Drama Archives - Page 86 of 120 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Passion of the Christ (2004) – DVD

August 15, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A
starring James Caviezel, Monica Bellucci, Claudia Gerini, Maia Morgenstern
screenplay by Benedict Fitzgerald and Mel Gibson
directed by Mel Gibson

by Walter Chaw The danger of a film like The Passion of the Christ is the fervour with which people will declare that it is unadorned "truth," will imagine that writer/director/hands-that-pound-the-nails-into-Christ Mel Gibson has somehow pointed a camera through a porthole into 33 A.D.–will forgive the piece any number of otherwise unforgivable cinematic sins, any abundance of opposing historical and canonical evidence, for fear that their discomfort with the picture might be read as blasphemy and that their ignorance of the minutia of scripture will be revealed. It is the sort of fearful, hysterical, insular, self-righteous groupthink in which the rabble Gibson blames for Christ's death engages, and the ironies embedded in the film and its reception don't end there. It seems ridiculous to remind that the film is no more and no less than Gibson's interpretation of the last twelve hours of Christ's life. The question worth asking is before this film, how many of its defenders looked to Gibson for guidance in cosmological (or any) issues? How it is that making a film in our cult-of-celebrity culture gifts any filmmaker the credentials of theologian pundit? Mel's on the cross, he blames the Jews (and now the critics) for putting him there, and his whole career begins to coalesce as a parade of martyrs.

She Hate Me (2004)

August 12, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Anthony Mackie, Kerry Washington, Ellen Barkin, Monica Bellucci
screenplay by Michael Genet and Spike Lee
directed by Spike Lee

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The crescendo to the opening credits of Spike Lee's ridiculous, desultory She Hate Me is a fluttering three-dollar bill with George W. Bush's face on it, an image as impotent as the poster for Fahrenheit 9/11 where Bush is clutching Michael Moore's hand through the miracle of Photoshop. (It's chatroom-prank as dogma.) Lee has a serious case of Moore envy, and it's reduced the long-time firebrand to making ad hominem attacks and casting too broad a net to accommodate fashionable targets like the current administration. While there's no such thing as a graceful segue in the majority of Lee's work as a hyphenate (two of his strongest films in the aftermath of Do the Right Thing have been adaptations of novels scripted by the novelists themselves, i.e., Clockers and the irreproachable 25^th Hour), the polemics of She Hate Me–the cutesily ebonical title a tip-off that it's second-tier Lee, à la Mo' Better Blues and He Got Game–are traumatizingly digressive and/or unmoored to any overriding motif.

Garden State (2004)

August 12, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance

*½/****
starring Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Ian Holm
written and directed by Zach Braff

by Walter Chaw As disaffected turns of phrase go, New Jersey's nickname "The Garden State" is a pretty fair description of a vegetative state of mind. Zach Braff's hyphenate debut Garden State seizes on that wilful misreading, offering up a Girl, Interrupted for boys featuring a lead character fresh from The Bell Jar: an over-medicated, under-emoted man who just wants to feel something, damnit. It's what passes for groundbreaking independent cinema in the new millennium–drugs and depression as a stage for spastic trick shots (the great fallout from Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream). It demeans low-achieving minimum wagers with small-dreams and extols the virtues of true love without aspiration, but its scattershot glimpse of fad-fortunes vs. old money doesn't go very far in making the case for Garden State as either social exposé or romantic whimsy. If the picture's anything, it's just a worn rock skipping along a smooth, glassy surface.

Thunderbirds International Rescue Edition – DVD

August 11, 20041960s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi, UK

THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO (1966)
**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
screenplay by Gerry Anderson & Sylvia Anderson
directed by David Lane

THUNDERBIRD 6 (1968)
*/**** Image A- Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS) Extras B+
screenplay by Gerry Anderson & Sylvia Anderson
directed by David Lane

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Why is it that "Thunderbirds", the marionette sci-fi TV series of 1960s vintage, exerts such weird fascination? Narratively, it's nothing to get excited about–just the usual conservative guff involving stiff-necked operators of sci-fi machinery, all of whom are given one trait each and are as pure in heart as they are heavy on exposition. One wants to make an obvious joke about the delivery being as wooden as the puppets, except that to do so would be missing the point: the erotics of the series are powerful specifically because everything is made of wood. The figures themselves are as rigid and rock-solid as the meticulously-designed machinery, making the stylization of the series total and more convincing than if it were superimposed over the documentary image of mere human flesh. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the two lavish and colourful movies made under the "Thunderbirds" brand, which, despite their formulaic tendencies, manage to hold our attention with a rich and affective sense of necrophilia.

