Then She Found Me (2008)

May 8, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

½*/****
starring Matthew Broderick, Colin Firth, Helen Hunt, Bette Midler
screenplay by Alice Arlen and Victor Levin & Helen Hunt and Helen Hunt (<–not a typo)
directed by Helen Hunt

Thenshefoundmeby Walter Chaw Mamet-lite–which is to say "garbage-lite"–for the most part, the dialogue in Helen Hunt's hyphenate debut is repetitive and deeply irritating, especially as delivered by Hunt in that perpetually whinging, laconic fashion of hers. Marry it to a directing style that could gently be called "self-aggrandizing" and generally be called "static" and Then She Found Me thuds into place as one of the most atrocious things to collapse on the silver screen in months. Here Hunt is Barbra Streisand without the singing, optimistically cast as a woman "about to turn forty" while asking poor, mortgage-needing Colin Firth to twice opine that her increasingly cadaverous-looking self is "beautiful" and "gorgeous." To each his own, of course, but Hunt the director/prime mover (she co-wrote and produced the benighted thing) sticking herself in front of a conservative gross of close-ups and pushing others to compliment her appearance is so far beyond distasteful that it's boring. Adoption, artificial insemination, infertility, miscarriage, infidelity, lumpen milquetoast Matthew Broderick as the really, really obscure object of desire, and stereotypes about East Coast Jews pollute this godawful mess like Union Carbide in some unfortunate, populous third-world nation. Call said ghetto the "arthouse" (its citizens, what the hell, "festivalgoers") and point to it whenever the random, ossified, effete intellectuals offer that they prefer to watch "indies" in the "arthouse," eschewing "mainstream" cinema with a sniff, a wave of a hanky, and a puff of talcum.

Iron Man (2008)

May 7, 2008Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow
screenplay by Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway
directed by Jon Favreau

Ironmanby Walter Chaw Iron Man is garden-variety pop heroism/wish-fulfillment that, marinated in Robert Downey Jr.'s effortless insouciant sauce, speaks volumes about the psychology of our nation at this disgusted, exhausted moment in our history. The plot's only casualties save its grand fiend are nameless Afghanis: terrorists on the one side, collateral damage on the other–few of them receiving the nobility of an individual death. Even the chief Al-Qaeda baddie is blown-up discreetly in the wings after a white guy first dazzles him with technology, then paralyzes him with the same. (Call it awe and shock.) The film's politics are easy and its racism similarly cavalier: Better dead than red (er, brown); when historians look back at this era in popular culture, it won't be terribly difficult to pick out that which forms the backbone of contemporary "Why We Fight" propaganda. What recommends the picture are sterling performances by Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow as Iron Man's Girl Friday, Jeff Bridges as the mentor-cum-baddie, and wonderful, reserved, dignified Shaun Toub in a too-brief cameo as the sole voice of moral "otherness." What's unfortunate about the flick is that it takes an awful long time to get to the good stuff, and that good stuff–almost entirely CGI-rendered–falls curiously flat. Not quite boring, Iron Man just seems sprung. There's no forward momentum, no impetus, no real gravity. With all that firepower at its fingertips, it has no idea where to point itself.

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008)

April 25, 2008Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical

½*/****
starring John Cho, Kal Penn, Rob Corddry, Neil Patrick Harris
written & directed by Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg

Haroldkumar2by Walter Chaw The first film was a pleasant surprise for its light-hearted puerility and surprising smarts, and Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (hereafter Harold & Kumar 2) misunderstands this to the extent that all that's left are the shit and dick jokes and the dispiriting carrying of the new torch that male full-frontal nudity is the ne plus ultra of comedy. When it works, credit John Cho and Kal Penn (and Neil Patrick Harris, reprising his role as the filthiest Neil Patrick Harris on the face of the planet) for their comfort in their roles–and when it doesn't (which is most of the time), blame a lacklustre screenplay that strives for edgy but, like the Judd Apatow school of moral/filth passion plays, is exceptionally conservative, even timid, in its message. All that stuff about smoking pot and saying "vagina" is a smokescreen for monogamous relationships, upholding traditional family values, and a studious avoidance of offending anyone politically in a movie that revolves around an Asian and an Indian getting sent to Guantanamo Bay because the one is mistaken for an Arab terrorist. The contortions the picture goes through to remain innocuous are so awkward (take, for example, the attempts to humanize W. and Muslims) that, in just a few short months, it could become this archaic artifact of the political correctness that's killed the current era in scatology. The flick's only sure target is homosexuality–because, let's face it, the only thing safe to talk about in this context is how much we hate fags. Am I right?

