Germany Archives - Page 10 of 17

The Chorus (2004)

February 4, 20052000s, 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

by 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.

Alone in the Dark (2005); Hide and Seek (2005); In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger (2005)

January 28, 20052000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ALONE IN THE DARK
ZERO STARS/****
starring Christian Slater, Tara Reid, Stephen Dorff, Frank C. Turner
screenplay by Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch and Peter Scheerer
directed by Uwe Boll

HIDE AND SEEK
**/****
starring Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Famke Janssen, Elisabeth Shue
screenplay by Ari Schlossberg
directed by John Polson

by Walter Chaw Edward Carnby (Christian Slater) is a "paranormal investigator," which in Uwe Boll's visual vernacular means that he dresses like Highlander Duncan MacLeod and lives in MacLeod's apartment, too. Chip through the film's hard veneer of unsightly stupidity (it looks a lot like a Jess Franco film shot on a smaller budget) and you'll begin to unearth a narrative of sorts concerning an ancient Indian tribe that opened a gateway between the light and dark worlds; most of this is imparted by an interminable opening scrawl that's read aloud because director Uwe Boll, himself illiterate, is sympathetic with his target audience, though we get other clues to a plot from an orphan in flashback who, unlike his twenty peers, escapes possession from, um, some bad thing, and a mad scientist Professor Hudgins (Mathew Walker) and his brilliant (snicker) assistant Aline (Tara Reid) trying to collect a bunch of relics so that they can, what, open the gateway between dark and light? I don't know. Casting Reid as a smart person is, by the way, the biggest miscalculation since casting Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist and Kevin Costner as a doctor, although it is admittedly amusing watching her struggle through phrases like "molecular composition."

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, 2005****/****, 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

by 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.

Coach Carter (2005)

January 14, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Sports, Theatrical

**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Ryan B. Adams, Ashanti, Adrienne Bailon
screenplay by Mark Schwahn and John Gatins
directed by Thomas Carter

by Walter Chaw Coach Carter is Dangerous Minds giving the gas good to Hoosiers. It's Stand and Deliver and Bad News Bears in flagrante delecto. The offspring of these dread unions is a trundling spawn so familiar, so much like its collection of moronically agreeable parents, that it's impossible not to sort of like it even as you're definitely sick of it. As is usually the case for movies like this, Coach Carter was inspired by a true story, which generally means that the events that instigated this project are not consequently saccharine and predictable enough to satisfy the imaginary demands of its imaginary audience. So there will be the athlete/students broken down into types to save time and energy on fleshing out the extended supporting cast, and there will be the valiant Dead Poets Society teacher who so rouses his/her hangdog students that they will eventually mass in a public show of support (standing on desks, running after ambulances, biking after cabs) when The Man (the school administration, the angry backwoods community) inevitably cracks down. What's not to like?

Beyond the Sea (2004)

December 29, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Music, Musical, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, John Goodman, Bob Hoskins
screenplay by Lewis Colick and Kevin Spacey
directed by Kevin Spacey

by Walter Chaw In Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin talks to the ghost of his kid self, a pint-sized Virgil leading Spacey's decrepit Dante into the hell of vanity projects. It's a flick that apes All that Jazz the way De-Lovely aped All that Jazz (that is: sickly, with a bad limp), with an aged Darin looking back on his life as though it were all a giant movie set. "Ain't he too old to play Bobby Darin?" a reporter in the film asks while Bobby Darin directs his own fictional auto-biopic. "He was born to play Bobby Darin!" responds an angry Bob Hoskins as Bobby Darin's father, who, one part Brooklyn hood and one part Russian bear, acts as the artist surrogate trying to pre-empt the chief criticism most will have of this creepy exercise in flaccid masturbation. Truth is, Beyond the Sea is the Kevin Spacey story without as much closeted homosexuality and just the same amount of delusions of grandeur and aspirations towards artistic martyrdom. It lacks passion and joy, replacing them both with something that smells a lot like mid-life crisis.

