Theatrical Archives - Page 43 of 65

Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (2005); Murderball (2005); The Aristocrats (2005)

August 11, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Documentary, Sports, Theatrical

DEUCE BIGALOW: EUROPEAN GIGOLO
*/****
starring Rob Schneider, Eddie Griffin, Til Schweiger, Jeroen Krabbé
screenplay by Rob Schneider and David Garrett & Jason Ward
directed by Mike Bigelow

MURDERBALL
**½/****
directed by Henry Alex Rubin & Dana Adam Shapiro

THE ARISTOCATS
**/****
directed by Paul Provenza & Penn Jillette

by Walter Chaw Oftentimes, as if in a freaky mescaline dream, I find myself defending in polite company Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, this story of an astonishingly ugly, balding little troll enlisted into the man-whore trade by myopic pimp T.J. (Eddie Griffin). Homophobic in a chiding, self-deprecating way, the picture has going for it a surprising tenderness that sees Deuce (Rob Schneider) demonstrating real humanity towards his disabled clients–finding him, for instance, taking a Tourette's Syndrome-stricken young lady to a ballgame, where her outbursts are cause for celebration. It also found Griffin, with his astonishing arsenal of insane euphemisms (twat-sicle, mangina, she-nis, he-pussy, and so on) delivered rat-a-tat with his manic, immaculate comic timing, crafting in frenetic T.J. a character with a penchant for savouring water-logged food and capped teeth that predict Hilary Duff's recent funhouse makeover. But most importantly, it had the benefit of Kate (Arija Bareikis) as Deuce's love interest: a beautiful, feminine, smart, funny woman who happens to be missing a leg. Disability is rarely, if ever, proudly on display in American cinema–funny to find it in Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.

The Best of Youth (2003) + Saraband (2003)

August 9, 2005****/****, 2000s, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Directors: Ingmar Bergman, Drama, Finland, Germany, Italy, Music, Norway, Romance, Sweden, Television, Theatrical

La Meglio gioventù
****/****
starring Luigi Lo Cascio, Alessio Boni, Adriana Asti, Sonia Bergamasco
screenplay by Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli
directed by Marco Tullio Giordana

SARABAND
**½/****
starring Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson, Börje Ahlstedt, Julia Dufvenius
written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

by Walter Chaw Television is the great bogey of the modern era. Newton Minnow’s vast wasteland. Marshall McLuhan’s “massage.” The corruptor of youth and the opiate of the people. The glass teat. Although it’s been excoriated as the prime example of what happens to art when commerce intrudes upon it, when the moneymen at the gates break through to undermine the best intentions of television artists yearning to break free, I think it’s more complicated than that. I think that television, like any other popular medium, is a cathode stethoscope held against the chest of the spirit of the world–a conduit to both what’s good and what’s venal in any culture. There are as many, maybe more, classics being produced for television now as there were during its Golden Age (and the good old days weren’t always good, besides), it’s just that we have more chaff to sift through before we get to the wheat nowadays–but more wheat, too. Say this for TV: it seems more capable of recognizing a hunger for quality than film does. Credit the smaller budgets and quicker turnarounds–something that’s put cinema in the catch-up position in the early years of the new millennium.

Broken Flowers (2005)

August 4, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Mystery, Road Movie, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Walter Chaw I think that humour is a sharply-honed defense mechanism: something ingratiating in its ability to transcend taboo and thus, through laughter, enlist others in a secret club where the only law of membership is mutual transgression. And I think that comedians–the good ones–work from a well of demons deep and dire. It's no surprise to me that Robin Williams can actually manage a human performance in Dead Again, or that Jim Carrey can be brilliant in The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, since so much of comedy is knowing what's acceptable and, more importantly, what's not. More to the point, it's no surprise that Bill Murray could refashion his career from the drunken bully of "Saturday Night Live" into this aging penitent, seeking absolution from some unnameable sin forever regenerating itself like a Promethean liver. It only took a couple of decades, but Murray has finally become Somerset Maugham's pilgrim Larry Darrell (whom he played in 1984's underestimated The Razor's Edge)–true maturity having a lot to do with the understanding that it doesn't take a shake-up as seismic as WWI to turn a man to blue moods. Often the first step in an existential journey is spurred by something as simple as a realization of how big of an asshole you used to be.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (2005); March of the Penguins (2005); Grizzly Man (2005)

