Mystery Archives - Page 16 of 29

Unbreakable (2000) – [VISTA Series] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

March 24, 20082000s, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Disability, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Thriller

**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
BD – Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright Penn, Spencer Treat Clark
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I came late to the Sixth Sense party. After sneering at the trailer–which, with its moppet-in-peril and supernatural themes, made the film look like just another one of those less commercial pop jobs that get shoehorned into late-summer release–I put it immediately out of my mind. But three weeks later, I discovered that it had become a huge hit, with a sizable amount of critical acclaim, and it led me to wonder how I had managed to miss the parade. What was it about this film about a boy who sees dead people that had touched such a sensitive nerve?

Nancy Drew (2007) – DVD

March 9, 20082000s, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Family, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Emma Roberts, Josh Flitter, Max Thieriot, Tate Donovan
screenplay by Andrew Fleming and Tiffany Paulsen
directed by Andrew Fleming

by Walter Chaw Andrew Fleming's Nancy Drew isn't just bad, it's fascinatingly bad. From minute one, it's an example of what happens when nobody knows what the hell is going on and doesn't have the wit to hide it. It suffers from the same malady as Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End in that it's only confusing if you walk into it believing there's something to figure out–but unlike that picture, this one has so little in the way of internal coherence that it's almost a work of surrealism. When teen sleuth Nancy (a fetching yet robotic Emma Roberts) awakens to find herself abducted in an old projection booth, she doesn't panic and search for exits, she stands up, collects her compass (why does anyone need a compass in the middle of Los Angeles? Dunno), and heads straight for a little window that she promptly opens onto a scaffolding, thus enabling her snickersnack escape. It mirrors an earlier scene in which Nancy discovers a letter pivotal to the picture's central mystery stuck in an old book that, as executed, has all the weight and import of every other indecipherable, non-linear, dada scene in the piece. I'm not suggesting, even, that there's no tension in the film, as there's tension galore in trying to follow, much less predict, its astonishing leaps of baffling, shit-headed incongruity. There are no impulses that make sense, no characters with either a toehold in our reality or a justification for their existence (and the only people who might give a damn about Nancy Drew as an institution are too old to see the film on their own and unlikely to take their baffled children, anyway). As a mystery, in the most literal sense, it's possibly the most mysterious film of the year.

Gone Baby Gone (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

February 11, 2008****/****, 2000s, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris
screenplay by Ben Affleck & Aaron Stockard, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
directed by Ben Affleck

by Walter Chaw It hurts a little to watch Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone, making the experience tricky because so much of it is so pleasurable. There's a moment in particular when amateur gumshoes Patrick (Casey Affleck) and Angie (Michelle Monaghan) are flanked by veteran homicide dicks Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton) at the beginning of an interrogation sequence that made my heart leap with joy. 2007 is shaping up to be the year that saw the best of the early New American Cinema genres resurrected through the prism of our national nightmare of paranoia and discontent; Gone Baby Gone slots in as the doppelgänger-in-spirit to that period's empty films noir: hard-boiled detectives left knowing less at journey's end than they did at the start. (Compare the way this picture uses genre as a launching pad instead of as a straitjacket.) The final image is an enduring one–in the days since I've seen Gone Baby Gone, it's hardly left my mind–and where bits of jingoistic garbage like Rendition are rattling bleeding heart sabres with patronizing, simpleminded zeal, here's a movie that takes the sobering, mature stance that even things that are black-and-white are never black-and-white. Light years ahead of the last adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel (Mystic River), Gone Baby Gone is about the insanity of agreeing to be absolutely in love in a temporary, capricious universe. It's about parenthood and, a recurring theme in Lehane's books, the cult of manhood, too: what defines loyalty and how those tenets are the tenterhooks to which we're attached to each other in the bedlam of everything else. It's hollow comfort to discover that once the dust settles, the only thing that makes us men is the handshake agreement to perceive ourselves as something other than animals–if nothing more than animals.

