The Longest Yard (1974) [Lockdown Edition] – DVD

May 27, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Prison, Sports

**½/**** Image B Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Burt Reynolds, Eddie Albert, Ed Lauter, Mike Conrad
screenplay by Tracy Keenan Wynn
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The more genteel segments of the viewing public will instantly have their tolerance level challenged by The Longest Yard. In the prologue, disgraced ex-quarterback Paul Crewe (Burt Reynolds) receives the third degree from the woman to whom he has become a disgruntled man-whore, only to respond by grabbing her by the face, lifting her off the floor, and tossing her on her ass. On the commentary track of Paramount's new DVD, the filmmakers express surprise at the cheers this scene got during test screenings, but as there's no other in-point but matinee idol Reynolds, there's really no other way to respond to it. And as the scuffle naturally leads to a car chase where he dumps her Maserati into the drink (serves you right, young missy thing), complete with attendant insouciance to the police, there's only one conclusion to draw: Burt Reynolds is one bad mofo.

William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (2004) + The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004) – DVDs

May 25, 2005Posted in2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Drama, DVD, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, Romance, Shakespeare, Thriller, UK

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes, Lynn Collins
screenplay by Michael Radford, based on the play by William Shakespeare
directed by Michael Radford

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Don Cheadle, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Niels Mueller & Kevin Kennedy
directed by Niels Mueller

Merchantnixonby Walter Chaw As we comb through the continuing fallout of the Bush Jr. administration's first term, themes begin to assert themselves on our movie screens as clear as the words of prophets written on tenement halls. Colorized misogyny and race-baiting spectacles share time with protest pictures that are oftentimes more strident and dogmatic than the party line–it's the Eighties neo-Cleavers at war with postmodern B-pulpers, which many moons ago manifested themselves as one of the most fertile periods in the history of science-fiction and now resurface as part of a new wave of existential science-fiction. We're all about Blade Runner these days, deep into Philip K. Dick territory where memories and dreams are manipulated and franchised for you dirt-cheap. Images have become the jealous currency traded in the underground of a land where one sad breast was flashed in the middle of our annual orgy of violence, sex (sometimes incestual, lesbian sex as sold by primogenetic neocon Pete Coors–"And twins!"), and unrestrained plea for/rewarding of mass consumption. It was enough to send my beloved nation's vocal demographic of selectively pious idiots into paroxysms of…what? Outrage? Righteousness? I don't know. What I do know is that in the United States, it ain't the suggestion of sex, it's the actual, pale, flaccid appendage that feeds the sometimes-joyous result of sex that offends. Women need to be protected from showing the outsides of their bodies in the same way they need to be protected from having a say in what happens to the insides of their bodies in the same way they need to be prevented from reading, voting, or holding a job. When a society gets really frightened, see, we must protect people from themselves. Let's start at the girls and the darkies and work our way up.

The Hunting Party (1971) – DVD

May 24, 2005Posted in1970s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, UK, Western

*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Oliver Reed, Candice Bergen, Gene Hackman, Simon Oakland
screenplay by William Norton and Gilbert Alexander & Lou Morheim
directed by Don Medford

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Pity poor Candice Bergen. First, her rich and brutal husband (Gene Hackman) rapes her before heading off to work, then she's kidnapped by Oliver Reed's gang and nearly raped by L.Q. Jones. Later, Reed rapes her, though she's strangely not upset on her second go-round. Still, she has plenty of opportunity to get worked up when Jones tries to rape her again. Hackman is clearly annoyed–if anyone's going to be raping anyone, it ought to be him, and the gauche competition so challenges his manhood that he sets out to shoot the (ahem) nice-guy rapist and his would-be rapist gang. I sure hope Bergen was well-compensated for her time, though I can't imagine what could compensate for sitting through the result.

