Theatrical Archives - Page 37 of 65

Lions for Lambs (2007)

November 9, 20072000s, 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

by 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, 20072000s, 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

by 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, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

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

by 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, 20072000s, 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

by 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, 2007****/****, 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.

Eastern Promises (2007)

September 26, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Viggo Moretensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl
screenplay by Steve Knight
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw As executed by our pre-eminent insect anthropologist, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is more fairytale than thriller, one that finds new muse Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the rising star of an émigré Russian mob family taken root in the heart of London within the red velvet-lined walls of a restaurant innocuously-/romantically-named “Trans-Siberian.” Self-described as “wolfish,” this pack is led by grandfatherly Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who’s disappointed with his ineffectual son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and looking to replace him with a surrogate heir. The rot of that familial discord throws its roots back to ferocious opening minutes that see first a vicious throat-slashing, then a fourteen-year-old, pregnant prostitute haemorrhaging on the floor of a drugstore after she’s told that, for Methadone, the pharmacist will need a prescription. Cronenberg’s London is a cess seething beneath a veneer of “normalcy”; regarded as a toxic tabernacle in Spider, the city is transformed here into a garish, meticulously theatrical wonderland. The central problem of the picture has a lot to do with the idea that Cronenberg has again taken a pre-existing script and reordered it along distinctly Cronenbergian lines–that what must have read initially as a sociological text on another facet of the immigrant experience (much like screenwriter Steve Knight’s Dirty Pretty Things) now plays like one of Cronenberg’s investigations into the difficulty of parsing concepts like “normal” and “family” in the crushing crucible of bugs pretending to be human among humans.

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

September 7, 20072000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Western

***/****
starring Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Peter Fonda, Gretchen Mol
screenplay by Halsted Welles and Michael Brandt & Derek Haas, based on the short story by Elmore Leonard
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw The distance–chronologically, ideologically–between the release of James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma and Andrew Dominick's looming The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford strikes me as identical to the space that connects Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch with Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand. The exhaustion in our popular culture feels the same; the nihilism feels the same; the fatalism with which a lot of us look at our political prospects (the incumbents are bums, the insurgents are morons) feels the same. You compare Peckinpah's criminal heroes, burnt by the sun into animated saddle bags, motivated by gold and orgies to go to their doom in blasted, godless places south of some metaphorical border, to Fonda's retinue of burnt-out, disillusioned, disenfranchised yippies and graceless lugs, and you're able to crystallize somehow a picture of how, even in the space of a single administration, the coarse diving bell of our basest natures is collapsed by too much terrible knowledge. (Compare Fonda in his own film to Fonda's wonderful cameo in this one–the dream is dead, indeed.) You can only fall back on how natural it is to be a bastard for so long before philosophical reflection rears its ugly head. The internal progression of Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde provides the template of this motion all by itself: The midpoint of that film, as Bonnie visits her mother on a soft-focus, sepia-smeared dirt farm, represents the generational gulf, sure, but also the turning point between the innocent bloodshed of that picture's celebratory first half and the strive towards domestic "normalcy" of its doomed second. I wonder if what lingers (and what initially so offended) about Bonnie & Clyde wasn't the gore and the sex but instead the suggestion that the way things are, just the act of growing old murders the spirit.

Halloween (2007)

August 30, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Malcolm McDowell, Sherri Moon Zombie, Scout Taylor-Compton, William Forsythe
screenplay by Rob Zombie, based on the screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw If Rob Zombie ever decides to direct a horror movie, watch out. To date, up to and including his remake of John Carpenter's legendary Halloween, he's presented us a series of family melodramas peppered with modest genre references and exploitation flourishes. His best film, The Devil's Rejects, is widely misread and underestimated, the most common complaint being that it isn't scary. It's a lot like complaining that Ordinary People isn't scary. But I'd challenge anyone to come up with many more ebullient, honest moments of uplift than the conclusion of that film (set to "Free Bird" of all things), as Zombie's miscreant clan makes a bid to let their freak flag fly in the middle of the American desert. His pictures are throwbacks to the Seventies in more ways than their relationship to drive-in and grindhouse fare: they're lovely odes to a sense of frustrated possibilities in a United States suffering the first throes of post-Sixties culture shock. It goes hand-in-hand with the Nixonian westerns littering the popular culture in the new millennium; no surprise to me that this administration–and the attendant feeling of paranoia and cynicism befouling our air–encourages this kind of revisionism, and really, who better than Zombie to helm an update of Carpenter's seminal slasher?

