Children of Men (2006) + Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

January 5, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, War

CHILDREN OF MEN
****/****
starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Timothy J. Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby, based on the novel by P.D. James
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
***½/****
starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase
screenplay by Iris Yamashita, based on the book Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Tsuyoko Yoshido
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Stop on any single frame of Alfonso Cuarón's remarkable war idyll Children of Men–a film that's rarely in repose, sometimes seeming composed of one long, frantic shot–and I suspect the sharp-eyed, educated viewer would be able to cull a reference to modern art, most likely one about men reduced to their base animal nature. For me, the two visual landmarks come in the form of a cue to the cover design for Pink Floyd's 1977 "Animals" when hero Theo (Clive Owen) goes to see his industrialist cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) for help and a re-creation of Richard Misrach's remarkable series of 1987 photographs documenting, among other things, a dead-animal pit in Nevada purportedly used to dispose of victims of a plutonium "hot spot." Both share a space with surrealism in the positioning of animals (artificial or deceased) in industrial spaces (London's Battersea Power Station is the iconic backdrop of the "Animals" cover) as mute commentary, perhaps, on man's destructive relationship with his environment–a read that jibes comfortably with the thrust of Children of Men, in which we're told that one day in the not-too-distant future, humans suddenly stop reproducing. (Fertile ground for science-fiction, this obsession with progeny (see: everything from Frankenstein to I Am Legend).) The picture opens with a Fleet Street terrorist bombing, a little like Terry Gilliam's dystopic Brazil–though rather than take the easier route of satirizing our current state of instability and free-floating paranoia, Children of Men makes a serious attempt to allegorize it.

Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster (1965) – DVD

December 6, 2006Posted in****/****, 1960s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Marilyn Hanold, Jim Karen, Lou Cutell, Nancy Marshall
screenplay by R.H.W. Dillard, George Garrett and John Rodenbeck
directed by Robert Gaffney

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Now, I think we're allowed to define these terms for ourselves (fans of exploitation movies being a friendly and decidedly unpretentious bunch), but the way I see it, there's a sharp difference in style between B-movies and Z-movies. B-movies are your creature features. Their narratives are actually quite strongly defined and they tend to produce a rather primitive but potent and genuine emotional reaction from the audience. You can picture yourself seeing these films at a drive-in double feature or maybe a Saturday matinee. In contrast, Z-movies are all jumbled noise. The audience does not exactly have an emotional reaction to Z-movies, they just watch them in a sort of dissociated daze. You could never imagine seeing Z-movies at an actual movie theatre or drive-in. The only place where they could possibly play is on a local unaffiliated television station at three in the morning.

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

November 27, 2006Posted in1980s, 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

Supermaniicapby 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.)

Déjà Vu (2006)

November 22, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Val Kilmer, Paula Patton, Jim Caviezel
screenplay by Bill Marsilii & Terry Rossio
directed by Tony Scott

Dejavuby Walter Chaw Who woulda thunk that crap-meister Tony Scott could be so in tune with the spirit of the times? Scott follows up Man on Fire–a vile piece of revenge-on-foreign-soil wish-fulfillment schlock–and Domino (another slice of the vigilante kind) with Déjà Vu, a time-travel fantasy complete with a horrifying act of domestic terrorism that noble ATF agent Carlin (Denzel Washington) is offered the chance, through the providence of limited time travel, to prevent. It’s one of those questions, right? Would you smother infant Hitler in his cradle to prevent the tears that will follow–and, if you did, would it change the course of history or just substitute that Adolf for another? Alas, Scott ultimately degrades this fun cocktail party conundrum into an action-movie finale involving heartbreakingly beautiful love interest Claire (Paula Patton), clean-Marine grassroots sicko Carroll (Jim Caviezel, doing High Crimes all over again), and a ferryboat full of people crossing over from Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. Working in the picture’s favour is that it’s thick with national calamity, making one wonder if Scott would even get a movie made anymore were he not so quick to jab a needle into the collective jugular. The pall of our recent history hangs over the proceedings like a borrowed mourning veil, but Scott muse Washington is so good–and the film’s premise so loopy–that en route to touching the steadily more tiresome post-9/11 bases of illegal/omniscient surveillance and sour regret, Déjà Vu actually breathes a little. It’s the best Tony Scott film since the underestimated, unofficial The Conversation sequel Enemy of the State, which ran over on the same technophobic ground. Call it another science-fiction romance to join this season’s already-bursting slate of Children of Men, Stranger Than Fiction, and The Fountain.

