Romance Archives - Page 27 of 46

In Good Company (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

May 18, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Scarlett Johansson

***/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
starring Dennis Quaid, Scarlett Johansson, Topher Grace, Marg Helgenberger
written and directed by Paul Weitz

by Walter Chaw A film about what happens when Benjamin Braddock decides to pursue a career in plastics, Paul Weitz's flawed In Good Company (its title, formerly Synergy, may be the worst thing about it) boasts a distinct human quality that lends depth where there might not otherwise be any. It's bolstered by the central trio of performers: Topher Grace, continuing his winning streak; Dennis Quaid, affecting in the kind of role that Harrison Ford should be doing now instead of Indiana Jones; and Scarlett Johansson, rapidly growing into something like a national treasure. And though Weitz is too in love with the extreme close-up, his tactic of displacing his characters in various visual terrariums does a good job of suggesting just how isolating it can be to balance breaking your back for a job you don't particularly like with enjoying the people for whom you do it in the first place. At its heart, In Good Company is a love song to hoary old axioms concerning love, loyalty, and honour–its charms are old-fashioned and its bromides, if not entirely unexpected, are at least earned.

Lullaby of Broadway (1951) + Calamity Jane (1953) – DVDs

May 16, 20051950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Romance, Western

LULLABY OF BROADWAY
*½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Doris Day, Gene Nelson, S.Z. Sakall, Billy DeWolfe
screenplay by Earl Baldwin
directed by David Butler

CALAMITY JANE
**½/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Doris Day, Howard Keel, Allyn McLerie, Philip Carey
screenplay by James O'Hanlon
directed by David Butler

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a pseudo-indie movie whose title escapes me that thought it would get an easy laugh by having a pretentious film theory major call her paper "Doris Day as Feminist Warrior." The joke was bad not because it was too exaggerated–as it happens, it wasn't much of an exaggeration at all. Doris Day was such a cottage industry for '90s pop-cult studies that she was (distantly) second only to Madonna as an item for rescue and reclamation, making such a title not only plausible but also inevitable. It's easy to see why: while the "legendary" screen goddesses stood around waiting to be claimed by the hero, Day was going ahead with a career or obliviously transgressing some other gender rule–not enough to topple Hollywood patriarchy, but enough to give clear-eyed individuals fugitive moments of pleasure.

Layer Cake (2004); 3-Iron (2004); Palindromes (2005)

May 12, 2005****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Japan, Romance, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

LAYER CAKE
***/****
starring Daniel Craig, Colm Meaney, Kenneth Cranham, Michael Gambon
screenplay by J.J. Connolly, based on his novel
directed by Matthew Vaughn

3-IRON
****/****
starring Lee Seung-yeon, Jae Hee
written and directed by Kim Ki-duk

PALINDROMES
***½/****
starring Ellen Barkin, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Richard Masur
written and directed by Todd Solondz

by Walter Chaw Producer Matthew Vaughn makes his directorial debut with the Brit underground gangster flick Layer Cake, and he does it with a sexy, cool savoir-faire that runs slick and smooth. It's softer than Jonathan Glazer's fabulously decadent Sexy Beast (most of that due, no doubt, to there being no baddie the equivalent of Ben Kingsley's Don Logan in Vaughn's film) and more coherent than Paul McGuigan's Gangster No. 1, but it slips snug into the same conversation. Now that Guy Ritchie's been gobbled whole by his very own vagina dentate, it stands to reason that Vaughn, Ritchie's producer on Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, would seek to fill the void left in the only U.K. pop genre with any sort of international currency all by his own self. Yet the product of Vaughn's hand isn't so much an imitation as it is a refinement: not better necessarily, but calmer–closer to the lounge lizard James Bond of the 1960s than to the feisty punk Michael Caine heisters from roughly the same period, though Layer Cake is infused, of course, with a healthy dose of nastiness and post-modern irony.

