Tristan + Isolde (2006)

January 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK, War

*/****
starring James Franco, Sophia Myles, Rufus Sewell, David O'Hara
screenplay by Dean Georgaris
directed by Kevin Reynolds

Tristanisoldeby Walter Chaw After bravely transforming the Robin Hood legend into a case of thirtysomething love jones with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner's well-known ex-best friend Kevin Reynolds turns the Tristan + Isolde legend into a WB/TIGER BEAT-friendly, mouth-breathing bodice-ripper indicated by lots of backlighting, orgasmic slow-mo, and dialogue purple enough to blind a Bronte sister. It's shot like a perfume commercial and written like a florid creative-writing exercise, one packed with such AM Gold, Luther Ingram treasures as: "Why does loving you feel so wrong?" Well, it might have something to do with said love being the basis for the Guinevere/Lancelot adultery story in which a woman comes between a king and his most trusted knight, leading to the ideological and literal collapse of a kingdom. Or it might have something to do with the fact that the actors playing the lovers in question never for a moment manage to spark the soggy tinder packed beneath the story. This allows a great deal of time for the sentient beings left in the audience after the ten-minute-mark exodus to suss out why this thing was delayed, then dumped in the middle of the January dead zone. It also, incidentally, caused me to fantasize about somehow harnessing the ability of films like this to make 125 minutes feel like six days for youth-giving effects and racing box scores.

Glory Road (2006) + Last Holiday (2006)

January 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

GLORY ROAD
½*/****
starring Josh Lucas, Derek Luke, Emily Deschanel, Jon Voight
screenplay by Christopher Cleveland & Bettina Gilois and Gregory Allen Howard
directed by James Gartner

LAST HOLIDAY
*/****
starring Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman, based on the screenplay by J.B. Priestley
directed by Wayne Wang

by Walter Chaw There are two big laughs in Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer's African-American Hoosiers, Glory Road. The first comes when some white guy says derisively, "Can you imagine what basketball dominated by Negroes would look like?", while the sight of defeated Kentucky coaching legend Adolph Rupp (Jon Voight), vilified by history perhaps unfairly (though there's no question that he's vilified unfairly by this film), mourning the loss of the National Championship Game to an upstart team prompts the second. Both moments speak to the biggest problems in a film riddled with little ones: the former because it makes the audience complicit in–and comfortable with–the picture's callousness and casual blanket racism, and the latter because everything that happens in the film is already a foregone conclusion. The only appeal left is rooted in seeing the black players put on exactly the kind of degrading sideshow the picture suggests they're too human for. Glory Road is smug, offensive, and ignorant in the way that films with no self-awareness are ignorant–wrapped in a story designed specifically to make people cheer and believe that this one game in 1966 changed peoples' attitudes towards African-Americans in sports instead of simply bolstering the idea that the black athlete was advantageous and alien rather than just merely alien.

Lady Sings the Blues (1972) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

January 10, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams, Richard Pryor, James T. Callahan
screenplay by Terence McCloy and Chris Clark and Suzanne De Passe
directed by Sidney J. Furie

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Billie Holliday never really surfaces in her ostensible biopic, Lady Sings the Blues. There's somebody using her name, of course, somebody who pouts and shrieks and cries copious tears–but no matter how much Diana Ross knocks herself out "emoting," she doesn't do justice to her predecessor. Nor, for that matter, does the movie she's in. The supremely jaundiced Sidney J. Furie has seen fit to jettison any real mention of either Holliday's music or her convictions, replacing them with a blackface Valley of the Dolls–the story of not one of jazz's premier vocalists, but a sad little girl hooked on heroin. Ross is a solid junkie, all right, yet she and everybody else connected with the production are wrong to impose this on someone who should be remembered for a few things beyond sordid melodrama.

