Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

December 10, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Family, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Michael Goldenberg, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

Mustownby Walter Chaw It's a blasted earth, this green that holds Hogwarts now, and during a scene where our hero wizard is being tortured into forgetfulness for his own good, director David Yates cues a blanket of forgetful snow to fall. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (hereafter Harry Potter 5) is, likes its title suggests, a startling return to form for the series after Alfonso Cuarón's exceptional Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was followed by the insipid contribution of rom-com specialist Mike Newell. Gratifyingly complex and deliciously Freudian, a moment where Harry loses the last of his family–mirroring a moment in the third film where, on the banks of a lake, he almost loses himself–is preceded by an identical progression from the third film in which he's mistaken for his own father. Alas this time, Harry's not able to affect positive change in the guise of his dad; it's the boy becoming the man, frustrated and folded into a world of dread and doom. As drawn in the film, Potter's universe is like Potter's Field, a place where strangers and orphans are buried on the eve of war and a child's unavoidable matriculation into corruption. Harry Potter 5 is dark as pitch: unsettling, unsettled, unresolved, and utterly remarkable.

The Golden Compass (2007)

December 7, 2007Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Sam Elliott, Eva Green, Daniel Craig
screenplay by Chris Weitz, based on the novel by Philip Pullman
directed by Chris Weitz

Goldencompassby Walter Chaw The newest entry in the "what the fuck" hall of fame is Chris Weitz's deplorable, dull, nonsensical, unwatchable The Golden Compass, which comes packed to the gills with meaningless terms, arcane concepts, stupid names, and a narrative patchwork that plays like a game of "make-up" improvised by a hyperactive child. Arriving on a wave of controversy as right-wing hard-ons decry its anti-Christian tendencies (where were they for Beowulf?), the picture's full-on attack on good taste and coherent filmmaking are what they really should be protesting. Adherents will thrill, I suppose, although I doubt that atheists are as natively stupid as born-agains–but without a good working knowledge of the Pullman books upon which the film is based, I can't imagine anyone having a chance with this stuff. Impenetrable ain't the least of it. Weitz is completely outmatched by the material, trying too hard to cram all the gobbledygook about daemons and dust and witches and armoured bears he possibly can into every crevice available between the CGI sequences while leaving out huge, gaping expanses of necessary exposition in the process. If this wasn't bad enough, consider the sequence that begins with a 900 lb. polar bear wisely suggesting that a thin ice shelf can't support both his weight and that of his 80 lb. rider (sage, indeed)–thus necessitating their splitting up–and ends with said 900 lb. bear materializing out of nowhere to somehow surprise a bad guy from the front. Even with full knowledge of the Pullman books, the way the movie's put together is plodding, non-sequitous, inept.

Beowulf (2007)

November 16, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
screenplay by Neil Gaiman & Roger Avary
directed by Robert Zemeckis

Beowulfby Walter Chaw The Old English epic gets what feels like its twentieth adaptation in the last couple of years alone with Robert Zemeckis's Polar Express-ized–which is to say, digitally rotoscoped to distraction and peopled with pixel phantoms that look like dead-eyed Toussaud versions of the actors voicing them–Beowulf. Not that there aren't a few pretty cool moments (especially in IMAX 3D, the six-story screen doing wonders for the masturbatory shazam interludes), but the whole thing is decidedly unthrilling and so technologically interesting that it overwhelms any connection we might otherwise have with the story. I spent a lot of energy admiring the whiz-bang and almost none giving much of a shit about anything else. What won me over at the end is that it's completely ballsy in its anti-Christian tactic, suggesting a few weeks before The Golden Compass debuts that the general sea change against the evangelicals, if not predicted by the cinema, is at least reflected by it. A scene where a bishop played by John Malkovich is carried on a cross from his dragon-levelled church, hissing about "sins of the fathers," is almost as tricky as another where good king Beowulf (Ray Winstone) announces that the "Christ God" has done away with all heroes, replacing them with "fear and shame." I prefer my heresy in the subtler vintage minted by stuff like Matthew Robbins's Dragonslayer, but what the hell: if Hollywood's going to fire a shot across the Conservative bow, I'd rather they do it this way than with something like Lions for Lambs. Also cool is the casting of Crispin Glover as evil troll Grendel.

Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)

October 19, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Halle Berry, Benicio Del Toro, David Duchovny, Omar Benson Miller
screenplay by Allan Loeb
directed by Susanne Bier

Thingswelostby Walter Chaw I love Danish director Susanne Bier's Open Hearts, the second Dogme95 picture by a woman and one of the most affecting tragic romances I've ever seen. (Much of its power is attributable to a scene where a man, newly paralyzed, dreams of reaching across a small space to touch his lover's hand.) I thought, even given the middling quality of her follow-ups Brothers and After the Wedding, that we'd found in Bier a distinct, exciting talent, an artist interested in charting the course of grief described in the coming-apart of complementary halves and doing so with minimal fanfare or melodrama. It usually would take more than one picture for me to lose the religion, but Bier's done it in brilliant fashion with her English-language debut, Things We Lost in the Fire. Blame her screenwriter Allan Loeb for a goodly portion of this glorious debacle, one that features an early exchange in which a father defines "fluorescent" for his six-year-old son as "lit from within," leading the boy, of course, to pipe up with, "Do you think that I'm lit from within?" Not that Bier escapes accountability: Refusing to let go of her Dogme flirtation, she shoots most of this gas-trap in total silence and extreme close-up, marking this boilerplate tearjerker as uniquely, unwatchably pretentious. It's also maudlin, mawkish, unintentionally hilarious, and utterly devoid of human emotion. The word I'm searching for, I guess, is "alien." After the extraordinary humanism of Open Hearts, to see Bier at the wheel of this infernal exercise in clearing off the mantle is nothing short of horrible.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

