The Martian Chronicles (1980) – DVD
½*/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Rock Hudson, Gayle Hunnicutt, Bernie Casey, Roddy McDowell
screenplay by Richard Matheson, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury
directed by Michael Anderson
by Walter Chaw There is and probably always will be a warm place in my heart for Ray Bradbury. The author of my childhood in many ways, Bradbury taught me about poetry in "April Witch," about fear in The Dark Carnival and Something Wicked This Way Comes, about dry irony in "A Sound of Thunder" and "There Will Come Soft Rains," and about vengeance reptilian and cold in "The Veldt." His only real work of science-fiction, Fahrenheit 451, remains an interesting touchstone of unintentional messages couched in seriomythic terminologies, but his output is moored deep, intractably deep, in the literary. Bradbury doesn't transpose well to different mediums (and a book of poetry, When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, was somehow even more disastrous than the multiple attempts to export the author to television and film)–he's too purple, his philosophies too immature, his worldview embarrassingly simplistic and only really current for children or the childish. I'll never be able to exactly express the thrill, the horror, of my first reading of "Mars is Heaven" when I was in third grade. Nor have I been able to replicate it by reading it again since.
Suspicion (1941) – DVD
**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Nigel Bruce
screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison and Alma Reville
directed by Alfred Hitchcock
by Walter Chaw In truth, watching any of Alfred Hitchcock’s American films is like hearing the voice of your master. So it is even with 1941’s Suspicion: Probably the most compromised of Hitchcock’s major pictures, it nevertheless sports a trio of sequences that rank among his best. An early flirtation between Cary Grant’s layabout playboy Johnnie Aysgarth and Joan Fontaine’s unlikely take on a dowdy spinster, for instance, looking for all the world like a rape and featuring brilliant, Lubitsch-esque purse-play, is as dense a five minutes as whole pictures. (The second virtuoso sequence involves a staircase and a glass of milk lit from inside the liquid while the third is a fantasy that transforms laughter into the howls of a dying man.) So coy and hesitating that it’s a lot like courting a eunuch, Suspicion is not easy to like, but it does offer a glimpse of what’s possible within a studio system that won’t allow one of its marquee players to play a villain. The picture gives lie to the idea that creative people suddenly lose their creativity when they move to Hollywood: It’s still there, it just goes (in this case, deep) underground.
The Vanishing (1993) + Hardcore (1979) – DVDs
THE VANISHING
**½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, Nancy Travis, Sandra Bullock
screenplay by Todd Graff, based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé
directed by George Sluizer
HARDCORE
***/**** Image A- Sound B
starring George C. Scott, Peter Boyle, Season Hubley, Ilah Davis
written and directed by Paul Schrader
by Bill Chambers 1993 was the year that American remakes of two estimable foreign thrillers became instant poster boys for Hollywood condescension. While John Badham’s Point of No Return is every bit as egregious as they said it was (although I prefer its “Cleaner” sequence with Harvey Keitel to Nikita‘s field test of Jean Reno’s Léon persona), George Sluizer’s The Vanishing, an Americanization of his own Spoorloos, often stands shoulder-to-shoulder with its forerunner–or is at the very least too provocative in its departures to dismiss out of hand. A lot of people wondered how Sluizer could desecrate what had been the crowning achievement of his career in this way, but what artist wouldn’t jump at the chance to view a piece of work through the looking glass without physically altering the original? (A kindred impulse drives novelists to sell the screen rights to their books.) All I can say is that the end result is more seductive than, say, Vanilla Sky, or Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia.