Kronk’s New Groove (2005) – DVD

January 9, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Philippines, Romance

*½/**** Image A+ Sound B+ (DD)/A- (DTS) Extras C
screenplay by Tom Rogers
directed by Saul Andrew Blinkoff & Elliot M. Bour

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You know you're watching a family film when: a) father issues dominate the plot; b) it talks down to the parents in the guise of speaking on their level; and c) the whole thing is larded with pseudo-in-jokes intended to make everybody feel smart. So it is with Kronk's New Groove, a straight-to-disc sequel (to an original unseen by yours truly) that posits the Emperor Kuzco's one-time adversary Kronk (voice of Patrick Warburton) in a race against time to impress his "Papi" with the classic wife/kids/house-on-hill bellwethers of success. Alas, it's an indifferently-concocted affair, with the minor character pushing more charismatic presences to the side and leaving nothing to distract from some feeble jokes, obvious plotting, and a total refusal to bring something new to the table.

Broken Lizard’s Puddle Cruiser (1996) + The Dukes of Hazzard (2005) [Unrated – Widescreen] – DVDs

January 9, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

Puddle Cruiser
½*/**** Image C- Sound C- Extras C
starring Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Stephen Lemme, Paul Soter
screenplay by Broken Lizard
directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

THE DUKES OF HAZZARD
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott, Jessica Simpson, Burt Reynolds
screenplay by John O'Brien
directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

by Walter Chaw The first film from what would become the comedy troupe Broken Lizard, Puddle Cruiser was completed and released in 1996 on a budget of a quarter of a million dollars and enjoys the dubious distinction of being irrefutable evidence that Jay Chandrasekhar and company are as funny now as they always were. Something about Chandrasekhar's Adam Corolla-on-quaaludes persona rubs me exactly the wrong way: it isn't the delivery, really, so much as the pervasive sense of smug superiority, not to mention the hostility and, while we're at it, the fact that he's just not funny. With Puddle Cruiser, he's created a film best described as a carbon copy of Noah Baumbach's debut pic Kicking and Screaming–the key difference between them that Chandrasekhar and co-writers Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske are woefully out of their element as scenarists, gag writers, actors, you name it. That Broken Lizard has attained a level of popularity now with garbage like Super Troopers, Club Dread, and The Dukes of Hazzard is astonishing, if not as astonishing as Chandrasekhar having helmed a handful of episodes from the brilliant "Arrested Development"'s first season. Goes to show that even a glib asshole can't ruin a gifted cast, pitch-perfect script, or ironclad premise.

The Jazz Singer (1980) [25th Anniversary] – DVD

December 22, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

*½/**** Image B Sound A- (DD)/B+ (DTS) Extras D
starring Neil Diamond, Laurence Olivier, Lucie Arnaz, Catlin Adams
screenplay by Herbert Baker, adaptation by Stephen H. Foreman, based on the play by Samson Raphaelson
directed by Richard Fleischer

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Having always had a knack for turning schlock into symptomatic gold, J. Hoberman once worked his magic on the remake of The Jazz Singer by comparing the original’s vision of Jewish cultural schizophrenia against the 1980 version’s post-Israel reversal. I recommend the essay (from his collection Vulgar Modernism) not merely for its brilliance, but also to discharge you from seeing the movie–because the only thing Hoberman gets wrong is that it’s “a mediocre film but a resonant one.” Mediocre it may be, but resonant it ain’t, entirely too careful as it is to soft-pedal some traumatic material so as not to upset star Neil Diamond’s MOR constituency. The Jazz Singer has all of the singer’s sentimental weaknesses without the attendant cheesy bombast that makes him entertaining. It’s a singularly bland film that doesn’t quite hurt but that feels like a chore as it trickles towards the end.

