Romance Archives - Page 22 of 46

The Break-Up (2006)

June 2, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Aniston, Joey Lauren Adams, Ann-Margret
screenplay by Jeremy Garelick & Jay Lavender
directed by Peyton Reed

by Walter Chaw Vince Vaughn can never seem sincere, only dazed and slack, making his proto-slob Gary in Peyton Reed’s infernal The Break-Up an odd object of desire for art gallery receptionist Brooke–or he would be if Brooke weren’t played by vanilla pudding Jennifer Aniston. The problem with the picture is that it’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (or the more-often-invoked Scenes from a Marriage)–with healthy doses of Swingers and The 40 Year Old Virgin to confuse the rancour–played by one-note actors who demonstrate not a soupçon of chemistry, thereby engendering zero rooting interest in their counterparts’ reunion. (The fact that the two stars appear to have found love off camera regardless suggests the Proof of Life Effect for the anti-romcom set.) You have to respect a picture that sports at least three or four scenes straight out of Hell and has the good sense at one point to mention it in so many words, like when Brooke comes home to find Gary engaged in some weird bacchanal, the two exchanging a long wordless look across the wasteland as the world comes to an end. But there’s so little presence demonstrated by either of the principals that the movie finally feels disconnected and inconsequential.

London (2006) – DVD

June 1, 20062000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK

*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Chris Evans, Jason Statham, Jessica Biel, Joy Bryant
written and directed by Hunter Richards

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I'll say this for Hunter Richards's London: it's compelling enough that you want its "hero" to get his. Whatever the (obnoxious, belligerent, self-absorbed) nature of main character Syd (Chris Evans), he's a well-drawn example of a common macho type, meaning the more stupid things he does the more you crave to see his comeuppance. But "payback" in this case would mean rejection by his ex-girlfriend London (Jessica Biel), whose going-away party he's just crashed–and no matter how many flashbacks we get to him behaving like a jerk in her presence, the film's total commitment to his point-of-view gives us the sinking feeling that he's not going to receive the brush-off he deserves. And sure enough.

Tennessee Williams Film Collection – DVD

May 30, 2006****/****, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Elia Kazan, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Romance

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden
screenplay by Tennessee Williams, based on his play
directed by Elia Kazan

BABY DOLL (1956)
****/**** Image B Sound A Extras B+
starring Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach, Mildred Dunnock
screenplay by Tennessee Williams
directed by Elia Kazan

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Burl Ives, Jack Carson
screenplay by Richard Brooks and James Poe, based on the play by Tennessee Williams
directed by Richard Brooks

THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (1961)
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Vivien Leigh, Warren Beatty, Lotte Lenya, Jill St. John
screenplay by Gavin Lambert, based on the novel by Tennessee Williams
directed by José Quintero

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962)
***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A
starring Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Shirley Knight, Ed Begley
screenplay by Richard Brooks, based on the play by Tennessee Williams
directed by Richard Brooks

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964)
****/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A
starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon
screenplay by Anthony Veiller and John Huston, based on the play by Tennessee Williams
directed by John Huston

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ SOUTH (1973)
**½*/**** Image C Sound D
directed by Harry Rasky

by Walter Chaw Marlon Brando is liquid sex in A Streetcar Named Desire, molten and mercurial. He’s said that he modeled his Stanley Kowalski after a gorilla, and the manner in which Stanley eats, wrist bent at an almost fey angle, picking at fruit and leftovers in the sweltering heat of Elia Kazan’s flophouse New Orleans, you can really see the primate in him. (Imagine a gorilla smelling a flower.) Brando’s Stanley is cunning, too: he sees through the careful artifice of his sister-in-law Blanche (Vivien Leigh, Old Hollywood), and every second he’s on screen, everything else wilts in the face of him. It’s said that Tennessee Williams used to buy front-row seats to his plays and then laugh like a loon at his rural atrocities; he’s something like the Shakespeare of sexual politics, the poet laureate of repression, and in his eyes, he’s only ever written comedies. In Kazan’s and Brando’s too, I’d hazard, as A Streetcar Named Desire elicits volumes of delighted laughter. The way that Stanley’s “acquaintances” are lined up in his mind to appraise the contents of Blanche’s suitcase. The way he invokes “Napoleonic Law” with beady-eyed fervour. And the way, finally, that he’s right about Blanche and all her hysterical machinations. The moment Stanley introduces himself to Blanche is of the shivers-causing variety (like the moment John Ford zooms up to John Wayne in Stagecoach), but my favourite parts of the film–aside from his torn-shirt “STELLA!”–are when Stanley screeches like a cat, and when he threatens violence on the jabbering Blanche by screaming, “Hey, why don’t you cut the re-bop!”