August 2, 2005****/****, 2000s, Antarctica, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Family, France, Theatrical

THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL
**½/****
directed by Judy Irving

La marche de l’empereur
*½/****
directed by Luc Jacquet

GRIZZLY MAN
****/****
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Nature documentaries have been the non-fiction standby ever since Marlin Perkins began manipulating dramatic moments for the edification of horrified youngsters. (I used to play a game of imagining what a “Mutual of Omaha’s” would be like if it were to focus on people and feature narration from, say, prairie chickens.) So with three high-profile nature documentaries hitting screens more or less simultaneously this summer, it’s the perfect–well, inevitable–opportunity to compare how far some have come in resisting the urge to project human behaviour onto animals, and how unapologetic others are in indulging in the insanity of pretending that gophers are tiny, furry people. Understand that far from speaking to any overt insensitivity on my part, pretending animals are people, too, tends to put both the animal and human at risk. More than just pathetic, there’s a moral repugnance to it. (Blame a country reared on a steady diet of Disney.) And though some–like Mark Bittner of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill–can’t be blamed for the jackholes who acquire pets without a commensurate sense of obligation to them for the whole of their lives, others, like self-taught naturalist Timothy Treadwell (the subject of Werner Herzog’s astounding Grizzly Man), really deserve to get pureed in Darwin’s cosmic blender. The tricky thing is that I’m guessing most of the folks who love Animal Planet wouldn’t love it as much if it were hammered home to them repeatedly that animals are alien entities without compassion–that given half the chance, many a critter wouldn’t think twice (or at all) about eating your baby. (Something to ponder over a plate of veal sausage and scrambled eggs, maybe.) Acknowledging that animals are animals, after all, cuts too close to the bone of the startling revelation that humans are also animals, and the only inauthentic bullshit in this ever-lovin’ world of ours is a product of our need to obsessively self-deceive.

Bad News Bears (2005)

July 22, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Sports, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Greg Kinnear, Marcia Gay Harden
screenplay by Bill Lancaster and Glenn Ficarra & John Requa
directed by Richard Linklater

by Walter Chaw Richard Linklater essentially does for Michael Ritchie’s The Bad News Bears what Gus Van Sant did for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. That is, not much. It’s the same song sung in the same tune, though the film’s missteps are unique to Linklater and company’s often-puzzling desire to soften the original by introducing a love interest for our drunken anti-hero and re-ordering the big game so that his redemption comes after an ugly on-field incident instead of just before when it still means something. This is not to say that the original film is much better than a button-pushing vehicle for the Walter Matthau persona, but to suggest that, for what it was, at least it was better than another button-pushing vehicle for the Billy Bob Thornton persona. And Richard Linklater, who seems content now to alternate nice little Rohmer-inspired talk-pieces with higher-profile formula flicks starring unknown kid-actors and manic curmudgeons. The only way to assess his career is by taking a closer look at his independent-minded projects (such as the upcoming Philip K. Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly) and deciding whether or not better-earning stuff like Bad News Bears was worth it.

The Island (2005)

July 21, 20052000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Michael Bay, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Djimon Hounsou, Sean Bean
screenplay by Caspian Tredwell-Owen and Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw What films often get wrong in depicting Satan is that Satan is beautiful. He tells intoxicating lies, was–at least according to Milton–the most stunning of the angels, and, if modern hackery is to be honoured, directs action movies that are kinetic and exciting. The problem of a guy like Michael Bay is that for as close to vermin as the man may be (and stories of his on-set behaviour, especially his treatment of women, are legion and ugly), his films are, at least on the surface, sleek, pulpy, thrill-ride fun. He's defined almost by himself a new way of seeing that has infected lesser technical talents with those same quick scissor-fingers and the attention spans of mayflies. Would that that were all, but this influence has secondary victims in a generation of young male moviegoers, bludgeoned with Bay's rubber mallet into a tacit acceptance of/complicity with Bay's opinion of women (strippers or bimbos or bimbo strippers), race, and how best to feed a movie into a Cuisinart. Still, his latest film, The Island, came with reasons to be hopeful: writers from sometimes-smart (as in not-always-stupid) show "Alias"; stars in Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson; and no Jerry Bruckheimer in sight. But the result isn't good so much as more of the same except without any excitement or novelty. His mask is slipping, and The Island is awkward, dated, and so fuddy-duddy (like in its retarded Logan's Run finale, shot on Bay's trademark Lazy Susan) that I actually caught myself feeling, just for an eye-blink, embarrassed for the guy. That Satan, he's a slippery puck, ain't he.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005); Hustle & Flow (2005); Last Days (2005)

