Mystery Archives - Page 20 of 28

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

April 12, 20052000s, 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.

The Letter (1940) – DVD

April 11, 20051940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, Frieda Inescort
screenplay by Howard Koch, based on the play by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by William Wyler

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Andrew Sarris once defended American film by saying "it completely dominates in the middle ranges, particularly in the good-bad movies and genres." The Letter represents that glorious middle range in all its good-bad glory. Keeping it from the top is its refusal to be anything but surface: despite its origins as a sociopolitical W. Somerset Maugham play, it's played as a straight melodrama, and that reliable workhorse William Wyler ensures that you feel the "basic human drama" without noticing sticky details like issues of class and race. But the surface is smooth, sleek, and shapely and the craftsmanship shows loving care, if not obsession, for rendering the mood and evoking the characters. It's less than a masterpiece, more than a time-killer, and an excellent argument for excursions into the middle.

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

April 10, 2005****/****, 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

by 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.

Oldboy (2003) + The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005)

April 7, 2005****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Revenge, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller

OLDBOY
****/****
starring Choi Min-sik, Yu Ji-tae, Kang Hye-jeong, Ji Dae-han
screenplay by Hwang Jo-yun, Lim Chun-hyeong, Park Chan-wook
directed by Park Chan-wook

THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE
**½/****
starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Catherine Keener, Camilla Belle, Paul Dano
written and directed by Rebecca Miller

by Walter Chaw

"I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter, and with her I will found the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen." -Aguirre, Aguirre: The Wrath of God

A Greek tragedy, an opera, a showcase for South Korean cinema, and one exhilaratingly sick piece of cinema, Park Chan-wook's Oldboy is like the three plays of the "Oresteia" distilled into one pure, malevolent, volatile essence. It's vengeance served hot and perverse like a Medeaen stew, a story of settling scores old enough to be archetype married to sounds and images so invasively intimate that the process of working through the film is a little like getting physically violated. It's vital stuff, this Oldboy, its very title suggesting an ironic superhero alter ego–sketching anti-hero Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) as a fright-mask of arrested development, a child raging against its prematurely-aged body. We meet him one drunken night as he's bailed out of a night in the tank only to spend the next fifteen years in a solitary-confinement prison cell masquerading as a chintzy backwater motor inn room. He watches TV there, mostly cable news and its horrorshow of buildings and bridges falling, with periodic gassings allowing his anonymous captors to stitch up his wrists and gather biological mementos to leave at the scenes of crimes he didn't commit. When he's finally released, it's not clear if he's been falsely led to believe that he's free, if he's escaped by the graces of an ingenious plan involving a chopstick and a lot of time, or if he's died and this is his demented brain's oxygen-starved fantasy of what he woulda done to the lousy sons o'bitches if only he'd lived.

What the Bleep Do We Know!? (2004) – DVD

March 30, 20052000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Sci-Fi

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras D
starring Marlee Matlin, Elaine Hendrix, Robert Bailey Jr., John Ross Bowie
screenplay by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Matthew Hoffman
directed by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Watching a bunch of young actresses knock themselves out with their Method masochism, Pauline Kael astutely noted how they “tried to find the motivation [where] actresses of an earlier generation would have merely provided it.” Little did she know that you could extend the exercise to philosophy: in its dogged attempt to confer genius on commonplace ideas, What the Bleep Do We Know!? proves that Method metaphysics is eminently possible. What the film doesn’t do is give us any point of view outside our own noggins, oversimplifying human experience as much as it mystifies it and dressing up self-involvement as enlightenment. It’s a movie that can’t let you see the man behind the curtain, lest you discover that he’s actually Dr. Phil.

The Ring (2003) [2-Disc Collector’s Set] – DVD

March 16, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, David Dorfman, Brian Cox
screenplay by Ehren Kruger, based on the novel Ringu by Kôji Suzuki and the screenplay Ringu by Hiroshi Takahashi
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Handsomely mounted and undeniably disconcerting, Gore Verbinski's The Ring, the American remake of the first of Japanese horror auteur Hideo Nakata's "Ring Trilogy" (itself based on a series of novels by Kôji Suzuki), lacks a good deal of the original's subtlety but makes up for it with the kind of electronic paranoia that is Yankee stock and trade. The ideas of an unfolding technical mystery, of a protagonist perhaps gifted with second sight, of being a cog at the will of a malignant machine, are borrowed with intelligence and profit from Coppola's masterpiece, The Conversation. The picture even lifts part of that film's dream sequence, a setting within a warehouse before a bank of media equipment, and a quiet tableau of individuals dwarfed by identical apartment units in the sterile honeycomb of modern inner-city housing.

