Nanny McPhee (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

July 18, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, France, UK

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Emma Thompson, Colin Firth, Angela Lansbury
screenplay by Emma Thompson, based on the "Nurse Matilda" books by Christianna Brand
directed by Kirk Jones

by Walter Chaw Often as garish and shrill as it is magical and enchanting, Kirk Jones' Nanny McPhee throws into sharp relief the difficulty of describing the tightrope so artfully navigated by Babe: Pig in the City. In its favour, there are strong, fairytale-sinister undercurrents to it that feel authentic where the darkness of the slick Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events felt, on the whole, manufactured and arch, and the film finds its surest footing in an idea essential to children's entertainment: that every action has a consequence. The answer to the question of what, exactly, is Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson), or what generator produces these Mary Poppinses like sexless, befrocked clergy attending wayward British moppets, is that Nanny McPhee is stuffy consequence personified–the element of parents and/or society that, often with something like a supernatural hand in the eyes of a child, embeds itself in a growing moral conscience. There's something grand and mysterious about these figures, and Jones allows Nanny the freedom to be as enigmatic, omniscient, and omnipotent as a superego on the wax.

Caché (2005) – DVD

June 26, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

Hidden
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Walter Chaw Gone uncommented-upon in greater detail, a glimmer of hope does exist in Michael Haneke’s difficult Funny Games, the scabrous Austrian auteur’s last picture that dealt with a brutal home invasion. Therein, the victims overcome their tormentors and are well on their way to freedom when Haneke inserts himself as the capricious godhead of his own piece (indeed, a director is never anything else) and rewinds the film like videotape, providing a different eventuality for his players. It’s a move as audacious and wry as anything in Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (and as existentially devastating as anything in Pirandello), something that’s earned Haneke his reputation for uncompromising–some would say sadistic (or intellectually austere)–morality plays about apocalypses proximate and ultimate.

Darwin’s Nightmare (2005) – DVD

May 31, 2006Posted in2000s, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Documentary, DVD, France, Germany

***/**** Image C+ Sound C+
directed by Hubert Sauper

by Walter Chaw Told almost completely in extended wordless sequences, Darwin's Nightmare covers how the introduction of feral perch to Tanzania's Lake Victoria to sate a ravenous European market has spelled doom for locals enlisted ("enslaved," director Hubert Sauper would insist) to harvest it at subsistence levels, forcing them to scavenge among the discards for sustenance. Even worse, Sauper suggests that arms traffickers use the incoming cargo planes–the very ones entrusted with the export of the perch–to smuggle their own illicit wares and thus further exploit stricken Africa. We learn that the perch were introduced into the lake as a means of supplementing an over-fished native supply to ironically-fantastic results–a perch boom that on-message factory owners and government officials proclaim as an economic miracle.

The Da Vinci Code (2006)

May 18, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Malta, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Dan Brown
directed by Ron Howard

Davincicodeby Walter Chaw The greatest threat that Dan Brown's novel, and now Ron Howard's film of the same, poses to spirituality is the same threat that any bad art presents the human soul. The Da Vinci Code is a retarded attempt to summarize painstaking scholarship and liturgy into broadly digestible gruel. In the eyes of many, it's what the Christian Bible is to centuries of pagan mythology and millennia of cultural anthropology: the greatest stories ever told, retold in a form that illiterates and the gullible can appreciate. It's nothing more and nothing less than The Celestine Prophecy (itself adapted for the silver screen this annus mirabilus) for fallen Catholics and armchair intellectuals: books so poorly-written, so bereft of poetry and grace, that they cannot offend (or repel) the unschooled and the indiscriminate with their oblique-ness, each about poetry and grace so brusquely raped and "decoded" that the "conspiracy"–the great mystery of great art–is laid bare as bad thriller material. It's skipping forward to read the last page of the book–and the wrong book at that. Is it really ironic that Ron Howard, who has never directed a graceful scene, has never had a film with a hint of a whiff or subtext (his version of "genius at work" is a holodeck (see: A Beautiful Mind and now The Da Vinci Code)) is the chosen one for the adaptation (along with partner in extreme, middlebrow-pleasing mendacity Akiva Goldsman) of an obscenely popular book (60-million copies sold and counting) that makes anyone with a half a brain crazy with grief for the plight of the sublime in our culture?

