The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (2005); March of the Penguins (2005); Grizzly Man (2005)

August 2, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Antarctica, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Family, France, Theatrical

THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL
**½/****
directed by Judy Irving

La marche de l’empereur
*½/****
directed by Luc Jacquet

GRIZZLY MAN
****/****
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Nature documentaries have been the non-fiction standby ever since Marlin Perkins began manipulating dramatic moments for the edification of horrified youngsters. (I used to play a game of imagining what a “Mutual of Omaha’s” would be like if it were to focus on people and feature narration from, say, prairie chickens.) So with three high-profile nature documentaries hitting screens more or less simultaneously this summer, it’s the perfect–well, inevitable–opportunity to compare how far some have come in resisting the urge to project human behaviour onto animals, and how unapologetic others are in indulging in the insanity of pretending that gophers are tiny, furry people. Understand that far from speaking to any overt insensitivity on my part, pretending animals are people, too, tends to put both the animal and human at risk. More than just pathetic, there’s a moral repugnance to it. (Blame a country reared on a steady diet of Disney.) And though some–like Mark Bittner of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill–can’t be blamed for the jackholes who acquire pets without a commensurate sense of obligation to them for the whole of their lives, others, like self-taught naturalist Timothy Treadwell (the subject of Werner Herzog’s astounding Grizzly Man), really deserve to get pureed in Darwin’s cosmic blender. The tricky thing is that I’m guessing most of the folks who love Animal Planet wouldn’t love it as much if it were hammered home to them repeatedly that animals are alien entities without compassion–that given half the chance, many a critter wouldn’t think twice (or at all) about eating your baby. (Something to ponder over a plate of veal sausage and scrambled eggs, maybe.) Acknowledging that animals are animals, after all, cuts too close to the bone of the startling revelation that humans are also animals, and the only inauthentic bullshit in this ever-lovin’ world of ours is a product of our need to obsessively self-deceive.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005); Hustle & Flow (2005); Last Days (2005)

July 21, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, France, Music, Theatrical, Thriller

De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté
***/****
starring Romain Duris, Niels Arestrup, Jonathan Zaccaï, Gilles Cohen
screenplay by Jacques Audiard, Tonino Benacquista, based on the screenplay for Fingers by James Toback
directed by Jacques Audiard

HUSTLE & FLOW
*/****
starring Terrence Howard, Anthony Anderson, Taryn Manning, Taraji P. Henson
written and directed by Craig Brewer

LAST DAYS
****/****
starring Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Green
written and directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw On my better days, I still think of film as the quintessential artform of the last century–a medium for expression uniquely suited to our Modernist Yeatsian decomposition, what with its malleability beneath the knife, as it were, cut and spliced back together again as the un-spooling literalization of some patchwork Prometheus. Likewise, in its 24 flickers a second, it's an illusion of life, teased from the amber of still photography, drawing, painting; mixed with symphonies; blended with dance and movement; enslaved to the syncopation of words and imaginary drum beats. It's a miracle, a golem, capable of illuminating the rawest humanity in one stroke and of exhuming the most abject failure of human impulse in the very next. Its tractability is astonishing–protean, not too much to say magical; in describing his first film experience as a visit to "the kingdom of shadows," Maxim Gorky brushes up against the ineffable sublimity of a medium that mimics the eye, stimulates the ear, and has as one of the key elements of its academic study a concept that suggests the moment a viewer finds himself "sutured" into the text. Like all fine art, then, when it's right, its "rightness" is indescribable–Frank Zappa's "dancing about architecture." And like the stratification of art imposed by some in varying orders to describe the proximity of each to the inexpressibility of their souls (prose to dance to painting to poesy to music, for me), when film aspires to combine the more abstract elements of human expression in its mélange, the results, always mixed, at least have the potential to be grand.

