Barbershop 2: Back in Business (2004) [Special Edition] – DVD

June 3, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Ice Cube, Cedric the Entertainer, Sean Patrick Thomas, Eve
screenplay by Don D. Scott
directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan

by Walter Chaw If not for a cringe-worthy conclusion and the awkwardness of an entire Queen Latifah subplot too clearly an embedded trailer for the upcoming Beauty Shop, Barbershop 2: Back in Business would not only be better than the first film, but also almost worthy of consideration as a lighthearted version of Do the Right Thing. Firmly rooted in politics, the opening credit sequence–which charts black history through the evolution of the afro haircut, with each image group ending, incisively, with a shot that demonstrates how white culture invariably hijacks black trends–is alone worth the price of admission. It summarizes a sticky, Ouroborosian circle of self-consumption, owing to the fact that hip-hop culture itself takes elements of white culture and redefines them through its own prism. What's the explanation for Vanilla Ice's ski-slope pompadour in the bigger picture of race relations and cultural diffusion? A look at the progression of Michael Jackson would seem the cheap shot, and it would have been out of this context, but while no mention of Wacko Jacko fails to inspire reflexive groans anymore, Barbershop 2 actually, wordlessly, scores a poignant, precise, eloquent point about the state of our state. Taking a swipe at the King of Pop is easy–having it score in a way fresh with insight is invaluable.

Roswell: The Complete First Season (1999-2000) – DVD

June 1, 2004Posted in1990s, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Teen, Television, Thriller

Image A Sound A Extras B
"Pilot," "The Morning After," "Monsters," "Leaving Normal," "Missing," "285 South," "River Dog," "Blood Brother," "Heat Wave," "The Balance," "Toy House," "Into the Woods," "The Convention," "Blind Date," "Independence Day," "Sexual Healing," "Crazy," "Tess, Lies and Videotape," "Four Square," "Max to the Max," "The White Room," "Destiny"

by Walter Chaw What begins as something romantic and mysterious ends as something predominantly memorable for the impact it had on Dido's wan career. Charting the WB's "Roswell"'s downward trajectory from a piquant, lovely pilot to the worst of "The X Files" and "Dawson's Creek" is a fascinating, instructive thing to watch–not only for the schadenfreude of it all, but also for the way that corporate perception of what an audience purportedly wants invariably leads to production of the same kind of dull crapulence over and over again. (Though, in the WB's defense, a grassroots letter-writing campaign that saved the series from oblivion at least once indicates a fervid devotion to this kind of garbage.) In the fine tradition of making a self-pitying clone of "thirtysomething" for teen-somethings played by a cast of twenty-somethings, "Roswell" is "Sweet Valley High" mixed with the Troll Books variety of soft-core science fiction, making that "My So-Called Life" feeling of middle school alienation literal in its tale of three or four actual aliens getting teased by jocks in Roswell, NM. It's the love child of Robert A. Heinlein and Judy Blume, and it ain't pretty.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

June 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, Fantasy, New Zealand

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

Returnofthekingeecap2

by Walter Chaw For the uninitiated few, Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) are diminutive hobbits making their way, with the treacherous Gollum (Andy Serkis) as their guide, through perilous lands on a quest to destroy the One Ring of power, forged by evil Sauron in a volcano called Mount Doom. Their story is set against a series of epic military manoeuvres and intimate Machiavellian machinations engaged in by elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom), dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), and the once and future human king, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen).

The Company (2003) – DVD

May 30, 2004Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Robert Altman, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Germany, Music, Romance, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Neve Campbell, Malcolm McDowell, James Franco, Barbara Robertson
screenplay by Barbara Turner
directed by Robert Altman

Mustownby Walter Chaw There is a moment in Robert Altman's beautifully metered The Company where we're introduced to a cook played by James Franco through a low angle shot hovering over the green, smoke-haloed expanse of a gin-joint pool table. Wordless, the sequence plays out as Ry (Neve Campbell, never better) shoots a rack to the cool blues slinking out of a corner jukebox, glancing up now and again to meet Josh's (Franco) frank interest with gradually thawing humour and heat. Discretely, the film cuts to the next morning as Josh cooks an omelette with what's available in the kitchen of Ry's artist's loft.

