Final Destination 3 (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, Kris Lemche, Crystal Lowe
screenplay by Glen Morgan & James Wong
directed by James Wong

by Walter Chaw Jettisoning any attempt to perpetuate the ponderous lore of the first two films, Final Destination 3 docks at the arrivals gate with a full payload of wry sadism and satirical high school archetypes and nothing but grim exploitation nihilism on its mind. It’s the perfect post-9/11 horror film in its way, and sure enough, 9/11 is invoked in an extraordinarily inappropriate photo of the WTC with the shadow of an airplane crossing its middle, which our dour, spoil-sport heroine presents in support of her thesis that photos taken of our soon-to-be-victims might provide clues as to their imminent demise. For the indoctrinated, the machinations of the picture are familiar: A small group of would-be teens avoids a Byzantine–and disgusting–fate, only to be hunted down by “death” (as a concept) and dismembered like flesh puppets ground in the gears of Rube Goldbergian contraptions. (Rube Goldberg with the unsavoury predilections of the Marquis de Sade, that is.) The calamity this time around is a hilariously sprung rollercoaster, and the dour, virginal OCD headcase who has the premonition and survives is Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), doing her level best to warn her fellow survivors but succeeding mainly in being our front-row surrogate witness to the most gleeful assemblage of remorseless bloodletting since, well, Final Destination 2.

In America (2003) + Big Fish (2003)|Big Fish [“Fairy Tale for a Grown-Up” Edition] – DVD

In America (2003) + Big Fish (2003)|Big Fish [“Fairy Tale for a Grown-Up” Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Theatrical

IN AMERICA
***½/****
starring Paddy Considine, Samantha Morton, Sarah Bolger, Emma Bolger
screenplay by Jim Sheridan & Naomi Sheridan
directed by Jim Sheridan

BIG FISH
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange
screenplay by John August, based on the novel by Daniel Wallace
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw Jim Sheridan’s In America sees the nation’s shores as the limits of a grand, dilapidated moviehouse, introduced at the border with The Lovin’ Spoonful‘s “Do You Believe in Magic?” and sustained by the ideas that all deaths are dimpled with nobility, and that all life is instilled with the fever dream of an insomniac’s carnival. Sheridan’s all-night ice cream parlours are, of course, Edward Hopper paintings populated by pink-clad waitresses, while screaming men haunt his rundown tenement brownstones (“This house isn’t haunted, it’s a magic house”–referring to the domicile, then America), artists and mystics marooned on emotional floes by some seismic existential divorce. And his heroes are a family, aliens in America illegally who discover that their only ward against life’s necessary evils is a faith in imagination and a fingernail declaration of hope.

When a Stranger Calls (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Camilla Belle, Tommy Flanagan, Tessa Thompson, Brian Geraghty
screenplay by Jake Wade Wall, based on the screenplay by Steve Feke and Fred Walton
directed by Simon West

by Walter Chaw There’s nothing patently, obviously offensive about Simon West’s abominable remake of the already awful “thriller” When a Stranger Calls: It’s neither misogynistic nor racist nor really anything more than exactly what you’d expect from a project like this, dumped as it has been in the wasteland of another early-February. It’s so studiedly inoffensive, in fact, that you could take an elderly nun to it and there would be nary a flutter in her rigidly tender sensibilities. It tittles no ates, manufactures no suspense, and no one in a packed audience of four-hundred folks at the preview screening rustled an inch when the cat–not once, but twice–provided the false jump before the “real” one, though I confess the reason for that might be that by the time West and company get around to actually having something happen, most anyone with any kind of sense is asleep or halfway home. I’ve failed to mention that it’s acted by heavy-browed lead Camilla Belle (as babysitter Johnson, Jill Johnson) like a toy robot with her key only half-wound. Were she to have run out of juice negotiating a wall and leaned there motionless, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, France, Mexico, Mystery, Theatrical, Western

*½/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cesar Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam
screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga
directed by Tommy Lee Jones

by Walter Chaw Crash by way of Cormac McCarthy, Tommy Lee Jones’s “fuck you” of a mouthful The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is another fairytale salvo from the race divide, fired from that good place that results in cultural artifacts so unbearably cheesy and proselytizing that any potential heat is lost long before the second reel has finished unspooling. It’s about serendipity, this elegy for the American West, hence no transgression is left unredeemed in its long, rambling, “it’s good for you, so swallow it” narrative, with blame going in equal portion to Jones–whose smug, smarter-than-you are attitude has shoehorned him into prestigious position as the resident asshole of Man of the House, Men in Black II, and The Missing–and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams, Amores Perros), who paints every Mexican in the film in the same shade of saintly. (All the gringos, on the other hand, have a lot to learn about the grand mystery of being human.) It’s tedious, unsurprising stuff, this picture–the kind of thing that gets the Right in a bunch about how Hollywood is a tool of the subversive Lefties while making smart folks on both sides of the Culture War cringe before its condescension.