Suspect Zero (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

May 23, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Aaron Eckhart, Ben Kingsley, Carrie-Anne Moss, Harry J. Lennix
screenplay by Zak Penn and Billy Ray
directed by E. Elias Merhige

by Walter Chaw A metaphysical serial killer film, E. Elias Merhige's Suspect Zero is implications and shadows married to exploitation and shock: a queasy stew dredging the well of archetype that disturbs with the blasted nihilism of its vision. With its wastelands and its bloated, appallingly fertile cadavers reaching into their own wounds, it reminds of Merhige's own avant-garde silent film Begotten; and it reminds of Dario Argento's Deep Red, literally in the reveal of a wallpaper-palimpsest and figuratively in the intrusion of the supernatural into the mendacity of a crime story. This is the only kind of police procedural film possible after Se7en, one that doesn't go over the same theological ground but rather forges paths through more philological terrain–the serial killer genre as Thomas Harris tried to redefine it for the literary elite. Suspect Zero is smart and anxious.

The Aviator (2004) [Two-Disc Widescreen Edition] – DVD

May 22, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Germany, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale, John C. Reilly
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw About a third of the way into Martin Scorsese’s fabulous The Aviator, a young Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio), with ingénue Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani) on his arm, attends the premiere of his lavish WWI epic Hell’s Angels (1930)–a picture that burned a significant portion of Hughes’s millions before becoming a smash, and one that still contains some of the most daring, astonishing aerial sequences ever shot for a motion picture. As paparazzi throng, smothering Hughes with flashbulbs and red carpet questions, he looks dazzled, confused: a consequence of his deafness in some part, sure, but also, I’d suggest, a clue into this idea of Scorsese’s–which he’s had since at least Taxi Driver–that film is a waking dream, a kind of bad yet thrilling hallucinogenic dope trip; this Howard Hughes is a sleepwalker who is, at this moment, struggling to stay asleep. Later, Hughes takes his lover Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) up in his airplane where they cruise the sky above the Hollywood hills and share a (gulp) bottle of milk. (No small step for the pathologically germophobic Hughes.) The source for Hughes’s mental illness is traced to a haunted opening scene where as a child he is bathed by his mother (comparable in repressed eroticism to the notorious bathtub sequence in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth) and warned that the world outside can only hold for him the promise of abandonment and mortal contamination.

Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003-2004) [Volume One] – DVD

May 20, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Television

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras C-

by Walter Chaw Something tickled the back of my brain as I was watching Genndy Tartakovsky's "Star Wars: Clone Wars", a series comprising twenty vignettes clocking in at roughly three-minutes apiece (save the last, which runs close to eight minutes) meant to bridge George Lucas's Episode II and Episode III: I realized that even though the action rises and falls twenty-three times, that no characters are developed beyond a sketch and a pose, and that the show is essentially the connective tissue between programs on the Cartoon Network, "Star Wars: Clone Wars" is every bit as good as–and sometimes better than–Lucas's current trilogy. (Lucas himself recently admitted that his prequels are approximately 40% substance and 60% filler. I think he was being generous–the first two films combined with the first half of the third film have enough substance for maybe one passable 90-minute feature.) But with most of the sport taken out of pounding on mad King George for twenty-some years now (starting with Ewoks and letting Lando live and ending with midichlorians and the Jedi turning out to be pantywaists and hypocritical assholes), all that's really left to say is that Tartakovsky's "Star Wars: Clone Wars" is what it is. And what is that, exactly? Twenty three-minute vignettes from the creator of "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Samurai Jack" that, set in the new Star Wars universe, come off a lot like a "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Samurai Jack" hybrid.