Must Love Dogs (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

December 20, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras D+
starring Diane Lane, John Cusack, Dermot Mulroney, Elizabeth Perkins
screenplay by Gary David Goldberg, based on the novel by Claire Cook
directed by Gary David Goldberg

by Walter Chaw There must be some kind of comfort in seeing a film that is a carbon copy with only minor variations of a bazillion other films exactly like it. Or maybe the champions of something like Must Love Dogs come equipped with a sensory mechanism that makes them more attuned to detecting nuance between what appear to my untrained eyes to be identical low-aspiring/low-achieving, plug-and-play clockworks. Or maybe, just maybe, the people who will love this movie just don’t expect that much from their movies and will, in fact, resent it mightily if you say something that falls out of line with their miniscule expectations. If that’s the case, the demographic that loves stuff like this (or anything by Garry Marshall or Nora Ephron) is as zombified and brainwashed into acceptance of communally-approved garbage as the demographic that loves stuff by George Lucas and Michael Bay. Dimwits, in other words–ones with a Y chromosome and ones without, but a dimwit by any other name would still spend their hard-earned money on feckless garbage masquerading as art. Must Love Dogs is more extruded, like an iron casting, than created–more a mold than a piece of art. Not everything needs to be art, of course, so here goes your proof.

The Family Stone (2005); Loggerheads (2005); The Dying Gaul (2005)

December 16, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

THE FAMILY STONE
*/****
starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Claire Danes, Diane Keaton, Rachel McAdams
written and directed by Thomas Bezucha

LOGGERHEADS
*½/****
starring Tess Harper, Bonnie Hunt, Michael Kelly, Michael Learned
written and directed by Tim Kirkman

THE DYING GAUL
**/****
starring Patricia Clarkson, Campbell Scott, Peter Sarsgaard, Ryan Miller
written and directed by Craig Lucas

by Walter Chaw An absolute freakin' nightmare: Imagine spending the holidays with Diane Keaton in full-smirk, full-chuffing, shit-eating laughter mode, then magnify that with a screenplay by hyphenate and former fashion executive Thomas Bezucha that never misses an opportunity to excrete a little dollop of quirk where silence would have spoken volumes. The Family Stone is an intensely middlebrow bath, dipped in warm sentiments and institutionalized ugliness–one half slapstick fish-out-of-water, one half chestnut-lit holiday perennial-hopeful. (The marriage works about as well as it does in other pieces of Yuletide garbage like Christmas with the Kranks and Home Alone.) Therein, eldest Stone boy Everett (professional piece of wood Dermot Mulroney) is home for the holidays (it's not as good, obviously, as Jodie Foster's film of the same name but it's cut from the same cloth) to introduce his girlfriend Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) to his quirky tribe. Chief antagonist for the first hour is mousy (yeah, right) Amy (Rachel McAdams), who has an NPR duffel bag in a brief introductory shot, thus establishing her character as much as it's ever going to be established. She doesn't like Meredith because I don't know why but proceeds to brand her a racist and a boor when it seems that, mostly, Meredith is intensely uncomfortable and self-conscious. Maybe she has social anxiety disorder, or the more common stick-up-her-ass-ism. That's how appropriately-named evil mother Sybil (Diane Keaton) diagnoses her, except she calls Meredith a monkey and replaces the ass-stick with a silver spoon.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004) – DVD

December 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Robert De Niro, Romance, Spain, UK

½*/**** Image A Sound A
starring F. Murray Abraham, Gabriel Byrne, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Mary McGuckian, based on the novel by Thornton Wilder
directed by Mary McGuckian

by Walter Chaw Given its cast as well as its presumption to chart the hazy intersection between predestination and circumstance, Mary McGuckian's excruciatingly dull The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the third adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, might be the biggest miscalculation of the year. Start with Robert De Niro as the corrupt Archbishop of Lima, presiding over the inquisition of Brother Juniper (Gabriel Byrne). Six years previous Juniper witnessed the unceremonious snapping of the titular bridge, which sent five random people to their howling doom. Had they known how boring our good brown-robed pilgrim would make them out to be, I wouldn't wonder why they didn't try to float. No, Brother Juniper has decided that he's going to write the world's dullest book about this quintet of unfortunates so as to perhaps accidentally ken the mysterious workings of the Almighty in the small lives of small people.

