Into the Blue (2005)

September 16, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Paul Walker, Jessica Alba, Scott Caan, Ashley Scott
screenplay by Matt Johnson
directed by John Stockwell

Intotheblueby Walter Chaw Although it's impossible to discern the purpose of a movie like this, you find yourself ironically spending all of Into the Blue trying to do just that. Shot in a leering, dirty-old-man disgusting way by John Stockwell (a filmmaker I've liked in the past, though this one causes me to reassess what's going on in my head), the film places your subjective-camera eye upwards between the ankles of one bathing beauty after another, tracking slowly up and down their swimsuit-model bods and fixing, occasionally and briefly, on a perfunctory thriller plot that arises from nothing, goes nowhere, and makes no impact whatsoever on the parade of cakes. (Both beef and cheese.) It's an exploitation flick in the basest sense of the term, because the poor idiots onscreen most likely believe they've been hired for some sort of talent imperceptible to the rest of us (and with no evidence showing itself for the balance of their careers up to this point) as opposed to for how great they look holding their breath and having a camera positioned three feet from their stern. It's not that I'm complaining about having to stare at Jessica Alba's almost-unclad ass for two extraordinarily long hours–I'm complaining about Alba protesting that she's always cast in films for her acting prowess and not for how she looks almost-naked. I don't know if it's false modesty or willful ignorance, but either way: you gotta be kidding me.

A Sound of Thunder (2005)

September 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Germany, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Edward Burns, Catherine McCormack, Ben Kingsley, Jemima Rooper
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and Gregory Poirier, based on the story by Ray Bradbury
directed by Peter Hyams

Soundofthunderby Walter Chaw Dr. Travis Ryer (Edward Burns) lives in 2055 Chicago, where he conducts hunting trips back to the same moment in the Cretaceous period to hunt the same dinosaur fated to die moments later in a tar pit. Cheap thrills for the future's bluebloods, the outfit is called "Time Safari," and it's owned by an evil capitalist, Hatton (Ben Kingsley), who, in trying to appease future-Chicago's strict time-travel regulatory agency, warns his clients to stay on the path and keep their hands to themselves lest the shockwaves of fucking with prehistory change the course of evolution. It's a term that A Sound of Thunder bandies about with some confidence, "evolution," but it does so without conveying the first idea of what evolution actually is or how it works. It's the kind of film that creationists and other retarded people will like because it mounts a pretty good case for the intelligent design-/flat earth-inspired "Heck, we don't know shit, anything could be true!" school of thought.

The Baxter (2005) + Pretty Persuasion (2005)

September 2, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

THE BAXTER
*/****
starring Michael Showalter, Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Williams, Justin Theroux
written and directed by Michael Showalter

PRETTY PERSUASION
½/****
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Ron Livingston, James Woods, Jane Krakowski
screenplay by Skander Halim
directed by Marcos Siega

by Walter Chaw Writer-director Michael Showalter swings for the rafters with his anti-romcom The Baxter and ends up hitting into a double play: it's less a satire of romcom conventions than a meek kowtow before their awesome ubiquity. Showalter (also starring as CPA Elliot Sherman) plays the titular schlub, the "Baxter" being a creature of extreme nerdy social incompetence most often glimpsed in frown and tux in the retreating background of Dustin Hoffman rescuing Katharine Ross from the altar. Not a terrible idea (i.e., making the boring, button-down dork the centre of a satirical romance) for a movie as self-serving, self-pitying, neo-Woody Allen ideas go, but as The Baxter unfolds with a suspiciously-familiar series of contrived situations, gentle misunderstandings involving homosexuality and a strange woman in your bed, and a parade of women so far out of Elliot's league as to render his eventual abandonment as inevitable as his ultimate match (with Cecil (Michelle Williams), likewise far out of his league) is unlikely, it becomes clear that the flick is just as stupid as that which it purports to lampoon. The Baxter is actually harder to stomach than its traditional romcom brethren because in place of a leading man locked in its pre-destined narrative, there's barely a supporting character.