My Mother (2004) + Exiles (2004)

July 14, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, France, Japan, Music, Portugal, Spain, Theatrical

Ma mère
*½/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Emma de Caunes, Joana Preis
screenplay by Christopher Honoré, based on the novel by Georges Bataille
directed by Christopher Honoré

Exils
***/****
starring Romain Duris, Lubna Azabal, Leila Makhlouf, Habib Cheik
written and directed by Tony Gatlif

Mamereexilsby Bill Chambers Even after the Hays Office lost its stranglehold on the screen trade, mainstream American erotica remained a largely intellectual affair. Rather than try to get you off, films like Paul Mazursky’s Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge were interested in examining the fallout from sex. Meanwhile, France was cranking out Sylvia Kristel movies, and the raincoat crowd could enjoy even such highbrow fare as Last Tango in Paris for long stretches. If the legit French sex cinema ultimately bore a closer resemblance to red-blooded American filth in the ’70s (and not just ethically: the ‘X aesthetic’ was like dumbed-down nouvelle vague), it makes sense that it would chart a course parallel with stateside porno’s gradual descent into the penetration abyss. But while the (d)evolution itself is an organic one born of desensitization, things have progressed along a more self-conscious path in recent years, with the incendiary work of Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, and Michael Haneke helping to foster the impression of contemporary Gallic life as a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Story of My Life (2004) – DVD

July 14, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, France, Romance

Mensonges et trahisons
Mensonges et trahisons et plus si affinités…
**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras N/A
starring Edouard Baer, Marie-Josée Croze, Alice Taglioni, Clovis Cornillac
written and directed by Laurent Tirard

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Ugly flashbacks to the indie '90s are unavoidable when considering The Story of My Life (Mensonges et trahisons). This French rom-com integrates the worst of Woody Allen worship with the worst of pre-fame artist's angst: it practically screams that it wants to be taken seriously while making every effort to ensure that you don't, a tactic typical of the callow and the imprecise. But though it treats the artistic vocation as just another tony career move, the film has its charms as light entertainment, with a couple of appealing performances and some handsome design. If nothing else, The Story of My Life is proof positive that Canada has had the bad effect on Quebec export Marie-Josée Croze and not the other way around.

The Machinist (2004) [Widescreen] + Enduring Love (2004) [Widescreen] – DVDs

July 4, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Romance, Spain, Thriller, UK

THE MACHINIST
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, Michael Ironside
screenplay by Scott Kosar
directed by Brad Anderson

ENDURING LOVE
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Daniel Craig, Rhys Ifans, Samantha Morton, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Ian McEwan
directed by Roger Michell

Machinistcapby Walter Chaw Sickness sweats out of every pore of Brad Anderson's The Machinist. It's leprous green, corpse flesh lit by sulphur light, marking the end of a progression that took Anderson from the sunny Happy Accidents to the sepia-inflected Session 9 to the bleak and subterranean–Plutonian, really–The Machinist. But like all of Anderson's work, the current film seems best described as coitus interruptus–congress interrupted at the moment of climax by the director's peculiar fixation on mendacity in favour of the supernatural. It's all about the tease for Anderson's genre explorations: time travel in Happy Accidents, haunted asylums in Session 9, and now–what, possession? Murderous blackouts? By plumbing the depths of human failings in a literal-minded fashion, one after the other (obsession, then greed, and finally guilt), Anderson ignores the possibility that genre is sharpest when wielded as metaphor for the same. Even the profession of machining speaks to the idea of precision and craftsmanship over flights of fancy or suspicions of otherness. It's a shame that The Machinist isn't ultimately more than an elaborate Rubik's Cube: not that hard to solve, not high on replay value.

