The Big Bounce (2004)

January 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Romance, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Owen Wilson, Morgan Freeman, Sara Foster, Charlie Sheen
screenplay by Sebastian Gutierrez, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard
directed by George Armitage

Bigbounceby Walter Chaw By the end of The Big Bounce, I was mildly surprised that it was still the same day I sat down to watch it. The film is aspiring to give Owen Wilson the role of the breezy, insouciant rake popularized by authors like Gregory MacDonald, Carl Hiaasen, and, more to the point, Elmore Leonard (who I guess wrote the source material, previously adapted into a vehicle for Ryan O'Neal), but succeeds mainly in making the likable Wilson tedious. More a mood piece than a heist flick, The Big Bounce also casts ex-MTV news anchorperson Sara Foster as some kind of femme fatale so vacuous, so bad an actress, that although she's stunning in a Nicolette Sheridan sort of way, she fails to convince that there's enough going on upstairs to be even vaguely dangerous. Foster's entire performance is a yellow bikini and a variety of lucky sheets used as impromptu wraps–an object who never convinces that she's an object on purpose.

Open Range (2003) + Northfork (2003)|Open Range – DVD

January 29, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical, Western

OPEN RANGE
**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Robert Duvall, Kevin Costner, Annette Bening, Michael Gambon
screenplay by Craig Storper, based on the novel The Open Range Men by Lauran Paine
directed by Kevin Costner

NORTHFORK
**½/****
starring James Woods, Nick Nolte, Claire Forlani, Duel Farnes
screenplay by Mark Polish & Michael Polish
directed by Michael Polish

Openrangeby Walter Chaw A little like Neil Diamond, Kevin Costner is an anachronism whose earnestness has landed him in Squaresville when the tragedy is that with a little tweaking in perspective, his peculiar brand of old-school earnestness might have his contemporaries looking upon him with more admiration than mirth. Costner is also the great American Gary Cooper hero archetype: tall, good-looking, dim-witted, and dull as dishwater–working almost exclusively in the realm of the sort of guileless red-blooded manifest determinism that loves mom, apple pie, horses, dogs, and guns. And why not? Costner has never stricken me, at least with his own projects, as the slightest bit condescending, his gift the reality or illusion that America's favourite simpleton is learning things at the same pace as his screenplays. His films, from Waterworld to Dances with Wolves to The Postman, are lovable for their complete lack of irony and self-reflection.

The Butterfly Effect (2004)

January 23, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Time Travel

***/****
starring Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Kevin Schmidt, Melora Walters
written and directed by J. Mackye Gruber & Eric Bress

Butterflyeffectby Walter Chaw The Butterfly Effect is tidy, nifty even, a great little genre picture that wallows in ugliness, child abuse, animal abuse, classism, and misogyny but with a dirty polish that tends to distract a little from the nastiness. Evan (Ashton Kutcher) suffers from blackouts, has ever since he was a kid, and no wonder, as there seems to be some nasty bouts of molestation, baby murder, and dog immolation buried in there, desperately in need of some good old-fashioned repression. Now a psych student at State U (his research having something to do with memory, naturally), he discovers that he can "possess" himself at various stages of his youth after being triggered by the comp book journals he's been keeping ever since he started having his spells. His efforts at "fixing" the tragedies of his life all tend towards failure, however, as every little wrinkle he puts in the fabric of time results in catastrophic changes in the present. The Butterfly Effect owes a great debt, then, to Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder," Brian Aldiss's "Poor Little Warrior," William Goldman's Control, and Clive Barker's "The Inhuman Condition"; that it manages to honour to some degree each one of its sources (if only with the precision lavished on the telling of its dank tale) identifies the picture as a most difficult beast to embrace–and just as difficult to dislike. The craft above reproach, it's the content that worries.