The Ringer (2005) – DVD

May 23, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Sports

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Johnny Knoxville, Brian Cox, Katherine Heigl, Jed Rees
screenplay by Ricky Blitt
directed by Barry W. Blaustein

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of fascinating things embedded in the premise and execution of Barry W. Blaustein’s Farrelly Brothers-produced The Ringer, the story of Steve Barker, a broke cubicle monkey who tries to do the right thing and ends up trying to rig the Special Olympics by impersonating a mentally-challenged athlete. One is the notion that it’s easier to feign retardation to the non-challenged than it is to the challenged; and the other is that, in taking Barker’s “Jeffy” at face value, there’s actually less offense in this broad play for sentimental, slapstick chuckles than in the Oscar-winning/aspiring pieces (Forrest Gump, I Am Sam, Rain Man) Steve uses as research. “There’s the secret,” a habit-clad Kate Winslet confides to Ricky Gervais in the brilliant debut of his new show, “Extras”. “If you want an Oscar you have to play a mental.”

Laura (1944) [Fox Film Noir] + Pinky (1949) [Cinema Classics Collection] – DVDs

May 16, 20061940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance

LAURA
***/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Vincent Price, Judith Anderson
screenplay by Jay Dratler and Samuel Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt, based on the novel by Vera Caspary
directed by Otto Preminger

PINKY
*/**** Image C Sound B- Extras A+
starring Jeanne Crain, Ethel Barrymore, Ethel Waters, William Lundigan
screenplay by Philip Dunne and Dudley Nichols, from a novel by Cid Ricketts Sumner
directed by Elia Kazan

by Walter Chaw A camp classic of a very particular variety, Otto Preminger’s stylish, pedigreed Laura might best be read as a satire of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, reuniting that film’s Judith Anderson with another late, lamented mistress and acres more scenery to chew. It replaces George Sanders with Vincent Price, Laurence Olivier with stiff-as-a-board Boy Scout Dana Andrews, and a never-present heroine with Gene Tierney, she of the unspeakably gorgeous cheekbones. Laura easily laps most films for narrative complexity, the sheer number of audacious hairpins it negotiates on the road of logic dizzying for their arbitrary contortions. The character of a fey, fifty-ish critic, Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), who introduces himself to a detective investigating the murder of the titular Laura (Tierney) by stepping out of a bath like some hybrid of Smithers and Mr. Burns, acts as the piece’s unreliable narrator, stalking through his scenes like a dandy in honorary high collar and spats while providing the strangest contention in a strange film: that this aging, fey, homosexual lothario was passionately in love with his ward, Laura. The picture might be the most overt iteration of film noir as a genre about emasculation ever put to celluloid, and trying to puzzle out whether Waldo’s for real and chief gumshoe McPherson (Andrews) buys any of his honeyed hooey constitutes a good portion of what’s fun and maddening in equal measure about it. That tension between what’s ridiculous and what the characters take seriously makes Laura a mystery, for sure, but not for the obvious reasons.

Art School Confidential (2006)

May 9, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Daniel Clowes
directed by Terry Zwigoff

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. When Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff sat down to adapt the former’s graphic serial Ghost World for the screen, they divided up the task generationally, if you will, with the younger Clowes writing the Enid parts and Zwigoff writing the Seymour parts, which themselves have no correlative in the graphic novel. Clowes flew solo on the semi-autobiographical script for the pair’s latest collaboration, Art School Confidential, and the main problem with it is that it’s all Enid and no Seymour. In fact, the film is so relentlessly glib that the Enid doppelgänger who pops up now and again seems gratuitous–and moreover belabours a Ghost World comparison (much like the extended cameo from an unbilled Steve Buscemi) that only finds Art School Confidential wanting. The closest thing the movie has to a moral compass is Joel Moore’s Bardo, one of those career students who becomes the Virgil to freshman Dante Jerome (Max Minghella). Adrift in a sea of poseurs, Jerome struggles in vain to win over his contemporaries, including comely life-drawing model Audrey (Sophia Myles). Meanwhile, a serial strangler trolling the campus for victims not only becomes Jerome’s unwitting muse, but also provides one of his roommates, Vince (Ethan Suplee), with fodder for his thesis film.

