Romance Archives - Page 17 of 46

Body of Lies (2008)

October 3, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

**/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani
screenplay by William Monahan, based on the novel by David Ignatius
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw Perfectly workmanlike, unimpeachably prestige-y, achingly contemporary, and a near-complete failure as revelation, Ridley Scott's Body of Lies tells the tale of modern spook-dom complete with spy satellites, cell-phone eavesdropping, torture, and terrorists. A compelling stew, one would think, yet something that a decade ago would be seen as science-fiction and as recently as a few years ago as satire today offers no surprises–no discernible sharp edges, smooth as a river stone worn down by a few fast years of crippling cynicism. So the United States is a fingernail factory skating on the razored edge of impossible technologies and still, because of two-minutes-ago wisdom and dusty bureaucrats, unable to exterminate subjects and achieve minimal objectives in our ideological war. The film advises that we trust no one, that the issues are complex, that our enemies aren't stupid, and that there will always be a super-suave Sharif-ian Arab in pictures like this lest we forget how much we're capable of getting behind the Disneyfied Aladdin portrait of the Near East when push comes to shove. It reminds that Russell Crowe can get fat with the best of them even if, after The Insider, no one was wondering–and it reminds that Leonardo DiCaprio is pretty good at this intense young man shtick (although no one was wondering that, either). The problem with Body of Lies isn't its craft (indeed, it's one of the most handsomely-mounted, professionally-executed pictures of the year)–the problem is that it's got nothing to say in a media-rich environment awash with pundits, alive with YouTube, and actually awake for all the sleepiness in our mid-section. The irony of Body of Lies is that it's about intelligence but its own is at least a few months behind the curve.

Appaloosa (2008)

October 3, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Romance, Western

*/****
starring Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris, Renée Zellweger, Jeremy Irons
screenplay by Robert Knott & Ed Harris, based on the novel by Robert Parker
directed by Ed Harris

by Walter Chaw There's a great moment early on in Ed Harris's howler of a vanity piece Appaloosa where gunman-for-hire Virgil Cole (Harris) and his sidekick Everett (Viggo Mortensen) have a friendly conversation with evil Briton Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) about law and order in the Old West. The rest of it is garbage. Comparisons of this film to Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven have been floating around, but where that picture is about the complexities of the promises men make to women that they can't keep, Appaloosa is macho juvenilia that espouses the idea of "bros before hos" and, thus, renders all the men unflawed in their limited, brutal glory and all the women bimbos, sluts, or bimbo-sluts. Enter Renée Zellweger's repugnant turn as mattress-back Allison French, her predilection for spreading her legs for the highest-ranking stud viewed not so much as a moral failing as one of those things women do either with principle (see: saloon girl Katie (Ariadna Gil)), or without (Allison). From her bizarre appearance (she looks like a swollen Bill Mumy) to that pinched, kewpie-doll chipmunk chitter-chatter she uses in the mawkish belief that it's an endearing quality in someone past the age of six, Zellweger would appear to be an easy target of blame for the film's general inadequacy. (Likewise shitting in the flan is composer Jeff Beal, whose theme for Allison is one of the most invasive, repugnant bits of musical hate-crime not composed by James Horner; Beal only increases the picture's cartoon feel.) Closer to the mark, though, would be to identify that Appaloosa falls on its ass because its worldview is arrested and incurious, content to offer that women are mercurial trollops and men, good or evil, are the bedrock of civilization. When Appaloosa is described as "old-fashioned," hear spin on more accurate terms like "ossified" and "badly-dated" and "naïve."