Street Kings (2008)

April 10, 2008Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans
screenplay by James Ellroy and Kurt Wimmer and Jamie Moss
directed by David Ayer

Streetkingsby Walter Chaw Keanu Reeves’s turn on the ring-around-the-mopey of skeezy LA crime dramas based on (or written by, or inspired by, or ripped-off from) James Ellroy’s hard-boiled noir prose is David Ayer’s second time around this track, Street Kings. No wonder it feels weary and worked-over, then, from the opening blare of an alarm clock to a gritty™ conclusion that suggests that the status quo is FUBAR–always has been, always will be, now with mas macho! Close your eyes and without any mental flexing replace Reeves with Ethan Hawke or Christian Bale or Scott Speedman or Joaquin Phoenix, or sub Reeves’s character’s commanding officer Wander (Forrest Whittaker) with similar wool-clad bogeys done not better but identically by Kurt Russell and James Cromwell. It’s never a question of who’s rotten in the force (everybody, stupid), never in question what the role of the anti-hero will be. Rather, it’s mainly a matter of what place vigilante justice will have in this moral quagmire of due process vs. capping the hoods and letting the legal vultures pick over the sticky wickets. It’s the Dirty Harry school of hanging judgment–the iconography of Eastwood and Bronson and Stallone in the ’80s (culminating for the latter in the ultimate state-sanctioned vigilante, Judge Dredd)–and it’s only really interesting for its popularity again amid the reign of a President who’s modelled his administration after Reagan’s. Why this concern about the breakdown of due process and the futility of real justice during terms that give lip-service loudest to a return to values? We only make films this ugly and futile when to a large extent we’ve abandoned any hope that our institutions of security will protect us from the night.

Leatherheads (2008)

April 4, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

*½/****
starring George Clooney, Renée Zellweger, John Krasinski, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by Duncan Brantley & Rick Reilly
directed by George Clooney

Leatherheadsby Walter Chaw George Clooney's Leatherheads is a lifeless, desperate-feeling vacuum that arrives without much reason for being other than to underscore that the Coen Brothers' Intolerable Cruelty was pretty underestimated as an attempt to revive the screwball farce. It's deeply flawed as a comedy, given that the only real laugh has to do with someone being set on fire. And while the instinct is to give it a pass because it's innocuous and slickly done, the other side of that is this giant diagram of a slippery slope. The film's first mistake is casting the flat, increasingly insipid Renée Zellweger as a Rosalind Russell/Kate Hepburn type; the second is its expectation that a screenplay by SPORTS ILLUSTRATED scribes Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly could have the same kind of oomph as a Charles Lederer or Brackett/Wilder piece; and the third and last is a slowing down of the patter from 45 to 33 to accommodate modern actors' relative inability to do rapid-fire delivery, thus highlighting the first and second mistakes anew. Zellweger further perfects her walking-on-a-rail-whilst-sucking-on-a-lemon shtick (she moves and acts like a puckering hat rack), leaving Clooney–a gifted physical comedian, as his work with the Coens would attest–to carry the load. No help that the Ralph Bellamy in the standard triangle is the American "The Office"'s Jon Krasinski, who'd better get Lloyd's of London on the horn about that fourth-wall smirk. Without it, he's wallpaper.

Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! (2008)

March 14, 2008Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Theatrical

***/****
screenplay by Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul, based on the book by Dr. Seuss
directed by Jimmy Hayward & Steve Martino

by Walter Chaw Surprised as anyone to be saying it, but Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! is actually pretty good. It's a climate-change kind of flick, as you might imagine, or at least that's the prism du jour through which one must view a world afflicted by weird weather patterns on the brink of complete annihilation. Likewise, when the residents of microbial Whoville are enlisted to participate in their own salvation (despite a feckless, flat-earther ruling party urging them to fiddle while Rome melts), it points a rather stern, Seussian finger at the fringe holdouts who still feel that evolution and global warming are theories in dispute. (I personally like the argument that because things are getting colder, it proves that global warming isn't happening–which is, let's face it, almost as ignorant as the idea that someone buried dinosaur bones to fool us into thinking there was a world before Man.) Not so much in dispute is this idea that films–especially genre films like this–are often the first indicators in popular culture of the things that infect us, that make us worried for ourselves and for our children. Heartening to find entertainment directed at kids that applies the cautionary warning of "The Emperor's New Clothes" to our heritage of instantly Oprah-fying atrocity–and that provides a CGI context for Dr. Seuss's sometimes-terrifyingly surreal imagery to spend no time gawping at its own invention.

Honeydripper (2008) + Married Life (2008)

March 7, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Music, Romance, Theatrical

HONEYDRIPPER
*/****
starring Danny Glover, Charles S. Dutton, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Stacy Keach
written and directed by John Sayles

MARRIED LIFE
***/****
starring Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Ira Sachs & Oren Moverman, based on the novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven by John Bingham
directed by Ira Sachs

by Walter Chaw As a huge admirer of John Sayles's middle-period body of work–a period marked by such pictures as Matewan, Eight Men Out, and Lone Star (still my pick for the best American film of the Nineties)–it pains me to look at something like Honeydripper and recognize in it everything I like about Sayles side-by-side with everything that's fast making him irrelevant. He's got a common touch, no question, something forged in the time he spent rolling up his sleeves, joining labour unions, hitchhiking across the country, and writing vital, committed novels about it all. Was a time his gift for how ordinary people talked and thought translated into definitive statements about the United States; now it seems that all he uses it for is passing, fleeting music in otherwise earthbound productions. Passion Fish is extraordinary in its effortlessness; Honeydripper is likewise effortless, but it lacks brio, and, more so than any of Sayles's films before it, it doesn't have one single reason for existing. Even flat, incontestable disasters like Silver City had going for it that Sayles-ian liberal dementia, and it boasted a performance in which long-time collaborator Chris Cooper hilariously channelled George W.'s reptilian, dangerous/dull political vacuum. Hold up Honeydripper to the least of Sayles's pictures and discover that what he's learned about craft remains while that indigent fire has apparently guttered to wax and ash. Pointedly, at a period in our country where it seems that some of the activism Sayles has spent much of his art trying to drum up has finally begun to manifest itself in voter-turnout among the young, Sayles has produced his most flaccid, middling film. Maybe this is the contented corncob pipe after a hard day in the fields.

In Bruges (2008)

February 8, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*½/****
starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Clémence Poésy
written and directed by Martin McDonagh

Inbrugesby Walter Chaw An ugly piece of work, writer-director Martin McDonagh's feature debut In Bruges has about it an unshakeable air of unleavened unpleasantness. It starts with the framing conceit of little boys with their heads blown off: the first victim unlikely because, hey, you'd at least turn your head if shooting started in the next room, right?; the second unsavoury because it caps a running joke about little people that isn't funny in the least. (No small accomplishment for running jokes about midgets, I don't have to tell you.) Between, find Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as hitmen Ray and Ken, respectively, exiled to Bruges, Belgium after a London hit goes bad and forced to excrete witticisms in one another's company like Juno-spawned Pez dispensers. McDonagh's idea of profound profanity consists of Ray being very amused by midgets, fat Americans, and effete Canadians and Ken being sucked in by the medieval, touristy charms of sleepy Bruges; both await some word from their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes), himself busy doing a real convincing impersonation of Ben Kingsley's insane mobster from Sexy Beast. Funny how something can be both overwritten and underwritten, but there you have it. In Bruges posits the idea that our boys are in God's waiting room–not Florida, but some enchanted backwater, waiting for judgment on high for their sins while sightseeing ancient churches and contemplating Bosch. Ken takes the communion, Ray takes a piss, and Harry surfaces like a Cockney shark in a third act remarkable for its feckless cupidity.