July 21, 2005****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, France, Music, Theatrical, Thriller

De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté
***/****
starring Romain Duris, Niels Arestrup, Jonathan Zaccaï, Gilles Cohen
screenplay by Jacques Audiard, Tonino Benacquista, based on the screenplay for Fingers by James Toback
directed by Jacques Audiard

HUSTLE & FLOW
*/****
starring Terrence Howard, Anthony Anderson, Taryn Manning, Taraji P. Henson
written and directed by Craig Brewer

LAST DAYS
****/****
starring Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Green
written and directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw On my better days, I still think of film as the quintessential artform of the last century–a medium for expression uniquely suited to our Modernist Yeatsian decomposition, what with its malleability beneath the knife, as it were, cut and spliced back together again as the un-spooling literalization of some patchwork Prometheus. Likewise, in its 24 flickers a second, it's an illusion of life, teased from the amber of still photography, drawing, painting; mixed with symphonies; blended with dance and movement; enslaved to the syncopation of words and imaginary drum beats. It's a miracle, a golem, capable of illuminating the rawest humanity in one stroke and of exhuming the most abject failure of human impulse in the very next. Its tractability is astonishing–protean, not too much to say magical; in describing his first film experience as a visit to "the kingdom of shadows," Maxim Gorky brushes up against the ineffable sublimity of a medium that mimics the eye, stimulates the ear, and has as one of the key elements of its academic study a concept that suggests the moment a viewer finds himself "sutured" into the text. Like all fine art, then, when it's right, its "rightness" is indescribable–Frank Zappa's "dancing about architecture." And like the stratification of art imposed by some in varying orders to describe the proximity of each to the inexpressibility of their souls (prose to dance to painting to poesy to music, for me), when film aspires to combine the more abstract elements of human expression in its mélange, the results, always mixed, at least have the potential to be grand.

My Mother (2004) + Exiles (2004)

July 14, 20052000s, Adventure, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, France, Japan, Music, Portugal, Spain, Theatrical

Ma mère
*½/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Emma de Caunes, Joana Preis
screenplay by Christopher Honoré, based on the novel by Georges Bataille
directed by Christopher Honoré

Exils
***/****
starring Romain Duris, Lubna Azabal, Leila Makhlouf, Habib Cheik
written and directed by Tony Gatlif

by Bill Chambers Even after the Hays Office lost its stranglehold on the screen trade, mainstream American erotica remained a largely intellectual affair. Rather than try to get you off, films like Paul Mazursky’s Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge were interested in examining the fallout from sex. Meanwhile, France was cranking out Sylvia Kristel movies, and the raincoat crowd could enjoy even such highbrow fare as Last Tango in Paris for long stretches. If the legit French sex cinema ultimately bore a closer resemblance to red-blooded American filth in the ’70s (and not just ethically: the ‘X aesthetic’ was like dumbed-down nouvelle vague), it makes sense that it would chart a course parallel with stateside porno’s gradual descent into the penetration abyss. But while the (d)evolution itself is an organic one born of desensitization, things have progressed along a more self-conscious path in recent years, with the incendiary work of Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, and Michael Haneke helping to foster the impression of contemporary Gallic life as a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah.

Wedding Crashers (2005)

July 14, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Christopher Walken, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Steve Faber & Bob Fisher
directed by David Dobkin

by Walter Chaw It should be over a half-hour before it's over–you can almost mark the exact moment when David Dobkin's Wedding Crashers starts running on fumes. Worse, its jokes are the same jokes that the jovial, fraternal gross-out sex comedy genre has been riding into the ground since Animal House–though the picture does provide a certain breed of rough beast its annual fix of unabashed homophobia, gratuitous body-double skin, arbitrary ass-invasion, lame surprise cameo, and the inevitable forced-sentiment finale. For that, offer a minor hosanna. Like talk radio, besides a couple of laughs against one's better judgment, movies like this offer a communal outlet for aggressions that might otherwise be visited on society at large. (See also Young Republican conventions, Promise Keepers conclaves, Young Life retreats, Klan rallies, and Scientology cloisters.) It's not as bloodily cathartic as Christians and lions, Jai Alai, or live execution, but it'll do.