Made of Honor (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

September 15, 20082000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance

*/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Patrick Dempsey, Michelle Monaghan, Kevin McKidd, Sydney Pollack
screenplay by Adam Sztykiel and Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont
directed by Paul Weiland

by Bryant Frazer First, the obvious. Made of Honor is what's generally known as a "chick flick." I'm not totally comfortable deploying that term, especially in its usual derogatory, casually-sexist usage–but in a purely descriptive and possibly cynical sense, that's what we have here. It's a love story, featuring a conventionally handsome leading man (Patrick Dempsey) playing opposite a conventionally pretty woman (Michelle Monaghan) whose character is engaged to marry the conventionally wrong guy (blond Scot Kevin McKidd). It's directed by a man (Paul Weiland), although to its credit there is a woman prominently involved (co-writer Deborah Kaplan), and it's designed from the bottom up to appeal to undemanding female filmgoers.

TIFF ’08: Gigantic

September 13, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**/****starring Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, Ed Asner, Jane Alexanderscreenplay by Adam Nagata & Matt Aseltondirected by Matt Aselton by Bill Chambers Gigantic is littered with dead and loose ends, which wouldn't be a big deal if this were the quasi-freeform jazz of a Cassavetes or even an Apatow wannabe, but is a considerable problem when taking into account the crispness of the film's aesthetics. The clean 'scope compositions and fat-free performances become increasingly incongruous; by the time the movie stops short with everything and nothing resolved, you're convinced the filmmakers snatched a script out of the oven half-cooked after a window…

Tootsie (1982) [25th Anniversary Edition] + The Pied Piper (1972) – DVDs

July 28, 20081970s, 1980s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, UK, West Germany

TOOTSIE
**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Teri Garr, Dabney Coleman
screenplay by Murray Schisgal and Larry Gelbart
directed by Sydney Pollack

THE PIED PIPER
*½/**** Image C Sound C
starring Donovan, Jack Wild, John Hurt, Donald Pleasence
screenplay by Andrew Berkin, Jacques Demy & Mark Peploe
directed by Jacques Demy

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The fatal flaw of Tootsie can be traced back to the fact that, here at least, Teri Garr is a better actress than Jessica Lange, playing a better character in a more interesting scenario. It only takes one scene to realize that: Garr's Sandy Lester, long-time friend and protégé to douchebag actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman, who possesses enough self-awareness as a douchebag actor to be the film's saving grace), bursts into tears because a promising role on the soap opera "Southwest General" requires the one quality she can't play: "a woman!" Suddenly, you're thrust into the compelling inner circle of a profession fraught with self-doubt, false friends, and the attempt to decipher a very slippery perception of "reality."

The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection – DVD

July 22, 20081940s, Animation, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Romance, Sports, War

ON THE TOWN (1949)
**/**** Image C Sound B-
starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, Ann Miller
screenplay by Adolph Green and Betty Comden, based on the play
directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME (1949)
**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Frank Sinatra, Esther Williams, Gene Kelly, Betty Garrett
screenplay by Harry Tugeno and George Wells
directed by Busby Berkeley

ANCHORS AWEIGH (1945)
**/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras D
starring Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, Gene Kelly, Dean Stockwell
screenplay by Isobel Lennart
directed by George Sidney

by Alex Jackson One of the cinema’s most startling moments in recent years was a close-up of Paul Dano early on in There Will Be Blood. Dano was never meant to get that friendly with the camera. I’m not sure I can properly convey this notion, but his close-up created a dissonant effect. It felt as though director Paul Thomas Anderson had broken some unstated rule of filmmaking. I think the reason it’s so jarring is that the Close-Up wasn’t designed for actors like Paul Dano. It was designed for somebody like his co-star, Daniel Day-Lewis. To put it as delicately as possible, Dano wasn’t blessed with a “movie star” face. He’s a bit strange-looking. In contrast, Daniel Day-Lewis is traditionally handsome and truly “belongs” on the silver screen. In and of himself, he’s as cinematic as anything you’re ever going to find in the movies.

