Wicker Park (2004) – DVD

February 16, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Josh Hartnett, Rose Byrne, Matthew Lillard, Diane Kruger
screenplay by Brandon Boyce
directed by Paul McGuigan

by Walter Chaw Paul McGuigan's Wicker Park is all about reflective surfaces. The whole thing casts Chicago (or Montreal, subbing for Chicago in just another slippery deception) as the house of mirrors sequence in The Lady from Shanghai, tempting us to dismiss it as stale noir sauced-up with a fresh spackle of postmodern, commercial/music video glamour. But Wicker Park, based on Gilles Mimouni's L'Appartement, is almost an act of pop art, opening with hunky Josh Hartnett walking the mean streets of the Windy City and shopping for a diamond engagement ring that becomes the prism through which the rest of the film, especially in its more pregnant moments, is seen.

Friday Night Lights (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Sports

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Derek Luke, Jay Hernandez, Lucas Black
screenplay by David Aaron Cohen and Peter Berg, based on the book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H.G. Bissinger
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw Turning the microscope on the reptile hearts and minds of small-town sports culture, Peter Berg's Friday Night Lights is so alive with seething energy and meanness that it emerges as one of the better sports films on the short list of good sports films. It's what the Omaha Beach sequence in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is to Oliver Stone's Platoon: an evolution by way of devolution that erases the veneer, such as there is, prettifying violent confrontation, becoming in the process the unadorned engine to which Stone's ultimately featherweight Any Given Sunday aspired. It finds Lucas Black (as star quarterback Mike Winchell) reunited with Sling Blade co-star Billy Bob Thornton (playing his coach, Gary Gaines), with the mental disability roles reversed ("There's something wrong with my head," Winchell complains) but the peek under the Rockwell covers at insular, provincial psychosis transplanted intact. Friday Night Lights is a work of sociology, a film that not only understands the all-American obsession with packaged violence and the cult of machismo, but is also a clearer barometer of the kind of sublimation of fear and loathing in these United States than any gross of pre-election political documentaries. Our country's in trouble because these brutal idiots can vote–and there are more of them than there are the rest of us.

The Notebook (2004) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

February 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, James Garner, Gena Rowlands
screenplay by Jeremy Leven, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks
directed by Nick Cassavetes

by Walter Chaw Ah, Nicholas Sparks. I once saw an interview with Nicholas Sparks in which he accused literary critics of envying his success, thus shedding light on the consistently bad reviews he's gotten throughout his career while failing to explain why he got terrible reviews for his debut novel as well. Nor does this explain how it is that someone who's barely literate himself could have understood his critics enough to feel offended–after all, Sparks's admirers certainly aren't reading the reviews. In fact, that movie executives appear to be among Sparks's biggest fans (The Notebook is the third faithfully awful adaptation of a Sparks opus–two more to go) says a lot about both movie executives and Sparks's books.

Mean Creek (2004) – DVD

February 9, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Teen

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Rory Culkin, Ryan Kelley, Scott Mechlowicz, Trevor Morgan
written and directed by Jacob Aaron Estes

Mustownby Walter Chaw Mean Creek is poised at the magic hour of the death of innocence. It deals in corruption like a maggot will, burrowing and gnawing its way through true fauna to take its sustenance in its blithe, indifferent way from the dying of the light. The film represents in its existence and function a transitional vehicle between the end of life and rebirth. In Mean Creek, a slug crawls across cold flesh in a quiet, crepuscular moment; a snail (similar/different) is punished an instant later by a clear-eyed little girl, completing her exile from Paradise in a stroke remarkably brutal not necessarily for the act, but for the freshness of the stain on the perpetrator. The picture's title refers not to malevolence, but to a nature metaphor that works as the centre-point–the protean "mean"–between two extremes. It is that ever-tilting line that marks childhood's end: mercurial, sure, yet as substantial and rude as a brick wall.

Rory O’Shea Was Here (2004)

February 4, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disability, Drama, France, Ireland, Theatrical, UK

Inside I’m Dancing
*/****
starring James McAvoy, Steven Robertson, Romola Garai, Brenda Fricker
screenplay by Jeffrey Caine
directed by Damien O’Donnell

Roryosheawashereby Walter Chaw Looking for shock value, the more unkind would call Rory O’Shea Was Here “One Rolled Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”: the film is a straight-up rip-off that substitutes Randle McMurphy and Chief Bromden for plucky punk afflicted with Muscular Dystrophy Rory (James McAvoy) and his cerebral palsy-afflicted chum Michael (not Donnie Wahlberg). Because neither actor is actually afflicted, it can be said that their performances are at best affected; at their worst, and at the service of a condescending screenplay, the two come off as patronizing caricatures engaged in an insipid waltz around the real issues that arise when you’re thrust by disability into the full-time care of strangers. It’s a great idea to cast the disabled in lead roles, even romantic (gasp!) roles, in motion pictures, but it’s a terrible idea to do so for the express purpose of making them into noble savages from which we can suckle our portion of moral outrage and smug, shit-eating superiority. Best, the rebel that brings a sparkle into the lives of everyone he touches has the decency to croak as his last act of charity, allowing the much-maligned social order to go on ticking with one fewer annoying gadfly.