Curly Top (1935) – DVD

December 13, 2005Posted in1930s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance

*½/**** Image F (colorized)/C (b&w) Sound C
starring Shirley Temple, John Boles, Rochelle Hudson, Jane Darwell
screenplay by Arthur J. Beckhard and Patterson McNutt
directed by Irving Cummings

by Alex Jackson It's funny how a film like Curly Top can feel so weird and so derivative at the same time. Starting with the writing, there is barely any plot to speak of. Shirley Temple is Curly Top, the orphaned child of two circus performers who has only her older sister Mary (Rochelle Hudson) to protect her from mean headmistress Mrs. Higgins (Rafaela Higgins). After becoming enchanted with Curly during a visit to the orphanage, wealthy benefactor Edward Morgan (John Boles) seeks to adopt her under the alias "Mr. Jones." Mary insists that she be adopted along with Curly, as she had promised her parents that the two would never separate. Morgan agrees, but as he spends more time with them he begins to fall in love with Mary. Though Mary likes Morgan back, she's engaged to the handsome Jimmie Rogers (Maurice Murphy). It's up to Curly to bring her "two favourite grown-ups" together.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

December 9, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Spielberg, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh, Kôji Yakusho
screenplay by Robin Swicord and Doug Wright, based on the novel by Arthur Golden
directed by Rob Marshall

Memoirsofageishaby Walter Chaw The wounds that WWII opened between the Chinese and the Japanese are still fresh. Over the course of a twelve-year occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese regular army, at least nine million Chinese civilians were butchered–and though the Chinese, lacking a unified defense, bear the burden of poor organization, petty in-fighting, and a fair share of mortal Pollyannaism, the Japanese refuse to this day to apologize for what they have officially dismissed as the standard toll collected in conventional warfare. I believe it’s this–as opposed to the centuries of racial hatred–that has called down the normally quiescent Chinese activist contingent on the suddenly-thorned head of the Steven Spielberg-produced Memoirs of a Geisha, a film written, directed, and produced by Caucasians based on a book by a white author who was promptly sued by the geisha, Mineko Iwasaki, he interviewed for the book on the grounds that he not only betrayed their confidentiality agreement, but also fabricated the fate of her virginity, which she claims was never auctioned off in the way that the Arthur Golden novel describes. True or not, it’s the sort of thing that would be particularly attractive to a Western mind transfixed by the sexy Mystery of the Geisha.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

December 9, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway
screenplay by Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Ang Lee talks about Brokeback Mountain like it’s a break that he needed after the pressure-cooker of Hulk, and the way that the film slinks around the topics that have garnered it its share of awards-season attention suggests that the director of The Ice Storm was well and truly on vacation. It’s the most polite depiction of homosexuality you can imagine while still featuring passionate kisses and simulated doggy-style penetration; most of the ways that Lee chooses to illustrate his star-crossed lovers’ isolation in the middle of the most closeted American genre are parsed from sub-par situation-comedy scenarios. I like when Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) sees his lover Ennis (Heath Ledger) for the first time in years and the two lock in a passionate embrace, mainly because by the revving-up of Gustavo Santaolalla’s score and the look on Ennis’s wife Alma’s (Michelle Williams) face, it means we’re about to get one of those hilarious scenes where the girlfriend walks in on something she wasn’t supposed to see. It’s a moment unworthy of the picture, just like another where Ennis flips Alma over during sex to simulate his stolen time with Jack, or when Alma chooses Thanksgiving dinner with Ennis, their kids, and her new husband to accuse him, histrionically, of indulging in gay love. I can’t think of one good reason for Alma being made the straight man in an old gag, the victim humiliated, and the hysterical representative of society at large except that even at close to two-and-a-half hours, the film is so under-populated that Alma must serve triple duty to Jack and Ennis’s shorthand romance. It speaks to Williams’s burgeoning talent that she wears the burden well.

Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005) – DVD

December 8, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Romance, Sports

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Lindsay Lohan, Justin Long, Breckin Meyer, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant and Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Angela Robinson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s this girl, Maggie Payton (Lindsay Lohan), who wants to be a NASCAR driver. That much I got. Her father (Michael Keaton) is, of course, an overprotective wuss who wants to shield Maggie from masculine pursuits. I’m right with you up to there. The only way to prove she can handle the danger is…to drive a self-propelled VW Bug that does all the work for her? Such is the logical conundrum of Herbie: Fully Loaded, which comes on like a female-empowerment comedy-melodrama while depriving its heroine of autonomy over the career she so desperately craves. As the damned Beetle completely destroys any attempt to make its pilot a prime mover, there’s really nothing at stake for anyone behind the wheel–and while this is fine if you’re a schlep like Dean Jones, it doesn’t do much if you’re trying to sneak in feminist subtext.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

December 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, Blake Lively, Alexis Bledel
screenplay by Delia Ephron and Elizebth Chandler, based on the novel by Ann Brashares
directed by Ken Kwapis

by Walter Chaw The quartet of best pals portrayed in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants are, we're told, complementary parts of one consciousness, which goes some way towards explaining why it is that individually they seem like machine-tooled fonts of tween didacticism. They're Judy Blume-spawned pods: the fat, brassy one with speeches about the importance of being fat and brassy; the slut with mother issues and speeches about regret; the frigid one who lightens up; and the morose one who learns to set aside her barbed irony at the expense of a disease-of-the-week urchin with a message of her own. Although the whole thing's too long as it is, there's barely enough room in the picture for each of the girls to have a complete narrative arc, and so we're given preachy shorthand speechifying in lieu of character complexity. It's a TIGER BEAT quiz about puberty and it's astonishingly irritating, even if you can spot glimmers of truth in there amid the weeping and screeching.

The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

December 6, 2005Posted in****/****, 1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Music, Musical, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK

Mustown****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, Leonide Massine, Robert Rounseville
written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

Talesofhoffmancapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover No doubt thinking of their gushy ballet epic The Red Shoes, Pauline Kael once dismissed the pretensions of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger by declaring the duo “the Franco Zefferellis of their day.” This annoyed me intensely. Putting aside the fact that the erotic-sadist Archers seem natural Kael material, her smug put-down completely misapprehends their levelling approach to popular and elite art. A poser, Zefferelli reduces Shakespeare to soap opera and pretends it’s still Shakespeare. His ideas are schlocky and titillating, yet he insists that they’re the citadel of culture, in effect dishonouring both the articulation of what used to be called “high” art and the honest reasons we keep wallowing in trash. The Archers, meanwhile, were aware of the high/low distinction–they simply refused to enforce it, instead commingling with the sublime and the ridiculous as though they were equally critical to a healthy aesthetic diet, thus upholding Kipling’s dictum (frequently repeated in Powell’s memoirs) that “all art is one, man–one!”

DIFF ’05: Love, Ludlow

November 24, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Romance
**/****starring Alicia Goranson, David Eigenberg, Brendan Sexton III, Andrea Maulellascreenplay by David Patersondirected by Adrienne J. Weiss by Walter Chaw Utterly stagebound and seldom anything but a small Sundance indie version of Dominick & Eugene, Adrienne Weiss's Love, Ludlow, against all odds, kicks free of its quirk crutches at around the halfway mark--long enough for it to modestly divert, if not especially edify. "Roseanne"'s Alicia "Lecy" Goranson is a tough-talking Queens girl, Myra, charged with the care of her bi-polar, Shakespeare-quoting brother Ludlow (Brendan Sexton III). That she gives the most self-conscious performance in a film about some sort of…

Rent (2005)

November 23, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Musical, Romance

½*/****
starring Rosario Dawson, Taye Diggs, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Jesse L. Martin
screenplay by Steve Chbosky, based on the play by Jonathan Larson
directed by Chris Columbus