Lars and the Real Girl (2007); The Passion of Greg the Bunny: The Best of the Film Parodies Volume 2 (2006-2007); The Cottage (2008) [Unrated] – DVDs

July 6, 20082000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Horror, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, UK

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL
*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider, Kelli Garner
screenplay by Nancy Oliver
directed by Craig Gillespie

THE PASSION OF GREG THE BUNNY: THE BEST OF THE FILM PARODIES VOLUME 2
Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
"Fur on the Asphalt," "Wumpus the Monster," "Sockville," "Blue Velveteen," "Plush: Behind the Seams," "Wacky Wednesday," "The Passion of the Easter Bunny: A Fabricated American Movie"

THE COTTAGE
½*/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras D
starring Andy Serkis, Reece Shearsmith, Stephen O'Donnell, Jennifer Ellison
written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams

by Ian Pugh Beyond its pale stab at indie street cred and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay (which are almost one and the same these days), Lars and the Real Girl shares with Juno an invitation to partake in a never-ending stream of laughs over its premise until it basically flips a switch and instructs you to get emotional over it–the supposed target of discussion here being nothing less than that ever-popular subject of paternalistic revulsion, mental illness. Ryan Gosling turns his "twitchy zombie" knob up to eleven as Lars, a quiet loner living in his brother Gus's (Paul Schneider) backyard shed. After Gus's pregnant wife Karin (Emily Mortimer) expresses concern that her brother-in-law is spending too much time by himself, Lars orders a realistic sex doll named "Bianca" over the Internet and parades it around the neighbourhood as the girlfriend he never had, much to the consternation of Gus, Karin, and Lars's would-be love interest Margo (Kelli Garner), who can only respond with uncertain stares and a lot of hemming and hawing.

P.S. I Love You (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

July 3, 20082000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

**/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Hilary Swank, Gerard Butler, Lisa Kudrow, Kathy Bates
screenplay by Richard LaGravanese and Steven Rogers, based on the novel by Cecelia Ahern
directed by Richard LaGravanese

by Bryant Frazer In P.S. I Love You, Hilary Swank gets to play a part that's typically the province of male actors: the lovesick bachelor. The gender-specific word for what she is here is widow: Her husband has succumbed to brain cancer, leaving her alone in a Chinatown apartment. But the stereotype is so familiar as a guy thing–Swank's place is littered with pizza crusts, Chinese take-out containers, and take-out coffee cups, and she herself parades around in boxers–that its presence is a touch of wit in a movie that has lots of grace notes. That's a testimony to the skills of writer-director Richard LaGravenese, a sort of go-to guy for contemporary melodrama. He's made a career out of investing commercial romantic comedy with soul, humour, and a little bit of weirdness. Alas, that LaGravenese touch is not enough to balance out the manipulative tone of the whole wish-fulfillment enterprise he's working at here. P.S. I Love You is easy to watch and occasionally rewarding, but it's so transparently inspirational that its feel-good contortions might end up making you feel worse for the wear.

The Love Guru (2008) + Get Smart (2008)

June 19, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Espionage, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

THE LOVE GURU
ZERO STARS/****
starring Mike Myers, Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Mike Myers & Graham Gordy
directed by Marco Schnabel

GET SMART
***/****
starring Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, James Caan
screenplay by Tim J. Astle & Matt Ember
directed by Peter Segal

by Walter Chaw Dick this, cock that, penis penis penis–let me mention in the interest of full, ahem, disclosure that I don't think Mike Myers is funny; that Chris Farley's death was a great shame for a lot of reasons, among the worst that his passing opened the door for Myers to voice Shrek; and that it's not amusing in the slightest to make an endless stream of johnson jokes. The Love Guru has Myers sort of taking a wave at a cheap Indian accent in a redux of that Eddie Murphy triumph Holy Man–which means, essentially, that he proves himself not as committed as Will Ferrell and not as feral as Adam Sandler and not as neutered, as it happens, as Eddie Murphy. Myers, in other words, is less than his peers, doomed to be upstaged at every turn by anyone unfortunate enough to share a scene with him. (Doomed, too, to be constantly undermined by his inability to resist mugging for the camera.) Myers is Guru Pitka, a writer of Dr. Phil-cum-Deepak Chopra self-help volumes hired by the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Jane (Jessica Alba), to cure star winger Roanoke (Romany Malco) of his sudden case of the shakes. Thus Myers marries his two passions (hockey and not being funny) into one noxious ball of shit and wiener jokes, in the process taking a colossal dump on an entire culture with puerile wordplays like "Guru Satchabigknoba" and "Guru Tugginmypudha" (Ben Kingsley, playing it cross-eyed). It was funny when Monty Python did it, yes, because Monty Python was made up of people who were funny.