Munich (2005) – DVD

May 8, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Spielberg, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz
screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth
directed by Steven Spielberg

Munichcap

by Walter Chaw Violence begets violence, terrorism begets terrorism, corruption begets corruption, and on and on up and down the self-righteous homily scale. Some time during the third hour of Steven Spielberg's slapdash Munich, the small lessons of this huge picture begin to feel like a ten-penny nail pounded into the middle of your forehead. There's possibly no other director who could have brought this film to fruition with such speed (principal photography began on the day Spielberg's other 2005 release, War of the Worlds, opened in the United States), but for as remarkable as that accomplishment is from a brinkmanship standpoint (about $250M-worth of film in one calendar year? Priceless), the stress begins to show in Munich–the first Spielberg film in memory so hamstrung with amateurish thematic visual concepts that you begin to wonder whether an editor fresh off the bus took over the picture's composition. Still, credit is due Spielberg, almost as well-known for his inability to resist tacking on unearned happy endings as for his savant-like conversance with the medium, for crafting a picture that's morally ambiguous (if only fitfully, and then torturously, so) as well as for daring to whisper that as a direct result of the best intentions of the bloodlust of "civilization" and Old Testament logic employed by the "good guys," the world may actually be a more dangerous place now than it was thirty years ago.

United 93 (2006)

April 28, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Lewis Alsamari, JJ Johnson, Trish Gates, Polly Adams
written and directed by Paul Greengrass

United93by Walter Chaw I guess when you talk about a movie like Paul Greengrass's United 93, you have to talk about the propriety of the project: Whether death, fear, and suffering at its most obscene is something we should try to know or gratefully shield ourselves from. Should 9/11 already be an Oprah special and a national holiday? It's an essential question, a defining one–and on either side of the question's divide, you'll find one person who thinks we should see our soldiers' caskets draped in American flags and another who feels that seeing war casualties is somehow bad for morale or, if our fearless leaders are to be believed, somehow unpatriotic. Ignorance is as blissful now as it ever was–it's one aphorism the film honours. Another is that you reap what you sow: The belief that our civil liberties, for which we eagerly fight and die to protect on foreign soil, are the first things we seem to sacrifice in times of peril (including a vocal rabble wondering if we're "ready" for a 9/11 film), is far stickier when the proposition before us is that Islamic extremists don't like us because of that which defines us as Americans. ("They hate our freedom" is the party line.) So when our government begins to infringe on our personal freedom after a meticulously organized and coordinated terrorist attack took us completely unawares (I still recall with a shudder how then-Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice claimed that no one could have imagined it) more than four years ago, that means–more than over twenty-one hundred military dead (and counting) does–that we've already lost.

Pride & Prejudice (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

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

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

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

The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

March 10, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, Wes Craven

*/****
starring Aaron Stanford, Kathleen Quinlan, Vinessa Shaw, Emilie de Ravin
screenplay by Alexandre Aja & Grégory Levasseur, based on the screenplay by Wes Craven
directed by Alexandre Aja

Hillshaveeyes2006by Walter Chaw Alexandre Aja's follow-up to his hateful-but-effective High Tension is a hateful but not particularly effective remake of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes. Opening exactly as Dr. Strangelove ends, with a montage of mushroom clouds set to soothing WWII-era croons (shock-cut with babies deformed by Agent Orange), the film all but declares itself a sardonic satire of the madness driving the United States' military policy where the original was pretty much a look at the country's simmering caste divide. Aja hopes to draw a line from the atrocities committed in Vietnam to atrocities committed in the desert against enemies of Our Own Making–and along the way, should a throwaway jab at the plight of subsistence miners be hurled and a few mutants get impaled by sharpened American flags, well, so be it. I'm not saying that there's nothing rotten in the state of Denmark, I'm saying that I don't care for a French filmmaker making a contemptuous, smug, proselytizing allegory about the legacy of Yankee colonial/expansionist violence. I don't buy Aja's outrage as anything more than practiced and ill-considered, the equivalent of those sick fuckers who drive around with pictures of aborted fetuses on the sides of their vans or set up haunted houses in their churches with any number of right-winger nightmares. As it doesn't teach anything new in any ways that are imaginative or truly horrifying, only the true believers are gratified, and then only by those same florid, ignorant little jabs.