George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005)

June 24, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: George A. Romero, France, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Zombie

*/****
starring Simon Baker, Dennis Hopper, Asia Argento, Robert Joy
written and directed by George A. Romero

Landofthedeadby Walter Chaw The weakest entry in George Romero's zombie quadrilogy by a long shot, the Toronto-lensed Land of the Dead loses the grit and familiarity of Romero's native Pittsburgh while managing to be every bit as awkward and allegorical as one of his trademark undead. The original concept for Day of the Dead was to have hundreds of trained zombies fighting one another in a post-apocalyptic landscape, a statement–and an eloquent one, as is, or was, Romero's practice–on war being an essential state of man that got scrapped due to budgetary concerns. With the success of films like Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later…, and the remake of Romero's own Dawn of the Dead, though, the primogenitor of the genre was given a respectable budget, the boon of CGI, and relatively free reign to continue a trio of films (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead) that besides spawning a legion of Italian knock-offs, were themselves gory, scary, and razor sharp.

Saving Face (2005) + High Tension (2003)

May 26, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Romance, Romania, Theatrical, Thriller, Will Smith

SAVING FACE
**/****
starring Joan Chen, Lynn Chen, Jin Wang, Guang Lan Koh
written and directed by Alice Wu

Haute tension
***/****
starring Cécile De France, Maïwenn Le Besco, Philippe Nahon, Franck Khalfoun
screenplay by Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur
directed by Alexandre Aja

Savingtensionby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Lesbians are pretty much invisible in American culture–banished, actually, to the ghetto that gay men tend to complain about even though, in truth, gay men were never more visible than they are now that they've been gifted with the lofty honour of being the only minority everyone can agree to hate with hilarious impunity. A couple of programs on Showtime notwithstanding, lesbians in the popular conversation are still either flannel-wearing she-males, the other daughter, or male fantasies of the voracious woman desperate for a good therapeutic dick to set her back on the straight and narrow. When a lesbian appears in a Western film (like in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason), the audience, myself included, regards her appearance as a kind of alien visitation. For a while, it's possible to forget that she's a sexual creature at all, so foreign are her Sapphic ways in our cultural conversation. Thus a pair of films featuring lesbian heroes front and centre happening upon these strange shores almost simultaneously is cause for some sort of modest celebration despite that one of them, Alice Wu's Saving Face, is a lot like an ethnic sitcom and the other, Alexandre Aja's High Tension, appears to hate lesbians with an unusual ugliness.

Unleashed (2005)

May 13, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Crime, Drama, France, Martial Arts, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

a.k.a. Danny the Dog
***½/****
starring Jet Li, Morgan Freeman, Bob Hoskins, Kerry Condon
screenplay by Luc Besson, Jet Li & Steven Chasman
directed by Louis Leterrier

Unleashedby Walter Chaw Though it was written by Luc Besson and directed by Besson protégé Louis Leterrier, Unleashed could slide into Walter Hill's portfolio with almost no tweaking. (A double-feature with Hill's Undisputed would make for indispensable viewing from the front lines of the culture wars.) Unleashed is interested in Hill's tent poles of social class and race, sprinkling in healthy doses of ugly machismo en route to what's best described as a virile noir fairy tale painted in shades of brown and green. Tight as a drum, the picture also reminds of an adult-themed anime–a science-fiction manga about a dog that learns to be a man under the tender ministrations of a kindly old piano tuner and his plucky schoolgirl daughter. Complicating Unleashed is its vision of a world in which white men are rich and corrupt, women (especially artists) are doomed to a life of prostitution, and a Chinese guy fitted with a dog collar shuffling meekly behind a white person is a sight that causes no head to turn. This world, of course, is the Hollywood mainstream.