The Chorus (2004)

February 4, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, Music, Switzerland, Theatrical

Les choristes
½*/****
starring Gérard Jugnot, François Berléand, Kad Merad, Jean-Paul Bonnaire
screenplay by Philippe Lopes-Curval, Christophe Barratier
directed by Christophe Barratier

Chorusby Walter Chaw The one good thing about Christophe Barratier's unbelievably inane, saccharine, and derivative The Chorus (Les Choristes) is that it offers the much put-upon American public a little comfort in the knowledge that the French mainstream (which made this film its top-grossing title of last year) has just as unquenchable a sweet tooth for pap. Useless to discuss at length, The Chorus is essentially another in a line of literally dozens of films in which an inspirational teacher changes the lives of a group of troubled/lower-class/underestimated children through will, kindness, and a rogue spark of crinkly-eyed genius that irks to no end the evil dean/headmaster/school board/community. It's not as bad as Filipino contribution Little Voices, nor is it as good as, say, Goodbye Mr. Chips–locating it somewhere in the neighbourhood of a disaster like Mr. Holland's Opus or the endlessly weird Wes Craven (!) picture Music of the Heart. Taken on its own merits, pretending that you've never seen Dead Poets Society, Stand and Deliver, The Blackboard Jungle, Conrack, Mona Lisa Smile, Dangerous Minds, Renaissance Man, Coach Carter, and so on and so on, The Chorus is still unspeakably maudlin and presented in so straightforward a fashion that if you did the right thing and asked for your money back after five minutes, you could reasonably fake having seen it to a circle of friends, who will admire your stamina in having sat through the whole benighted thing.

Kingdom Hospital: The Entire Series (2004) – DVD

February 2, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Stephen King, Television

Image A Sound A Extras B
"Thy Kingdom Come," "Death's Kingdom," "Goodbye Kiss," "The West Side Of Midnight," "Hook's Kingdom," "The Young And The Headless," "Black Noise," "Heartless," "Butterfingers," "The Passion Of Reverend Jimmy," "Seizure Day," "Shoulda Stood In Bed," "Finale"

by Walter Chaw The sort of program you want other people to see in the same way you want someone else to smell how spoiled the milk is, the 13-part, 10-hour, Stephen King-scripted adaptation of Lars Von Trier's brilliant Danish miniseries "Riget" (a.k.a. "The Kingdom") is only as bloated, ridiculous, and incompetent as the rest of the master of terror's last decade of work. Auto-cannibalistic like his protagonist in "Survivor Type" and pitched as a cross between "E.R." and, one presumes, the TV version of King's "The Shining" (while playing like a community theatre rendition of "The Singing Detective"), "Kingdom Hospital" is awkward at best and eye-clawing hokum at its worst. There's no other way to describe a talking CGI anteater called "Antubis" (after the Egyptian god of death Annubis, I'm thinking) that fights a Depression-era vampire in the bowels of the titular place of healing. A spooky little girl à la The Shining (played by a terrible kid actor à la Danny from Kubrick's The Shining) describes him this way: "He eats disease, he likes to be scratched behind the ears. He's horrible. Beautiful." Yep.

No Vacancy (1999) – DVD

January 26, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Lolita Davidovich, Timothy Olyphant, Christina Ricci, Tom Todoroff
written and directed by Marius Balchunas

by Walter Chaw You watch No Vacancy the same way you watch a triathlon, in that it's not an enjoyable viewing experience by any conventional standards, but you find the participants' dedication in completing what experiential evidence suggests is an odious, exceedingly unpleasant task stimulating just the same. As a normal person would quit five minutes in, it's the pluck that fascinates, that willingness to say and do fabulously stupid things during the audition process or the production itself to honour the craft of acting, even if the project that houses it dishonours the craft of filmmaking.