Happy Endings (2005)

July 14, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Music, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Tom Arnold, Jesse Bradford, Bobby Cannavale, Steve Coogan
written and directed by Don Roos

by Walter Chaw As abortion dramedies go, this year's already seen Todd Solondz's far superior Palindromes and will soon see the abhorrent right-wing stem cell flick The Island, and for bellwethers of such things, there's still Hal Hartley's timeless Trust from fifteen years back. (Not incidentally, Don Roos's best and first film as a director, the teen-pregnancy drama The Opposite of Sex, features Trust's Martin Donovan.) So Roos's Happy Endings isn't just irritating, it's superfluous, too: a gimmicky way to tackle the tired romantic roundelay format that should be viewed in a double feature with Miranda July's almost-as-irritating Me and You and Everyone We Know just so you can say you've done your time this year in the indie coal mine. Truth is, if you can suffer through Roos's device of insouciant half-screen captions that periodically comment on the action, critique his characters, broadly clarify his themes, and make predictions about their futures (a lot like the video for Van Halen's "Right Now") without punching the person in front of you, you're made of sterner stuff than I. They've honestly handed out Purple Hearts for less.

Fantastic Four (2005)

July 7, 20052000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Ioan Gruffudd, Michael Chiklis, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans
screenplay by Michael France and Mark Frost, based on the Marvel comic
directed by Tim Story

by Walter Chaw Terrible. Tim Story's Fantastic Four is just terrible. It's not overly offensive, not sociologically damaging, and the only way it'll pervert your children is by making them stupider. But if you love and respect the cinema as a medium capable of giving life to fantasy and passion to the impossible, the picture's crimes are no less egregious. Fantastic Four is a prime example in every respect of how not to make a movie: it's badly cast, poorly written, clumsily-directed, respects no internal logic, and looks extremely ugly to boot–it resembles those '80s production-line comedies (Police Academy, Hot Dog: The Movie) populated by fashion-plate superheroes instead of fashion-plate stoners. The pacing is so mortally off that it feels like days have been slipped in there in place of minutes, and there's so little rapport among the cast that it often appears as though the actors were filmed separately and later composited in some dork's basement mainframe. You can feel your life being siphoned away by this thing. Did I fail to mention that the special effects are bad? It's a lot of things simultaneously: a nightmare; a joke; a disaster. I dropped my notebook at one point during the screening and spent the rest of the time wondering if I should just leave it there as Fantastic Four finally dribbled to a close. It's bad enough to put you off movies for good.

Clarifying the Image: FFC Interviews Sally Potter|Yes (2005)

July 2, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Interviews, Romance, Theatrical, UK

Spotterinterviewtitle Sally Potter reflects on her films

YES
*½/****

A loaded word, "pretentious," and one that I think is overused, but whatever its dictionary definition, to me the idea of "pretentious" has a lot to do with the ratio of intent to teach vs. what's actually taught. From The Tango Lesson to The Man Who Cried to Orlando, Sally Potter's films have generally been admirably high on ambition if lamentably low on insight: You can make a film about how cinema is protean and existentially thorny, but unless there's a greater purpose to that insight, it's just first-year film school mixed with a little first-year biology. Take Yes, a picture concerned with lenses and reflective surfaces–written in the high style, The Bard's own iambic, but not so much in play form as in couplets (call it "playful" playwriting)–featuring not only an agile (and game) cast, but also a boatload of pretensions that lead the viewer to the conclusion that what Potter believes is very interesting is only very interesting to her. Trapped in a loveless marriage with Anthony (Sam Neill), "She" (Joan Allen) is having a torrid affair with "He" (Simon Akbarian); she's people are from Belfast, He's are from Beirut, and throughout the tension of He/She is set against the three-R archetypes of polarity: race, religion, and region. Potter uses different film stocks to express disconnection, Antonioni's framing tactics to express the same, and a handful of soliloquies delivered on the so-called fourth-wall-breaking proscenium by a taciturn maid (Shirley Henderson) that explain the Brownian motion of the motes that open the piece, the microbes She examines in her day job, and the ultimate deconstructionalist rationalization that for all this talk of difference, it's just a matter of semantics. Yes is thus film about language and communication at mortal war with true emotion and protean thought, boasting a lot of arresting images and briefly interesting ideas that unfortunately deflate when it becomes clear that a pretty picture and a clever turn mask subterranean drafts of aimless, circular comings and goings and talk of Michelangelo.–WC