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2006) + Why We Fight (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Denmark, Documentary, France, Satire, Theatrical, UK, War

LOOKING FOR COMEDY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
*/****
starring Albert Brooks, John Carroll Lynch, Sheetal Sheth, Fred Dalton Thompson
written and directed by Albert Brooks

WHY WE FIGHT
**/****
directed by Eugene Jarecki

by Walter Chaw The most frustrating thing about Albert Brooks's crushingly boring, infuriatingly unfunny Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (hereafter Comedy) is the possibility that such was the intention all along. 'Lost in Arabia' (well, India and Pakistan–let's not get crazy, here) finds Brooks doing a high-wire act with post-modernism–the same one he's been doing his whole career, as it happens. At some point, though, it's fair to wonder how long you can push self-awareness before it finally flies apart in a storm of narcissistic deconstruction. Mull over, if you will, a moment where Brooks (as Brooks) recreates one of his classic gags–involving the world's most ironically-tragic ventriloquist–in the middle of an interminable stand-up routine staged in a New Delhi auditorium, closing his act with the dummy (the wooden one) drinking a glass of water. It's Brooks, and Brooks's film, in microcosm: a man who returns the term "mortification" to ritual and religion while being incapable of subsuming the belief that he's still the smartest guy in the room. The trick of Comedy is that in making a movie that isn't very funny about a man who isn't very funny in the middle of a gulf of cultural misunderstanding that's especially not very funny, Brooks hopes to draw a corollary between how the troubles of the world boil down to everybody's inability to communicate. As revelations go, it's not earth-shattering. Guess it goes without saying that it's also not worth the effort to get there.

The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes (2006); Mutual Appreciation (2006); Unknown (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, France, Germany, Music, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE PIANOTUNER OF EARTHQUAKES
*½/****
starring Amira Casar, Gottfried John, Assumpta Serna, César Saracho
screenplay by Alan Passes and The Quay Brothers
directed by The Quay Brothers

MUTUAL APPRECIATION
***½/****
starring Justin Rice, Rachel Clift, Andrew Bujalski, Seung-Min Lee
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

UNKNOWN
½*/****
starring Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Bridget Moynahan, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Matthew Waynee
directed by Simon Brand

by Walter Chaw The Quay Brothers, Stephen and Timothy, are marvellous animators, having shepherded stop-motion and a disquieting biomechanical ethic into a series of notably discomfiting shorts, more than one of which pays tribute to their hero/mentor Jan Svankmajer. I met their 1995 transition to live-action features (Institute Benjamenta) with equal parts excitement, curiosity, and trepidation–I believed they'd be a little like either fellow animator-turned-director Tim Burton or those masters of a form who overreach by switching to a different medium, à la Michael Jordan. The truth is somewhere in-between, as the Quays have retained a bit of their glacial patience and a marked affection for created environments but have miscalculated the extent to which our fascination with animate clockworks translates into a commensurate fascination with people sitting around, staring at a wall. The former inspires existential thoughts on the nature of sentience; the latter generally inspires boredom. No question in my mind that something's lurking in the Quays' underneath, but it's important to mark that fine line distinguishing fascination from obtuseness for the sake of itself. Exploring the waking/dreamlife divide is interesting–but it's neither original nor terribly useful when the main tactic seems to be to conjure up pomposity-inspired sleepiness.

