I Remember Mama (1948) + George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey (1984) – DVDs

Posted in1940s, 1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Family

I REMEMBER MAMA
***/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Irene Dunne, Barbara Bel Geddes, Oscar Homolka, Philip Dorn
screenplay by Dewitt Bodeen, based on the play by John Van Drutten
directed by George Stevens

GEORGE STEVENS: A FILMMAKER'S JOURNEY
**/**** Image A- Sound A-
directed by George Stevens, Jr.

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Andrew Sarris once remarked that George Stevens was "a minor director with major virtues" who became "a major director with minor virtues." He was referring to the point at which Stevens cast screwball frivolity aside in favour of the lugubrious, but there's more complexity to the A Place in the Sun helmer than that: he was simultaneously light and heavy, keeping details in focus as he blew small stuff way out of proportion. His dramatic talent is the kind that gets overestimated by Oscar-watchers but underestimated by intellectuals, falling in some distorted medium that is major and minor at the same time.

21 Grams (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, Charlotte Gainsbourg
screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga
directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

by Bill Chambers Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros was the first film in the wake of Pulp Fiction to wallow in criminal behaviour and monkey with chronology that still managed to stake its own cinematic claim (not the least of which, inaugurating the Mexican New Wave) far removed from the squatters in Tarantinoland, and if I found its fatalism terribly endearing, I realize now that I also derived a lot of pleasure from its trip-hop vibe, which served a function as the film’s levity. To its great detriment, 21 Grams has no sense of humour: Iñárritu seeks to depress you with his English-language sophomore effort by weaving a tapestry of dejection and sorrow, but unless the sun breaks through the clouds once in a while, how can we lament its absence? That Iñárritu dismisses the human process of adaptation in examining the aftermath of a fatal car accident is only half the problem: he underestimates the swiftness with which an audience grows acclimated and eventually impervious to suffering, too.

The Long, Hot Summer (1958) + Hud (1963) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1950s, 1960s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Western

THE LONG, HOT SUMMER
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Franciosa, Orson Welles
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the William Faulkner stories "Barn Burning" and "The Spotted Horses"
directed by Martin Ritt

by Walter Chaw The Long, Hot Summer is a classic example of Hollywood trying to have it both ways: it combines the seriousness of a literary property and some young Method talent with the lurid garishness of a dime-store novel. Seizing upon the exploitable elements–all that decadent behaviour and sexual dysfunction–of William Faulkner's work, the film pushes them to the fore, giving the cast the opportunity to sex things up in bare-shirted, post-Brando fashion. As a result, the film resembles soapy melodrama much more than Faulkner ("NOT SINCE PEYTON PLACE!" screams the trailer), but it's melodrama with the strength of its fetid convictions that makes for lively entertainment, whatever its shortcomings.

So Close (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Hong Kong, Romance, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Shu Qi, Vicki Zhao, Karen Mok, Song Seung Hun
screenplay by Jeff Lau
directed by Corey Yuen

by Walter Chaw Frankly, So Close could suck a tennis ball through a keyhole. Directed by action choreographer Corey Yuen (whose The Transporter I actually sort of liked), the film, a head-scratching mix of elaborate camera angles and stultifying “Dragnet” editing, is so dedicated to trundling from one rigorously disinteresting action set-piece to the next that it’s fair to wonder why the filmmakers even bothered to provide exposition of any sort.

Assassination Tango (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

***/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Robert Duvall, Ruben Blades, Kathy Baker, Luciana Pedraza
written and directed by Robert Duvall

by Walter Chaw In one of a series of largely-improvised exchanges about the mystical hold of the tango on the spirit of Argentines, a crusty veteran confides in enigmatic Yankee hitman John J. (Robert Duvall, also writer-director) that the tango, among absolutes such as love and hate, is life. In Assassination Tango, the titular dance is also the metaphor for the desire to find balance between the brutish and the sublime or, failing that, to provide a strict framework within which the brute can prowl. (A visit to a caged panther in a Buenos Aires zoo becomes the visual manifestation of the idea as well as oblique reference to Kafka's "The Hunger Artist," the hero of which searches, like J., for sustenance.) The tango is the urgent pull of ritual that binds animal sexuality into the meticulous structure of dance, working on the literal level as doppelgänger to John J.'s carefully-controlled, gradually encroaching chaos and on another level as metaphor for a filmmaker seeking equilibrium between personal crisis and professional ambition at the end of his career. It's rationale enough for a picture so often interested in frustrating narrative to the benefit of the richness of its palimpsest; if ever there were a film that lives entirely in its subtext, Assassination Tango (even its title a semantic conundrum) is it.