Stardust (2007) + Interview (2007)

August 14, 20072000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Netherlands, Robert De Niro, Romance, Theatrical, UK

STARDUST
***½/****
starring Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Sienna Miller, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman
directed by Matthew Vaughn

INTERVIEW
*/****
starring Sienna Miller, Steve Buscemi
screenplay by David Schecter and Steve Buscemi, based on the film by Theo Van Gogh
directed by Steve Buscemi

by Walter Chaw I do wonder about films that don't seem to be about anything, but I'll say this at the outset: Matthew Vaughn's Stardust, based on a book by Neil Gaiman, isn't about anything at all–and it's wonderful. Far from empty-headed, though, Stardust is a deeply meaningful series of sweet-nothings, wholly apolitical even in a macho supporting character revealed as a cross-dresser and hair stylist; and by its end, it wins not in spite of being so exuberant in its indulgence of flamboyant clichés, but because it is. It's so much better than the trailers and Gaiman's track record as a novelist (his métier is decidedly rooted in the comics) would lead you to believe, while the inevitable comparisons to The Princess Bride are misleading because The Princess Bride is a piece of shit. A beloved piece of shit, but a piece of shit just the same. On the contrary, Stardust is extremely well-made despite an opening half-hour that boasts of a few too many long establishing shots, directed with real snap by Guy Ritchie's former producer Matthew Vaughn (who did the same with Layer Cake) and executed by a stellar cast that includes a literally incandescent Claire Danes as a fallen star named Yvaine and Michelle Pfeiffer as a hideous bitch goddess, which, given that Stardust follows on the heels of Hairspray, appears to be the vehicle of her late-career comeback. More difficult to embrace is Robert De Niro as the film's Dread Pirate Roberts, a fencing mentor who happens, in this incarnation, to be a ballroom-dancing guru as well. The instinct is to recoil, but damned if it isn't the first De Niro performance in his self-parodic period that's both spot-on in its auto-satire and funny to boot.

Reign Over Me (2007) + TMNT (2007)|TMNT – DVD

August 5, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Hong Kong, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

REIGN OVER ME
**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Jada Pinkett Smith, Liv Tyler
written and directed by Mike Binder

TMNT
*/****
written and directed by Kevin Munroe

by Walter Chaw In response to the charge that critics are "downers" because they're too judgmental, a colleague and friend said on a panel that I participated in that some films only deserve judgment. It's a wonderfully bleak declaration, and dead on–think of it as an expansion of Pauline Kael's belief that no one ever takes the time to bash terrible pictures. But there's more to it than simply that brittle shattering of cinema's impregnable mythic mystique. I think certain movies deflect even judgment–movies that are the exact equivalent of, say, Michael Bolton and Kenny G collaborating on a cover of a Richard Marx song. Rail against them if you must, but there's no sport in it, and definitely no swaying of the assembled masses. There are films that are what they are, deserving neither praise nor condemnation in providing precisely the comfort of a tattered terry cloth robe worn ritualistically until disintegration. It's possible to meticulously, ruthlessly, intellectually deconstruct the aesthetic and functional properties of a favourite pair of sneakers, you know, but it's masturbatory and redundant and like swatting a fly with a Buick. I suspect that deep down everyone knows films like Reign Over Me and TMNT are as worthless as a plug nickel, that their appeal lies entirely in the fact that they'll present no surprises along with their usual meek payload of cheap emotional prattle and pocket uplift. And I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with that, either–I'm just saying I feel like I don't have much more to say after reviewing the same fucking movie about a dozen times a year.

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

August 2, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, France, Germany, Mystery, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Joan Allen
screenplay by Tony Gilroy and George Nolfi, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw I look at the first film in this very fine trilogy as Jason Bourne embodying Harrison Ford’s Deckard character from Blade Runner: someone with hidden potential and a certain confusion about his place in the world–and the kind of figure Matt Damon is best at portraying, as it happens. I see the second film as Bourne-as-Roy Batty: robotic, violent, inexorable, and at the end of his string, valuing life and looking to make what amends he can. This third film, The Bourne Ultimatum, directed again by Paul Greengrass and welcoming several key players (Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, Damon, screenwriter Tony Gilroy, DP Oliver Wood) back into the fold, ties both strings together: Bourne inhabiting his potential as something of an unparalleled killing machine while, simultaneously, becoming more human in his machine-like purposefulness. If there’s a feeling we’ve been here before, mark that down as the inevitable side-effect of staying just a little too long with a series that, to this point, had yet to make any missteps, minor or otherwise. Consequently this film, more than the other two, feels like a straight line: less improvisation, more inevitability, all of it leading to the moment where our hero, the merciless assassin, decides whether his training to be an instrument overrules his instinct to be a human. It can’t be a surprise anymore, so all that’s left is that it be true.