The Fountain (2006)

November 22, 2006Posted in****/****, 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

Fountainby 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.

Slither (2006) – DVD

October 23, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Michael Rooker, Gregg Henry
written and directed by James Gunn

Slithercapby Walter Chaw Paying tribute to his Lloyd Kaufman roots with a shot in which The Toxic Avenger is on TV in the background, James Gunn's Slither is more in line with the hipster revisionism of his screenplay for Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead. Postmodernism its point, then, drying up the musty cellars somewhat of the films it riffs on, Slither misses when it does only because it has little resonance beyond the basic Cronenbergian sexual-parasites thing and the shopworn idea that Americans are voracious, disgusting, ignorant swine. (In truth, the one moment that really bugs me is a fairly demented rape sequence (involving more infant-menace than anything in the new The Hills Have Eyes) and its played-for-giggles fallout.) In place of useful sociology, it does for redneck archetypes what Shaun of the Dead did for workaday slobs, poking fun at the thin line between slack-jawed yokels (initiating deer season with a barn-busting hoedown) and beef-craving, slug-brained zombies (recalling that NASCAR now boasts its own brand of meat). The biggest surprise is that Gunn appears to have seen and liked Night of the Creeps, and that, like that film, Slither does what it does without sacrificing too much of its good-natured, self-deprecating sense of humour along the way.

Blade Runner – The Director’s Cut (1982/1992) – DVD

October 9, 2006Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
directed by Ridley Scott

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Ridley Scott is quite obviously no auteur. Not notable for returning to a series of themes and tropes, he's more for gazing at a pretty set and ladling on the chiaroscuro. The man is less Orson Welles than Michael Curtiz, presiding stylishly over writers and actors and, crucially, designers, bringing them together in harmony instead of imposing some personal meaning on the whole shooting match. But just as Curtiz will be rescued from obscurity by the fluke triumph of Casablanca, Scott's Euro-trash imagery will always seem like more because of his resonant cult fave Blade Runner. This is a film that unites all manner of disparate elements to produce something greater than the sum of its parts, one that speaks to the displacement we feel in a technocratic world far more succinctly than if the filmmakers were conscious of what they were doing.

Alien Nation: The Complete Series (1989-1990) + Doctor Who: The Complete First Series (2005) – DVDs

October 3, 2006Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, UK

ALIEN NATION: THE COMPLETE SERIES
Image C Sound C Extras C
"Alien Nation: The TV Movie (Pilot)," "Fountain of Youth," "Little Lost Lamb," "Fifteen with Wanda," "The Takeover," "The First Cigar," "Night of the Screams," "Contact," "Three to Tango," "The Game," "Chains of Love," "The Red Room," "The Spirit of '95," "Generation to Generation," "Eyewitness News," "Partners," "Real Men," "Crossing the Line," "Rebirth," "Gimme, Gimme," "The Touch," "Green Eyes"

DOCTOR WHO: THE COMPLETE FIRST SERIES
Image A Sound B Extras B
"Rose," "The End of the World," "The Unquiet Dead," "Aliens of London," "World War Three," "Dalek," "The Long Game," "Father's Day," "The Empty Child," "The Doctor Dances," "Boom Town," "Bad Wolf," "The Parting of the Ways"

by Walter Chaw I'm a fan of Graham Baker's dreadful Alien Nation from 1988. Run the words of the title together and you get a not-terribly-clever yet not-entirely-awful summary of what the film is getting at when it's not busy being a ludicrous high-concept buddy cop flick pairing your typical crusty old vet with an earnest rookie who happens to be an alien with a spotted pate instead of a hilarious racial minority. (Shades of Dead Heat, where Joe Piscopo played a bug-eyed zombie.) It's a schlocky B-concept, granted, but the parallax view suggests that lurking in Alien Nation is a neat parable about the Chinese-American experience in San Francisco around the turn of the century and on through to the modern day.