Twisted (2004) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen Collection] – DVD
½*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Ashley Judd, Samuel L. Jackson, Andy Garcia, David Strathairn
screenplay by Sarah Thorp
directed by Philip Kaufman
by Walter Chaw Ashley Judd's stab at In the Cut, Twisted washes out to be closer to a distaff Tightrope. It's just another Judd film co-starring Morgan Freeman, here played by Samuel L. Jackson. Once again humiliated and physically abused for her sexuality, Judd has this perverse penchant for self-mortification legitimized by yet another contractually required African-American mentor. What really wounds is that it's a movie with a pedigree and a little promise (unlike Judd's constant dalliances with the best of the airport bookrack), what with Philip Kaufman, back on the west coast in his favourite American setting of San Francisco, at the reins. A love of the City by the Bay is on display in a gorgeously-composed opening sequence that finds the Golden Gate Bridge floating on a bed of fog and, later, when the first body is discovered in Twisted's requisite corpse gallery against the nighttime backdrop of Pac Bell Ballpark, and there's an underlying menace to San Francisco that no one aside from Hitchcock has been able to capture quite like Kaufman, especially in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. So the possibility that this ostensibly dark psychological thriller might actually be good springs eternal for a full five minutes, exactly the amount of time that passes until someone utters the first of screenwriter Sarah Thorp's tragically over-written lines–and for us to rediscover Judd as an extremely limited actress whose best film remains the grossly underestimated Eye of the Beholder.
Without a Paddle (2004)
ZERO STARS/****
starring Matthew Lillard, Seth Green, Dax Shepard, Burt Reynolds
screenplay by Jay Leggett & Mitch Rouse
directed by Steven Brill
by Walter Chaw Steven Brill's Without a Paddle is relentless and brutal–like Alanis Morrissette's version of Cole Porter's "Let's Do It," the torment of it just never ends. Weathered CIA spooks would spill their mother's social security numbers after five minutes of enduring this kind of torture. It's not fair, really–normal people aren't equipped to withstand a cross between The Goonies, Bushwhacked, Deliverance, Surviving the Game, The Great Outdoors, The Pursuit of D. B. Cooper, American Pie, Southern Comfort, Swiss Family Robinson, and The Big Chill that borrows the cell phone gag from Jurassic Park III and even a little something from, I kid you not, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. It is, in other words, a gross-out slapstick comedy set in the wilderness that is unkind to Appalachians while making a play for cuddly sentimentality despite more than a few moments that are needlessly graphic or just plain grotesque. Blame the brain trust of actors-turned-screenwriters Jay Leggett and Mitch Rouse–or, better yet, blame director Steven Brill, a Sandler crony who proves that sad nepotism does not a director make.
The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
***/****
starring Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber, Kimberly Elise
screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, based on the novel by Richard Condon
directed by Jonathan Demme
by Walter Chaw Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate is arguably more of a retelling of William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars (1953) than it is of John Frankenheimer’s incomparable 1962 original. Like Menzies’s science-fiction B-movie classic, the premise of Demme’s updating is that some alien force (Earthling mad scientist in this instance instead of Martian) has implanted a small device in certain respected members of our society in order to manipulate them into harming our surprisingly fragile good old American value system. Also like Invaders from Mars, the whole film moves with the logic of a fever dream, all intense close-ups, hallucinatory visions, and suggestions of going underground.
The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
***½/****
starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Brian Cox, Julia Stiles
screenplay by Tony Gilroy, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
directed by Paul Greengrass
by Walter Chaw The Bourne Identity was directed by Doug Liman, an unusually gifted indie punk blessed with a screenplay by Tony Gilroy that touched on a lot of the same existential hallmarks as Blade Runner. Stripped of embellishment, The Bourne Identity is almost a textbook on movement and gesture, as purely cinematic an action film as any to come down the pike since the heyday of the ’70s British gangster genre. The Bourne Supremacy, taking up the story of a broken assassin two years later, has lost Liman, retained Gilroy, and gained Brit helmer Paul Greengrass, the man behind the brilliant pseudo-documentary Bloody Sunday. The picture’s a different beast from its predecessor–more, like Bloody Sunday, like a chronicle of a forgotten catastrophe than a post-modern thriller. And it’s delirious and whip-smart.
Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) – DVD
**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Nicholas Rowe, Alan Cox, Sophie Ward, Anthony Higgins
screenplay by Chris Columbus
directed by Barry Levinson
by Walter Chaw Fresh from The Natural and with a couple of films to go until Rain Man, Barry Levinson snuck in Young Sherlock Holmes, another adventure of a gawky idiot savant hero, which I initially saw as a lad of twelve one afternoon with my best friend before either of us had developed much discretion. Touted as the first picture to feature a completely computer-generated character and featuring a post-end credits epilogue that we found out about however it was that dorks found out about stuff like that before the Internet, the picture came to me the winter after the summer I'd spent reading the collected works of Arthur Conan Doyle, and the entire experience left me thoroughly enchanted. But in revisiting this slightly sadistic boy's tale, what emerges is less a sense of thrill and awe than a recognition of the oppressive influence that executive producer Steven Spielberg had on this and all of the projects under his pre-DreamWorks aegis, Amblin Entertainment.
