The Cave (2005)

Posted 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

by 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.

Asylum (2005)

Posted 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 Transporter (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD|[Special Delivery Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, France, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras C
SDE DVD – Image B- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Jason Statham, Shu Qi, Francois Berleand, Matt Schulze
screenplay by Luc Besson & Robert Mark Kamen
directed by Cory Yuen

by Walter Chaw That Cory Yuen's The Transporter is unapologetically misogynistic, badly plotted, and poorly acted isn't so much a criticism as a recognition that one of Jet Li's favourite Chinese directors has made a French film in many ways identical to the chop-socky/gun-fu flicks China was churning out throughout the eighties and into the nineties. Where the film fails is in its resemblance, ironically, to Yuen's own work on The Bodyguard from Beijing (and even the awful Women on the Run), and in its uncomfortable similarity to John Woo's Hong Kong output–a cribbing owed as much to Yuen as producer Luc Besson, who has made it something of a closet industry in his action films to borrow liberally from The Killer and Hard-Boiled (and, in this particular instance, A Better Tomorrow II). The Transporter is too slick and winking, then–a post-modern take on the "heroic bloodshed" genre that already had one foot in self-satire, with the other dancing in operatic melodrama. The foot shouldn't be keeping time with a techno beat; it should be tapping to a lonesome harmonica.

Dracula III: Legacy (2005); Hellraiser: Deader (2005); The Crow: Wicked Prayer (2005) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Revenge, Romania, Thriller, Vampire, Wes Craven

DRACULA III: LEGACY
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jason Scott Lee, Jason London, Alexandra Westcourt, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Joel Soisson & Patrick Lussier
directed by Patrick Lussier

HELLRAISER: DEADER
*/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras B
starring Kari Wuhrer, Paul Rhys, Simon Kunz, Doug Bradley
screenplay by Neal Marshall Stevens and Tim Day
directed by Rick Bota

THE CROW: WICKED PRAYER
½*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Edward Furlong, Tara Reid, David Boreanaz, Emmanuelle Chriqui
screenplay by Lance Mungia & Jeff Most and Sean Hood
directed by Lance Mungia

by Walter Chaw This is the game plan if you’re in the business of producing direct-to-video schlock for Dimension: go to Romania (the poor man’s Czech Republic, itself the poor man’s Toronto–itself the poor man’s New York), show some tits, throw buckets of blood against the wall, and scrimp, wherever possible, on niceties like script and direction. It’s sure-fire–particularly if you can skim a month or two off the shooting schedule and lure a few has-beens in serious decline. But the question with urgency is, “Sure-fire what?” Not good art–because they seldom have anything to say about the society that spawned them (and because the directors of these messes are generally assclowns)–and not good travelogues, either, these little straight-to-home penny dreadfuls tend to be tired variations on the same quasi-Christian mythos, tarted up with surprisingly good production values and the kind of cheap thrills that kept EC Comics, then Hammer Films, then Italian giallos, in business.

Possessed (1947) – DVD

Posted in1940s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raymond Massey, Geraldine Brooks
screenplay by Silvia Richards and Ranald MacDougall, based on a story by Rita Weiman
directed by Curtis Bernhardt

by Alex Jackson Although it’s both talky and obvious (problems, I think, that have always threatened the noir genre), Possessed is propelled by a brilliant prologue and achieves momentum through an abundance of positively electric individual moments. Possessed is not strong enough to initiate any new addictions or produce any new highs, but it’s enough to qualify as a fix for the existing addict of cinema. After watching it, I felt that I could go on and face another day.

Nightmare Alley (1947) – DVD

Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker
screenplay by Jules Furthman, based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham
directed by Edmund Goulding

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The great thing about Edmund Goulding's Nightmare Alley is its refusal to show you The Way. Its noir-sap hero is all about The Way, you see (in his case, an amalgam of grifting and a genuine psychic ability), but when he places his total faith in it, he inevitably loses everything. Of course, he's not the only sap looking for an absolute answer: his victims are all too willing to ditch intellectual self-defense in favour of a god/shaman/big know-it-all to relieve them of the burden of making their own choices. The film is smart enough to lay waste to not just the traditional target of spiritualists, but also the modern voodoo science of psychology–both in their own way valid, but with powers blown so far out of proportion that they become vivid media for drawing the long con.

