The Outer Limits: The Original Series – The Entire Second Season (1964-1965) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller, ZERO STARS

Outerlimitstuesdayby Walter Chaw After a tumultuous first season plagued by short-sighted censors, tight budgets, and ever-diminishing production schedules, embattled producer Leslie Stevens was replaced by “nuts and bolts” man Ben Brady while Joseph Stefano, in something of a show of solidarity (and that he had other projects to attend to), likewise stepped down to be replaced by Seeleg Lester. (DP Conrad Hall had already parted ways with the show towards the end of season one.) The benefits and pitfalls of such a traumatic upheaval are difficult to compartmentalize, but to me, the series went along for its last seventeen episodes with a pioneering spirit (something that most veterans of the production owe to Lester) similar to that of the first thirty-two. The too-brief second season run includes not only a couple of the best episodes of “The Outer Limits”, the origin of a future blockbuster lawsuit, and the canny recruitment of Harlan Ellison as sometime scribe, but also one episode that stands as arguably the best hour of television ever broadcast.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) + Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002)|Once Upon a Time in Mexico – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Germany, Revenge, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO
*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Johnny Depp, Rubén Blades
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE MIDLANDS
*/****
starring Robert Carlyle, Vanessa Feltz, Ricky Tomlinson, Kathy Burke
screenplay by Paul Fraser & Shane Meadows
directed by Shane Meadows

Onceuponatimeby Walter Chaw Ferociously patriotic but lacking in the epic scope suggested by its obvious debt to Sergio Leone's late masterpieces, pastiche-meister Robert Rodriguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico is a magnification of John Woo in a lot of the same ways that Woo was a magnification of Leone–a post-post modern exercise bound together with a compelling sense of style but an alarming dearth of even the basics of sense. At the same time, if Leone understood the raucous humanism at the heart of Kurosawa, and Woo the insolent demystification of genre archetype of Leone, Rodriguez seems mainly to have ported the puerile macho fantasy of Woo while glancing off the deeper well of questions of honour and the mysterious bond between killers of men. I'm beginning to think that Rodriguez is a cheap filmmaker, interested in the mechanics of a piece more than the motivations of them. He can shoot a mean picture, he just can't set it up, pay it off, or explain it–and in replicating the best shoot-outs of Woo and Leone, he demonstrates that he's no Woo and most definitely no Leone.

Black Widow (1987) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Debra Winger, Theresa Russell, Sami Frey, Dennis Hopper
screenplay by Ronald Bass
directed by Bob Rafelson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I suppose there are worse fates than to be made to watch Black Widow. Scripted by '80s stalwart Ronald Bass and directed by fallen '70s wunderkind Bob Rafelson, it's a coldly professional piece of work that combines some clear (if obvious) Hitchcockian doubling with the director's patented sterile master shots. But if much of the mechanics of the thing are put to good, ominous effect, that effect wears off quickly. It's not for lack of potential: pitting a well-put-together ice-queen killer against a falling-apart-at-the-seams female federal agent, its insistence on symmetry between the two solicits a conscious feminist analysis. Alas, the film is so wrapped up in defining itself as a good-time thriller that any subtextual frisson it might have had gets buried, resulting in a not-unpleasant experience that unfortunately doesn't stick.

Ginger Snaps II: Unleashed (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Horror, Thriller

Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed
***/****
starring Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle, Tatiana Maslany, Janet Kidder
screenplay by Megan Martin
directed by Brett Sullivan

Gingersnapsiiby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Many times I have watched Canadian films, and many times I have wondered: do my countrymen not know about a thing called montage? Too many Canuck efforts park the camera outside of the action and refuse to cut in come hell or high water, creating a national cinema of cold, static films that move like molasses. So it was with shock that I witnessed Brett Sullivan's deft use of cutting in Ginger Snaps II: Unleashed–whatever shortcomings the film might have, it never ceases to remind you that you're watching a movie as opposed to a record of people talking. The result of Sullivan's grasp of editing is a film that jams its themes in your face, daring you to try and ignore them, making for an experience more bracing than that of the usual Canadian product.

Naked Killer (1992) – DVD

Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Romance, Thriller

*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring Chingmy Yau, Simon Yam, Carrie Ng, Kelly Yiu
screenplay by Wong Jing
directed by Fok Yiu Leung

by Walter Chaw Ah, 1992. What a year for Wong Jing, as no fewer than seven of his excrescent scripts were produced and Hong Kong's answer to Jess Franco found himself behind the camera on a staggering eight more pictures. It just can't come as any surprise that there's something like creative fatigue evidenced in the man's career, and though he didn't direct Naked Killer (that dishonour fell to Fok Yiu Leung, a.k.a. Clarence Fok), the picture is only marginally better than such Wong-helmed garbage as City Hunter and Royal Tramp–mainly because it's not quite as cartoonish. A case has been made for this film being an obliterating feminist picture along the lines of I Spit on Your Grave or Mother's Day, and indeed, a tale of a band of lesbian seductress assassins who practice their deadly arts on a basement-full of rapists has the potential to say smart things about an important topic. But the execution is so unwatchable and coy that it's hard to embrace Naked Killer as either political or tellingly exploitative.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan
screenplay by Nicholas Meyer & Denny Martin Flinn
directed by Nicholas Meyer