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

May 6, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Spain, Theatrical, UK, War

**/****
starring Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson, David Thewlis, Eva Green
screenplay by William Monahan
directed by Ridley Scott

Kingdomofheavenby Walter Chaw The hero of Ridley Scott’s film about the Crusades would rather not discuss that whole “God” thing. It’s a stance that renders Kingdom of Heaven the second such impotent “prestige” picture to grace the early-summer screens after Sydney Pollack’s simpering, stance-less The Interpreter, as well as another wondrously bland example of the toll that small minds and political correctness have taken on our popular culture. In The Interpreter‘s defense, it only slaughtered a few hundred thousand imaginary black people to get its white heroes making doe-eyes at one another–to get Kingdom of Heaven‘s cuties batting eyelashes, it takes tens of millions of real dead infidels. French Balian (Orlando Bloom) is a 12th century blacksmith who has just lost his wife and child when his long lost father Godfrey (Liam Neeson) rides in with a small band of merry Crusaders to offer Balian lordship of a little town in the Middle East. Balian accepts, has run-ins with religious fanatic Templars Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas) and his henchman Reynald (Brendan Gleeson), and gains the trust of leper king Baldwin IV (Edward Norton) and ideological martyr Tiberias (Jeremy Irons).

Lost Embrace (2004); Hard Goodbyes (2002); Walk on Water (2004)

April 12, 2005Posted in2000s, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Mystery, Spain, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller

El Abrazo partido
*/****
starring Daniel Hendler, Adriana Aizemberg, Jorge D’Elía, Sergio Boris
screenplay by Marcelo Birmajer, Daniel Burman
directed by Daniel Burman

Hard Goodbyes: My Father
Diskoli apocheretismi: O babas mou
***/****
starring Yorgos Karayannis, Stelios Mainas, Ioanna Tsirigouli, Christos Stergioglou
written and directed by Penny Panayotopoulou

WALK ON WATER
**/****
starring Lior Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, Caroline Peters, Gideon Shemer
screenplay by Gal Uchovsky
directed by Eytan Fox

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Woody Allen’s been on something like a two-decade slide, so if there’s a little voice in your head telling you that the last thing you need to see is an Argentine version of a Woody Allen “where’s daddy” neurosis opera: listen to it. Daniel Burman’s Lost Embrace (El Abrazo partido) is an interminable slog through the congested headspace of one Ariel Makaroff (Daniel Hendler), an insufferable, navel-gazing Pol expat living out his self-loathing strut and fret in the ridiculous family lingerie shop of a cut-rate shopping centre. (Yeah, it’s Scenes from a Mall in Spanish.) Burman likes breaking the fourth wall, likes humourless inter-titles that separate his film into a dozen awkward sketches, and really likes dense monologues about, essentially, why no one is ever happy. The extent to which you will cotton to Lost Embrace has a lot to do with how much you enjoy wallpaper narration and old Jewish-Polish grandmothers singing homey folk songs square to the camera–how much you delight in Jewish mothers nudzhing their schlemiel sons before divesting their aggressively middle-class closets of ancient infidelities set against intra-mall flings with an Internet café bimbo. Ennui, listlessness, and gab gab gab, Lost Embrace earns the occasional moment of interest or topicality in stuff like a semi-amusing interview Ariel endures before the Polish consulate (during which he expresses admiration for the recently-deceased Polish Pope), but the film spends most of its goodwill on masturbating with a furious, chafing intensity. Oh, and it’s mawkishly sentimental, too.

p.s. (2004) + Birth (2004)|Birth (2004) – DVD

April 10, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

p.s.
**½/****
starring Laura Linney, Topher Grace, Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden
screenplay by Helen Schulman and Dylan Kidd, based on the novel by Helen Schulman
directed by Dylan Kidd

BIRTH
****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Danny Huston, Lauren Bacall
screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière, Milo Addica, Jonathan Glazer
directed by Jonathan Glazer

Psbirthby Walter Chaw Second chances, erasing memories, manipulating perception–films this year like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Code 46, The Forgotten, The Manchurian Candidate, The Village, The Butterfly Effect, Before Sunset, 50 First Dates, The Final Cut, and so on suggest a collective desire to wash the slate clean, put on blinkers, and regain a little of that sweet, blithe ignorance of the day before yesterday. It's never as easy as all that, of course, since things have a tendency of coming back–and when an artifact of the past intrudes on the present it carries with it (along with all those memories of green) an aggressive payload of unexpected reactions. You can never go home again, nor can home ever return to you. Nevertheless, it tries to in a pair of films, two sophomore efforts, as it happens: Dylan Kidd's p.s. and Jonathan Glazer's Birth. Curiously, just the idea of the first film after a triumphant debut is tangled with the desire to recapture a little of the magic of the past.

