Chariots of Fire (1981) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

April 3, 2006Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Drama, DVD, Sports, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Nigel Havers, Cheryl Campbell
screenplay by Colin Welland
directed by Hugh Hudson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Crushed by the upset win at this year's Oscars, a critic friend of mine bemoaned the fact that "until the Earth crashes into the sun, Crash will have won Best Picture." I couldn't help thinking of that while watching Chariots of Fire, a film that would have been forgotten long ago had it not copped its own surprise Oscar in 1981. I still can't wrap my head around its slipping through the cracks: though there's an awesome professionalism at work, it's remote and inhuman enough to push you far outside the action, making it seem as if its rather primitive story is being viewed by astronauts looking in the opposite direction. The film is so obsessed with the dead surfaces of period detail that it winds up stifling its simple underdog narrative. Watching the virtuous come out on top isn't much fun when the filmmakers appear to be thinking of anything other than that triumph over whatever.

Fun with Dick and Jane (2005) – DVD

April 2, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

½*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Jim Carrey, Téa Leoni, Alec Baldwin, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Judd Apatow & Nicholas Stoller
directed by Dean Parisot

Funwdickandjane2005capby Walter Chaw Dean Parisot's remake of Ted Kotcheff's 1977 Fun with Dick and Jane is simultaneously lifeless and desperate, a collection of horrid eleventh-hour edits that result in jokes without punchlines and Carrey's old physical-comedy riffs trotted out in the service of a half-assed redux of a half-assed original. The one nod to freshening up the original's full-frontal assault on capitalism as a means towards happiness (a satirical slot machine tugged to better effect by the act and allure of playing "The Sims") is that it's set in the year 2000 and deals with corporate malfeasance of the kind most conspicuously indulged in by Enron. (In case you don't get that, the last rimshot of the film is taken at Enron's expense, while the first closing credit is a "special thanks" to Ken Lay and his lieutenants.) The fictional big bad fiscal wolf of the piece is Globodyne, presided over by Jack McAllister (Alec Baldwin, in his second corporate bigwig turn after Elizabethtown), a southerner mainly because "southerner" is one of the last cultural groups (along with, say, Asians and gays) you can mock without much fear of backlash. On the day before it's revealed that "Big Jack" has stripped the corporate coffers (including pensions), Dick (Carrey) is promoted to VP of something or another, inspiring wife Jane (Leoni) to quit her job and pushing Dick before the cameras on some Lou Dobbs's "Moneyline" show, where he discovers, in a very public way, that his steed is a paper tiger.

Huff: The Complete First Season; Masters of Horror: Dreams in the Witch House; Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns – DVDs

March 30, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: John Carpenter, Drama, DVD, Horror

HUFF: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON (2004-2005)
Image A Sound B Extras C
"Pilot," "Assault and Pepper," "Lipstick on Your Panties," "Control," "Flashpants," "Is She Dead?," "That Fucking Cabin," "Cold Day in Shanghai," "Christmas Is Ruined," "The Good Doctor," "The Sample Closet," "All the King's Horses," "Crazy Nuts & All Fucked Up"

MASTERS OF HORROR: H.P. LOVECRAFT'S DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE (2005)
Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Ezra Godden, Chelah Horsdal
teleplay by Dennis Paoli & Stuart Gordon, based on the story by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Stuart Gordon

MASTERS OF HORROR: CIGARETTE BURNS (2005)
Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Norman Reedus, Udo Kier
teleplay by Drew McWeeny & Scott Swan
directed by John Carpenter

