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SOURCE CODE ****/**** starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright screenplay by Ben Ripley directed by Duncan Jones
Copie conforme ****/**** starring Juliette Binoche, William Shimell written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami
by Walter Chaw The one part of Source Code that isn’t duck-ass tight poses so many questions about the nature of our hero’s heroism and the aftermath of the film that it opens up what initially seems a hermetically-sealed conceit into something of real depth and fascination. Far from the solipsism of failures interesting (Timecrimes) and not (Primer), different from marginal successes like 12 Monkeys and Déjà Vu, Duncan Jones’s sophomore feature (after the similarly thorny Moon) plays most like a child of Last Year at Marienbad and a companion piece to Abbas Kiarostami’s contemporaneous Certified Copy. It speaks in terms of quantum physics and string theory, but without pretension, achieving the almost impossible by introducing difficult concepts at the same pace with which its characters–not a dummy among them–are able to understand them without gassing (or worse, falling well behind) the audience. That it presents itself as a mainstream, popular entertainment is more to its credit, giving lie to the notion that Hollywood is bankrupt of ideas. Rather, it’s the destination for gifted filmmakers–some of them smart enough, and resourceful enough, to hold fast to their idealism and intelligence for, if not an entire career, then at least long enough to set a bar.
**½/**** starring Bradley Cooper, Abbie Cornish, Andrew Howard, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Leslie Dixon, based on the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn
directed by Neil Burger
by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Its plot follows a drably straight line and its Joe Gillis narration is tiresome; the most original idea that Limitless has is that, hey, maybe drug abuse isn’t such a bad thing after all. That snarky notion extends past the actual narrative into the presentation itself. Whether that’s enough to sustain your interest is, ultimately, up to you. Eddie (Bradley Cooper) is a down-and-out novelist when his ex-brother-in-law Vernon (Johnny Whitworth) introduces him to NZT, a miracle pill that increases his creative and intellectual prowess to the nth degree. With a wealth of suppressed knowledge suddenly at his disposal, Eddie is overcome with, yes, limitless ambition: he completes his long-stalled novel in four days and goes on to learn new skills, talents, and languages in the blink of an eye. As the drug’s power only increases with time and dosage and won’t let him stand still, he applies his newfound intelligence to the stock market (leading to an encounter with a corporate big shot (one of Robert De Niro’s trademark extended cameos)) and plans to further increase his wealth with money borrowed from the mob (leading to an encounter with a lowlife thug (Andrew Howard)). Then come the unexpected side effects–such as the random murders and hired goons who seem to follow him everywhere. If Limitless isn’t about the horrors of drug addiction, then what is it about? How the attempt to “enhance” one’s own identity removes that identity completely, perhaps? Maybe the overconfidence that attends brilliance? No on both counts, but it’s a wild ride while it lasts. And that, in itself, is sort of the point.
ZERO STARS/**** starring Amanda Seyfried, Gary Oldman, Billy Burke, Julie Christie
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson
directed by Catherine Hardwicke
by Walter Chaw That Catherine Hardwicke keeps getting jobs speaks to a deep, ugly dysfunction in the Hollywood dream factory. Not the thought that money talks, but the idea that people like Hardwicke and Adam Sandler and Michael Bay are handed the keys to the executive washroom because they understand what it is that certain critically-deficient demographics want and proceed to provide it in massive, deadly draughts. In other industries, there would be regulatory agencies–though it’s fair to consider that checking the poster for Red Riding Hood would give you all the nutritional information you probably need. Namely that Hardwicke is the main ingredient, and that had I remembered this before the screening, I never, ever would have gone, in exactly the same way I wouldn’t eat scrapple again. I’m sure a lot of people like that shit, but grey pig-mush is grey pig-mush. Red Riding Hood is easily the worst movie I’ve seen since probably all the way back to A Sound of Thunder, and in a lot of the same ways: horribly written; horribly performed (but they didn’t have a chance); directed by someone that cameras should file a restraining order against; and edited by a cast-iron moron (make that pair of morons: long-time Hardwicke accomplice Nancy Richardson and poor Julia Wong). At least there’s Gary Oldman along for the ride to order his Moorish henchmen to, at one point, “put him in the elephant!”