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume One (1992-1993/1996-1999) – DVD

January 8, 20081990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, DVD, Family, Mystery, Television

Image B Sound B Extras B
"My First Adventure," "Passion for Life," "The Perils of Cupid," "Travels with Father," "Journeys of Radiance," "Spring Break Adventure," "Love's Sweet Song"

by Ian Pugh It's important to understand that Indiana Jones didn't make history cool, but even more important to understand that history didn't make Indy cool, either. "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones" (formerly known as "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" and henceforth "Young Indy") purports to portray the daring archaeologist's early years as he travels around the world with his father (Lloyd Owen), meeting famous figures and going to great pains to teach the young'ns in the audience a thing or two about the artists and revolutionaries of the early twentieth century. Because the attempt to educate binds itself to a down-to-earth approach, the series completely ignores the fact that Indy's franchise appeal lies in a careful collision of the mundane and the fantastic, of reality and fantasy. It's one thing to demythologize the romantic violence often attributed to the Old West but quite another to try to demythologize something so immersed in theology and the supernatural that to abandon them is to lose something inextricably vital to the concept. Imagine if Raiders of the Lost Ark had ended with the Ark of the Covenant revealed to be an ornate box full of dust, sans the wrath of God, and you'll understand the basic problems that plague "Young Indy".

Atonement (2007) + The Kite Runner (2007)

December 25, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, France, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, UK, War

ATONEMENT
*½/****
starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Ian McEwan
directed by Joe Wright

THE KITE RUNNER
½*/****
starring Khalid Abdalla, Homayoun Ershadi, Shaun Toub, Saïd Taghmaoui
screenplay by David Benioff, based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw No end-of-year sweepstakes would be complete without the requisite bushel of awards-baiting pabulum, rich with a nice, thick vein of glossy pandering. They're movies you're supposed to love: can't-miss, sure-fire formula flicks that bank on their sparkly casts and borrowed prestige the way blockbuster action flicks rely on special effects and the promise of mayhem. Reduce it down enough and the dreg at the bottom of the stew pot is still just making money–you don't reinvent the wheel by following a recipe, and indeed, a good 99% of movies in any given year don't boast of anything new. To say that you like something like August Rush is to say that you hate to be challenged by a film–that escapism is the first and last reason you go to the movies. Where something like Transformers wants to inspire a car- or girl-related boner, something like Atonement wants to ennoble the cineplex arthouse crowd into paroxysms of self-congratulation. It's the same feeling that compels awards bodies to vote for this stuff: mainstream passing as estimable while the real deal flies for the most part under the radar. The more assembly line chunder like Atonement and The Kite Runner gets chosen for Academy recognition, the fewer slots there are available for big studio pics that actually deliver the goods, like No Country for Old Men, The Darjeeling Limited, There Will Be Blood, and Sweeney Todd (presuming, of course, that an impressive number of remarkable studio flicks released earlier this calendar year are already lost causes).

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

December 10, 2007****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Family, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Michael Goldenberg, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw It's a blasted earth, this green that holds Hogwarts now, and during a scene where our hero wizard is being tortured into forgetfulness for his own good, director David Yates cues a blanket of forgetful snow to fall. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (hereafter Harry Potter 5) is, likes its title suggests, a startling return to form for the series after Alfonso Cuarón's exceptional Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was followed by the insipid contribution of rom-com specialist Mike Newell. Gratifyingly complex and deliciously Freudian, a moment where Harry loses the last of his family–mirroring a moment in the third film where, on the banks of a lake, he almost loses himself–is preceded by an identical progression from the third film in which he's mistaken for his own father. Alas this time, Harry's not able to affect positive change in the guise of his dad; it's the boy becoming the man, frustrated and folded into a world of dread and doom. As drawn in the film, Potter's universe is like Potter's Field, a place where strangers and orphans are buried on the eve of war and a child's unavoidable matriculation into corruption. Harry Potter 5 is dark as pitch: unsettling, unsettled, unresolved, and utterly remarkable.

Metalocalypse: Season One (2006) + The Lair: The Complete First Season (2007) – DVDs

November 28, 2007Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Horror, Music, Mystery, Romance, Television, Vampire

Metalocalypse: Season One
Image B+ Sound A Extras D+
"The Curse of Dethklok," "Dethwater," "Birthdayface," "Dethtroll," "Murdering Outside the Box," "Dethkomedy," "Dethfam," "Performance Klok," "Snakes n' Barrels," "Mordland," "FatKlok," "Skwisklok," "Go Forth and Die," "Bluesklok," "Dethkids," "Religionklok," "Dethclown," "Girlfriendklok," "Dethstars," "The Metalocalypse Has Begun"