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

December 27, 20042000s, 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.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)

December 17, 20042000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Germany, Theatrical

A Series of Unfortunate Events
**½/****
starring Jim Carrey, Jude Law, Liam Aiken, Emily Browning
screenplay by Robert Gordon, based on the books The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window by "Lemony Snicket"
directed by Brad Silberling

by Walter Chaw The best children's entertainments accentuate a child's strengths, encouraging the pursuit of aptitude and bliss instead of impossible pipe dreams. It's the lesson of The Incredibles, one of the bravest, most subversive films the year–and it seems to be the lesson of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events as well until the picture caves in to kid-flick conventions and worse. But while it's humming along with the freshly-orphaned Baudelaires–Violet (Emily Browning), Klaus (Liam Aiken), and little Sunny (Kara and Shelby Hoffman)–doing what they do best (Violet the engineer, Klaus the reader, Sunny the biter), Lemony Snicket, with its gothic sets and grotesque gallery of rogues, offers up a brilliant antidote to the saccharine blather of traditional holiday fare. Fleetingly effective or no, it's a shot of insulin in a season that generally offers up bloated prestige items for the grown-ups and freakishly genial, accidentally perverse fare for the kiddies.

Alexander (2004)

November 24, 20042000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Netherlands, Romance, Thailand, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto
screenplay by Oliver Stone and Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis
directed by Oliver Stone

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Oliver Stone's Alexander is packed tight to the girders with catchphrases like "By the sweet breath of Aphrodite" and "By Apollo's eye" and "By Dionysus yours is the very soul of Prometheus!" It's stuffed to the gills with sword-and-sandal histrionics and props that become kitsch artifacts the instant they're rolled out for display in this awards season's gaudiest rummage sale. If it's not going to set anybody's codpiece on fire, Alexander at least lays claim to being one of the funniest movies of the year. It would have worn the title Oliver! more comfortably, opening as it does with Virgil's "fortune favours the bold" and ending, after a ridiculously long time, with the not-stunning revelation that what Stone has done is imagine the travails of a fourth-century B.C. Macedonian king as his very own. Conspiracies abound, popularity in the court of public opinion fades, bottomless campaign budgets are squandered in faraway lands for mysterious personal reasons, Oedipus rears his travel-worn head, and gay subtext begins to feel a little homophobic because it's subtext. Rosario Dawson in all her animalized glory? No problem. Colin Farrell giving Jared Leto a little peck on the cheek? Not in this house, buddy.

Once Upon a Time: FFC Interviews Marc Forster

November 14, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Interviews, Switzerland

November 14, 2004|Looking more than a little like Michael Stipe, German-born, Switzerland-raised director Marc Forster speaks with a soft Swiss accent, supplementing his thoughts with delicate hand gestures and a nervous self-deprecation. He seems almost too fragile for the world, and in fact admits that he retreats into fantasy, the womb of fable, when he can. His instinct to fashion metaphor out of life's cruelties drew his debut and sophomore features–the festival darling Everything Put Together (about the loss of a child) and arthouse smash Monster's Ball (which won an Oscar for Halle Berry while making of race and class a fairy tale of the reconstruction), respectively–their fair share of criticism. A gauzy look at the South, Monster's Ball, for instance, reminded me of Faulkner but many others of Jim Crow. Taking the harsher edges of life and rounding them into allegory rubs me, where Forster's first two films are concerned, the right way. I can't say the same for his latest, Finding Neverland.

The Clearing (2004) + Before Sunset (2004) – DVDs

November 9, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, UK

THE CLEARING
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Robert Redford, Helen Mirren, Willem Dafoe, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Justin Haythe
directed by Pieter Jan Brugge

BEFORE SUNSET
***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
screenplay by Richard Linklater & Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke
directed by Richard Linklater

by Walter Chaw Nothing much happens in Pieter Jan Brugge's The Clearing–so little happens, in fact, that it's difficult to pinpoint what all the to-do was about by film's end. Laid-off everyman schlub Arnold Mack kidnaps car rental magnate Wayne Hayes (Robert Redford) from the front gate of his palatial estate. He leads Hayes through the woods to meet up with his partners-in-crime, having a heart-to-heart concerning the dissatisfactions of modern living along the way. Hayes's wife Eileen (Helen Mirren) and grown children (Alessandro Nivola and glassy-eyed Melissa Sagemiller) gather with disaffected FBI agent Fuller (Matt Craven) to field ransom demands and likewise have heart-to-hearts about the dissatisfactions of modern living. Brugge plays with time in interesting ways: the events of the first day with Wayne and Arnold are intercut with the events of several weeks with the Hayes clan. But the picture's biggest trick is making ninety minutes seem like an eternity.