The Band’s Visit (2007)

February 8, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Israel, Music, Romance, Theatrical

Bikur Ha-Tizmoret
***½/****
starring Shlomi Avraham, Saleh Bakri, Ronit Elkabetz, Sasson Gabai
written and directed by Eran Kolirin

by Walter Chaw I've been reading a lot of Thomas Friedman lately, mostly because I have glaring, embarrassing gaps in my education and popular, contemporary scholarship about our Middle East imbroglio is chief among them. I've read a good bit on The Crusades and on the wars we've waged during the two Bush administrations; what I haven't read is any extensive insight into the psyche of the Arab Street. Where better to start than through the erudition of a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner? I approached Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit in a different way, I realize, than I would have prior to my dip into Friedman's headspace–and was gratified, as I seldom have been, by how a juncture in my interests resulted in what could only be a richer film experience. The Band's Visit is already remarkable for its sensitivity and patience, but knowing a little of the tragic intractability of Israeli/Arab relations lends it an implacable weight of sorrow. I'm convinced that there's already a latent melancholy in the picture, but armed with just a gloss of Camp David, the Israeli/Egyptian conflict, suddenly all of the picture's travails–being shut out of the Cairo film festival and, at the last minute, the Abu Dhabi fest as well–take on this terrible weight of irony and hopelessness. Without showing anybody coming over to "the other side," as it were, The Band's Visit is about communication, understanding, and acceptance, its characters united in their difference in the quest for the indefinable sublime. It's the best kind of political film in that it's a work, without pretension, of essential humanity–and the best kind of sentimental film in that it earns its sentiment.

Atonement (2007) + The Kite Runner (2007)

December 25, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, France, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, UK, War

ATONEMENT
*½/****
starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Ian McEwan
directed by Joe Wright

THE KITE RUNNER
½*/****
starring Khalid Abdalla, Homayoun Ershadi, Shaun Toub, Saïd Taghmaoui
screenplay by David Benioff, based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini
directed by Marc Forster

Atonementby Walter Chaw No end-of-year sweepstakes would be complete without the requisite bushel of awards-baiting pabulum, rich with a nice, thick vein of glossy pandering. They're movies you're supposed to love: can't-miss, sure-fire formula flicks that bank on their sparkly casts and borrowed prestige the way blockbuster action flicks rely on special effects and the promise of mayhem. Reduce it down enough and the dreg at the bottom of the stew pot is still just making money–you don't reinvent the wheel by following a recipe, and indeed, a good 99% of movies in any given year don't boast of anything new. To say that you like something like August Rush is to say that you hate to be challenged by a film–that escapism is the first and last reason you go to the movies. Where something like Transformers wants to inspire a car- or girl-related boner, something like Atonement wants to ennoble the cineplex arthouse crowd into paroxysms of self-congratulation. It's the same feeling that compels awards bodies to vote for this stuff: mainstream passing as estimable while the real deal flies for the most part under the radar. The more assembly line chunder like Atonement and The Kite Runner gets chosen for Academy recognition, the fewer slots there are available for big studio pics that actually deliver the goods, like No Country for Old Men, The Darjeeling Limited, There Will Be Blood, and Sweeney Todd (presuming, of course, that an impressive number of remarkable studio flicks released earlier this calendar year are already lost causes).