Code 46 (2004) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Tim Robbins, Samantha Morton, Om Puri, Emil Marwa
screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce
directed by Michael Winterbottom

Code46dvdcapby Walter Chaw Visually, Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 locates its textures somewhere between the supple romanticism of Wong Kar-wai and the grimy lyricism of Lynne Ramsay. (Indeed, one of the film's two cinematographers, Alwin H. Kuchler, is also Ramsay's DP.) It's a science-fiction film in J.G. Ballard's barest definition of the genre–an exploration of time, space, and identity set in the near future in a cloud of languages and ideas–that periodically soars like invention can when it's raised from a foundation of familiar catastrophe and intimate calamity. Flanked in theatres by Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Joseph Ruben's The Forgotten, Code 46 represents one of three 2004 releases to deal with memory-tampering. Curious zeitgeist we find ourselves in, this mad desire to erase the past (and note a recent run of disaster flicks as well) and start anew.

Target (1985) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image D+ Sound D+
starring Gene Hackman, Matt Dillon, Gayle Hunnicutt, Josef Sommer
screenplay by Howard Berk and Don Petersen
directed by Arthur Penn

by Walter Chaw Of the myriad disappointments of Arthur Penn's atrocious Target, one of the smaller ones is the appalling score by Michael Small, who, in the Seventies, was doing very fine work on Penn films like Night Moves and Alan Pakula flicks like The Parallax View and Klute. His music for Target reminds of the incidental cues on "Scarecrow and Mrs. King". The rest runs the gamut from flat direction from one of the prime architects of the amazing cinema of the American '70s, an unspeakable screenplay by non-native speaker José Luis Navarro and some idiot named Don Petersen, a pair of squandered (if only mediocre) performances from the great Gene Hackman and the badly-miscast Matt Dillon, and a plot that's an unapologetic ripper of John Schlesinger's Marathon Man. It's such a bad film, in fact, that the only enjoyment to be had from the thing is through the cruel deconstruction of its gaping implausibility. If Target finally provides a few chuckles, it does so at the expense of one of the United States' genuinely important actors (Hackman, natch) and directors.

The X Files: Abduction (1993-1995) [Four-Disc Mythology Collection] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image B Sound B Extras D
"Pilot," "Deep Throat," "Fallen Angel," "E.B.E.," "The Erlenmeyer Flask," "Little Green Men," "Duane Barry," "Ascension," "One Breath," "Red Museum," "Colony," "End Game," "Anasazi," "The Blessing Way," "Paper Clip"

Xfilesmyth1by Walter Chaw I used to, like every other dork I know, love "The X Files"–used to look forward to its mythology episodes as though series creator Chris Carter actually had something up his sleeve in terms of a long-term plan for his show, never suspecting until the middle seasons that the emperor was nude. (Desperate, too.) See, "The X Files" is guilty of giving the public what it wanted, forgetting that the public never really knows what it wants (would it have asked for a show about two platonic FBI agents investigating UFOs in the first place?) and that once it gets what it thinks it wants, it tends to stop waiting around for it. "The X Files"' slogan "The Truth is Out There" became something of an early-Nineties pop-cultural mantra akin to "Keep On Truckin'" of the mid-'60s to mid-'70s and "Shit Happens" of Reagan-era id suppression (the biggest surprise of "The X Files" may be how creaky and antiquated it is a mere twelve years out of the can)–and like other shorthands for real thinking, it has a bumper-sticker hookiness to it but not a lot of meat upon closer examination. That kind of lack of substance dooms it to cultural specificity, with camp immortality and flea-market coffee mugs its only eternal footmen. In retrospect, "The X Files" couldn't have had a better tagline.

The Island (2005)

Posted 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)

Posted 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.