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

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

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

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

Lord of War (2005) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

March 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Nicolas Cage, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto, Bridget Moynahan, Ethan Hawke
written and directed by Andrew Niccol

by Walter Chaw At times the film that Paul Brickman's brilliant screenplay for Deal of the Century promised, Aussie futurist Andrew Niccol crafts with Lord of War a sometimes transcendent, sometimes finger-wagging fable about a ridiculously successful gunrunner, Yuri (Nicolas Cage), prowling the hot spots of the Third World like a vampire in trenchcoat and shades. (I'm not convinced it wasn't the effect Niccol was going for, what with the obvious connection between spreading pestilence and feeding on death–and, of course, what with Cage's best role arguably being the quasi-vampire in Vampire's Kiss.) Without much of a narrative, even subplots concerning Yuri's mad, druggie brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) and model wife Ava (Bridget Moynahan) seem like way-stations along a dotted line. Too often, the picture lives and dies on its ability to keep the pace fluid–but just that need for momentum suggests something amiss at the heart of the piece, a certain surface tension that would pop should the rock-star protagonist we envy ever collide against the satire of the kind of colossal moral vacuity required of his vocation. It's the embedded problem of what Hitchcock observed as a character we like because he does his job well: what if that job is essentially reprehensible and, moreover, what if the ultimate desire of the film is that we experience righteous repugnance?

Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005) + Domino (2005) [New Line Platinum Series|Widescreen] – DVD

March 2, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
**½/****
starring David Strathairn, Patricia Clarkson, George Clooney, Jeff Daniels
screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

DOMINO
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo
screenplay by Richard Kelly
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw Rigorous and principled, George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. is a curiously slight film for more reasons than the fact that almost a third of it is comprised of archival footage integrated semi-successfully into the story. It's a recreation of a very specific battle in a very specific war that resonates with our Patriot Act/Guantanamo Bay situation, and indeed, that's the target Clooney seems most interested in striking. But without a larger context (the sort that would have weakened its allegorical usefulness), the picture sets itself up as something as obvious as it is minor and feather-light. It's a professional, high-minded, and staid biopic is what I'm saying, a film that says what it says with the stark B&W cinematography of a Dr. Strangelove, but in its icy, humourless way, it's the same stark B&W cinematography of a Fail-Safe, too. It's close and under-populated–and even with so insular and finely-focused a spotlight, it contains at least two completely superfluous characters.

Wall (2004) – DVD

February 10, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD, France, Israel

Mur
***/**** Image A- Sound A-
directed by Simone Bitton

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Wall's greatest strength–its serene pictorialism–is also its greatest limitation. On the one hand, the film asks us to think long and hard about the sheer presence of the massive concrete edifice designed to keep terrorists out of Israel and whether that presence is necessary. To that end, it features some skilful photography of the towering edifice in all its intrusive glory. On the other hand, Wall pushes the surrounding populace onto an abstract plane, letting the Kafkaesque spectacle drive the movie when really it ought to be providing more, pardon the pun, concrete information. It's a tough call, as the film manages to gently grip instead of blind with the alienating rage the subject understandably attracts–it gets you to listen, but at the expense of a certain kind of perspective. Still, considering the passionate hysteria this topic usually incites, perhaps it's offering a necessary stretch of distance.

