Romance Archives - Page 21 of 46

Sergeant York (1941) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

December 19, 20061940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Romance, War

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Joan Leslie, George Tobias
screenplay by Abem Finkel & Harry Chandlee and Howard Koch & John Huston
directed by Howard Hawks

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Before it settles into the martial flag-waver it clearly wants to be, Sergeant York is a terrific movie. Its story of Tennessee-born WWI hero Alvin York, heavily supervised by the man himself, is one of not just a military coup, but an evolving conscience as well–and if that conscience eventually cons itself into supporting that most pointless of international conflicts, the film is nevertheless a moving story of personal growth. Though it barely betrays the hand of Howard Hawks (it lacks the team spirit that courses through his oeuvre), the director tells the tale with the kind of conviction and nuance a lesser director couldn’t provide. The movie feels York’s progress from alcoholic ne’er-do-well to industrious would-be farmer and prospective husband, and instead of taking his emotions for granted, it expresses them with a noted lack of condescension.

The Holiday (2006)

December 13, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Jack Black
written and directed by Nancy Meyers

by Walter Chaw There are bad movies, and then there are Nancy Meyers movies (first What Women Want, followed by the similarly excrescent Something’s Gotta Give): chick flicks in the most damning, insulting sense of the patronizing term and reason enough to question the wisdom of ever spending money to see a movie. If you go to Meyers’s latest, not only are you about to watch what is easily the worst movie of the year–you’re most likely going to do it in the company of people who’ll actually like it. The Holiday is appallingly written and icky besides in that familiar way of this brand of Love Actually/The Family Stone yuletide romantic refuse, casting Cameron Diaz and Jude Law as lovers fucking away the hours inside a Thomas Kincaid painting while Diaz’s frumpy house-swap buddy, played by Kate Winslet, finds meaning in Santa Monica by propping up a fossil (Eli Wallach) and falling for a James Horner-esque composer of horrible soundtracks (Jack Black). Parliament on the Thames is featured as prominently as the Pacific Coast Highway to underscore either how vacuous the filmmakers are or how stupid they think the audience is while Hans Zimmer’s soul-sucking, teddy bears-humping score saps away the last hints of credibility anyone has after participating in this gingerbread death march. If the opening voiceover narration by Winslet’s lovelorn Iris isn’t warning enough, consider that the narrative crutch used by Diaz’s emetic movie trailer editor Amanda is a series of fake movie trailers about Amanda’s romantic imbroglios.

DIFF ’06: The Architect

December 2, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****starring Anthony LaPaglia, Viola Davis, Isabella Rossellini, Hayden Panettierewritten and directed by Matt Tauber by Walter Chaw I am sick to death of pieces of shit like Matt Tauber's The Architect--sick of the White Guilt Trip, which here finds architect Leo (Anthony LaPaglia) the boogeyman behind all the cultural evils housed in the Cabrini-Green tenement he designed. When he protests to neo-Alfre Woodard Neely (Viola Davis) that he's just the mastermind behind the building's outline and thus unaccountable for the collapse of urban civilization housed therein, the effect is one of outrage not at the arrogance of The Man,…

DIFF ’06: Breaking and Entering

November 30, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, UK

*½/****starring Jude Law, Juliette Binoche, Robin Wright Penn, Ray Winstonewritten and directed by Anthony Minghella by Walter Chaw Carefully modulated for maximum inoffensiveness and awards-season consideration, Anthony Minghella's King's Cross diary Breaking and Entering plays less like a London native's Crash than like Woody Allen's solipsistic version of the same. Find the Aryan faction led by architect Will (Jude Law) and girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn) and the foreigners by Croatian single-mom Amira (the increasingly one-note Juliette Binoche) and, in another star-making turn by Vera Farmiga, a Polish hooker named Oana. A weary detective (Ray Winstone) verbalizes the social schism…

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (1981/2006) – DVD

November 27, 20061980s, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Romance, Sci-Fi, Superhero, UK

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. A would-be victim of its own London After Midnight-esque mystique, the "Richard Donner Cut" of Superman II is marginally superior to Richard Lester's mutilation, but mitigating circumstances prevent it from being a totally viable alternative. Reconstructed from suppressed outtakes with due diligence (if a journeyman sensibility) according to pre-Lester drafts of the screenplay, the film follows the same basic storyline, though it's a little more efficiently plotted. (While a few Lester bits remain, there is almost certainly less Lester-generated footage here than there is Donner-generated footage in the theatrical version.) Gone is the Eiffel Tower set-piece, replaced by a charming sequence better allied–aesthetically speaking–with the previous Superman in which Lois tries to call Clark's bluff by jumping out a window of THE DAILY PLANET's headquarters; now the weapon of mass destruction responsible for freeing the three supervillains from the Phantom Zone is an errant missile from the climax of the original, which is clever but probably made more sense before they transposed the dopey turning-back-time conceit from the second film onto the first. (More on that later.)