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

September 25, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

½*/**** Image N/A Sound A Extras C+
starring Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellen, Famke Janssen
screenplay by Simon Kinberg & Zak Penn
directed by Brett Ratner

Xmenlaststandcapby Walter Chaw As an example of what can happen when a homophobic, misogynistic, misanthropic moron wildly overcompensates in a franchise that had as its primary claim to eternity that it was sensitive to the plight of homosexuals, Brett Ratner's painfully queer X-Men: The Last Stand (hereafter "X3") manages to present its series of melodramatic vignettes in such a way as to completely negate any sense of peril, individuality, or struggle for the characters. Without a sense of weight, the references in the piece to genocide and The Holocaust ("Ink shall never again touch my skin!" says Ian McKellen's Magneto) become pure, laggard exploitation in the service of a sub-par superhero action film that shows its true colours time and again in its hatred of women ("Hell hath no fury!") and loathing of female sexuality, as well as in its flat-eyed regard of children trying to hasp off their wings while their fathers attempt to break down the bathroom door. It's Michael Bay's Schindler's List: a reptilian populist, at ease with the slick and facile, has been asked to take the reins of a project that, for whatever its crimes of pacing and exposition, had in its Bryan Singer-helmed episodes the good sense not to kick over ant piles it wasn't prepared to contain.

TIFF ’06: The Host

September 10, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, South Korea, TIFF
Gue-mool***½/****starring Song Kang-ho, Byun Hee-bong, Park Hae-il, Bae Doo-na, Ko Ah-sungscreenplay by Bong Joon-ho, Hah Joon-won, Baek Chul-hyundirected by Bong Joon-ho by Bill Chambers I knew I would love The Host as soon as I realized that the man in the surgical scrubs was none other than national treasure Scott Wilson, who, in his most heinous role since In Cold Blood (or maybe Shiloh), observes dust on the jars of formaldehyde in the morgue of a South Korean military base and bullies a reluctant attendant into disposing of them by dumping their contents down the sink. It's not merely that I…

Lifespan (1976) [Uncut Special Edition] – DVD

July 6, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Belgium, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Netherlands, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C-
starring Klaus Kinski, Hiram Keller, Tina Aumont, Fons Rademakers
screenplay by Judith Rascoe, Alva Ruben, Alexander Whitelaw
directed by Alexander Whitelaw

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Lifespan appears to be comprised of inserts from somebody else's movie. It huffs and puffs in expositional voiceover largely because it hasn't written any self-evident drama–we see loving shots of scenic Amsterdam and a lot of people walking in/out/through buildings, but nothing that might actually clue us into what the hell is going on. You could (as the special features on the film's DVD release do) insist that this is a Last Year at Marienbad-esque ploy, since there are other elements to support that thesis. Alas, Alexander Whitelaw is no Alain Resnais, and his rudimentary exploration of the meaning of eternal life sounds most like a biology student on the make. Aside from a bit of gratuitous skin, there's almost nothing to watch–but all sorts of terrible, pretentious things you never need to hear.

Superman Returns (2006)

June 28, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

****/****
starring Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, James Marsden, Kevin Spacey
screenplay by Michael Dougherty & Dan Harris
directed by Bryan Singer