We Live Again (1934) – DVD

April 21, 20051930s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, War

**½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Anna Sten, Fredric March, Jane Baxter, C. Aubrey Smith
screenplay by Maxwell Anderson, Leonard Praskins and Preston Sturges, based on Leo Tolstoy's novel Resurrection
directed by Rouben Mamoulian

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The wrong side of the tracks is a bad place to be, unless you're in Hollywood and see a way to make a buck: hence We Live Again, an adaptation of Tolstoy's Resurrection that looks past the niggling period details to go straight for the selfless-sacrifice weeper at its core. As melodrama, it has its qualities, including half a good Frederic March performance and stellar cinematography by the great Gregg Toland, but as anything other than a soaking-wet emotional sponge, it's largely ridiculous. It knows its audience wants to see rich boy/poor girl working things out, and how much you get out of the film depends on how much you can respond to that device–though anyone else will either be outraged or on the floor. Which is not to say that We Live Again is entirely without merit.

Closer (2004) [Superbit] – DVD

April 19, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A+
starring Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Clive Owen
screenplay by Patrick Marber, based on his play
directed by Mike Nichols

by Walter Chaw A girl takes off and cleans a guy’s glasses on her jacket as he’s talking, then gently replaces them. She asks him what a euphemism for her would be, and he tells her: “Disarming.” “That’s not a euphemism.” But he assures her that it is. A girl takes a picture of a guy, a guy talks to another guy through the anonymity of a computer screen, a guy visits a girl performing at a peepshow and offers her a large amount of money to tell him her real name. A guy meets a girl at an aquarium where she’ll go to steal pictures of strangers as they look at the captive marine life in the blue glow of sharks circling. Mike Nichols’s Closer is beautifully directed from Patrick Marber’s adaptation of his own play, shot with an extraordinary amount of verve and resonance around the loaded themes of ways of seeing (glasses, cameras, correspondence) and their connection to voyeurism, objectification and confinement, and forms of physical and emotional abuse. A scene in the middle set at a photo exhibit crystallizes every thread: people milling about, buffeted by giant projected reproductions of ‘disarmed’ subjects, coming and going and talking of Michelangelo. It’s overwritten but clever, too, doing a dangerous little dance along the edge of relevance and camp like a film from the 1970s (Nichols’s own Carnal Knowledge, sure, but more like another film from 1971, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs), only really failing in one performance and a seeming inability to follow through on its central punch. It’s a courageous mainstream picture, no question, though it’s mainly courageous in comparison to its contemporaries. Was a time when films like this and more toothsome were the norm and not the semi-quailing exception.

Film Freak Central does “The Art of Silent Film” series

April 19, 2005****/****, 1920s, 1930s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Charles Chaplin, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Soviet Union, Thriller

by Walter Chaw Denver Art Museum curator Tom Delapa is a one-man production. He books the prints, rents the space, does the research, and twice annually puts on a show consisting of possibly the most historically vital revivals in the Mile High City. Past years have seen screenings of pictures as varied as The Fountainhead and It Came From Outer Space in its original 3-D form–and now, over the course of seven consecutive Tuesdays at Denver's Starz Filmcenter beginning April 5, Mr. Delapa brings us "The Art of Silent Film." It's an ambitious program consisting of lesser-known pieces or rare prints from well-regarded artists of the silent era, giving cineastes the opportunity to see King Vidor's The Crowd (as yet unreleased on DVD) in 16mm with live accompaniment from pianist Hank Troy, as well as 35mm prints of both Buster Keaton's The Navigator and Charlie Chaplin's defiant Modern Times. These share the bill with 16mm presentations of Sergei Eisenstein's Strike, F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh, Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives, and G.W. Pabst's bleak, profound Diary of a Lost Girl. While the audience has grown for the Denver Art Museum film series, the truism remains that for as much lip service as is paid to the dearth of quality cinema in the heartland, if you don't get out and support essential institutions like this one, then they'll just go away.

