Lady Chatterly’s Lover (1981) + Mata Hari (1985)

September 8, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD

LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER
**/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Sylvia Kristel, Nicholas Clay, Shane Briant
screenplay by Marc Behm, based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence
directed by Just Jaeckin

MATA HARI
½*/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Sylvia Kristel, Christopher Cazenove, Oliver Tobias, Gaye Brown
screenplay by Joel Ziskin
directed by Curtis Harrington

by Alex Jackson Cinematically at least, I view the 1980s as being an entirely pro-cultural period. Black became mainstream–everybody listened to music from black artists and watched films and television shows starring black actors. Gay became mainstream, blurring gender lines. Feminism likewise became mainstream, blurring gender roles. Blacks, gays, and women were not necessarily disenfranchised in the culture during the 1970s, but by the 1980s they defined the dominant culture, creating a new status quo. The '80s were not a carbon copy of the 1950s, rather they were the 1950s dragged through the '60s and '70s; it was essentially a period of multicultural homogenization. There was, then, never a proper counterculture or fringe element. Nobody was an outsider and nobody was "other." Similarly, there was no feeling of liberation, as there was nothing to be liberated from.

House M.D.: Season One (2004-2005) – DVD

September 6, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television

Image C+ Sound A- Extras C+
"Pilot," "Paternity," "Occam's Razor," "Maternity," "Damned if You Do," "The Socratic Method," "Fidelity," "Poison," "DNR," "Histories," "Detox," "Sports Medicine," "Cursed," "Control," "Mob Rules," "Heavy," "Role Model," "Babies & Bathwater," "Kids," "Love Hurts," "Three Stories," "Honeymoon"

by Bill Chambers The high-concept premise of "House M.D." is, like that of executive producer Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects, ultimately fraudulent. After all, for us plebes, there's no way of knowing whether the "Sherlock Holmes of Medicine" lives up to his billing, save his addiction to an opiate. (I'm reminded of that inside-baseball wannabe Brown Sugar, in which the characters cringe at the alleged awfulness of a hip-hop act that sounds to the untrained ear exactly like every other hip-hop act.) As the head of "diagnostics" at the fictitious Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, unorthodox Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) uses an informed process of elimination to cure anomalous illnesses (one per week, it's self-reflexively pointed out), but as the patients invariably go from bad to worse to healed, civilian audiences are denied the basic level of interactivity that is the raison d'être of the whodunit. "House M.D." is a "C.S.I." clone–right down to the impromptu Innerspace tours of the bloodstream–with science no longer the pretext but the text itself.

The Narrow Margin (1952) – DVD

September 5, 2005Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor, Jacqueline White, Don Beddoe
screenplay by Earl Felton
directed by Richard Fleischer

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Narrow Margin is the kind of minor classic that makes a few of the major ones look puny. Possessing a careful, Artful Dodger deviousness, the film pulls the rug out from under you before you even notice it was there–it refuses to waste time on speeches or showboating and simply gets down to the business of blowing your expectations right out of the water. It's also a strangely affirmative noir in its insistence on overturning surfaces to see the individual beneath the bluster, a testament to the cleverness and thoughtfulness of screenwriter Earl Felton. If Felton's efforts lean more towards chamber piece than grandiose masterwork, he's still clever enough to suck you in and unpretentious enough not to pat himself on the back for this triumph of art over budget.

Fever Pitch (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

September 5, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Romance, Sports

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Drew Barrymore, Jimmy Fallon, James B. Sikking, JoBeth Williams
screenplay by Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw Ben (Jimmy Fallon), a Red Sox fanatic and middle-school math teacher, falls in love with corporate minx Lindsey (Drew Barrymore), who, as is often the case in Farrelly Brothers films, is perfect. She's beautiful, bug-eyes and all, and when she simpers in her mealy-mouthed way that she loves Ben as much as Ben loves baseball, all the men folk are supposed to melt–but I have serious doubts as to whether Barrymore is romantic lead material. Though she's fine getting hit in the face with a hard foul (her best roles are as the benighted bimbos in Adam Sandler trainwrecks), much of Barrymore's sultriness has to do with the idea of her as a naughty schoolgirl (Poison Ivy), not as a savvy woman of the world. She's no Mary, in other words, and her lack as one-half of Fever Pitch's romantic pairing is distracting–if not actually crippling, since leading man Fallon is himself a stammering vanilla doormat.