Supermanreturnsby Walter Chaw The saddest, most desperately lonesome and melancholy mainstream film in recent memory, Bryan Singer's Superman Returns is about loss and, as a Scrabble board early in the picture denotes, alienation. It's about fathers and sons and, by extension, why so many of our mythologies are about sons divorced from fathers who spend the rest of their lives, nay, the rest of eternity striving for impossible reunions. Prometheus is mentioned by name while Atlas, Christ, and Lucifer are referenced in image, Singer's transition from fallen Titans to fallen Angels an ineffably graceful symbolic examination of where, exactly, comic-book martyrs and gods (of which Superman is both) place in the modern spiritual pantheon. Superman is a figure at a juncture in the middle of pagan and Christian just as he's become something like a transitional icon bridging science and religion, classic comics and the modern superhero era, and Americana and the Wasteland. In the film, Superman is a character warring between what he wants and the destiny his father has charted for him–and aren't we all. When a child in Superman Returns takes a picture with his cell phone that we recognize as the cover for Superman's debut, 1938's "Action Comics" No. 1, it's at once bemused and in love with Richard Donner's original vision of the hero, but most of all it's eloquent in its assured, maybe even prickly, recognition of where we were and what we've become.

Riddick Trilogy: The Franchise Collection – DVD

June 7, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Short Films, Thriller

PITCH BLACK – UNRATED DIRECTOR'S CUT (2000)
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Vin Diesel, Radha Mitchell, Cole Hauser, Keith David
screenplay by Jim & Ken Wheat and David Twohy
directed by David Twohy

DARK FURY (2004)
The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
screenplay by Brett Matthews
directed by Peter Chung

THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK – UNRATED DIRECTOR'S CUT (2004)
***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
starring Vin Diesel, Thandie Newton, Karl Urban, Judi Dench
written and directed by David Twohy

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover At the dawn of the century came a little movie called Pitch Black that didn't seem like an opportunity for blockbuster inflation. Produced for a mere $20 million, it turned out to be only moderately successful yet built up a cult following on video and cable. In the interim, its star Vin Diesel did smash business in The Fast and the Furious and xXx, positioning him as the next bankable action hero and generating a hunt for properties with which to exploit his appeal. Thus did the chamber piece Pitch Black beget the big-budget extravaganza The Chronicles of Riddick, a sequel nobody was particularly salivating for but which showed up anyway to widespread confusion and audience indifference. The two films couldn't be more disparate: where the former is a guilt-ridden ensemble piece in which the ensemble rapidly dwindles, the latter is an over-designed star spectacular with a glut of supporting supplicants and plenty of action set-pieces.

Quintet (1979) [Robert Altman Collection] – DVD

April 27, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Robert Altman, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Paul Newman, Bibi Andersson, Fernando Rey, Vittorio Gassman
screenplay by Frank Barhydt & Robert Altman and Patricia Resnick
directed by Robert Altman

Robertaltmanquintetcapby Bill Chambers Set during another Ice Age (in a featurette on the DVD, co-writer/director Robert Altman makes the even loopier suggestion that the action takes place on another planet, perhaps to either demonstrate what little use he has for prologue or account for a total absence of people of colour), Quintet stars Paul Newman–never particularly well-matched with the iconoclasts–as Essex, a seal hunter trekking across the frozen tundra with pregnant wife Vivia (Brigitte Fossey) in search of his brother Francha (Tom Hill), who lives in candlelit ruins that now constitute a metropolis. Francha greets Essex by inviting him to play Quintet, a glyphic board game that has developed a religious following in these joyless times (some of Quintet's adjudicators have even adopted the names of patron saints, and they all wear makeshift Tudor caps), and when Essex goes off to fetch firewood, Altman pulls a Psycho and kills off every member of his party. It turns out that latter-day Louis XIV Grigor (Fernando Rey) has turned this dystopia into a human Quintet board by orchestrating the deaths of losing players. For largely nebulous reasons, Essex assumes the identity of Francha's assassin and joins a high-stakes tournie; Grigor sees through this ruse but decides to humour him, if only because to do otherwise would be unsportsmanlike.

