Requiem (2006) – DVD

Requiem (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Germany, Horror

***½/**** Image B Sound A- (IFC) B+ (Mongrel)
starring Sandra Hüller, Burghart Klaussner, Imdgen Kogge, Anna Blomeier
screenplay by Bernd Lange
directed by Hans-Christian Schmid

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like most pop epics, The Exorcism of Emily Rose was all about being sure. One had to throw down for the concept of the physical manifestation of Satan–any human considerations were swept aside in the affirmation of God’s merciless will. And if certain college girls were crushed to pulp (a sentiment which extends to the general expendability of humankind), so be it. Thank goodness, then, that there’s a movie like Requiem, based on the same case that inspired The Exorcism of Emily Rose but comparatively merciful in its mission. It wants to salvage the blighted life of an epileptic tossed around from doctor to doctor–one who, once presented with the beginnings of psychosis, had only religion and a mistrust of medicinal practice to fall back on. She’s a victim of other people’s indecision rather than of the Devil himself.

Blood Diamond (2006) + Apocalypto (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, Mexico, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

BLOOD DIAMOND
*/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly, Djimon Hounsou, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Charles Leavitt
directed by Edward Zwick

APOCALYPTO
***/****
starring Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez, Jonathan Brewer, Morris Birdyellowhead
screenplay by Mel Gibson & Farhad Safinia
directed by Mel Gibson

by Walter Chaw After sending Matthew Broderick to head a Negro battalion in the Civil War and Tom Cruise to witness–and survive–the end of Feudal Japan, director Edward Zwick dispatches Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly to Sierra Leone and its own diamond-fuelled Civil War to moralize endlessly from the superior ethical vantage afforded by time and privilege. (That they also lend a much-needed nougat centre to Blood Diamond‘s thin chocolate coating goes without saying.) The Denzel Washington/Ken Watanabe token this time around is the oft-similarly-abused Djimon Hounsou: as the DC Comics-sounding Solomon Vandy, Hounsou seeks to trade a rare pink diamond for the life of his son, who’s been molded by the evil Sierra Leonians into a soulless murdering/raping machine.

The Nativity Story (2006) + 3 Needles (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Family, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK

THE NATIVITY STORY
*/****
starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, Oscar Isaac, Hiam Abbass, Shaun Toub
screenplay by Mike Rich
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

3 NEEDLES
½*/****
starring Shaun Ashmore, Stockard Channing, Olympa Dukakis, Lucy Liu
written and directed by Thom Fitzgerald

by Walter Chaw The nativity, consigned primarily in my imagination to bad children’s pageants and gaudy lawn displays, gets a third image in my own private trinity with Catherine Hardwicke’s The Nativity Story: a thunderously boring film so circumscribed in scope and crippled in execution that it’s destined to be a minor hit fuelled by the line of buses stretching from your local bible chapel. It’s another teen melodrama from Hardwicke, complete with disapproving adults and pregnant little girls batting doe-eyes at rough-and-tumble shepherds; you see Hardwicke occasionally attempting an anachronistic Fast Times at Golan Heights à la Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, but Coppola, for all her dips into self-pity, is a filmmaker of note, while Hardwicke is just beating someone else’s drum on someone else’s dime. (Proof positive is that despite the uniformity of Hardwicke’s output across three identically nondescript flicks, there is still no sense that decisions are being made, or that anything more than a sickly colony from a thin scrape across the John Hughes petri dish has been born.) Mary is played by young Maori actress Keisha Castle-Hughes–her race of note because if there’s something important about the instantly forgotten pic, it’s that its cast comprises people who look like people might have looked in Nazareth around two thousand years ago and not like Andy Gibb. A shame that Castle-Hughes is dreadful (and not helped a bit by another dreadful, pop-eyed screenplay courtesy Mike Rich of Radio and Finding Forrester fame) and that Oscar Isaac (as Joseph)–who is not dreadful–is trapped in this prosaic sinkhole. Tempting to use terms like “sanctimonious” and “smug,” but The Nativity Story is more accurately dissected with the observation that it’s a faithful telling of a story that has as its only purpose the drumming up of ecstatic anticipation for a foregone conclusion.