Sunshine (2007) + The Simpsons Movie (2007)

December 17, 2007Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

SUNSHINE
***/****
starring Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Chris Evans, Troy Garity
screenplay by Alex Garland
directed by Danny Boyle

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
screenplay by James L. Brooks & Matt Groening & Al Jean & Ian Maxtone-Graham & George Meyer & David Mirkin & Mike Reiss & Mike Scully & Matt Selman & John Swartzwelder & Jon Vitti
directed by David Silverman

Sunshinesimpsonsby Walter Chaw I had the great fortune to revisit Michael Almereyda's astounding Hamlet the other night with a smart, engaged audience, and more than once during Danny Boyle's Sunshine it occurred to me that Almereyda should've directed it. Almereyda, after all, would've made the movie beautiful and intelligent–wouldn't have leaned on genre conventions like a late picture boogeyman too much like Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty (and Blade Runner's just one of the dozens of pictures the film cribs from). He would've had sufficient faith in the premise to not muck it up with one metaphor for the fall of man too many. Sunshine is gorgeous for much of its run, however, good enough to merit comparison to Soderbergh's Solaris (though not Tarkovsky's, mind you–it's never that introspective) in its careful juxtaposition of human frailty against the awesome, insensate inscrutability of the universe. Set in a not-too-distant future where the sun is suffering from the need for a little jump-start, the picture opens seven years after the first expedition to save the world, the badly-/poignantly-named "Icarus I", has disappeared and a second expedition carrying the last of Earth's fissionable material ("Icarus II", natch) has been dispatched. Once they've encountered the rescue beacon of their predecessor, the ship's crew of seven–three of them Asian, which is really kind of amazing (a fourth is Maori)–gradually comes to realize that they're on a mission to touch the face of God.

The Golden Compass (2007)

December 7, 2007Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Sam Elliott, Eva Green, Daniel Craig
screenplay by Chris Weitz, based on the novel by Philip Pullman
directed by Chris Weitz

Goldencompassby Walter Chaw The newest entry in the "what the fuck" hall of fame is Chris Weitz's deplorable, dull, nonsensical, unwatchable The Golden Compass, which comes packed to the gills with meaningless terms, arcane concepts, stupid names, and a narrative patchwork that plays like a game of "make-up" improvised by a hyperactive child. Arriving on a wave of controversy as right-wing hard-ons decry its anti-Christian tendencies (where were they for Beowulf?), the picture's full-on attack on good taste and coherent filmmaking are what they really should be protesting. Adherents will thrill, I suppose, although I doubt that atheists are as natively stupid as born-agains–but without a good working knowledge of the Pullman books upon which the film is based, I can't imagine anyone having a chance with this stuff. Impenetrable ain't the least of it. Weitz is completely outmatched by the material, trying too hard to cram all the gobbledygook about daemons and dust and witches and armoured bears he possibly can into every crevice available between the CGI sequences while leaving out huge, gaping expanses of necessary exposition in the process. If this wasn't bad enough, consider the sequence that begins with a 900 lb. polar bear wisely suggesting that a thin ice shelf can't support both his weight and that of his 80 lb. rider (sage, indeed)–thus necessitating their splitting up–and ends with said 900 lb. bear materializing out of nowhere to somehow surprise a bad guy from the front. Even with full knowledge of the Pullman books, the way the movie's put together is plodding, non-sequitous, inept.

Juno (2007)

December 7, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Teen, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman
screenplay by Diablo Cody
directed by Jason Reitman