Square Pegs: The Like, Totally Complete Series… Totally (1982-1983) + Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985) – DVDs

June 16, 20081980s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Music, Romance, Teen, Television, ZERO STARS

SQUARE PEGS
Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
"Square Pegs (Pilot)," "A Cafeteria Line," Pac-Man Fever," "Square Pigskins," "Halloween XII," "A Simple Attachment," "Weemaweegate," "Open 24 Hours," "Muffy's Bat Mitzvah," "Hardly Working," "A Child's Christmas in Weemawee," "It's All How You See Things," "Merry Pranksters," "It's Academical!," "The Stepanowicz Papers," "To Serve Weemawee All My Days," "No Substitutions," "No Joy in Weemawee," "The Arrangement"

GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN
ZERO STARS/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Helen Hunt, Shannen Doherty, Lee Montgomery
screenplay by Amy Spies
directed by Alan Metter

by Ian Pugh The "square pegs" of the title are brainiac Patty (Sarah Jessica Parker, already having settled into a halting conversational style that never left her) and "fat girl" Lauren (Amy Linker), newly-initiated freshmen at Weemawee High School who pledge during the opening narration of each episode that this year, this year, they're going to be popular. Unfortunately, their never-ending–maybe even Wile E. Coyote-esque–bid to break into Weemawee's social elite always results in half-baked schemes and humiliating compromises. (Upon being ousted from a table in a crowded diner by the popular crowd, Lauren rationalizes that "having them sit where we were just sitting is almost as good as sitting with them.") While "Square Pegs" never fails to empathize with the folks who are young and foolish enough to believe in such a ridiculous enterprise–because it's all they know at this stage of their lives–what really makes the series special is how it forces older viewers to contemplate the people they were in high school and who they are now.

Youth Without Youth (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

June 9, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Italy, Mystery, Romance, Romania, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz, André M. Hennicke
screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novella by Mircea Eliade
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

by Walter Chaw Set in just-antebellum Europe, Francis Ford Coppola’s Golden Age superhero fantasy Youth Without Youth finds mild-mannered ancients professor Dominic (Tim Roth) transmogrified by a bolt of lightning into a being who appears to not only have regained his youthful appearance, but also developed the ability to alter physical objects with his mind. Dominic is in 1938 Romania when 1.21 gigawatts of electricity send him back to the future, able to absorb entire volumes with a single touch, learn dead languages in his sleep, and have contentious conversations with himself reflected in mirrors literal and figurative. It’s a superhero movie in the same sense as Kasi Lemmons’s sorely underestimated The Caveman’s Valentine: based on a literary source, it’s itself intensely literate, sprinkling Mandarin and Sanskrit in with, late in the game, a language of our hero’s own devising to which he devotes reels of obsessive notes. All that’s missing is a purpose for our hero–something remedied as the picture moves forward past WWII and Dominic encounters Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara) en route to her own collision with cosmic destiny.