by Walter Chaw In an effort to step out from the shadow of HBO's remarkable run of original programming, Showtime contributes to the noise pollution with retarded, sub-par retreads like the inexplicably-lauded hour-longs "Weeds", "The L Word", and the puffed-up psychodrama "Huff". I'm a big fan of Hank Azaria, for no good reason, I guess, beyond his long-term involvement with "The Simpsons", but cast herein as the titular shrink (Craig "Huff" Huffstodt) who witnesses a gay patient (Noel Fisher) commit suicide in his office in the pilot episode, Azaria finds more than just his character neutered and ineffectual. The writing is the first problem with "Huff", leaning hard as it does on the Dr. Phil Handbook for Fake Shrinks in its therapy sessions (leave out the dead gay kid, incidentally, and until episode four's guy-who-refuses-to-shit Huff's patients all appear to be beautiful women) and making the bad mistake of thinking that castrating bitch goddess mothers (Blythe Danner, playing Estelle Getty), nymphomaniac wives (Paget Brewster), and precious/precocious kids (Anton Yelchin) will write themselves out of narrative Bermuda Triangles. Its lack of originality and stultifying obviousness isn't what I hate (it's too boring to hate), though: what I hate is the intrusion of the supernatural in the character of a Hungarian panhandler (Jack Lauger) Huff helps in ways so astonishingly altruistic as to suggest religious mania–not to mention an aesthetic that applies edits and score with the feckless aggression of the genuinely clueless. It looks cool, it sounds sage, and it leaves characters stranded in the middle of a whole lot of slick, iMovie-crunched, amateurish bullshit.

Bill Hicks: Sane Man (1989) – DVD

March 29, 2006Posted in1980s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Concert Doc, DVD

**½/**** Image D/C Sound D/B Extras C-
directed by Kevin Booth

by Alex Jackson For anybody who reads a lot of my work, it may seem as if I can’t get through an entire review without lodging this same complaint–but for the record, rebelliousness for the sake of rebelliousness should not be a characteristic of anybody’s art. Once you become a full-time professional rebel, you’ll eventually start telling the people who listen to you not to do so, and then what are we to do? You can’t fulfill that request without violating it and you can’t violate it without fulfilling it. Artists and consumers of the arts need to come up with their own ideas of what’s good and what’s not. If these ideas happen to coincide with the popular consensus, then that’s perfectly fine; and if they happen to go against the popular consensus, that’s fine, too. The opinion of the popular consensus should not really come into play, period. The professional rebel, as you could probably surmise, is a distinctly adolescent creation, but I do not denounce him because I wish to distinguish myself from adolescents. I denounce him because he’s vapid. He’s all for show and not serious about arriving at any fruitful universal truths.

Elizabethtown (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

March 28, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras D+
starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

Elizabethtowncapby Walter Chaw Casting about wildly for that elusive "Lubitsch Touch" so prized by his hero Billy Wilder, underdog-uplift auteur Cameron Crowe has patched together Elizabethtown: an awkward, shambling, Frankenstein's monster of a romantic screwball farce that, for all its slickness, shows off every one of its bolts and stitches in monstrous bas relief. Crowe piles on the pathos in this tale of fallen shoe designer Drew (Orlando Bloom), who travels from the West Coast to the semi-Deep South (the titular Elizabethtown, KY) to collect the ashes of his freshly-dead father for the purposes of a maudlin (and interminable) eleventh-hour road trip. "We should have done this years ago," says Drew to his dad's earthly remains, wiping away a brave tear, but for as machine-calibrated as the scene is to pluck at the heartstrings, there isn't–as there isn't at any moment in this film–a hint of authenticity to the sentiment. It's hard to question Crowe's earnestness, but it's easy to point at the alien remove of this picture and speculate as to whether the mom-dependent Crowe (has anyone checked to see if he's still attached to her umbilically?) has ever had a genuinely examined emotion regarding his pop.

Bee Season (2005) – DVD

March 27, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Germany

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, Flora Cross, Max Minghella
screenplay by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, based on the novel by Myla Goldberg
directed by Scott McGehee & David Siegel

Beeseasoncapby Walter Chaw A lot of mortal liberties were taken with Myla Goldberg's Bee Season on its way to the big screen under the pen of Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and direction of Scott McGehee and David Siegel, most of them having to do with softening the suffocating fanaticism and sensuality of the novel in favour of the soothing neutral tones of the fearful doorstop demographic. It's not that the book is better, it's that the book is entirely different: the one has a point of view while the other mainly boasts an air of pusillanimous equivocation that turns a vaguely threatening story concerning Kaballah and Hebrew mysticism into Searching for Bobby Fischer. The problem might be that Richard Gere's Saul is a hotshot college professor in this version, and completely reasonable and charming to boot. The problem might be, in other words, that Gere is too good for this movie.

