Smokin’ Aces (2007) + Seraphim Falls (2007)

January 26, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War, Western

SMOKIN' ACES
½*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Common, Andy Garcia
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

SERAPHIM FALLS
*/****
starring Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, Angie Harmon, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Abby Everett Jaques & David Von Ancken
directed by David Von Ancken

by Walter Chaw Director Joe Carnahan replicates a heart attack in the prologue of Narc, and David Von Ancken, in the action-packed opening to his feature debut Seraphim Falls, simulates a mildly hysterical bout of narcolepsy–but more on that later. Carnahan's third film, Smokin' Aces, is drawing a lot of unfavourable comparisons to Guy Ritchie's gangster sagas, but the real lineage can be traced to whatever strain of viral ADD infected Tony Scott. The film is so like Scott's Domino in its visual affectations and uniform incompetence that the two pictures could exchange scenes willy-nilly without losing a step. (Compare it to Wayne Kramer's similarly canted Running Scared for a mini-primer on when lawless misanthropy and the coked-up editor aesthetic can be wielded with delighted, visceral purpose as opposed to simply wielded.) Ultimately, Smokin' Aces is little more than a parade of sad "didn't you used to be…" stunt cameos installed for the missing "edge" that buckets of blood, rains of bullets, and a few power tools seem incapable of manifesting. With Narc, Carnahan showed real growth from his directorial debut (Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane, which is actually not unlike the new one at all). Now he's just showing off.

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.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

December 29, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Mexico, Spain, Theatrical, War

****/****
starring Ariadna Gil, Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú
written and directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw Brutal and ignoble, the antithesis of romantic, the violence in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth slaps metal against flesh like the flat of a hand against a steel table. It's the only element of the picture that isn't lush, that isn't laden with the burnished archetype of Catholic superstition as it exists in eternal suspension with the pagan mythologies it cannibalized. By itself, this seems a metaphor for the pain and the magic of how fable turns the inevitability of coming-of-age into ritual. An early scene where hero girl Ofelia (Ivana Baquero)–a storyteller equal parts experientially innocent and allegorically savvy, making her the manifestation of del Toro's ideal avatar–tells her prenatal brother a story about a rose that blooms nightly on a mountain of thorns touches in one ineffably graceful movement all the picture's themes of immortality, aspiration, isolation, and the promise of escape held, sadistically, just out of reach. There's something of the myth of Tantalus in Ofelia's tale, as much as there is of Lewis Carroll's Alice and the sagas of parental absence by the Brothers Grimm, which surface in the premise of a young girl traveling, as the film opens, with her pregnant mother into the war-torn Spanish countryside during Franco's rule to join her wicked stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi López) at his remote outpost. Ofelia will be reminded repeatedly throughout the film that there's no such thing as justice or innocence left in the world, and that the best intentions are crushed by cynicism and rage. The question left as the picture closes has to do with whether Ofelia's taken the lesson to heart, to say nothing of del Toro–or us.

Dreamgirls (2006)

December 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Eddie Murphy, Musical, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé Knowles, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover
screenplay by Bill Condon, based on the play by Tom Eyen
directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Hailed as one of the more innovatively-staged musicals in the modern pantheon of such entertainments, Dreamgirls, transferred to the big screen, is nothing special in the way of something trying way too hard to dazzle. It’s the plain girl swathed in a gallon of makeup: there’s so much misdirection that you actually try harder to dig up a foundation that can’t bear the scrutiny. Said base for Dreamgirls is of course one of the most successful Broadway musicals (6 Tonys, 1,522 performances) from an era that counts “Les Miz”, Andrew Lloyd Weber’s dreadful operettas, and, what, “A Chorus Line”(?), among its chief rivals. You want to attribute its Broadway success to its spinning stage, choreographed and motorized $3.2M tower set, and coy deconstruction of bitch-goddess Diana Ross and her Supremes, but it’s hard not to wonder if it merely benefits from the relative quality of its competition. Then again, its success is likely the by-product of a fairly consistent mass appetite for cookie-cutter musical biopics, which have been self-satirized to near-total inconsequence first by VH1’s “Behind the Music” series, then to quickly-diminishing returns at the multiplex by Ray and Walk the Line.