Mae West: The Glamour Collection [The Franchise Collection] – DVD

April 27, 20061930s, 1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Musical, Romance, Western

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT (1932)
*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring George Raft, Constance Cummings, Wynne Gibson, Mae West
screenplay by Vincent Lawrence and Kathryn Scola, based on the novel Single Night by Louis Bromfield
directed by Archie Mayo

I'M NO ANGEL (1933)
***½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Mae West, Cary Grant, Gregory Ratoff, Edward Arnold
screenplay by Mae West
directed by Wesley Ruggles

GOIN' TO TOWN (1935)
***/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Mae West, Paul Cavanagh, Gilbert Emery, Marjorie Gateson
screenplay by Mae West
directed by Alexander Hall

GO WEST YOUNG MAN (1936)
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Mae West, Warren William, Randolph Scott, Alice Brady
screenplay by Mae West, based on the play Personal Appearance by Lawrence Riley
directed by Henry Hathaway

MY LITTLE CHICKADEE (1940)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Mae West, W.C. Fields, Joseph Calleia, Dick Foran
screenplay by Mae West & W.C. Fields
directed by Edward F. Cline

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Flower Belle Lee reads some words off a school blackboard: "'I am a good boy. I am a good man. I am a good girl.' What is this, propaganda?" Thusly does My Little Chickadee sum up the appeal of its female star, Mae West, who invited all of us (but mostly women) to reject the nice behaviour we learned in school and chart a course based on glory and gratification. You can keep your Bette Davises and your Katharine Hepburns, so often punished for their lively behaviour or pushed into the arms of some man; rest assured that men found their way into West's arms and not the other way around. Certain proto-feminist elements are inescapable: long before Laura Mulvey was a gleam in her mother's eye, West would dare to return the male gaze and demand a sexual appetite equal to, if not exceeding, the men bound to use it against her in a double standard. There was only one standard in West's world, and she set it.

The New World (2005) – DVD

April 23, 2006****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, Q'Orianka Kilcher
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick opens The New World with "come spirit, help us," invoking the muse before embarking on a spoken history part rapturous, part hallucinogenic, all speculative, reverent, and sanctified hearsay. Malick is the post-modern American epic poet of the division ploughed through the middle of America, telling our history with one voice, painting it in golden shades of romance and poesy. It's the only viable approach to the Captain John Smith/Pocahontas story in a minefield of debris strewn by not only our Western genre tradition, but also our newer guilt at how American Indians have been (and continue to be) portrayed in our culture: the most bestial, savage notions of the Natural have come around to their personification as an unsullied, Edenic embodiment of an impossibly harmonious nature. It's an organic progression from bigotry to paternalism, and Malick charts these dangerous waters with the audacity of an artist well and truly in the centre of his craft. He makes the doomed love between Smith and the much younger Pocahontas function as a metaphor for the decimation of the Native American population–and in so doing suggests the possibility that all human interaction can be analyzed along the lines of love and misunderstanding. Routinely described as inscrutable or remote, Malick's The New World presents history as something as simple as two people who come together, fall in love, and betray one another because their cultures are too different, too intolerant, to coexist with one another. It's history as a progression of human tragedy.

Whisper of the Heart (1995) – DVD

April 20, 20061990s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Japan, Music, Romance

***/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki
directed by Yoshifumi Kondo

by Walter Chaw Three years after directing Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki-scripted Whisper of the Heart, and before he was able to complete a second picture for the venerable Japanese institution, ace animator and Miyazaki protégé Yoshifumi Kondo passed away of an aneurysm at the age of 47. Knowledge of Kondo's fate colours the already wistful Whisper of the Heart with another layer of blue (especially if you're a fan of Kondo's behind-the-scenes work on landmark anime like Grave of the Fireflies and Princess Mononoke), but it doesn't completely rescue its remarkable humanity from frequent descents into culturally-alien specificity. The obsession with reworking John Denver's hilljack schmaltz classic "Country Road" into an un-ironic ode to the "concrete roads" of the picture's Tokyo-bound little girl protagonist (Shizuku (Youko Honna)), for instance, almost by itself renders Whisper of the Heart a Hello Kitty! for that particular brand of Japanese, Yank-ophile, cross-eyed badger shit. It's a better film if you're Japanese–kind of an amazing thing to say, I know, but the moments that don't reconstitute American "popular" culture through a Nipponese filter manage a fair-to-amazing job of evoking the overwhelming rush of first love. Shame, then, that John Denver appears at regular intervals to remind us of how peculiar a beast cultural diffusion can be.