Sahara (2005)

April 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, France, Germany, Spain, Theatrical, UK, War
*½/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, Penélope Cruz, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and John C. Richards and James V. Hart, based on the novel by Clive Cussler
directed by Breck Eisner
 
by Walter Chaw For as difficult as it is to read a Clive Cussler novel, it's no more or less difficult to read something by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Robert James Waller, Dean Koontz, or Nicholas Sparks. A Cussler book is exactly what it is: a bestseller written specifically for people who base their reading decisions on how many other people have bought and ostensibly read a given book–bad grammar, bad sense, and ridiculous narratives be damned. So Sahara, Breck "Spawn of Michael" Eisner's feature debut (and what star Matthew McConaughey hopes is a franchise starter despite Cussler disowning the picture and threatening to sue), is an utterly faithful adaptation of the source material in that it's destined to become one of those movies people see or avoid depending on how low their expectations are going in or how irresistible the Friday night peer-pressure gets. It's a soulless picture, a wisp of a whimsy layered across what wishes it were an epic adventure, playing fast and loose with character and charisma while slathering on the boom-crash opera. The result isn't something awful so much as a spectacle without a hint of a human centre: a blockbuster played by action figures and written by children.

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

April 4, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Ireland, Romance, UK

½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Andrew Davies and Helen Fielding and Richard Curtis and Adam Brooks, based on the novel by Fielding
directed by Beeban Kidron

Bridgetjonesedgecapby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The gusto with which a certain audience will guffaw at Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (henceforth Bridget Jones 2)–will buffet each other on the back in robust bonhomie at a joke well told and a prejudice indulged in appropriate company–says all there really is to say about the class schism that the film itself broaches but stops short of actually addressing. (If you squint, you can see them rendered satiric as swine in top hats, smoking cheap cigars and playing cards in their pearls and print dresses.) We reunite with our porcine heroine (Renée Zellweger) a little more than a month after the end of the first film, at which point she's shagged her new boyfriend Darcy (Colin Firth) a lot but remains saddled with her suspicions that he's a prick. He's a lawyer, see, and clearly too good for her, so Bridget, as is her wont, proceeds to embarrass herself in polite stuffed-shirt company, scoffing at the prig who suggests that giving to charity is bad and pretending to be able to ski whilst wrapped in a dreadful pink jumper. The resulting delightfully-patronizing humiliations are the sort of thing generally installed as the engine in romance novels, the main audience for which is one that looks like Bridget, is probably ten years older, and would be surprised to see that, were a film ever actually made of their fantasy projection of themselves onto the heroine role of their little pulp bodice-rippers, would look just as preposterous as Bridget Jones 2.

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?

Son of the Mask (2005)

February 18, 2005Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, France, Germany, Romania, Superhero, Theatrical, Venezuala, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jamie Kennedy, Alan Cumming, Traylor Howard, Steven Wright
screenplay by Lance Khazei
directed by Lawrence Guterman

Sonofthemaskby Walter Chaw Towards the end of the uniquely awful Son of the Mask, star Jamie Kennedy gets two fistfuls of his screen-wife Traylor Howard’s bosom (this after pummelling her head against the ground in a scary depiction of domestic violence) and declares, in so many words, “Eureka–so it is you, honey.” It’s a charming vignette that follows about an hour of fart, snot, golden shower, and Exorcist jokes, each trumping the last in level of inappropriateness until finally the deadened synapses begin to register that with sets like “Edge City” and “Fringe City”, the brain trust behind this abortion might actually have had something subversive in mind. A shame, then, that they’ve confused “edge” and “fringe” elements with puerile scatology and institutional dehumanization, intercut with baby and animal reaction shots and a marginal and failed television comedian (playing a marginal and failed television animator) mugging in an astoundingly lifeless approximation of “manic.” For a film that might want to be taken as “edgy,” in other words, Son of the Mask caters to the absolute lowest and commonest of the lowest common denominators.