July 3, 2005|A chat in the basement of Denver's Hotel Monaco with the loquacious, eloquent Sally Potter wrapped three interviews in three days, not counting the one with Gregg Araki conducted via e-mail, which was apparently pre-screened by someone (a first in my experience, as I've never interviewed Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie) at tiny distributor Tartan and has not, since a minor blow-up on my end, been completed as promised by the "maverick" director. Whether he was offended, put-off, or frightened by the questions, if they even got to him, I'm not sure (maybe he's just too busy with his alien-abduction comedy to honour his commitment), but I'll be honest, I'm finding it hard to give a shit. Less to transcribe. I ask them all and filmmakers, to a one, complain about how far the art of film criticism has fallen in the United States, about how it's consumer reportage nowadays instead of an invitation to a conversation and those tentative early steps towards immortality. But a mouth has two corners, and you talk out of one in righteousness and the other in insecurity; although I provide an outlet for the outrage of the artist jilted at the hands of one too many clever wordsmiths, I also get the sense that most of these film professionals would prefer getting the junket line to any actual serious inquiry into their work.

Credit Sally Potter, then, for having the guts to discuss what her work is actually about. They're pretentious, her films, they're always meaningful and they always strike me as trying too hard to impress an imaginary demographic. Ironically, Potter's pictures underline the truism that artist intentionality is a decent place to start an autopsy but a horrible place to end one. In her case, without the auteur theory, there's nothing to say, and so it is with her latest film, Yes, another of Potter's examinations of the meta-quality of film-within-film and the cinema as a medium of projection and inversion. Written in couplets of proto-Shakespearean iambic pentameter (done with more liquid realism–and fewer rhymes–on HBO's "Deadwood"), it's an intriguing experiment for a good half-hour before its usefulness as a glass held to language diminishes, leaving a soggy, vaguely orientalist romance to hold as its symbolic centre. Give her due for being courageous enough to make a picture so unapologetically rigorous in its intellectualism, particularly in an age when "nuance" is effete and the most minor critical analysis is seen as an unforgivable offense to God and country. Potter is articulate and gracious in explaining what she's getting at in an environment grown too comfortable with not getting at anything at all.

George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005)

June 24, 20052000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: George A. Romero, France, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Zombie

*/****
starring Simon Baker, Dennis Hopper, Asia Argento, Robert Joy
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw The weakest entry in George Romero's zombie quadrilogy by a long shot, the Toronto-lensed Land of the Dead loses the grit and familiarity of Romero's native Pittsburgh while managing to be every bit as awkward and allegorical as one of his trademark undead. The original concept for Day of the Dead was to have hundreds of trained zombies fighting one another in a post-apocalyptic landscape, a statement–and an eloquent one, as is, or was, Romero's practice–on war being an essential state of man that got scrapped due to budgetary concerns. With the success of films like Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later…, and the remake of Romero's own Dawn of the Dead, though, the primogenitor of the genre was given a respectable budget, the boon of CGI, and relatively free reign to continue a trio of films (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead) that besides spawning a legion of Italian knock-offs, were themselves gory, scary, and razor sharp.

Bewitched (2005)

June 23, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Will Ferrell, Shirley MacLaine, Michael Caine
screenplay by Nora Ephron & Delia Ephron and Adam McKay
directed by Nora Ephron

by Walter Chaw Five minutes into Bewitched I was sick to death of its cutesy, smarmy self-satisfaction. This is Nicole Kidman talking something like Marilyn Monroe crossed with a feather duster, doing her best to work her mouth around Delia and Nora Ephron's vapid dialogue while wishing all the while that someone would solve the mystery of how she could be so accomplished at picking independent projects (Birth, Dogville) and so incompetent in picking mainstream ones (The Stepford Wives, Cold Mountain). It's a movie completely dependent on the belief that everyone has seen the Sol Saks sitcom upon which the flick is based (a belief supported at least in part by the warmth with which a multitude of clips from said sitcom were received), meaning it's the picture for which the term "meta" was created. Not the endlessly replicating screenplay, but the fabled film that is about nothing, is based on nothing, and features big stars struggling to overcome the freakish inconsequence of a project that should never have gotten beyond the what-if stage. (Who outside of coma would even consider starring in a film written by the Ephron sisters, directed by Nora, and produced by Penny freaking Marshall?) This is the film that cotton candy would imagine because it cheerfully has no mind to speak of, making Kidman's freaky, alien, doll-like performance (her Isabel eats buckets of Miracle Whip in one of the film's concessions to its powder-puff inconsequence) a minor stroke of genius, if only in hindsight.