DIFF ’06: The Lives of Others

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller
Das Leben der Anderen ***/**** starring Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Mühe, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck by Walter Chaw Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck makes his hyphenate debut with The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), a picture revolving around the days leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall as experienced by prominent playwright Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), his actress girlfriend Christa (Martina Gedeck), and the Stasi investigator Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) assigned to listen in on their conversations for evidence of dissent. The premise--monster grows a soul in the presence…

Feast (2006) [Unrated] + The Woods (2006) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

FEAST
**/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Balthazar Getty, Henry Rollins, Navi Rawat, Clu Gulager
screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
directed by John Gulager

THE WOODS
***½/**** Image A Sound A+
starring Agnes Bruckner, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel Nichols, Bruce Campbell
screenplay by David Ross
directed by Lucky McKee

by Walter Chaw I’m surprised that more great films aren’t shuttled to the direct-to-video twilight zone, seeing as how mainstream taste-makers, particularly in regards to genre pictures, seem primarily invested in churning out the same pre-masticated gruel. At the very least, prefab garbage like School for Scoundrels might as well have been dumped on the home market without a ripple in the fabric of daily life. (Something like Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game, on the other hand, deserved a theatrical release: Disguised as a dtv unload, it’s the best thriller in years.) Between their low budgets, how they perform without bankable leads, and how they pretty much guarantee a healthy return on their investments, it’s almost inexplicable that horror movies get exiled to Blockbuster as often as they do. You can learn a lot about a people from the mythologies they construct to frighten and warn, although because horror films are bankable product (and always were), they fall prey to the same venal, filthy lucre-inspired pitfalls of formula drudgery. Still, I like to refer to them as the “indicator species” of our cultural swamp in that they’re not only ugly, dirty, bottom-feeding, what have you, but also the first species of entertainment to reflect the elements polluting the spirit of this exact moment in our social history. If you can find the pulse of it, a horror movie will tell you a lot about that quickening in your own chest when you watch the evening news.

All the King’s Men (1949) – DVD

All the King’s Men (1949) – DVD

Posted in1940s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

**½/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, Joanne Dru, John Derek
screenplay by Robert Rossen, based on the book by Robert Penn
directed by Robert Rossen

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover All the King’s Men is an entertainingly blunt-witted exploration of Hollywood’s favourite activist cause: Corruption Bad. Taken from Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winner (the inspiration for the current remake, recently trounced by our own Walter Chaw), it finds a juicy if pointless target in Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), the Huey Long stand-in who rises from earnest, clueless nobody to governor of the state, leaving a trail of graft and destruction in his wake. Nobody ever stops to consider what cynical lessons we’re learning about the futility of social change and the corruptibility of the individual: as its paragons of decency are a wealthy blueblood family with political ties, it’s not exactly a Marxist/Leninist extravaganza. But no matter, as it allows a collection of people to sound off with the kind of melodramatic bull that only Tinseltown can provide.

TIFF ’06: Black Book

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Drama, Espionage, Film Festivals, Germany, Netherlands, Thriller, TIFF, UK, War
Zwartboek
**/****
starring Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, Halina Reijn
screenplay by Gerard Soeteman & Paul Verhoeven
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bill Chambers The word on Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book (Zwartboek) around the TIFF was that it’s “Showgirls meets Schindler’s List,” which is a cute bit of shorthand but decidedly misleading, not that I can begin to imagine what that movie would be like. All it really means is that we’re never going to let Verhoeven live Showgirls down, so who can blame him for going back to Holland, where he’s still an object of veneration? Alas, you can take Verhoeven out of Hollywood but you can’t take Hollywood out of Verhoeven; Black Book is not so much a return to form–by which I mean a throwback to his subversive early work–as it is a supplement to his American output, the kind of Oscar-baiting wartime saga you just know he’d been aching to make with studio resources but only had the guts to execute in his native tongue. (In the press notes for the film, Verhoeven confesses that he stuck with genre in the U.S. because it better disguised his loose grasp of the English language.) The admittedly well-paced picture follows one Dutch Jewish woman’s transformation from Anne Frank into Mata Hari as Rachel-cum-Ellis (Carice van Houten, for whom big things lie ahead) takes a Gestapo general (Jeroen Krabbé doppelgänger Sebastian Koch) for a lover as well as a job at his office, hoping it will all lead to the release of some fellow resistance fighters.