Rory O’Shea Was Here (2004)

February 4, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disability, Drama, France, Ireland, Theatrical, UK

Inside I’m Dancing
*/****
starring James McAvoy, Steven Robertson, Romola Garai, Brenda Fricker
screenplay by Jeffrey Caine
directed by Damien O’Donnell

Roryosheawashereby Walter Chaw Looking for shock value, the more unkind would call Rory O’Shea Was Here “One Rolled Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”: the film is a straight-up rip-off that substitutes Randle McMurphy and Chief Bromden for plucky punk afflicted with Muscular Dystrophy Rory (James McAvoy) and his cerebral palsy-afflicted chum Michael (not Donnie Wahlberg). Because neither actor is actually afflicted, it can be said that their performances are at best affected; at their worst, and at the service of a condescending screenplay, the two come off as patronizing caricatures engaged in an insipid waltz around the real issues that arise when you’re thrust by disability into the full-time care of strangers. It’s a great idea to cast the disabled in lead roles, even romantic (gasp!) roles, in motion pictures, but it’s a terrible idea to do so for the express purpose of making them into noble savages from which we can suckle our portion of moral outrage and smug, shit-eating superiority. Best, the rebel that brings a sparkle into the lives of everyone he touches has the decency to croak as his last act of charity, allowing the much-maligned social order to go on ticking with one fewer annoying gadfly.

The Chorus (2004)

February 4, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, Music, Switzerland, Theatrical

Les choristes
½*/****
starring Gérard Jugnot, François Berléand, Kad Merad, Jean-Paul Bonnaire
screenplay by Philippe Lopes-Curval, Christophe Barratier
directed by Christophe Barratier

Chorusby Walter Chaw The one good thing about Christophe Barratier's unbelievably inane, saccharine, and derivative The Chorus (Les Choristes) is that it offers the much put-upon American public a little comfort in the knowledge that the French mainstream (which made this film its top-grossing title of last year) has just as unquenchable a sweet tooth for pap. Useless to discuss at length, The Chorus is essentially another in a line of literally dozens of films in which an inspirational teacher changes the lives of a group of troubled/lower-class/underestimated children through will, kindness, and a rogue spark of crinkly-eyed genius that irks to no end the evil dean/headmaster/school board/community. It's not as bad as Filipino contribution Little Voices, nor is it as good as, say, Goodbye Mr. Chips–locating it somewhere in the neighbourhood of a disaster like Mr. Holland's Opus or the endlessly weird Wes Craven (!) picture Music of the Heart. Taken on its own merits, pretending that you've never seen Dead Poets Society, Stand and Deliver, The Blackboard Jungle, Conrack, Mona Lisa Smile, Dangerous Minds, Renaissance Man, Coach Carter, and so on and so on, The Chorus is still unspeakably maudlin and presented in so straightforward a fashion that if you did the right thing and asked for your money back after five minutes, you could reasonably fake having seen it to a circle of friends, who will admire your stamina in having sat through the whole benighted thing.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004); Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004); Time of the Wolf (2003)|Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

January 24, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

イノセンス
Innocence
Inosensu: Innocence
****/****
written and directed by Mamoru Oshii

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi
written and directed by Kerry Conran

Le Temps du loup
****/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Béatrice Dalle, Patrice Chéreau, Rona Hartner
written and directed by Michael Haneke