Baadasssss! (2004)

May 27, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical

How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass
***/****
starring Mario Van Peebles, Joy Bryant, T.K. Carter, Terry Crews
screenplay by Mario Van Peebles & Dennis Haggerty, based on the book Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song by Melvin Van Peebles
directed by Mario Van Peebles

Baadasssssby Walter Chaw In 1971, Melvin Van Peebles, weary of the way that Hollywood portrayed people of colour, set out under the guise of a non-union skin flick to make Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song, the highest-grossing independent feature of its time, and easily the most influential African-American picture of the modern age. It featured a black man as its mustachioed hero, sexual and virile, unafraid to stand up to police corruption and the stultifying social oppression of "the man" ("Rated X by an All-White Jury," its poster proclaimed), and it allowed him to rebel without punishing him in the final reel–a radical idea then, a radical idea now. Mario Van Peebles, thirty-three years after the fact, has crafted a surprisingly edged ode to the making of his father's film, Baadasssss! (originally titled How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass), which manages the tricky feat of replicating the insouciant rebellion of Melvin's political, if not cinematic, masterpiece while somehow sidestepping the trap of hagiography. Melvin, played by Mario, comes off as a man of principle, but also an adulterer, callous towards the needs and fears of his children, as well as the kind of battlefield general who keeps the goals of victory to himself.

Crimson Gold (2003)

May 27, 2004Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Iran, Theatrical, Thriller

Talaye sorkh
****/****
starring Hussein Emadeddin, Kamyar Sheissi, Azita Rayeji, Shahram Vaziri
screenplay by Abbas Kiarostami
directed by Jafar Panahi

Crimsongoldby Bill Chambers Those planning on taking in Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow this weekend solely to judge the credibility of its disaster-movie hijinks would be better off buying a ticket to its competition in several North American markets, Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold (Talaye sorkh), in which a scenario of inevitable, cyclical doom unfolds with astonishing veracity. The shooting of a jewellery-store owner by a thief who turned the gun on himself inspired master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami to reverse-engineer the thief's motives in a screenplay written specifically for his former assistant director Panahi, fresh from the bittersweet triumph of The Circle. (Widely acclaimed everywhere, it was banned in his native Iran.) Some details specific to Iran's theocracy notwithstanding (a party is raided by police because men and women are dancing together), Crimson Gold is arguably a more globally inclusive film than The Circle, as it deals with the insidious threat of classism that on some level affects us all.

Carandiru (2003)

May 27, 2004Posted in2000s, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, Crime, Drama, Italy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos, Milton Gonçalves, Ivan de Almeida, Ailton Graça
screenplay by Hector Babenco, Fernando Bonassi, Victor Navas, based on the book Estação Carandiru by Dráuzio Varella
directed by Hector Babenco

by Walter Chaw Argentine director Hector Babenco's ninth film, Carandiru is his fourth that, at least in an ancillary fashion, has something to do with prison (the others being Lució Flávio, Pixote, and Kiss of the Spider Woman), and it's easily the least of them, justifying the men-behind-bars tropes and queen stereotypes by hiding behind its ostensible basis in Dráuzio Varella's non-fiction fiction. The film was adapted from a book that is based on a true story, the degrees of separation from reality dramatic enough as to render its hero doctor a smirking, condescending Virgil in a stock Inferno peopled with an all-too familiar panoply: smart con; murderous con who finds God; artistic elderly con; brutal street con; possibly innocent naïf con; philosophical con; and so on into nausea. The picture makes mistakes early and often, deciding to condense hundreds of stories into a few basic sketches and then choosing to recreate each of the pastiche criminal's life story in vignette flashbacks that do more to celebrate the brassy hedonism of São Paulo than underscore its underbelly of desperation and criminality. That carnival atmosphere comes off as a fragrant bouquet of patronizing pap that revels in its sordidness yet feels curiously naïve–"Oz" by a creative team that doesn't appear to know that the bar on prison dramas has been raised since Brute Force.