Hairspray (2007)

July 19, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Nikki Blonsky, John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Queen Latifah
screenplay by Leslie Dixon
directed by Adam Shankman

by Walter Chaw It's pretty easy to take the neo-hipster stance of having been there when Divine ate dog shit and, because of status conferred by said endurance of John Waters at his most insouciantly "fuck you," to denounce the Broadway-ification of his already-mainstream-courting Hairspray–now turned into a movie based on a musical based on the original movie–as "Waters-lite." Except that Waters's satire at its best has always been a gloss on cults of pop (this is a guy who made an iconic cameo on "The Simpsons", for God's sake)–and after Polyester, all of his movies run like book for the plastic-fantastic of the Great White Way anyway. Artificiality is actually the point, affectedness another; like Italian, the only way to speak the language is to exaggerate past the point of embarrassment. Still, the key to Waters is the requirement that by assembling a collection of misfits to play his assembly of misfits, not a one of them takes to their duty ironically. Waters is the same kind of archivist as Quentin Tarantino in that way: the casting can be interpreted as a post-modern joke, but the performances need to be true to the essential nostalgia driving the casting. John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, in other words, needed very much to play it as straight as John Travolta is capable of playing it.

Live Free or Die Hard (2007) + Transformers (2007)

July 3, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Michael Bay, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller

LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD
***½/****
starring Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Mark Bomback
directed by Len Wiseman

TRANSFORMERS
*/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Jon Voight
screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw I remember the way I felt as a lad of fifteen when I saw John McTiernan's Die Hard, that tingly excitement of not being able to figure out how we were going to get out of this fine mess. The bad guys were smarter than the good guys, their plan was perfect, the henchmen were ruthless eurotrash, and the hero didn't have shoes. Understand it wasn't fear that the baddies would win, but trust that the filmmakers knew what they were doing even though their methods were mysterious: I could let myself relax because the heavy-lifting was already done for me. I felt the same way as Live Free or Die Hard (hereafter Die Hard 4) unspooled its tale of computer hackers running the world from the basements of their mothers' homes: if the bad guys could hijack anything controlled by a computer (that is, pretty much everything), then what hope would a bald, 52-year-old, Luddite cop with an estranged family and a worn-out smirk have? The film plays on that despair and, unlike in the second (awful) and third (excellent) instalments of this series, John McClane (Bruce Willis) seems fresh again, a walking revelation that even action heroes get old and obsolete to the point where they're cautionary tales for young studs and metaphors for their own careers. Remember Harrison Ford in Firewall? Instead of acknowledging that the world eventually passes you by, leaving you embittered and bellicose (as Die Hard 4 shows), Ford's character in Firewall is not only good with a knuckle sandwich, but also a "with it" computer stud. As miscalculations go, that's more pathetic than most.

Sicko (2007)

July 3, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Theatrical

**/****
directed by Michael Moore

by Walter Chaw There's a moment that stands out in my mind about Fahrenheit 9/11, which tied with The Passion of the Christ as my pick for the worst film of 2004 (one for the left, one for the right): it's the moment when Michael Moore, in the middle of a riff about the "coalition of the willing" backing the United States into Iraq, descends through archival footage and rinky music to mock the countries that were actually our allies. The point being that America pretty much took matters into their own hands while breaking international law and flaunting its power over a largely impotent United Nations–and the effect being that Moore is a complete fucking asshole so concentrated on making a narrow, obvious point that he handily proves the widespread perception of Americans as xenophobic, arrogant, ignorant, and loudmouthed. Going after the Bush administration is enough like shooting fish in a barrel that most of Bush's own party has turned against him (not helping, probably, is that a majority of soldiers losing their lives in Iraq come from economically-disadvantaged families). Likewise, going after lax gun-control laws and a society of fear following the Columbine High School shootings; likewise corporate superciliousness in the rise and fall of industry in industrial America. I think, in other words, that Moore has made a living shooting fish in barrels, and that his latest target in Sicko, the United States' inhuman health care industry (and its lobbyists–four per congressman!, Moore informs), is just another one of those arguments no one is taking the other side on.