Normal Life (1996) – DVD

April 17, 20051990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Ashley Judd, Luke Perry, Bruce Young, Jim True
screenplay by Peg Haller & Bob Schneider
directed by John McNaughton

by Bill Chambers I might be apocryphally attributing this to Pauline Kael, but I’m fairly confident that it was she who said there’s no such thing as bad acting, only bad casting. When people hear that John McNaughton’s Normal Life stars Luke Perry and Ashley Judd, they tend to lose interest, but to quote another of my favourite critics, Alex Jackson, “a great performance incorporates and molds a persona. It deals with it. Their body, voice, and persona are inescapable facts [and] the greatness of a performance lies in nothing more [than] the acknowledgment of these facts.” It’s interesting that the contemporary actors most likely to be credited with soul-searching to find the emotional truths of a character–Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, even Mark Ruffalo–are heirs apparent to Lon Chaney, gradually transforming themselves from without. In the same piece quoted above, a review of Midnight Express published just prior to last year’s Academy Awards, Jackson says he values Christina Ricci’s work in Monster over that of her co-star Charlize Theron: Where Ricci plumbs the depths of her established screen persona, Theron’s aesthetically-assisted turn is so anomalous in terms of her career as to register as standoffish. “I suspect that it takes more courage to be an icon than an actor,” Jackson brilliantly surmises.

House of Flying Daggers (2004) – DVD

April 17, 2005****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Romance

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, Ziyi Zhang, Song Dandan
screenplay by Li Feng & Zhang Yimou & Wang Bin
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the dozen or so eye-bleedingly beautiful sequences in Zhang Yimou's new wuxia pian, the encapsulating image is that of the incandescent Ziyi Zhang prostrate beneath a would-be paramour, her delicate, ivory hand pressed against his lips in an eloquently ineffective ward. It's a tableau introduced in a more overt attempted rape in a brothel and revisited in a stream where a quartet of thugs nearly succeed in literally/metaphorically piercing Ziyi with their long spears. House of Flying Daggers (its title in Chinese the loaded "Ambush from Ten Directions"–essentially an ambush from everywhere) is at its essence an allegory for rape and the Chinese tradition of concubinage that Zhang has already explored to varying degrees in Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Shanghai Triad, and, of course, Red Sorghum, in which a young woman played by Gong Li (Ziyi's predecessor as Zhang's muse) is saved from rape by a young man with whom she later runs a winery. But the conceit of a young woman teaming with her knight in shining armour is complicated in House of Flying Daggers by the fact that she is more than capable of taking care of herself, except, fascinatingly, when the attacks against her are sexualized.

The Letter (1940) – DVD

April 11, 20051940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, Frieda Inescort
screenplay by Howard Koch, based on the play by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by William Wyler

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Andrew Sarris once defended American film by saying "it completely dominates in the middle ranges, particularly in the good-bad movies and genres." The Letter represents that glorious middle range in all its good-bad glory. Keeping it from the top is its refusal to be anything but surface: despite its origins as a sociopolitical W. Somerset Maugham play, it's played as a straight melodrama, and that reliable workhorse William Wyler ensures that you feel the "basic human drama" without noticing sticky details like issues of class and race. But the surface is smooth, sleek, and shapely and the craftsmanship shows loving care, if not obsession, for rendering the mood and evoking the characters. It's less than a masterpiece, more than a time-killer, and an excellent argument for excursions into the middle.

p.s. (2004) + Birth (2004)|Birth (2004) – DVD

April 10, 2005****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

p.s.
**½/****
starring Laura Linney, Topher Grace, Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden
screenplay by Helen Schulman and Dylan Kidd, based on the novel by Helen Schulman
directed by Dylan Kidd

BIRTH
****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Danny Huston, Lauren Bacall
screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière, Milo Addica, Jonathan Glazer
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw Second chances, erasing memories, manipulating perception–films this year like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Code 46, The Forgotten, The Manchurian Candidate, The Village, The Butterfly Effect, Before Sunset, 50 First Dates, The Final Cut, and so on suggest a collective desire to wash the slate clean, put on blinkers, and regain a little of that sweet, blithe ignorance of the day before yesterday. It's never as easy as all that, of course, since things have a tendency of coming back–and when an artifact of the past intrudes on the present it carries with it (along with all those memories of green) an aggressive payload of unexpected reactions. You can never go home again, nor can home ever return to you. Nevertheless, it tries to in a pair of films, two sophomore efforts, as it happens: Dylan Kidd's p.s. and Jonathan Glazer's Birth. Curiously, just the idea of the first film after a triumphant debut is tangled with the desire to recapture a little of the magic of the past.