The Girl Next Door (2004) [Unrated Version] – DVD

August 8, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Emile Hirsch, Elisha Cuthbert, Timothy Olyphant, James Remar
screenplay by Stuart Blumberg and David T. Wagner & Brent Goldberg
directed by Luke Greenfield

by Walter Chaw Though it reminds a great deal of Paul Brickman's Risky Business, The Girl Next Door reminds all the more that there's really only one Paul Brickman, and while this picture sustains the sleazy wish-fulfillment of Risky Business for a good long run, it can't replicate the same kind of insouciant rebellion. The exercise feels forced in a way that Risky Business doesn't, the earlier film's ease owing mostly to Brickman but also to another of Tangerine Dream's definitive Eighties scores and, perhaps, the bestial liquid chemistry between Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay–a chemistry that's never quite replicated by a very fine Emile Hirsch and the very fine Elisha Cuthbert. Without the reckless air of youth on the verge, The Girl Next Door starts to feel like calculated imitation, becoming affected and, eventually, what a teenage sex comedy can't be: restrained. Its bark is worse than its bite, and in the end, only its premise is subversive.

Collateral (2004)

August 5, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo
screenplay by Stuart Beattie
directed by Michael Mann

by Walter Chaw To hear Michael Mann tell it, you'd think he'd found a new way to film Los Angeles, the most-filmed city in the world. To watch Collateral is to discover that he has. I wish that there were some meat to Collateral, because even without it, it's hands-down this year's most gorgeously-directed film. If there was ever any question to Michael Mann's genius after Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, or Heat, it must be laid to rest now–he's pushing Spielberg in terms of visual gift, trumping him in terms of maturity (and courage, of course), and he's moving into an upper echelon of cinematic directors (Stanley Kubrick, for example) who, when they're on, produce tapestries so pure that you feel as though if you tapped them they'd ring like crystal.

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

July 30, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Jonathan Demme, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber, Kimberly Elise
screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, based on the novel by Richard Condon
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate is arguably more of a retelling of William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars (1953) than it is of John Frankenheimer’s incomparable 1962 original. Like Menzies’s science-fiction B-movie classic, the premise of Demme’s updating is that some alien force (Earthling mad scientist in this instance instead of Martian) has implanted a small device in certain respected members of our society in order to manipulate them into harming our surprisingly fragile good old American value system. Also like Invaders from Mars, the whole film moves with the logic of a fever dream, all intense close-ups, hallucinatory visions, and suggestions of going underground.

Wyatt Earp (1994) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

July 27, 20041990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Western

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras D
starring Kevin Costner, Dennis Quaid, Gene Hackman, Jeff Fahey
screenplay by Dan Gordon and Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Lawrence Kasdan

by Walter Chaw It seemed like a good idea at the time: Kevin Costner–still a hot commodity just four years removed from Dances with Wolves, fresh from what might be the most important film of his career (A Perfect World), and not yet stigmatized by Waterworld–reteaming with his Silverado director Lawrence Kasdan, then one of the best genre writers in Hollywood, for a biopic of the famous lawman Wyatt Earp. Unfortunately, Wyatt Earp flopped like Kurt Rambis in the paint. It was too long, too prosaic, and in what appears in retrospect to be a pathological lack of pretense, too pretentious by half. It was the first real nail in Costner's career coffin–a product of his having way too much power and way too little savvy in a cynical America that had outgrown his kind of aw-shucks long about Gary Cooper. Costner's still shouting, but it's hard to hear him from all the way back there in 1940.