Touching the Void (2003) + Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (2004)

January 23, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Romance, Sports, Theatrical, UK

TOUCHING THE VOID
**/****
starring Nicholas Aaron, Richard Hawking, Brendan Mackey, Joe Simpson
based on the book by Joe Simpson
directed by Kevin Macdonald

WIN A DATE WITH TAD HAMILTON!
*½/****
starring Kate Bosworth, Topher Grace, Josh Duhamel, Ginnifer Goodwin
screenplay by Victor Levin
directed by Robert Luketic

Touchingtadby Walter Chaw For those wondering what it would be like if one of those READER'S DIGEST "Drama in Real Life"s were ever made into a film, wonder no longer, for Touching the Void, packaged complete with suspense-shattering survivor testimonials and manageable tidbits of easily-digestible narrative, is a cunning simulacrum of the same. A feature-length dramatic re-creation in the television tabloid style, Touching the Void tells of a harrowing mountaineering cock-up that is, I guess, legendary in mountaineering circles for the same reason that dead NASCAR drivers are legendary in their sport. The problem though isn't with the ultimate banality of this account of one guy who crawls to safety down the bottom half a mountain he's already fallen down the top half of, but that the film of it mixes the victims of their own daredevil genes offering their perspective in front of a black backdrop with re-enactments featuring wheezy actors not entirely up to the task.

Along Came Polly (2004)

January 16, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Ben Stiller, Jennifer Aniston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bryan Brown
written and directed by John Hamburg

Alongcamepollyby Walter Chaw A half-baked, underfed comedy of body function that doesn't even manage the wit to successfully honour the threadbare conventions of its idiot slapstick sub-genre, Along Came Polly isn't offensive so much as apocalyptically tiresome. Even at an anaemic eighty-five minutes, the film drags somehow, limping across the finish line with an ass rimshot that isn't funny at the beginning of the picture with Hank Azaria and hasn't gotten any funnier by the end of it with Ben Stiller. How something so indebted to dozens upon dozens of other films can't get the imitation right buggers the imagination, providing a nation of yearning hacks that dulcet feeling of hope that results in a few more horrifically inept screenplays (produced and directed with commensurate incompetence) just like this one probably in the first half of 2004 alone. Bleak doesn't even begin to describe it.

21 Grams (2003)

December 31, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

**/****
starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, Charlotte Gainsbourg
screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga
directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

21gramsby Bill Chambers Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros was the first film in the wake of Pulp Fiction to wallow in criminal behaviour and monkey with chronology that still managed to stake its own cinematic claim (not the least of which, inaugurating the Mexican New Wave) far removed from the squatters in Tarantinoland, and if I found its fatalism terribly endearing, I realize now that I also derived a lot of pleasure from its trip-hop vibe, which served a function as the film's levity. To its great detriment, 21 Grams has no sense of humour: Iñárritu seeks to depress you with his English-language sophomore effort by weaving a tapestry of dejection and sorrow, but unless the sun breaks through the clouds once in a while, how can we lament it? That Iñárritu dismisses the human process of adaptation in examining the aftermath of a fatal car accident is only half the problem: he underestimates the swiftness with which an audience grows acclimated and eventually impervious to suffering, too.

Peter Pan (2003)

December 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, New Zealand, Romance, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Jason Isaacs, Jeremy Sumpter, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Lynn Redgrave
screenplay by P.J. Hogan and Michael Goldenberg, based on the play by James M. Barrie
directed by P.J. Hogan

by Walter Chaw A perverse lollapalooza of loaded images and disquieting implications, P.J. Hogan’s live-action Peter Pan is this year’s most intriguing Freudian shipwreck, resurrecting the darkness and poetic pessimism of J.M. Barrie’s play–and Peter and Wendy, Barrie’s own novelization–that has been all but forgotten since Disney’s well-regarded 1953 treatment. (While nowhere near as saccharine as something as mendacious as Brother Bear, that animated version is still of a Disney tradition that washes dangerous source material mostly clean of credible malice.) At its heart, consider that the Pan story is about child seduction/abduction in the Yeatsian “Stolen Child” tradition and a colony of “lost boys” that have forgotten their parents and, crucially, been forgotten in turn. The mirror of a parent’s love discarded in this way renders the film’s heart-warming conclusion a touch bitter, with the spectre of the question “But what about their parents?” hanging over it.