Melinda and Melinda (2005) + Head-On (2004)

April 7, 2005****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, Turkey

MELINDA AND MELINDA
**/****
starring Will Ferrell, Radha Mitchell, Chloë Sevigny, Chiwetel Ejiofor
written and directed by Woody Allen

Gegen die Wand
****/****
starring Birol Ünel, Sibel Kekilli, Catrin Striebeck, Güven Kiraç
written and directed by Fatih Akin

by Walter Chaw I was pretty sure that the stultified paralysis of Anything Else would eventually cause me to do myself serious injury and felt fortunate that when the lights came up, most of the intensity of my dislike for the Woody Allen of the last several years dissipated like the details of a bad dream. It's possible to leave the diminutive auteur in the dark, it seems, and such is the fate, too (and not a bad critique), of the more palatable but no less appallingly reductive and juvenile Melinda and Melinda. It's metaphysics by way of Strindberg, of course, and only as good as Allen ever is at capering around his familiar autumnal Manhattan fantasias in his "serious filmmaker" cap. His milieu, his Yoknapatawpha County, has always been the mating rituals of "blocked" artists–often filmmakers casting or directing films within films (What's Up, Tiger Lily?, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Stardust Memories, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hollywood Ending)–orbiting around one another in impotent, inevitably mortal, orbits. If he doesn't star in them himself, he hires someone to impersonate him–the Woodman is never far from his own lover/hand, and his casts of invariably grateful manqué dutifully take on his cadences and exhortations to debate Bartók and Bergman in airless dinner parties that would drive even Buñuel nuts.

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

April 4, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Ireland, Romance, UK

½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Andrew Davies and Helen Fielding and Richard Curtis and Adam Brooks, based on the novel by Fielding
directed by Beeban Kidron

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The gusto with which a certain audience will guffaw at Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (henceforth Bridget Jones 2)–will buffet each other on the back in robust bonhomie at a joke well told and a prejudice indulged in appropriate company–says all there really is to say about the class schism that the film itself broaches but stops short of actually addressing. (If you squint, you can see them rendered satiric as swine in top hats, smoking cheap cigars and playing cards in their pearls and print dresses.) We reunite with our porcine heroine (Renée Zellweger) a little more than a month after the end of the first film, at which point she's shagged her new boyfriend Darcy (Colin Firth) a lot but remains saddled with her suspicions that he's a prick. He's a lawyer, see, and clearly too good for her, so Bridget, as is her wont, proceeds to embarrass herself in polite stuffed-shirt company, scoffing at the prig who suggests that giving to charity is bad and pretending to be able to ski whilst wrapped in a dreadful pink jumper. The resulting delightfully-patronizing humiliations are the sort of thing generally installed as the engine in romance novels, the main audience for which is one that looks like Bridget, is probably ten years older, and would be surprised to see that, were a film ever actually made of their fantasy projection of themselves onto the heroine role of their little pulp bodice-rippers, would look just as preposterous as Bridget Jones 2.

Guess Who (2005) + Beauty Shop (2005)

March 30, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

GUESS WHO
***/****
starring Bernie Mac, Ashton Kutcher, Zoë Saldaña, Judith Scott
screenplay by David Ronn & Jay Scherick and Peter Tolan, based on the screenplay by William Rose
directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan

BEAUTY SHOP
**½/****
starring Queen Latifah, Alicia Silverstone, Andie MacDowell, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Kate Lanier and Norman Vance, Jr.
directed by Billie Woodruff

by Walter Chaw Taking a cue from his own surprisingly poignant Barbershop 2, director Kevin Rodney Sullivan's Guess Who, a contemporary inversion of Stanley Kramer's proselytizing dinosaur Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, surpasses expectations by presenting a trio of characters in various scenarios that actually offer some pithy commentary on race relations in these United States. It's a formula flick, make no mistake (one whose basic premise was mined as recently as Meet the Fockers), but in-between its usual glaring dad/fumbling beau gags, Sullivan takes the time to give each of his pairings moments of genuine connection.