Random Harvest (1942) – DVD

January 25, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Ronald Colman, Greer Garson, Philip Dorn, Susan Peters
screenplay by Claudine West, George Froeschell and Arthur Wimperis
directed by Mervyn LeRoy

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Random Harvest isn't really a good movie, but it's strangely satisfying. Though its double-amnesia contrivance would perhaps embarrass an episode of "Diff'rent Strokes", it's impossible not to be a little touched–if not by a literal interpretation of the plot, then by the yearning for the titanic reconciliation facilitated by its crisis. As it takes away, gives back, and takes away again in its narrative rush to final release, the film's grasp of the Freudian fort/da dynamic becomes prime fodder for a Psych-101 term paper. You're never sure which part of the equation is more important, but its primitive game of deprivation and wish fulfilment is too powerful to dismiss. And while Random Harvest borders on camp, it's sincere (or oblivious) enough not to cross the line.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004); Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004); Time of the Wolf (2003)|Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

January 24, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

イノセンス
Innocence
Inosensu: Innocence
****/****
written and directed by Mamoru Oshii

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi
written and directed by Kerry Conran

Le Temps du loup
****/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Béatrice Dalle, Patrice Chéreau, Rona Hartner
written and directed by Michael Haneke

Skyghostwolfby Walter Chaw For me, the most intoxicating visions of the future are those in which we’re drowning in an ocean of our past–garbage, wreckage, Romes burned to a cinder and heaped against the new Meccas of our collective tomorrows. Star Wars proffered a kind of aesthetic of dirt that appealed: a wonderland where the spaceships looked like they’d been flown and there were places like Mos Eisley that reeked of stale liquor, sawdust, and cigarettes. (The distance that George Lucas has gone to disinfect his grubby vision of the future is the same distance that esteem for the franchise has fallen amongst all but the most die-hard chattel.) Among the spearhead of a group of artists who redefined the science-fiction genre in film the same way that Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah scuffed-up the western in the Sixties, Ridley Scott evolved the idea of a functional future, with his Alien and Blade Runner serving as visual echoes of T.S. Eliot’s broken stones and fragments shored against our ruins. Terry Gilliam defined the aesthetic when describing his rationale for the look of Brazil (1985): he wanted it to seem as though the whole century had been compacted into a single moment. The timeless “someday soon” that is always just around a corner that never comes.

Are We There Yet? (2005)

January 21, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Family, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ice Cube, Nia Long, Aleisha Allen, Philip Bolden
screenplay by Steven Gary Banks & Claudia Grazioso and J. David Stem & David N. Weiss
directed by Brian Levant

Arewethereyetby Walter Chaw Hot on the heels of the abominable Racing Stripes comes Are We There Yet?, an Ice Cube vehicle the rapper-turned-actor also produced that teaches in broad terms that black people like rims on their cars and bling around their necks, that Asians are just irritating and venal under/oversexed white people, and that actual white people are either hillbilly truckers or dancing, rapping grandmothers. Projectile vomit, scary slapstick, and pissing on women share equal time with forced sentiment and actions so inexplicable as to exist only in the infernal nether-verses reserved for this kind of jerk-finds-a-heart flick. Piling on the pleasure, a pair of demonic children carry on director Brian Levant's (Problem Child, Beethoven, Jingle All the Way) proud tradition of featuring insufferable kids in unwatchable movies that will be popular enough to ensure that this grade-A assclown gets to continue to making them. Levant's a racist and a card-carrying Neanderthal–and if he's not, he's actually something worse. If he's not the retarded ogre that his films suggest he is, then he's exuding this gruel with a calculated purpose instead of just a moronic fecklessness. That the little boy in this film has a doll that resembles the MegaMan toy at the centre of Jingle All the Way tells me that Levant is harking back on that debacle with fondness, which is a little like the Catholic Church harking back fondly on indulgences, child molestation, and the Crusades.

Deep Impact (1998) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

January 20, 2005Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spielberg

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin
directed by Mimi Leder

by Walter Chaw Filthy as it is with TV stars past and present, it comes as no surprise that Deep Impact plays almost exactly like a movie-of-the-week grafted onto one of those stars-gone-to-seed-studded Seventies disaster flicks. Helmed by veteran TV director Mimi Leder in somehow small-screen-friendly Panavision (that she manages to make her panoramic establishing shots look like the stock transitions in any episode of "Hart to Hart" should be included in a textbook somewhere), the picture goes through the motions–from discovery of the peril by naïfs to the involvement of the Internet to the slow-in-coming participation of the powers that be–of a genre most recently (and faithfully) resurrected by The Day After Tomorrow. Both movies finding their way to DVD within a couple weeks of each other (Deep Impact in a freshly-minted "Special Collector's Edition") isn't, I'd wager, serendipity so much as an opportunity on the one side to capitalize on a semi-blockbuster.