The Lair: The Complete First Season
Image B+ Sound B Extras D
episodes 101-106

by Ian Pugh I never understood the appeal of Brendon Small's "Home Movies", a show I've always found more frustrating than anything else. Besides being hard on the eyes (its characters evolving from garish preschool squiggles to sharp-yet-shapeless Flash monstrosities), it gathers together a lot of smart, funny people to meander aimlessly through three or four of the same maddeningly droll scenarios. Teamed with "Conan O'Brien"/"TV Funhouse" alum Tommy Blacha, Small finally has a purpose to go with his aesthetic. Following the daily activities of death metal band Dethklok–idiot vocalist Nathan Explosion (voiced by Small), self-loathing bass player William Murderface (Blacha), balding Midwesterner Pickles the Drummer (Small), "the world's fastest guitarist" Skwisgaar Skwigelf (Small), and Norwegian naïf Toki Wartooth (Blacha)–"Metalocalypse" certainly allows its characters to ramble incoherently, but its premise demands such focus that even the incoherent rambling has to lead somewhere.

Shark: Season One (2006-2007) – DVD

November 19, 20072000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television

Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
"Pilot," "LAPD Blue," "Dr. Feelbad," "Russo," "In the Grasp," "Fashion Police," "Deja Vu All Over Again," "Love Triangle," "Dial M for Monica," "Sins of the Mother," "The Wrath of Khan," "Wayne's World," "Teacher's Pet," "Starlet Fever," "Here Comes the Judge," "Blind Trust," "Backfire," "Trial by Fire," "Porn Free," "Fall from Grace," "Strange Bedfellows," "Wayne's World 2: Revenge of the Shark"

by Ian Pugh The latest in a long line of television series to track the exploits of a douchebag-genius-misanthrope, "Shark" has a distinct leg up on progenitor "House" and the rest of the competition in its hiring of an undisputed master of such characters to lead the way. In a pantheon of pure indulgence, casting James Woods as the eponymous fast-talking asshole ranks up there with letting Nicolas Cage unleash his inner lunatic–and "Shark" certainly gives Woods a chance to go to town as famous defense attorney-turned-high-profile prosecutor Sebastian Stark. The actor almost completely embodies the pleasures to be found in the show, to such an overwhelming degree that his near-perpetual "step aside, junior" demeanour leaks through the fourth wall, simultaneously wowing the viewing audience and putting pretenders like Hugh Laurie firmly in their place.

Lions for Lambs (2007)

November 9, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, War

½*/****
starring Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Derek Luke
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan
directed by Robert Redford

by Walter Chaw Stilted, awkward, an Ayn Rand screed complete with straw men and pontiffs poised to burn them down, Robert Redford's smug, self-satisfied liberal weltschmerz anthem Lions for Lambs is tailor-made for festival-season standing ovations. It's the prime example of why a lot of Republicans get away with calling Hollywood–the single highest concentration of Big Business and corporate interest outside the Beltway–a lefty hotbed of pinko nonsense carried on a cloud of flatulent hot air. It's a prime example, too, of why it's so hard to vote for Democrats even when the alternative is the GOP. Put this one on the shelf between Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe and this year's deplorable Rendition–movies so earnest in their chest-pounding pontification that it's impossible to imagine on the one hand who could be converted by them and on the other who could resist changing their party affiliation out of sheer embarrassment. In this one, the call is for activism in whatever form said activism might take just for the sake of doing something, damnit. To quote a guy writing in the 1920s, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

The Invisible (2007) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

October 29, 20072000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, South Africa, Sweden, Thriller

*½/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Justin Chatwin, Margarita Levieva, Chris Marquette, Marcia Gay Harden
screenplay by Mick Davis and Christine Roum, based on the novel Den Osynlige by Mats Wahl
directed by David S. Goyer

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I never thought I'd find myself comparing a movie unfavourably to Disturbia, but the technical success of that hormonal-teenagers-in-peril flick bears directly on the failure of The Invisible, which aspires to the same kind of hooky teen angst without really understanding it. Say what you like about Disturbia (and I frequently do), it both completely understood and refused to condescend to the power fantasies and frustrated desires of its adolescent audience. The Invisible doesn't get that constituency–it's just cynically and transparently aimed at it. It goes through the motions of depicting the agonies of adolescence without ever seeming credible, as if the filmmakers knew they wanted to grab the teen market but had no desire to learn what that demographic actually cared about. When it throws in its supernatural device, it registers as exactly that: there's no metaphor, just a high concept in search of a purpose. The disparity between the two movies, Disturbia and The Invisible, shows why one was a surprise hit while the other sank without a trace.

