What the Bleep Do We Know!? (2004) – DVD

March 30, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Sci-Fi

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras D
starring Marlee Matlin, Elaine Hendrix, Robert Bailey Jr., John Ross Bowie
screenplay by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Matthew Hoffman
directed by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Watching a bunch of young actresses knock themselves out with their Method masochism, Pauline Kael astutely noted how they “tried to find the motivation [where] actresses of an earlier generation would have merely provided it.” Little did she know that you could extend the exercise to philosophy: in its dogged attempt to confer genius on commonplace ideas, What the Bleep Do We Know!? proves that Method metaphysics is eminently possible. What the film doesn’t do is give us any point of view outside our own noggins, oversimplifying human experience as much as it mystifies it and dressing up self-involvement as enlightenment. It’s a movie that can’t let you see the man behind the curtain, lest you discover that he’s actually Dr. Phil.

Miss Congeniality (2000) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD

March 30, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Sandra Bullock, Michael Caine, Benjamin Bratt, Candice Bergen
screenplay by Marc Lawrence & Katie Ford & Caryn Lucas
directed by Donald Petrie

by Walter Chaw It starts pretty early on when a waitress at a Russian restaurant stands in front of a surveillance camera, causing the boys in the van to exclaim that "this broad has two asses!" (hey, if it's good enough for Porky's, right?)–and it's all downhill from there. Donald Petrie's Miss Congeniality has something to do with an ugly, bitter, uncouth woman discovering true happiness (love, career success, respect) by waxing her area and strutting down a runway. Confused? At least. Especially when the ugly woman in question is Sandra Bullock, who has made a career, more or less, out of being the beauty queen you think you have a shot at. The girl who binge eats like a hot dog eating contestant, records SportsCenter, and can still shimmy into her size 4 nightgown becomes a different kind of pornographic fantasy when you need a quick reminder of who has a real penis and who just has a gun–think There's Something About Mary without the irony. A scene before mutt becomes mah-vellous, in which she's watching past beauty queens for tips on how best to go undercover as a pageant contestant and offers a litany of comments on the women's intelligence, isn't so much hilarious as it is mean. And it's made worse by the end of the film, when all of the convenient bimbo stereotypes are bolstered and magnified rather than shown to be unkind shorthand.

After the Sunset (2004) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

March 30, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Pierce Brosnan, Salma Hayek, Woody Harrelson, Don Cheadle
screenplay by Paul Zbyszewski and Craig Rosenberg
directed by Brett Ratner

Afterthesunsetdvdcapby Walter Chaw Hard to know by their films whether Michael Bay or Brett Ratner is the bigger asshole, but when cold reaches a certain level it's just cold, so I'm comfortable calling it a draw. Ratner's latest, After the Sunset, is Trouble in Paradise by way of the Pierce Brosnan version of The Thomas Crown Affair: a joyless exercise in the sex-play heist genre featuring a plastic couple for whom, when they first met, it was grand larceny. Along the way, there's enough leering misogyny to satisfy a legion of folks either too young or too afraid of God to go rent some good old-fashioned, red-blooded porn. Audiences for this garbage choose instead to slake their venal lusts, to for a moment calm the roil of inadequacy and self-doubt at the public trough of screaming homophobia, queer gun-fondling, and enough women making bad decisions in front of a camera-wielding man to fill a "Girls Gone Wild" video.

Firewalker (1986) – DVD

March 24, 2005Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Chuck Norris, Lou Gossett, Melody Anderson, Will Sampson
screenplay by Robert Gosnell
directed by J. Lee Thompson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Of the many right-wing cinematic fantasies of the 1980s, by far the most flagrant and shameless were those of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. The Cannon Pictures magnates specialized in white folk dropped in the middle of jungles urban and outback: they gave us freedom fighters in Vietnam (Missing in Action), vigilante crime-fighters (the later entries in the Death Wish saga), and Indiana Jones cross-referenced with his colonial ancestors (King Solomon's Mines, et al). But though they were naked and blatant in their retrograde daydreams, they were also impossible to take seriously: Golan-Globus weren't just jerks, they were inept jerks–slovenly to the point of awe and stupefaction. Firewalker doesn't find them in top ludicrous form, but its childlike belief in both outdated stereotypes and papier-mâché sets facilitates a drinking game quite nicely.