Nobody’s Fool (1986) – DVD

January 19, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Rosanna Arquette, Eric Roberts, Mare Winningham, Jim Youngs
screenplay by Beth Henley
directed by Evelyn Purcell

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I haven't very much to say about 1986's Nobody's Fool (no relation to the 1936 or 1994 films of the same name), a Southern-set romantic saga in which a young woman named Jessie (Rosanna Arquette) must either reconcile with lost ex-boyfriend Billy (Jim Youngs) and the dead-end small town he represents, or blow away into the frightening unknown with travelling stagehand Riley (Eric Roberts). No guessing how it ends up: as one suitor is played by Eric Roberts and the other is not, it's pretty obvious what's going to go down long before it actually does. Also in Riley's/Roberts's corner is that everyone in the town of Buckeye–a cultural backwater that's destructive to free souls like Jessie's–is either completely loathsome (such as Billy, who deserted poor Jessie when she got pregnant) or dismissive (such as Jessie's mother, played by Louise Fletcher with superb restraint). In a narrative sense, it's all as surprising as snow in January.

Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) + Elektra (2005)

January 14, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, France, Superhero, Switzerland, Theatrical, Thriller

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
***/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, John Leguizamo, Maria Bello
screenplay by James DeMonaco, based on the screenplay by John Carpenter
directed by Jean-François Richet

ELEKTRA
½*/****
starring Jennifer Garner, Goran Visnjic, Will Yun Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
screenplay by Zak Penn and Stuart Zicherman & Raven Metzner
directed by Rob Bowman

by Walter Chaw Being under siege and obsessive-compulsive disorder have together wrought a weird parallel generation in the remake Assault on Precinct 13 and sequel/comic book adaptation Elektra. In each is not only a woman who uses numbers obsessively in stressful situations, but also some sort of predicament where a gang of bad guys traps a band of good guys only to be given the business end of heroic pluck. Both are unusually ugly films with a higher-than-expected body count, and, to various degrees of success, both traffic in a paranoid marshalling of forces that comes with a fear of invasion from without. When you’re panicked, drawing those you trust closer to the vest since the rest of the universe has murder in mind is the sanest recourse–even when you’re aware that you’re addicted, mad, or otherwise in desperate need of therapy. Early in 2005, trends are pointing to a year in which we champion isolationism, fear the marauding Hun, and start wondering if there’s a blue-stater playing sheep in the quilting cotillion. Unless, that is, the blue-stater is you, and the constant threat of lynching or crucifixion has caused you to lose your mind.

Racing Stripes (2005)

January 14, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Sports, Theatrical

ZERO STARS/****
starring Bruce Greenwood, Hayden Panettiere, Gary Bullock, Wendie Malick
screenplay by David Schmidt
directed by Frederik Du Chau

Racingstripesby Walter Chaw It's some sort of tradition now, some kind of sick trick: a collaboration of nitwits releases a "family" film as counter-programming against the glut of morose, adult-oriented awards-season drivel that seeps into middle America in the first few months of the New Year. Kangaroo Jack, Home on the Range, Chasing Liberty, Snow Dogs, A Walk to Remember…each so misguided that to watch them in tandem is to see a pack of dogs outsmart a black man (and comment that he tastes like chicken), a trio of women (cows) receive threats of gang rape, and a wildlife conservationist have her breasts groped. (Then, of course, there's the metaphysical dead end of casting Mandy Moore in anything.) If parents don't pre-screen what their children watch, then care of the child's tender sensibilities is forked over to the chowderheads trafficking in shit, fart, boob, and pratfall jokes, which are only a quarter as damaging as the angry misogyny and casual racism binding them together. Add to the shaggy parade of diseased entertainments the 2005 edition, Frederik Du Chau's flat unwatchable Racing Stripes.

Coach Carter (2005)

January 14, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Sports, Theatrical

**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Ryan B. Adams, Ashanti, Adrienne Bailon
screenplay by Mark Schwahn and John Gatins
directed by Thomas Carter

Coachcarterby Walter Chaw Coach Carter is Dangerous Minds giving the gas good to Hoosiers. It's Stand and Deliver and Bad News Bears in flagrante delecto. The offspring of these dread unions is a trundling spawn so familiar, so much like its collection of moronically agreeable parents, that it's impossible not to sort of like it even as you're definitely sick of it. As is usually the case for movies like this, Coach Carter was inspired by a true story, which generally means that the events that instigated this project are not consequently saccharine and predictable enough to satisfy the imaginary demands of its imaginary audience. So there will be the athlete/students broken down into types to save time and energy on fleshing out the extended supporting cast, and there will be the valiant Dead Poets Society teacher who so rouses his/her hangdog students that they will eventually mass in a public show of support (standing on desks, running after ambulances, biking after cabs) when The Man (the school administration, the angry backwoods community) inevitably cracks down. What's not to like?