Fracture (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

October 11, 20072000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound A Extras D+
starring Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling, David Strathairn, Rosamund Pike
screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers
directed by Gregory Hoblit

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Although the term "cat-and-mouse" has already become synonymous with Gregory Hoblit's Fracture, it's something of a misnomer in that it implies a clever battle of wits. The film actually hinges on precisely two turnarounds of one-upsmanship between the designated cat and mouse: the revelation of the convoluted, coincidence-dependent plan to commit the perfect murder, and the fatal flaw in said plan (the "fracture," get it?) that eventually brings its perpetrator to justice–and as both are telegraphed far in advance, it's impossible to play along with the expectation for surprise. So inevitable are these conclusions, in fact, that I just gave up and accepted the ending, which sidesteps a first-glance case of double jeopardy with such vague dialogue, recited in such a bland tone of sotto voce, that I only got the basic gist of how we got from Point A to Point B. With Point B such a shrug-worthy certainty, I wasn't nearly confused enough to care besides.

Eastern Promises (2007)

September 26, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Viggo Moretensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl
screenplay by Steve Knight
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw As executed by our pre-eminent insect anthropologist, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is more fairytale than thriller, one that finds new muse Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the rising star of an émigré Russian mob family taken root in the heart of London within the red velvet-lined walls of a restaurant innocuously-/romantically-named “Trans-Siberian.” Self-described as “wolfish,” this pack is led by grandfatherly Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who’s disappointed with his ineffectual son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and looking to replace him with a surrogate heir. The rot of that familial discord throws its roots back to ferocious opening minutes that see first a vicious throat-slashing, then a fourteen-year-old, pregnant prostitute haemorrhaging on the floor of a drugstore after she’s told that, for Methadone, the pharmacist will need a prescription. Cronenberg’s London is a cess seething beneath a veneer of “normalcy”; regarded as a toxic tabernacle in Spider, the city is transformed here into a garish, meticulously theatrical wonderland. The central problem of the picture has a lot to do with the idea that Cronenberg has again taken a pre-existing script and reordered it along distinctly Cronenbergian lines–that what must have read initially as a sociological text on another facet of the immigrant experience (much like screenwriter Steve Knight’s Dirty Pretty Things) now plays like one of Cronenberg’s investigations into the difficulty of parsing concepts like “normal” and “family” in the crushing crucible of bugs pretending to be human among humans.

Dexter: The First Season (2006) – DVD

September 18, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
"Dexter," "Crocodile," "The Popping Cherry," "Let's Give the Boy a Hand," "Love American Style," "Return to Sender," "Circle of Friends," "Shrink Wrap," "Father Knows Best," "Seeing Red," "Truth Be Told," "Born Free"

by Walter Chaw "Dexter" sucks in that special Showtime way. It has nothing for the soul–not because it's nihilistic, but because it isn't. It's "The Facts of Life" crossed with "Matlock" starring a good-hearted serial killer; a superhero melodrama along the lines of "The Incredible Hulk" whose self-contained mysteries are held together ever so loosely by a season-long thread involving a manhunt. What I'm trying to say is that it's unbelievably patronizing. It's not nuanced, not laden with depth–it's a quirk machine, facile and shallow. See, a serial killer with heart isn't "deep," it's a sketch. It's the black guy who thinks he's white, the horny old lady, the hooker with a heart of gold. What begins as a really fun-seeming premise is undone utterly by a succession of weak scripts and, with the exception of Michael C. Hall's virtuoso turn as a sociopath working as a blood-spatter expert in Miami, slack performances. He's a lot better than the material deserves, it goes without saying, but like Mary-Louise Parker in the similarly pandering, similarly terrible Showtime series "Weeds", he's just good enough to prolong the show's already-lamentable existence. Maybe the real argument pertains to the wisdom of creating a series about something so heinous in such a way that it trips no sensitivity meters. It's a time bomb hidden in a teddy bear–and then the bomb doesn't go off.