The Tenants (2006) – DVD

April 20, 20062000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Dylan McDermott, Snoop Dogg, Rose Byrne, Seymour Cassel
screenplay by David Diamond, based on the novel by Bernard Malamud
directed by Danny Green

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Parts of The Tenants are very good indeed. Most of them involve the live-wire presence of Snoop Dogg, who, as an angry black writer named Willie Spearmint, acts as conscience/spur/romantic rival to Jewish novelist Harry Lesser (Dylan McDermott). While Snoop doesn't quite convince as a product of the film's '70s milieu, he's right on the money as a resentful, easily-provoked hard case seeking humiliating assistance from Lesser. Every time he has to flip-flop on some bit of respect or contempt for the cringing whitey, he shoots the movie straight through the ceiling–so much so that The Tenants often seems to have more to it than it actually does. As it stands, the film doesn't know what to do with source novelist Bernard Malamud's mash-up between a dithering Jew and a motor-mouthed black with nothing in common except their oblivious monomania for writing.

Edward Scissorhands (1990) [Anniversary Edition] – DVD

April 11, 20061990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, Fantasy, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder, Dianne Wiest, Anthony Michael Hall
screenplay by Caroline Thompson
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw Edward (Johnny Depp), all of Edward Gorey blacks and angles, is the product of a variation on the Frankenstein myth, his mad scientist creator (Vincent Price) dying before he can replace Edward's scissor-hands with wax appendages. Marooned at a child's emotional development, he's thus unburdened by the sort of rage for usurpation of Mary Shelly's creation; when he kills his "father" by neither accident nor design, find in Edward an adolescent's existential angst in an Oedipal split interrupted at the moment he was to be given the instruments of his ascension into "humanity" by his creator. The irony of his condition is expressed by the Stan Winston-designed shears with which he's burdened, lost on the edges of civilization (Tim Burton's twisted view of suburbia), cutting out articles from scavenged magazines and junk mail flyers and arranging them in a collage that includes a story about a boy without eyes, an ad for the kind of prefab-furniture favoured by Burton's suburbanites, and a Madonna-and-child. Our introduction to Edward, facilitated by chirpy Avon sales lady and housewife Peg (Dianne Wiest), is the film's signature set-piece, allowing as it does this twisted, tragic figure to emerge as both effrontery and holy effigy. For Burton, Edward glows with the romance of an eternal child–Peter Pan in love with a memory of Wendy for eternity, adrift with the Lost Boys and working with ice.

Friends with Money (2006)

April 6, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand
written and directed by Nicole Holofcener

by Walter Chaw Nicole Holofcener follows her marginal success Lovely and Amazing with the equally marginal failure Friends with Money, presenting a series of interpersonal apocalypses as awkward dinner parties and scenes made unwisely at Old Navy by super-successful fashion designers. It's not subtle in its broad strokes, and once the layers of Angelino self-mortification and obfuscation are plumbed, it's not subtle in its character strokes, either. What it is is a caesura in the middle of those pictures that don't care about their characters that's only interested in its characters–a film that might be shorthanded as "European" in that nothing much happens as words and glances billow in carefully ventriloquited clouds. It's about how people talk to one another among friends and then lover/confidants on the drive home, and as such it provides a clearer look at conversation in any single exchange than does the whole of Crash. Friends with Money is a comparison of our intimate with our open lives; in the comparison, it suggests a third persona, an interiority–though not entirely successfully, making it only as good, really, as the conversation that it may itself inspire on the ride home.

Adam & Steve (2006)

April 5, 20062000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, Music, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Craig Chester, Malcolm Gets, Parker Posey, Chris Kattan
written and directed by Craig Chester

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This site's editor Bill and I were on the phone one night, and we came up with a pleasant dream: What if a movie's stereotypical gay character–the one who gets all the bitchy repartee–actually wasn't funny? Be careful what you wish for: Adam & Steve is all stereotypes, all the time, and none of them are remotely funny. Only not by design, like in our fantasy–it's meant to be hilarious, meaning that you die of embarrassment on behalf of everyone involved. Although the film is supposed to be about a gay romance, its real theme is failure, and it's so terrified to seem like anything less than an outrageous good time that it tries too hard. (That the film's lone comedienne generally performs to crickets pretty much sums up the self-flagellant tone of the whole enterprise.) Hostile, ugly, and generally unpleasant to endure, it engenders fear intense enough to snuff out whatever lightness it might have had.