The Ring Two (2005)

March 14, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Naomi Watts, Simon Baker, David Dorfman, Elizabeth Perkins
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Hideo Nakata

by Walter Chaw The hope that Hideo Nakata’s The Ring Two will be as pleasant a surprise as Gore Verbinski’s The Ring lasts all of five minutes. Two high school kids (Ryan Merriman and Emily VanCamp), alone without the parents, cuddle up to watch a video but, lo, the boy is just in it to get the girl “in trouble” so that he’ll be off the hook while proving to a chortling pal on the telephone that he is, indeed, mas macho. All the reasons we had for doing the awful things we did in high school find a wonderful vehicle in a demonic videotape that, like a really bad venereal disease, kills anyone who indulges in it seven days after they “do” it. But the premise that carried the first film (and the original Japanese trilogy and mini-series)–the idea of a media-borne STD (or drug addiction), transformed here into something carried aloft by the virulence of peer pressure–is instantly discarded along with its deadline gimmick in favour of about two hours of garbage involving killer deer, a somnambulantly possessed kid (if demonic possession renders your nine-year-old docile as a fawn, that’s a trade-off some might be willing to make), and poor Naomi Watts huffing and puffing and delivering awful, repetitive monologues at her catatonic kid.

The Jacket (2005)

March 4, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh
screenplay by Massy Tadjedin
directed by John Maybury

by Walter Chaw Lyrical, dislocated, and grim in the fashion of a Derek Jarman film (and director John Maybury served as editor on Jarman's The Last of England), The Jacket, like Altered States, Miracle Mile, Jacob's Ladder, and 12 Monkeys before it, is the sort of doom-filled genre romance that's regularly underestimated in popular contemporary conversation. Peter Deming (the cinematographer on David Lynch's Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive and on the Hughes Brothers' From Hell) shoots the film in a straightforward, beautifully-(under)lit fashion that is equally adept at underscoring the claustrophobia in some sequences and the breathless expanse of others. A scene where Adrien Brody, as Gulf War I vet Jack Starks, wanders away from his loony bin down a long tunnel in a Robert Frost wood and Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh) stumbles after him demonstrates both, with Deming painting a beautiful landscape from paint pots full of bleak, oppressive isolation. Scored lightly by a series of Brian Eno compositions, The Jacket is an apocalyptic poem of love and loss that's unusually wise about its visual vocabulary–about ways of looking, the line between dreaming and reality, and how eyes on film can be a powerful and elastic metaphor for the audience engaged in a kind of liquid dreaming.

Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

March 1, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Stellan Skarsgård, Izabella Scorupco, James D'Arcy, Remy Sweeney
screenplay by Alexi Hawley
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw Beginning with a kinky apocalypse that Ken Russell would surely have created had ever he the budget and equipment, Renny Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning is good, old-timey drive-in exploitation garbage. It hates children with a unique fury, boasting the highest dead-kid count since Schindler's List, and sure enough, somehow Harlin manages to work in an uncomfortable subplot about exorcising Holocaust demons as our happy Catholics exorcise a literal one. I don't know if Paul Schrader, the man who helmed the first run at this troubled production (the very first director attached was the late John Frankenheimer)–ostensibly scrapped because it wasn't scary enough (and frankly, the guy who did the Nastassja Kinski Cat People should probably not be going near horror movies in the first place)–included a Holocaust subplot in his version of the flick, but I'm hoping not. Mainly because when you introduce a Holocaust subplot into a movie that also features hyenas ripping apart a little boy in protracted, excruciating detail, a woman giving birth to a maggot-infested infant, and another Holocaust survivor bleeding gallons from her Nazi-ruined vagina, you're wandering into the territory of cinema as audience punishment.

I Can’t Sleep (1994) – DVD

February 28, 20051990s, 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?