Lady in the Water (2006) + Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)|Lady in the Water [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

December 18, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Revenge, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

LADY IN THE WATER
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bob Balaban, Jeffrey Wright
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Chinjeolhan geumjassi
****/****
starring Lee Yeong-ae, Choi Min-sik, Kim Shi-hoo, Kwon Yea-young
written and directed by Park Chanwook

by Walter Chaw The creeping, inescapable feeling is that M. Night Shyamalan would like to be known as “M. Christ Shyamalan”: a guy who wants you to drink the Kool-Aid; a messiah with a shrinking flock preaching a platform that his increasingly deluded, astonishingly arrogant fables are actually themselves the secret to world peace. He claims to hear voices–the first couple of times he did so (here in the stray interview, there in The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, that abhorrent mock-documentary he did for the Sci-Fi Channel), I thought he was kidding. Hell, the first couple of times he did it, he probably was kidding. But I don’t think he’s kidding anymore. And there’s no longer any currency in playing this ethereal shaman card. Prancing about like a mystic while shitting away millions of other people’s money isn’t a pastime with longevity: it’s something only a zealot would do. I think he’s gone off the deep end, hubris first, overfed to bloating on a steady diet of his own press and the tender ministrations of yes-men too afraid to set off Shyamalan’s diseased persecution complex by telling him that while he might be good at a few things, Lady in the Water was unsalvageable. When Disney executives did approximately that, Shyamalan took his ball and went across the street to Warner Brothers.

The Holiday (2006)

December 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Jack Black
written and directed by Nancy Meyers

Holidayby Walter Chaw There are bad movies, and then there are Nancy Meyers movies (first What Women Want, followed by the similarly excrescent Something’s Gotta Give): chick flicks in the most damning, insulting sense of the patronizing term and reason enough to question the wisdom of ever spending money to see a movie. If you go to Meyers’s latest, not only are you about to watch what is easily the worst movie of the year–you’re most likely going to do it in the company of people who’ll actually like it. The Holiday is appallingly written and icky besides in that familiar way of this brand of Love Actually/The Family Stone yuletide romantic refuse, casting Cameron Diaz and Jude Law as lovers fucking away the hours inside a Thomas Kincaid painting while Diaz’s frumpy house-swap buddy, played by Kate Winslet, finds meaning in Santa Monica by propping up a fossil (Eli Wallach) and falling for a James Horner-esque composer of horrible soundtracks (Jack Black). Parliament on the Thames is featured as prominently as the Pacific Coast Highway to underscore either how vacuous the filmmakers are or how stupid they think the audience is while Hans Zimmer’s soul-sucking, teddy bears-humping score saps away the last hints of credibility anyone has after participating in this gingerbread death march. If the opening voiceover narration by Winslet’s lovelorn Iris isn’t warning enough, consider that the narrative crutch used by Diaz’s emetic movie trailer editor Amanda is a series of fake movie trailers about Amanda’s romantic imbroglios.

Eragon (2006)

December 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Hungary, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Edward Speleers, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Guillory, John Malkovich
screenplay by Peter Buchman and Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal, based on the novel by Christopher Paolini
directed by Stefen Fangmeier

Eragonby Walter Chaw Fears that veteran F/X man Stefen Fangmeier's directorial debut Eragon, a feature-length adaptation of a fifteen-year-old trying on Anne McCaffrey's jodhpurs, would be the sequel to Dragonheart nobody wanted prove unwarranted, as Eragon is actually the sequel to BloodRayne that nobody wanted. It's ugly as sin, with the much-vaunted dragon at its centre (voiced by Rachel Weisz), designed by skilled craftspeople from both Peter Jackson's WETA workshop and Industrial Light and Magic, looking fatally inorganic to its environment. Not helping matters, the titular rider (Edward Speleers) resembles a younger, equally rubbery David Lee Roth and sports the acting chops of the same. Eragon is the towheaded farmboy who heeds a call to glory to save Sienna Guillory's beautiful Princess Arya ("Help me Eragon, you're my only hope") while gaining a mysterious old hermit mentor (Jeremy Irons–the poor sod should've learned his lesson with Dungeons & Dragons) who dies during a daring raid on the Death Star–er, on the castle keep of Darth Vader, er, King Galbatorix (John Malkovich). Alas, this Luke Skywalker also has an Uncle Owen (Uncle Garrow (Alun Armstrong)), and his Darth Vader has a henchman (Robert Carlyle) who at one point kills an underling general and declares the second-in-command "promoted." Eragon is a rip-off and a bad one, a carbon copy made on one of those old mimeograph machines: washed out, juvenile (even weighed against the not-exactly-mature example of Star Wars), and nigh unbearable for anyone so much as cursorily familiar with genre fare.