Prison Break: Season One (2005-2006) – DVD

August 27, 20072000s, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image B+ Sound B Extras C
"Pilot," "Allen," "Cell Test," "Cute Poison," "English, Fitz or Percy," "Riots, Drills and the Devil (Part 1)," "Riots Drills and the Devil (Part 2)," "The Old Head," "Tweener," "Sleight of Hand," "And Then There Were 7," "Odd Man Out," "End of the Tunnel," "The Rat," "By the Skin & the Teeth," "Brother's Keeper," "J-Cat," "Bluff," "The Key," "Tonight," "Go," "Flight"

by Ian Pugh The elements that make "Prison Break" compulsively watchable are almost painfully easy to locate and describe, but the taut dialogue, compelling characters, and claustrophobic environment–which together bring a renewed vigour to a genre mired in bravado and uneasy partnerships–also make it something of a chore to sift through the supposed complexities that serve as the show's pretext. Begin with the bare essentials that probably constituted the pitch: wrongfully convicted of the murder of the Vice President's brother, death row inmate Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) has quickly burned out his appeals and has less than a month before he's to be executed at Fox River Penitentiary. But there may be hope yet: Lincoln's brother, Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller), is a structural engineer by trade, and in fact designed Fox River. Intentionally botching a bank robbery, Michael enters the prison sporting an elaborate body tattoo that hides a complete map of the prison grounds–in addition to a series of codes and ciphers that detail what Michael will have to do and with whom he must ally himself in order to bust his brother out.

Disturbia (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

August 13, 20072000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A Extras C+
BD – Image B+ Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS) Extras C+
starring Shia LaBeouf, David Morse, Sarah Roemer, Carrie-Anne Moss
screenplay by Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth
directed by D.J. Caruso

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I’m not terribly upset that Disturbia directly steals from the infinitely superior Rear Window. If ever there was a time to resurrect the lesson in voyeurism that is Hitchcock’s masterpiece, it’s now, at the dawn of the closed-circuited twenty-first century. The problem with the newer film isn’t that it’s a rip-off, but that it fundamentally misunderstands its source. The terribly ambiguous stance on Jimmy Stewart’s Peeping Tom tendencies has become 100% gung-ho support of illegal surveillance, a development problematic for reasons that go beyond ethical considerations and political ramifications. I get that nobody involved means for Disturbia to champion creep behaviour–they’re merely fulfilling the hormonal wishes of the adolescents who made it a surprise hit last spring. It’s just that, stripped of any theme beyond catching a killer, Rear Window‘s not that interesting to watch.

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

August 2, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, France, Germany, Mystery, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Joan Allen
screenplay by Tony Gilroy and George Nolfi, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw I look at the first film in this very fine trilogy as Jason Bourne embodying Harrison Ford’s Deckard character from Blade Runner: someone with hidden potential and a certain confusion about his place in the world–and the kind of figure Matt Damon is best at portraying, as it happens. I see the second film as Bourne-as-Roy Batty: robotic, violent, inexorable, and at the end of his string, valuing life and looking to make what amends he can. This third film, The Bourne Ultimatum, directed again by Paul Greengrass and welcoming several key players (Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, Damon, screenwriter Tony Gilroy, DP Oliver Wood) back into the fold, ties both strings together: Bourne inhabiting his potential as something of an unparalleled killing machine while, simultaneously, becoming more human in his machine-like purposefulness. If there’s a feeling we’ve been here before, mark that down as the inevitable side-effect of staying just a little too long with a series that, to this point, had yet to make any missteps, minor or otherwise. Consequently this film, more than the other two, feels like a straight line: less improvisation, more inevitability, all of it leading to the moment where our hero, the merciless assassin, decides whether his training to be an instrument overrules his instinct to be a human. It can’t be a surprise anymore, so all that’s left is that it be true.

Shooter (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

June 19, 20072000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Mark Wahlberg, Michael Peña, Danny Glover, Ned Beatty
screenplay by Jonathan Lemkin, based on the novel Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw Think of it as the latest in the proud tradition of Walking Tall hicksploitation: a redneck Bourne Identity with a bleeding heart tacked to its sleeve by barbed chicken wire. Or, better, think of Shooter as a noble attempt to win back the Kansan-Tennesseean-Montanan wingnut demographic from the arch-conservatives who've made men buggering one another of greater concern than their farms going under and their children fighting indefensible wars declared by an impossibly wealthy aristocracy-by-coup. Sound extreme? Shooter is all this and more: a nihilistic exercise in Old Testament revenge that has more in common with such cult classics as Next of Kin than with cult classics like the suddenly-reserved-seeming Sniper. It makes no bones about its politics, assembling talking heads in the form of a venerable Red State senator (Ned Beatty) and a too-old-for-this-shit Colonel (Danny Glover, too old for this shit almost twenty years ago) to spout on endlessly about the lack of WMDs, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, and, for shits and giggles, the conspiracy behind the JFK assassination. No The Parallax View, the film mines the complex machinations of good guys being good and bad guys being bad: bad guys being politicians and military guys drunk on power and good guys being hillbilly guardsmen with access to the Internet and too many guns.