All the King’s Men (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini
screenplay by Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren
directed by Steven Zaillian

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Ask most wags and they’ll tell you that Sean Penn is the best actor of his generation; for a performance or two (consider that in Dead Man Walking, he goes the distance without the use of his hands), I’d be inclined to agree, but look at the way writer-director Steven Zaillian and, especially, composer James Horner, treat Penn in the long-delayed All the King’s Men–and marvel at how little they think of their leading man. The second adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a populist-leaning stump-thumper modeled after Huey Long, the film garnered attention first for its sterling cast and Tiffany pedigree, then for its sudden disappearance from last year’s Oscar slate, only to appear now, without fanfare (save a gala screening at last week’s TIFF), in the middle of what’s traditionally a dumping ground for dead weight. And every time Penn delivers an allegedly rousing speech to a gaggle of hicks, proposing to nail the entrenched fat cats in the Big Easy’s beleaguered senate to a rail, Horner’s tiresome score endeavours to drown him out in a flood of sugared plastic emotion. Still, at least this sloppy brass orgy has a pulse, as opposed to Horner’s “mournful theme,” i.e., the one that accompanies the retarded voiceover narration of journalist Jack Burden (Jude Law), which sounds a lot like the piano exit music from the old “Incredible Hulk” TV show. If you believe your actors are capable of conveying emotion and nuance, you don’t shoot them in sexy angles and luxury-car commercial colour schemes while trying to drown them out in spasmodic torrents of empty, manipulative noise.

TIFF ’06: Fay Grim

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Espionage, Film Festivals, France, Germany, TIFF
**/**** starring Parker Posey, Jeff Goldblum, James Urbaniak, Saffron Burrows written and directed by Hal Hartley by Bill Chambers Those hoping this unexpected sequel to the terrific Henry Fool will be a Before Sunset should brace themselves for a Texasville. I think the problem is not that Parker Posey can't carry a picture (Posey's more of a movie star than she is a character actor, after all, so inflexible is her neurotic persona), but that her Fay Grim can't carry a picture. In that sense, Fay Grim is a little bit like a highbrow Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,…

Hollywoodland (2006); The Black Dahlia (2006); Factotum (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Brian De Palma, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Mystery, Norway, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical, Thriller

HOLLYWOODLAND
*/****
starring Adrien Brody, Diane Lane, Ben Affleck, Bob Hoskins
screenplay by Paul Bernbaum
directed by Allen Coulter

THE BLACK DAHLIA
**½/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank
screenplay by Josh Friedman, based on the novel by James Ellroy
directed by Brian De Palma

FACTOTUM
**½/****
starring Matt Dillon, Lili Taylor, Marisa Tomei, Didier Flamand
screenplay by Bent Hamer and Jim Stark, based on the novel by Charles Bukowski
directed by Bent Hamer