Chicken Little (2005) – DVD

March 27, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
screenplay by Ron Anderson, Steve Bencich and Ron J.Friedman
directed by Mark Dindal

Chickenlittlecapby Walter Chaw Frantic, frenetic, anxious, obnoxious: the ideal audience for Chicken Little should be in bed by seven, and Disney's umpteenth cry of "sure-fire comeback project" looks, appropriately, like another convulsive episode of corporate crying-wolf. Chicken Little, for instance, makes pop culture references that don't mean anything in the context of a film whose sole purpose appears to be instructing your children to be fearful and hyper. They're just there to give parents, alternately stunned and bored, a little rootless pleasure in the middle of epileptic flash; what's left isn't clever (or kinetic) enough for us to ignore its essential emptiness. What Chicken Little is more than anything else is exhausting. You could by rights hope that it's is a send-up of the Fifties cycle of Martian invasion pictures (it name-checks War of the Worlds for no good reason) as The Incredibles was a send-up of Golden Age superhero comics, but even a cursory comparison between the two films shows that Disney's desperation to make Pixar's looming secession a non-issue is as limp and impotent as the Nevada State Boxing Commission.

The War of the Worlds (1953) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

March 7, 2006Posted in1950s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Gene Barry, Ann Robinson, Les Tremayne
screenplay by Barré Lyndon, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Byron Haskin

by Walter Chaw Opening with a newsreel and ending with a peculiar bit of religiosity, Byron Haskin's (really George Pal's) The War of the Worlds runs the gamut of H.G. Wells's seminal bit of seriocosmic/pseudo-scientific allegory, assaulting colonialism by dooming spoilers to strange diseases in faraway places. You could call it "God;" I think Wells would have called it "kismet." In any case, the business in-between in this The War of the Worlds was as visually dazzling for its time as Steven Spielberg's frightening and reprehensible 9/11 redux version is for ours, and it holds the same sort of micro/macro fascination of Armageddon courtesy mysterious beings raining death from above. Obviously a cold war parable, the film arguably has as its best quality its sound design, which finds through an ominous thrum of silence a rattlesnake rattle in the noise the baddies produce once they finally emerge from their smouldering crater. It was the stuff of nightmares for me when I caught it on Saturday afternoon television as a child; revisiting it for a film series and now in conjunction with the long-awaited re-release of the film on DVD, I find most interesting the fact that screeching little girl Dakota Fanning replaces the Ann Robinson character in the remake in what can only be described as a horizontal substitution.

Ryan’s Daughter (1970) [Two-Disc Special Edition] + Dune (1984) [Extended Edition] – DVDs

February 23, 2006Posted in1970s, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: David Lynch, Disability, Drama, DVD, Mexico, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

RYAN’S DAUGHTER
***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard, Christopher Jones, Sarah Miles
screenplay by Robert Bolt
directed by David Lean

DUNE
***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Francesca Annis, Leonardo Cimino, Brad Dourif, José Ferrer
screenplay by David Lynch, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by David Lynch

DUNE (Extended Edition)
*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Francesca Annis, Leonardo Cimino, Brad Dourif, José Ferrer
screenplay by Judas Booth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Alan Smithee

by Bill Chambers The common charge levelled at Ryan’s Daughter when it was released in 1970 was that it seemed anachronistic within contemporary film culture. Indeed, what so infuriated the New York critics, in particular, was not just that Lean had strayed from his roots (thematically, Ryan’s Daughter in fact represents a throwback for the Brief Encounter director), but that he had lost all trace of humility in the bargain. One might say the English were finally getting a taste of their own medicine, as Lean had essentially become a Hollywood imperialist, intruding on cinema’s evolution towards minimalism by treating a rather insular love triangle–catnip to the infidelity-obsessed British realists–like a theme-park attraction, subjecting it to both hyperbole and an incongruous perfectionism.1 (“In general the only way for artists to work in the medium is frugality,” wrote Pauline Kael, thereby consigning Lean to the realm of not-artists.) This violation of an unspoken Prime Directive resonates in the current trend of giving A-list makeovers to grindhouse fare.