½*/**** starring Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Ramon Rodriguez, Michael Peña
screenplay by Christopher Bertolini
directed by Jonathan Liebesman
by Ian Pugh The action sequences in Battle: Los Angeles operate on a clockwork schedule. A group of Marines traverses the title city in search of civilians and/or shelter. Suddenly, aliens! The camera shakes for five minutes. The Marines find a safehouse and plan their next move. Suddenly, aliens! Lather, rinse, repeat. But, you will ask, what happened while the camera was shaking? How did they escape? And, as one character inevitably puts it, “What is that thing?” Fair questions, all. I’m pretty sure I caught a glimpse of a rocket launcher built like that BigDog robot, though I can’t be 100% certain. There’s actually a specific moment where you give up trying to distinguish one thing from another. At the beginning of this adventure, we’re told that the Marines have a mere three hours to recover their civilians before the military blows up Santa Monica. Time finally runs out with some folks holed up in a random liquor store, and your first impulse is to question why the movie would leave its final countdown to an analog clock on the wall–but then you realize that you have no idea who these people are, how they got there, who died in the interim, or whether this is a liquor store at all. (Maybe it’s somebody’s wine cellar? I think I saw wine bottles.) It’s not an interpretation of wartime chaos, it’s just plain incomprehensible.
½*/**** starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Anthony Mackie, Terence Stamp screenplay by George Nolfi, based on the story “Adjustment Team” by Philip K. Dick directed by George Nolfi
by Walter Chaw George Nolfi, writer of Ocean’s Twelve, The Sentinel, The Bourne Ultimatum, and other movies I can’t really remember if I’ve seen returns to his “Renaissance Fair: The Movie” (a.k.a. Timeline) roots with this howler of a hyphenate debut. Somehow mushing together the worst elements of bad films as disparate as The Box and Return to Me with an uncannily bad ear for dialogue and the instincts of a twelve-year-old Catechism student, The Adjustment Bureau jollily romps through Christian quandaries of predestination vs. free will by pitting fedora’d Wim Wenders angels against milquetoast Matt Damon and his badly-slumming object of desire Emily Blunt during their Satanic (I guess) quest to be married to each other. It doesn’t take a stand one way or the other, having its host and eating it, too, all the way through to a genuinely stupid conclusion in which it’s revealed that the almighty DIRECTOR is neither and both male and female and appears to all of us in His/Her own way. I suppose you could say that The Adjustment Bureau is a Wim Wenders movie if Wenders were a douchebag given to sackless pop-Christianity musings scored (by the up-and-down Thomas Newman) with what sounds like the music from Field of Dreams as performed by an orchestra of baby deer.
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B- starring George Clooney, Violante Placido, Thekla Reuten, Paolo Bonacelli screenplay by Rowan Joffe, based on the novel A Very Private Gentlman by Martin Booth directed by Anton Corbijn
by Walter Chaw Though nothing more than a well-made Jean-Pierre Melville shrine at first glance, Anton Corbijn’s lovely The American leaves a surprising amount of aftertaste in a year of film that will probably be remembered for the number of “growers” among its roster of resonant pictures. An unusual take on the monotony of any profession (be it prostitution or engineering to-order weapons for assassins), it’s more evidence that George Clooney, with this tribute to Melville, his Kaufman-scripted Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and his Tarkovsky redux Solaris, is quietly becoming a visible, above-the-line champion for smart American genre flicks–fomenting his own little underground Nouvelle Vague with movies that audiences, for the most part, are anxious to dismiss. The American is provocatively self-conscious in the way of its best French antecedents; aware of the shoulders upon which it stands (everything from Le Samourai to Breathless to later stuff like the homegrown Eye of the Needle), it also has the gumption to title itself after the original title for Citizen Kane. In so doing, it announces itself as something like a commentary on how the passionate, bloody carnality at the foundation of the United States has aged into an almost bored functionality in the first decade post-9/11.