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

December 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Will Smith, Thandie Newton, Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, Brian Howe
screenplay by Steven Conrad
directed by Gabriele Muccino

Pursuitofhappynessby Walter Chaw They should pass out insulin plungers with the purchase of a ticket to the new Will Smith vehicle The Pursuit of Happyness, which sports a subtle tickle of plantation politics that's overwhelmed by a sense of smug entitlement and ugly elitism. Inspired by the true story of Eighties Wall Street bootstrap wizard Chris Gardner, it's a telling in a way of the Hercules legend, complete with insurmountable, fickle tasks and divine inheritance. Our mythological hero solves the Rubik's Cube in the back of a taxi for the bemused delight of potential employer Jay Twistle (Brian Howe); deals with the abandonment of his frustrated wife (Thandie Newton); and figures out a way to retrieve a pair of the bone-density scanners (the sale of which were his profession pre-Dean Witter) stolen by the homeless peers he disdains. It's true: the picture–even with its ghetto-cred misspelled title and restroom-to-boardroom fable–is intolerant of people consigned to the impoverishment the film contorts to assure us will be Chris' plight for only the time it takes his uplift to ripen.

Blood Diamond (2006) + Apocalypto (2006)

December 8, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, Mexico, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

BLOOD DIAMOND
*/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly, Djimon Hounsou, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Charles Leavitt
directed by Edward Zwick

APOCALYPTO
***/****
starring Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez, Jonathan Brewer, Morris Birdyellowhead
screenplay by Mel Gibson & Farhad Safinia
directed by Mel Gibson

Bloodapocalyptoby Walter Chaw After sending Matthew Broderick to head a Negro battalion in the Civil War and Tom Cruise to witness–and survive–the end of Feudal Japan, director Edward Zwick dispatches Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly to Sierra Leone and its own diamond-fuelled Civil War to moralize endlessly from the superior ethical vantage afforded by time and privilege. (That they also lend a much-needed nougat centre to Blood Diamond's thin chocolate coating goes without saying.) The Denzel Washington/Ken Watanabe token this time around is the oft-similarly-abused Djimon Hounsou: as the DC Comics-sounding Solomon Vandy, Hounsou seeks to trade a rare pink diamond for the life of his son, who's been molded by the evil Sierra Leonians into a soulless murdering/raping machine.

The Nativity Story (2006) + 3 Needles (2006)

December 1, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Family, Theatrical

THE NATIVITY STORY
*/****
starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, Oscar Isaac, Hiam Abbass, Shaun Toub
screenplay by Mike Rich
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

3 NEEDLES
½*/****
starring Shaun Ashmore, Stockard Channing, Olympa Dukakis, Lucy Liu
written and directed by Thom Fitzgerald

Nativityby Walter Chaw The nativity, consigned primarily in my imagination to bad children's pageants and gaudy lawn displays, gets a third image in my own private trinity with Catherine Hardwicke's The Nativity Story: a thunderously boring film so circumscribed in scope and crippled in execution that it's destined to be a minor hit fuelled by the line of buses stretching from your local bible chapel. It's another teen melodrama from Hardwicke, complete with disapproving adults and pregnant little girls batting doe-eyes at rough-and-tumble shepherds; you see Hardwicke occasionally attempting an anachronistic Fast Times at Golan Heights à la Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, but Coppola, for all her dips into self-pity, is a filmmaker of note, while Hardwicke is just beating someone else's drum on someone else's dime. (Proof positive is that despite the uniformity of Hardwicke's output across three identically-non-descript flicks, there is still no sense that decisions are being made, or that anything more than a sickly colony from a thin scrape across the John Hughes petri dish has been born.) Mary is played by young Maori actress Keisha Castle-Hughes–her race of note because if there's something important about the instantly forgotten pic, it's that its cast is comprised of people who look like people might have looked in Nazareth around two thousand years ago and not like Andy Gibb. A shame that Castle-Hughes is dreadful (and not helped a bit by another dreadful, pop-eyed screenplay courtesy Mike Rich of Radio and Finding Forrester fame) and that Oscar Isaac (as Joseph)–who is not dreadful–is trapped in this prosaic sinkhole. Tempting to use terms like "sanctimonious" and "smug," but The Nativity Story is more accurately dissected with the observation that it's a faithful telling of a story that has as its only purpose the drumming up of ecstatic anticipation for a foregone conclusion.