Hustle (1975) – DVD

Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Burt Reynolds, Catherine Deneuve, Ben Johnson, Paul Winfield
screenplay by Steve Shagan
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In 1955, Robert Aldrich directed Kiss Me Deadly. Ending in a fiery conflagration that suggested the end of civilization, its chief selling point was the chance to watch a bunch of degenerates lose their last shred of decency. And because it transgressed norms that would not be fully shattered until a decade-plus later, it had a nasty kick that was hard to shake. Flash forward twenty years to 1975, and the director is in a bit of a bind: with norms everywhere falling like a stripper's pasties, it's clear that civilization has, indeed, come to an end–not with the bang of Kiss Me Deadly, but with the whimper of Hustle, a film that flaunts its creep credentials with such pathetic stridency that you can't even raise the enthusiasm to take offense. You're merely bored with a director whose raison d'être had been rendered obsolete.

Steamboy (2004) [Collector’s Gift Set] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Sadayuki Murai and Katsuhiro Otomo
directed by Katsuhiro Otomo

Steamboycapby Walter Chaw Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira is both the best and the worst thing ever to happen to anime in the United States. For the believer, its Blade Runner cyberpunk ultra-cool was an eye-opener, but to hold the film up as the standard for the medium means that a lot of people looking to it as their introduction believe that anime is a little excitement cordoned off by long stretches of confused, gravid exposition. It tries to condense hundreds of pages of metaphysical text into scientist characters delivering what seem like endless exchanges in high-minded gobbledygook. Akira's popularity obscures the finest examples of the medium, films that manage to balance serious metaphysical musing with actual forward momentum (the two Ghost in the Shell films, for instance); to tell adult tales in affecting ways (Grave of the Fireflies); to redefine genre thriller (Perfect Blue), action (Ninja Scroll), and fantasy (Princess Mononoke); and to present children's fables as artifacts that are as useful for adults as they are for kids (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro). Akira isn't the greatest anime film, just the most well-known, and it's worth speculating how its notoriety may have retarded the maturation of American animation.

Happy Endings (2005)

Posted 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.

The Machinist (2004) [Widescreen] + Enduring Love (2004) [Widescreen] – DVDs

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Romance, Spain, Thriller, UK

THE MACHINIST
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, Michael Ironside
screenplay by Scott Kosar
directed by Brad Anderson

ENDURING LOVE
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Daniel Craig, Rhys Ifans, Samantha Morton, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Ian McEwan
directed by Roger Michell

Machinistcapby Walter Chaw Sickness sweats out of every pore of Brad Anderson's The Machinist. It's leprous green, corpse flesh lit by sulphur light, marking the end of a progression that took Anderson from the sunny Happy Accidents to the sepia-inflected Session 9 to the bleak and subterranean–Plutonian, really–The Machinist. But like all of Anderson's work, the current film seems best described as coitus interruptus–congress interrupted at the moment of climax by the director's peculiar fixation on mendacity in favour of the supernatural. It's all about the tease for Anderson's genre explorations: time travel in Happy Accidents, haunted asylums in Session 9, and now–what, possession? Murderous blackouts? By plumbing the depths of human failings in a literal-minded fashion, one after the other (obsession, then greed, and finally guilt), Anderson ignores the possibility that genre is sharpest when wielded as metaphor for the same. Even the profession of machining speaks to the idea of precision and craftsmanship over flights of fancy or suspicions of otherness. It's a shame that The Machinist isn't ultimately more than an elaborate Rubik's Cube: not that hard to solve, not high on replay value.