The Tarzan Collection – DVD + Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) – DVDs

July 26, 20041930s, 1940s, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, UK

TARZAN THE APE MAN (1932)
***/**** Image B- Sound B+
starring Johnny Weissmuller, Neil Hamilton, C. Aubrey Smith, Maureen O’Sullivan
adaptation by Cyril Hume; dialogue by Ivor Novello
based on characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by W.S. Van Dyke

by Bill Chambers As with most “origin” Tarzan films, Tarzan himself is an off-screen promise for the first third of Tarzan the Ape Man, though his famous yodel (which the studio maintains was artificially created) portends his appearance about ten minutes before he actually materializes. Likewise, as with most origin Tarzans, this one has become something of a viewing formality: The basics of Tarzan are pop-culture fundamentals passed down through the generations as if by osmosis, and so any film that aims to tell the story from scratch is bound to seem a little sluggish. It’s remarkable, then, that Tarzan the Ape Man, in addition to exhibiting a surprising immunity to the ravages of time, is also mostly spared the contempt born of familiarity. Cutie-pie Maureen O’Sullivan essays the talkies’ first Jane, who joins her father James’s (C. Aubrey Smith) expedition in Africa and immediately casts a spell on dad’s right-hand man, Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton). Once they begin their treacherous journey across the Mutia escarpment, beyond which allegedly lies an elephant graveyard that James and co. plan to raid for its ivory, Jane meets her true intended, the monosyllabic, acrobatic Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller). Though Tarzan more or less abducts Jane, their compatibility is such that she refutes her father’s claim that Tarzan belongs to the jungle when she’s reunited with the caravan. “Not now. He belongs to me,” she pouts.

The Belly of an Architect (1990) – DVD

July 26, 20041990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, UK

***/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Brian Dennehy, Chloe Webb, Lambert Wilson
written and directed by Peter Greenaway

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Living as I do in Toronto’s rapidly-gentrifying Queen West gallery district, I am often subjected to graffiti and other detritus romantically asserting the social necessity of art and aesthetics–as if a fresh coat of paint and some nicely-arranged furniture will somehow go towards solving the homeless problem. I find this hilarious, because despite the left-wing cast that the artistic community has acquired, it can all too easily turn into the plaything of the rich, as has happened with local hotspot the Drake Hotel, a former transient lodge transformed into a posh art venue and nightclub for pretentious scenesters. Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect simultaneously addresses and embodies the creative hubris that overlooks this fact, whipsawing between annoyance at its corpulent hero’s placement of aesthetic considerations above all human interactions and wistfully lamenting the fact that such considerations often add up to nothing. If the results are imperfect, they’ll at least give the art-minded a certain amount of pause.

Garage Days (2002) – DVD

July 25, 20042000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music

*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Kick Gurry, Maya Stange, Pia Miranda, Russell Dykstra
screenplay by Dave Warner & Alex Proyas and Michael Udesky
directed by Alex Proyas

by Walter Chaw A film done better just last year with Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, the brilliant Alex Proyas’s third film is a relatively innocuous, mostly-failed rags-to-rags garage-band opera that finds its speed in its usage of stock crowd footage from an old INXS concert. Garage Days is, as you might assume, a period piece of sorts, but period only in the sense that a Baz Luhrman film is a period film (Baz is even referenced, in the picture’s best moment, in an LSD hallucination set to Rick James at his sleaziest)–ostensibly taking place on the Manchester-esque mean streets of Sydney sometime in the last twenty years, though unmistakably a product of the self-reverential school of the post-modern visual boom-factory. The style the substance, Garage Days is all cover and no book and the sort of picture that seems like a lot of fun without actually being all that much fun: Trainspotting with amplifiers.

Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London (2004) [Special Edition]; The Cheetah Girls (2003); Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004) – DVDs

July 21, 20042000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Germany, Music, Musical, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

AGENT CODY BANKS 2: DESTINATION LONDON
*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C-
starring Frankie Muniz, Anthony Anderson, Cynthia Stevenson, Daniel Roebuck
screenplay by Don Rhymer
directed by Kevin Allen

THE CHEETAH GIRLS
*/**** Image C Sound B Extras C-
starring Raven, Adrienne Bailon, Kiely Williams, Sabrina Bryan
screenplay by Alison Taylor, based on the series of books by Deborah Gregory
directed by Oz Scott

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Here’s how it works. The entertainment machine churns out low-quality wish-fulfillment fantasies for ‘tweens and teenagers, then print and web outlets assign grown men and women to review them. Yes, the logic behind this weird symbiosis is elusive, as few teenagers are savvy enough to read reviews and few adult reviewers (beyond the occasional junket flunky) are possibly going to recommend them to anyone else. But somebody somewhere must benefit from this arrangement, because I have two such discs staring me in the face right now: one is the Frankie Muniz vehicle Agent Cody Banks 2, the other is a Disney Channel TV movie called The Cheetah Girls. Both are fantasies of juvenile mastery, both are scrubbed clean and chaste, both seem to have been dashed off in an afternoon by drunken hacks, and I guarantee you that both will make anyone over the age of fifteen want to poke their eyes out with a metal spike. But that’s just me. I’m 31.