Cold Mountain (2003)

December 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Italy, Road Movie, Romance, Romania, Theatrical, UK, War

*½/****
starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Charles Frazier
directed by Anthony Minghella

Coldmountainby Walter Chaw Existing in an awards-season netherworld where the ugliest girl is Renée Zellweger (or Jena Malone), dad is Donald Sutherland, and Odysseus is Jude Law, Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain is a tarted-up march to the awards-night podium starring Nicole Kidman, possibly the most over-exposed actor of the last five years. Everything about the film is careful artifice, from its casting to its grandiloquent direction to its half-baked dialogue ("Small moments like a bag of diamonds," indeed), with only Law, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the magnificent Brendan Gleeson emerging unscathed from the golden wreckage. What Minghella seems best at is recasting edged, emotionally tumultuous novels into sun-kissed temples to the cinematographer's craft, the more dappled sunlight in the eye with which to bedazzle awards-season voters. The strength of Charles Frazier's National Book Award-winning source material lies in its socio-political details of America's Civil War period, but Minghella has focused his picture unerringly on the overrated novel's weaknesses instead: its dialogue, its clumsy Homeric riff (for better country-fried Odyssey, stick to O Brother Where Art Thou?), and its sweeping gothic romance, which finds its characters, at one point, reading the real deal in Wuthering Heights. The result is, like Minghella's previous literary adaptations (The Talented Mr. Ripley and The English Patient), lavish, lugubrious, and off-target.

Teknolust (2003); In July (2000); Taking Sides (2002); Monster (2003)

December 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Germany, Music, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

TEKNOLUST
**/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Davies, James Urbaniak, Karen Black
written and directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson

Im Juli.
***/****
starring Moritz Bleibtreu, Christiane Paul, Mehmet Kurtulus, Idil Üner
written and directed by Fatih Akin

TAKING SIDES
**/****
starring Harvey Keitel, Stellan Skarsgård, Moritz Bleibtreu, Birgit Minichmayr
screenplay by Ronald Harwood
directed by István Szabó

MONSTER
**½/****
starring Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern, Scott Wilson
written and directed by Patty Jenkins

Teknoby Walter Chaw As the year winds down and distributors great and small try to cram their films into rotation for possible awards consideration, the truism that there are just as many mediocre foreign and independent films as mainstream ones proves sage for a quartet of minor releases. Lynn Hershman-Leeson chimes in with Teknolust, another of her riffs on Derek Jarman, this one obsessed with Tilda Swinton and eternity through technology. Fatih Akin’s second film In July (Im Juli.) is essentially a German The Sure Thing with elements of After Hours, obsessed with eternity through an immortal beloved lit by the nimbus of various suns. One-time Oscar-winner István Szabó offers Taking Sides, a morality tale plucked half-formed from the stage, questioning the eternity of art against the requirements of morality. And Patty Jenkins weighs in with Monster, this year’s Boys Don’t Cry; it’s vérité as lower-class urban ugly, with Charlize Theron seeking eternity through a performance that breaks her out of her starlet mold, Halle Berry-style. Only time will tell if any of it keeps.

Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

December 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal
screenplay by Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal
directed by Mike Newell

Monalisasmileby Walter Chaw Julia Roberts films, by and large, seem to hate men. In a real way, her pictures are as objectionable as those films regularly pilloried for objectifying women (and those like the unforgivable Love Actually that somehow slip under the radar for doing the same), functioning as something of a reactionary version of feminism that seeks to denigrate the opposite gender as the sole means toward gender equality. The big secret about films like Mona Lisa Smile is that they're every bit the big-budget Hollywood spectacle film derided by a goodly portion of its audience as puerile, predictable, and thematically reprehensible. Because Mona Lisa Smile is so much the child of formula, it's difficult to muster much energy in condemning the film by itself–by itself, after all, it's handsomely mounted and well-performed. But as a symptom of that facile societal desire for superficial uplifts and comforting negative stereotypes, the smoothness of the coating for this bitter pill deserves some measure of profound distaste.