In Good Company (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

May 18, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Scarlett Johansson

***/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Dennis Quaid, Scarlett Johansson, Topher Grace, Marg Helgenberger
written and directed by Paul Weitz

Ingoodcompanycapby Walter Chaw A film about what happens when Benjamin Braddock decides to pursue a career in plastics, Paul Weitz's flawed In Good Company (its title, formerly Synergy, may be the worst thing about it) boasts a distinct human quality that lends depth where there might not otherwise be any. It's bolstered by the central trio of performers: Topher Grace, continuing his winning streak; Dennis Quaid, affecting in the kind of role that Harrison Ford should be doing now instead of Indiana Jones; and Scarlett Johansson, rapidly growing into something like a national treasure. And though Weitz is too in love with the extreme close-up, his tactic of displacing his characters in various visual terrariums does a good job of suggesting just how isolating it can be to balance breaking your back for a job you don't particularly like with enjoying the people for whom you do it in the first place. At its heart, In Good Company is a love song to hoary old axioms concerning love, loyalty, and honour–its charms are old-fashioned and its bromides, if not entirely unexpected, are at least earned.

Pooh’s Heffalump Movie (2005) – DVD

May 17, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Mystery

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Brian Hohlfeld and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Frank Nissen

by Bill Chambers Pretty much everything I wrote about Piglet's Big Movie applies to Pooh's Heffalump Movie: it's inoffensive but laborious, and the soundalike replacements for the original vocal talent know the notes but not the music. (Think that friend of yours whose Homer Simpson impersonation is perfect in every way except for its inability to make you laugh.) Carly Simon contributes another pallid batch of stopgap ditties to another frail narrative in which Pooh Bear is again hustled off to the sidelines. But melancholy has returned to the fold (because, I suspect, a certain Britishness informs the tone this time around), and since that was key to the resonance of Pooh's early screen and literary outings alike, we should be grateful that Pooh's Heffalump Movie deals with more urgent themes than is customary.

Lullaby of Broadway (1951) + Calamity Jane (1953) – DVDs

May 16, 2005Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Romance, Western

LULLABY OF BROADWAY
*½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Doris Day, Gene Nelson, S.Z. Sakall, Billy DeWolfe
screenplay by Earl Baldwin
directed by David Butler

CALAMITY JANE
**½/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Doris Day, Howard Keel, Allyn McLerie, Philip Carey
screenplay by James O'Hanlon
directed by David Butler

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a pseudo-indie movie whose title escapes me that thought it would get an easy laugh by having a pretentious film theory major call her paper "Doris Day as Feminist Warrior." The joke was bad not because it was too exaggerated–as it happens, it wasn't much of an exaggeration at all. Doris Day was such a cottage industry for '90s pop-cult studies that she was (distantly) second only to Madonna as an item for rescue and reclamation, making such a title not only plausible but also inevitable. It's easy to see why: while the "legendary" screen goddesses stood around waiting to be claimed by the hero, Day was going ahead with a career or obliviously transgressing some other gender rule–not enough to topple Hollywood patriarchy, but enough to give clear-eyed individuals fugitive moments of pleasure.

The Grass Harp (1996) – DVD

May 16, 2005Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD

*½/**** Image B Sound A
starring Joe Don Baker, Nell Carter, Charles Durning, Sean Patrick Flannery
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant and Kirk Ellis, based on the novel by Truman Capote
directed by Charles Matthau

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A movie for people who think eccentrics are just a rumour, The Grass Harp's rendering of the same-named Truman Capote novel is so crammed full of unhinged folk that you expect a little lyrical madness in the filmmaking itself. Sadly, Charles Matthau's direction treats its outsiders and weirdoes in an objectifying manner, as if he's building models for a museum exhibit–and since there's nothing interior about the film's bland, stodgy technique, one can't really understand the bonds between its characters, who seem totally unrelated to each other beyond the demands of the script. All Matthau can do is look benignly upon people he doesn't really understand and hope that we'll follow his lead. I didn't, and I doubt that you will, either.