Ratatouille (2007)

June 29, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Pixar, Theatrical

****/****
written and directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Brad Bird’s latest film Ratatouille is the auteur’s affirmation that it’s possible, no matter the station, to find genius among the rabble. It’s charmingly egalitarian, this idea that any class or creed can produce the next Einstein or Baryshnikov, and it seems a direct response to the critics of his The Incredibles who would say that that superhero film’s mantra of “if everyone is super, no one is” is an embodiment of intolerance and classism. Ratatouille‘s answer is a lot like the one offered by Bird’s feature debut, The Iron Giant: that not only is it possible to overcome one’s basic programming, but also that choice supersedes predestination and, moreover, that a basic morality governs the actions of all things. A lot to put on the doorstep of a film about a rat, Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), who wishes he could be a chef in the kitchen of idol Gasteau (Brad Garrett)–but Bird, in the course of just three films (and stints with “The Simpsons” and “The Critic”), has forged a pretty formidable ideology based on, of all alien things, the sociology of common sense. Some people are more gifted than others, some people are assholes, and most people are idiots; just as an understanding of race and gender comes with the acceptance of basic differences, so, too, does understanding within a culture only come through a similar acceptance that some people are super and others are simply background.

A Mighty Heart (2007)

June 27, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Irrfan Khan, Archie Panjabi
screenplay by John Orloff, based on the book by Mariane Pearl
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Walter Chaw An avowed Michael Winterbottom fan, I think he's amazing even when he fails. I marvel at his Thomas Hardy adaptations–the devastating Jude and the redemptive The Claim (his take on The Mayor of Casterbridge)–and I hadn't thought, before I actually saw him do it, that anyone but Charlie Kaufman would have a shot at turning Tristram Shandy into a viable film. When the extremely prolific Winterbottom decided to explore how music and sex evolve sympathetically in culture, he turned out a little unofficial trilogy (24 Hour Party People, Code 46, 9 Songs) in the span of two years. And now that he's become politicized–something he would say he always was, with 1997's vérité Welcome to Sarajevo as evidence–he's turned out, in the same span, In This World, The Road to Guantanamo, and now A Mighty Heart. This is the story of Mariane Pearl, widow of WALL STREET JOURNAL reporter Daniel Pearl, who was infamously beheaded while covering Al-Qaeda in Pakistan in the early days leading up to our current boondoggle. As that fan of Winterbottom's, I'm inclined to give the picture a benefit of a doubt I nevertheless wonder if it deserves. First run through my head, A Mighty Heart strikes me as pointless and unsurprising; Winterbottom is of course a better anthropologist than he is a political philosopher: if he's trying to apply Donald Symons's models of cultural evolution to ethics instead of more immediately compatible pursuits (music, or literature), then what's emerged from the experiment is the revelation that ethics and morality appear to have nothing to do with the base nature of man–and, moreover, that Angelina Jolie will never be Nicole Kidman in her ability to be both herself and someone else.

1408 (2007)

June 22, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical

*½/****
starring John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Mary McCormack, Tony Shalhoub
screenplay by Matt Greenberg and Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, based on the story by Stephen King
directed by Mikael Håfström

by Walter Chaw Boy, do I like John Cusack. He has scary, earnest intensity. No one does the nervous pit-pat like he does; no one else could have been Lloyd Dobler, or Martin Blank. Then there’s The Sure Thing, Better Off Dead, Being John Malkovich, and hey, I liked The Ice Harvest (most of it, anyway). And boy, I guess Samuel L. Jackson is sometimes not terrible. The one scene he and Cusack have together in the prestige horror flick 1408 plays like seriomythic garbage-pop poetry: everything’s good–the cadence, the words; what I’m saying is that I was well and truly on board with this dumbathon all the way up to the point where Jackson’s hotel manager Olin (and as an aside, King has a special place in my heart for opening The Shining with “Officious little prick,” referring to a different hotel manager) offers that the titular room in question isn’t haunted, it’s just an “evil fucking room.” Cusack is haunted landmark guide writer Mike (the landmark guides aren’t haunted, and neither is he, he documents haunted locations…never mind), not only a bit of a lush who looks like he’s gained a few pounds on his liquid diet but a surfer, too, making this one of a sudden slew of films to deal with surfing (Surf’s Up, Evan Almighty, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer) while providing 1408 (it adds up to “13,” get it?) its Jacob’s Ladder/”Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” escape clause. Yes, it’s that kind of film–what kind of film did you think it was going to be?