Father & Son (2003) – DVD

November 3, 20042000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Russia

Father and Son
Otets i syn
**/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring Andrev Shchetinin, Aleksey Neymyshev
screenplay by Sergey Potepalov
directed by Alexander Sokurov

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover After Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark, I was ready to accept almost anything Sokurov did–a TV movie, some Wheaties ads, those trivia slides before the show starts, anything. Surely in the wake of the dense, virtuoso track of that earlier film, I could expect more philosophical fireworks, more challenging juxtapositions, more dazzling movements. Alas, it was not in the cards: Sokurov's follow-up Father & Son turns out to be the same old homosocial militarism familiar to a million lesser talents, tarted up with elite finery. (Think Top Gun with Tchaikovsky instead of Kenny Loggins.) Though the controversy surrounding its alleged homoeroticism is a red herring inasmuch as it fails to consider other sources (the film is about the mortal flesh of religious painting, not the pornographic bodies of pop), it's all in the service of the ain't-boys-grand, I-love-a-man-in-uniform vagueness that might be profundity but also suggests Tony Scott with a haircut and a new suit.

Deathwatch (2002) – DVD

October 25, 20042000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Germany, Horror, Thriller, UK, War

**½/**** Image B Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Bell, Ruaidhri Conroy, Laurence Fox, Torben Liebrecht
written and directed by Michael J. Bassett

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Reading the blurb on the keepcase for Deathwatch, I had to wonder: what kind of individual sets a horror film in World War I? The connection isn't obvious until you see the movie, whereupon you realize that this most pointless of military adventures provides an ideal location for the nihilism and futility that defines the genre. The conflict here serves as proof of the original sin that will result in the retributive deaths of the cast (whether they actually deserve it or not); simply put, it's a slasher movie, but with Kaiser Wilhelm instead of sex. The association is so suggestive that Deathwatch threatens to say things about the Great War that I've never really seen on film before–but alas, it doesn't fully grasp the potential of the link, forcing us instead to contend with fairly standard combat intrigue and officer-bashing as we wait for another flash of intelligence. Still, it's a cut above most straight-to-disc fare (it opened theatrically in the UK), and at its best it has a dank resonance setting it apart from the war and horror movie rabbles.

The Final Cut (2004)

October 22, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Germany, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Robin Williams, Mira Sorvino, James Caviezel, Mimi Kuzyk
written and directed by Omar Naim

by Walter Chaw It's interesting to me in an esoteric way that Robin Williams consistently seeks out projects that position him as some sort of levitating guru detached from the travails of the common man, floating above the madding crowd with a beatific smile on his god's-eye mug. Think of, among the many shrinks, ex-shrinks, serial killers, and genies Williams has played, his "Wizard of Oz"-ian Dr. Know from A.I., his demented developer Sy from One Hour Photo, or his sainted Dr. Chris from What Dreams May Come. By all accounts, Williams is a nice fellow–a little manic and arrested, perhaps, but pleasant and even philanthropic. So what is it about the camera that turns him into an auto-consumptive egoist with a bizarre saviour complex, into this sad clown, velvet or otherwise, who finds humour in tragedy (so the theory goes) but lately has worked pretty hard at just being gloweringly melancholic in "psychological thrillers" long on sterile atmosphere and short on any sort of resonance? Williams has this air of feeling sorry for humanity that doesn't seem pious as much as it seems self-satisfied and superior. I'm not sure what the holy land for his crusade is, but I hope that he and Kevin Spacey conquer it soon so they can get back to not being irritating pricks with delusions of Christ.

Team America: World Police (2004)

October 19, 20042000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Germany, Satire, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Trey Parker & Matt Stone & Pam Brady
directed by Trey Parker

by Walter Chaw The comedy bits that work in Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Team America: World Police are the most vile, the most puerile. The now-notorious puppet sex scene is uproarious–the consumption of Hans Blix by a catfish and the attempts at having marionettes fight one another in hand-to-hand combat are pretty funny, too, and though it's a little oblique, I appreciated our intrepid band's endeavour to disguise one of their own as a gentle-puppet of Middle Eastern decent. But we reach a point during this experiment in neo-"Thunderbirds" cinema where it becomes clear that the satirical sharpness that defines the duo's at-times incandescently brilliant "South Park" has been shunted aside in favour of vomit gags and screaming homophobia. It's faint praise to say that Team America is sometimes as funny as Steve Oedekerk's "thumb" movies, but more often it's just protracted and uninspired.