Miss Congeniality (2000) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD

March 30, 20052000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Sandra Bullock, Michael Caine, Benjamin Bratt, Candice Bergen
screenplay by Marc Lawrence & Katie Ford & Caryn Lucas
directed by Donald Petrie

by Walter Chaw It starts pretty early on when a waitress at a Russian restaurant stands in front of a surveillance camera, causing the boys in the van to exclaim that "this broad has two asses!" (hey, if it's good enough for Porky's, right?)–and it's all downhill from there. Donald Petrie's Miss Congeniality has something to do with an ugly, bitter, uncouth woman discovering true happiness (love, career success, respect) by waxing her area and strutting down a runway. Confused? At least. Especially when the ugly woman in question is Sandra Bullock, who has made a career, more or less, out of being the beauty queen you think you have a shot at. The girl who binge eats like a hot dog eating contestant, records SportsCenter, and can still shimmy into her size 4 nightgown becomes a different kind of pornographic fantasy when you need a quick reminder of who has a real penis and who just has a gun–think There's Something About Mary without the irony. A scene before mutt becomes mah-vellous, in which she's watching past beauty queens for tips on how best to go undercover as a pageant contestant and offers a litany of comments on the women's intelligence, isn't so much hilarious as it is mean. And it's made worse by the end of the film, when all of the convenient bimbo stereotypes are bolstered and magnified rather than shown to be unkind shorthand.

The Cat Returns (2002) – DVD

March 24, 20052000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Japan, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Reiko Yoshida
directed by Hiroyuki Morita

by Walter Chaw With the frantic, infernal energy (and cats) and even a little of the barbed social satire of Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, Hayao Miyazaki protégé Hiroyuki Morita's directorial debut The Cat Returns is undone a little by its hysteria but salvaged by its artistry and smarts. A familiar tale for fans of Studio Ghibli, the film follows plucky schoolgirl Haru (Chizuru Ikewaki in the Japanese track, Anne Hathaway in the English dub) as she saves a mysterious grey cat from certain flattening, thus earning her the dubious boon of eternal gratitude from the Cat King (Tetsuro Tamba & Tim Curry). After being cursed with a yard-full of cattails, a pocketful of catnip, and a locker-full of gift-wrapped mice, Haru receives the ultimate prize of betrothal to the Cat Prince (Takayuki Yamada & Andrew Bevis)–a fate she seeks to avoid with the help of portly kitty Muta (Tetsu Watanabe & Peter Boyle) and the stately Baron (Yoshihiko Hakamada & Cary Elwes). Haru's journey is essentially one of perspective as she evolves from a silly sort of girl into a person who's learned to trust that her instincts are good and that her courage is, indeed, up to snuff.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) – DVD

March 21, 20051970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Ellen Burstyn, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Green Bush, Diane Ladd
screenplay by Robert Getchell
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers The zeitgeist made Martin Scorsese and his mentor John Cassavetes artistically simpatico in 1974, when the two helmed "women's pictures" independent of each other's counsel. It was the beginning of women's lib, and Warner hoped to corner the market via Ellen Burstyn and her pet project Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, while it would seem that with his brilliant A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes just wanted to say something hopeful about marriage to counter the prevailing propaganda. Both pictures were demonized in certain feminist circles for yoking their heroines to knights in tarnished armour, but in the case of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, they were preaching to the compromised.