Cold Mountain (2003)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Italy, Road Movie, Romance, Romania, Theatrical, UK, War

*½/****
starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Charles Frazier
directed by Anthony Minghella

Coldmountainby Walter Chaw Existing in an awards-season netherworld where the ugliest girl is Renée Zellweger (or Jena Malone), dad is Donald Sutherland, and Odysseus is Jude Law, Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain is a tarted-up march to the awards-night podium starring Nicole Kidman, possibly the most over-exposed actor of the last five years. Everything about the film is careful artifice, from its casting to its grandiloquent direction to its half-baked dialogue ("Small moments like a bag of diamonds," indeed), with only Law, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the magnificent Brendan Gleeson emerging unscathed from the golden wreckage. What Minghella seems best at is recasting edged, emotionally tumultuous novels into sun-kissed temples to the cinematographer's craft, the more dappled sunlight in the eye with which to bedazzle awards-season voters. The strength of Charles Frazier's National Book Award-winning source material lies in its socio-political details of America's Civil War period, but Minghella has focused his picture unerringly on the overrated novel's weaknesses instead: its dialogue, its clumsy Homeric riff (for better country-fried Odyssey, stick to O Brother Where Art Thou?), and its sweeping gothic romance, which finds its characters, at one point, reading the real deal in Wuthering Heights. The result is, like Minghella's previous literary adaptations (The Talented Mr. Ripley and The English Patient), lavish, lugubrious, and off-target.

Teknolust (2003); In July (2000); Taking Sides (2002); Monster (2003)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Germany, Music, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

TEKNOLUST
**/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Davies, James Urbaniak, Karen Black
written and directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson

Im Juli.
***/****
starring Moritz Bleibtreu, Christiane Paul, Mehmet Kurtulus, Idil Üner
written and directed by Fatih Akin

TAKING SIDES
**/****
starring Harvey Keitel, Stellan Skarsgård, Moritz Bleibtreu, Birgit Minichmayr
screenplay by Ronald Harwood
directed by István Szabó

MONSTER
**½/****
starring Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern, Scott Wilson
written and directed by Patty Jenkins

by Walter Chaw As the year winds down and distributors great and small try to cram their films into rotation for possible awards consideration, the truism that there are just as many mediocre foreign and independent films as mainstream ones proves sage for a quartet of minor releases. Lynn Hershman-Leeson chimes in with Teknolust, another of her riffs on Derek Jarman, this one obsessed with Tilda Swinton and eternity through technology. Fatih Akin’s second film In July (Im Juli.) is essentially a German The Sure Thing with elements of After Hours, obsessed with eternity through an immortal beloved lit by the nimbus of various suns. One-time Oscar-winner István Szabó offers Taking Sides, a morality tale plucked half-formed from the stage, questioning the eternity of art against the requirements of morality. And Patty Jenkins weighs in with Monster, this year’s Boys Don’t Cry; it’s vérité as lower-class urban ugly, with Charlize Theron seeking eternity through a performance that breaks her out of her starlet mold, Halle Berry-style. Only time will tell if any of it keeps.

Destry Rides Again (1939) + The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) – DVDs

Posted in1930s, 1960s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Western

DESTRY RIDES AGAIN
***/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart, Brian Donlevy, Charles Winninger
screenplay by Felix Jackson, Gertrude Purcell and Henry Mayers, based on the novel by Max Brand
directed by George Marshall

THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX
***/**** Image A- Sound A
starring James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Hardy Kruger
screenplay by Lukas Heller, from the novel by Elleston Trevor
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The word "clever" can be used as a compliment or an insult–it's either a means of saying how ingenious you are, or a way of showing how far you are from being "intelligent." The same goes for the star rating, which can be used to mark a sleeper that shows some real talent or to warn you that something is "only entertainment"–when is three stars just right, and when is it not enough? This is the conundrum that faces me in reviewing Destry Rides Again and The Flight of the Phoenix, two films completely separate in time and subject matter, but which both rate about the same in terms of their achievement. But despite their equal entertainment value, I have a better feeling about Phoenix than I do about Destry: it's more creative and resourceful, even if it doesn't come off perfectly. That doesn't mean you shouldn't see Destry, though it is an indication that you shouldn't raise your hopes too high for it–and that you might be surprised by the lesser-known Phoenix.

Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal
screenplay by Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal
directed by Mike Newell

by Walter Chaw Julia Roberts films, by and large, seem to hate men. In a real way, her pictures are as objectionable as those films regularly pilloried for objectifying women (and those like the unforgivable Love Actually that somehow slip under the radar for doing the same), functioning as something of a reactionary version of feminism that seeks to denigrate the opposite gender as the sole means toward gender equality. The big secret about films like Mona Lisa Smile is that they’re every bit the big-budget Hollywood spectacle film derided by a goodly portion of its audience as puerile, predictable, and thematically reprehensible. Because Mona Lisa Smile is so much the child of formula, it’s difficult to muster much energy in condemning the film by itself–by itself, after all, it’s handsomely mounted and well-performed. But as a symptom of that facile societal desire for superficial uplifts and comforting negative stereotypes, the smoothness of the coating for this bitter pill deserves some measure of profound distaste.

House of Sand and Fog (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jennifer Connelly, Ben Kingsley, Ron Eldard, Frances Fisher
screenplay by Vadim Perelman and Shawn Lawrence Otto
directed by Vadim Perelman

Houseofsandandfogby Walter Chaw Based on an award-winning novel by Andres Dubus III, son of Canadian novelist and short-story writer Andre Dubus, Vadim Perelman's hyphenate debut House of Sand and Fog is difficult to gauge on its own merits, given that the typically invasive grandiosity of another abominable James Horner score sinks the picture almost by itself. With no moment uncommented-upon by Horner's bank of weeping violins and no lovely Roger Deakins tableau unmarred by Horner's insatiable taste for schmaltz, the picture is a prime example of two things: the prestige picture/Oscar grab; and the film of grand emotions that decides to trust its composer over its cast and screenplay. The similarities between House of Sand and Fog and In the Bedroom (a film based on Dubus Sr.'s short story "Killings") are obvious, but where the latter allows its cast to breathe, House of Sand and Fog smothers Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly in a fatal dose of Horner's saccharine ministrations. In Horner's defense, however, the extended climax during which a vein-popping Kingsley is allowed too much rein is awful without help.

Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Second Season (1998-1999) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Dawson's Creek, Drama, DVD, Teen, Television

Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
“The Kiss”, “Crossroads”, “Alternative Lifestyles”, “Tamara’s Return”, “Full Moon Rising”, “The Dance”, “The All-Nighter”, “The Reluctant Hero”, “The Election”, “High Risk Behavior”, “Sex, She Wrote,” “Uncharted Waters”, “His Leading Lady”, “To Be or Not to Be…”, “…That is the Question”, “Be Careful What You Wish For”, “Psychic Friends”, “A Perfect Wedding”, “Abby Morgan, Rest in Peace”, “Reunited”, “Ch…Ch…Ch…Changes”, “Parental Discretion Advised”

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In striving for an original approach to reviewing the sophomore year of a show for which there are already umpteen online episode guides at one’s disposal, I’ve decided to take inventory of “Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Second Season”‘s seven major players. A series driven by personalities, if far from light on incident, “Dawson’s Creek”, as executive producer Paul Stupin says in his DVD commentary for the season finale (or is it the premiere?), hit pay dirt with its core ensemble, so let’s examine how their roles evolved beyond the preliminary 13-episode run–and meet a couple of interlopers while we’re at it.

Love Don’t Co$t a Thing (2003) + Something’s Gotta Give (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Jack Nicholson, Romance, Theatrical

LOVE DON'T CO$T A THING
½*/****
starring Nick Cannon, Jordan Burg, Jackie Benoit, George Cedar
screenplay by Troy Beyer and Michael Swerdlick, based on Swerdlick's screenplay Can't Buy Me Love
directed by Troy Beyer

SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE
*/****
starring Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, Amanda Peet, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Nancy Meyers

by Walter Chaw The only thing stranger than an urban remake of the late-'80s Patrick Dempsey teensploitation flick Can't Buy Me Love is a blow-by-blow remake of 2000's What Women Want, the latter suddenly more understandable in light of the stultifying limitations John Gray-disciple Nancy Meyers brings to the table as writer-director of that unforgivable rom-com and the dedicatedly unremarkable Something's Gotta Give as well. The disturbing realization is that both Love Don't Co$t a Thing and Something's Gotta Give are products of women filmmakers, writing and directing films in an industry, at least in the United States, still dominated by men–and that both films are non-descript, fairly unflattering to women, definitively unkind to men, and ostensible comedies that wring the genre dry with great droughts of meet-cute, contrivance, bad direction, and enough predictable, twee dialogue to fill a dozen Ephron sisters pictures.