Trekvicapby Bill Chambers On the eve of a Klingon truce with the Federation, Spock (Leonard Nimoy), to Kirk's (William Shatner) dismay, has come out in support of said peace treaty, whose prevention would directly result in the extinction of the Klingon race. ("Let them die," Kirk, still mourning the loss of his son to the power-mad Klingons of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, barks at his Vulcan cohort.) Recruited to host an ice-breaking pre-conference dinner for Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner) and his Klingon crew aboard Enterprise-B, Kirk proves a shabby host, loading up on Romulan ale (illegal, don'tcha know) in some attempt to conceal, excuse, or liberate his prejudice. Later that evening, as Gorkon's vessel Kronos One is fired on by photon torpedoes sourced back to the Enterprise, two figures cloaked in Federation gear assassinate the chancellor; evil General Chang (Christopher Plummer, tarted up to resemble Fu Manchu*) wastes no time in pinning the coup on Kirk and Bones (DeForest Kelley), who are promptly exiled to the gulag of icy Rura Penthe.

The Butterfly Effect (2004)

Posted 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.

Runaway Jury (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring John Cusack, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, Rachel Weisz
screenplay by Brian Koppelman & David Levien and Rick Cleveland and Matthew Chapman, based on the novel by John Grisham
directed by Gary Fleder

by Walter Chaw Marked by strong performances, a liberal bias, and a few thriller conventions that work, Gary Fleder's slickefied Grisham flick Runaway Jury is slickefied Grisham flick all the same, and its cast is so huge as to threaten at every moment to be ponderous. Still, the good outweighs the bad, if only just–the picture finding a way to forget, in forgivable ways, dozens of admittedly inconsequential characters while delivering on the juicy promise of a showdown between its titans: Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. (In a courthouse outhouse, no less.) At bottom and at the least, it's a lefty screed–this one against gun manufacturers–that isn't witheringly embarrassing (thinking of such miscalculated stroke jobs as The Contender, John Q, and The Life of David Gale)–and as an Austrian bodybuilder finds himself the governor of La La Land on no other merit than that he married royalty and was cunning enough to make a fortune from playing hunks of metal and pre-Christian barbarians, a left-leaning movie not similarly dimwitted and exasperating is cause for minor celebration.

Swimming Pool (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Charlotte Rampling, Ludivine Sagnier, Charles Dance, Marc Fayolle
screenplay by François Ozon and Emmanuele Bernheim
directed by François Ozon

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover On evidence of the four films of his released theatrically in North America, François Ozon has two modes: a hyper-real pastiche on someone else's work ( Water Drops on Burning Rocks, 8 Women) and a more conventionally realistic gloss on his own material (Under the Sand and now Swimming Pool). I must say that I prefer the former to the latter, as there's nothing particularly radical about the director's own ideas (which often veer off into cliché) and his style, unlike in his crazy adaptations, reads nothing into the material that might redeem it from its own limitations. Swimming Pool is a classic example of this, with a listless look barely propping up a standard-issue script fit for those who fancy themselves culturally aware but were born yesterday as far as the art of the cinema is concerned.

Lucía, Lucía (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mexico, Mystery, Romance, Spain, Thriller

La hija del caníbal
**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C+
starring Cecilia Roth, Carlos Álvarez-Novoa, Kuno Becker, Manuel Blejerman
screenplay by Antonio Serrano, based on the novella Homónima by Rosa Montero
directed by Antonio Serrano

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A critic at the CHICAGO READER once pointed out that movies often show events that would traumatize us if they happened in real life. But what happens when they cheat and fail to traumatize the characters to which they occur? That's the major problem with Lucía, Lucía (La hija del caníbal), a film that takes a threatened murder and a shocking betrayal and treats them as springboards for a character-building "adventure." In reality, the events swirling around the protagonist would crush her spirit and leave her a broken woman, but in Antonio Serrano's Learning Annex version, everything is a conduit to her self-actualization–a desperately naïve approach that so lowers the stakes of the film that it barely registers.

The Outer Limits: The Original Series – The Entire First Season (1963-1964) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller, ZERO STARS

Outerlimitstuesdayby Walter Chaw In the hour or so past my bedtime in the endless dusk of UHF syndication, I used to watch Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” and Joseph Stefano’s “The Outer Limits” with my father. The previous fed the nightmares of my youth, the latter fed my fondest desires and deepest faith in the eternal verity, and nobility, of asking questions, of ambition, of being courageous enough to fail to change the world. “The Outer Limits”, I realize in these first months after my father’s death, represented the best things about him–and about me: that line pure that stretches between where we are and where we hope to go. “The Outer Limits” is, more so than “The Twilight Zone”, about how we never feel as though we are the men we ought to be because our fathers have set too difficult an example. Where Serling dazzled with O. Henry-like twists, “The Outer Limits” sobered with existential frustrations: one is the dove resolution, the other the hat forever emptying.