In My Country (2005)

March 11, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Ireland, Romance, South Africa, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Juliette Binoche, Brendan Gleeson, Menzi Ngubane
screenplay by Ann Peacock, based on the novel Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog
directed by John Boorman

by Walter Chaw A wrongheaded film from a director responsible for a couple of masterpieces (Deliverance, Point Blank), a couple of cult classics (Excalibur, Zardoz), one of the best films of the '90s (The General), a couple of unqualified disasters (Exorcist II: The Heretic, Leo the Last), and a few flicks that are just sort of middling there in-between grotesque (Where the Heart Is), winsome (Hope and Glory), and generally freaky (The Emerald Forest), In My Country–originally more provocatively titled Country of My Skull–finds itself closer to a disaster than to a noodle. It makes the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in post-Apartheid South Africa something of a Western problem instead of an African one (better were it elevated into a human one) and, worse, makes an illicit romance between two fictional characters, public radio journalist Anna Malan (Juliette Binoche, atrociously cast) and WASHINGTON POST journalist Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson), a metaphor for South Africa endeavouring to make love, not war.

Raise Your Voice (2004) – DVD

March 8, 20052000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Coming of Age, DVD, Family, Music, Musical, Romance, Teen

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Hilary Duff, Rita Wilson, David Keith, Jason Ritter
screenplay by Sam Schreiber
directed by Sean McNamara

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The best one can say for Raise Your Voice is that it was made with non-toxic materials–your impressionable 'tween will not be exposed to any really reprehensible behaviour. It's not a disguised infomercial for crass capitalism, it's not leeringly inappropriate in its sexual attitudes, and, save for a somewhat-patronized struggling black character, its politics are vague and inoffensive. Granted, this doesn't preclude Raise Your Voice from positing an alternate universe where music conservatories teach scratching and rock guitar, or wrapping up huge traumatic events with the ease of turning on a light, but the film does keep you from becoming disgusted with the corruption of kids' entertainment. You may feel bored and bewildered, but never disgusted.

Boxcar Bertha (1972) [The Martin Scorsese Film Collection] – DVD

March 7, 20051970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Barbara Hershey, David Carradine, Barry Primus, Bernie Casey
screenplay by Joyce H. Corrington & John William Corrington, based on Sisters of the Road by Bertha Thompson, as told to Ben L. Reitman
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers Although a Martin Scorsese retrospective could easily survive the absence of Boxcar Bertha, the film is a cornerstone of the director's filmography: Without it, there is conceivably no The Last Temptation of Christ–Bertha herself, Barbara Hershey, introduced Scorsese to the Nikos Kazantzakis source novel during production–and no Mean Streets. Because he'd been toiling away on the Hollywood fringe after getting fired from his would-be sophomore effort, 1970's The Honeymoon Killers, for shooting everything in master (an experiment he would repeat to great acclaim with The King of Comedy), Scorsese agreed to helm AIP's umpteenth Bonnie and Clyde wannabe, an in-name-only sequel to the drive-in sensation Bloody Mama (which incidentally starred his future muse, Robert De Niro). "You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit," went John Cassavetes's immortal response to the results, a critique not so much of the work itself as of Scorsese's decision to play the hired gun. Thus aborted his mission to position himself as one of the California film brats conquering the industry, as Cassavetes's tough-love approach spurred him to return to New York and resurrect the idea for Season of the Witch, a thematic follow-up to Who's That Knocking At My Door that eventually became Mean Streets.

Carrie (1952) – DVD

March 2, 20051950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Laurence Olivier, Jennifer Jones, Miriam Hopkins, Eddie Albert
screenplay by Ruth Goetz and Augustus Goetz
directed by William Wyler

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie is a masterpiece of interiority, which makes adapting it for the screen rather tricky. The book's characters say things they don't mean and do things they don't understand while the author interprets the buried motives behind their casually destructive actions. So much editorializing goes on that a straight-up regurgitation of the narrative simply won't suffice: it's a novel for a director versed in atmospherics, one who can counter the spoken word with visual information to the contrary–Fritz Lang would have been right, likewise Douglas Sirk or Max Ophüls. But there's nobody less suited to the task than William Wyler. The master of long-take, deep-focus literalism, he knows nothing that he can't see and hear and thus sees and hears nothing. Wyler takes in the scenery, notes the mangled verbiage of the screenwriters, and fails completely to evoke what's essential about the work being translated.