The Painted Veil (2006) – DVD; The Good Shepherd (2006); The Good German (2006) – DVD

May 21, 20072000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, China, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Romance, Thriller, War

THE PAINTED VEIL
***/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Diana Rigg
screenplay by Ron Nyswaner, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by John Curran

THE GOOD SHEPHERD
**/****
starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Eric Roth
directed by Robert De Niro

THE GOOD GERMAN
*½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Paul Attanasio, based on the novel by Joseph Kanon
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw One of seemingly dozens of pretentious, self-produced vanity pieces from the Edward Norton grist mill, The Painted Veil, John Curran's adaptation of Somerset Maugham's story of colonial malaise, is a pleasant surprise. Naomi Watts and Toby Jones are fabulous (and Norton is steady); it's not terribly paternalistically racist despite being another Western film in which white people exert their magical influence in foreign lands; and even though it's all about prestige and hedonism, it manages now and again to actually be about prestige and hedonism. But like the simultaneously-opening Soderbergh noir The Good German, it's mostly interesting in the meta. What keeps this updating of the old Greta Garbo weeper from being literally better is the lack of immediacy in its tale of emotionally distant scientists and their flapper wives, adrift in the boiler pot of 1920s Shanghai. Not timeless in its remove but instead ineffably dated by it, it's an Old Hollywood production in both epic scale and lack of subtext, making the picture a lovely trifle not unlike other well-done bits of instantly-forgotten prestige (see: Philip Noyce's The Quiet American).

The Messengers (2007) – DVD

May 14, 20072000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Kristen Stewart, Dylan McDermott, Penelope Ann Miller, John Corbett
screenplay by Mark Wheaton
directed by Danny Pang & Oxide Pang

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Horror is not my area of expertise, but I'm fairly certain that The Messengers barely qualifies for the category. A two-bit riff on Ju-On and The Sixth Sense (themselves worth four bits at best), it's professionally shot and cleanly designed but fails completely to be at all scary or even marginally resonant. Those who recognize and revere the social relevance of genre entries from the '70s will be tearing their hair out at the film's hermetic sealing-away from anything beyond teen angst, with references to no less than the high foreclosure rate in farm country used purely as a plot convenience. (Inexcusable when you consider what sort of eldritch imagery might be wrung from a devastated agricultural wasteland.) What you get from The Messengers are some by-the-book jump-scares, "creepy" imagery that wouldn't damage the average eight-year-old, and a "surprise" ending that any thinking adult will see coming from miles away.

To Catch a Thief (1955) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

May 8, 20071950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C
starring Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Jessie Royce Landis, John Williams
screenplay by John Michael Hayes, based on the book by David Dodge
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw If Rear Window is Hitchcock's "testament" movie to that point in 1954 (post-North by Northwest, the term no longer has much meaning), then To Catch a Thief, appearing just a year later, recovers the only element missing from Hitchcock's black chest in Rear Window's exhausting exhumation: homosexuality. Note the way that Cary Grant's cat burglar John Robie is greeted by a former accomplice in scenic Nice: as Grant descends a staircase to an outdoor café run by all the reformed dregs of society once involved with Robie and now resentful that Robie appears to be back on the prowl, the head waiter pops a champagne cork in the first of several ejaculatory similes. I do wonder whether the entire film could in fact be read as a gay "reclamation"–its most famous sequence, the juxtaposition of the central seduction sequence with fireworks over Cannes, begins with Robie being teased for his asexuality, recalling an earlier flirtation with rival Danielle (Brigitte Auber) that ends with Robie asking her to cover her legs. More blatantly, Robie is approached by a muscle stud on the beach as Grace Kelly lounges in the background; and when offered on a picnic the choice between a "breast or a leg," Robie demurs, "You make the choice." Clever double entendres, no question, but what exactly is the second "understanding" that we come to in this series of innuendos? Moreover, what to make of the mother figure, reappearing at key erotic moments in body or direct reference (indeed, Kelly's Frances accuses Robie of thinking of her mother during their first kiss) and comprising the punchline of the picture as Frances threatens to make them a household of three (a literal "ménage a trios"–particularly given the film's setting). That kind of mother-love doesn't reach its apotheosis until Psycho five years hence, but there's something along the way to Hitch's complex Oedipal materphobia that suggests here a certain Freudian gay arrest.