Then She Found Me (2008)

May 8, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

½*/****
starring Matthew Broderick, Colin Firth, Helen Hunt, Bette Midler
screenplay by Alice Arlen and Victor Levin & Helen Hunt and Helen Hunt (<–not a typo)
directed by Helen Hunt

by Walter Chaw Mamet-lite–which is to say "garbage-lite"–for the most part, the dialogue in Helen Hunt's hyphenate debut is repetitive and deeply irritating, especially as delivered by Hunt in that perpetually whinging, laconic fashion of hers. Marry it to a directing style that could gently be called "self-aggrandizing" and generally be called "static" and Then She Found Me thuds into place as one of the most atrocious things to collapse on the silver screen in months. Here Hunt is Barbra Streisand without the singing, optimistically cast as a woman "about to turn forty" while asking poor, mortgage-needing Colin Firth to twice opine that her increasingly cadaverous-looking self is "beautiful" and "gorgeous." To each his own, of course, but Hunt the director/prime mover (she co-wrote and produced the benighted thing) sticking herself in front of a conservative gross of close-ups and pushing others to compliment her appearance is so far beyond distasteful that it's boring. Adoption, artificial insemination, infertility, miscarriage, infidelity, lumpen milquetoast Matthew Broderick as the really, really obscure object of desire, and stereotypes about East Coast Jews pollute this godawful mess like Union Carbide in some unfortunate, populous third-world nation. Call said ghetto the "arthouse" (its citizens, what the hell, "festivalgoers") and point to it whenever the random, ossified, effete intellectuals offer that they prefer to watch "indies" in the "arthouse," eschewing "mainstream" cinema with a sniff, a wave of a hanky, and a puff of talcum.

Coyote Ugly (2000) [The Unrated Extended Cut] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

April 24, 20082000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

*½/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ (DD)/A- (DTS) Extras C
BD – Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Piper Perabo, Adam Garcia, Maria Bello, Melanie Lynskey
screenplay by Gina Wendkos
directed by David McNally

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover J. Hoberman once nailed the work of '80s trash director Adrian Lyne by calling it "the spectacle of female self-actualization (as enacted for a male viewer)." This shrewd playing of both sides of the gender fence figures heavily into Coyote Ugly, which combines a cheesy uplift story with bounce-and-jiggle eye candy to maximize the number of potential ticket buyers. But though it was produced by former Lyne benefactor Jerry Bruckheimer and practically channels the director's empty-calorie flash, the his 'n' hers formula doesn't work this time around: whatever else could be said against the dissipated Brit, there was a hysterical urgency to Lyne that his substitute, David McNally, can't match. You see the flesh, you hear the pain, but aside from some very obvious body-double skin added to the film for DVD, none of it adds up to anything you can't get from Moses Znaimer on a Sunday night.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

April 17, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance

½*/****
starring Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand
screenplay by Jason Segel
directed by Nicholas Stoller

by Walter Chaw Listen, I have a family. There are so many places I'd rather be than in a theatre watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall, listening to the reaction elicited by three fleeting full-frontal shots of male nudity and trying for the life of me to understand how a comedy that clocks in at nearly two hours could elicit only one real laugh, maybe two. There's a potentially interesting discussion about the exploitation of the male form in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and how, in general, the reaction to male nudity is a hell of a lot different than the reaction to female nudity (there's a good reason that Colin Farrell's penis was excised from the already-unintentionally-funny A Home at the End of the World: male nudity is a threat you respond to with laughter; female nudity is an invitation you respond to with various levels of sexual discomfort)–but you can still have that discussion without actually enduring the picture. You could try to figure out how it is that Judd Apatow has parlayed his newfound hitmaker status into a cottage industry of filthy family-values flicks that fall lock-step behind one another while increasingly raising suspicions that what they're really preaching is ultra-conservative (chastity, pro-life, anti-fag) all the way down the line. If Forgetting Sarah Marshall doesn't end in a wedding, it's only because it ends before the hero and his prize get the chance. It's a romcom pretending to be a guy-flick, and I hope that's the kind of garbage we can all agree is garbage.