No Small Affair (1984) – DVD

July 20, 20041980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

*½/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Demi Moore, Jon Cryer, George Wendt, Peter Frechette
screenplay by Charles Bolt and Terence Mulcahy
directed by Jerry Schatzberg

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's hard to remember from the vantage point of today that Jerry Schatzberg used to be somebody. Maybe not so hard for the French (he did, after all, serve on this year's Cannes jury), but definitely for North Americans, who are wont to forget that Schatzberg won the Cannes Jury Prize for Scarecrow and gave Al Pacino a pre-Godfather role in The Panic in Needle Park. But by 1984, the same hard times that hit most other directors who came to prominence in the 1970s had apparently befallen Schatzberg as well, to the point that he was reduced to teensploitation nonsense like No Small Affair. To be fair, the film isn't the pasty aesthetic blight that was the norm for '80s teen efforts, but it is the same soup of shaggy-dog romantics and coy sexual intrigue as a million other films of its stripe. That it doesn't condescend to its material makes its failure all the more rueful, like watching Eric Rohmer attempt The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes with deluded gusto.

Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Third Season (1999-2000) – DVD

July 19, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Teen, Television

Image B Sound B+ Extras B
"Like a Virgin", "Homecoming", "None of the Above", "Home Movies", "Indian Summer", "Secrets & Lies", "Escape from Witch Island", "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", "Four to Tango", "First Encounters of the Close Kind", "Barefoot at Capefest," "A Weekend in the Country", "Northern Lights", "The Valentine's Day Massacre", "Crime and Punishment", "To Green, With Love", "Cinderella Story", "Neverland", "Stolen Kisses", "The Longest Day", "Show Me Love", "The Anti-Prom", "True Love"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. With zeitgeist lightning-rod Kevin Williamson having jumped ship at the end of the second year, the training wheels were off for season three of "Dawson's Creek", and the show immediately drove, arms flailing, into a tree, an analogy that draws itself when a slaphappy Dawson (James Van Der Beek) crashes a speedboat in the premiere. However ironic my appreciation of the show might ultimately be, its third season starts out appreciably terrible. Falsely equating Williamson's liberal mindset with titillation, a mostly-new writing staff (there was something of an unrelated mass exodus when Williamson left, with head scribe Mike White answering the beacon of "Freaks and Geeks" and others taking similar advantage of the teen boom) resorted to Aaron Spelling licentiousness–even wallflower Joey (Katie Holmes) doffs her clothes in the season opener. It's her attempt to win back Dawson after ostracizing him at the close of the previous season, and more absurdly than that, it backfires.

De-Lovely (2004)

July 15, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Musical, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Kevin Kline, Ashley Judd, Jonathan Pryce, Kevin McNally
screenplay by Jay Cocks
directed by Irwin Winkler

by Walter Chaw Tempting to fall back on clever insults ("de-readful" or "de-reary") when summarizing genuinely bad director Irwin Winker's De-Lovely, a musical biography about the life and times of Cole Porter that's de-adening in its execution. The picture's framework sees old Cole Porter (Kevin Kline)–looking a lot like Carl Reiner–sitting in an empty theatre with some sort of angel of death (Jonathan Pryce) as the events of Porter's life unfold like a Broadway musical before them. The film will be interrupted periodically by old Porter screaming at young Porter (still Kline) that he's an idiot or that No, no, no, it didn't happen that way, just to be reminded by Death that nobody can hear him. It's as stupid as it sounds.

Maria Full of Grace (2004)

July 15, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Colombia, Crime, Drama, Ecuador, Theatrical

Maria, llena eres de gracia
***/****
starring Catalina Sandino Moreno, Guilied Lopez, Patricia Rae, Orlando Tobon
written and directed by Joshua Marston

by Walter Chaw In Maria Full of Grace (Maria, llena eres de gracia), Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno), to prepare for swallowing the horse-choker, heroin-filled prophylactics that Colombian drug mules ingest by the dozens, practices on a few large grapes (call it “Maria full of Grapes”), and in her resolute suffering, she heralds the arrival of an actor to be reckoned with. Overflowing with subplots and burdened by at least one major character who’s superfluous and distracting, Joshua Marston’s hyphenate debut is as overstuffed as Maria’s digestive tract, but Moreno’s performance is so sure-footed and clear that it smoothes over some of the rougher patches of the piece.