21 Grams (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical, Thriller

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

by 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 its absence? 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.

So Close (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Hong Kong, Romance, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Shu Qi, Vicki Zhao, Karen Mok, Song Seung Hun
screenplay by Jeff Lau
directed by Corey Yuen

by Walter Chaw Frankly, So Close could suck a tennis ball through a keyhole. Directed by action choreographer Corey Yuen (whose The Transporter I actually sort of liked), the film, a head-scratching mix of elaborate camera angles and stultifying “Dragnet” editing, is so dedicated to trundling from one rigorously disinteresting action set-piece to the next that it’s fair to wonder why the filmmakers even bothered to provide exposition of any sort.

S.W.A.T. (2003) [Widescreen Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Crime, DVD, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Colin Farrell, Jeremy Renner, Michelle Rodriguez
screenplay by David Ayer and David McKenna
directed by Clark Johnson

by Walter Chaw The promise of the premise is a return to John Carpenter's Escape from L.A., or his Rio Bravo redux Assault on Precinct 13, an idea of a seething urban cess erupting at the promise of notoriety and filthy lucre, but S.W.A.T. washes out as a flaccid, almost wholly uninteresting bit of macho formula. The potential of the film to be Aliens with rampaging hordes of West Coast gangsters seems, at the least, acknowledged in the United Colors of Benetton casting, down to the tough-talking, one-named Latina, but like everything else in the film, the only thing that S.W.A.T. genuinely achieves is a feeling of squandered opportunities and a lot of quiet time to think about them. More, the picture has that distinctive feeling of something that never started by the time it ends–a laggardly-paced two hours of limp set-up that hobbles across the finish line, sputtering on fumes and bluster, boasting mainly of the questionable achievement that it is the exact simulacrum of any episode of the dated '70s television series on which it is based.

Assassination Tango (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

***/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Robert Duvall, Ruben Blades, Kathy Baker, Luciana Pedraza
written and directed by Robert Duvall

by Walter Chaw In one of a series of largely-improvised exchanges about the mystical hold of the tango on the spirit of Argentines, a crusty veteran confides in enigmatic Yankee hitman John J. (Robert Duvall, also writer-director) that the tango, among absolutes such as love and hate, is life. In Assassination Tango, the titular dance is also the metaphor for the desire to find balance between the brutish and the sublime or, failing that, to provide a strict framework within which the brute can prowl. (A visit to a caged panther in a Buenos Aires zoo becomes the visual manifestation of the idea as well as oblique reference to Kafka's "The Hunger Artist," the hero of which searches, like J., for sustenance.) The tango is the urgent pull of ritual that binds animal sexuality into the meticulous structure of dance, working on the literal level as doppelgänger to John J.'s carefully-controlled, gradually encroaching chaos and on another level as metaphor for a filmmaker seeking equilibrium between personal crisis and professional ambition at the end of his career. It's rationale enough for a picture so often interested in frustrating narrative to the benefit of the richness of its palimpsest; if ever there were a film that lives entirely in its subtext, Assassination Tango (even its title a semantic conundrum) is it.

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

Posted 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

by 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.

House of Sand and Fog (2003)

Posted 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.

City of Ghosts (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Matt Dillon, James Caan, Natascha McElhone, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Matt Dillon & Barry Gifford
directed by Matt Dillon

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It pains me to have to pan something as accomplished as Matt Dillon's directorial debut City of Ghosts. On a technical level, the film is unimpeachable, moving at a comfortable click and remarkably seamless in its creation and assembly; it's not genius, perhaps, but it's certainly capable and, considering that it's a first feature, surprisingly at ease with the mechanics of image-making. Alas, image-making is not the only criteria by which we judge a movie, and so it must be regretfully said that the story that City of Ghosts has to tell is at best condescending and at worst casually racist, with a tourist's eye for the Phnom Penh setting viewing one more Marlow looking for his Kurtz.

X2: X-Men United (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Thriller

X2
**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry
screenplay by Michael Dougherty & Dan Harris
directed by Bryan Singer

X2dvdcap

by Walter Chaw Where the first film opened with a Holocaust backstory, the second instalment begins in the White House with a quote from Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address and a cool doubling of Aaron Shikler's pensive portrait of John F. Kennedy. X-Men is setting itself up as a high-minded comic book franchise, one unusually committed to relating its empowerment panel soap-opera with solid performances, decent scripting, and direction from a filmmaker, Bryan Singer, interested in the sanctity of narrative. The problems with X2's (a.k.a. X-Men 2 and X2: X-Men United) premise and its wrangling of so large an ensemble are fairly obvious: there are no real limits placed on the powers of the "X-Men" mutants and there is little time afforded to the proper establishment of relational conflict.

The Missing (2003)

Posted 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

Lookee what we have here--one-a them frontier elvesby 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.