House of Sand and Fog (2003)

December 19, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jennifer Connelly, Ben Kingsley, Ron Eldard, Frances Fisher
screenplay by Vadim Perelman and Shawn Lawrence Otto
directed by Vadim Perelman

Houseofsandandfogby Walter Chaw Based on an award-winning novel by Andres Dubus III, son of Canadian novelist and short-story writer Andre Dubus, Vadim Perelman's hyphenate debut House of Sand and Fog is difficult to gauge on its own merits, given that the typically invasive grandiosity of another abominable James Horner score sinks the picture almost by itself. With no moment uncommented-upon by Horner's bank of weeping violins and no lovely Roger Deakins tableau unmarred by Horner's insatiable taste for schmaltz, the picture is a prime example of two things: the prestige picture/Oscar grab; and the film of grand emotions that decides to trust its composer over its cast and screenplay. The similarities between House of Sand and Fog and In the Bedroom (a film based on Dubus Sr.'s short story "Killings") are obvious, but where the latter allows its cast to breathe, House of Sand and Fog smothers Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly in a fatal dose of Horner's saccharine ministrations. In Horner's defense, however, the extended climax during which a vein-popping Kingsley is allowed too much rein is awful without help.

Love Don’t Co$t a Thing (2003) + Something’s Gotta Give (2003)

December 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Jack Nicholson, Romance, Theatrical

LOVE DON'T CO$T A THING
½*/****
starring Nick Cannon, Jordan Burg, Jackie Benoit, George Cedar
screenplay by Troy Beyer and Michael Swerdlick, based on Swerdlick's screenplay Can't Buy Me Love
directed by Troy Beyer

SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE
*/****
starring Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, Amanda Peet, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Nancy Meyers

by Walter Chaw The only thing stranger than an urban remake of the late-'80s Patrick Dempsey teensploitation flick Can't Buy Me Love is a blow-by-blow remake of 2000's What Women Want, the latter suddenly more understandable in light of the stultifying limitations John Gray-disciple Nancy Meyers brings to the table as writer-director of that unforgivable rom-com and the dedicatedly unremarkable Something's Gotta Give as well. The disturbing realization is that both Love Don't Co$t a Thing and Something's Gotta Give are products of women filmmakers, writing and directing films in an industry, at least in the United States, still dominated by men–and that both films are non-descript, fairly unflattering to women, definitively unkind to men, and ostensible comedies that wring the genre dry with great droughts of meet-cute, contrivance, bad direction, and enough predictable, twee dialogue to fill a dozen Ephron sisters pictures.

The Last Samurai (2003) + The Girl from Paris (2003)

December 5, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Japan, New Zealand, Theatrical, Tom Cruise

THE LAST SAMURAI
**½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Billy Connolly, Tony Goldwyn, Shin Koyamada
screenplay by John Logan and Marshall Herskovitz & Edward Zwick
directed by Edward Zwick

Une hirondelle a fait le printemps
***/****
starring Michel Serrault, Mathilde Seigner, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Frédéric Pierrot
screenplay by Christian Carion and Eric Assous
directed by Christian Carion

Lastsamuraiby Walter Chaw Concerned with the encroachment of technology, spawned by the humanism of the French Revolution, Romanticism as a movement in poetry is involved in nostalgia for an idealized Natural history. On film, it occasionally manifests itself in period pieces that focus on the encroachment and proliferation of the railroad: its engines (as in King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun and Beyond the Forest, or the Hughes Brothers’ From Hell) the manifestation of the industrial revolution in terms of hellmouths and serpents–William Blake’s “Tyger” burning bright in the forests of a primordial night, all-consuming and inexorable. That loss of ritual to the march of time, tradition and heritage falling before the metal chimera of technology finds itself articulated in two very different films: Edward Zwick’s curious, derivative, workmanlike The Last Samurai, and Christian Carion’s bleak and affecting The Girl from Paris (Une hirondelle a fait le printemps).