DIFF ’06: Americanese

November 24, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance

**½/****starring Chris Tashima, Allison Sie, Sab Shimono, Munda Razookiscreenplay by Eric Byler, based on the novel by Shawn Wongdirected by Eric Byler by Walter Chaw Eric Byler's follow-up to his haunted, blue Charlotte Sometimes is this adaptation of Shawn Wong's American Knees, which, like Charlotte Sometimes, follows the day-to-day of Asian-Americans--though unlike that film, it fails to find that buried thrum to tie together the little glimpses comprising the whole. It's not for lack of trying, as Byler (over)uses the dissolve as his primary editing tactic in what tracks as an attempt to poeticize the essentially mundane and to literalize what, in the novel,…

The Fountain (2006)

November 22, 2006****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz, Ellen Burstyn, Mark Margolis
written and directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw As deeply emotional and damnably frustrating as any work of pure individual vision must be, Darren Aronofsky's long-gestating The Fountain is officially devastating from about thirty-minutes in and buoyed by its singular vision for the remainder. A film that defines the fatigued term "ambitious," it's the story of Man's need to transcend the physical, to defeat mortality, to address the divine that takes the form of what the director has called "science-fiction for the new millennium." Is it arrogant to seek to redefine an entire genre? No doubt–but it's that exact genus of hubris under the microscope in The Fountain, with its three interwoven storylines concerning the courage to explore new worlds armed and shielded only (and enough) by dogged, ragged faith, and so Aronofsky's arrogance becomes, only as it should be, the connective fibre that binds his film together. The Fountain is philosophy, posing questions about the nature of art, of communication, of the truly big questions of existence. And because it's good philosophy, it doesn't seek to answer the mysteries of our intellectual life, but rather offers as the only humanist answer another mystery: love. It's oblique to the point of opaque for long stretches of its "future" passage (involving the voyage to a nebula wrapped around a dying star in what appears to be a bubble housing a hilltop and a tree) and verges on the brink of camp in "past" segments set during the Age of Discovery and the Spanish Inquisition, yet it finds its core–its thematic and emotional anchor–in the "present" with a research scientist's race against his wife's voracious cancer.

The Fountainhead (1949) – DVD

November 21, 20061940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, Raymond Massey, Kent Smith
screenplay by Ayn Rand, based on her novel
directed by King Vidor

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By now, it's tedious to recount the many intellectual sins of Ayn Rand. Anyone with the intelligence to put two and two together knows that her "radical individualism" is mere solipsism with a pretty face, but this of course has not stopped teenagers of all ages from thrilling to her Freudian, sexed-up literature, which preaches the "virtue of selfishness," i.e., whatever the audience decides is in its best interest. Still, one has to attest to the compelling nature of her screwball oeuvre, and the film version of her The Fountainhead pretty much sums up why she's so hilariously entertaining. The problem isn't that she's not acquainted with reason, but that she's not acquainted with human behaviour; her script is so outrageously presumptive of how the mediocre and the mob-driven think that it's impossible to keep from laughing long and heartily.

A Good Year (2006) + Harsh Times (2006)

November 10, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

A GOOD YEAR
½*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Albert Finney, Marion Cotillard, Freddie Highmore
screenplay by Marc Klein, based on the book by Peter Mayle
directed by Ridley Scott