Transamerica (2005) + Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Music, Road Movie, Theatrical, UK, War

TRANSAMERICA
**/****
starring Felicity Huffman, Kevin Zegers, Fionnula Flanagan, Graham Greene
written and directed by Duncan Tucker

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS
*½/****
starring Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins, Will Young, Christopher Guest
screenplay by Martin Sherman
directed by Stephen Frears

by Walter Chaw Duncan Tucker makes his hyphenate debut with Transamerica, one of the first pictures distributed by the Weinsteins under their new aegis. Predictably, all the earmarks of the earnest indie genre Miramax blazed are cemented into place: it's over-written when it's not overreliant on a soundtrack of ethnically-cued melodies (the wood flute marks the appearance of an Indian, for instance) and folksy ballads (I challenge you not to 'pit up when a tune about a rose blooming accompanies our hero swapping his "outie" for an "innie"); narratively creaky; and hangs its hopes on its star, Felicity Huffman, to impose nuance where there is none. Huffman's performance being the sort of stunt in a minor independent film that plays fast and loose with smug liberal paternalism should guarantee her an Oscar nomination–and it can't hurt that another Leonardo DiCaprio doppelgänger arrives post-Michael Pitt in the form of Kevin Zegers, trailing a little pathos and a little inappropriate titillation on his thin shoulders.

Match Point (2005)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Luxembourg, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Walter Chaw Match Point is a quasi-Patricia Highsmith flick about a rudderless Ripley cruising like a shark amongst England’s polite society, and the extent to which it works has to do with the degree to which its philosophy of chance and living with ghosts attaches itself to the zeitgeist. The picture opens with a shot of a tennis ball lobbed low and in slow-motion into the top of a net, an image that has as its echo a key moment where a wedding ring tossed towards a river rebounds against a fence into the street. The voiceover talks about the common fear that our lives are governed by happenstance and entropy, transforming the ball going forward into a metaphor for winning–and back into one for losing. Using this as gospel, it’s interesting to wonder what it means that, when push comes to shove, our hero’s victory is defined by his defeat. Match Point is Woody Allen’s best film in some time, which is a left-handed compliment at best; better to say that it’s another decent millennial fable about class, the vicissitudes of fate, the reptilian hunger of infiltrating the social strata, and living with ghosts.

Tristan + Isolde (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, Germany, Ireland, Romance, Switzerland, Theatrical, UK, War

*/****
starring James Franco, Sophia Myles, Rufus Sewell, David O’Hara
screenplay by Dean Georgaris
directed by Kevin Reynolds

by Walter Chaw After bravely transforming the Robin Hood legend into a case of thirtysomething love jones with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner’s well-known ex-best friend Kevin Reynolds turns the Tristan + Isolde legend into a WB/TIGER BEAT-friendly, mouth-breathing bodice-ripper indicated by lots of backlighting, orgasmic slow-mo, and dialogue purple enough to blind a Brontë sister. It’s shot like a perfume commercial and written like a florid creative-writing exercise, one packed with such AM Gold, Luther Ingram treasures as: “Why does loving you feel so wrong?” Well, it might have something to do with said love being the basis for the Guinevere/Lancelot adultery story in which a woman comes between a king and his most trusted knight, leading to the ideological and literal collapse of a kingdom. Or it might have something to do with the fact that the actors playing the lovers in question never for a moment manage to spark the soggy tinder packed beneath the story. This allows a great deal of time for the sentient beings left in the audience after the ten-minute-mark exodus to suss out why this thing was delayed, then dumped in the middle of the January dead zone. It also, incidentally, caused me to fantasize about somehow harnessing the ability of films like this to make 125 minutes feel like six days for youth-giving effects and racing box scores.

Glory Road (2006) + Last Holiday (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

GLORY ROAD
½*/****
starring Josh Lucas, Derek Luke, Emily Deschanel, Jon Voight
screenplay by Christopher Cleveland & Bettina Gilois and Gregory Allen Howard
directed by James Gartner

LAST HOLIDAY
*/****
starring Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman, based on the screenplay by J.B. Priestley
directed by Wayne Wang

by Walter Chaw There are two big laughs in Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer’s African-American Hoosiers, Glory Road. The first comes when some white guy says derisively, “Can you imagine what basketball dominated by Negroes would look like?”, while the sight of defeated Kentucky coaching legend Adolph Rupp (Jon Voight), vilified by history perhaps unfairly (though there’s no question that he’s vilified unfairly by this film), mourning the loss of the National Championship Game to an upstart team prompts the second. Both moments speak to the biggest problems in a film riddled with little ones: the former because it makes the audience complicit in–and comfortable with–the picture’s callousness and casual blanket racism, and the latter because everything that happens in the film is already a foregone conclusion. The only appeal left is rooted in seeing the black players put on exactly the kind of degrading sideshow the picture suggests they’re too human for. Glory Road is smug, offensive, and ignorant in the way that films with no self-awareness are ignorant–wrapped in a story designed specifically to make people cheer and believe that this one game in 1966 changed peoples’ attitudes towards African-Americans in sports instead of simply bolstering the idea that the black athlete was advantageous and alien rather than just merely alien.

Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (2005)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Piper Perabo, Tom Welling
screenplay by Sam Harper
directed by Adam Shankman

Cheaperbythedozen2by Walter Chaw I spent altogether too much time during Cheaper by the Dozen 2 anticipating the moment when Hilary Duff would snuffle some sugar cubes out of a little girl’s hand–but in my defense, what else was there to do? I feel strange saying that this film is unwatchable because, hey, I’m proof that, technically, it is watchable; I guess I should say that it’s highly inadvisable to watch this film. I want to be clever, to turn a phrase that better illustrates the point, but in cases like these it’s probably better to be straightforward. If you find yourself in a theatre with this film, leave. It’s awful. Director Adam Shankman is the Uwe Boll of family movies: he doesn’t know how to pace a picture, he has no idea what to do with a camera (check out an outdoor banquet sequence that looks like it was shot under muddy water), and his use of John Debney’s atrocious, hate-crime of a score should set off Amnesty International’s radar. This is film as punishment, I’m serious. It’s never funny, never insightful, never valuable in any way. Kids might like it in the way that kids like anything that’s short and kinetic, yet the film preys upon a consistent mass hunger for “family” entertainment, and children and idiots deserve better supervision. Family films in the United States seem defined only as having no “objectionable” content, such as non-cartoon violence, a whiff of poetry, or any hint of sexuality. At the risk of being a rebel, let me offer the heretical view that the only content that’s truly objectionable is witless sludge like Cheaper by the Dozen 2.

The Family Stone (2005); Loggerheads (2005); The Dying Gaul (2005)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

THE FAMILY STONE
*/****
starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Claire Danes, Diane Keaton, Rachel McAdams
written and directed by Thomas Bezucha

LOGGERHEADS
*½/****
starring Tess Harper, Bonnie Hunt, Michael Kelly, Michael Learned
written and directed by Tim Kirkman

THE DYING GAUL
**/****
starring Patricia Clarkson, Campbell Scott, Peter Sarsgaard, Ryan Miller
written and directed by Craig Lucas

by Walter Chaw An absolute freakin' nightmare: Imagine spending the holidays with Diane Keaton in full-smirk, full-chuffing, shit-eating laughter mode, then magnify that with a screenplay by hyphenate and former fashion executive Thomas Bezucha that never misses an opportunity to excrete a little dollop of quirk where silence would have spoken volumes. The Family Stone is an intensely middlebrow bath, dipped in warm sentiments and institutionalized ugliness–one half slapstick fish-out-of-water, one half chestnut-lit holiday perennial-hopeful. (The marriage works about as well as it does in other pieces of Yuletide garbage like Christmas with the Kranks and Home Alone.) Therein, eldest Stone boy Everett (professional piece of wood Dermot Mulroney) is home for the holidays (it's not as good, obviously, as Jodie Foster's film of the same name but it's cut from the same cloth) to introduce his girlfriend Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) to his quirky tribe. Chief antagonist for the first hour is mousy (yeah, right) Amy (Rachel McAdams), who has an NPR duffel bag in a brief introductory shot, thus establishing her character as much as it's ever going to be established. She doesn't like Meredith because I don't know why but proceeds to brand her a racist and a boor when it seems that, mostly, Meredith is intensely uncomfortable and self-conscious. Maybe she has social anxiety disorder, or the more common stick-up-her-ass-ism. That's how appropriately-named evil mother Sybil (Diane Keaton) diagnoses her, except she calls Meredith a monkey and replaces the ass-stick with a silver spoon.

Syriana (2005)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Espionage, Theatrical, Thriller, United Arab Emirates

**/****
starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper
written and directed by Stephen Gaghan

Syrianaby Walter Chaw An omnibus of shorthand outrage standing in place of actual information, Stephen Gaghan's perfectly respectable–principled, even–Syriana reassures us with its glut of disconnected pop-up liberal soundbites that it's weary and wise enough for the both of us should it be the case, most likely, that we're just weary. But on the off chance there's nothing to connect to here despite all the grandstanding, it makes clear that at the end of the day it's really about something as simple as not taking your family for granted. Call it the secular Magnolia, itself a similarly longish, flashy film that was also about being kind to your children. There isn't anything for us to do with the dry intellectualizing of Syriana: once we're told that the CIA sends assassins around the world, that sometimes Arab kids are turned into suicide bombers by wackos, that the oil industry is a nepotistic disaster, and that as soon as the oil runs out in the Middle East, the emirs of Saudi Arabia will be back "in tents, chopping each other's heads off," what are we left with but justification for our under-informed fears and lazy superiority?