DIFF ’04: Stage Beauty

October 16, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, UK

**/****starring Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Tom Wilkinson, Rupert Everettscreenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher, based on his play "Compleat Female Stage Beauty"directed by Richard Eyre by Walter Chaw A Samuel Pepys quotation opens Stage Beauty, something about how in the seventeenth century, Ned Kynaston was the most beautiful woman on a stage that forbade women from strutting and fretting their hours. Playing Desdemona in a mannered production of "Othello", Kynaston (Billy Crudup) is king of the roost, oblivious to the crush of his ahistorical assistant, Mrs. Margaret "Maria" Hughes (a sort of well-cast Claire Danes), the first lady of the theatre, who…

DIFF ’04: Imaginary Crimes

October 15, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany

**/****starring Sigourney Weaver, Emile Hirsch, Jeff Daniels, Michelle Williamswritten and directed by Dan Harris by Walter Chaw Another installment in the ongoing Ice Storm chronicles, screenwriter-turned-hyphenate Dan Harris's Imaginary Heroes also incorporates elements of stuff like A Home at the End of the World and Moonlight Mile. The picture shows its hand early and often, with a star swimmer (Kip Pardue) killing himself before the main titles have finished, thus leaving his already-dysfunctional family to pick up the suburban, Ordinary People pieces. Mom is Sigourney Weaver, sis is Michelle Williams, Pa is Jeff Daniels, and the star of the show…

DIFF ’04: Kinsey

October 14, 20042000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance

***/****starring Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaardwritten and directed by Bill Condon by Walter Chaw Liam Neeson plays the venerable zoologist-turned-sex scientist Alfred Kinsey, who, buoyed by a supportive Indiana University Bloomington dean (Oliver Platt) and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, single-handedly drew back the curtains on the human libido in the rigid 1950s (1948-1953). The picture (written/directed by Gods and Monsters' Bill Condon) covers Kinsey's contentious relationship with his stentorian father (John Lithgow, reprising his evil preacher performance from Footloose), his open relationship with wife Clara "Mac" Kinsey (Laura Linney), and his stewardship of young Clyde…

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

September 24, 20042000s, Adventure, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Brazil, Chile, Drama, France, Germany, Peru, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo De la Serna, Mía Maestro, Mercedes Morán
screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on the books Notas de viaje by Ernesto Guevara and Con el Che por America Latina by Alberto Granado
directed by Walter Salles

by Walter Chaw Adapting respective memoirs by then-young Cuban-by-way-of-Argentine revolutionary Ché Guevara (Gael García Bernal) and his best friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo De la Serna) that documented their Kerouac-ian odyssey down the spine of South America to find the soul of their country, Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries is difficult at best. It’s a road movie and a good one, as far as it goes, but it lacks the fire of change of something like Easy Rider in its substitution of a picaresque travelogue lightly spiced with delightful romantic misunderstandings for Peter Fonda’s swiftly tilting planet and deserts of the real. Easy Rider talks about the dying of the light; The Motorcycle Diaries talks about how doe-eyed Ernesto Guevara became Ché, the Hoffa of Latin America and eventually the most reproduced and mass-marketed image since Marilyn Monroe’s.

TIFF ’04: I ♥ Huckabees

September 11, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF, UK

i ♥ huckabeesI Heart Huckabees**/****starring Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Huppert, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzmanscreenplay by David O. Russell & Jeff Baenadirected by David O. Russell by Bill Chambers David O. Russell's debut feature Spanking the Monkey now bears the mark of Kane. (Citizen, that is.) A funny, caustic mood-piece that heralded the Second Coming of Hal Ashby, it was also an impossible thing to live up to--or down, for that matter, Spanking the Monkey's mother-son incest plot in some ways a modern correlative to Citizen Kane's taboo-shattering demystification of William Randolph Hearst. Russell's work since (Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings) has…

Cellular (2004)

September 10, 20042000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Kim Basinger, Chris Evans, Eric Christian Olsen, Jessica Biel
screenplay by Chris Morgan
directed by David R. Ellis

by Walter Chaw At last, a film for all the yahoos with a cell phone soldered onto their ears–a giant eighty-minute billboard for Nokia with characters constantly extolling the virtues of what the Chinese call their hand-engines: "Amazing thing these new cell phones. They take digital video, remember the last fifty numbers that call it…" Stuntman-turned-director David Ellis follows up Final Destination 2 with Cellular, its top-heavy gimmick flick dreamed up by the king of high-concept, one-trick ponies, Larry Cohen, who cobbles together the story at the heart of the thing from the odds-and-ends of his last telecommunications thriller, Phone Booth. It's Strange Days married to Nick of Time, Falling Down, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where Asians are still Orientals (and boy, are they stupid) and black people are sassy back-talkers working at impound lots. Yet, understand that it's not so much racist as it is prehistoric–ossified and bone-weary.