Dream a Little Dream (1989) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

*½/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Jason Robards, Corey Feldman, Piper Laurie, Meredith Salenger
screenplay by Daniel Jay Franklin and Marc Rocco & D.E. Eisenberg
directed by Marc Rocco

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover How to describe the sublimely awful experience of Dream a Little Dream? Imagine a whacked-out homage combo to John Hughes and Nicolas Roeg–one made without the talent or intelligence of either–and you’ll have an idea of its astoundingly ill-advised combination of temporal step-dancing and teenage romance. You have to admire the guts of director Marc Rocco for going so far out on aesthetic limbs that he’ll inevitably crash to earth–if nothing else, he’s willing to try things, and his plotting and editing rhythms are so unlike anything in the rest of the ’80s teen genre that they border on the avant-garde. Dream a Little Dream isn’t actually good, but it’s certainly never dull, and it will keep bad-film enthusiasts forever wallowing in pig heaven.

Seabiscuit (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Sports

*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Cooper, Tobey Maguire, Elizabeth Banks
screenplay by Gary Ross, based on the book by Laura Hillenbrand
directed by Gary Ross

by Walter Chaw In a summer redolent with superhero melodramas, Seabiscuit, a Golden Age bodice-twister about a plucky boy and his intrepid horse populated with a cast of good-looking cut-outs to fill out the good-looking backgrounds, isn't even the most interesting. All of it feels a little airless–a carefully-manipulated arrangement composed entirely of meticulously-preserved flowers that give the illusion of vitality when in truth, they're taken out of time and well past their prime. Seabiscuit could have been made in the 1940s–and it was, really, as My Friend Flicka: two untamed spirits tamed by one another while various authority figures wisely cheer them on. Like that film, writer-director Gary Ross's adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's excellent non-fiction washes out as something creepily nostalgic, weightless, and unintentionally disturbing. There's something poetic about a scene in the middle of Seabiscuit when Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges, always good) leaves in the middle of a bloody bullfight when taken with a line later in the film when plucky boy jockey Red (Tobey Maguire) warns his replacement not to beat Seabiscuit on his left flank because "that's where he was beaten when he was young." Beat him on the right side, is the implication, and decades of conditioning from other films (particularly Disney's anthropomorphic films) have made driving animals to the brink of exhaustion and death at the end of whip a little hard to take with a blithe indifference.

The Last Samurai (2003) + The Girl from Paris (2003)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Japan, New Zealand, Theatrical, Tom Cruise

THE LAST SAMURAI
**½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Billy Connolly, Tony Goldwyn, Shin Koyamada
screenplay by John Logan and Marshall Herskovitz & Edward Zwick
directed by Edward Zwick

Une hirondelle a fait le printemps
***/****
starring Michel Serrault, Mathilde Seigner, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Frédéric Pierrot
screenplay by Christian Carion and Eric Assous
directed by Christian Carion

Lastsamuraiby Walter Chaw Concerned with the encroachment of technology, spawned by the humanism of the French Revolution, Romanticism as a movement in poetry is involved in nostalgia for an idealized Natural history. On film, it occasionally manifests itself in period pieces that focus on the encroachment and proliferation of the railroad: its engines (as in King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun and Beyond the Forest, or the Hughes Brothers’ From Hell) the manifestation of the industrial revolution in terms of hellmouths and serpents–William Blake’s “Tyger” burning bright in the forests of a primordial night, all-consuming and inexorable. That loss of ritual to the march of time, tradition and heritage falling before the metal chimera of technology finds itself articulated in two very different films: Edward Zwick’s curious, derivative, workmanlike The Last Samurai, and Christian Carion’s bleak and affecting The Girl from Paris (Une hirondelle a fait le printemps).