Dillinger (1945) – DVD

September 5, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Biopic, Crime, DVD, Gangster

**/**** Image B Sound B- Commentary C+
starring Lawrence Tierney, Edmund Lowe, Anne Jeffreys, Eduardo Ciannelli
screenplay by Philip Yordan
directed by Max Nosseck

by Alex Jackson You have got to be shitting me. This is Lawrence Tierney? The guy who played Joe in Reservoir Dogs and Elaine’s dad on “Seinfeld”–that Lawrence Tierney? The Lawrence Tierney with whom modern audiences had come to be acquainted was a goat-munching ogre; in Reservoir Dogs Mr. Orange characterized him as the real-life Thing, and indeed the only way to describe late-period Tierney is as a superhuman being. Lawrence Tierney is to heavies as Marilyn Monroe is to bombshells and Casablanca is to the movies themselves–that is to say, a conglomerate of all that have ever existed. Like Marilyn Monroe and Casablanca, Tierney is essentially an impersonal and even rather cornball artificial construction, but along those same lines, he’s also a deeply iconic one. Caricature is, after all, a kissing cousin to archetype–and archetype is one of the essential ingredients of pure cinema.

Nick Frost’s Danger! 50,000 Volts! (2002) – DVD

September 1, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Documentary, DVD, Television, UK

Danger! 50,000 Volts!
Image C Sound C Extras A
"Alligator Attack!", "Thugs with Baseball Bats!", "High Speed Chases!", "Minefields!", "Fires!", "Being Impaled!", "Lightning Strikes!", "Tidal Waves!", "Hostage Situations!"

by Walter Chaw Locating itself somewhere between "Jackass", "Insomniac with Dave Attell", and "MythBusters", "Danger! 50000 Volts!" is a series of semi-improvisational interviews with people in bad jobs, interspersed with the jocular, rotund Frost putting himself in situations of peril for the bemusement of a bemused audience. More British than terrible, "Danger! 50000 Volts!" reminds of a "World's Greatest Chases" hidden-camera show where Scotland Yard chased down a felon at speeds approaching upwards of ten, eleven miles an hour. So the pacing isn't exactly pulse-pounding, but there's an affability to Frost and his willingness to insert himself into dangerous situations that makes the show an agreeable time-passer. Its apocalyptic tone (shades of "Worst Case Scenario")–the idea that you'll eventually find yourself in a minefield after having fallen through ice and been impaled on a pole the very same day you were attacked by a gorilla and hooligans with baseball bats–is ludicrous, of course (in fact, there's very little about the show that's real-world applicable), but watching a chubby comedic actor endure indignity has sort of an archetypal feel to it. It's the Oliver Hardy school of vaudeville, I think.

Starstruck (1982) – DVD

August 31, 2005Posted in1980s, Australia, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Musical

***/**** Image A Sound A (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B
starring Jo Kennedy, Ross O'Donovan, Margo Lee, Max Cullen
screenplay by Stephen MacLean
directed by Gillian Armstrong

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By all rights, Starstruck shouldn't be as much fun as it turns out to be. Chief amongst the film's faults is its insistence on laying a '70s template over an '80s milieu: the harsh straight lines of new wave get rounded off, making for a completely incongruous let-it-all-hang-out attitude. Things are not improved by the tentative approach of director Gillian Armstrong, not known for extroverted behaviour in the past and seemingly unsure of herself here. Yet although it's rather like watching Meat Loaf belt out Gary Numan's "Cars" at the top of his lungs, the combination of bright happy colours and an aw-shucks demeanour is undeniably infectious. You wind up grinning uncontrollably despite Starstruck's decidedly uncool approach to being cool.

Lilo & Stitch (2002); Stitch! The Movie (2003); Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch (2005) – DVDs

August 29, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

LILO & STITCH
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
written and directed by Chris Sanders & Dean DeBlois

by Bill Chambers Lilo (exceptionally well-voiced by Daveigh Chase) enjoys arts and crafts–she's in her "Blue Period"–and resents her vain classmates. Her homelife is less than ideal, since she has yet to become accustomed to thinking of her sister, Nani (Tia Carrere), as her dead mother's replacement. The dissent is mutual, and put in a pressure-cooker by child protective services, under whose watchful eye the siblings have fallen. Like a couple on the brink, Lilo and Nani try to patch things up by finding a use for their pet door, but what they bring home from the pound is not common and definitely not housebroken. Bent on destruction, Stitch (Chris Sanders, channelling Howie Mandel's Bobby), a six-limbed Miyazaki koala known on his planet as Experiment 626, escaped intergalactic incarceration and fell to Earth, only to be run over by a big-rig and placed in an animal shelter. The lenience and affection Lilo shows him deprograms Stitch, which in turn stuns his mad-scientist creator.