by Walter Chaw Deadening, dull, sepia-drenched faux-noir period hokum of a suddenly popular stripe, Allen Coulter’s Hollywoodland casts lantern-jawed, wooden-countenanced Ben Affleck as his way-back literal and metaphorical doppelgänger George Reeves. An apparent suicide that has fostered a small measure of conspiracy theories, Reeves, television’s original Superman, is shot in the head, naked in bed, on a summer night in 1959, briefly throwing a generation of kids into minor existential turmoil. But casting Reeves’s death into suspicion is a far stickier wicket: Even with the introduction of a woefully-underwritten fictional gumshoe (Adrien Brody) with his own crew-cut, wayward boy, and ice queen ex (Molly Parker) to match, the suggestion that someone in the portly statue’s coterie (including his wife-of-a-studio-bigwig-mistress, played by the ageless Diane Lane) might have had a motive for slaying him is given a quick spin and then stabled without a whimper. What’s left is the typical and unsurprising Hollywood fable of the high price of fame and the dreadful cost of its pursuit. The central irony that drives Hollywoodland is that, in its desperate attempt to make a mystery of Reeves’s death, the only thing it succeeds in doing is cataloguing the myriad reasons Reeves had to justifiably cap himself.

The TIFFing Point

Posted in2006, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Blog, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Horror, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Thriller, TIFF, UK, War

Two more days until I turn back into a pumpkin (or something like that), probably for the good of not only my health, but also that of FILM FREAK CENTRAL. Anyway, some more stopgap coverage for you…

FAY GRIM (d. Hal Hartley)
As far as this unlikely sequel to the brilliant Henry Fool is concerned, those hoping for a Before Sunset should brace themselves for a Texasville. The movie feels like it came out of Hartley sideways (or, conversely, all too painlessly), and it never really catches fire until Thomas Jay Ryan makes his long-delayed cameo as Henry Fool. By then, it’s too little too late. **/****

Lucky Number Slevin (2006) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Josh Hartnett, Morgan Freeman, Sir Ben Kingsley, Lucy Liu
screenplay by Jason Smilovic
directed by Paul McGuigan

Luckynumberslevincapby Walter Chaw I wonder if it's not ultimately a little too pat for its own good, but Paul McGuigan's Lucky Number Slevin is another slick, Guy Ritchie crime-manqué to pair with the director's breakthrough Gangster No. 1. It stars his muse Josh Hartnett (great in McGuigan's underestimated Hitchcock shrine Wicker Park) as the handsome Roger O. Thornhill/Wrong Man archetype–and it finds for Lucy Liu the first role that didn't make me sort of want to punch her mother. But the real star of a film that finds supporting roles for Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Stanley Tucci, and Sir Ben Kingsley is McGuigan's restless camerawork: an intricate lattice of matching shots and glittering surfaces that becomes almost an impressionistic projection of the mad, labyrinthine interiority of a mind bent on vengeance. Flashbacks and CGI-aided swoops and zooms are woven into the picture's visual tapestry, so that Lucky Number Slevin is read best as a lurid, comic-book send-up of a genre–every scene is played with a good-natured nudge, and when it overstays its welcome with a round-up that verges on sickly, its only real crime is that it's less a grotesque than a screwball romance. Hitchcock did it like that sometimes, too.

Don’t Come Knocking (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Music, UK

**/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange, Tim Roth, Gabriel Mann
screenplay by Sam Shepard, based on his play
directed by Wim Wenders

by Walter Chaw Howard Spence (Sam Shepard) is a has-been western star knocked down a few pegs by alcohol, drugs, and groupies–and so like any good anti-hero, he takes off in the middle of shooting a film, on horseback, to reunite with his long-estranged mother (Eva Marie Saint) before heading off to Butte, Montana in search of a long-lost bastard son (Gabriel Mann). He has a few conversations with the barmaid (Jessica Lange) he knocked up once upon a time, while a sullen girl (Sarah Polley) carrying a blue urn stalks him around town, offering the occasional cryptic message before retreating again into the wallpaper. But what glorious wallpaper it is, with Wim Wenders and his cinematographer Franz Lustig finding in Butte a myth of the American West frozen in bright, primary, Edward Hopper amber. Twin painters of isolation and suspension, Wenders and Hopper–since long about The American Friend–have been on a mission to redraw the psychic divorce of one American from another in minor chords and long, drawn-out tremolos. Don't Come Knocking, though, is only minor Wenders, and I do wonder if giving over too much faith in the flagging abilities of Shepard to write a script worth shooting has cost him his pitch this time around.