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.

Bobby (2006) + Fast Food Nation (2006)

November 17, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Mexico, Theatrical, UK

BOBBY
½*/****
starring Harry Belafonte, Joy Bryant, Nick Cannon, Emilio Estevez
written and directed by Emilio Estevez

FAST FOOD NATION
*/****
starring Patricia Arquette, Luis Guzman, Ethan Hawke, Ashley Johnson
screenplay by Eric Schlosser & Richard Linklater
directed by Richard Linklater

Bobbyfastfoodby Walter Chaw A completely pointless exercise in winsome, pathetic hand-wringing, the navel-gazing Bobby is just one of this year's inevitable examples of the power of nepotism in dictating who gets to continue churning out the worst films anyone's ever seen. Triple-threat Emilio Estevez (doing duties here as bad actor, bad director, and bad writer) continues his reign of terror unabated on the back of poor Bobby Kennedy, and those clips from RFK's speeches littering the picture are the only things remotely of interest. Bobby itself is a Crash-like roundelay of desperately manufactured bathos, covering the entire spectrum of miserable plotting and characterization from the old battleaxe (Sharon Stone) to the youngsters tripping on acid (to the tune of Jefferson Airplane and images of Vietnam carpet-bombing, natch) to the buttermilk-scrubbed ingénue (Lindsay Lohan) marrying her gay schoolmate (Elijah Wood–that casting admittedly the only hint that the schoolmate is gay) to save him from the draft to the non-drama of an Ambassador Hotel manager (William H. Macy) and his firing of a mildly-racist kitchen manager (Christian Slater). Is there any doubt that each and every one of these folks (and more: best to forget Martin Sheen and the still-execrable Helen Hunt pillow-talking until well-past the point of audience tolerance) will find themselves in the kitchen where/when Bobby meets his end? I imagine them as the cardboard cut-out "friends" Steve Martin's Lonely Guy uses to simulate a kickin' cocktail party, here repurposed to simulate "characters" in a movie that's supposed to mean something.

A Good Year (2006) + Harsh Times (2006)

November 10, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

A GOOD YEAR
½*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Albert Finney, Marion Cotillard, Freddie Highmore
screenplay by Marc Klein, based on the book by Peter Mayle
directed by Ridley Scott

HARSH TIMES
**/****
starring Christian Bale, Freddy Rodriguez, Eva Longoria, Terry Crews
written and directed by David Ayer

Goodyearharshby Walter Chaw The Fighting Temptations, The Family Man–the list of sappy redemption flicks about terrible assholes is as long and lamentable as Ridley Scott's interminable A Good Year. Masquerading as a man-opause version of Under the Tuscan Sun, it is instead an incredibly cynical play for exactly the kind of audience Scott and Russell Crowe don't reach and, apparently, shouldn't bother trying to seduce. Imagine a light, frothy romantic comedy written by Dostoevsky and directed by David Lean: every pratfall registers like a cattle stampede, every delightful romantic misunderstanding like a nuclear disarmament talk. Meanwhile, all around it, golden-drenched landscape shots of Provence play the part of the grinning idiot, dancing like crazy to distract the potentially-duped. (Scott at his best works in palettes drained of warmth and heat. Even the sunny Thelma & Louise plays like twenty miles of rough road compared to A Good Year's pretty postcards and stultifying stereotypes.) With the whole mess paying off in the most unlikely and irritating sequence of happy endings in a film not directed by Garry Marshall (or his Limey equivalent, Richard Curtis), the choices are either that you believe Scott and Crowe to have lost their minds or that A Good Year is smug and strident for the very reason that its creators are supercilious jackasses long since detached from any notion of the possible. Moreover, the picture demonstrates a marked disdain for those poor sods who aren't millionaire stockbrokers or possessed of dead uncles with a sprawling villa to will to their heirs.

Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) + This Film is Not Yet Rated (2006)

November 3, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Documentary, Pseudo-Documentary, Theatrical, UK

BORAT! CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN
***/****
directed by Larry Charles

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED
*½/****
directed by Kirby Dick

Boratby Walter Chaw British Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, as his Kazakhstani journalist alter ego Borat, tells former Georgia senator Bob Barr that the cheese Barr's just eaten was made from his wife's breast milk, and he does it in such a way as to suggest the naïf savage stereotype's unaffected innocence as it preys on the secret bigot in us all. Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan plays on America's belief that the rest of the world is run and populated by ridiculous children alternately in need of careful guidance and firm scolding. The Borat character, then, is very much a creation of the shortsightedness of a condescending American intolerance, while his ability to infiltrate America's living rooms speaks to a complex national desire to fold the aliens it abhors to its breast in some sort of misplaced act of missionary grace. If we reduce the aim of evangelical Christianity down to the twin compulsions of damnation and salvation, what Borat really does is reveal the hypocrisy at the root of our professed acceptance and, more troublingly, highlight how divorced we are from the guiding principles of this sea to shining sea. In a film that does this much to expose the ugly undercurrent of homophobia, racism, and xenophobia in this country, it's no great surprise when New York subway riders threaten to kill Borat for kissing them on the lips in exuberantly misguided greeting–and the reactions of these Big Apple commuters strike me as refreshingly honest.

Babel (2006)

October 27, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, Esoterica, France, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, Kôji Yakusho
screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga
directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Babelby Travis Mackenzie Hoover By this late date, the Magnolia-esque interconnected-lost-souls genre ought to have burned out. The films never meant anything, and when they did move us, it was in such an arbitrary, unfocused way that nothing intelligent could be gleaned from our self-interested pity. But here it is 2006 and I find myself reviewing Babel, which fills the tired bill to a chronologically-fractured T. I'd say that it isn't the worst of the genre, yet figuring out which one is suggests an academic exercise from which I'd rather be excused; suffice it to say that this globalized spin on the old saws is predictably pointless, with the added extra of none of its characters' actions resembling human behaviour even once. Instead of a powerful statement on the loneliness of individuals, we encounter a cavalier attitude towards the non-white and a prurient interest in the damaged sexuality of a teenage girl that destroys whatever patience we might have left.

The Prestige (2006)

October 25, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, Mystery, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, based on the novel by Christopher Priest
directed by Christopher Nolan

Prestigeby Walter Chaw It's possible to say that Christopher Nolan's perplexing chimera of a film, The Prestige, has something on its mind about not only the nasty, zero-sum game of vengeance but also the belief that if you cut one head off a malevolent beast it will, hydra-like, sprout another. It's a costume drama that feels like the world's darkest, dour-est, most inappropriate thriller serial, placing a series of increasingly complicated and unpleasant revenge-scenarios in chronological order and reminding of, if anything, just how bad Nolan's Memento makes you feel. The Prestige shares a heart of darkness, after all, with that film: a belief that men are essentially callow opportunists and liars who will misuse the people in their lives in order to maintain an illusion of command, however tenuous, over entropy. The manipulation of illusion is arguably the auteur mark of Nolan, who played with the idea of the manipulation of fear as a weapon in Batman Begins, the practical purpose of dream sleep in his remake of Insomnia, and of course of identity as fluid, ephemeral, and dangerously malleable in Memento and Following. Matching this director with a strange, campy film about turn-of-the-century magicians engaged in mortal combat makes a lot of sense.