The Greatest American Hero: Season Three (1982-1983) – DVD

August 29, 2005Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Superhero, Television

Image A Sound A Extras C
"The Price is Right," "30 Seconds Over Little Tokyo," "Divorce Venusian Style," "Live at Eleven," "The Resurrection of Carlini," "Wizards and Warlocks," "Heaven is in Your Genes," "This is the One the Suit Was Meant For," "The Newlywed Game," "Desperado," "Space Ranger," "It's Only Rock 'n Roll," "Vanity, Says the Preacher"

by Walter Chaw Aliens come to earth in a giant metal calamari ring and give a nebbish schoolteacher a red superhero outfit with the Chinese symbol for "centre" on the centre of its chest. They also give him an instruction booklet he promptly loses, leading to a couple of seasons of Ralph (William Katt) trying his best to figure out how to use his special jammies with the help of his attorney girlfriend Pam (Connie Selleca) and rogue FBI agent Bill (Robert Culp). It's on-the-job training, though, as the reluctant crime-fighting trio find themselves, weekly, pitted against a Saturday morning cartoon's rogue's gallery of two-bit hoodlums that reek, somehow simultaneously, of desperate invention and formula contrivance. (How else to explain the second-season search for a sea monster in the Caribbean?) But there's something that remains effective–sticky, even–about a show more at home in the Shazam! posture than in the prime time slot it was asked to fill. (Indeed, I discovered the show in syndication, seeing as I was too busy during its regular run watching "Knight Rider" and "The A-Team" on a rival network.) It's wish-fulfillment of the flavour towards which most superhero creations tend, sure, but it also speaks to what is essential in the American ethos: that the least of us believes we can be heroes under the right circumstances.

The Blues Brothers (1980) [25th Anniversary Edition (Widescreen)] – DVD

August 29, 2005Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Music, Musical, Road Movie

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, James Brown, Cab Calloway
screenplay by Dan Aykroyd and John Landis
directed by John Landis

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Long before Quentin Tarantino would run a tear across the super soul sounds of the '70s, there was the strange case of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in the deadly "Blues Brothers" affair. Sitting somewhere at the low end of White Negro trickle-down, the Blues Brothers were two conspicuously white soul singers who made up for in enthusiasm what they lacked in talent–though their "Saturday Night Live" clowning conveniently omitted this bit of information, half-expecting us to take them seriously as they tumbled and caterwauled their way through various musical numbers. Where a true hipster would have meticulously re-created their favoured forms, Joliet Jake Blues (Belushi) and his brother Elwood (Aykroyd) had nothing but "heart" and "sincerity"–a nice way of saying they were rank amateurs doing primitive karaoke. They were compellingly frantic performers, but they weren't the blues and never would be.

Illegally Yours (1988) – DVD

August 23, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD

*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Rob Lowe, Colleen Camp, Kenneth Mars, Kim Myers
screenplay by M.A. Stewart & Max Dickens
directed by Peter Bogdanovich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The '80s drove a lot of talented filmmakers to desperate lengths, but few sank to the levels of depravity that Peter Bogdanovich did with Illegally Yours. Like so many before him, the once-unstoppable cineaste was forced to rethink his auteurism along cheesy romantic-comedy lines; unlike so many before him, he chose to ignore the ugly implications of a disturbingly infantile screenplay, instead committing to a literal interpretation as tedious as it is unpleasant. Watching Rob Lowe pester a suffering woman on the flimsiest of pretexts isn't at all funny (it's like watching a stalker get rewarded for his predations), and as he's surrounded by some of the most irritating "hilarious" types ever to grace the screen, the only variation is in the switch from creepiness to frustrated annoyance.