Boogeyman (2005) [Special Edition] – DVD

May 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Barry Watson, Emily Deschanel, Skye McCole Bartusiak, Lucy Lawless
screenplay by Eric Kripke and Juliet Snowden & Stiles White
directed by Stephen Kay

by Walter Chaw Unusually ambitious for a film that seems to have no intention other than to be the celluloid equivalent of Jokey Smurf, Boogeyman is tremendously dislocating at times, even existentially surreal. It posits that a child's worst fears are only conquerable if "faced," leading our hero through the loss of his parents, the rejection of his object choice, and the expulsion from his sanctuary in a children's asylum, until finally he's forced into a situation where he must destroy the totems of his youth to embrace the lonely demystification of his adulthood. There's something really sad going on in Boogeyman: It's about shining a light on the dark corners of the past and vanquishing ghosts, but in the hero's triumph over his nightmares, he casts himself adrift from some of the magic of being a kid.

Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Fifth Season (2001-2002) – DVD

May 9, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Teen, Television

Image B Sound B+
"The Bostonians," "The Lost Weekend," "Capeside Revisited," The Long Goodbye," "Use Your Disillusion," "High Anxiety," "Text, Lies, and Videotape," "Hotel New Hampshire," "Four Scary Stories," "Appetite for Destruction," "Something Wild," "Sleeping Arrangements," "Something Wilder," "Guerilla Filmmaking," "Downtown Crossing," "In a Lonely Place," "Highway to Hell," "Cigarette Burns," "100 Light Years From Home," "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)," "After Hours," "The Abby," "Swan Song"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. A little over a month ago I had all of my wisdom teeth plus their four adjacent molars extracted, and I honestly can't decide what I'd prefer: going through that ordeal again, or suffering the fifth season of "Dawson's Creek" a third time. This, friends, is where the shameless apologist who reviewed seasons one through four for this site throws up his hands in defeat–I got nothin'. Interestingly, the series predicted its own fall from grace the previous year by having Joey (Katie Holmes) deliver one of the show's trademark po-mo diatribes:

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) [The Criterion Collection – Special Edition Two-Disc Set] – DVD

May 9, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Anjelica Huston
 screenplay by Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw His idiosyncrasies are by now familiar, but it still takes more than one viewing to assimilate Wes Anderson’s quirk with the undercurrent of wisdom and emotionality that makes it sing. The excavation of the relationships between brothers that ultimately explains the longevity of his light debut Bottle Rocket, the exploration of loneliness and the connection between mentors and boys that buoys Rushmore, and, most affectingly, the rough bond between fathers and sons in The Royal Tenenbaums edify Anderson’s work like the unexpected pockets of tenderness in the Coen Brothers’ early stuff, or those flashes of intricacy that transform John Cassavetes’s vérité chuff into masterworks. With The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Anderson goes back to what’s familiar in his studiedly unfamiliar way: to mentors and boys, to fathers and sons, and to brothers incidentally if not in fact–casting them all adrift in a hermetic universe that is as influenced by Sixties lounge kitsch as it is by post-modern dissociative cool. And in retracing his steps, he manages to recreate a lot of the same surprising humanity of his first three films, but I do wonder about The Life Aquatic‘s lasting resonance.

Beach Red (1967) – DVD

May 5, 2005Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, War

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Cornel Wilde, Rip Torn, Burr DeBenning, Patrick Wolfe
screenplay by Clint Johnston, Donald A. Peters and Jefferson Pascal
directed by Cornel Wilde

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Naiveté can sometimes take you places. Beach Red is a pacifist war movie that believes so strongly in its material that it makes you want to believe, too–even when the material in question is hackneyed, unconvincing, or Ed Wood fanciful. The film's attempt to suggest an American version of Miklós Jancsó's The Red and the White trades on the figure instead of dialogue and image instead of word, with director/star Cornel Wilde trying to give his attack on the futility of war a lyrical spin. "The futility of war" is, of course, an idea that's older than the hills, but so it was for Jancsó–and though Wilde lacks the Hungarian filmmaker's virtuosity, he has a similar attraction to agonized bodies and the power of a picture to trample over a person like a tank.