The Jane Austen Book Club (2007) – DVD

April 15, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Kathy Baker, Maria Bello, Marc Blucas, Lynn Redgrave
screenplay by Robin Swicord, based on the novel by Karen Joy Fowler
directed by Robin Swicord

by Walter Chaw I hate smug little pieces of masturbatory treacle like Robin Swicord's The Jane Austen Book Club, bits of piffle strutting around like peacocks on a parade ground, secure in the knowledge that it's pretentious in just the right way for the only demographic that it cares about at all. What kills me is that the idiots thronging to shit like this are the same ones who criticize "mainstream" Hollywood for its propensity to squeeze out cookie-cutter nuggets of worthless effluvium for the slavering approval of teenage boys. I wonder if young men and middle-aged women (the kind who watch "The View" and join Oprah's Book Club) aren't, in fact, natural ideological enemies: the former unaware of the evil stereotypes perpetrated by their favoured entertainment, the latter, you know, likewise. In our age of missing information, it makes perfect sense that mouth-breathing pundits find favourable spawning conditions. And in any age, it makes perfect sense that the stupid ones seek them out.

Leatherheads (2008)

April 4, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

*½/****
starring George Clooney, Renée Zellweger, John Krasinski, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by Duncan Brantley & Rick Reilly
directed by George Clooney

by Walter Chaw George Clooney's Leatherheads is a lifeless, desperate-feeling vacuum that arrives without much reason for being other than to underscore that the Coen Brothers' Intolerable Cruelty was pretty underestimated as an attempt to revive the screwball farce. It's deeply flawed as a comedy, given that the only real laugh has to do with someone being set on fire. And while the instinct is to give it a pass because it's innocuous and slickly done, the other side of that is this giant diagram of a slippery slope. The film's first mistake is casting the flat, increasingly insipid Renée Zellweger as a Rosalind Russell/Kate Hepburn type; the second is its expectation that a screenplay by SPORTS ILLUSTRATED scribes Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly could have the same kind of oomph as a Charles Lederer or Brackett/Wilder piece; and the third and last is a slowing down of the patter from 45 to 33 to accommodate modern actors' relative inability to do rapid-fire delivery, thus highlighting the first and second mistakes anew. Zellweger further perfects her walking-on-a-rail-whilst-sucking-on-a-lemon shtick (she moves and acts like a puckering hat rack), leaving Clooney–a gifted physical comedian, as his work with the Coens would attest–to carry the load. No help that the Ralph Bellamy in the standard triangle is the American "The Office"'s Jon Krasinski, who'd better get Lloyd's of London on the horn about that fourth-wall smirk. Without it, he's wallpaper.

Gattaca (1997) – Blu-ray Disc

March 26, 20081990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Alan Arkin, Jude Law
written and directed by Andrew Niccol

by Walter Chaw No great surprise that the end of our last millennium coincided with a glut of reality-testing, existentially thorny speculative fictions–films that reflected a sudden Ludditism spawned by the looming Y2K disaster, a spate of scary school shootings, and a decade in cinema intent on paving the way for the CG phantasmagorias of the '00s. In ten years, go from the truth-telling, auburn celluloid lasso of sex, lies, and videotape (1989) to the truth-telling digital one of American Beauty (1999), with touchpoints in the appalling, historical-integrity-raping Forrest Gump and Titanic along the way. Of course we're asking ourselves if we've taken the virtuous path through the wood when all looks to be falling down around our ears. The prescience of Blade Runner and The Terminator become clearer, too, as the Eisenhower-era nostalgia fostered by Reagan's time in the White House reaps its harvest in the barely subsumed sex of Pleasantville (1995) and the god in the machine of The Truman Show (1998). Meanwhile, our viability as a species is questioned in solipsistic wonderlands like The Matrix (1999), Dark City (1998), and Michael Almereyda's wonderful Hamlet (2000), wherein noir anti-heroes are transformed into deities of their technology-sick societies. It even explains the black, awesomely unpleasant ending of Spielberg's A.I. and, fascinatingly, why A.I. is now enjoying a critical revision. How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise indeed in the key picture of this cycle, The Blair Witch Project; and how brilliantly Kiwi hyphenate Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997) manages to craft as timely a picture as there could be about our regret and loathing of our wet-nurse technology, in addition to our dawning recognition, too late, that the birds have come home to roost.