Chicken Little (2005) – DVD

March 27, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
screenplay by Ron Anderson, Steve Bencich and Ron J.Friedman
directed by Mark Dindal

Chickenlittlecapby Walter Chaw Frantic, frenetic, anxious, obnoxious: the ideal audience for Chicken Little should be in bed by seven, and Disney's umpteenth cry of "sure-fire comeback project" looks, appropriately, like another convulsive episode of corporate crying-wolf. Chicken Little, for instance, makes pop culture references that don't mean anything in the context of a film whose sole purpose appears to be instructing your children to be fearful and hyper. They're just there to give parents, alternately stunned and bored, a little rootless pleasure in the middle of epileptic flash; what's left isn't clever (or kinetic) enough for us to ignore its essential emptiness. What Chicken Little is more than anything else is exhausting. You could by rights hope that it's is a send-up of the Fifties cycle of Martian invasion pictures (it name-checks War of the Worlds for no good reason) as The Incredibles was a send-up of Golden Age superhero comics, but even a cursory comparison between the two films shows that Disney's desperation to make Pixar's looming secession a non-issue is as limp and impotent as the Nevada State Boxing Commission.

Grey’s Anatomy: Season One (2005) + Arrested Development Season: Two (2004-2005) – DVDs

March 26, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Television

GREY'S ANATOMY: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound B Extras C
"A Hard Day's Night," "The First Cut Is the Deepest," "Winning a Battle, Losing the War," "No Man's Land," "Shake Your Groove Thing," "If Tomorrow Never Comes," "The Self Destruct Button," "Save Me," "Who's Zoomin' Who?"

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: SEASON TWO
Image A Sound B+ Extras B
"The One Where Michael Leaves," "The One Where They Build a House," "Amigos," "Good Grief!," "Sad Sack," "Afternoon Delight," "Switch Hitter," "Queen for a Day," "Burning Love," "Ready, Aim, Marry Me," "Out on a Limb," "My Hand to God," "Motherboy XXX," "The Immaculate Election," "The Sword of Destiny," "Meet the Veals," "Spring Breakout," "Righteous Brothers"

by Walter Chaw A show so odious, so repugnant, that it's impossible not to have predicted its newly-minted role as the most popular program in the land, Shonda Rhimes's "Grey's Anatomy" has the singular distinction of transforming the adorable Ellen Pompeo into a shallow, whorish version of Doogie Howser, practiced in the art of interspersing extraordinary, near-savant leaps of medical intuition with rolling in the hay with her boss, the hipster-dubbed Dr. McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey). When Dr. Meredith Grey meets a new patient, lay you even money that his/her pain and suffering will be used to augment Meredith's face-swallowing, thirtysomething pout, which is one thing–making her brilliant ex-doctor mother a victim of prime time soap opera Alzheimer's for the same ends is something else altogether. Other alternatives include Dr. Meredith babysitting a severed penis in a Coleman cooler and, better, her lingerie model-turned-MD cohort intervening on behalf of a man undergoing erection-threatening prostate surgery. What better way to end the season, then, but to do a whole episode about a syphilis epidemic sleazing like wildfire through the show's Seattle Grace Hospital?

The Losers (1970) – DVD

March 23, 2006Posted in1970s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Thriller, War

Nam's Angels
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring William Smith, Bernie Hamilton, Adam Roarke, Houston Savage
screenplay by Alan Caillou
directed by Jack Starrett

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Figuring out the ideology of an exploitation movie is a tricky proposition. The libertarian leanings of a form generally concerned with sex, violence, and loose living lend themselves to right and left interpretations, often within the same movie. Consider The Losers: in one corner, it's a biker exploitation number given to sticking it to the man and getting it on in mass quantities, but in the other, it's one of the few pre-Rambo movies to be unambiguously positive about the Vietnam war. This cross-genre mélange basically charts the right-left mix of biker gangs themselves, which could ally themselves with the counterculture or claim themselves to be the real free Americans in the same breath. Pity, then, that they have to do their free living at the expense of "slopes" and "slants"–evidence that freedom is a one-way street.