The Wicker Man (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Mexico, Mystery, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Ellen Burstyn, Kate Beahan, Frances Conroy
screenplay by Neil LaBute, based on the screenplay by Anthony Shaffer
directed by Neil LaBute

Wickerman2006by Walter Chaw You mark off certain literary flourishes in Neil LaBute's remake of Robin Hardy's classic The Wicker Man, and then you can't help but note that beneath the pagan matriarchy that is its villain and the hangdog cop (Nicolas Cage) that is its dullard hero, the film is just the auteur's latest unnecessarily reductive gender deconstruction. It's another major disappointment from the man who put humanity on the spit in In the Company of Men and–to a lesser, if no less affecting, degree–Your Friends and Neighbors. This redux hates women and, more, it hates femininity–typical LaBute, you could fairly offer, especially after Possession and The Shape of Things; The Wicker Man demonstrates again that LaBute is one of the brightest, most well-read American directors working–and that he's become incapable of focusing his smarts on a target other than the cruel and essentially alien nature of women. Hitchcock's films are arguably as obsessed, but his "wrong men" were hardly free of complicity in the construction of their own downfalls. Fatal to the production, then, is the introduction of an unsullied male hero–a literal martyr this time instead of the figurative types of LaBute's last couple pictures: a man of action (no milquetoast intellectuals here) struggling against a rising tide of castrating, hippie harpies.

Miami Vice (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Gong Li, Naomie Harris
written and directed by Michael Mann

Miamiviceby Walter Chaw Slot Michael Mann's Miami Vice in there alongside other millennial films about the disintegration of society and its subsequent renewal along tribal, exclusively masculine lines. It's a film from whose nihilism I would've recoiled just a few years ago, but now I see that as perhaps the definitive trend of the first six years of this brave new world (first five after 9/11, the inciting event of this love affair with apocalyptic cultural reset) and not entirely divorced from our reality besides. The best illustration of how we've gone from the voodoo of self-esteem of the Reagan '80s (for which the Mann-produced "Miami Vice" television show has become something of a cultural roadmark) to the blasted, self-abnegating, divided wasteland of Bush 2's America might be the difference between the white suits and socks-less loafers of the previous incarnation to the flak-jackets and high-velocity splatter head-shots of this one. WWI introduced irony into our lexicon with the advent of long-range, impersonal murder–and 9/11 deepened it in the popular culture in the United States with an existential fatalism borne of the idea that not only is sudden, arbitrary destruction from above a possibility, but most likely an unavoidable eventuality.

Gabrielle (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Romance

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras N/A
starring Isabelle Huppert, Pascal Greggory, Claudia Coli, Thierry Hancisse
screenplay by Patrice Chéreau & Anne-Louise Trividic, based on the novel The Return by Joseph Conrad
directed by Patrice Chéreau

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's official: the heritage movie is dead. Long the bane of young rowdies and middlebrow-haters the world over, the form breathed its last breaths earlier this century following a couple of decades of uncritical support. Witness Patrice Chéreau's outstanding literary adaptation Gabrielle, which manages to avoid the pitfalls of the genre while simultaneously critiquing its lesser examples. There is no comfort to be had in well-appointed houses or the tasteful appreciation of "the arts"–only, after Joseph Conrad's The Return, a vain and selfish man who uses such accoutrements for his self-aggrandizement. The film snatches away the cheap pleasures of heritage, blowing up its shallow comforts and rocking you in ways a mere "period piece" never could.