The Cat Returns (2002) – DVD

March 24, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Japan, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Reiko Yoshida
directed by Hiroyuki Morita

by Walter Chaw With the frantic, infernal energy (and cats) and even a little of the barbed social satire of Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, Hayao Miyazaki protégé Hiroyuki Morita's directorial debut The Cat Returns is undone a little by its hysteria but salvaged by its artistry and smarts. A familiar tale for fans of Studio Ghibli, the film follows plucky schoolgirl Haru (Chizuru Ikewaki in the Japanese track, Anne Hathaway in the English dub) as she saves a mysterious grey cat from certain flattening, thus earning her the dubious boon of eternal gratitude from the Cat King (Tetsuro Tamba & Tim Curry). After being cursed with a yard-full of cattails, a pocketful of catnip, and a locker-full of gift-wrapped mice, Haru receives the ultimate prize of betrothal to the Cat Prince (Takayuki Yamada & Andrew Bevis)–a fate she seeks to avoid with the help of portly kitty Muta (Tetsu Watanabe & Peter Boyle) and the stately Baron (Yoshihiko Hakamada & Cary Elwes). Haru's journey is essentially one of perspective as she evolves from a silly sort of girl into a person who's learned to trust that her instincts are good and that her courage is, indeed, up to snuff.

Fat Albert (2004) – DVD

March 23, 2005Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Kenan Thompson, Kyla Pratt, Dania Ramirez, Bill Cosby
screenplay by William H. Cosby, Jr. & Charles Kipps
directed by Joel Zwick

by Bill Chambers The memory I have of watching Bill Cosby's "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" as a wee lad is that it always left me a little bit depressed, like listening to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" or dining at the Ponderosa restaurant. (Doesn't "ponderosa" mean "weighty" in English?) Subtext is a kind of phantom presence when you're five or six years old: you're too young to be able to read it but also young enough that you've not yet been blinded by anti-intellectualism to everything below the surface. I realize now that it was probably through the Saturday-morning buzzkill of "Fat Albert…" that I became cognizant of poverty, and just the fact that the show was populated with an all-black cast of ragamuffins (almost all of whom suffered from learning disabilities) took the patronizing sting out of its NBC Life Lessons–it was less pious than it was possessed of an old soul. I'm happy to report that Fat Albert, an anachronism of a live-action feature film based on the long-running (and long-cancelled) cartoon, captures a lot of its source's melancholy appeal. Moreover, its ideas are provocative verging on profound, although they're shackled to a sketchy screenplay (by Cosby and Charles Kipps) and an aesthetic that is as paint-by-numbers as the animation that inspired it. No surprise that director Joel Zwick hails from television–multi-camera sitcoms, to be precise.

Carnivàle: The Complete First Season (2003) – DVD

March 22, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Fantasy, Television

Image A Sound A Extras C
"Milfay," "After the Ball Is Over," "Tipton," "Black Blizzard," "Babylon," "Pick a Number," "The River," "Lonnigan, Texas," "Insomnia," "Hot and Bothered," "The Day of the Dead," "The Day That Was the Day"

by Walter Chaw It's the Depression in Dust Bowl United States, and Ben (Nick Stahl) really needs a bath: His mother's just died (but not before hissing at him to keep his distance, Mr. Antichrist) and he's in the act of burying her when a traveling carnival happens along to spirit him away before the local constabulary can. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy threatens briefly to break out as a bulldozer shows up to raze Ben's ramshackle homestead, but hey diddley hee, the roustie's life for me, says Ben. In a way, comparisons of HBO's handsomely-mounted "Carnivàle" to Douglas Adams's brilliant stuff is apt as Ben, like Adams's everyman Arthur, is orphaned from his home, set adrift in an absurd universe in the company of freaks, and burdened with the responsibility for the salvation of all mankind. A parallel story, joined to Ben's by a couple of early dream sequences, involves preacher-man Brother Crowe (Clancy Brown) navigating some tricky incestual straits with spinster sister Iris (Amy Madigan) in the midst of trying to establish a mission for the dislocated Okies flooding the Golden State–a purpose at odds with a Church hierarchy represented by kindly Father Balthus (Ralph Waite). In almost no time (well, actually, just barely in time for the end of the first season), the opening narration provided by Management liaison Samson (Michael J. Anderson) telling of one avatar for good and one for evil born into each generation comes into focus with Ben on one side and Brother Crowe on the other. No prize for guessing who's who.