Time (2006) – DVD

March 24, 2008****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Japan, Mystery, Romance, South Korea

Shi gan
****/**** Image B- Sound A Extras D
starring Sung Hyan-ah, Ha Jung-woo, Park Ji-Yeon
written and directed by Kim Ki-duk

by Walter Chaw Horror is the product of Kim Ki-duk's Time, the South Korean auteur's unbelievably unpleasant treatise on misogyny and objectification: the twin crosses he bears in the crucible of his own country's harshest criticism of him. To see it as the director's response to his detractors is simplistic, to be sure, and given that other filmmakers' marches to rhetorical cavalries (Todd Solondz's Storytelling, Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things) are so obviously band-aids applied to sucking chest wounds, it's not a flattering analysis, either. But Time is the species of rebuttal that functions as a prime example of the artist's essential concerns applied to what are perceived to be his essential blind spots. It's a Kim picture that clarifies other Kim pictures–a treatise on misogyny that is not in itself misogynistic. It's self-aware in a way that Kim's films haven't been so far, enough on point throughout that common charges of Kim's wandering attention span are difficult to levy. What elevates Hitchcock into the pantheon has more than a little to do with the fact that his masterpieces are consistently and mainly about his blind spots. You don't so much dissect Vertigo as Vertigo, with every year and every subsequent viewing, dissects you. Time isn't Vertigo, but it lives behind the same door in our collective, Jungian cellar. It tackles the big existential question of personal identity by concerning itself topically with the current plastic-surgery fad run amuck in South Korea. Peel back its surface to find an underneath writhing with a universal horror of temporariness and mortality.

Nancy Drew (2007) – DVD

March 9, 20082000s, 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.

Honeydripper (2008) + Married Life (2008)

March 7, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Music, Romance, Theatrical

HONEYDRIPPER
*/****
starring Danny Glover, Charles S. Dutton, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Stacy Keach
written and directed by John Sayles

MARRIED LIFE
***/****
starring Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Ira Sachs & Oren Moverman, based on the novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven by John Bingham
directed by Ira Sachs

by Walter Chaw As a huge admirer of John Sayles's middle-period body of work–a period marked by such pictures as Matewan, Eight Men Out, and Lone Star (still my pick for the best American film of the Nineties)–it pains me to look at something like Honeydripper and recognize in it everything I like about Sayles side-by-side with everything that's fast making him irrelevant. He's got a common touch, no question, something forged in the time he spent rolling up his sleeves, joining labour unions, hitchhiking across the country, and writing vital, committed novels about it all. Was a time his gift for how ordinary people talked and thought translated into definitive statements about the United States; now it seems that all he uses it for is passing, fleeting music in otherwise earthbound productions. Passion Fish is extraordinary in its effortlessness; Honeydripper is likewise effortless, but it lacks brio, and, more so than any of Sayles's films before it, it doesn't have one single reason for existing. Even flat, incontestable disasters like Silver City had going for it that Sayles-ian liberal dementia, and it boasted a performance in which long-time collaborator Chris Cooper hilariously channelled George W.'s reptilian, dangerous/dull political vacuum. Hold up Honeydripper to the least of Sayles's pictures and discover that what he's learned about craft remains while that indigent fire has apparently guttered to wax and ash. Pointedly, at a period in our country where it seems that some of the activism Sayles has spent much of his art trying to drum up has finally begun to manifest itself in voter-turnout among the young, Sayles has produced his most flaccid, middling film. Maybe this is the contented corncob pipe after a hard day in the fields.