“Good-looking people turn me off. Myself included.” –Patrick Wayne Swayze
RED DAWN (1984) [COLLECTOR’S EDITION] – DVD **½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras N/A starring Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Powers Boothe screenplay by Kevin Reynolds and John Milius directed by John Milius
THE OUTSIDERS (THE COMPLETE NOVEL) (1983) [TWO-DISC SPECIAL EDITION] – DVD ****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A+ starring C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Leif Garrett screenplay by Kathleen Knutsen Rowell, based on the novel by S.E. Hinton directed by Francis Ford Coppola
YOUNGBLOOD (1986) [TOTALLY AWESOME 80s DOUBLE FEATURE] – DVD ZERO STARS/**** Image D+ Sound C- starring Rob Lowe, Cynthia Gibb, Ed Lauter, Patrick Swayze, Jim Youngs written and directed by Peter Markle
POINT BREAK (1991) [PURE ADRENALINE EDITION] – DVD + [WARNER REISSUE] – BLU-RAY DISC ***/**** DVD – Image B- Sound A Extras C BD – Image B- Sound B+ Extras C starring Patrick Swayze, Keanu Reeves, Gary Busey, Lori Petty screenplay by W. Peter Iliff, based on the novel by Rick King directed by Kathryn Bigelow
DIRTY DANCING (1987) [TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY] – DVD ½*/**** Image B Sound A Extras B starring Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey, Jerry Orbach, Steven Reuther screenplay by Eleanor Bergstein directed by Emile Ardolino
GHOST (1990) [SPECIAL COLLECTOR’S EDITION] – DVD + BLU-RAY DISC */**** DVD – Image A- Sound B Extras B BD – Image A Sound B+ Extras B starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, Tony Goldwyn screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin directed by Jerry Zucker
KEEPING MUM (2006) – DVD ½*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B starring Rowan Atkinson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Patrick Swayze screenplay by Richard Russo and Niall Johnson directed by Niall Johnson
by Walter Chaw Early on in the stupidest/smartest movie of 1984, a band of high-schoolers, having just witnessed a few planeloads of Cuban paratroopers land in their football field and machine gun their history teacher (“Education this!”), stock up for a stay in forest exile by cleaning out a gas-n-sip. Sleeping bags, canned goods, and the last thing off the shelf? That’s right: a football. I spent the rest of Red Dawn trying to figure out if the football played some role in the eventual fighting prowess of our carbuncular guerrillas or if it was merely a big “fuck you” to the rest of the world that thinks “football” is soccer. The jury’s still out, because while there’s an awful lot of grenade-chucking in the last hour of the picture, none of it looks particularly football-like (or athletic come to think of it) despite the deadly accuracy of each toss aimed at the hapless commie combatants. (So clueless are they about modern-day conventional warfare that they’re repeatedly ambushed by this untrained makeshift militia; they’re the Washington Generals to our Harlem Globetrotters.) It’s just one puzzle in an altogether puzzling film–one that has Patrick Swayze playing Charlie Sheen’s older brother (and Jennifer Grey the sister of Lea Thompson in an even greater genetic stretch) and C. Thomas Howell as a remorseless, psychopathic nihilist who takes his dose of glory by Rambo’ing up against a Russian attack helicopter. Maybe his transformation from ’80s-wallpaper milquetoast to tough-guy killing machine had something to do with being forced by the brothers Swayze-Sheen to drink fresh deer blood from a tin cup.
Image A- Sound B Extras B “Fire in the Hole,” “Riverbrook,” “Fixer,” “Long in the Tooth,” “The Lord of War and Thunder,” “The Collection,” “Blind Spot,” “Blowback,” “Hatless,” “The Hammer,” “Veterans,” “Fathers and Sons,” “Bulletville”
by Jefferson Robbins Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Timothy Olyphant gotta sidle. It’s the actor’s natural means of locomotion–he may approach an object or adversary or inamorata head-on at first, but by the time he’s within arm’s length, his gaze has tilted to squint at his target with one coyote eye dominant. It’s the walk not only of an actor who’s thoroughly considered the best way to present himself to a camera but also of a man who might have to reach for his pistol at any time. It may be an actorly crutch, but Olyphant can alternately wield it as a wedge, a hook, or a truncheon to coerce a viewer into watching him more closely. We want to know what he sees that makes his glare go askance.