The Squid and the Whale (2005) + The Weather Man (2005)|The Squid and the Whale [Special Edition] – DVD

March 23, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
****/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring Laura Linney, Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

THE WEATHER MAN
½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis, Michael Rispoli
screenplay by Steven Conrad
directed by Gore Verbinski

Mustownby Walter Chaw The title refers to a New York Museum of Natural History diorama called "Clash of the Titans" that proposes what a tussle between a sperm whale and a giant squid would look like–and it functions as the final, stirring tableaux of a 16mm film self-consciously shot in the manner of early Jim Jarmusch or Spike Lee joints. But The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach's fourth film as writer-director, has inspired more conversation about the degree to which it does or does not tell the story of his own childhood–more specifically, the divorce of his parents, novelist Jonathan Baumbach and former VILLAGE VOICE film critic Georgia Brown–than about the self-reflexive canniness of the filmmaking itself.

Occupation: Dreamland (2005) – DVD

March 21, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD, War

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
directed by Garrett Scott & Ian Olds

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

"I guess someone smarter than me knows what's going on."
-Pfc. Thomas Turner, Occupation: Dreamland

Last year's thoroughly deplorable Gunner Palace had exactly one mode of thought: things are bad for our boys. Treating the citizens of Iraq as errant children and the soldiers like tin gods, it ironically had the effect of making the Iraqis look like victims and the troops look like callous, oblivious schmucks. Occupation: Dreamland is the necessary corrective to that film, at once granting the low-ranking occupiers a claim to feeling righteously confused and the occupied the right to answer back to people they never wanted there in the first place. Though many of the troops are as contemptuous as they were in Gunner Palace (some of them even more so), the overwhelming feeling is that nobody knows anything, with the inevitable end result being a mess of chaos and recrimination that neither side on the ground has a direct means of stopping. It's a reminder that the people who "know what's going on" are generally silent, largely remote, and completely unconcerned with the mess their ill-considered orders create.

King Kong (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

March 20, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Germany, New Zealand, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the screenplay by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace
directed by Peter Jackson

Mustownby Walter Chaw Naomi Watts is absolutely adorable in King Kong. Good thing, too, because she has to convince that with a few vaudeville pratfalls and a strategically-wielded switch she can win the heart of one of the most venerated monsters in movie history. The way Peter Jackson films her suggests that he’s found his own muse: she’s always set against impossible backlot sunsets, asked to feign love for a fake film before transforming herself–in the same, wonderful shot–into feigning real love for a man in this film when she spots her suitor, playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), author of a play (“Isolation”) for which she sees herself as perfect for the melancholy lead. (“You must be the saddest girl in New York.” She is.) In a lot of ways, Watts’s Ann Darrow is the logical extension of her Betty from Mulholland Drive: both are actresses with hidden elements to their personalities, both are asked to audition for us on an imaginary stage, and both, in the end, find themselves embroiled in a dark romance that ends in show-business betrayal. During the final third of King Kong, once the beast famously has Ann in his clutches while scaling the side of a mighty edifice in the Big Apple, it’s fair to be distracted by the rapture on her face–and to wonder if she knows that there’s only one eventuality possible to her quiescence.

Prime (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

March 17, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Meryl Streep, Uma Thurman, Bryan Greenberg, Jon Abrahams
written and directed by Ben Younger

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Conservatives may actually be right when they say that Hollywood is out of touch–their mistake lies in thinking it's because the major studios don't serve their agenda. More to the point, Hollywood is out of touch with human behaviour, ethical consistency, left or right politics, and simple cause and effect, so much so that the most "normal"-seeming of films is seething with unacknowledged fear and loathing. One might expect a film about a 37-year-old woman dating a 23-year-old man, for instance, to have some feminist or at least Freudian subtext, especially when coupled with the fact that the young man's mother is the older woman's therapist. But Hollywood's version–the pointless and confused Prime–goes out of its way to avoid the dangerous implications of its subject matter, hedging its bets enough times that it's impossible to divine what the hell it's trying to say.