Criminal (2004) – DVD

May 4, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring John C. Reilly, Diego Luna, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Mullan
screenplay by Gregory Jacobs & Sam Lowry, based on the screenplay for Nueve reinas by Fabián Bielinsky
directed by Gregory Jacobs

by Walter Chaw As an assistant director, Gregory Jacobs has been involved in so many good projects (his resume includes Miller's Crossing, Hal Hartley's Amateur, and Steven Soderbergh's Solaris) that his directorial debut raises expectations. Too many, perhaps, as Criminal, an adaptation of Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky's Nine Queens, from just a couple of years ago, barely qualifies as something as cut-rate and devalued as one of those cookie-cutter, self-conscious, tedious David Mamet capers. It's badly miscast, with John C. Reilly in the lead as a well-travelled huckster on the prowl for that one Big Score that looms like El Dorado for the larcenous breed. (Reilly is fine as a cuckolded husband, nonplussed by a woman he doesn't deserve–not so fine as someone who lives by trip-hammer reflex and quicksilver wit.) And in place of the oil-derrick rhythms of a caper flick, there's something suspiciously like manners and formalism in Criminal–it's a jazz improvisation performed by robots and metered by a drum machine. All the elements are there, but there's no soul to it.

Beaches (1988) [Special Edition] – DVD

April 29, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music

**/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Bette Midler, Barbara Hershey, John Heard, Spalding Gray
screenplay by Mary Agnes Donoghue, based on the novel by Iris Rainer Dart
directed by Garry Marshall

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's long been easy sport to mock Beaches, whose sins are multiple and numerous. This is, after all, a so-called chick-flick starring Bette Midler, directed by Garry Marshall, and featuring an easy-listening hit that's even blander than the reputation of the film it supports. Yet despite these warning signs, somehow they fail to justify the contempt to which the film is typically subjected. Lord knows it's not a good movie, but its treatment of life for women beyond men is anomalous enough to make you wonder what might have happened with a filmmaker at the helm. Given that Marshall would never again direct a movie in which a female character achieved something on her own (he followed up Beaches with the horrible Pretty Woman and The Princess Diaries), the rarity of the occurrence keeps you mildly interested, if generally enervated.

Japón (2002) – DVD

April 28, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mexico, Spain

***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Alejandro Ferretis, Magdalena Flores, Yolanda Villa, Martin Serranos
written and directed by Carlos Reygadas

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You are hereby warned: there's a sense in which Japón is long-winded, ponderous, and full of dead spots that go on forever. But there's also a sense that without those dead spots, the shining nuggets of value wouldn't mean nearly as much. It's not a story, it's a landscape, there to be explored as opposed to shuttled through in a hurry; if you lose your interest one moment, something will come along to pique it again. Though the keepcase of Japón's DVD release approvingly links it to that other natural wonder, Andrei Tarkovsky, the film is more carnal and less religious than his work: director Carlos Reygadas isn't into the music of the spheres so much as the beauty of the land and sweat trickling down your body. You get distracted, but don't worry: you'll be back.

Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Second Season (2001) + The Anna Nicole Show: The First Season (2002) – DVDs

April 25, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Documentary, DVD, Television

CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM…: Image A Sound A
"The Car Salesman," "Thor," "Trick or Treat," "The Shrimp Incident," "The Thong," "The Acupuncturist," "The Doll," "Shaq," "The Baptism," "The Massage"

THE ANNA NICOLE SHOW…: Image A Sound A Extras D
"House Hunting," "The Introduction of Bobby Trendy," "The Eating Contest," "The Dentist," "Las Vegas, Pt. I," "Las Vegas, Pt. II," "Pet Psychic," "Cousin Shelly," "The Driving Test," "NYC Publicity Tour," "Paintball," "Halloween Party," "The Date"

