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.

Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

March 1, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Stellan Skarsgård, Izabella Scorupco, James D'Arcy, Remy Sweeney
screenplay by Alexi Hawley
directed by Renny Harlin

Exorcistbeginningcap

by Walter Chaw Beginning with a kinky apocalypse that Ken Russell would surely have created had ever he the budget and equipment, Renny Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning is good, old-timey drive-in exploitation garbage. It hates children with a unique fury, boasting the highest dead-kid count since Schindler's List, and sure enough, somehow Harlin manages to work in an uncomfortable subplot about exorcising Holocaust demons as our happy Catholics exorcise a literal one. I don't know if Paul Schrader, the man who helmed the first run at this troubled production (the very first director attached was the late John Frankenheimer)–ostensibly scrapped because it wasn't scary enough (and frankly, the guy who did the Nastassja Kinski Cat People should probably not be going near horror movies in the first place)–included a Holocaust subplot in his version of the flick, but I'm hoping not. Mainly because when you introduce a Holocaust subplot into a movie that also features hyenas ripping apart a little boy in protracted, excruciating detail, a woman giving birth to a maggot-infested infant, and another Holocaust survivor bleeding gallons from her Nazi-ruined vagina, you're wandering into the territory of cinema as audience punishment.

I Can’t Sleep (1994) – DVD

February 28, 2005Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Switzerland, Thriller

J'ai pas sommeil
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Katerina Golubeva, Richard Courcet, Vincent Dupont, Laurent Grevill
screenplay by Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau
directed by Claire Denis

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Claire Denis thinks the world is a lot like Paris–which is to say, a morally bankrupt no-man's land that chews you up and spits you out. Nobody seems to know how to get by in Denis's fifth feature, I Can't Sleep: not Daiga (Katerina Golubeva), the young refugee from a perestroika-ravaged Lithuania looking for a new chance; not Theo (Alex Descas), the put-upon furniture deliveryman who's been taken advantage of once too often; and certainly not the old ladies victimized by a ruthless serial killer. Apparently, anything goes in Paris, standing in for the corrupt void faced after the fall of some once-eternal verities, and everything is up for grabs for the ideological clean-slate capable of seeing the odds. The only one enjoying himself at all is Theo's brother, Camille (Richard Courcet). Did I mention that he's the killer?

Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1968) – DVD

February 28, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Zina Bethune, Harvey Keitel, Anne Collette, Lennard Kuras
written and directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers All of the scenes that constitute the plot of Martin Scorsese's directorial debut Who's That Knocking at My Door look washed-out and indistinct in comparison to the rest of the feature. This is because the project began life as Bring on the Dancing Girls, a 35mm, hour-long thesis short so poorly received that Scorsese went back to the drawing board, but with only enough money to shoot fresh material in 16mm. And yet the disconnect seems oddly premeditated, especially since almost every 16mm passage is a veritable non sequitur. An extended riff on the mores of youth raised in Little Italy, Who's That Knocking at My Door charts a parallel course for Scorsese avatar J.R. (Harvey Keitel), a practising Catholic who, when not clowning around with punks from the neighbourhood, spends lazy afternoons in the company of a secular, middle-class blonde (soap star Zina Bethune, her character billed only as "the girl") he meets on the Staten Island ferry by striking up a conversation about a Scorsese touchstone, John Ford's The Searchers. As wishful thinking goes, it's cute.

Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) – DVD

February 17, 2005Posted in1930s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Gangster, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, The "Dead End" Kids, Humphrey Bogart
screenplay by John Wexley and Warren Duff
directed by Michael Curtiz

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover For those who hold to the dubious belief that the Production Code produced better filmmaking through deviousness, there is no better ammunition than 1938's Angels with Dirty Faces. On the surface satisfying the crime-doesn't-pay, no-bad-deed-shall-go-unpunished virtuousness so beloved by censorship organizations and humourless types, the film succeeds in pushing to the margins that which seems reckless or corrosive by comparison. But there's subtext all over the place in this singularly agonized gangster melodrama, with the dreams and desperation of slum dwellers bubbling forth to envelop its platitudes and pieties. Angels with Dirty Faces is locked in mortal combat with itself, a repressed sinner wanting to do good while needing to blow its top, resulting in one hell of a potent "classic" that goes well beyond the standard pleasures of studio craftsmanship.

Wicker Park (2004) – DVD

February 16, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Josh Hartnett, Rose Byrne, Matthew Lillard, Diane Kruger
screenplay by Brandon Boyce
directed by Paul McGuigan

by Walter Chaw Paul McGuigan's Wicker Park is all about reflective surfaces. The whole thing casts Chicago (or Montreal, subbing for Chicago in just another slippery deception) as the house of mirrors sequence in The Lady from Shanghai, tempting us to dismiss it as stale noir sauced-up with a fresh spackle of postmodern, commercial/music video glamour. But Wicker Park, based on Gilles Mimouni's L'Appartement, is almost an act of pop art, opening with hunky Josh Hartnett walking the mean streets of the Windy City and shopping for a diamond engagement ring that becomes the prism through which the rest of the film, especially in its more pregnant moments, is seen.

Friday Night Lights (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Sports

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Derek Luke, Jay Hernandez, Lucas Black
screenplay by David Aaron Cohen and Peter Berg, based on the book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H.G. Bissinger
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw Turning the microscope on the reptile hearts and minds of small-town sports culture, Peter Berg's Friday Night Lights is so alive with seething energy and meanness that it emerges as one of the better sports films on the short list of good sports films. It's what the Omaha Beach sequence in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is to Oliver Stone's Platoon: an evolution by way of devolution that erases the veneer, such as there is, prettifying violent confrontation, becoming in the process the unadorned engine to which Stone's ultimately featherweight Any Given Sunday aspired. It finds Lucas Black (as star quarterback Mike Winchell) reunited with Sling Blade co-star Billy Bob Thornton (playing his coach, Gary Gaines), with the mental disability roles reversed ("There's something wrong with my head," Winchell complains) but the peek under the Rockwell covers at insular, provincial psychosis transplanted intact. Friday Night Lights is a work of sociology, a film that not only understands the all-American obsession with packaged violence and the cult of machismo, but is also a clearer barometer of the kind of sublimation of fear and loathing in these United States than any gross of pre-election political documentaries. Our country's in trouble because these brutal idiots can vote–and there are more of them than there are the rest of us.