Transporter 2 (2005)

September 2, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, France, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Jason Statham, Alessandro Gassman, Amber Valletta, Kate Nauta
screenplay by Luc Besson & Robert Mark Kamen
directed by Louis Leterrier

by Walter Chaw After the unqualified triumph of Unleashed, the other Luc Besson/Louis Leterrier flick from 2005, my expectations were sky high for Transporter 2, the sequel to Cory Yuen's fitfully-entertaining, unapologetically puerile throwback to the delirious Hong Kong cinema of John Woo and Ringo Lam. (Yuen returns as choreographer.) What a disappointment, then, that this picture's even weaker than its predecessor in terms of character development and plotting, content as it is to be a Jackie Chan ripper with Man on Fire's plot. What so intoxicated about Jackie Chan was this gathering cult of personality born of the man's reckless disregard for his own well-being in the pursuit of fashioning a body of work (individual scenes, not films–the films mostly suck) that for a while resurrected Buster Keaton in every movie theatre outside American soil. Without that sense of Chan's legacy (no one is "collecting" Jason Statham's groovy but inorganic fight scenes), all that's left is a vacuous, utterly-disposable chop-socky flick that pervs on girls with the same kind of childishness with which it pervs on cars. Telling that the MacGuffin of the piece is a hyper-phallic syringe and that the chief henchman is Lola (Katie Nauta), an Aryan Grace Jones with a fondness for lingerie and submachine guns.

The Brothers Grimm (2005)

August 26, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Czech Republic, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Peter Stormare, Lena Headey
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Terry Gilliam

Brothersgrimmby Walter Chaw A film with all the drama and flair of a Tuesday Morning tchotchke shop, The Brothers Grimm is the only Terry Gilliam film since Jabberwocky that I've actively disliked. It's the star-crossed director's most conventional, most compromised work, the first to betray the behind-the-scenes strife–the desperation that has defined Gilliam's career to this point. Already pre-emptively disowning the finished product (citing various impasses with the Brothers Weinstein), Gilliam doesn't, this time around, have the aegis of a subversive finished product to hide behind. There may be a lot of people responsible for what's wrong with The Brothers Grimm, but the bulk of the responsibility for its failure is parked square at Gilliam's doorstep–and the rest of it belongs to nitwit screenwriter Ehren Kruger, whose flavour-of-the-month status might finally be souring. It's perhaps unfair to expect the director to constantly pull his Waterloos out of the woods, but The Brothers Grimm is finally the film that his detractors have always accused him of making: busy, unfocused, obnoxious, and lousy.

The Cave (2005)

August 25, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mexico, Romania, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Cole Hauser, Morris Chestnut, Lena Headey, Piper Perabo
screenplay by Michael Steinberg & Tegan West
directed by Bruce Hunt

Caveby Walter Chaw The comparisons are inevitable, but that's mostly because The Cave is about 80% identical to Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid: the same throat-talking white hero (Jack (Cole Hauser this time)), complementary women (Lena Headey as the smart one and Piper Perabo as the bikini), black guy (Morris Chestnut in both films), Asian (Daniel Dae Kim), and egghead (Marcel Iures); the same fall from a giant waterfall; and the same various other good-looking male-model types who serve as chum for the same blurrily-shot CGI beast. There's even a cave in Anacondas, if you recall. But the 20% of The Cave that's different (no fraidy-cat Stepin Fetchit in this one), most notably the major plot twist (already spoiled in a doctored image in the film's trailers), make it the superior film. Not a good film, let's not go crazy, but not a terrible one, either–and if you can get into the idea that what the picture's really doing is rewriting the vampire mythos in biological/parasitical terms, you might even have a good time of the Reign of Fire variety.