The Transporter (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD|[Special Delivery Edition] – DVD

August 22, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, France, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras C
SDE DVD – Image B- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Jason Statham, Shu Qi, Francois Berleand, Matt Schulze
screenplay by Luc Besson & Robert Mark Kamen
directed by Cory Yuen

by Walter Chaw That Cory Yuen's The Transporter is unapologetically misogynistic, badly plotted, and poorly acted isn't so much a criticism as a recognition that one of Jet Li's favourite Chinese directors has made a French film in many ways identical to the chop-socky/gun-fu flicks China was churning out throughout the eighties and into the nineties. Where the film fails is in its resemblance, ironically, to Yuen's own work on The Bodyguard from Beijing (and even the awful Women on the Run), and in its uncomfortable similarity to John Woo's Hong Kong output–a cribbing owed as much to Yuen as producer Luc Besson, who has made it something of a closet industry in his action films to borrow liberally from The Killer and Hard-Boiled (and, in this particular instance, A Better Tomorrow II). The Transporter is too slick and winking, then–a post-modern take on the "heroic bloodshed" genre that already had one foot in self-satire, with the other dancing in operatic melodrama. The foot shouldn't be keeping time with a techno beat; it should be tapping to a lonesome harmonica.

Dracula III: Legacy (2005); Hellraiser: Deader (2005); The Crow: Wicked Prayer (2005) – DVDs

August 17, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Revenge, Romania, Thriller, Vampire, Wes Craven

DRACULA III: LEGACY
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jason Scott Lee, Jason London, Alexandra Westcourt, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Joel Soisson & Patrick Lussier
directed by Patrick Lussier

HELLRAISER: DEADER
*/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras B
starring Kari Wuhrer, Paul Rhys, Simon Kunz, Doug Bradley
screenplay by Neal Marshall Stevens and Tim Day
directed by Rick Bota

THE CROW: WICKED PRAYER
½*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Edward Furlong, Tara Reid, David Boreanaz, Emmanuelle Chriqui
screenplay by Lance Mungia & Jeff Most and Sean Hood
directed by Lance Mungia

by Walter Chaw This is the game plan if you’re in the business of producing direct-to-video schlock for Dimension: go to Romania (the poor man’s Czech Republic, itself the poor man’s Toronto–itself the poor man’s New York), show some tits, throw buckets of blood against the wall, and scrimp, wherever possible, on niceties like script and direction. It’s sure-fire–particularly if you can skim a month or two off the shooting schedule and lure a few has-beens in serious decline. But the question with urgency is, “Sure-fire what?” Not good art–because they seldom have anything to say about the society that spawned them (and because the directors of these messes are generally assclowns)–and not good travelogues, either, these little straight-to-home penny dreadfuls tend to be tired variations on the same quasi-Christian mythos, tarted up with surprisingly good production values and the kind of cheap thrills that kept EC Comics, then Hammer Films, then Italian giallos, in business.

Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) – DVD

August 16, 2005Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Silverman, Catherine Mary Stewart, Terry Kiser
screenplay by Robert Klane
directed by Ted Kotcheff

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Film comedy ceased to be the realm of the inventive and the stylish some time ago–about 30 years ago, to be precise, after wit and flair gave way to the Brightly-Lit Comedy (BLC). In order to domesticate the laffer, the architects of the BLC invented a lighting style that a) ensured that every stick of poorly-chosen furniture was impossible to miss, and b) destroyed the possibility of shadow play or other flourishes that might call attention to themselves. The BLC flooded the set with white light, banishing nuance and paving the way for stuff like Weekend at Bernie's–a black hole from which not even humour itself can escape.

Now, Voyager (1942) – DVD

August 15, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD

**/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper
screenplay by Casey Robinson, based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty
directed by Irving Rapper

by Alex Jackson I'll admit to being rather tickled by Now, Voyager, but I frankly believe that the movies should have higher aspirations than to tickle. Though getting tickled is sort of fun for a short while, in any long duration it simply becomes obnoxious. Now, Voyager is trash, but it's not particularly great trash. There is nothing in its straight-faced inanity that successfully works as critical commentary on the material. This is camp at its most superficial; scratch off the simple surface pleasures and you're left with one black void.

Possessed (1947) – DVD

August 14, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raymond Massey, Geraldine Brooks
screenplay by Silvia Richards and Ranald MacDougall, based on a story by Rita Weiman
directed by Curtis Bernhardt

by Alex Jackson Although it’s both talky and obvious (problems, I think, that have always threatened the noir genre), Possessed is propelled by a brilliant prologue and achieves momentum through an abundance of positively electric individual moments. Possessed is not strong enough to initiate any new addictions or produce any new highs, but it’s enough to qualify as a fix for the existing addict of cinema. After watching it, I felt that I could go on and face another day.