Elizabethtown (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

March 28, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras D+
starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Walter Chaw Casting about wildly for that elusive "Lubitsch Touch" so prized by his hero Billy Wilder, underdog-uplift auteur Cameron Crowe has patched together Elizabethtown: an awkward, shambling, Frankenstein's monster of a romantic screwball farce that, for all its slickness, shows off every one of its bolts and stitches in monstrous bas relief. Crowe piles on the pathos in this tale of fallen shoe designer Drew (Orlando Bloom), who travels from the West Coast to the semi-Deep South (the titular Elizabethtown, KY) to collect the ashes of his freshly-dead father for the purposes of a maudlin (and interminable) eleventh-hour road trip. "We should have done this years ago," says Drew to his dad's earthly remains, wiping away a brave tear, but for as machine-calibrated as the scene is to pluck at the heartstrings, there isn't–as there isn't at any moment in this film–a hint of authenticity to the sentiment. It's hard to question Crowe's earnestness, but it's easy to point at the alien remove of this picture and speculate as to whether the mom-dependent Crowe (has anyone checked to see if he's still attached to her umbilically?) has ever had a genuinely examined emotion regarding his pop.

Grey’s Anatomy: Season One (2005) + Arrested Development Season: Two (2004-2005) – DVDs

March 26, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Television

GREY'S ANATOMY: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound B Extras C
"A Hard Day's Night," "The First Cut Is the Deepest," "Winning a Battle, Losing the War," "No Man's Land," "Shake Your Groove Thing," "If Tomorrow Never Comes," "The Self Destruct Button," "Save Me," "Who's Zoomin' Who?"

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: SEASON TWO
Image A Sound B+ Extras B
"The One Where Michael Leaves," "The One Where They Build a House," "Amigos," "Good Grief!," "Sad Sack," "Afternoon Delight," "Switch Hitter," "Queen for a Day," "Burning Love," "Ready, Aim, Marry Me," "Out on a Limb," "My Hand to God," "Motherboy XXX," "The Immaculate Election," "The Sword of Destiny," "Meet the Veals," "Spring Breakout," "Righteous Brothers"

by Walter Chaw A show so odious, so repugnant, that it's impossible not to have predicted its newly-minted role as the most popular program in the land, Shonda Rhimes's "Grey's Anatomy" has the singular distinction of transforming the adorable Ellen Pompeo into a shallow, whorish version of Doogie Howser, practiced in the art of interspersing extraordinary, near-savant leaps of medical intuition with rolling in the hay with her boss, the hipster-dubbed Dr. McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey). When Dr. Meredith Grey meets a new patient, lay you even money that his/her pain and suffering will be used to augment Meredith's face-swallowing, thirtysomething pout, which is one thing–making her brilliant ex-doctor mother a victim of prime time soap opera Alzheimer's for the same ends is something else altogether. Other alternatives include Dr. Meredith babysitting a severed penis in a Coleman cooler and, better, her lingerie model-turned-MD cohort intervening on behalf of a man undergoing erection-threatening prostate surgery. What better way to end the season, then, but to do a whole episode about a syphilis epidemic sleazing like wildfire through the show's Seattle Grace Hospital?

King Kong (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

March 20, 2006****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Germany, New Zealand, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the screenplay by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace
directed by Peter Jackson

by Walter Chaw Naomi Watts is absolutely adorable in King Kong. Good thing, too, because she has to convince that with a few vaudeville pratfalls and a strategically-wielded switch she can win the heart of one of the most venerated monsters in movie history. The way Peter Jackson films her suggests that he’s found his own muse: she’s always set against impossible backlot sunsets, asked to feign love for a fake film before transforming herself–in the same, wonderful shot–into feigning real love for a man in this film when she spots her suitor, playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), author of a play (“Isolation”) for which she sees herself as perfect for the melancholy lead. (“You must be the saddest girl in New York.” She is.) In a lot of ways, Watts’s Ann Darrow is the logical extension of her Betty from Mulholland Drive: both are actresses with hidden elements to their personalities, both are asked to audition for us on an imaginary stage, and both, in the end, find themselves embroiled in a dark romance that ends in show-business betrayal. During the final third of King Kong, once the beast famously has Ann in his clutches while scaling the side of a mighty edifice in the Big Apple, it’s fair to be distracted by the rapture on her face–and to wonder if she knows that there’s only one eventuality possible to her quiescence.