The Constant Gardener (2005)

August 25, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, Kenya, Mystery, Romance, Switzerland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, based on the novel by John Le Carré
directed by Fernando Meirelles

Constantgardnerby Walter Chaw An interesting companion piece to both Philip Noyce’s The Quiet American and Andrew Niccol’s upcoming Lord of War, non-antipodean Fernando Meirelles’s follow-up to City of God, the John Le Carré adaptation The Constant Gardener, is beautifully shot in the murky style of David Fincher or high-fashion photography. Not a bad thing–indeed, The Constant Gardener is one of the most technically proficient pictures of the year–but not a great thing, either, when talking about children killing children in Brazil’s favelas or, as is the case here, a British diplomat confronting his culture’s pathological politeness in the plague-fields of Kenya. What recommends The Constant Gardener is the uniform tonal perfection of the performances, and even if the film itself seems to glamorize (and condescend to) the plight of starving and exploited African nations, it at least demonstrates, along with its cinematic brethren (add The Interpreter and Stephen Gaghan’s forthcoming Syriana to that list), cinema’s willingness to take a more global stance. A paternalistic one, for the most part, but a global one just the same.

Asylum (2005)

August 24, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Ireland, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Natasha Richardson, Ian McKellen, Hugh Bonneville, Gus Lewis
screenplay by Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis, based on the novel by Patrick McGrath
directed by David Mackenzie

by Walter Chaw Director David Mackenzie's follow-up to his stygian Young Adam is the stygian Asylum, based on a Patrick McGrath (Spider) novel that draws, again, upon a young McGrath's experiences as the son of the medical superintendent for Britain's Broadmoor Prison for the Criminally Insane during the late-1950s, when Freudian analysis was the rule and sway. ("Axe murderers and schizophrenics were my pram pushers," McGrath says.) Moments of sun in the picture–shot all in greens and shadow–are illusions within the walls of the asylum to which new administrator Max Raphael (Hugh Bonneville) and his wife Stella (Natasha Richardson) have arrived, a pale yellow glow indicating a path to right reason and an unnatural dusk leading down a hall to madness and bedlam. It is what the provocatively-named head shrink Dr. Cleave (Ian McKellen) would refer to as a "problem with passion," and as part of their first, vaguely flirtatious meeting, Stella will ask Cleave if he's so afflicted. Pinched silence is the answer–and by the end, once Dr. Cleave has shown how a lack of passion has twisted his interiors, it becomes clear that silence is perhaps the best answer to questions of the heart.

The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)

August 19, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Romance, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Paul Rudd, Romany Malco
screenplay by Judd Apatow & Steve Carell
directed by Judd Apatow

40yearoldvirginby Walter Chaw You should go just for the spectacle of Elizabeth Banks masturbating in a bathtub, but the real surprise of the piece is the disarming understanding that the usual Greek Chorus of man-friends giving bad advice seem to spring this time from a piquant desire to recapture something of their own lost youth. With a title like The 40 Year Old Virgin (and with a marketing campaign that borders on genius), you know that, as with other “losin’ it” pictures (Losin’ It, Revenge of the Nerds, Hardbodies, The Last American Virgin, and on and on), the hero’s going to get laid–most often to a fireworks accompaniment (or selections from Hair, as the case may be). The only question is if he will get there via the respectable, wife/long-term girlfriend method or bust his cherry against some kind of Tara Reid-esque trollop. But what elevates The 40 Year Old Virgin beyond the same old musty sex-quest flick is the feeling that at its heart it believes there is actually something precious about chastity–even when its preservation has slipped past pathetic. The film is essentially sweet-natured and occasionally insightful about the ways that men never really grow up; small wonder it was co-written and directed by one of the co-creators of “Freaks and Geeks”.

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

August 11, 2005Posted in2000s, 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, 2005Posted in****/****, 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, 2005Posted in2000s, 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, 2005Posted in****/****, 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, 2005Posted in2000s, 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

Badnewsbearsby 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, 2005Posted in2000s, 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

Islandby 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, 2005Posted in****/****, 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, 2005Posted in2000s, 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

Mamereexilsby 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, 2005Posted in2000s, 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

Weddingcrashersby 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, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Music, Theatrical, Thriller

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

Happyendingsby 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, 2005Posted in2000s, 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

Fantasticfourby 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.