Panic in the Streets (1950) – DVD

March 21, 2005Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Richard Widmark, Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes, Jack Palance
screenplay by Richard Murphy
directed by Elia Kazan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Did Elia Kazan really direct Panic in the Streets? Nothing in his grandstanding filmography–not the staring-at-particle-board virtue of Gentleman's Agreement, not the prosaic rationalizing of On the Waterfront, not the great but still morally show-offy A Streetcar Named Desire–describes the scene, evokes the mood, or gets to the point quicker than this marginalized but delicious 1950 semi-noir. For once, Kazan isn't telling you how to sympathize, opting instead to show you the issue and let you draw your own conclusions. The result is speedy, gripping, and affecting like nothing in his turgid oeuvre, and makes the people stick with you longer than the pasteboard symbols in Kazan's other films.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) – DVD

March 21, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Ellen Burstyn, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Green Bush, Diane Ladd
screenplay by Robert Getchell
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers The zeitgeist made Martin Scorsese and his mentor John Cassavetes artistically simpatico in 1974, when the two helmed "women's pictures" independent of each other's counsel. It was the beginning of women's lib, and Warner hoped to corner the market via Ellen Burstyn and her pet project Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, while it would seem that with his brilliant A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes just wanted to say something hopeful about marriage to counter the prevailing propaganda. Both pictures were demonized in certain feminist circles for yoking their heroines to knights in tarnished armour, but in the case of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, they were preaching to the compromised.

Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed (2004) – DVD

March 17, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B
directed by Shola Lynch

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Shirley Chisholm's adventures in presidential politics prove that the American electoral system fails even when it's working as planned–making me wish its unmasking in Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed were a little more cogently outraged. The film, like Chisholm herself, is as bluntly assertive as it is unfailingly polite, but the qualities that are refreshing in a politician cancel each other out in a documentary that wants to light a fire but can't seem to find a match. Nevertheless, it's far from a washout, at once a meticulous recounting of a quixotic but principled enterprise that rejected the cynical games of personality politics and a proud advertisement for an inclusive, no-bull dream that sadly never came true.

The Ring (2003) [2-Disc Collector’s Set] – DVD

March 16, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, David Dorfman, Brian Cox
screenplay by Ehren Kruger, based on the novel Ringu by Kôji Suzuki and the screenplay Ringu by Hiroshi Takahashi
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Handsomely mounted and undeniably disconcerting, Gore Verbinski's The Ring, the American remake of the first of Japanese horror auteur Hideo Nakata's "Ring Trilogy" (itself based on a series of novels by Kôji Suzuki), lacks a good deal of the original's subtlety but makes up for it with the kind of electronic paranoia that is Yankee stock and trade. The ideas of an unfolding technical mystery, of a protagonist perhaps gifted with second sight, of being a cog at the will of a malignant machine, are borrowed with intelligence and profit from Coppola's masterpiece, The Conversation. The picture even lifts part of that film's dream sequence, a setting within a warehouse before a bank of media equipment, and a quiet tableau of individuals dwarfed by identical apartment units in the sterile honeycomb of modern inner-city housing.

Amongst Friends (1993) – DVD

March 14, 2005Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Gangster

½*/**** Image A Sound A
starring Steve Parlavecchio, Joseph Lindsey, Patrick McGaw, Mira Sorvino
written and directed by Rob Weiss

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In 1973, Martin Scorsese made Mean Streets, a film that related the agony of someone with actual problems: Scorsese had lived in a world where the only way out of becoming a victim was to be a gangster or a priest; his inability to accept the wasting of himself and the people he knew gave his film infinite potency. Exactly twenty years later came Rob Weiss's Amongst Friends, in which a bunch of spoiled Long Island kids opt for crime out of boredom and lack of imagination–it's about people who stupidly want to have Scorsese's hellish problems, and it's about as thought through as its protagonists' boneheaded dreams. Unable to get past post-Scorsese gangster chic, the movie's shallow ineptitude is painful reminder that imitation is the sincerest form of incomprehension.

Toolbox Murders (2004) – DVD

March 14, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror

*½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Angela Bettis, Brent Roam, Juliet Landau, Greg Travis
screenplay by Jace Anderson & Adam Gierasch
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Bill Chambers I suppose I'm a hypocrite, because one of the reasons I don't like the Marcus Nispel remake of Tobe Hooper's 1974 masterpiece The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is that it's basically the Young Guns version, a fun-size snuff film with a reductively commercial aesthetic that literalizes the Grant Wood underpinnings of the original. If that's not enough, its typecasting of ubiquitous B-listers R. Lee Ermey, David Dorfman, Jessica Biel, Eric Balfour, and, arguably, apple-cheeked goddess Erica Leerhsen (because she didn't survive Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2) makes the movie feel reassuring in a way that runs philosophically counter to its grindhouse roots, thus negating any street cred it gained from hiring the earlier film's DP, Daniel Pearl. But Tobe Hooper's reimagining of Dennis Donnelly's splatter flick The Toolbox Murders has confirmed for me that I really disagree with a redux of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in principle, irrespective of practice. For the record, I don't want to see cover versions of the same year's The Godfather Part II, A Woman Under the Influence, The Conversation, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Parallax View, or Chinatown, either.