Surf’s Up (2007)

June 12, 20072000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Sports, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Don Rhymer and Ash Brannon & Chris Buck & Chris Jenkins
directed by Ash Brannon & Chris Buck

by Walter Chaw I guess it's fair to say that Ash Brannon (Toy Story 2) and Chris Buck's mockumentary Surf's Up is a successful send-up of the Endless Summer-style documentary recently revived by Stacy Peralta's Riding Giants–but its triumph as such is relegated to so microscopic a genre that its usefulness as satire is negligible. It might delight a few guys who revere Bruce Brown's waterlogged hagiographies or, closer to the vein, the handful of folks who'll actually recognize that surf legends Kelly Slater and Rob Machado make cameos–but we're a long way here from a roomful of toys coming to life when their owner is gone, and while it's tempting to laud Surf's Up for being ambitious, it's frustrating that the picture has to dedicate a tedious amount of time to the usual slapstick gags just to apologize for its obscure premise. Far from condemning it as the next Shrek, though, I'd say the worst thing about Surf's Up is that it's clever enough to leave you expecting more–and inoffensive enough (unless scenes of a primitive tribe of cannibal penguins can somehow be traced back to Native-fear flicks or intolerance towards Polynesians) to leave you wishing some of the "nuggets" its anachronistic Chicken Joe (Jon Heder, in the first performance of his career that didn't leave me wanting to punch his mother) mentions were in more obvious display in the filmmakers.

Knocked Up (2007)

June 6, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

***/****
starring Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann
written and directed by Judd Apatow

by Walter Chaw As a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Judd Apatow’s work with Paul Feig on “Freaks and Geeks”, I mark in his solo efforts (The 40 Year Old Virgin and now Knocked Up) a preoccupation with going to Hell. (“Freaks and Geeks”, on the other hand, is mainly about not drowning whilst wallowing in hell.) I mean that not only theologically but also biologically and emotionally–Apatow’s are comedies about worrying that you’re not where you’re meant to be at certain milestones in your life and, moreover, that you might never get there. Being 40 the critical point in his last picture, here it’s articulated in an exchange between slacker king Ben (Seth Rogen) and his sad-eyed father (Harold Ramis), where the expectations of embracing responsibility are passed as fear and regret from a man to his son.

Shrek the Third (2007)

May 17, 20072000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Eddie Murphy, Family, Fantasy, Japan, Romance, Theatrical

½*/****
screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman and Chris Miller & Aron Warner
directed by Chris Miller

by Walter Chaw A bad franchise reaches its nadir as DreamWorks Animation's flat-awful Shrek the Third (hereafter Shrek 3) tackles the King Arthur mythos in eighty unwatchable minutes of thunderously boring and occasionally moralizing shit, puke, and hitting gags. The only thing mildly entertaining in the whole mess is a prolonged death scene for a frog followed by a chorus of the things singing a Wings song–entertaining, though not in any way inspired or satirical. As calling the movie dumb would constitute a recommendation for people actually interested in seeing it, better to call it the kind of life-suck where you can feel the irretrievable minutes siphoning out your eyes. To say that children would enjoy it is a smokescreen for the mentally-underdeveloped and emotionally immature to indulge in lowest-common-denominator slapstick and the type of hollow banter that passes for wit in great swaths of greater primate societies. All else fails and toss in a cover of Heart's "Barracuda" by that champion of women's rights and humps Fergie–paired in facile shorthand with a throwaway gag featuring one of the pantheon of fairy tale princesses burning her bra. (Describing it is already more funny and clever than the action itself is in the film.) Prescribing medieval Ever After revisionist feminism to something as essentially useless and inert as Shrek 3 is jarring to the point of total incoherence. If anything, this film is the prime example of what happens when the aim of crafting something for the express purpose of entertaining dullards, mental defectives, and toddlers results in something so middlebrow that it tends toward a vacuum. In its "defense," it's more likely to cause naps than to cause hyperactivity.