Junoby Walter Chaw Brutally overwritten, smug, and self-indulgent to no discernible point, Jason Reitman’s disappointing Juno is an unfortunate attempt to marry Judd Apatow’s sleazy morality plays with a Kevin Smith pop-cultural gabber–the result being a ventriloquism tract in which virgin screenwriter (formerly blogger) Diablo Cody crams so many unlikely gluts of verbiage into so many sterile, undeveloped characters that the whole production is the ultimate act of masturbatory puppetry. The movie would be twice as funny with half as many wisecracks–it’s so stuffed that there are long moments of zero interplay as one person or another acts as mute sounding board to whoever’s reeling off a Dennis Miller-ism. Red-flag time when a film acts as both main attraction and audience. Ellen Page stars as the titular Juno McGuff, a Soupy Sales-referencing sixteen-year-old who finds herself pregnant by her nebbish boyfriend, Bleeker (Michael Cera). Exactly: What 16-year-old references Soupy Sales? What 66-year-old? Look to something like Heathers for how to write absurdist dialogue–that film along with Clerks the chief antecedent for Juno, which isn’t as good as either because it wears its hipster cred like a chip on its shoulder. It’s also not very good because even though it’s about teen pregnancy, abortion, and adoption, it’s about nothing so much as quirky teen romance, revealing itself to be inclined towards mining laughter from dorkiness and thus allaying itself, too (and in the worst possible way), with Napoleon Dynamite.

Margot at the Wedding (2007) + The Savages (2007)

November 30, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING
***½/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Black, John Turturro
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

THE SAVAGES
**½/****
starring Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco
written and directed by Tamara Jenkins

Margotby Walter Chaw As a big fan of Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming and The Squid and the Whale, I find myself jarred by his Rohmer-shrine Margot at the Wedding–not so much by its prickliness, but by how much that prickliness brings into harsh relief the clothed knife-blades in his previous work. It's easy to forget the young son in Squid telling his mother that she's ugly; I wonder if it isn't the lightness that tempers his first two pictures that's led Baumbach to craft a film full of the kind of stuff that elicits only the blackest laughter. There aren't any safety nets in Margot at the Wedding: though structurally (and a character's named "Pauline" to boot) it's Rohmer, in execution it's more than a bit Fassbinder, which is to say that it's a comedy of manners written with mean, acerbic precision, excoriating the educated bourgeois as intellectual leather freaks–sadomasochism as withering remarks and arch ripostes, a Dorothy Parker poem come to life. The Margot of the title, as played to alien, frostbitten perfection by Nicole Kidman, is a NEW YORKER contributor (and Jennifer Jason Leigh, as Margot's sister Pauline, played Mrs. Parker herself once upon a time) who's ventured out to wintry Long Island to talk her sister out of marrying schlub Malcolm (Jack Black). A tree growing onto the property of their bestial neighbours gives the film its trope and underclass antagonist, but Margot at the Wedding isn't a satire of the gulf that divides the intelligentsia from the unwashed so much it's as an observation that psychological pissing contests are pissing contests by any other name. The interludes in the picture are moments where Margot's boy Claude (Zane Pais) and eventually Margot herself peep on a couple engaged in mysterious carnal rites–sex of some sort, the dressing of a pig–that speaks to the idea that these hyper-educated people are divorced entire from their physical and native moral intelligence.

Beowulf (2007)

November 16, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
screenplay by Neil Gaiman & Roger Avary
directed by Robert Zemeckis

Beowulfby Walter Chaw The Old English epic gets what feels like its twentieth adaptation in the last couple of years alone with Robert Zemeckis's Polar Express-ized–which is to say, digitally rotoscoped to distraction and peopled with pixel phantoms that look like dead-eyed Toussaud versions of the actors voicing them–Beowulf. Not that there aren't a few pretty cool moments (especially in IMAX 3D, the six-story screen doing wonders for the masturbatory shazam interludes), but the whole thing is decidedly unthrilling and so technologically interesting that it overwhelms any connection we might otherwise have with the story. I spent a lot of energy admiring the whiz-bang and almost none giving much of a shit about anything else. What won me over at the end is that it's completely ballsy in its anti-Christian tactic, suggesting a few weeks before The Golden Compass debuts that the general sea change against the evangelicals, if not predicted by the cinema, is at least reflected by it. A scene where a bishop played by John Malkovich is carried on a cross from his dragon-levelled church, hissing about "sins of the fathers," is almost as tricky as another where good king Beowulf (Ray Winstone) announces that the "Christ God" has done away with all heroes, replacing them with "fear and shame." I prefer my heresy in the subtler vintage minted by stuff like Matthew Robbins's Dragonslayer, but what the hell: if Hollywood's going to fire a shot across the Conservative bow, I'd rather they do it this way than with something like Lions for Lambs. Also cool is the casting of Crispin Glover as evil troll Grendel.