Dracula: The Legacy Collection – DVD

May 27, 2004Posted in1930s, 1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Vampire, Werewolf

DRACULA (1931)
***/**** Image C Sound C|A (with Glass score) Extras A+
starring Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye
screenplay by Garrett Fort, based on the novel by Bram Stoker and on the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston
directed by Tod Browning

DRÁCULA (1931)
***/**** Image C+ Sound B-
starring Carlos Villarias, Lupita Taylor, Pablo Alvarez Rubio, Barry Norton
screenplay by Garrett Fort, based on the novel by Bram Stoker and on the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston; adapted in Spanish by B. Fernandez Cue
directed by George Melford

DRACULA’S DAUGHTER (1936)
***½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden, Marguerite Churchill, Edward Van Sloan
screenplay by Garrett Fort, based on the story “Dracula’s Guest” by Bram Stoker
directed by Lambert Hillyer

SON OF DRACULA (1943)
*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Lon Chaney Jr., Robert Paige, Louise Allbritton, Evelyn Ankers
screenplay by Eric Taylor
directed by Robert Siodmak

HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945)
½*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Martha O’Driscoll, Lionel Atwill
screenplay by Edward T. Lowe Jr.
directed by Erle C. Kenton

by Walter Chaw Tod Browning’s Dracula finds its way to the DVD format for the second time as part of a handsome “Legacy Collection” heralding the theatrical bow of the studio’s lead balloon Van Helsing, possibly denoting the first time that a cynically-timed archival video release was announced with pride and fanfare instead of slipped surreptitiously into the marketplace. Never mind that a purchase of the Legacy collection whole (essaying Dracula, The Wolf Man, and Frankenstein) proves to be far better for the soul than shelling out a few bones to catch Stephen Sommers’s latest assault on sense and cinema, even if doing so feels a little like letting Universal have its cake and eat it, too: There are worse things in the world than a mainstream shipwreck inspiring a vital resurrection.

Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003) + Monster (2003) – DVDs

May 24, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Crime, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Thriller, UK

AILEEN: LIFE AND DEATH OF A SERIAL KILLER
***/**** Image B Sound B
directed by Nick Broomfield & Joan Churchill

MONSTER
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern, Lee Tergesen
written and directed by Patty Jenkins

by Bill Chambers If the documentary's renaissance needed further confirmation, it's either the propagation of sequels to non-fiction films (nothing nestles a genre into the mainstream like second chapters), or the commercial synergy that has so flagrantly asserted itself in the marketing of Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill's Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer–a quasi-continuation, as it happens, of Broomfield's own 1992 Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Of course, it was one thing for Lantern Lane Entertainment to time the theatrical release of Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (henceforth Aileen 2) so that it surfed the ripples of hype generated by the splash-landing of Newmarket's Monster, and it's another thing for Sony, their common home video distributor, to unleash the two films on DVD simultaneously. But for NY MAGAZINE to print "Aileen Wuornos, the subject of Charlize Theron's Monster, distills absolutely terrifying interviews with the late serial killer," and for Columbia TriStar to then splatter that quote on the back of the Aileen 2 disc, signifies a blurring of divides more critical than ever in this age of reality-TV. Neither Theron nor Wuornos deserves to become inextricably associated with the other's (mis)deeds over a marketing crutch; Monster probably should've been called Aileen Wuornos for Dummies, but it wasn't, and that's the point.

Saving Private Ryan (1998) [D-Day 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition] – DVD

May 24, 2004Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Spielberg, War

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore
screenplay by Robert Rodat
directed by Steven Spielberg

Savingprivateryancap

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One is tempted to speculate that, perhaps even more than his father's tour of duty, something that inspired the teenaged Steven Spielberg to shoot a succession of WWII docudramas on 8mm (since he had authentic props–Dad's medals–at his disposal), lingering guilt over his dismissal from the U.S. Army after a military shrink deemed him unfit for the battlefield accounts for Spielberg's frequent digressions into the war genre. As reductive, nay, Freudian as this may seem, for one thing, it has the potential to dilute the vitriol commonly reserved for the bookends of Saving Private Ryan by bringing them into autobiographical relief. Certainly ignoring the picture's prologue and epilogue altogether doesn't help: I once programmed my DVD player to do just that and the result felt surprisingly incomplete, as the context for a WWII narrative with a conspicuously anecdotal quality had all of a sudden disappeared.