HARSH TIMES
**/****
starring Christian Bale, Freddy Rodriguez, Eva Longoria, Terry Crews
written and directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw The Fighting Temptations, The Family Man–the list of sappy redemption flicks about terrible assholes is as long and lamentable as Ridley Scott's interminable A Good Year. Masquerading as a man-opause version of Under the Tuscan Sun, it is instead an incredibly cynical play for exactly the kind of audience Scott and Russell Crowe don't reach and, apparently, shouldn't bother trying to seduce. Imagine a light, frothy romantic comedy written by Dostoevsky and directed by David Lean: every pratfall registers like a cattle stampede, every delightful romantic misunderstanding like a nuclear disarmament talk. Meanwhile, all around it, golden-drenched landscape shots of Provence play the part of the grinning idiot, dancing like crazy to distract the potentially-duped. (Scott at his best works in palettes drained of warmth and heat. Even the sunny Thelma & Louise plays like twenty miles of rough road compared to A Good Year's pretty postcards and stultifying stereotypes.) With the whole mess paying off in the most unlikely and irritating sequence of happy endings in a film not directed by Garry Marshall (or his Limey equivalent, Richard Curtis), the choices are either that you believe Scott and Crowe to have lost their minds or that A Good Year is smug and strident for the very reason that its creators are supercilious jackasses long since detached from any notion of the possible. Moreover, the picture demonstrates a marked disdain for those poor sods who aren't millionaire stockbrokers or possessed of dead uncles with a sprawling villa to will to their heirs.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) – DVD

October 30, 20061940s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Christmas, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance

***/****
OUV DVD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
AE DVD – Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Beulah Bondi
screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett and Frank Capra
directed by Frank Capra

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The year was 1990. I was 17, and had managed to elude the silver-backed beast known as It's a Wonderful Life for most of my young life. Having heard of the corn factory known as Frank Capra, I, a hard-bitten cynic, naturally feared the worst–I was more interested in corrosive (and recent) films like Do the Right Thing or Drugstore Cowboy than in some schmaltzy old battleaxe starring Jimmy Stewart. But I was working in a video store at Christmastime, which meant only one thing: the constant rotation of It's a Wonderful Life on the store monitor. And I was shocked to discover that the movie is pretty disturbing; it may have come dressed as the lamb of sentimentality, but inside it was a howling wolf, seething with failure and loneliness and wishing for something to take it all away.

Little Children (2006)

October 18, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connelly, Gregg Edelman
screenplay by Todd Field & Tom Perrotta
directed by Todd Field

by Walter Chaw Kate Winslet is a joy if no longer a revelation, and in Todd Field's Little Children, she demonstrates the kind of courage that has made her the most essential actress of her generation. Aside from Winslet, Little Children feels like a burlesque of deep-feeling pictures: the lesser of two possible sophomore efforts from the guy who brought us In the Bedroom, which was, in 2001, my since-regretted pick for best of the year. (I can be a sucker for well-played big emotions, I guess.) But Little Children is icy, stentorian, and patrician in its staginess and self-consciousness, and its disdain for its subject matter is front and centre. The picture presents its tale of suburban woe as the world's most condescending fairytale, inserting an omniscient narrator in a way that, along with the upcoming Stranger Than Fiction, makes me wonder what it is about unseen movers that is so seductive in the modern conversation. I also wonder how Field and co-screenwriter Tom Perrotta (adapting his own book) could have rationalized the amount of bile mustered in reconfiguring American Beauty to include a raincoat perv (Jackie Earle Haley, the heart and soul of the film–if also its patsy and mule) and a sweaty adultery punctuated fatally by a winking nod to Madame Bovary.

The Science of Sleep (2006) + Jet Li’s Fearless (2006)

September 27, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, China, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Martial Arts, Romance, Theatrical

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP
*½/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alain Chabat, Miou-Miou
written and directed by Michel Gondry

Fearless
**/****
starring Jet Li, Nakamura Shidou, Sun Li, Dong Yong
screenplay by Chris Chow, Christine To
directed by Ronny Yu

by Walter Chaw A cacophony of cascading whimsy, Michel Gondry's exercise in Freudian bric-a-brac The Science of Sleep plays like a movie based on a thrift store specializing in Harlequin novels–French Harlequin novels. It adheres to the music-video director's maxim of maximum images per second, and it casts Gael García Bernal as Stéphane, a useless lug endlessly working on a calendar of calamitous events and pining after his across-hall neighbour Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), with whom he is too smitten to confess that his mother is her landlord. His dreams take the form of a one-man variety show, while Gondry revels in scenes where he inflates his hero's hands and has him ride an animated patchwork horse. But The Science of Sleep is more exhausting than illuminating–more a loud masturbation than any kind of intercourse with the audience. The difference between the Gondry of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Gondry of The Science of Sleep, it seems obvious to say, is the difference between a film scripted by Charlie Kaufman and one not, though it's more complicated than that in that the Kaufman of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an artist who finally struck a balance between affectation and a much finer connective tissue. Gondry is still just engaged in the twist.