City of Ghosts (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Matt Dillon, James Caan, Natascha McElhone, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Matt Dillon & Barry Gifford
directed by Matt Dillon

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It pains me to have to pan something as accomplished as Matt Dillon's directorial debut City of Ghosts. On a technical level, the film is unimpeachable, moving at a comfortable click and remarkably seamless in its creation and assembly; it's not genius, perhaps, but it's certainly capable and, considering that it's a first feature, surprisingly at ease with the mechanics of image-making. Alas, image-making is not the only criteria by which we judge a movie, and so it must be regretfully said that the story that City of Ghosts has to tell is at best condescending and at worst casually racist, with a tourist's eye for the Phnom Penh setting viewing one more Marlow looking for his Kurtz.

Darling (1965) – DVD

Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK

*½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Julie Christie, Laurence Harvey, Dirk Bogarde
screenplay by Frederic Raphael
directed by John Schlesinger

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Marking the point where Britain's realist directors turned from the proletariat to Swinging London, Darling is determined to show you all the depravity the latter milieu entails–and then make you suffer for it. The film is stultifying in its old-bourgeois disapproval of what used to be condescendingly referred to as "the younger generation," and as it ticks off the sins of its titular protagonist, Darling only makes you hate the filmmakers for being so high and mighty. There's no real analysis of what motivates the picture's aimless and amoral heroine, and no appreciation of the complexity of her plight; there is only smug moral judgment and a curt dismissal. The film is so self-consciously "serious" that it counts out any and all pleasure as shallow and destructive, leaving a grimy austerity that is as taken with surfaces as the woman it's supposed to be indicting.

Eloise at the Plaza (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Julie Andrews, Jeffrey Tambor, Sofia Vassilieva, Christine Baranski
screenplay by Janet Brownell, based on the book written by Kay Thompson & illustrated by Hilary Knight
directed by Kevin Lima

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I never thought I'd hear myself saying this, but Eloise at the Plaza is made with far greater skill and care than a Disney TV-movie would normally warrant. Derived from the much-loved children's books by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight, the film goes out of its way to reproduce their junior-NEW YORKER tone, only in a heavily formalist, hyper-real manner that thrives on perfect shape and well-timed movement. So accomplished is the look of the film that it makes one forget the mealy-mouthed sentiment of some of the dialogue–the clockwork archness of the production transforms its clichés into pure narrative form, so that they might give pleasure in their deployment and execution. In short, it's much better than it had to be and not half bad on its own terms, even by the standards of devoted cynics like me.

Bubba Ho-Tep (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

***/****
starring Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Reggie Bannister, Bob Ivy
screenplay by Don Coscarelli, based on the novel by Joe R. Lansdale
directed by Don Coscarelli

by Walter Chaw Joe R. Lansdale is best known for his tales of the “weird west,” a genre mixing splatterpunk with alternate-history western almost entirely defined by the author in the early-Nineties. His work reads a little like the sort of folklore in which Mark Twain dabbled (or the gothic in which Flannery O’Connor was involved), but with zombies and gore, while Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho-Tep, an adaptation of a Lansdale short story, is steeped in the same sort of bent sensibility that informs the author’s work, performing something like a masterstroke in casting Bruce Campbell as Elvis and Ossie Davis as JFK–if ultimately falling a little short of the astonishing audacity of Lansdale’s prose. (That very ballsiness what has kept any film prior to this one being made from Lansdale’s work, methinks.) What distinguishes the picture, however, is what feels like a genuine concern for the difficulties of aging and the aged, a melancholy tone to the proceedings that, fascinatingly, equates a mummy unquiet for being buried nameless with a pair of American folk heroes declining, also anonymous, in a retirement facility in East Texas.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, War

***½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, James D’Arcy, Edward Woodall
screenplay by Peter Weir & John Collee, based on the novel by Patrick O’Brian
directed by Peter Weir

by Walter Chaw By turns brutal and majestic, Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (hereafter Master and Commander) reunites the antipodean director with Russell Boyd, the cinematographer with whom he shot The Last Wave, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously, and the two have produced a picture on par with those films: historically aware, but more notable for its epic beauty and scope. The effect of Master and Commander is rapture–it engulfs with its detail, finding time to flirt with the secrets of the Galapagos as parallel to the unfolding mystery of technology that finds the HMS Surprise outclassed by the French Acheron, stealthy and peerless enough to inspire speculations of supernatural origin. Issues of the old at war with the new (superstition vs. science, instinct vs. calculation) are nothing new for Weir, who is, after all, at his best when examining the dangers of individuals at odds with tradition, and the rewards for modern men able to assimilate the ancient into the new.