Heights (2005); Mysterious Skin (2005); It’s All Gone Pete Tong (2005)

June 22, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Music, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical, UK

HEIGHTS
**½/****
starring Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, Jesse Bradford, James Marsden
screenplay by Amy Fox, based on her play
directed by Chris Terrio

MYSTERIOUS SKIN
*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Elisabeth Shue, Michelle Trachtenberg
screenplay by Gregg Araki, based on the novel by Scott Heim
directed by Gregg Araki

IT’S ALL GONE, PETE TONG
**½/****
starring Paul Kaye, Beatriz Batarda, Kate Magowan, Mike Wilmot
written and directed by Michael Dowse

by Walter Chaw Obsessed with doors and passages, façades and captured images, Chris Terrio’s Heights takes on the dour, dark, and twisted interpersonal machinations of The Scottish Play its diva Diana (Glenn Close) rehearses for some of the 24-hour period covered therein. Heights is a sexual film steeped in betrayals and unmaskings at its root, clothed in symbols for discovery and disguise that are almost literary in their uniform complexity. It’s therefore through a cloud of signs that its insular roundelay emerges. Wedding photographer Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), daughter of Diana and fiancée of Jonathan (James Marsden), is fired from her job on the day–on the hour, almost–that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cover a foreign war is offered her by an ex-boyfriend. Jonathan, meanwhile, has an ex-boyfriend of his own to suppress as pretty young actor Alec (Jesse Bradford) catches Diana’s eye in the hours before she discovers her husband is honouring their open marriage with her understudy. Questions of female sexual jealousy abound, hand in hand with the ruthless barbs of ambition (the price of success weighed against the cost of failure), tied into a messy bow by big ugly truths and the inescapability of our pasts.

Batman Begins (2005)

June 15, 2005****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes
screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw It's perhaps only right that in a year that has seen Robert Rodriguez present a scary-faithful adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City, Christopher Nolan should re-envision (and revitalize) the Batman film franchise with a picture, Batman Begins, that at last captures the pitch blackness of Miller's seminal graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns (itself a re-envisioning and revitalization of Batman for its time). Batman Begins is to Tim Burton's Batman films as Burton's films are to Adam West's camp-classic television series, so drastically have Nolan and co-scriptor David S. Goyer de-fabulized the mythology. Compare, for starters, a sequence in the 1989 film where Batman shines a little penlight in the eyes of an over-curious lady-fair while chauffeuring her in the Batmobile to the modern iteration in which Batman trashes the Gotham police force en route to getting a young lady an antidote to a concentrated militarized hallucinogen that, unchecked, could inspire her to rip her own face off.

November (2005); Brothers (2004); Ladies in Lavender (2005)

June 9, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Drama, Music, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

NOVEMBER
*/****
starring Courteney Cox, James LeGros, Michael Ealy, Nora Dunn
screenplay by Benjamin Brand
directed by Greg Harrison

Brødre
**½/****
starring Connie Nielsen, Ulrich Thomsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Bent Mejding
screenplay by Anders Thomas Jensen
directed by Susanne Bier

LADIES IN LAVENDER
*½/****
starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Natascha McElhone, Daniel Brühl
screenplay by Charles Dance, based on the short story by William J. Locke
directed by Charles Dance

by Walter Chaw There are as many middling to miserable movies in the foreign and domestic independent market as in the oft-maligned mainstream. If there are around five hundred films released in a twelve-month period, after all, only thirty or so are ever in contention for the best of the year–and of those, maybe three will be remembered once the hosannas have died down. The vast majority of pictures are just rest areas between elation and outrage; capturing lightning in a bottle is as unlikely for movies as for any product of any other branch of the arts. Here, then, are three smaller films in fast succession caught in the twilight zone of instant forgetfulness and doomed to spend eternity as either the film that was the long lonesome whistle stop for someone's career, or the promising picture that pointed the way to bigger and brighter things.