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

September 15, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Brian De Palma, Drama, France, Germany, Italy, Mystery, Norway, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical, Thriller

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

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

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

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

TIFF ’06: The Pleasure of Your Company

September 13, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

½*/****starring Jason Biggs, Isla Fisher, Joe Pantoliano, Michael Weston, Edward Herrmannwritten and directed by Michael Ian Black by Bill Chambers To paraphrase comedian Andy Kindler talking about The Three Stooges, I finally figured out why I don't like sketch comic Michael Ian Black: he's not funny. Until The Pleasure of Your Company, Black's hyphenate debut, I thought maybe it was a/n natural/irrational aversion to his countenance--he looks bizarrely like a member of Our Gang, one who just keeps getting taller. But that ferret face is only the most appropriate avatar for Black's hipster snottiness. Around these parts, we often talk…

Quinceañera (2006); Fall to Grace (2006); The Puffy Chair (2006)

August 23, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

QUINCEAÑERA
**½/****
starring Jesus Castanos, Araceli Guzman-Rico, Emily Rios, Alicia Sixtos
written and directed by Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland

FALL TO GRACE
½/****
starring René Alvarado, Ricardo Azulay, Bill Johnson, Cassidy Johnson
written and directed by Mari Marchbanks

THE PUFFY CHAIR
**½/****
starring Mark Duplass, Kathryn Aselton, Rhett Wilkins, Julie Fischer
screenplay by Mark Duplass
directed by Jay Duplass

by Walter Chaw Gentrification is the inciting phenomenon of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's Quinceañera, only the second film to land both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at Sundance. Its celebration at the festival–which, like most festivals, prices itself culturally and financially out of most of the subjects its films exploit–should be regarded as something of a foregone conclusion: If it's not a product born of self-flagellation, Quinceañera at least owes its existence to an instinct towards the atonement of its two white, privileged creators, shooting a quasi-documentary/half-improvised character drama in the Echo Park neighbourhood where they found themselves the land-investor fixer-uppers. But it's even more complicated than that, owing to Glatzer and Westmoreland's homosexuality and the specific insight that an unpopular, oft-misrepresented minority engaged in the creation of a non-traditional family unit might bring to a story of another unpopular, oft-misrepresented minority (Mexican working class) looking to create a haven of kinship in a sea of cultural turmoil. Inserting themselves into the story as unkind spoiler-avatars in the piece (a gay, white couple acts as Quinceañera's bogeymen)–the set for their tasteful duplex serves as Glatzer/Westmoreland's real-life digs–is as thorny a po-mo entanglement as these two otherwise successful guys interpolating themselves in their neighbour's lives, homes, and rituals with movie cameras and an evangelical mission.

Mildred Pierce (1945) – DVD

August 21, 20061940s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Joan Crawford, Jack Carson, Zachary Scott, Eve Arden
screenplay by Ranald MacDougall, based on the novel by James M. Cain
directed by Michael Curtiz

by Alex Jackson The difference between Joan Crawford and her inextricably-linked contemporary Bette Davis is the difference between an icon and a mere actress. Davis was always acting and, in her lesser moments, downright hammy; Crawford simply was. A finished product, all she has to do is walk out and exude “Crawfordness.” If it’s not her best film, Mildred Pierce is certainly Crawford’s best-known film, and one of the fascinating things about it is how it illustrates her screen persona blending together with her personal one. I’m fascinated with the idea of transforming from an inferior being into a superior one–the leap from ape to Star Child in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, to put it in its purest form. This is mankind’s most pressing drive, is it not–that is, to escape the banality of our mortal existence? Perhaps such philosophical musings are a function of my still living in young adulthood: I’m a year away from beginning a career in which I expect to spend the next forty years, and there is the persistent fear of this being “all there is.” That there’s nothing left; I’m going to spend the rest of my life attempting to maintain a constant state of security. The iconology of Crawford achieves such escape. She’s embraced the cinema in a way Davis never did. She’s drunk from the proverbial cup and is now immortal. Prick her, she doesn’t bleed; tickle her, she doesn’t laugh. She is beyond the flesh now, a creature of light and celluloid.