The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan (2004) + Pauly Shore is Dead (2004) – DVDs

March 11, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, DVD, Pseudo-Documentary, ZERO STARS

THE BURIED SECRET OF M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A
written by Melissa Foster
directed by Nathaniel Kahn

PAULY SHORE IS DEAD
½*/**** Image C Sound B Extras D
starring Pauly Shore, Jaime Bergman, Todd Bridges, Rick Ducommon
screenplay by Pauly Shore and Kirk Fox
directed by Pauly Shore

by Walter Chaw The only thing separating M. Night Shyamalan from Pauly Shore is that Shyamalan actually has a couple of classic modern suspensers under his belt and Shore doesn't have anything on his resume that could be remotely considered indispensable. Both are weasels, both have spent some period of time being really popular, both have endured a critical and popular backlash, and both have produced mock-documentaries detailing how interesting they think they are. But at the end of the day, only Shore's Pauly Shore Is Dead has anything like an affecting, self-deprecating, clear-eyed sense of self: The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan is an embarrassing and cripplingly self-congratulatory PR gag. Shore knows that he's like nails across a chalkboard for most sentient beings on this planet (going so far as to portray his remaining fanbase as a hilljack in a trailer somewhere in Kentucky); Shyamalan thinks that a fake documentary shot in the style of Curse of the Blair Witch is a cute way to not only publicize his sham of a post-9/11 psychodrama The Village, but also debunk some of the venomous press (and leaked memorandums) that he's been amassing ever since deciding to start giving himself top-billing and face-time within the promotional materials for his films. (Check out the Signs DVD's packaging and cast your mind back to the last time you saw a picture of the director incorporated into the cover art of any release.) Shore knows he's become an object of ridicule; Shyamalan thinks he's become a national treasure–or at least the poet laureate.

The Yes Men (2004) – DVD

March 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Documentary, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
directed by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The key scene in The Yes Men comes when pranksters Michael Bonanno and Andy Bichelbaum suddenly stop to ask the question: is it more fun to engage in satire than in regular protest? They quickly agree that it is, but the issue has always been hanging around their flamboyant efforts to impersonate WTO spokespeople and tell the ridiculous truth about the organization's activities. And although it's obvious that satire is indeed more fun, its effectiveness is called into question over and over again when it becomes apparent that nobody really appreciates the joke. If one can crash a conference and throw outrageous but true accusations at globalization and not get thrown out, was anything truly subverted? The film mounts a good case for the entertainment factor of this shtick without backing up its larger claims as a lefty consciousness-raiser, a process far more arduous than these Yes Men let on.

Raise Your Voice (2004) – DVD

March 8, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Coming of Age, DVD, Family, Music, Musical, Romance, Teen

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Hilary Duff, Rita Wilson, David Keith, Jason Ritter
screenplay by Sam Schreiber
directed by Sean McNamara

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The best one can say for Raise Your Voice is that it was made with non-toxic materials–your impressionable 'tween will not be exposed to any really reprehensible behaviour. It's not a disguised infomercial for crass capitalism, it's not leeringly inappropriate in its sexual attitudes, and, save for a somewhat-patronized struggling black character, its politics are vague and inoffensive. Granted, this doesn't preclude Raise Your Voice from positing an alternate universe where music conservatories teach scratching and rock guitar, or wrapping up huge traumatic events with the ease of turning on a light, but the film does keep you from becoming disgusted with the corruption of kids' entertainment. You may feel bored and bewildered, but never disgusted.