Wicker Park (2004) – DVD

February 16, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Josh Hartnett, Rose Byrne, Matthew Lillard, Diane Kruger
screenplay by Brandon Boyce
directed by Paul McGuigan

by Walter Chaw Paul McGuigan's Wicker Park is all about reflective surfaces. The whole thing casts Chicago (or Montreal, subbing for Chicago in just another slippery deception) as the house of mirrors sequence in The Lady from Shanghai, tempting us to dismiss it as stale noir sauced-up with a fresh spackle of postmodern, commercial/music video glamour. But Wicker Park, based on Gilles Mimouni's L'Appartement, is almost an act of pop art, opening with hunky Josh Hartnett walking the mean streets of the Windy City and shopping for a diamond engagement ring that becomes the prism through which the rest of the film, especially in its more pregnant moments, is seen.

Kingdom Hospital: The Entire Series (2004) – DVD

February 2, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Stephen King, Television

Image A Sound A Extras B
"Thy Kingdom Come," "Death's Kingdom," "Goodbye Kiss," "The West Side Of Midnight," "Hook's Kingdom," "The Young And The Headless," "Black Noise," "Heartless," "Butterfingers," "The Passion Of Reverend Jimmy," "Seizure Day," "Shoulda Stood In Bed," "Finale"

by Walter Chaw The sort of program you want other people to see in the same way you want someone else to smell how spoiled the milk is, the 13-part, 10-hour, Stephen King-scripted adaptation of Lars Von Trier's brilliant Danish miniseries "Riget" (a.k.a. "The Kingdom") is only as bloated, ridiculous, and incompetent as the rest of the master of terror's last decade of work. Auto-cannibalistic like his protagonist in "Survivor Type" and pitched as a cross between "E.R." and, one presumes, the TV version of King's "The Shining" (while playing like a community theatre rendition of "The Singing Detective"), "Kingdom Hospital" is awkward at best and eye-clawing hokum at its worst. There's no other way to describe a talking CGI anteater called "Antubis" (after the Egyptian god of death Annubis, I'm thinking) that fights a Depression-era vampire in the bowels of the titular place of healing. A spooky little girl à la The Shining (played by a terrible kid actor à la Danny from Kubrick's The Shining) describes him this way: "He eats disease, he likes to be scratched behind the ears. He's horrible. Beautiful." Yep.

The Grudge (2004) – DVD

February 1, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Thriller

*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A-
starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, KaDee Strickland, Clea DuVall
screenplay by Stephen Susco, based on a screenplay by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Takashi Shimizu

by Walter Chaw Fans of Takashi Shimizu's Japanese horror franchise Ju-On, rest assured that his English-language but still Tokyo-set version of The Grudge is laudably faithful to the source material. So faithful, in fact, that The Grudge is completely free of those tedious drags character development, tension, scenario, narrative, plot, intelligence, point, sociological relevance, technical aptitude, and scares, really, since it leaves "pacing" somewhere back where the rest of that stuff was jettisoned. What The Grudge has a lot of, though, are "jump scares," the cats-through-windows thing where somebody crawls around in an attic with a lighter because they've heard an ominous knocking and then a face appears in the gloom accompanied by a sting note on the soundtrack.

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.

The Forgotten (2004) – DVD

January 10, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Julianne Moore, Dominic West, Gary Sinise, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Gerald DiPego
directed by Joseph Ruben

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I couldn't really understand at the time why Dark City didn't arouse imaginations. I resented the following year's The Matrix for stealing some of Dark City's thunder; I blamed a lack of vision and a general disdain for genre. Now I wonder if it wasn't a matter of the film coming out a few years ahead of its time. Maybe it was just too light for the Age of Irony. Maybe it was too apocalyptic a vision for a people who had yet to experience an apocalypse in their own backyard. But there are certain prescient pictures that point north, films like The Truman Show that I underestimated like I thought everyone else underestimated Dark City, or films that remain underestimated, such as Strange Days and Twelve Monkeys, Terry Gilliam's most uncompromising film since Brazil. It's the duty of some movies to draw the outlines in chalk, set the groundwork, dig the foundation for the way that speculative fiction will seek to define this culture in the aftermath of an inflamed fault line even before the dime drops. Just before Y2K, we dug ourselves into cinematic bunkers in preparation for some kind of technological apocalypse. Who would have suspected that the shape of our crucible would be not faulty microchips and mainframes, but assault rifles, airplanes, leadership without vision, and children without protection from leadership without vision?