Dimples (1936) + Mad Hot Ballroom (2005) – DVDs

March 17, 2006Posted in1930s, 2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, DVD, Family, Musical

DIMPLES
**/**** Image F (colorized)/C (b&w) Sound C
starring Shirley Temple, Frank Morgan, Robert Kent, Stepin Fetchit
screenplay by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin
directed by William A. Seiter

MAD HOT BALLROOM
*/**** Image B Sound B
directed by Marilyn Agrelo

Dimplescapby Alex Jackson When Chuck Workman juxtaposed Shirley Temple with Adolf Hitler in his underseen 1995 documentary The First 100 Years, he was dramatizing America's suckling on the opium pipe of Temple musicals while Hitler rose to power in Germany. This is reflective of the general attitude towards Temple in the 1940s: not only was she no longer cute, she also embodied a sense of brain-dead frivolousness in American film that the zeitgeist started snuffing out through soppy sentimentality, hardened disillusionment, or some combination of the two. Movies got heavy in the Forties, and Temple could not keep up with them.

Big Bad Mama (1974) [Roger Corman: Early Films] – DVD

March 14, 2006Posted in1970s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B-
starring Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, Tom Skerritt, Susan Sennett
screenplay by William Norton and Frances Doel
directed by Steve Carver

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Has Molly Haskell written on Big Bad Mama? The title of her seminal feminist study on American film–From Reverence to Rape—fits the movie and its two-faced approach to women perfectly. Under any other circumstances, completely implacable mother Wilma McClatchie (Angie Dickinson) would be a feminist superhero for her ability to go on the lam and do what's best for her daughters, all while swindling the system. But Wilma's will-to-power is largely played for laughs: not only is she way in denial about her offspring's abilities (both of whom turn out to be brain-dead sex objects), but her whole mission is perceived as transgressive in the wrong ways, opening her up to ridicule and, in her nude scenes, degradation. One doesn't expect feminism from Roger Corman, but the handling of the women in Big Bad Mama is telling about a time and place far beyond its diegetic moment.

Pride & Prejudice (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

March 14, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Romance, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Brenda Blethyn, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Deborah Moggach
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw There's fat to be trimmed from Joe Wright's noble go at Jane Austen's adapted-to-death Pride and Prejudice, which clocks in at a flabby 127 minutes (yet still seems somehow rushed at its conclusion), but when it works, it does for Austen what Kenneth Branagh's Henry V and Hamlet did for Shakespeare: it makes the trials of these iconic literary figures feel immediate and sensible–and it does so with a screenplay (by Deborah Moggach) that understands what parts of the text are timeless and what parts are not. This isn't to say that this Pride & Prejudice is more post-modern than the source, but that Wright understands where to prompt top-billed Keira Knightley to laugh sardonically and thus crafts an illusion of an interior life for her Elizabeth Bennet beyond the usual impression of adolescent cattiness. Knightley may very well be headed for an Oscar nomination for what has become the chick-Hamlet (Austen being the crucible through which young British actors put themselves in preparation for, I guess, Domino and sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean), but I'm thinking if she gets one, she owes at least half of it to Wright for the amount of time he put into highlighting her script.

Everything is Illuminated (2005) + A History of Violence (2005)|A History of Violence [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

March 13, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, DVD, Theatrical, Thriller

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
**/****
starring Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin, Laryssa Lauret
screenplay by Liev Schreiber, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
directed by Liev Schreiber

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt
screenplay by Josh Olson, based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw A year after a glut of films about the past being wilfully stifled by the present, find Liev Schreiber's Everything is Illuminated and David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, literal calls to awake following the nightmare of the night before–or, better, avenues through which we might recognize that suppressing a collective shadow mainly serves to nourish it until it explodes, monstrous, back into our consciousness. The one is based on an Anthony Burgess-like book of great linguistic imagination by Jonathan Safran Foer, the other a spare graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke–and just the obliqueness of the respective source materials speaks to the primacy of their message: "Everything is illuminated by the past." The keystone line in Schreiber's picture, this serves as a mission statement of sorts for both films, locating in the middle of this first decade of the new millennium something that feels like a weary acceptance that not only are we products of our trauma and misdeeds, but also that our trauma and misdeeds are beyond redress and completely inescapable. To parse the best line in Kenneth Branagh's Dead Again, it's the karmic payment plan: buy now, pay forever.