Coffee and Cigarettes (2004) + The Saddest Music in the World (2004)

May 20, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Music, Musical

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES
***½/****
starring Roberto Benigni, Steven Wright, Joie Lee, Cinqué Lee
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD
***/****
starring Isabella Rossellini, Mark McKinney, Maria de Medeiros, Ross McMillan
screenplay by Guy Maddin & George Toles, based on a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro
directed by Guy Maddin

Saddestcoffeeby Walter Chaw Philosopher-scientist Nikola Tesla (of coil fame) once suggested that the universe winding down vibrated to a sympathetic rhythm; art, at its best, puts a tuning fork to it. The words that we use to describe tapping that fricative synergy (archetype, the sublime, the ineffable) are also the words that we use, to borrow a phrase from Frank Zappa, to dance about architecture–to describe what's indescribable about the collective experience, the existential electricity that ranks music above painting above poetry above literature (and film the twentieth century stepchild that falls somehow north and south of each). It is the unique privilege of the cinema to be all things at its best and less than nothing at its worst: to be sculpture for Matthew Barney; photography for Stanley Kubrick; ad art for Roy Andersson; poetry for Jean-Luc Godard; hymn for Abbas Kiarostami; and music for Sergio Leone. For Jim Jarmusch, it's the Romanticist sensibility distilled deliriously through the Nouvelle Vague, while for Guy Maddin, it's perhaps the critical instinct at its most self-loathing, arch, and unpleasant.

Too Late the Hero (1970) – DVD

May 19, 2004Posted in1970s, Action, Drama, DVD, War

***/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Michael Caine, Cliff Robertson, Ian Bannen, Harry Andrews
screenplay by Robert Aldrich and Lukas Heller
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Too Late the Hero is the consummate "solid flick"–sturdy, well-written, and just thoughtful enough to keep its machinations from working on autopilot. It's not a masterpiece by any stretch, but it is suffused with a dread and a tension that lift it out of the bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission ghetto and into something more sober and dignified. Whether or not it is the subterfuge Vietnam allegory of cult legend, it's a war film about people–not iron-jawed superheroes–whose selfless deeds have all the more impact when placed in context with the cowardice and stupidity of others. In the end, it does mouth certain pieties about that heroism that keep it from being too corrosive, but in this age of Black Hawk Down and Iraq prison scandals, it's refreshing for its refusal to knuckle under to the myth of the glorious warrior.

Everybody’s All-American (1988) + That Championship Season (1982) – DVDs

May 16, 2004Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports

EVERYBODY’S ALL-AMERICAN
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Jessica Lange, Dennis Quaid, Timothy Hutton, John Goodman
screenplay by Tom Rickman, based on the book by Frank Deford
directed by Taylor Hackford

THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON
**/**** Image C+ Sound C+
starring Bruce Dern, Stacy Keach, Robert Mitchum, Martin Sheen
written and directed by Jason Miller

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Taylor Hackford’s Raging Bull, the episodic pigskin melodrama Everybody’s All-American boasts a trio of fantastic performances at the service of a picture that’s all sturm and no drang, a weightless thing packed to the rafters with heaving moments over the course of a twenty-five-year span that somehow fail to add up to an affecting whole. It comes at the tail end of the prolific Dennis Quaid’s most prolific era, rounding up unqualified successes like The Big Easy and Innerspace (and unqualified miscues like D.O.A.) and serving as a handy career summary for Hackford, who hit it big with the revered cheese classic An Officer and a Gentleman, which he’s been dutifully remaking in one form or another ever since. Success is an unforgiving mistress–so is lack of range and imagination.