DUE DATE
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C- starring Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis, Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan screenplay by Alan R. Cohen & Alan Freedland and Adam Sztykiel & Todd Phillips directed by Todd Phillips
MEGAMIND
**/**** screenplay by Alan J. Schoolcraft & Brent Simons directed by Tom McGrath
by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Peter Highman (Robert Downey Jr.) is eager to fly out of Atlanta back to Los Angeles to witness the birth of his child, but a chance encounter with wannabe actor/lone weirdo Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis) lands the pair on a no-fly list and leaves Peter without his luggage or his wallet. With no alternatives, Peter becomes Ethan’s unwilling passenger–taking a seat alongside a small dog and the ashes of Ethan’s late father–on a road trip west. There appears to be a general consensus that the premise of Todd Phillips’s Due Date too closely resembles that of John Hughes’s Planes, Trains & Automobiles, but there’s a vital difference in that Due Date‘s lead characters are legitimately crazy. The exasperated straight man is re-imagined as a sneering jerk full of jealousy and rage (Downey Jr. maintains a cold, sweaty stare throughout), while the lovable klutz is a dangerously irresponsible lout. Roger Ebert once wrote that the Hughes film was about “empathy [and] knowing what the other guy feels.” So it is; by virtue of its characters, Due Date bypasses empathy altogether, yet it still talks about treating other people with a modicum of compassion. Phillips has finally made a naughty comedy that contemplates the consequences of its actions. Here’s a movie in which a father-to-be grows so frustrated with an annoying boy that he socks him in the stomach, then unknowingly mocks a disabled veteran (Danny McBride) and gets his ass kicked for it.
**/****directed by Marshall Curry by Alex Jackson I have officially reached the point in my life where when I see a cop beating up on a hippie, I identify with the cop. There's a shot in Marshall Curry's If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front in which the police spray two ELF members directly in the eyes with mace during a peaceful sit-in. Some audience members behind me interjected, I think by pure reflex, "That's not fair!" But I found myself feeling considerably less enraged. Yes, these protesters were being entirely non-violent, but what alternatives have…
*½/****starring Pierce Brosnan, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Greg Kinnearscreenplay by Doug Max Stone & George Ratliff, based on the novel by Larry Beinhartdirected by George Ratliff by Alex Jackson What a waste. The cast assembled for George Ratliff's Salvation Boulevard is one for the ages. You have Pierce Bronson as super-evangelist Reverend Dan Day, Jennifer Connelly as infatuated housewife Gwen Vandeveer, Ciarán Hinds as Gwen's hard-ass Naval vet father Billy, and Ed Harris as pompous, bearded intellectual Dr. Paul Blaycock. These are traditionally serious dramatic actors in roles that lend themselves to caricature, yet they invest these characters with history…
**½/**** starring Jason Statham, Ben Foster, Tony Goldwyn, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Richard Wenk and Lewis John Carlino
directed by Simon West
by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT FOR BOTH THIS FILM AND THE ORIGINAL THE MECHANIC. Michael Winner’s The Mechanic (1972) is nominally an action film, but it gets its point across with moments of extraordinary discomfort. As its primary attraction, it features Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent as contract killers with literally nothing to do, bored to tears as they stand around waiting for people to die. It’s a weird and disturbing scenario, but with modern box-office expectations being what they are, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s been effortlessly transformed into an average Jason Statham vehicle. The particulars remain the same: Hitman Arthur Bishop (Statham) is forced to kill his mentor, Harry (Donald Sutherland), under a contract from his employer (Tony Goldwyn); perhaps feeling a pang of guilt, he takes Harry’s wayward son Steve (Ben Foster) under his wing to teach him about the rules and tools of his trade. But it’s all presented in a much sillier light. There’s no other way to put it. When one of our assassins is instructed to poison his quarry, the characters (and the movie) deem this plan much too boring, and the whole ordeal ends in a gory brawl in which both parties stab each other with whatever they can get their hands on. It’s ridiculously over-the-top, sure, and although that’s to its credit, there are still too many moments where the viewer is left wanting something more substantial.