Secret Window (2004) – DVD
**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Johnny Depp, Maria Bello, Timothy Hutton, John Turturro
screenplay by David Koepp, based on the novella "Secret Window, Secret Garden" by Stephen King
directed by David Koepp
by Walter Chaw Secret Window is a checklist for Stephen King fans in exactly the same way his bloated fiction from the last ten years is a rehash of past material (and like old King material is a rehash of classic EC Comics/"Outer Limits" plots). It's an intensely wearying public window into how a popular writer has taken to auto-consumption and automatic regurgitation when inspiration flags. Typewriter intrigue? "Redrum"-like mantra? Curious wife? Lovable black sidekick dispatched with a hatchet à la Kubrick's The Shining? Check, all. Weird religious iconography, wide-brimmed Amish hats, some sort of sinister cornfield à la Children of the Corn? Surely. Popular writer tortured by an obsessive fan who wants him to write something special, à la Misery? You got it. Mysterious alter-ego nom de plume that appears to have been made manifest à la The Dark Half? Uh huh. Murdered pet and secluded woodland retreat à la Pet Sematary? Even that. Country mouse à la The Green Mile? Believe it or not. In fact, the only thing about Secret Window that doesn't stink of the King perpetual mimeograph machine (The Tommyknockers, "Ballad of the Flexible Bullet") is Johnny Depp's sly comic timing and the smooth direction by Stir of Echoes hyphenate David Koepp.
Spartan (2004) – DVD
½*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Commentary C+
starring Val Kilmer, Derek Luke, William H. Macy, Ed O'Neill
written and directed by David Mamet
by Walter Chaw Because we hate Arabs (and women almost as much as we think that Arabs hate women, those hateful Arabs), there are films like David Mamet's patently ridiculous, relentlessly offensive, unintentionally hilarious Spartan. A brilliant theatre man, the very definition of a keen cultural philosopher (his book of essays Some Freaks is must-reading), Mamet as film auteur has grown increasingly esoteric to the point now that his exclusive playpens of linguistic masturbation are so alien and self-conscious that they begin instantly to function as satires of themselves. His action is action as imagined by an egghead, all awkward movement and frustrated invective. His is the school of anti-casual cool, the drama club suiting up for the Friday night football game, and his supporters are cut from the same cloth, believing that there's a point to be made in Beckett for the brute while ignoring that Beckett is best staged with Spartan minimalism and left in the theatre besides. The films Mamet has directed range from sophomoric (House of Games) to grating (State and Main) to just incompetent (Heist), though Spartan reminds the most of one he only wrote: the wilderness howler The Edge, with its machismo over-examined and placed in a context that isn't allegorical as it must be, but hardboiled realism as it can't be. It's P.G. Wodehouse adapted for the screen by John Milius, and predictably awful.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
****/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Gary Oldman
screenplay by Steven Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by Alfonso Cuarón
by Walter Chaw There's real poetry in Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (hereafter Harry Potter 3), encapsulated in a moment where Harry mistakes a vision of himself for the phantom of his dead father. It's another of the Mexican director's magic-realism conversations about children coming of age emotionally and sexually, marking the picture as a lovely companion piece to his A Little Princess and identifying Cuarón as a gifted, eloquent voice for the rage and the rapture of adolescence. Opening with the 13-year-old Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) fiddling with his wand beneath a blanket, the theme of self-discovery unfolds along jagged, de-romanticized lines like the rough rhythms of an Irish lyric or, more to the heart of the matter, a Mexican folk tale, all of blood, dirt, and heroic fervour.