Timeline (2003)

November 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Paul Walker, Frances O'Connor, Gerard Butler, Billy Connolly
screenplay by Jeff Maguire and George Nolfi, based on the novel by Michael Crichton
directed by Richard Donner

Timelineby Walter Chaw So it's come to this: "Renaissance Fair: The Movie." A costume thriller based on another terrible Michael Crichton potboiler, Timeline isn't so much disinterested in plausibility as it is interested in pitching itself to the stupidest kid in class. It takes pains to bring along a guy fluent in French on its time travel adventure to fourteenth century France when it would have behooved them to find someone fluent in Middle French or, for that matter, Middle English. Guys weren't talking like Black Adder in 1357, they were talking like Chaucer, and what bothers me isn't that the filmmakers either don't know or don't care about that, but that they've taken pains to illogically address the language barrier, this happy group of time-tripping scientists, and the filmmakers are confident that no one stupid enough to buy a ticket for this film will know the difference. On second thought, they may have a point there.

The Missing (2003)

November 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

*½/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Cate Blanchett, Evan Rachel Wood, Jenna Boyd
screenplay by Ken Kaufman, based on the novel The Last Ride by Thomas Edison
directed by Ron Howard

Missingby Walter Chaw Probably best described as Ron Howard's The Searchers, the really quite awful The Missing (the first clue is a James Horner score) and its tale of bad Indians vs. sacrificial Indians vs. white settlers unfolds during a frontier period that, the last time Howard dabbled, unleashed Far and Away. With Horner's help, Howard proves with The Missing that there's no source material too bleak (not schizophrenia, not reality television, not space mishaps) for him to shine his dimwitted, beatific smile upon. He transforms Thomas Eidson's bleak frontier western (The Last Ride) into a curious sort of faux-feminist uplift melodrama ("Mildred Pierce, Medicine Woman"), demonstrating, along the way, that he has no idea what issues he's raising, much less any idea how to honour them.

Bubba Ho-Tep (2003)

November 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Western

***/****
starring Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Reggie Bannister, Bob Ivy
screenplay by Don Coscarelli, based on the novel by Joe R. Lansdale
directed by Don Coscarelli

Bubbahotepby Walter Chaw Joe R. Lansdale is best known for his tales of the "weird west," a genre mixing splatterpunk with alternate-history western almost entirely defined by the author in the early-Nineties. His work reads a little like the sort of folklore in which Mark Twain dabbled (or the gothic in which Flannery O'Connor was involved), but with zombies and gore, while Don Coscarelli's Bubba Ho-Tep, an adaptation of a Lansdale short story, is steeped in the same sort of bent sensibility that informs the author's work, performing something like a masterstroke in casting Bruce Campbell as Elvis and Ossie Davis as JFK–if ultimately falling a little short of the astonishing audacity of Lansdale's prose. (That very ballsiness what has kept any film prior to this one being made from Lansdale's work, methinks.) What distinguishes the picture, however, is what feels like a genuine concern for the difficulties of aging and the aged, a melancholy tone to the proceedings that, fascinatingly, equates a mummy unquiet for being buried nameless with a pair of American folk heroes declining, also anonymous, in a retirement facility in East Texas.