The Pacifier (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Thriller

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Vin Diesel, Lauren Graham, Faith Ford, Brittany Snow
screenplay by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant
directed by Adam Shankman

Pacifiercap

by Bill Chambers Three months after failing to return kidnapped professor Howard Plummer (Tate Donovan) to safety, Special Ops lieutenant Shane Wolfe (Vin Diesel) is assigned to stay with the late scientist's family while their mother (Faith Ford) visits Switzerland with Shane's superior (Chris Potter) to claim the contents of Howard's safety deposit box. Professor Plummer was killed over a piece of software named G.H.O.S.T. (though not in the pantry with a candlestick) now believed to have been stashed somewhere in his home; when the snot-nosed kids–vain Zoe (Brittany Snow), surly Seth (Max Thieriot), precocious Lulu (Morgan York, also one of the Cheaper by the Dozen brats), and reaction-shot fodder Peter (Keegan & Logan Hoover) and Baby Tyler (Bo & Luke Vink (and with "The Dukes of Hazzard"'s impending renaissance, boy are those two in for a rude awakening at the start of school))–grease the stairwell to take out Shane, they end up driving away their German nanny (a typically misused Carol Kane) instead, forcing Shane into a more maternal role and leaving him little time to search for the computer program.

I, Robot (2004) [Widescreen + All-Access Collector’s Edition] – DVDs

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Will Smith

*/****
DVD – Image A Sound A+ Extras C
DVD (CE) – Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, Bruce Greenwood, James Cromwell
screenplay by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman
directed by Alex Proyas

by Walter Chaw Alex Proyas makes movies about men who don’t know who they are. The Crow, Dark City, and, to an extent, his underachieving small-band-doesn’t-make-good dramedy Garage Days, feature main characters forced to come to terms with their identities before becoming empowered by them. It would appear, then, that Proyas is the perfect fit for the faux-philosophical science-fiction epic I, Robot, wherein a Luddite detective, played by Will Smith, struggles with his stupid past while an Aryan robot, played by Alan Tudyk, wonders if it’s a person. But instead of the existential grief of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, or even A.I., I, Robot is a mess of spare parts cannibalized from superior models and victimized by bad wiring. Poor Isaac Asimov is sparking in his grave–good thing the movie was only “suggested by a book by,” which at some point simply means “has the same title as.”

Paparazzi (2004) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Cole Hauser, Robin Tunney, Dennis Farina, Tom Sizemore
screenplay by Forrest Smith
directed by Paul Abascal

by Walter Chaw Loathsome doesn't begin to describe it. How about "toxic"? View Paparazzi and producer Mel Gibson's own The Passion of the Christ together for a better perspective on where Gibson's coming from these days. Better, view the two together for some insight into the way that martyr complexes sometimes metastasize into a belief that feelings of rage and vengeance are justifiable responses to the indignities of a world whose sole focus is to torture the privileged with wealth, adoration, and extraordinarily high levels of creature comfort. Paparazzi are no angels, what with the recent spate of highly-publicized incidents culminating in the accusation that one of the adorable little shutterbugs slammed his car into Lindsay Lohan's in order for his compatriots to snap a few shots of the starlet vehicle-free. But rather than deal in a serious fashion with the toll the paparazzi take on any individual's right to a certain measure of personal space and safety, Paparazzi chooses to offer an unironic manifesto that forgives the vigilante-style abuse of Gibson's very own personal Sanhedrin. The film is suspect from the trailers, and its horrific morality grows more noxious with prolonged exposure.

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

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: George A. Romero, France, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Zombie

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

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

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) – DVD

Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Robert Blake, Billy "Green" Bush, Jeannine Riley, Elisha Cook
screenplay by Robert Boris
directed by James William Guercio

Electraglideinbluecapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a priceless scene in Albert Brooks's Lost in America where our white-collar hero David Howard (played by Brooks himself) has to deal with a motorcycle cop. About to be ticketed for a minor infraction, David informs his tormentor that he's living out the dream of Easy Rider in his Winnebago–whereupon the cop, incredibly, professes the same with regards to being a bike cop, and tears up the ticket. The joke is that a lumpy bourgeois in a camper and a policeman in anything can bend the rebellious ways of that film to their own establishment end, cancelling out both sides in a puff of semiotics. But what was a throwaway in Lost in America is the whole movie in Electra Glide in Blue, a film centred around motorcycle cops that owes a serious debt to Easy Rider while blowing its us-vs.-them dichotomy out of the water from the other side of the line.