Ang-ma-reul bo-at-da***½/****starring Lee Byung-hun, Choi Min-sik, Jeon Gook-hwan, Jeon Ho-jinscreenplay by Park Hoon-jungdirected by Kim Ji-woon by Alex Jackson The rape scenes in Kim Ji-woon's I Saw the Devil are the most blatantly eroticized and sadistic I've seen since Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, but they're countered by the hilariously gory revenge scenes against the rapist (Choi Min-sik) by his victim's boyfriend (Lee Byung-hun). The film isn't trying to rationalize the rape with the revenge or the revenge with the rape. Rather, it regards women and the men who rape them as equally undeserving of our sympathy. One is tortured for…
THE KILLER (1989)
****/**** Image C- Sound C Extras B starring Chow Yun-Fat, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh, Chu Kong written and directed by John Woo
HARD-BOILED (1992) ***/**** Image C Sound B Extras A+ starring Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung, Teresa Mo, Philip Chan screenplay by Barry Wong directed by John Woo
by Walter Chaw It’s possible to try to detail the history of John Woo at the beginning of the Heroic Bloodshed movement in Hong Kong–how, with the first two A Better Tomorrows (the second of which features a genuinely astonishing amount of violence and the infamous subtitled malapropism “don’t fuck on my family!”), he created in buddy Chow Yun-Fat a fashion/role model in the James Dean mold, and how he eventually left for Hollywood’s golden shore at the service of Jean-Claude Van Damme and John Travolta (twice) and Nicolas Cage (twice). It’s possible–but Planet Hong Kong, City on Fire, Hong Kong Babylon, and on and on have done a pretty fair job of it already. Better to say that Woo’s group of films from this period–the A Better Tomorrow pictures, his acknowledged masterpiece The Killer, his flawed but undeniably bombastic Hard-Boiled, and his ambitious, deeply felt Bullet in the Head–meant the world to me as a Chinese kid growing up in a predominantly white area in predominantly white Colorado. I saw a devastated 35mm print of The Killer at a midnight show in CU Boulder’s Chem 140 auditorium in the early ’90s. It was dubbed (a mess), the screening was packed, and I, for maybe the first time in my life (and still one of the only times in my life), felt a genuine kinship with my countrymen and a certain pride in being Chinese. Here, after all, was the best action film I’d ever seen, and it wasn’t John McTiernan’s or Robert Zemeckis’s or Steven Spielberg’s name above the title, but someone called John Woo. And he was directing not Bruce Willis nor Arnie nor Sly nor any of the tools he would eventually work with in the United States, but a handsomer version of me with the same last name. As existential epiphanies go, it wasn’t bad.
**½/****starring Rutger Hauer, Brian Downey, Gregory Smith, Molly Dunsworthscreenplay by John Daviesdirected by Jason Eisener by Alex Jackson Director Jason Eisener and screenwriter John Davies must have been left in the care of a particularly negligent babysitter throughout the 1980s. Their Hobo with a Shotgun, an adaptation of a fake trailer the two made for Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse contest back in 2007 (it won, and was subsequently attached to Canadian prints of the film), not only cites Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Robocop, and probably Cobra among its myriad references but also pays what I think is an incontrovertible homage to…
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine
written and directed by Christopher Nolan
by Walter Chaw I dunno, the wordiness of The Dark Knight didn’t bother me that much. I suppose it has something to do with it being a comic-book movie and plot-driving pronouncements seeming the order of the day. I find it impossible now to think of The Dark Knight without seeing it as a corollary to No Country For Old Men: the one composed of broad, garish strokes, the other of grace notes you hesitate to call delicate, but that’s just what they are. With Inception, Christopher Nolan’s correlative piece is Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, NY, and the comparison in this instance doesn’t prove mutually evocative so much as devastating to Nolan’s film, exposing his shtick as reams of deadening exposition interrupted by the occasional virtuoso set-piece. It is, in other words, aggressively nothing-special, save for a few astonishing zero-g sequences. As it happens, saying the best part of Inception is its weightlessness is a pretty pithy criticism of the whole damned enterprise. For a film about dreams, it’s distinctly light on possibility: Armed with the power to shape reality, our erstwhile dream-weavers fold a city in half in a dorm-room Escher shout-out but decline to, you know, fly and stuff. More, Inception doesn’t confront archetypes of any kind, instead retreating into some basic stuff about projections and the architecture of the unconscious being a freight elevator while relying overmuch on the built-in gravitas of father and dead-wife issues. And in case you miss any of that, Nolan crams it into the dialogue like one crams elephants into elevators. Rule of thumb: if a movie uses the word “deep” as much as this one does, it probably isn’t.
***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B starring Ben Affleck, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, Chris Cooper screenplay by Peter Craig and Ben Affleck & Aaron Stockard, based on the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan directed by Ben Affleck
by Walter Chaw If I'm still not entirely sold on Ben Affleck as an actor of depth, I'm completely sold on him as a director of depth. A director good enough, as it happens, to identify and avoid the actor's own weaknesses and augment his strengths, and to guide Affleck the actor to his best performance in a picture, The Town, that would be something like a revelation were Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, not so exceptional. Absolutely filthy with its story of place, count The Town as a tough-love love letter to Boston suburb Charlestown, a place established in the film as a breeding ground for bank robbers. Affleck plays Doug MacCray, the head of one such crew that also includes childhood buddy Jimmy (Jeremy Renner, excellent again) in an echo of the macho/familial dynamic established in the Aussie bank robber drama Animal Kingdom. More about the ties that bind men to a place and an idea of manhood than about the crimes themselves, The Town compensates for what it lacks in originality with its patience and its bracing trust in its screenplay and cast. Monologues that could be didactic are laced with what feels like genuine yearning; a moment in which Doug tells new girlfriend Claire (Rebecca Hall) about his childhood could have (should have) been embarrassing, but comes off under Affleck's surprising wisdom as heartfelt, even resonant.