The Forgotten (2004) – DVD

January 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Julianne Moore, Dominic West, Gary Sinise, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Gerald DiPego
directed by Joseph Ruben

Forgottendvdcapby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I couldn't really understand at the time why Dark City didn't arouse imaginations. I resented the following year's The Matrix for stealing some of Dark City's thunder; I blamed a lack of vision and a general disdain for genre. Now I wonder if it wasn't a matter of the film coming out a few years ahead of its time. Maybe it was just too light for the Age of Irony. Maybe it was too apocalyptic a vision for a people who had yet to experience an apocalypse in their own backyard. But there are certain prescient pictures that point north, films like The Truman Show that I underestimated like I thought everyone else underestimated Dark City, or films that remain underestimated, such as Strange Days and Twelve Monkeys, Terry Gilliam's most uncompromising film since Brazil. It's the duty of some movies to draw the outlines in chalk, set the groundwork, dig the foundation for the way that speculative fiction will seek to define this culture in the aftermath of an inflamed fault line even before the dime drops. Just before Y2K, we dug ourselves into cinematic bunkers in preparation for some kind of technological apocalypse. Who would have suspected that the shape of our crucible would be not faulty microchips and mainframes, but assault rifles, airplanes, leadership without vision, and children without protection from leadership without vision?

The Village (2004) [VISTA Series – Widescreen] – DVD

January 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw M. Night Shyamalan’s films have become life support systems for his twists–empty, ponderous, self-righteous shells of ideas carried by cadaverous actors speaking in contraction-less sentences and spectral tones. He seems with Signs and now The Village to be espousing some kind of insane puritanical religion–call it the Church of Shyamalan, where the real world is too loutish a place for his gallery of close-mouthed martyrs, who exist in specially-created Hitchcockian microverses as airless as they are unlikely. It’s not too much of a stretch to begin to view his mission as one where he challenges his East Indian self to make his increasingly self-aggrandizing cameos as difficult as possible. Philadelphia? No problem. Hooterville, PA–a little tougher. Turn of the century Amish-town? Byzantine, to say the least.

Party of Five: The Complete First Season (1994-1995) – DVD

January 7, 2005Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Family, Television

Image B- Sound B+ Extras C+
"Pilot," "Homework," "Good Sports," "Worth Waiting For," "All's Fair," "Fathers and Sons," "Much Ado," "Kiss Me Kate," "Something Out of Nothing," "Thanksgiving," "Private Lives," "Grownups," "Not Fade Away," "It's Not Easy Being Green," "Aftershocks," "In Loco Parentis," "Who Cares?," "Brother's Keeper," "The Trouble with Charlie," "All-Nighters," "The Ides of March"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's strange that the term "afterschool special" has hung on as a pejorative long after the death of the form it officially describes. But in a sense, it never really did leave us: hanging over much dramatic television is the spectre of issues raised but never dealt with, pain stated but never felt, emotions described without being expressed. There's a little Afterschool spirit in most hour-longs, hovering as they do over the abyss of controversy into which artistic personnel love to gaze and which the front office lives to deny. Still, the mid-'90s drama "Party of Five" is an especially bizarre example of this sort of bet-hedging and trading off, taking as it does hugely traumatic events and making them seem as threatening and life-changing as a trip to Disneyland. It's a spectacular display of cake-having and cake-eating-too that defines the Afterschool mentality, ensuring that it will raise issues without dealing with them honestly.

A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

January 7, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller

Janghwa, Hongryeon
****/****
starring Kim Kap-su, Jum Jung-ah, Lim Su-jeong, Mun Geun-yeong
written and directed by Kim Ji-woon

Taleoftwosistersby Walter Chaw Every frame of Kim Ji-Woon's A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, Hongryeon) is like taking a dip in the violet pools of A Place in the Sun-era Elizabeth Taylor's eyes. It's sensuous–and the characters that inhabit the velvet, silk, and wood environments put out their hands to touch, dangle their feet off the end of a wharf in the soft green water below, lay their faces against cool blue sheets touched by crepuscular shadows. This is filmmaking as tactile exercise, and the atmosphere in which Kim houses his debauched delights is something like smothering beneath the tender insistence of a satin glove. A Tale of Two Sisters is based on an old Korean folktale of two sisters so abused by the capriciousness of the world that they're forced to take refuge in one another and within themselves. In tone and execution, it feels like Heavenly Creatures; in its tale of an evil stepmother and a haunted castle by the lake in the woods, it has the heft of classic German fairytales.