The X Files: Black Oil; The X Files: Colonization; The X Files: Super Soldiers [Four-Disc Mythology Collection] – DVDs

February 13, 2006Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

THE X FILES: BLACK OIL – FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (1995-1997)
"Nisei," "731," "Piper Maru," "Apocrypha," "Talitha Cumi," "Herrenvolk," "Tunguska," "Terma," "Memento Mori," "Tempus Fugit," "Max," "Zero-Sum," "Gethsemane," "Redux," "Redux II"

THE X FILES: COLONIZATION – FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (1998-2000)
"Patient X," "The Red and the Black," "The End," "The Beginning," "S.R. 819," "Two Fathers, One Son," "Biogenesis," "The Sixth Extinction," "The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati," "Sein Und Zeit," "Closure," "En Ami," "Requiem," "Within," "Without"

THE X FILES: SUPER SOLDIERS – FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (2001-2002)
"Par Manum," "This is Not Happening," "Deadalive," "Three Words," "Vienen," "Essence," "Existence," "Nothing Important Happened Today," "Trust No 1," "Provenance," "Providence," "William," "The Truth"

Image A Sound A Extras B

by Walter Chaw Even if you're curious, you're probably not curious enough to wade through the sixteen DVDs that constitute "The X Files"' "mythology" (a.k.a. "Oh, no, not another one of these episodes"), compiled by creator Chris Carter in a quartet of four-disc collections that chronologically recap the ostensible "Truth" in the series' "The Truth is Out There" tagline. After the first set, "Abduction", comes "Black Oil", then "Colonization", then "Super Soldiers", the four of them parceling out the vital information that our government's struck a deal with aliens to turn us into human-alien hybrids; that most of the universe has been colonized by a virus that moves around in (or as) a black, oily substance; that some people are transformed by said alien entity into super-beings; and that there are other aliens out there hoping to prevent the spread of this contagion in the universe. That's it. Oh yeah, Scully and Mulder kiss–and it's dreamy. Happy?

Repo Man (1984) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

February 6, 2006Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez, Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash
written and directed by Alex Cox

Repomanunicapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The question I ask after a screening of Repo Man is this: is it punk? And if it isn't punk, what is it? Those used to the anarcho-communitarian (i.e., "nice") ideals adopted by punk's intelligentsia would have no truck with the mentality of this film, whose hero, Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez), is in it for cheap thrills and hasn't got an ideal in his head. Indeed, once he gets sucked into the more "intense" world of car repossessor Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) and thus gainful employment, he distances himself from his punk friends–as represented by the three mohawk'd chumps whose idea of "doing crimes" is "let's order sushi and not pay!" But the repo gig leads to another dead end, as Bud turns out to be a blowhard full of idiot rules and his compatriots prove more unstable than Otto's old friends. There is no future to Otto's dreaming–just the cul-de-sac of punk's dark flipside: nihilism.

Jerry Lewis: The “Legendary Jerry” Collection – DVD

January 27, 2006Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Music, Romance, Sci-Fi

Jerryondvdtitleby Travis Mackenzie Hoover If you're savvy enough to read film criticism, you probably know it's supposed to be funny that the French love Jerry Lewis. We all have a big, self-satisfied laugh when we first hear that, as if anyone could take Jerry Lewis seriously. (We certainly didn't.) But the thing is, there aren't a lot of people who will admit to actually seeing one of his movies–the Lewis hate-on has become so intense that the only thing remaining of him is the joke; he's the scapegoat of anti-French resentment and anti-intellectual hostility, as if only frogs and eggheads could possibly find anything redemptive in his work. Thus a generation has shunned his films, never to know if there really is a centre to the onion, something more than mugging to the Lewis mystique.

We at FILM FREAK CENTRAL have decided to put a stop to this. Over the next ten weeks, we will be interrogating the Lewis canon (as it relates to Paramount's recently released DVD box set "Jerry Lewis: The 'Legendary Jerry' Collection") for traces of artistic merit–assuming there are some to be found. We may come up with revelations; we may come up with suggestive patterns; or we may come up with nothing whatsoever. By the end, though, we hope to have definitively answered the question of whether the French are onto something–and if we can really point fingers in a culture that conversely embraces Betty Blue. And Luc Besson. And Amélie. Originally published: November 11, 2005.