Sundance ’06: Into Great Silence

February 7, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Sundance, Switzerland
Die Große Stille****/****directed by Philip Gröning by Alex Jackson I actually saw director Philip Gröning's previous film at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. It was called L'Amour, l'argent, l'amour, and it was kind of awful, I guess, very long and very pretentious. But it was kind of mesmerizing, too, and the mesmerizing and the awful become inextricable--it's the sort of "bad" movie that only a true genius could make. Gröning's Into Great Silence is in the same insane tradition. I offer no intellectual defense towards either of these two movies; I don't know if I'm complimenting the Emperor on his…

Sundance ’06: By the Ways, A Journey with William Eggleston

February 2, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Sundance
***/****directed by Cédric Laty & Vincent Gérard by Alex Jackson I'm certain that William Eggleston is a real photographer; I'm a little less sure that Cédric Laty and Vincent Gérard are real Frenchmen: I can't find anything about them on the Internet not directly related to this movie. You would understand my skepticism were you to see By the Ways, A Journey with William Eggleston, which plays like a particularly bizarre practical joke. The film purports to be a study of Eggleston's life and work, but it's actually more of a Parisian love letter to American cars, the American south,…

Pickpocket (1959) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

January 30, 2006Posted in****/****, 1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Martin La Salle, Marika Green, Jean Pelegri, Dolly Scal
written and directed by Robert Bresson

Pickpocketcapby Walter Chaw Manny Farber described the films of Robert Bresson as “crystalline,” and it’s hard to argue with the singular idea of purity represented by that word: they’re all of gesture and implication, reduced down to the purest grist so that the powder of dramatic movements, rubbed together, might hum in miniature perfection. Diderot, Tolstoy, and especially Dostoevsky are sent to the kiln in Bresson, emerging at the end as a distillation thick with the observation that human behaviour, winnowed down, is only as mysterious as the mechanical motions of insects. When you use a term like “crystalline,” you evoke clockwork–the inner workings of music boxes, say. It’s wilfully, damnably, emotionally inscrutable, of course, and if it also calls to mind a watchmaker and his intricate art, then find another explanation for Bresson’s fascination with, and eroticizing of, the secret life of hands.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

January 25, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, France, Mexico, Mystery, Theatrical, Western

*½/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cesar Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam
screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga
directed by Tommy Lee Jones

Threeburialsby Walter Chaw Crash by way of Cormac McCarthy, Tommy Lee Jones's "fuck you" of a mouthful The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is another fairytale salvo from the race divide, fired from that good place that results in cultural artifacts so unbearably cheesy and proselytizing that any potential heat is lost long before the second reel has finished unspooling. It's about serendipity, this elegy for the American West, hence no transgression is left unredeemed in its long, rambling, "it's good for you, so swallow it" narrative, with blame going in equal portion to Jones–whose smug, smarter-than-you are attitude has shoehorned him into prestigious position as the resident asshole of Man of the House, Men in Black II, and The Missing–and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams, Amores Perros), who paints every Mexican in the film in the same shade of saintly. (All the gringos, on the other hand, have a lot to learn about the grand mystery of being human.) It's tedious, unsurprising stuff, this picture–the kind of thing that gets the Right in a bunch about how Hollywood is a tool of the subversive Lefties while making smart folks on both sides of the Culture War cringe before its condescension.

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2006) + Why We Fight (2006)

January 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Denmark, Documentary, France, Satire, Theatrical, UK, War

LOOKING FOR COMEDY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
*/****
starring Albert Brooks, John Carroll Lynch, Sheetal Sheth, Fred Dalton Thompson
written and directed by Albert Brooks

WHY WE FIGHT
**/****
directed by Eugene Jarecki

by Walter Chaw The most frustrating thing about Albert Brooks's crushingly boring, infuriatingly unfunny Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (hereafter Comedy) is the possibility that such was the intention all along. 'Lost in Arabia' (well, India and Pakistan–let's not get crazy, here) finds Brooks doing a high-wire act with post-modernism–the same one he's been doing his whole career, as it happens. At some point, though, it's fair to wonder how long you can push self-awareness before it finally flies apart in a storm of narcissistic deconstruction. Mull over, if you will, a moment where Brooks (as Brooks) recreates one of his classic gags–involving the world's most ironically-tragic ventriloquist–in the middle of an interminable stand-up routine staged in a New Delhi auditorium, closing his act with the dummy (the wooden one) drinking a glass of water. It's Brooks, and Brooks's film, in microcosm: a man who returns the term "mortification" to ritual and religion while being incapable of subsuming the belief that he's still the smartest guy in the room. The trick of Comedy is that in making a movie that isn't very funny about a man who isn't very funny in the middle of a gulf of cultural misunderstanding that's especially not very funny, Brooks hopes to draw a corollary between how the troubles of the world boil down to everybody's inability to communicate. As revelations go, it's not earth-shattering. Guess it goes without saying that it's also not worth the effort to get there.