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Spielberg, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh, Kôji Yakusho
screenplay by Robin Swicord and Doug Wright, based on the novel by Arthur Golden
directed by Rob Marshall

Memoirsofageishaby Walter Chaw The wounds that WWII opened between the Chinese and the Japanese are still fresh. Over the course of a twelve-year occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese regular army, at least nine million Chinese civilians were butchered–and though the Chinese, lacking a unified defense, bear the burden of poor organization, petty in-fighting, and a fair share of mortal Pollyannaism, the Japanese refuse to this day to apologize for what they have officially dismissed as the standard toll collected in conventional warfare. I believe it’s this–as opposed to the centuries of racial hatred–that has called down the normally quiescent Chinese activist contingent on the suddenly-thorned head of the Steven Spielberg-produced Memoirs of a Geisha, a film written, directed, and produced by Caucasians based on a book by a white author who was promptly sued by the geisha, Mineko Iwasaki, he interviewed for the book on the grounds that he not only betrayed their confidentiality agreement, but also fabricated the fate of her virginity, which she claims was never auctioned off in the way that the Arthur Golden novel describes. True or not, it’s the sort of thing that would be particularly attractive to a Western mind transfixed by the sexy Mystery of the Geisha.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway
screenplay by Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Ang Lee talks about Brokeback Mountain like it’s a break that he needed after the pressure-cooker of Hulk, and the way that the film slinks around the topics that have garnered it its share of awards-season attention suggests that the director of The Ice Storm was well and truly on vacation. It’s the most polite depiction of homosexuality you can imagine while still featuring passionate kisses and simulated doggy-style penetration; most of the ways that Lee chooses to illustrate his star-crossed lovers’ isolation in the middle of the most closeted American genre are parsed from sub-par situation-comedy scenarios. I like when Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) sees his lover Ennis (Heath Ledger) for the first time in years and the two lock in a passionate embrace, mainly because by the revving-up of Gustavo Santaolalla’s score and the look on Ennis’s wife Alma’s (Michelle Williams) face, it means we’re about to get one of those hilarious scenes where the girlfriend walks in on something she wasn’t supposed to see. It’s a moment unworthy of the picture, just like another where Ennis flips Alma over during sex to simulate his stolen time with Jack, or when Alma chooses Thanksgiving dinner with Ennis, their kids, and her new husband to accuse him, histrionically, of indulging in gay love. I can’t think of one good reason for Alma being made the straight man in an old gag, the victim humiliated, and the hysterical representative of society at large except that even at close to two-and-a-half hours, the film is so under-populated that Alma must serve triple duty to Jack and Ennis’s shorthand romance. It speaks to Williams’s burgeoning talent that she wears the burden well.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell
screenplay by Ann Peacock and Andrew Adamson and Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Andrew Adamson

by Walter Chaw I'm offended by the marketing for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (hereafter Narnia 1)–not the trailers (which are pedestrian) or the print ads, per se, but the campaign to pre-screen reels to churches and church groups, including Colorado's wildly divisive rightwing activist organization Focus on the Family. It's not something I'm terribly surprised to see from Walden Media–but it's something that strikes me as peculiar coming from the gay-friendly Walt Disney Pictures, a studio currently "suffering" a boycott from Focus on the Family that aims, in part, to force Disney to explain their "Jekyll and Hyde" products and policies. Of the two hypocrisies, fiduciary vs. ideological, I guess I'd favour one over the other, not being in the business of weighing sins, as it were.