Metal and Melancholy (1994) + Crazy (1999)

November 14, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Netherlands, Theatrical

Metaal en melancholie
***½/****
directed by Heddy Honigmann

CRAZY
***½/****
directed by Heddy Honigmann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Where has Heddy Honigmann been all my life? Hidden amongst the well-intentioned sheep and voyeuristic wolves that usually crowd my stays at the Hot Docs documentary festival is her ferocious intelligence and shattering compassion–which, when combined, results in wrenching, haunting films that stand alone and put most other documentarians to shame. Like no other filmmaker, she shows people caught in the crossfire of forces beyond their control, and like no other filmmaker, she captures the creative ways in which people adapt to the environment created by those forces. Furthermore, there isn't a shred of liberal self-congratulation anywhere to be found–there is no distance from the pain of her subjects, and there is no escaping the surge of confusion at the situations in which they find themselves. Her films are direct, unpretentious, and highly articulate in their evocation of the people and places they describe.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

November 14, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, War

***½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, James D’Arcy, Edward Woodall
screenplay by Peter Weir & John Collee, based on the novel by Patrick O’Brian
directed by Peter Weir

by Walter Chaw By turns brutal and majestic, Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (hereafter Master and Commander) reunites the antipodean director with Russell Boyd, the cinematographer with whom he shot The Last Wave, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously, and the two have produced a picture on par with those films: historically aware, but more notable for its epic beauty and scope. The effect of Master and Commander is rapture–it engulfs with its detail, finding time to flirt with the secrets of the Galapagos as parallel to the unfolding mystery of technology that finds the HMS Surprise outclassed by the French Acheron, stealthy and peerless enough to inspire speculations of supernatural origin. Issues of the old at war with the new (superstition vs. science, instinct vs. calculation) are nothing new for Weir, who is, after all, at his best when examining the dangers of individuals at odds with tradition, and the rewards for modern men able to assimilate the ancient into the new.

My Brother Silk Road (2002); Swing (1993); Kairat (1992)

November 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Coming of Age, Drama, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Romance, Theatrical

Altyn Kyrghol
**½/****
starring Busurman Odurakaev, Tynar Abdrazaeva, Mukanbet Toktobaev, Kabatai Kyzy Elmira
written and directed by Marat Sarulu

Sel'kincek
**½/****
starring Mirlan Abdykalykov, Bakyt Toktokozhayev
written by Ernest Abdyjaparov, Talgat Asyrankulov, Aktan Arym Kubat
directed by Aktan Arym Kubat

KAIRAT
***/****
starring Talgat Assetov, Samat Beysenbin, Baljan Bisembekova, Indira Jeksembaeva
written and directed by Darezhan Omirbayev

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's impossible to understand an entire national cinema–or, for that matter, several national cinemas–through the prism of exactly three films. That's all I have by which to judge the Cinematheque Ontario's massive series Films From Along the Silk Road, which brings together films from five Central Asian countries–and so I offer my opinions with trepidation: I wouldn't want to turn you off of something magnificent that might be hiding within the schedule. Nevertheless, the selections offered to the press are/were of a fair-to-middling nature–pictorially accomplished despite extremely low budgets, but lacking a finished quality in themes and narratives. They're fascinating as cultural documents from a part of the world that never makes much of an impact in North America, but as cinema only one rates a proper recommendation.

The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

November 5, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving
written and directed by Lana Wachowski & Lilly Wachowski

by Walter Chaw Where The Matrix Reloaded works best as a kitschy send-up of West Side Story, The Matrix Revolutions is the funniest, most overblown re-telling of The Old Testament since The Ten Commandments. It should have been called "Revelations," truth be told, and indeed a sly wink to covenants and the Apocalypse comprises its final scenes. The film comes complete with martyred saints, crucified saviours, and enough murder and fireworks to keep Philistines attentive during the extended lore sequences, less boring here than in the last instalment, though those looking for mortal doses of faux philosophical pretension will find their goblets full to brimming. What saves this chapter, as it did the previous, is the idea that the arrogance required to pull off something this ponderous, this glowering and self-important, is in fact a valuable thing in a mainstream movie climate more interested in the comfortable affirmation of formula. Though it's likely that box office history will interpret the last two parts of The Matrix unkindly, it's all too possible that the trilogy may come to be seen as something like a classic of ambitious, hysterical overreaching. And why not? That's exactly what it is.