The Iron Giant (1999) [Special Edition] – DVD

March 7, 2005Posted in****/****, 1990s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Family, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by Tim McCanlies, based on The Iron Man by Ted Hughes
directed by Brad Bird

Mustownby Walter Chaw Brad Bird's The Iron Giant, based on a children's book, The Iron Man, that British poet laureate (and Mr. Sylvia Plath) Ted Hughes wrote after his wife's suicide, is improbably transformed from the dark and Anglocentric source into a throughline pure and sweet to the rapturous Americana of Richard Donner's Superman. It captures an impossible period existing between the idealism of Rockwell and the lonely realist decompositions of Edward Hopper in a flurry of animated cels, telling the tale of a boy and his robot in the month or so when Sputnik was scaring the bejesus out of a suddenly-humbled, suddenly-Luddite United States. Accordingly, the Colour from Outer Space that was the monstrous bad guy in the book is transformed in the film into the paranoia of a country taught to fear an invisible (or barely visible) foe–marking The Iron Giant as something of a timeless picture particularly topical for a country embroiled in a war on foreign soil, a war with an invisible enemy, and the makings of a cold war with a country that has decided the only way to combat American aggression is with nuclear weapons. Tellingly, it's the appearance of nukes at the end of The Iron Giant that coaxes out the heart of the titular tin man–the last word that he has in the picture–"Superman"–whispered with something like awe that has never failed to bring a tear to my secretly-patriotic eye.

Boxcar Bertha (1972) [The Martin Scorsese Film Collection] – DVD

March 7, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Barbara Hershey, David Carradine, Barry Primus, Bernie Casey
screenplay by Joyce H. Corrington & John William Corrington, based on Sisters of the Road by Bertha Thompson, as told to Ben L. Reitman
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers Although a Martin Scorsese retrospective could easily survive the absence of Boxcar Bertha, the film is a cornerstone of the director's filmography: Without it, there is conceivably no The Last Temptation of Christ–Bertha herself, Barbara Hershey, introduced Scorsese to the Nikos Kazantzakis source novel during production–and no Mean Streets. Because he'd been toiling away on the Hollywood fringe after getting fired from his would-be sophomore effort, 1970's The Honeymoon Killers, for shooting everything in master (an experiment he would repeat to great acclaim with The King of Comedy), Scorsese agreed to helm AIP's umpteenth Bonnie and Clyde wannabe, an in-name-only sequel to the drive-in sensation Bloody Mama (which incidentally starred his future muse, Robert De Niro). "You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit," went John Cassavetes's immortal response to the results, a critique not so much of the work itself as of Scorsese's decision to play the hired gun. Thus aborted his mission to position himself as one of the California film brats conquering the industry, as Cassavetes's tough-love approach spurred him to return to New York and resurrect the idea for Season of the Witch, a thematic follow-up to Who's That Knocking At My Door that eventually became Mean Streets.

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976) [Special Edition] + The Loveless (1982) – DVDs

March 5, 2005Posted in1970s, 1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blue Underground, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring Millie Perkins, Lonny Chapman, Vanessa Brown, George "Buck" Flowers
screenplay by Robert Thom
directed by Matt Cimber

THE LOVELESS
***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Willem Dafoe, Marin Kanter, Robert Gordon, J. Don Ferguson
written and directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw Looking and feeling a lot like a classic 1970s Seka porno flick, Matt Cimber's seedy, disquieting The Witch Who Came from the Sea straddles an exploitation line in telling a simple tale with an unexpected degree of pretense and, if only occasionally, artistry. History suggests that most of this is due to the contribution of cinematographer Dean Cundey, working here early in his career in his preferred 'scope format and offering the sort of stunning seaside-tableaux counterweight he would employ to greater success in John Carpenter's underestimated The Fog. His landscapes dwarf the lost heroine of the picture, swallowing her whole in the ocean of her past, her obsession with television commercials, and the culture of machismo that manifests itself in 1976 Southern California as muscle beaches and professional football. Opening with Molly (Millie Perkins) telling a tale of her long lost sea captain father to her two nephews (shades, again, of The Fog), The Witch Who Came from the Sea finds its themes topical even when its presentation skews often and badly into the unfortunately-dated.

Carrie (1952) – DVD

March 2, 2005Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Laurence Olivier, Jennifer Jones, Miriam Hopkins, Eddie Albert
screenplay by Ruth Goetz and Augustus Goetz
directed by William Wyler

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie is a masterpiece of interiority, which makes adapting it for the screen rather tricky. The book's characters say things they don't mean and do things they don't understand while the author interprets the buried motives behind their casually destructive actions. So much editorializing goes on that a straight-up regurgitation of the narrative simply won't suffice: it's a novel for a director versed in atmospherics, one who can counter the spoken word with visual information to the contrary–Fritz Lang would have been right, likewise Douglas Sirk or Max Ophüls. But there's nobody less suited to the task than William Wyler. The master of long-take, deep-focus literalism, he knows nothing that he can't see and hear and thus sees and hears nothing. Wyler takes in the scenery, notes the mangled verbiage of the screenwriters, and fails completely to evoke what's essential about the work being translated.