Marie Antoinette (2006) + Tideland (2006)

October 19, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Canada, Coming of Age, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, France, Horror, Japan, Theatrical, UK

MARIE ANTOINETTE
**½/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn
screenplay by Sofia Coppola, based on the novel Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
directed by Sofia Coppola

TIDELAND
***½/****
starring Jodelle Ferland, Jeff Bridges, Brendan Fletcher, Jennifer Tilly
screenplay by Terry Gilliam & Tony Grisoni, based on the novel by Mitch Cullin
directed by Terry Gilliam

Marietidelandby Walter Chaw In going from The Virgin Suicides to Lost in Translation to Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola appears to be charting the arc of her own soft, unstructured dive into the morass of melancholia and regret, discovering her voice along the way in the bell tones of Kirsten Dunst, who plays a fourteen-year-old in The Virgin Suicides and, at the start of Coppola's latest film, a fourteen-year-old again, the Austrian Archduchess Marie Antoinette. Coppola's "Fast Times at Palais Versailles" opens with Marie loping through her Austrian palace, just another sleepy, stupid girl with a tiny dog, one poised to have the fate of two countries riding on her ability to produce a male offspring. Betrothed to nebbish French King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), she's put into a French court ruled by gossip and bloodline (in one of the film's few literal moments, Marie offers that her waking ritual attended by what seems the entire family plot is "ridiculous") and, while crowned with the mantle of governance, thrust into the role of most popular girl in school, sprung fully-grown as the captain of the football team's best girl. It's impossible for me to not see something of Coppola's own premature coronation as the emotional centre of her father's own royal court, the third Godfather film–and to see in the intense media scrutiny afforded her in the wake of that fiasco the source of all these films about lost youth and the pain of hard choices made on her behalf. Marie Antoinette isn't a historical film so much as it's a dress-up picture; and like most any work of honesty, it's autobiographical (as indicated by its selection of '80s punk-influenced pop) and intensely vulnerable–at least for most of its first hour.

Little Children (2006)

October 18, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connelly, Gregg Edelman
screenplay by Todd Field & Tom Perrotta
directed by Todd Field

Littlechildrenby Walter Chaw Kate Winslet is a joy if no longer a revelation, and in Todd Field's Little Children, she demonstrates the kind of courage that has made her the most essential actress of her generation. Aside from Winslet, Little Children feels like a burlesque of deep-feeling pictures: the lesser of two possible sophomore efforts from the guy who brought us In the Bedroom, which was, in 2001, my since-regretted pick for best of the year. (I can be a sucker for well-played big emotions, I guess.) But Little Children is icy, stentorian, and patrician in its staginess and self-consciousness, and its disdain for its subject matter is front and centre. The picture presents its tale of suburban woe as the world's most condescending fairytale, inserting an omniscient narrator in a way that, along with the upcoming Stranger Than Fiction, makes me wonder what it is about unseen movers that is so seductive in the modern conversation. I also wonder how Field and co-screenwriter Tom Perrotta (adapting his own book) could have rationalized the amount of bile mustered in reconfiguring American Beauty to include a raincoat perv (Jackie Earle Haley, the heart and soul of the film–if also its patsy and mule) and a sweaty adultery punctuated fatally by a winking nod to Madame Bovary.

The Departed (2006)

October 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Gangster, Hong Kong, Jack Nicholson, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg
screenplay by William Monahan
directed by Martin Scorsese

Departedby Walter Chaw Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is his funniest–and most nihilistic–film since After Hours, which remains for me the most enjoyable of his pictures, not the least for its travelogue of the Wasteland, complete with a gallery of freaks and grotesque statuary. It’s a bleak, Kirkegaardian thing more oppressive as fraught cityscape than Travis Bickle’s New York, seeing as how there’s no filter of the unreasonable to buffer against the assertion that scum does, indeed, need to be washed off those mean streets. That city finds a doppelgänger in the blasted, depressed Boston of The Departed, whose set-pieces unfurl inside dives, abandoned warehouses, and condemned buildings, and in which we find the only relationship worth saving is between a brilliantly profane Massachusetts State Trooper Sergeant, Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), and his captain in the Special Investigations Unit, Queenan (Martin Sheen). The brutality with which that relationship is preserved, in fact, ultimately delineates this as a rare comedy (in the traditional sense) among Scorsese’s long legacy of American tragedies, albeit one that’s laced with poison and the unmistakable taint of a post-millennial/post-apocalyptic stench.