pretty young actor Alec (Jesse Bradford) catches Diana’s eye in the hours before she discovers her husband is honouring their open marriage with her understudy. Questions of female sexual jealousy abound, hand in hand with the ruthless barbs of ambition (the price of success weighed against the cost of failure), tied into a messy bow by big ugly truths and the inescapability of our pasts.

Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

June 15, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, Music

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Terrence Howard, Joy Bryant, Bill Duke
screenplay by Terence Winter
directed by Jim Sheridan

by Walter Chaw Another in the recent cycle of slick biopics overseen in whole or part by either the subjects themselves or relatives of the same, Jim Sheridan's Get Rich or Die Tryin', the peculiarly flaccid hagiography of two-bit rapper 50 Cent, is an overlong, overly-familiar, wholly sentimental look at a nobody who became a somebody primarily known for getting shot a few times. It's a companion piece of sorts to the also-white-guy-directed Hustle & Flow, a means through which the majority culture tries to reconfigure the minority culture into comfortable terms (minstrel/criminal) that are so entrenched they've been assimilated by the offended. Assimilated to the point, in fact, that it's hard to know if these images, words, and messages are even offensive anymore. Bill Cosby has taken a lot of heat over the past couple of years for his comments about African-American culture losing its mind, but, shocker, he's right. For that matter, arguably no one in popular culture has earned the right to speak out about blacks in the American mainstream more than Cosby.

Batman Begins (2005)

June 15, 2005****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes
screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw It's perhaps only right that in a year that has seen Robert Rodriguez present a scary-faithful adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City, Christopher Nolan should re-envision (and revitalize) the Batman film franchise with a picture, Batman Begins, that at last captures the pitch blackness of Miller's seminal graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns (itself a re-envisioning and revitalization of Batman for its time). Batman Begins is to Tim Burton's Batman films as Burton's films are to Adam West's camp-classic television series, so drastically have Nolan and co-scriptor David S. Goyer de-fabulized the mythology. Compare, for starters, a sequence in the 1989 film where Batman shines a little penlight in the eyes of an over-curious lady-fair while chauffeuring her in the Batmobile to the modern iteration in which Batman trashes the Gotham police force en route to getting a young lady an antidote to a concentrated militarized hallucinogen that, unchecked, could inspire her to rip her own face off.

The Reivers (1969) + Tom Horn (1980) – DVDs

June 14, 20051960s, 1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Western

THE REIVERS
*½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Steve McQueen, Sharon Farrell, Will Geer, Michael Constantine
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the novel by William Faulkner
directed by Mark Rydell

TOM HORN
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steve McQueen, Linda Evans, Richard Farnsworth, Billy Green Bush
screenplay by Thomas McGuane and Bud Shrake
directed by William Wiard

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The oldest, most tired story to beguile the male artist is the Moment at Which Innocence is Irretrievably Lost. Most writers try their hand at it at some point, and I really wish they wouldn't: it suggests they'd rather be stupidly oblivious to not just the pains but also the rewards of adulthood. It's a boring default trauma, but at least when William Faulkner did it (in The Reivers), it was a boring default trauma with genius digressions that occasionally distracted from the emptiness of the narrative line. Not so Mark Rydell's big-screen adaptation of The Reivers, from which all of Faulkner's background about the landscape and the history and his characters' desperate lives has been excised, leaving the innocence-losing adventures to hog the spotlight and make you wish you were watching something that aspired to dissipation for a change.

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) – DVD

June 13, 20051970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Robert Blake, Billy "Green" Bush, Jeannine Riley, Elisha Cook
screenplay by Robert Boris
directed by James William Guercio

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a priceless scene in Albert Brooks's Lost in America where our white-collar hero David Howard (played by Brooks himself) has to deal with a motorcycle cop. About to be ticketed for a minor infraction, David informs his tormentor that he's living out the dream of Easy Rider in his Winnebago–whereupon the cop, incredibly, professes the same with regards to being a bike cop, and tears up the ticket. The joke is that a lumpy bourgeois in a camper and a policeman in anything can bend the rebellious ways of that film to their own establishment end, cancelling out both sides in a puff of semiotics. But what was a throwaway in Lost in America is the whole movie in Electra Glide in Blue, a film centred around motorcycle cops that owes a serious debt to Easy Rider while blowing its us-vs.-them dichotomy out of the water from the other side of the line.

November (2005); Brothers (2004); Ladies in Lavender (2005)

June 9, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Drama, Music, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

NOVEMBER
*/****
starring Courteney Cox, James LeGros, Michael Ealy, Nora Dunn
screenplay by Benjamin Brand
directed by Greg Harrison

Brødre
**½/****
starring Connie Nielsen, Ulrich Thomsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Bent Mejding
screenplay by Anders Thomas Jensen
directed by Susanne Bier

LADIES IN LAVENDER
*½/****
starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Natascha McElhone, Daniel Brühl
screenplay by Charles Dance, based on the short story by William J. Locke
directed by Charles Dance

by Walter Chaw There are as many middling to miserable movies in the foreign and domestic independent market as in the oft-maligned mainstream. If there are around five hundred films released in a twelve-month period, after all, only thirty or so are ever in contention for the best of the year–and of those, maybe three will be remembered once the hosannas have died down. The vast majority of pictures are just rest areas between elation and outrage; capturing lightning in a bottle is as unlikely for movies as for any product of any other branch of the arts. Here, then, are three smaller films in fast succession caught in the twilight zone of instant forgetfulness and doomed to spend eternity as either the film that was the long lonesome whistle stop for someone's career, or the promising picture that pointed the way to bigger and brighter things.

The Cincinnati Kid (1965); The Thomas Crown Affair (1968); Junior Bonner (1972) [Western Legends] – DVDs

June 7, 20051960s, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller, Western

THE CINCINNATI KID
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Karl Malden
screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr. and Terry Southern
directed by Norman Jewison

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston
written by Alan R. Trustman
directed by Norman Jewison

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I imagine our American readers are astonished to learn that Norman Jewison is lionized in English Canada. Rest assured, it's not because we think his films are better than flimsy liberal mush (even if we pretend otherwise)–it's because for the longest time, he was the biggest fish in our cinematic pond. Until the rise of Cronenberg and his many disciples, Jewison was, expat or not, the highest-profile Canuck director in the game, and our nation's disbelief at his success has allowed him to seem more important than he actually is. Though he's good at nice-guy friendliness rendered with a modicum of craft, anything more ambitious comes off a little strained. Thus, his downplaying of the grim parts of The Cincinnati Kid makes the film a tolerable entertainment, while his self-consciously "creative" The Thomas Crown Affair wears out its welcome pretty fast.