Ask the Dust (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek, Donald Sutherland, Eileen Atkins
screenplay by Robert Towne, based on the novel by John Fante
directed by Robert Towne

by Walter Chaw As a male of the average chauvinist-pig variety, you find yourself inclined to give Robert Towne's Ask the Dust the benefit of the doubt because he's convinced Salma Hayek to strip naked a few times and roll around in the surf. And yet the realization dawns inescapable that no matter the acres of flesh, the film is every bit as horrible as that self-serious, neo-camp sexploitation classic Original Sin (another noir based on a lesser-known, period-dependent novel–that one by Cornell Woolrich, this one by John Fante), with only the gender/race roles reversed–that watching naked Angelina Jolie writhe around with Antonio Banderas can be every bit as disturbingly sexless as Hayek and Colin Farrell doing same. Promising to follow the James M. Cain pot-boiler formula with its dense voiceovers and faux-sordid, sepia-stained sexing, Ask the Dust is actually just inert, a painfully-overwritten, impossible-to-execute picture loaded down with self-conscious slatted shadows and mirrors (and all manner of noir affectations) that isn't only set in 1930s Los Angeles, but plays exactly as anachronistic and fusty as most films produced in the Thirties, too. It's the kind of movie that makes much of a character's English-impaired malapropisms ("Not 'grew on me,' grew in me…like a baby," mewls Hayek's character in one of many excruciating proclamations); to its core, it's the kind of movie that sucks now and always has in exactly the same way.

Running Scared (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Paul Walker, Cameron Bright, Vera Farmiga, Chazz Palminteri
written and directed by Wayne Kramer

by Walter Chaw I liked Wayne Kramer's Running Scared because Running Scared isn't ashamed of itself. It's not terribly audacious (in direct contradiction to the consensus opinion that the film is "over-the-top," I found it to be sort of tame in its sexuality, violence, and atrocity) and it's not witty or smart or loaded with the archetype that a direct homage to the Brothers Grimm (the picture is set in the fictitious hamlet of "Grimley") would imply. Its prologue's cliffhanger, for instance, is paid off at the end in absolutely the most spineless way possible, betraying the dark fairytale template of which the film is so proud. (Fairytales were never this squeamish about strangers actually injuring–sometimes killing–children.) Besides, there's nothing terribly subversive about suggesting that the world is a dangerous place for kids. And yet, there is embedded in Running Scared's clueless schizophrenia (it wants to be edgy even as it's spending the majority of its energy on slick editing tricks, comic-book CGI effects, and a restless camera that doesn't hold still long enough for a fly to land on it) a nasty, seductive class of real cinematic infatuation and a knowledge, idiot savant-like or otherwise, of how to implicate a viewer in the things unfolding onscreen. A neat trick. Neater because the protagonist with which we suture, as it were, is played by one Paul Walker: possibly the worst actor the United States has ever produced, no matter what Armond White says.

BloodRayne (2006) [Unrated Director’s Cut] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Germany, Horror, Vampire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras C
starring Kristanna Loken, Michelle Rodriguez, Michael Madsen, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Guinevere Turner
directed by Uwe Boll

by Walter Chaw It seems sort of pointless at this juncture to keep kicking at Uwe Boll–indeed, there's a minor backlash against all the lash, most of it dedicated to defending the Kraut Ed Wood along the lines of his latest, the excrescent BloodRayne, as being only as bad as ordinary bad films and not as bad as getting your eyelid caught on a nail. The secret to this bountiful wealth of backhanded praise, Boll has discovered, is found somewhere in the intersection of gratuitous gore and gratuitous nudity–both virtues forgiving a multitude of the director's other shortcomings (a tin ear, a blind eye, a plugger's grace, and so on), because it transforms his sword-and-sorcery saga into something that looks and sounds just like the crap most of us squandered our misspent youth surfing for on late night cable, tissue in one hand, lotion in the other. Without stretching too extravagantly, it's easy to see in that great sloppy act of pubescent self-abuse the very same method guiding Boll's hand at the camera through his ersatz trilogy of terrible. Fair to wonder a time or two over the course of the film if someone should invoke the Geneva Convention and get the fuck outta dodge. I guess there's a purpose to everything under the sun, and BloodRayne, based on a video game series of the same name, must be around to give hope to anyone with a camera in a country with a tax loophole that they, too, can make really bad movies with which to waste other peoples' lives.

Caché (2005) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2006, 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.