Prime (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

March 17, 20062000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Meryl Streep, Uma Thurman, Bryan Greenberg, Jon Abrahams
written and directed by Ben Younger

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Conservatives may actually be right when they say that Hollywood is out of touch–their mistake lies in thinking it's because the major studios don't serve their agenda. More to the point, Hollywood is out of touch with human behaviour, ethical consistency, left or right politics, and simple cause and effect, so much so that the most "normal"-seeming of films is seething with unacknowledged fear and loathing. One might expect a film about a 37-year-old woman dating a 23-year-old man, for instance, to have some feminist or at least Freudian subtext, especially when coupled with the fact that the young man's mother is the older woman's therapist. But Hollywood's version–the pointless and confused Prime–goes out of its way to avoid the dangerous implications of its subject matter, hedging its bets enough times that it's impossible to divine what the hell it's trying to say.

Pride & Prejudice (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

March 14, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Romance, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Brenda Blethyn, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Deborah Moggach
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw There's fat to be trimmed from Joe Wright's noble go at Jane Austen's adapted-to-death Pride and Prejudice, which clocks in at a flabby 127 minutes (yet still seems somehow rushed at its conclusion), but when it works, it does for Austen what Kenneth Branagh's Henry V and Hamlet did for Shakespeare: it makes the trials of these iconic literary figures feel immediate and sensible–and it does so with a screenplay (by Deborah Moggach) that understands what parts of the text are timeless and what parts are not. This isn't to say that this Pride & Prejudice is more post-modern than the source, but that Wright understands where to prompt top-billed Keira Knightley to laugh sardonically and thus crafts an illusion of an interior life for her Elizabeth Bennet beyond the usual impression of adolescent cattiness. Knightley may very well be headed for an Oscar nomination for what has become the chick-Hamlet (Austen being the crucible through which young British actors put themselves in preparation for, I guess, Domino and sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean), but I'm thinking if she gets one, she owes at least half of it to Wright for the amount of time he put into highlighting her script.

Failure to Launch (2006)

March 10, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Sarah Jessica Parker, Zooey Deschanel, Justin Bartha
screenplay by Tom J. Astle & Matt Ember
directed by Tom Dey

by Walter Chaw Starring professional unctuous petroleum spill Matthew McConaughey as Tripp, a carefree stallion still making a stable of his parent's house, Tom Dey's excruciating Failure to Launch is two things and both of them suck: a romantic comedy and a boorish fraternity slapstick, mashed together like a jumped track mashes together train cars. When Tripp is ready to break up with a girl too interested in something resembling an adult relationship, the modus is to screw her at his place and hope that his folks walk in on them. So what do his adoring parents (Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw: she's not naked this time, he is–let's call it a draw) do but hire an unctuous tan line named Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker) to pretend to be his girlfriend? Yes, they get their boy a whore, who, in a particularly uncomfortable scene in a particularly uncomfortable film, mumbles her way around an excuse as to why she's fucked her client to keep him from breaking up with her. Now that's professionalism for you. (At least in The Wedding Date, the jane had the decency to pay for her own escort.) If you don't think it's loathsome when the Bradshaw character, ogling Paula, says, "I'm payin' fer it, I'll stare if I want to," then have I got a movie for you.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005) – DVD

February 27, 20062000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Halle Berry, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Michael Ealy, Terrence Howard
screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks and Bobby Smith, Jr., based on the novel by Zora Neale Hurston
directed by Darnell Martin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Their Eyes Were Watching God is so much better than it had to be that you wish it were better than it actually is. There's nothing slapdash or careless about its rendering of Zora Neale Hurston's famous novel–clearly, the book meant enough to executive producer Oprah Winfrey that she and her creative team tried to pull out all the stops. Alas, it's professional and pleasant but never actually hits any high notes, forming a straight-line narrative without many stylistic digressions or visual curlicues. After a while, you want a little more from it than the best that small-screen discipline can provide. Still, it's not slapped-together or careless, and it manages to hold your attention fervently enough to pass the time, if not astound you.