Sky High (2005) + Stealth (2005)|Sky High [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

SKY HIGH
½*/****  Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Michael Angarano, Danielle Panabaker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kurt Russell
screenplay by Paul Hernandez and Robert Schooley & Mark McCorkle
directed by Mike Mitchell

STEALTH
**/****
starring Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Sam Shepard
screenplay by W.D. Richter
directed by Rob Cohen

Skyhighby Walter Chaw A kids movie for the stupid ones and a guys movie for the stupid ones of those, Sky High and Stealth are lowest-common-denominator entertainments that throw sense out the window in favour of clumsy one-liners, bad special effects, and an eye focused keen on demographics and the bottom line, which those demographics promise to fork over on opening weekend. It doesn't matter if they're good, just that they rake in enough moolah before people get a whiff of the noisome rot and ennui wafting on air-conditioned currents out of the friendly neighbourhood cineplex and start staying home again in droves. The dreadfulness of Sky High and Stealth can be measured by the extent to which this nation's timid, gaffed, untrained, dispassionate film critics equivocate in their reviews that it's for kids, that it's an enjoyable film if you check your brain at the door, and/or that it's "finally" the family/action/blockbuster you've been waiting for all summer long.

The Beautiful Country (2004); Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005); The World (2005)|The Beautiful Country – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Norway, Theatrical

THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Nick Nolte, Tim Roth, Bai Ling, Temeura Morisson
screenplay by Sabina Murray
directed by Hans Petter Moland

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
*½/****
starring John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson, Brandon Ratcliff
written and directed by Miranda July

Shijie
****/****
starring Zhao Tao, Chen Taisheng, Jing Jue, Jiang Zhong-wei
written and directed by Jia Zhang-ke

Beautifulcountrycapby Walter Chaw Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland makes films about isolated individuals trapped in simulacra of motion, and his best work is savage and melancholic: a trip taken by broken people to the bedside of a dying mother in Aberdeen; a pilgrimage made by a poet to locate his masculinity in the company of a maniac in Zero Kelvin. Even his first film, the quiet Secondløitnanten, touches on men oppressed by the caprice of nature–of other men driven to their natural state and the situations that melt away the lies that keep our lives liveable. Moland's films are beautifully framed (picaresque, it's not too much to say), capturing in their sprawling, austere landscapes the plight of individuals dwarfed by the mad, engulfing entropy of existence. He's a good fit with American auteur Terrence Malick, in other words–so it's without much surprise that Malick approached Moland to direct The Beautiful Country, a project he'd worked on, on and off, for a period of years before deciding that the producer's role would better suit him in this instance. The result is a picture that looks, sounds, often feels like a Malick film–even more so, it goes without saying, than Moland's early output does, leaving the project something that feels uncomfortably like ventriloquism. And though I'm a fan of both puppet and master, I find that I prefer the one drawing a line to the other rather than pulled around by the master's strings.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane
screenplay by Steven Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by Mike Newell

Harrypotter4by Walter Chaw Just as Harry and the other arms of his archetypal triangle stumbled into adolescence with aplomb and poetry under the guidance of Alfonso Cuarón in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, they awkward-and-gangly their way into a holding pattern in Mike Newell's puttering Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (hereafter Harry Potter 4). It looks grungy and it lacks grace: the moments meant to inspire are tired and the moments meant to edify are portentous and unbearably drawn-out. There's not a lot here for the non-fanatic, with screenwriter Steve Kloves failing the material for the first time and Newell showing himself to be exactly the kind of director who would make slick, protracted nothings like Mona Lisa Smile and Pushing Tin. The Newell film Harry Potter 4 most resembles, however, is Four Weddings and a Funeral (his conduit to the big time and, consequently, the one he's most likely to cannibalize when handed the golden ticket), in that this third sequel tries to worry itself about the trials of youngsters falling in puppy love, going to their first formals, and learning that there are such things in the world as death and taxes. A noble pursuit, chasing characters as they grow from chapter to chapter, from innocence to churlishness to experience (we presume)–but for me, at least, Harry Potter 4 is the first wholly dispensable instalment, repeating the best parts of Cuarón's film and adding to the conversation only the disturbing resurrection of archenemy Voldemort.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan, Corbin Bernsen
written and directed by Shane Black

Kisskissbangbangby Walter Chaw The same kind of movie as Doug Liman's Mr. and Mrs. Smith but more so, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang marks the hyphenate debut of star screenwriter Shane Black, and it's the kind of movie his Last Action Hero would have been had they aimed it at adults (and cast actors). A meta-exercise taken to plucky, insouciant excess, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is nihilistic, misanthropic, and it just might hate its audience a little, but damn if it doesn't wash out as something as exhilaratingly lawless as Sin City and recklessly experimental as Rian Johnson's Brick (two other examples of noir's recent extreme makeover). Though it's not shy in its one agonizing scene of gore, the picture seems more concerned about the way we assimilate–and anticipate–sex and violence at the movies.