Skyghostwolfby Walter Chaw For me, the most intoxicating visions of the future are those in which we’re drowning in an ocean of our past–garbage, wreckage, Romes burned to a cinder and heaped against the new Meccas of our collective tomorrows. Star Wars proffered a kind of aesthetic of dirt that appealed: a wonderland where the spaceships looked like they’d been flown and there were places like Mos Eisley that reeked of stale liquor, sawdust, and cigarettes. (The distance that George Lucas has gone to disinfect his grubby vision of the future is the same distance that esteem for the franchise has fallen amongst all but the most die-hard chattel.) Among the spearhead of a group of artists who redefined the science-fiction genre in film the same way that Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah scuffed-up the western in the Sixties, Ridley Scott evolved the idea of a functional future, with his Alien and Blade Runner serving as visual echoes of T.S. Eliot’s broken stones and fragments shored against our ruins. Terry Gilliam defined the aesthetic when describing his rationale for the look of Brazil (1985): he wanted it to seem as though the whole century had been compacted into a single moment. The timeless “someday soon” that is always just around a corner that never comes.

Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) + Elektra (2005)

January 14, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, France, Superhero, Switzerland, Theatrical, Thriller

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
***/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, John Leguizamo, Maria Bello
screenplay by James DeMonaco, based on the screenplay by John Carpenter
directed by Jean-François Richet

ELEKTRA
½*/****
starring Jennifer Garner, Goran Visnjic, Will Yun Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
screenplay by Zak Penn and Stuart Zicherman & Raven Metzner
directed by Rob Bowman

by Walter Chaw Being under siege and obsessive-compulsive disorder have together wrought a weird parallel generation in the remake Assault on Precinct 13 and sequel/comic book adaptation Elektra. In each is not only a woman who uses numbers obsessively in stressful situations, but also some sort of predicament where a gang of bad guys traps a band of good guys only to be given the business end of heroic pluck. Both are unusually ugly films with a higher-than-expected body count, and, to various degrees of success, both traffic in a paranoid marshalling of forces that comes with a fear of invasion from without. When you’re panicked, drawing those you trust closer to the vest since the rest of the universe has murder in mind is the sanest recourse–even when you’re aware that you’re addicted, mad, or otherwise in desperate need of therapy. Early in 2005, trends are pointing to a year in which we champion isolationism, fear the marauding Hun, and start wondering if there’s a blue-stater playing sheep in the quilting cotillion. Unless, that is, the blue-stater is you, and the constant threat of lynching or crucifixion has caused you to lose your mind.

Species III (2004) [Unrated Edition] + Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) [Special Edition] – DVDs

December 27, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, DVD, France, Germany, Horror, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Zombie

SPECIES III
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Robin Dunne, Robert Knepper, Amelia Cooke, J.P. Pitoc
screenplay by Ben Ripley
directed by Brad Turner

RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr, Thomas Kretschmann
screenplay by Paul W.S. Anderson
directed by Alexander Witt

by Walter Chaw There used to be only two avenues for women in the modern, post-Black Christmas horror genre: they could be the bimbo at the end of the machete, or the virgin wielding one at the end of the movie. After rape/revenge stuff like I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45 (and, ultimately, Aliens), though, it became possible for women to be men from the first frame of their ordeals instead of incurring steady masculinization throughout the course of some torturous, highly structured pursuit. What made Roger Donaldson's Species (1995) so interesting is that it transformed the woman's biological urge into the sui generis of the premise: The bad guy in Species was a bad girl named Sil, and Sil wanted to mate really bad (and really badly). But just like her brothers in slasherdom (Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger), that will-to-fuck is largely unrealized–enough so that most academic reads of this horror subgenre involve the acting out of priapic males unable to reach climax through a variety of phallic substitutes. This is acknowledged in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 as Leatherface's titular dick runs out of gas between a girl's legs–and the would-be victim knowing the score strokes it anyway, soothing his bruised male ego.