Roswell: The Complete First Season (1999-2000) – DVD
Image A Sound A Extras B
"Pilot," "The Morning After," "Monsters," "Leaving Normal," "Missing," "285 South," "River Dog," "Blood Brother," "Heat Wave," "The Balance," "Toy House," "Into the Woods," "The Convention," "Blind Date," "Independence Day," "Sexual Healing," "Crazy," "Tess, Lies and Videotape," "Four Square," "Max to the Max," "The White Room," "Destiny"
by Walter Chaw What begins as something romantic and mysterious ends as something predominantly memorable for the impact it had on Dido's wan career. Charting the WB's "Roswell"'s downward trajectory from a piquant, lovely pilot to the worst of "The X Files" and "Dawson's Creek" is a fascinating, instructive thing to watch–not only for the schadenfreude of it all, but also for the way that corporate perception of what an audience purportedly wants invariably leads to production of the same kind of dull crapulence over and over again. (Though, in the WB's defense, a grassroots letter-writing campaign that saved the series from oblivion at least once indicates a fervid devotion to this kind of garbage.) In the fine tradition of making a self-pitying clone of "thirtysomething" for teen-somethings played by a cast of twenty-somethings, "Roswell" is "Sweet Valley High" mixed with the Troll Books variety of soft-core science fiction, making that "My So-Called Life" feeling of middle school alienation literal in its tale of three or four actual aliens getting teased by jocks in Roswell, NM. It's the love child of Robert A. Heinlein and Judy Blume, and it ain't pretty.
The Haunted Mansion (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD
**/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
starring Eddie Murphy, Terence Stamp, Wallace Shawn, Marsha Thomason
screenplay by David Berenbaum
directed by Rob Minkoff
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Watching Eddie Murphy act his heart out in The Haunted Mansion, you have to ask yourself: how does he do it? How does he take a family-entertainment sausage like this and keep his enthusiasm up, filling out his time-tested family man with enough tics and asides to almost humanize him? Alas, the question is a moot point, because all that hard work is thrown away–Murphy is working in a vacuum, performing to the best of his ability a role that's completely beneath him. And that sums up the production in general: a lot of very talented people, from actors and technicians to designers and costumers, have knocked themselves out in the service of an advertisement for a theme park. The good work hasn't even got the wherewithal to reach beyond its material: gifted though they are, everybody involved with the production believes in the system to such an extent that the chances of artistic subversion on set were about nil. The result is surprisingly watchable but predictably unmoving.
Paycheck (2003) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD
½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Michael C. Hall
screenplay by Dean Georgaris, based on the short story by Philip K. Dick
directed by John Woo
by Walter Chaw At the end of John Woo's latest Hollywood misstep, Ben Affleck, as brilliant "reverse engineer" Michael Jennings, hefts two bags of manure on his back and stumbles around with them for a while, effectively defusing anything cogent I could say about Paycheck. It is worth wondering, however, why people like Affleck and Keanu Reeves are so attractive in science-fiction premises (Reeves even had a turn with the memory-loss high-tech agent thing in Johnny Mnemonic)–probably something to do with the idea of robots and minds wiped clean. The problem with Paycheck isn't really that it's not well thought-out or that it's possibly the first Woo action film to be genuinely boring from start to finish, but that Woo seems to have replaced his joy of genre (and genius within the medium) with a scrabbling desperation to manufacture what used to come naturally.
The Return (2003) + Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (2003)
Vozvrashcheniye
****/****
starring Vladimir Garin, Ivan Dobronravov, Konstantin Lavronenko, Natalya Vdovina
screenplay by Vladimir Moiseyenko & Aleksandr Novototsky
directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev
SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER… AND SPRING
****/****
starring Yeong-su Oh, Ki-duk Kim, Young-min Kim, Jae-kyeong Seo
written and directed by Ki-duk Kim
by Walter Chaw Andrei Tarkovsky by way of Terrence Malick, Andrei Zvyagintsev's shockingly assured debut The Return (Vozvrashcheniye) approaches the primitive through the sublime, finding the first testament of human existence in the bland, devouring indifference of the natural and providing the moribund Russian film industry its first real voice in a generation. While it's impeccably acted and scripted with a respect for the spaces before, after, and between, what astounds about the picture is Zvyagintsev's patient, painterly eye, which fills the void in world cinema left by Takeshi Kitano since the first half of Brother and offers a voice of simple, audacious purity that fashions of the cinema something like a cold blue rapier. The Return is as good a film debut (and in almost the same way) as Malick's Badlands: an intimate character study and an archetypical road trip that fashions a crystalline portrait of a very specific time and place that, nonetheless, shines a light on the landmarks of a collective interior. Zvyagintsev talks about boys needing their father and couches it in terms poetic and mesmerizing.