The Door in the Floor (2004)

July 13, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Jon Foster, Elle Fanning
screenplay by Tod Williams, based on the novel A Widow for One Year by John Irving
directed by Tod Williams

by Walter Chaw Jeff Bridges is so easy that it's criminal. He does things actors shouldn't be able to do, and he does them without breaking a sweat. He's one of our national treasures, because he never draws any attention to himself in the manner of, say, a Sean Penn or a Tom Hanks. It's not showy, what he does–it's acting. And lest you think that it isn't, compare his cocky swagger in Bad Company to his awkward shuffle in Starman to his stung braggadocio in The Fisher King to his archetypal slob in The Big Lebowski to his shell-shocked suburbanite in Fearless. Take each performance by itself and it's comfortable to think that Bridges is just being Bridges; consider them as a whole and it dawns that the man's a genius. Any movie with Bridges in it therefore has something in it to recommend–no less so than his latest, Tod Williams's The Door in the Floor, an adaptation of the first third of John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year.

For Queen & Country (1989) – DVD

July 11, 20041980s, Action, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Denzel Washington, George Baker, Amanda Redman, Dorian Healy
screenplay by Martin Stellman and Trix Worrell
directed by Martin Stellman

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I've asked it before, and I'll ask it again: what the hell happened to British cinema? I don't just mean that the quality of the images has slipped–the general sense of contemporary life that it championed in the late '70s and '80s has vanished without a trace. Something in the water during the dark days of Thatcher's reign produced blunt, bracing films about subjects that would be demeaned by the tag 'social issues': the great, nimble Stephen Frears/Hanif Kureishi collaborations, for instance, or the brutally frank teleplays of Alan Clarke, demonstrated that you could engage working-class, non-white, and gay realities without looking like Tony Richardson or hiding in Merchant/Ivory denial. To be sure, For Queen & Country isn't in the league of the abovecited examples, and it isn't even very good on its own terms, but even its half-flubbed earnestness was committed enough to make me nostalgic for a cinema that was dedicated and fleet-footed–if not for the economic conditions that made it necessary.

Broken Wings (2002) – DVD

July 8, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Israel

Knafayim Shvurot
***½/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Orly Silbersatz-Banai, Maya Maron, Nitai Gaviratz, Vladimir Friedman
written and directed by Nir Bergman

by Walter Chaw Israeli filmmaker Nir Bergman's Broken Wings (Knafayim Shvurot) is a film about the intricacies of a family implosion told in the minimal, spare, largely unsentimental fashion of a Mike Leigh picture, managing to relay its tale uncorrupted by the Israeli-Palestinian issue and, in Bergman's discretion, making a stronger statement about the mad choreography of war by personalizing the victims on its periphery. It separates itself from Leigh (and another headwater, Ken Loach) with a few scenes of carefully-constructed mise-en-scène that locate Bergman as a fan of the magical possibilities of cinema–and establish Broken Wings as a picture that challenges the post-modern idea that emotional truth can't be achieved without the trappings of handheld vérité.

King Arthur (2004)

July 6, 20042000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, UK, War

*/****
starring Clive Owen, Kiera Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by David Franzoni
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw King Arthur wants to have it both ways. It wants to be smart and it wants to be stupid, too. It wants to appeal to eggheads, so it opens with a title card that promises what follows is based on "new" archaeological evidence; then, for the alleged delight of the peanut gallery, it trots out the same period epic dog-and-pony show to which we've been repeatedly subjected since Zulu Dawn. Strangely enough, this new archaeological evidence apparently dates feminism back to the fifth century (witness the dominatrix version of Guinevere, decked out at one point like Grace Jones), in addition to facilitating a clumsy political satire of twenty-first century America's religiosity, arrogance, and imperialism. Needless to say, when something tries to please everyone, everyone is seldom pleased; King Arthur is both stupid and boring, and the revelation that, stripped of tragedy, controversy, and resonance, Arthurian legend is as banal as and similar to Tears of the Sun (director Antoine Fuqua's previous film) displeases indeed.