Rentby Walter Chaw On the list of painful experiences, the modern Broadway musical ranks fairly high, so it's fair to wonder how an adaptation of Rent–by Chris Columbus, of all people–could have struck anyone as a bright idea. In all honesty, though, pretending not to understand the reasoning behind a project like this is disingenuous snobbery, because when something this terrible has proven to be that popularly galvanizing, it's only a matter of time, really, before Hollywood moneymen come calling with dollar signs in their eyes and memories of Chicago dancing in their heads. (I can only assume that that's also the reason the legendarily awful Phantom of the Opera got a greenlight with Joel Schumacher at the helm–and that Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane's stupendously popular (and similarly awful–film and play both) The Producers is set to bow this Christmas.) But with Rent, in place of a name like Webber or Mel Brooks to drive its inexplicable success, you find a genuine middlebrow cause célèbre, loaded well beyond safe with Message carried on the backs of a thundering stable of Alphabet City freaks and caricatures of freaks, each of them wilting from a romantic wasting disease (AIDS, naturally, or 'disenchantment' in place of source La Boheme's 'consumption')–the same one, not-so-incidentally, that claimed creator Jonathan Larson a few tragic months before Rent's triumphant debut on the Great White Way.

DIFF ’05: The White Countess

November 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, UK, War
**/****starring Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgravescreenplay by Kazuo Ishigurodirected by James Ivory by Walter Chaw Even without recently-deceased partner-in-crime Ismail Merchant, stalwart period-costume-drama codger James Ivory delivers the slavishly middlebrow, meandering, Anglo-centric goods with The White Countess, the tale of a sightless American ex-diplomat, Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), who falls for refugee Russian countess Sophia (Natasha Richardson) in Shanghai on the eve of Japanese occupation. Packed to the rafters with Redgraves (Lynn and Vanessa also appear) and meticulously airless accents, the picture represents a certain ossified breed of prestige picture of the A Room with a View and…

DIFF ’05: Casanova

November 13, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Romance
*/****starring Heath Ledger, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Irons, Oliver Plattscreenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kimberly Simidirected by Lasse Hallström by Walter Chaw Casanova is a perfectly dreadful Lasse Hallström/Miramax picture that can be claimed, appropriately enough, by Buena Vista now that the Weinsteins have moved on to produce this kind of stuff for their new company. It's "The Merchant of Venice" stripped of any whiff of controversy, going through the motions of its shrivelled little romantic-comedy checklist with the miserable meticulousness of the truly unimaginative. For a change, why don't you tell me how it works? Two people meet and hate…

A Farewell to Arms (1957) + Francis of Assisi (1961) – DVDs

November 8, 2005Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Romance, War

A FAREWELL TO ARMS
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Rock Hudson, Jennifer Jones, Vittorio De Sica, Mercedes McCambridge
screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Charles Vidor

FRANCIS OF ASSISI
*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Bradford Dillman, Dolores Hart, Stuart Whitman, Pedro Armendariz
screenplay by Eugene Vale, James Forsyth and Jack Thomas
directed by Michael Curtiz

by Walter Chaw One of David O. Selznick's many attempts to shape the largely immutable mug of lady-love Jennifer Jones into the face that launched a thousand cinematic ships, the badly-fumbled Hemingway adaptation A Farewell to Arms finds Jones, about two decades past the age of her Red Cross nightingale Catherine, paired opposite the not-quite-long-in-the-tooth-but-almost Rock Hudson as her doomed love Lt. Henry. The setting is Italy during The Great War; playboy Lt. Henry falls for mad "Cat," who, as written by the legendary Ben Hecht (himself a decade removed from his best work and well on his way to becoming king of cheese epics), comes off as an entirely inappropriate nod to Blanche Dubois. Selznick served John Huston–the right man for this picture–his walking papers early on for correctly identifying the love story in Hemingway's novel as just a metaphor for the tragedy and irony of WWI's carnage, subbing Huston with second-stringer Charles Vidor, who meekly agreed to amplify the alleged love between Lt. Henry and Cat while pushing all manner of hysterical spectacle to the wings of the proscenium.