The Wolf Man: The Legacy Collection – DVD
THE WOLF MAN (1941)
**/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy
screenplay by Curt Siodmak
directed by George Waggner
FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN (1943)
**½/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, Ilona Massey, Patric Knowles
screenplay by Curt Siodmak
directed by Roy William Neill
SHE-WOLF OF LONDON (1946)
*/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Don Porter, June Lockhart, Sara Haden, Jan Wiley
screenplay by George Bricker
directed by Jean Yarbrough
WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1935)
*½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Henry Hull, Warner Oland, Valerie Hobson, Lester Matthews
screenplay by John Colton
directed by Stuart Walker
Extras A-
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Pity the poor Wolf Man. In ranking the unholy trinity of Universal monsters, he's the ugly stepchild, lacking both the popularity and iconic weight loaded onto stablemates Dracula and Frankenstein. As far as I know, no teenage outsider ever acted out by pretending to be a werewolf, nor does anyone make a metaphor of lycanthropy the way they do with Frankenstein's Monster. The Wolf Man is a beast without home or purpose, a welcome addition to monster tag teams but otherwise a second-tier entity who failed to capture the public's imagination as something to be taken beyond face value.
Ripley’s Game (2002) – DVD
**** Image A Sound A
starring John Malkovich, Dougray Scott, Ray Winstone, Lena Headey
screenplay by Charles McKeown and Liliana Cavani, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Liliana Cavani
by Walter Chaw When I heard that The Night Porter auteur Liliana Cavani was adapting one of Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley novels, I knew to expect something more in line with René Clément's brilliant Purple Noon than Anthony Minghella's lavishly simpering The Talented Mr. Ripley. What I didn't anticipate was that this film, which never received any sort of domestic theatrical distribution before being summarily dropped, supplement-free, onto the home video market, would be one of the best of its year–indeed, of its kind. Ripley's Game is doomed to the "direct-to-video" label and an ignominious eternity buried in the Blockbuster shelves for the occasional stunned bemusement of the well traveled and the John Malkovich fetishist–it languishes there while over-masticated tripe like The Alamo finds its way to thousands of screens, its lingering impact to remind again that the slippery slope in Hollywood's distribution game just got steeper. Ripley's Game would have looked great on the big screen–and some genius robbed us of the opportunity to see it that way, thinking we'd prefer American Splendor or Along Came Polly.
Wild Things 2 (2004) – DVD
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Susan Ward, Leila Arcieri, Isaiah Washington, Tony Denison
screenplay by Ross Helford & Andy Hurst
directed by Jack Perez
by Walter Chaw Alligator swamps and high school, I get the comparison, but like the first film, Wild Things 2 is coy, smug, and not so much meta as a self-satisfied, misogynistic tease. Those looking for titillation will have to settle for a lot of slo-mo beach volleyball, multiple views of Susan Ward walking around slowly in such a way as to hide her alarming thighs, and a brief three-way featuring a body double for repulsive/hot (see also: Brittany Murphy) Leila Arcieri, who drops Arcieri down about two cup sizes while upping her pastiness by at least three Danes. Seriously here, how hard would it have been to find a couple of exhibitionistic starlets for a direct-to-video smut pic like Wild Things 2? The really disturbing thing about that is that Arcieri and Ward were apparently hired for their acting ability.
demonlover (2002) – DVD
***/**** Image D+ Sound D+
starring Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny, Gina Gershon
written and directed by Olivier Assayas
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Right now, I think I like Olivier Assayas's demonlover. I think. I don't always feel this way: after a couple of screenings and a lot of pondering, I have to say that this singularly dense and elliptical movie has a lot of things going against it. Like its lead, it's cold and austere to a fault, viewing its techno-financial milieu from a safe distance and attributing to it a number of traits that simply don't add up. But in the cold light of day, the film connects the dots about the business of cultural production that are normally hidden from view. Assayas may be grasping at straws in a number of instances, but his general framework is sound, and as he speaks of the disconnect of people from the industries that shape them, I'm inclined to look past demonlover's weaknesses. Right now, at least.