The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes (2006); Mutual Appreciation (2006); Unknown (2006)

January 19, 2006Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, France, Germany, Music, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE PIANOTUNER OF EARTHQUAKES
*½/****
starring Amira Casar, Gottfried John, Assumpta Serna, César Saracho
screenplay by Alan Passes and The Quay Brothers
directed by The Quay Brothers

MUTUAL APPRECIATION
***½/****
starring Justin Rice, Rachel Clift, Andrew Bujalski, Seung-Min Lee
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

UNKNOWN
½*/****
starring Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Bridget Moynahan, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Matthew Waynee
directed by Simon Brand

by Walter Chaw The Quay Brothers, Stephen and Timothy, are marvellous animators, having shepherded stop-motion and a disquieting biomechanical ethic into a series of notably discomfiting shorts, more than one of which pays tribute to their hero/mentor Jan Svankmajer. I met their 1995 transition to live-action features (Institute Benjamenta) with equal parts excitement, curiosity, and trepidation–I believed they'd be a little like either fellow animator-turned-director Tim Burton or those masters of a form who overreach by switching to a different medium, à la Michael Jordan. The truth is somewhere in-between, as the Quays have retained a bit of their glacial patience and a marked affection for created environments but have miscalculated the extent to which our fascination with animate clockworks translates into a commensurate fascination with people sitting around, staring at a wall. The former inspires existential thoughts on the nature of sentience; the latter generally inspires boredom. No question in my mind that something's lurking in the Quays' underneath, but it's important to mark that fine line distinguishing fascination from obtuseness for the sake of itself. Exploring the waking/dreamlife divide is interesting–but it's neither original nor terribly useful when the main tactic seems to be to conjure up pomposity-inspired sleepiness.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004) – DVD

December 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Robert De Niro, Romance, Spain, UK

½*/**** Image A Sound A
starring F. Murray Abraham, Gabriel Byrne, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Mary McGuckian, based on the novel by Thornton Wilder
directed by Mary McGuckian

by Walter Chaw Given its cast as well as its presumption to chart the hazy intersection between predestination and circumstance, Mary McGuckian's excruciatingly dull The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the third adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, might be the biggest miscalculation of the year. Start with Robert De Niro as the corrupt Archbishop of Lima, presiding over the inquisition of Brother Juniper (Gabriel Byrne). Six years previous Juniper witnessed the unceremonious snapping of the titular bridge, which sent five random people to their howling doom. Had they known how boring our good brown-robed pilgrim would make them out to be, I wouldn't wonder why they didn't try to float. No, Brother Juniper has decided that he's going to write the world's dullest book about this quintet of unfortunates so as to perhaps accidentally ken the mysterious workings of the Almighty in the small lives of small people.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

December 9, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Spielberg, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh, Kôji Yakusho
screenplay by Robin Swicord and Doug Wright, based on the novel by Arthur Golden
directed by Rob Marshall

Memoirsofageishaby Walter Chaw The wounds that WWII opened between the Chinese and the Japanese are still fresh. Over the course of a twelve-year occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese regular army, at least nine million Chinese civilians were butchered–and though the Chinese, lacking a unified defense, bear the burden of poor organization, petty in-fighting, and a fair share of mortal Pollyannaism, the Japanese refuse to this day to apologize for what they have officially dismissed as the standard toll collected in conventional warfare. I believe it’s this–as opposed to the centuries of racial hatred–that has called down the normally quiescent Chinese activist contingent on the suddenly-thorned head of the Steven Spielberg-produced Memoirs of a Geisha, a film written, directed, and produced by Caucasians based on a book by a white author who was promptly sued by the geisha, Mineko Iwasaki, he interviewed for the book on the grounds that he not only betrayed their confidentiality agreement, but also fabricated the fate of her virginity, which she claims was never auctioned off in the way that the Arthur Golden novel describes. True or not, it’s the sort of thing that would be particularly attractive to a Western mind transfixed by the sexy Mystery of the Geisha.