The Village (2004) [VISTA Series – Widescreen] – DVD

January 10, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw M. Night Shyamalan’s films have become life support systems for his twists–empty, ponderous, self-righteous shells of ideas carried by cadaverous actors speaking in contraction-less sentences and spectral tones. He seems with Signs and now The Village to be espousing some kind of insane puritanical religion–call it the Church of Shyamalan, where the real world is too loutish a place for his gallery of close-mouthed martyrs, who exist in specially-created Hitchcockian microverses as airless as they are unlikely. It’s not too much of a stretch to begin to view his mission as one where he challenges his East Indian self to make his increasingly self-aggrandizing cameos as difficult as possible. Philadelphia? No problem. Hooterville, PA–a little tougher. Turn of the century Amish-town? Byzantine, to say the least.

A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

January 7, 2005****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller

Janghwa, Hongryeon
****/****
starring Kim Kap-su, Jum Jung-ah, Lim Su-jeong, Mun Geun-yeong
written and directed by Kim Ji-woon

by Walter Chaw Every frame of Kim Ji-Woon's A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, Hongryeon) is like taking a dip in the violet pools of A Place in the Sun-era Elizabeth Taylor's eyes. It's sensuous–and the characters that inhabit the velvet, silk, and wood environments put out their hands to touch, dangle their feet off the end of a wharf in the soft green water below, lay their faces against cool blue sheets touched by crepuscular shadows. This is filmmaking as tactile exercise, and the atmosphere in which Kim houses his debauched delights is something like smothering beneath the tender insistence of a satin glove. A Tale of Two Sisters is based on an old Korean folktale of two sisters so abused by the capriciousness of the world that they're forced to take refuge in one another and within themselves. In tone and execution, it feels like Heavenly Creatures; in its tale of an evil stepmother and a haunted castle by the lake in the woods, it has the heft of classic German fairytales.

Red Lights (2004)

December 24, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, France, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Feux rouges
**/****
starring Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Carole Bouquet, Vincent Deniard, Carline Paul
screenplay by Cédric Khan and Laurence Ferreira-Barbosa, based on the novel by Georges Simenon
directed by Cédric Khan

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Red Lights (Feux rouges), the latest from the increasingly venerable Cédric Khan, joins this year's growing crop of ephemeral auteur flicks. Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi, Michael Mann's Collateral, Alexander Payne's Sideways–there's a prosaic quality that undermines the resonance of these pictures, even though each is uniquely a product of its director. Red Lights, about a marriage spiralling down the drain, about a guy chasing his tail, about the symmetry that always seems to assert itself in chaotic situations, opens with a montage of roundabouts and other circle-based imagery. Hell, it's called Red Lights, and there probably isn't another film from 2004 that so compels you to yell, "Stop!" at its unheeding protagonist. Khan is the masticating mama bird to our tractable hatchlings, and the only reason that Red Lights hasn't caught on like the similarly pre-chewed Million Dollar Baby is because it's not awash in sentiment. At least not until the problematic finale.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure (2003); National Lampoon’s Holiday Reunion (2003); Dorm Daze (2004) – DVDs

November 29, 20042000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Television

Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure
½*/****
Image B Sound B Extras F
starring Randy Quaid, Miriam Flynn, Dana Barron, Jake Thomas
screenplay by Matty Simmons
directed by Nick Marick

Thanksgiving Family Reunion
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Bryan Cranston, Judge Reinhold, Hallie Todd, Penelope Ann Miller
screenplay by Marc Warren & Dennis Rinsler
directed by Neal Isreal

DORM DAZE
*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Tatyana Ali, Botti Bliss, James DeBello, Marieh Delfino
screenplay by Patrick Casey, Worm Miller
directed by David Hillenbrand and Scott Hillenbrand

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Did anybody ever actually read NATIONAL LAMPOON? That question occurred to me while contemplating the idea of reviewing three recent, awful exploitations of the magazine's name, and I came to the conclusion that I've never met anybody who in fact had. Maybe I was slightly too young to know the rag's heyday, for all I remember were the movies stamped with their logo–and it's largely through the popularity of Animal House and the Vacation series that most of the non-snarky population felt their influence. Whatever its content as a publication, it sold tickets for a good stretch–but decades have passed and the Lampoon brand has lost its currency, meaning it's been largely reduced to whoring itself out to low-grade imitations of past successes. Thus we have the ignominy of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2 (relegated to television), Holiday Reunion (cable), and Dorm Daze (more or less straight-to-video), all of which cost money better spent on special editions of National Lampoon's glory-days titles.