Troy (2004)

May 13, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Malta, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, Diane Kruger
screenplay by David Benioff
directed by Wolfgang Petersen

Troyby Walter Chaw There are two major problems with Wolfgang Petersen's bloated swords and sandals opera Troy. The first is that James Horner contributes another of his patented walls of non-directional trumpets and violins as the score, and the second is that first-billed Brad Pitt lacks the gravity to hold down the middle of a 165-minute epic. There's a reason that people are always surprised to learn that Pitt stands just north of six feet tall: a gifted second fiddle who consistently steals the show (12 Monkeys, Thelma and Louise, Fight Club, Se7en, Kalifornia, Legends of the Fall, Snatch) and a sometimes-leading man who consistently has the show stolen out from him (Seven Years in Tibet, Meet Joe Black, The Mexican), Pitt, as warrior Achilles in this adaptation of Homer's The Iliad, is curiously weightless, a phantom haunting the film, so that by the end it all it feels like nothing of great import has happened. Consider what the film would have been like with Russell Crowe as Achilles (or, conversely, consider what Master and Commander would have been like with Pitt)–there's a reason that Gladiator was a success, and it had very little to do with its scripting or plot.

Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) + Paul McCartney: The Music and Animation Collection – DVDs

May 13, 2004Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Music, Short Films, UK

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROAD STREET
**/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Paul McCartney, Bryan Brown, Ringo Starr, Barbara Bach
screenplay by Paul McCartney
directed by Peter Webb

PAUL McCARTNEY: THE MUSIC AND ANIMATION COLLECTION
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
directed by Geoff Dunbar

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Self-absorption is probably an occupational hazard at a certain level of fame: once the world lays itself at your feet, pelts its money at you, and replaces your mirrors with airbrushed portraits, it's well-nigh impossible not to be nudged a little closer to the realm of the narcissistic. Such is the case with Paul McCartney, who, having been canonized during his stint with The Beatles, apparently came to believe that anything involving his personage would be a celestial experience for all. The ego trips of 1984's Give My Regards to Broad Street and his more current forays into animation show a McCartney trapped in his own private hall of mirrors, one whose past musical triumphs are looking ever more distant from the tepid easy-listening of his present-day output.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) [Studio Classics] – DVD

May 13, 2004Posted in****/****, 1940s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Charley Grapewin
screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, based on the book by John Steinbeck
directed by John Ford

Mustownby Bill Chambers John Steinbeck wrote a, if not the, great American novel with The Grapes of Wrath, but John Ford's emotionally devastating film version, I say without a trace of anti-intellectualism, supplants Steinbeck's prose in memory. In the hands of Ford and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (peaking early), Steinbeck's Dust Bowl evokes Nazi Germany played out on American soil. Though this was a metaphor nascent in Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning book (whose publication preceded the film's release by approximately one year), with The Grapes of Wrath landing in theatres a month after Germany's deportation of Jews into occupied Poland, with those gaunt faces registering far less innocuously than Steinbeck's descriptions of them, it became a full-fledged allegory in its transition to the big screen. (That Ford was initially drawn to the project because it recalled ancestral tales of the Irish potato famine points to themes that camouflage with each new epoch. Is Steinbeck the last mythmaker?) Johnson may streamline Steinbeck to a degree that softens his guarded optimism, but his script is of tonal fidelity; Ford, revolutionizing talkies by revisiting the techniques of silent-era Expressionism with world-class cinematographer Gregg Toland, gives the picture the glaze of a thriller, as though recognizing a new urgency in old rhymes.

The Statement (2003) – DVD

May 10, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Thriller, UK

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Michael Caine, Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Northam, Alan Bates
screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Brian Moore
directed by Norman Jewison

by Walter Chaw A so-so director even at his best (thinking of The Cincinnati Kid) who vacillates aimlessly between soft romantic comedies and undisguised, under-informed diatribes against barn sides like big business (Rollerball, F.I.S.T., Other People's Money), American racism (In the Heat of the Night, A Soldier's Story, The Hurricane), and religious intolerance (Jesus Christ Superstar, Agnes of God, The Statement), Norman Jewison is full of activism–just not terribly ripe with ideas and perspective. His fists are of ham and his pulpit is splintered from the hammering, Jewison's political films distinctive mainly for the broadness of their focus and his romantic films distinctive for the extent to which the facile cultural stereotypes he seems so concerned about elsewhere are machined into the rom-com grist mill therein.