Nightmare Alley (1947) – DVD

August 11, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker
screenplay by Jules Furthman, based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham
directed by Edmund Goulding

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The great thing about Edmund Goulding's Nightmare Alley is its refusal to show you The Way. Its noir-sap hero is all about The Way, you see (in his case, an amalgam of grifting and a genuine psychic ability), but when he places his total faith in it, he inevitably loses everything. Of course, he's not the only sap looking for an absolute answer: his victims are all too willing to ditch intellectual self-defense in favour of a god/shaman/big know-it-all to relieve them of the burden of making their own choices. The film is smart enough to lay waste to not just the traditional target of spiritualists, but also the modern voodoo science of psychology–both in their own way valid, but with powers blown so far out of proportion that they become vivid media for drawing the long con.

Monster-in-Law (2005) [Platinum Series] – DVD

August 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A- Extras D
starring Jennifer Lopez, Jane Fonda, Michael Vartan, Wanda Sykes
screenplay by Anya Kochoff
directed by Robert Luketic

by Walter Chaw I felt real pain as Monster-in-Law unfolded. It was the variety of headache that begins behind the eyes before settling somewhere in the gorge. Two whole lines in my notebook were devoted to the word "hate," and true enough, it took all of five minutes for me to know that I despised this film. Five minutes being the same amount of time it takes for the picture to resort to a dog-humping gag, something that has never been funny in any incarnation and is always, always a sign that the oft-dredged barrel bottom is getting scraped once more, with feeling. Monster-in-Law has Jane Fonda playing a fossilized Barbara Walters manqué who attacks a Britney Spears manqué on the day that Fonda's Viola Fields is fired. (The faux-Britney has mistaken Roe Vs. Wade for a boxing match, a crime of ditz maybe less egregious than, say, cheerfully having your picture taken on a North Vietnamese gun battery circa 1972.) Meanwhile, Jennifer Lopez continues to do a whinier, Puerto Rican Melanie Griffith. But the picture isn't about the age issue or the class issue or the race issue–how could it be when Viola owns an eye-rolling, foolishness-talking mammy slave archetype named Ruby (Wanda Sykes)? No, Monster-in-Law isn't about anything on purpose except Fonda's too-real desperation, great draughts of random ugliness, and extorting money from people who will say once the dust settles that I'm out of touch.

Kung Fu Hustle (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

August 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Stephen Chow, Yuen Wah, Yuen Qiu, Lam Tze Chung
screenplay by Stephen Chow, Tsang Kan Cheong, Lola Huo, Chan Man Keung
directed by Stephen Chow

by Walter Chaw There's a moment near the beginning of Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer where a reverie about sweet buns turns into a spontaneous, slightly Asian-fied street recreation of the zombie shuffle from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. If Chow is going to break through into the American mainstream with more success than fellow Hong Kong émigrés Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, John Woo, Jet Li, Ringo Lam, and Sammo Hung, it'll be because of his savvy and respect for Western pop archetypes. Evidence of this has surfaced with some regularity in all of his pictures to date, no less so in Kung Fu Hustle, a delirious-verging-on-surreal send-up of Kung Fu attitudes and traditions mutated with a Tex Avery cartoon. It's the film Joe Dante has been trying to make for the whole of his career: a multi-cultural pop explosion cross-pollinated to produce a fevered hybrid of the post-industrial standard of Asian innovation of Western invention. Chow is Asia's answer to hip-hop: fugitive poetry primed to gratify the Yankee ruling culture while laying out a subtext of Chinese pride that would feel like a threat if it didn't get your hips shaking and your fingers snapping.

Code 46 (2004) – DVD

August 7, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Tim Robbins, Samantha Morton, Om Puri, Emil Marwa
screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce
directed by Michael Winterbottom

Code46dvdcapby Walter Chaw Visually, Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 locates its textures somewhere between the supple romanticism of Wong Kar-wai and the grimy lyricism of Lynne Ramsay. (Indeed, one of the film's two cinematographers, Alwin H. Kuchler, is also Ramsay's DP.) It's a science-fiction film in J.G. Ballard's barest definition of the genre–an exploration of time, space, and identity set in the near future in a cloud of languages and ideas–that periodically soars like invention can when it's raised from a foundation of familiar catastrophe and intimate calamity. Flanked in theatres by Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Joseph Ruben's The Forgotten, Code 46 represents one of three 2004 releases to deal with memory-tampering. Curious zeitgeist we find ourselves in, this mad desire to erase the past (and note a recent run of disaster flicks as well) and start anew.