HORROR OF DRACULA (1958) ***/**** Image B- Sound B- starring Peter Cushing, Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling, Christopher Lee screenplay by Jimmy Sangster directed by Terence Fisher
DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968) ***/**** Image B+ Sound B starring Christopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson, Barry Andrews screenplay by John Elder directed by Freddie Francis
THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957) ***½/**** Image C- Sound B starring Peter Cushing, Hazel Court, Robert Urquhart, Christopher Lee screenplay by Jimmy Sangster directed by Terence Fisher
FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969) ***/**** Image B Sound C+ starring Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones, Simon Ward screenplay by Bert Batt directed by Terence Fisher
by Jefferson Robbins As one of the twin stars of the original Hammer Films horror canon, the precise and skilful Peter Cushing had the task of portraying both villain (Dr. Frankenstein) and vanquisher (Dr. Van Helsing). His co-star Christopher Lee, on the other hand, seldom got to be the good guy: when he wasn’t baring plastic fangs or crusted over with dried-prune makeup, he usually embodied a more human evil. Lee’s unmasked performances were assertions of will–his Dracula, for instance, overwhelms with force of presence and a hungry smoulder in his eyes. Cushing could not disguise his native gentility and bladed intelligence, but he could turn those qualities towards sinister or humanitarian ends as needed.
**/**** starring Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton screenplay by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and Christopher McQuarrie and Julian Fellowes directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
by Ian Pugh The loss of Bond 23 to MGM's umpteenth bankruptcy drama was just one of the many disappointments in the cinematic year that was–but an even bitterer pill arrived in the films that took 007's place. With neither Daniel Craig nor Matt Damon to keep a perpetually-ailing genre on its feet, 2010's triumvirate of identical spy thrillers (Knight and Day, Salt, now The Tourist) represents a return to the cozy arms of irrelevance. Sexpot secret agent Elise Ward ("Salt" herself, Angelina Jolie) leads her superiors on a wild goose chase through Venice in search of American math teacher Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), whom they believe to be her mysterious fugitive beau, Alexander Pearce. Unfortunately, this little game also garners the attention of a gangster (Steven Berkoff) to whom Pearce is rather severely indebted. The Tourist is not a daring picture by any means. The most unconventional thing about it, other than the casting of Depp, is the oddity of hiring Timothy Dalton to play a version of "M" when this is so clearly a Roger Moore movie: a romantic trip across Italy in a white tuxedo, peppered with stunts that border on slapstick.
****/**** starring Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey screenplay by Andres Heinz and Mark Heyman and John McLaughlin directed by Darren Aronofsky
by Walter Chaw She’s incapable of reaching climax throughout the first hour of Black Swan, but then the floodgates open in the most Keatsian work in Darren Aronofsky’s growing portfolio of Romanticist explorations. Call it a ballet of the consummation sublime, the idea that once achieved, the immediate disappointment and disgust for the act overwhelms the sexual release of the moment before–and watch Black Swan in a lovelorn double-feature with Jane Campion’s Bright Star for the full impact of Aronofsky’s achievement here. As a thriller, Black Swan doesn’t do much more than graft a few phantom frames onto the periphery of Jean Benoit-Levy’s Ballerina, Altman’s The Company, or Powell/Pressburger’s The Red Shoes–but note how the picture owes its creepy intensity to the sort of social satire-through-body horror popularized by David Cronenberg. (Though it’s Cronenberg as fever dream rather than as insectile chill.) Note, too, how Natalie Portman finally finds herself the actor she was always considered to be in a role that breaks her legs and feet, forces her to masturbate and self-mutilate, and in the end transforms her into the very effigy of the absolute, voracious, consumptive nature of creation. In its nasty sexual biology, it’s the evocation of the secret ending to Charlotte’s Web–the off-stage fucking, and cannibalism, and matricide, and all that hunger prettified into a phrase artfully turned.
by Ian Pugh
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