Junebug (2005) – DVD

March 10, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Amy Adams, Embeth Davidtz, Ben McKenzie, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Angus MacLachlan
directed by Phil Morrison

by Walter Chaw Charting the vicissitudes of regional attitudes and the mercurial family dynamic, Phil Morrison's Junebug restores some of the lustre to the indie dysfunction genre (and to the Sundance imprint) with a beautifully performed drama about the cost of grace. If critics have a function anymore besides carving their own gravestones on the marble of modern cinema, it's to point a finger at films like Junebug, which sounds like a thousand other pictures but is actually something all its own: a Southern Gothic in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor that treats its characters as more than plot-movers or cardboard caricatures. More, it tackles an issue as delicate as outsider art with a deceptively sharp satirist's scalpel, understanding that the best weapon against paternalism is an affectionate portrayal of people just as mean, petty, and ruined by life as the rest of us. It can't hurt that its cast is uniformly fantastic, that its script, by Angus MacLachlan, is intuitive and smart, and that Morrison understands devalued things like mise-en-scène and visual metaphors, presenting them with a quiet, unobtrusive confidence. Junebug is a character study in every way that "character study" used to be the gold standard instead of an overworked catchphrase used to describe boring, predictable low-budget movies set in the 1970s. It's nasty and it's lovely, it's nuanced and complex.

Forbidden Games (1952) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

March 9, 2006Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, War

Jeux interdits
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Brigitte Fossey, Georges Poujouly, Amédée, Laurence Badie
screenplay by Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, François Boyer, René Clément
directed by René Clément

Forbiddengamescapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover René Clément's Forbidden Games is perhaps the best place to begin when comparing the Nouvelle Vague to its nemesis, the Tradition of Quality. As the director (and co-scenarists Pierre Bost and Georges Aurenche, regular CAHIERS DU CINEMA whipping boys) came in for abuse under Truffaut, there's no denying the film's connection to the ToQ and how that tradition represses so much of its more disturbing content. Indeed, one wonders how a movie that revolves around a WWII orphan named Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) who nicks grave markers can be this matter-of-fact and cute. Despite the astonishing morbidity of the subject matter, the film goes about it like Wally and the Beav setting barrel hoops for Lumpy Rutherford. Still, its total lack of shame is something that would be lost in the ensuing New Wave revolution, and though big claims for it are hard to make, it's remarkably fresh and open–if more than a little naïve.

The War of the Worlds (1953) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

March 7, 2006Posted in1950s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Gene Barry, Ann Robinson, Les Tremayne
screenplay by Barré Lyndon, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Byron Haskin

by Walter Chaw Opening with a newsreel and ending with a peculiar bit of religiosity, Byron Haskin's (really George Pal's) The War of the Worlds runs the gamut of H.G. Wells's seminal bit of seriocosmic/pseudo-scientific allegory, assaulting colonialism by dooming spoilers to strange diseases in faraway places. You could call it "God;" I think Wells would have called it "kismet." In any case, the business in-between in this The War of the Worlds was as visually dazzling for its time as Steven Spielberg's frightening and reprehensible 9/11 redux version is for ours, and it holds the same sort of micro/macro fascination of Armageddon courtesy mysterious beings raining death from above. Obviously a cold war parable, the film arguably has as its best quality its sound design, which finds through an ominous thrum of silence a rattlesnake rattle in the noise the baddies produce once they finally emerge from their smouldering crater. It was the stuff of nightmares for me when I caught it on Saturday afternoon television as a child; revisiting it for a film series and now in conjunction with the long-awaited re-release of the film on DVD, I find most interesting the fact that screeching little girl Dakota Fanning replaces the Ann Robinson character in the remake in what can only be described as a horizontal substitution.