Lions for Lambs (2007)

November 9, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, War

½*/****
starring Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Derek Luke
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan
directed by Robert Redford

Lionsforlambsby Walter Chaw Stilted, awkward, an Ayn Rand screed complete with straw men and pontiffs poised to burn them down, Robert Redford's smug, self-satisfied liberal weltschmerz anthem Lions for Lambs is tailor-made for festival-season standing ovations. It's the prime example of why a lot of Republicans get away with calling Hollywood–the single highest concentration of Big Business and corporate interest outside the Beltway–a lefty hotbed of pinko nonsense carried on a cloud of flatulent hot air. It's a prime example, too, of why it's so hard to vote for Democrats even when the alternative is the GOP. Put this one on the shelf between Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe and this year's deplorable Rendition–movies so earnest in their chest-pounding pontification that it's impossible to imagine on the one hand who could be converted by them and on the other who could resist changing their party affiliation out of sheer embarrassment. In this one, the call is for activism in whatever form said activism might take just for the sake of doing something, damnit. To quote a guy writing in the 1920s, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Martian Child (2007) + Bee Movie (2007)

November 1, 2007Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Theatrical

MARTIAN CHILD
½*/****
starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Sophie Okonedo, Joan Cusack
screenplay by Seth E. Bass & Jonathan Tolins, based on the novel The Martian Child by David Gerrold
directed by Menno Meyjes

BEE MOVIE
*/****
screenplay by Jerry Seinfeld and Spike Feresten & Barry Marder & Andy Robin
directed by Simon J. Smith, Steve Hickner

Martianbeeby Walter Chaw If not for a moment where John Cusack delivers in his Cusack Patter™ a speech about the beauty of love in a temporary world, there would be nothing at all to recommend Martian Child. It's a heartless bit of heartfelt pap wherein widower and sci-fi author David (Cusack™) decides on an apparent whim to adopt crazy-ass little boy Dennis (Bobby Coleman) from a day-care/orphanage that should have its license revoked. The little kid looks and acts like Michael Jackson, complete with DayGlo complexion, parasol, and breathy squeak-talk from the Jennifer Lopez school of urgency, turning Coleman's into the most irritating performance since the last time Lopez was in anything. Closer to the point, the screenplay is a series of non-reactive statements expected to be taken at face value: that this dude would adopt a quirkily-disabled kleptomaniac freakshow and feel the sting of parental devotion, for instance, or that the two of them would teach each other to, gulp, love again. It all plays like an Oliver Sacks case study by the end, a Paul Simon adult-contemporary story-song–The Boy on the Specimen Tray and the Dog Reaction Shot.

Rendition (2007)

October 19, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Peter Sarsgaard, Meryl Streep
screenplay by Kelley Sane
directed by Gavin Hood

Renditionby Walter Chaw It plays the right political/philosophical card for my money, this idea that torture is morally wrong and suspect as an interrogation tool, but it does it in such a patronizing way that by the end I felt as though I'd had a nice, leisurely blow-job. By a toothless whore, to boot. Here I was thinking it was the Neo-Conservatives who believe their constituency to be composed of dim-witted children in desperate need of fables with moral resolutions. Reese Witherspoon is plucky Izzy, the very pregnant mother of an adorable 6-year-old whose movie-star handsome husband Anwar (Omar Metwally), the whitest-looking Arab on God's green Earth, is spirited away by the evil C.I.A. and stashed in a secret prison in North Africa. There, he's tortured for a week while observer/novice analyst Douglas–I shit you not–FREE-MAN (Jake Gyllenhaal) develops an audience-surrogate conscience and James Bond's brass balls. Izzy uses her resources, namely senatorial aide Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), to try to figure out what happened to hubby, while the Evilest Person In The World, Corrinne Whitman (Meryl Streep), plays M to Freeman's Bond. As a native corrective, Gavin Hood's tedious, childish Rendition also offers the Muslim side of things with the soap-opera saga of little girl lost Fatima (Zineb Oukach) falling in with a plucky lad (Moa Khouas) who happens to have lost a brother to the tender interrogation ministrations of evil CIA collaborator Fawal (Yigal Naor), who happens to be the little girl's…wait for it…father. In defense of Hood and his follow-up to Oscar-winner Tsotsi, at least Rendition is just exactly as bad as his first, critically-beloved picture. I predict a different reception for this one, however, because there aren't any black people to feel superior to in this film and thus forgive it its fervent jerking-off.

Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)

October 19, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Halle Berry, Benicio Del Toro, David Duchovny, Omar Benson Miller
screenplay by Allan Loeb
directed by Susanne Bier

Thingswelostby Walter Chaw I love Danish director Susanne Bier's Open Hearts, the second Dogme95 picture by a woman and one of the most affecting tragic romances I've ever seen. (Much of its power is attributable to a scene where a man, newly paralyzed, dreams of reaching across a small space to touch his lover's hand.) I thought, even given the middling quality of her follow-ups Brothers and After the Wedding, that we'd found in Bier a distinct, exciting talent, an artist interested in charting the course of grief described in the coming-apart of complementary halves and doing so with minimal fanfare or melodrama. It usually would take more than one picture for me to lose the religion, but Bier's done it in brilliant fashion with her English-language debut, Things We Lost in the Fire. Blame her screenwriter Allan Loeb for a goodly portion of this glorious debacle, one that features an early exchange in which a father defines "fluorescent" for his six-year-old son as "lit from within," leading the boy, of course, to pipe up with, "Do you think that I'm lit from within?" Not that Bier escapes accountability: Refusing to let go of her Dogme flirtation, she shoots most of this gas-trap in total silence and extreme close-up, marking this boilerplate tearjerker as uniquely, unwatchably pretentious. It's also maudlin, mawkish, unintentionally hilarious, and utterly devoid of human emotion. The word I'm searching for, I guess, is "alien." After the extraordinary humanism of Open Hearts, to see Bier at the wheel of this infernal exercise in clearing off the mantle is nothing short of horrible.

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

October 19, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola & Jason Schwartzman
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw If there's a Wes Anderson cult, I guess you should sign me up. His latest, The Darjeeling Limited, represents to me a maturing artist grappling with the stagnation of the relationship between fathers and sons. This notion that the relationship's reconciliation can only be arrived at posthumously is devastating–not because it's bleak, but because more often than not it holds true. Accordingly, Anderson's picture only has the suggestion of a father (unlike the surrogate father of The Life Aquatic or the redeemable father of The Royal Tenenbaums) at its beginning and maybe a spectre of a father played in cameo by Bill Murray, chasing down the titular train in the film's already-emotional prologue. I've offered that my appreciation of Anderson's work in the past has necessitated multiple viewings (if I'd had a second look at The Royal Tenenbaums prior to composing my year-end list in 2001, it wouldn't have had much competition for the top spot), but found The Darjeeling Limited to be affecting from the start. Something to do with a familiarity with Anderson, perhaps, or with Anderson growing up from the precocious scamp of Rushmore into the ravaged visage of Francis Whitman (Owen Wilson), the eldest of the three Whitman brothers, called to India after a year's estrangement on a quest for spiritual discovery in Satyajit Ray country. (Indeed, the film's score is cobbled together from snippets of Ray's music as well as a few choice cuts from The Kinks–the use of "This Time Tomorrow" from Lola vs. the Powerman & the Money-Go-Round, Pt. 1 is nearly as exquisite as the use of the Rolling Stones' "Play With Fire" late in the picture.) More probably, I connected instantly with The Darjeeling Limited, a film about mourning the death of a father, because I've been doing the same thing–imperfectly, badly–for almost exactly four years now.