Lords of Dogtown (2005)

June 2, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Sports, Teen, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Emile Hirsch, Victor Rasuk, John Robinson, Michael Angarano
screenplay by Stacy Peralta
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

by Walter Chaw Because Catherine Hardwicke never met a rack zoom she didn't massage or a hard-luck adolescent's lament she didn't exploit, seeing her as a match for Stacy Peralta's semi-autobiographical account of the Zephyr skateboard team's halcyon days doesn't require that much of a squint. Directed like a heart attack and edited in such a way that most every scene ends with something breaking or someone running away, the picture is what baseball folks would call a "loud out"–a ball hit with pepper that peters out on the warning track; it doesn't even get an asterisk on the scorecard. Lords of Dogtown is the fictionalization of Peralta's interesting if overlong documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which detailed how the skateboard fad evolved from a combination of a lack of good surfing, the invention of urethane wheels, and a drought that created backyard terror-domes of skater-bliss in forcing California residents to drain their swimming pools. And what Lords of Dogtown lacks in characterization and narrative meat it makes up for in epileptic flash-edits, jittery camera work, and two interpretive dance sequences that drag on for long enough to point a long finger at the silliness of the whole endeavour. Call it S.E. Hinton for the new millennium, the romanticization of bad behaviour in a frantic stew turgid enough to embalm instead of bronze. Between this and her hysteria opus thirteen, Hardwicke is making a name for herself as the world's coolest aunt: arrested development in one hand, shot of Jack in the other, bail money in her back pocket.

The Longest Yard (2005) + Madagascar (2005)

May 27, 20052000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Family, Sports, Theatrical

THE LONGEST YARD
*½/****
starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, James Cromwell, Nelly
screenplay by Sheldon Turner, based on the screenplay by Tracy Keenan Wynn
directed by Peter Segal

MADAGASCAR
**/****
screenplay by Mark Burton & Billy Frolick and Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath
directed by Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath

by Walter Chaw Chris Rock seems like a smart dude. His stand-up is sharp and perceptive and his now-defunct pay-cable talk show broke some ice in the traditionally chilly national race conversation. So know that I say this respecting Rock’s abilities in certain areas: Chris Rock is not now, nor will he ever be, a viable presence in film. He has no charisma that translates to the silver screen, none of that “it” factor that draws the eye to him, and when he’s forced to follow a script, whether he’s written it or not, he sounds desperate and pinched, as though he were being pulled through a garden hose. He joins giants like Richard Pryor in that no matter what you thought of Stir Crazy, it’s a far cry from his seminal work on stage. That Chris Rock is now in two major motion pictures seeing release on the same day both bolsters the suspicion that Rock is a smart dude and provides two new examples of Rock not only not possessing that movie star quality, but also lacking the potential to be movie star material. With the inevitable success of these films, however (none of which will have anything to do with Rock), put your money on the man making a few more sad attempts at headlining a picture before Hollywood discovers what most of us already know.

Saving Face (2005) + High Tension (2003)

May 26, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Romance, Romania, Theatrical, Thriller, Will Smith

SAVING FACE
**/****
starring Joan Chen, Lynn Chen, Jin Wang, Guang Lan Koh
written and directed by Alice Wu

Haute tension
***/****
starring Cécile De France, Maïwenn Le Besco, Philippe Nahon, Franck Khalfoun
screenplay by Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur
directed by Alexandre Aja

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Lesbians are pretty much invisible in American culture–banished, actually, to the ghetto that gay men tend to complain about even though, in truth, gay men were never more visible than they are now that they've been gifted with the lofty honour of being the only minority everyone can agree to hate with hilarious impunity. A couple of programs on Showtime notwithstanding, lesbians in the popular conversation are still either flannel-wearing she-males, the other daughter, or male fantasies of the voracious woman desperate for a good therapeutic dick to set her back on the straight and narrow. When a lesbian appears in a Western film (like in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason), the audience, myself included, regards her appearance as a kind of alien visitation. For a while, it's possible to forget that she's a sexual creature at all, so foreign are her Sapphic ways in our cultural conversation. Thus a pair of films featuring lesbian heroes front and centre happening upon these strange shores almost simultaneously is cause for some sort of modest celebration despite that one of them, Alice Wu's Saving Face, is a lot like an ethnic sitcom and the other, Alexandre Aja's High Tension, appears to hate lesbians with an unusual ugliness.