by Walter Chaw The way that white people behave badly runs the social gamut from being impolitic to being uncouth–it can be calculated or just the product of bad breeding, but find in a pair of television series that would at first glance seem miles apart dual examples of Caucasians running amuck in their natural upper-class habitat. Larry David's HBO series "Curb Your Enthusiasm" has won critical hosannas and the "Seinfeld" demographic, while Anna Nicole Smith's "The Anna Nicole Show" has been heralded as the dawn of the apocalypse. Both, however, are vignette sitcoms based on slightly fictionalized versions of semi-celebrities positioned as the ass in various Byzantine and embarrassing situations. While David's sense of humour is self-conscious, his "Curb Your Enthusiasm" an example of the self-aware media hybrid, it would be a terrible mistake to presume that Smith is as stupid as, say, Jessica Simpson, and "The Anna Nicole Show" is so carefully calculated that with a little tweaking it could be as post-modern and oppressively-scripted as "Law & Order: Courtney Love Unit".

The Manson Family: Unrated Version (2004) [2-Disc Special Edition] + 99 Women (1969) – DVDs

April 25, 2005Posted in1960s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Horror, Italy, Liechtenstein, Prison, Thriller, UK, West Germany

THE MANSON FAMILY
***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Marcello Games, Marc Pitman, Leslie Orr, Maureen Alisse
written and directed by Jim VanBebber

Der heiße Tod
**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Maria Schell, Mercedes McCambridge, Maria Rohm, Rosalda Neri
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

by Walter Chaw Attempting exactly the same thing as Mel Gibson's bloodier and no less exploitive telling of a hippie religious leader whose teachings produced immediately sanguine results (with Gibson's martyr going on to establish what is possibly the bloodiest nation in the history of the planet), Jim VanBebber's laudably disquieting The Manson Family is distinguished by its self-awareness as a document of hate rather than one of hosanna on high. Fifteen years in the making, it demonstrates a commensurate level of passion in its creation, the same obsession with recreating the period in the mode of its predominant artform (static representation for the one, drive-in cinema for the other), culminating in an orgy of violence that's gotten a bad rap precisely because there's no prurient thrill to be gained from it. Close examination reveals, in fact, that the deeds of Manson's merry men and women aren't shown in as much detail as they could have been–the chief excision being the fate of Sharon Tate and her in utero baby. The madness of King VanBebber, then, seems to have a method: not to, like Gibson's blood-soaked reverie, revel in every minute detail of flayed viscera and spilled humours, but to recreate the uncomfortable viciousness of loose ideology set free in the schizophrenic fin de siècle sandwiched between free love and its Vietnam War bloodletting counterweight. The Manson Family is about how tragic is the loss of mind and life; The Passion of the Christ is about how tragic it is, for their sake, that the Jews and the Romans didn't know what a bad motherfucker they were messing with. Context is everything.

Hoosiers (1986) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

April 21, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Sports, UK

**/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, Dennis Hopper, Sheb Wooley
screenplay by Angelo Pizzo
directed by David Anspaugh

by Walter Chaw A gifted coach with a past takes over a misfit team and leads them, after some of the usual adversity, to the big game. Why fight it? There's nothing I can say about how sappy and derivative David Anspaugh's revered Hoosiers is without coming off like a scrooge incapable of elation. No demonstration of pedigree, no gesture towards the trophy shelf or war stories about the time we tipped an opposing player over in a port-a-potty just to see the bastard turn blue will make a lick of difference in the quick gauge of the level of bitterness for the nerd unwilling to surrender to the glory of such astonishingly polished underdog crap. Why fight it when what Hoosiers does–and does magnificently–is capture exactly how childish (and childishly exhilarating) sports can be–how it's an exclusive boy's club that underscores those infant verities of honour, brotherhood, and courage under fire in a ritualized environment only trumped in its bloodlust by certain communal religious ceremonies. If Hoosiers understands anything, it's that while there is, in fact, crying in baseball (and basketball, and football, hockey, lacrosse, rugby, soccer, etc.), there's no such thing as subtlety in the absolute tyranny of the interplay between muscle, sinew, and pigskin.