Just My Luck (2006) – DVD

August 21, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Lindsay Lohan, Chris Pine, Faizon Love, Missi Pyle
screenplay by I. Marlene King and Amy B. Harris
directed by Donald Petrie

by Bill Chambers A movie as ill-conceived as the original Bring It On (yeah, let's root for the privileged white chicks against the…all-black inner-city cheerleading squad?), Donald Petrie's Just My Luck fatally hitches its wagon to the miniscule charms of Lindsay Lohan. The migraine begins to form as soon as Lohan makes her grand entrance as PR chick Ashley Albright, striding out into the pouring rain without an umbrella knowing full well that the weather will clear up to accommodate her. (It does.) After scraping his jaw off the sidewalk, her Stepin Fetchit of a doorman hails a taxi, and while climbing into it Ashley notices a five-dollar bill stuck to the bottom of her boot. Does this cosmically-pampered princess tip the doorman with it? LOL! She's admiring the creases in Lincoln's beard as the cab peels away. Later, Ashley will receive two barely-provoked, if wholly deserved, punches in the face from a jailed black woman, while a Suge Knight-type record company overlord (Faizon Love) will declare: "I used to be [an idealist and a purist]…but then I decided to become filthy rich." I'm as surprised as you are that D.W. Griffith didn't write the treatment for this thing.

The Illusionist (2006) + Half Nelson (2006)

August 17, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

THE ILLUSIONIST
*½/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Edward Norton, Jessica Biel, Rufus Sewell
screenplay by Neil Burger, based on a story by Steven Millhauser
directed by Neil Burger

HALF NELSON
***/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Shareeka Epps, Anthony Mackie
screenplay by Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden
directed by Ryan Fleck

by Walter Chaw Out of the gate, Neil Burger's The Illusionist threatens to become the Viennese magician version of Amadeus, with Paul Giamatti's Inspector Uhl subbing for Salieri and Eisenheim the Illusionist (Edward Norton) his rabbit-hatted Mozart. But the film resolves itself in no time into something a good deal more mundane: a twisty crime drama complete with gauzy Guy Maddin visuals that cements Norton as the gravitas-heavy young actor most likely to be cast as Heathcliff in a badly-considered community theatre adaptation of Wuthering Heights. It's tedious and protracted, if not otherwise offensive–an elaborate piece of fluff that does its little tricks to the medium-delight of its tiny, undemanding audience before fading into the wings. Though it's tempting to laud it for having no pretensions to greatness, it's equally tempting to stay home and laud it from there.

Harry and Tonto (1974) – DVD

August 14, 20061970s, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Commentary B+
starring Art Carney, Ellen Burstyn, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Larry Hagman
screenplay by Paul Mazursky and Josh Greenfeld
directed by Paul Mazursky

by Alex Jackson I complain a lot about film criticism being reduced to archaeology, but I don't think I've ever seen anything quite as impenetrable along these lines as Paul Mazursky's 1974 sleeper Harry and Tonto. It never coheres, it never makes its point, and it never justifies its existence. You know Mr. Bernstein's anecdote about the girl in the white dress in Citizen Kane, or Marge Gunderson's drink with her old high school chum in Fargo–those nice little throwaway moments that haven't much to do with the actual movie? In Harry and Tonto, Mazursky gets rid of the "actual movie" and gives us nothing but throwaway moments. Yeah, it's that kind of film.

Only Human (2004) + House of Sand (2005)

August 10, 20062000s, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, Comedy, Drama, Portugal, Romance, Spain, Theatrical, UK

Seres queridos
**/****
starring Guillermo Toledo, Marián Aguilera, María Botto, Fernando Ramallo
written and directed by Dominic Harari & Teresa Pelegri

Casa de Areia
***½/****
starring Fernanda Montenegro, Fernanda Torres, Ruy Guerra, Seu Jorge
screenplay by Elena Soárez
directed by Andrucha Waddington

by Walter Chaw Married hyphenates Dominic Harari and Teresi Pelegri craft a screwball comedy (which has the audacity to end with the final line of Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot) about what happens when good Jewish girl Leni (Marián Aguilera) brings Palestinian nebbish boyfriend Rafi (Guillermo Toledo) home to meet her My Big Fat Greek Wedding ethnic cartoon family. There's the blind, rifle-toting old fossil fond of recounting his days of potting Arabs along the Gaza strip; the short, hysterical Jewish mother; the slutty older sister who only fucks anything with a dick because mama loved little sister more; the younger brother who's newly fanatical about the Koran and the observance of the Jewish Sabbath; and the niece who's a monster because, well, who wouldn't be in that household? Discomfort turns into farce when Rafi drops a cube of frozen soup out a window, killing someone who might be Leni's father (said father later mistaking a black prostitute for Leni's mother)–this event also leading to the discovery that Leni's mother has never had an orgasm and the tableaux homorte where grandpa is caught groping Rafi during a trip to the loo.