Millennium Actress (2002) + Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

May 9, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Japan, Romance

MILLENNIUM ACTRESS
***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Satoshi Kon and Sadayuki Murai
directed by Satoshi Kon

TOKYO GODFATHERS
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by Keiko Nobumoto and Satoshi Kon
directed by Satoshi Kon and Shôgo Furuya

by Walter Chaw Four years separate Satoshi Kon's astonishing Perfect Blue and his astonishing Millennium Actress; it seems that what the intervening period brought to Kon's palette is a strong sense of visual humour and an affecting pathos to cut the existential dread of his identity crises–the year or two distancing Tokyo Godfathers from Millennium Actress further refining Kon as a humorist even as it blunted his razor's edge. Where Perfect Blue is the first film in decades to use Hitchcock correctly in a sentence, it still fails for the most part to jump from horror to hilarity on the turn of a heel, making its story of an actress being stalked by a doppelgänger brilliant, no question, but also relentlessly grim. Millennium Actress takes many of the same themes (down to the same basic structure) of performance and meta-reality, stage and screen, cradling them in a story about a man's lifetime of unrequited love for an actress, herself suffering from a lifetime's unrequited love for a mysterious revolutionary. Both threads entwine in a mutual affection for the life of the cinema, which, by film's end, serves as the ends and the means by which their respective love stories are resolved. Like Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress is about living with ghosts, but where the one is all shadow, Millennium Actress is all alight.

Miracle (2004) [Widescreen] + Club Dread (2004) – DVDs

May 6, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Canada, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Horror, Sports, Thriller

MIRACLE
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Kurt Russell, Patricia Clarkson, Noah Emmerich, Eddie Cahill
screenplay by Eric Guggenheim
directed by Gavin O'Connor

Broken Lizard's Club Dread
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Brittany Daniel, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Jordan Ladd
screenplay by Broken Lizard
directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

by Bill Chambers That it's well-cast, well-shot, and well-edited leads one to conclude that Miracle is, in fact, well-directed (by Tumbleweeds' Gavin O'Connor). It's therefore invaluable, really, as proof that nothing can save a hackneyed screenplay. The film, which recreates a rink-bound pissing contest between the U.S. and Soviet hockey teams at the 1980 Olympics that retroactively came to stand for a Seabiscuit-like national uplift, is so self-critiquing that watching it is purely a formality and only an occasional joy, not for its underdog intrigue, but for its technical proficiency and the ever-dependable Kurt Russell. (If there are better actors than Russell, there certainly aren't better movie stars.) Surmounting a number of aesthetic obstacles, including a moptop that looks scalped from his character in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Russell skillfully essays real-life coach Herb Brooks, a failed puck-slinger looking to live vicariously through a gold medal line-up.

The Return (2003) + Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (2003)

May 6, 2004Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Russia, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller

Vozvrashcheniye
****/****
starring Vladimir Garin, Ivan Dobronravov, Konstantin Lavronenko, Natalya Vdovina
screenplay by Vladimir Moiseyenko & Aleksandr Novototsky
directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev

SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER… AND SPRING
****/****
starring Yeong-su Oh, Ki-duk Kim, Young-min Kim, Jae-kyeong Seo
written and directed by Ki-duk Kim

by Walter Chaw Andrei Tarkovsky by way of Terrence Malick, Andrei Zvyagintsev's shockingly assured debut The Return (Vozvrashcheniye) approaches the primitive through the sublime, finding the first testament of human existence in the bland, devouring indifference of the natural and providing the moribund Russian film industry its first real voice in a generation. While it's impeccably acted and scripted with a respect for the spaces before, after, and between, what astounds about the picture is Zvyagintsev's patient, painterly eye, which fills the void in world cinema left by Takeshi Kitano since the first half of Brother and offers a voice of simple, audacious purity that fashions of the cinema something like a cold blue rapier. The Return is as good a film debut (and in almost the same way) as Malick's Badlands: an intimate character study and an archetypical road trip that fashions a crystalline portrait of a very specific time and place that, nonetheless, shines a light on the landmarks of a collective interior. Zvyagintsev talks about boys needing their father and couches it in terms poetic and mesmerizing.