October 12, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, France, Germany, UK, War

½*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen, Samantha Morton
screenplay by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst
directed by Shekhar Kapur

Elizabeth2by Walter Chaw I don't mind historical pictures that aren't historically accurate until that historical inaccuracy–like in U-571, for instance–becomes so fucking retarded that it lowers the temperature of the room. Elizabeth: The Golden Age is just that fucking stupid. Should being dumb not be reason enough to avoid this movie, know that it's also unintentionally hilarious, appears to have had its screenplay ghost-written by Bob Dylan, and casts Catholics and Spaniards as Skeksis in some perverse re-imagining of The Dark Crystal as a psychodrama about the cherry-busting beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton, dreadfully wasted) and penile conjugation-by-double-proxy of rapscallion Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) into the hallowed womb (and womb-like cathedral interiors of this England). Cate Blanchett reprises her role from director Shekhar Kapur's first Bollywoodization of British history (he made one other, The Four Feathers, in between) as the Virgin Queen born fully-formed from the school of Arch and Tic. (I wonder if soon there'll be any actresses left who haven't played one Elizabeth or another–seems the distaff "Hamlet" proving ground of our time.) There's a Nostradamus character for whatever goddamned reason, a candlelit bath scene only because it's mandated in sub-BBC pieces of shit like this, and a thinly-veiled CIA spook, Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), who acts as Elizabeth's chief intelligence officer.

28 Weeks Later (2007) – DVD

October 8, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Spain, Thriller, UK, Zombie

****/**** Image N/A Sound A Extras B
starring Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Idris Elba
screenplay by Rowan Joffe, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, E.L. Lavigne, Jesús Olmo
directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

Walter Chaw It’s phenomenal. Where 28 Days Later… was saddled with ambition that exceeded its reach and, in Danny Boyle, a director who not only disdained the genre but has otherwise proven himself a grade-A tool as well, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s sequel 28 Weeks Later is brutally graceful in its vision of a nuclear family’s dissolution as the metaphor for a broader, collective unrest. The triumph of the picture, though, is that it’s as succinct and eloquent as a heart attack; as a parable of the Iraq War (popularly called “The War in Iraq,” a subtle semantic distancing technique particularly trenchant to this discussion), it’s all about aftermath and occupation. It’s impossible not to compare it to the years and tens of thousands of fatalities since the declaration of “mission accomplished” when the picture begins with the reassurance that everything’s peachy in dead-as-a-doornail England. Repatriation and reconstruction have begun six months after the outbreak of the first film’s “rage virus,” reuniting two kids, Tammy (future superstar Imogen Poots) and Andy (Harry Potter-named Mackintosh Muggleton), with their tightly-wound da’, Don (Robert Carlyle). In an end-of-the-world opening in what only appears to be night (it’s the first of several brilliant reversals), we see how a fissure develops in Don’s marriage to wife Alice (Catherine McCormack), and of how that stress fracture becomes the foundation for the rest of the picture’s relationships and politics.

Eastern Promises (2007)

September 26, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Viggo Moretensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl
screenplay by Steve Knight
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw As executed by our pre-eminent insect anthropologist, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is more fairytale than thriller, one that finds new muse Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the rising star of an émigré Russian mob family taken root in the heart of London within the red velvet-lined walls of a restaurant innocuously-/romantically-named “Trans-Siberian.” Self-described as “wolfish,” this pack is led by grandfatherly Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who’s disappointed with his ineffectual son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and looking to replace him with a surrogate heir. The rot of that familial discord throws its roots back to ferocious opening minutes that see first a vicious throat-slashing, then a fourteen-year-old, pregnant prostitute haemorrhaging on the floor of a drugstore after she’s told that, for Methadone, the pharmacist will need a prescription. Cronenberg’s London is a cess seething beneath a veneer of “normalcy”; regarded as a toxic tabernacle in Spider, the city is transformed here into a garish, meticulously theatrical wonderland. The central problem of the picture has a lot to do with the idea that Cronenberg has again taken a pre-existing script and reordered it along distinctly Cronenbergian lines–that what must have read initially as a sociological text on another facet of the immigrant experience (much like screenwriter Steve Knight’s Dirty Pretty Things) now plays like one of Cronenberg’s investigations into the difficulty of parsing concepts like “normal” and “family” in the crushing crucible of bugs pretending to be human among humans.

Why I’m Not Formally Reviewing ‘Control’

September 9, 2007Posted inAustralia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blog, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Japan, Music, TIFF, UK

Control is an authentic-feeling biopic about the late Ian Curtis, the epileptic front man for Joy Division who committed suicide–though a revisionist theory absurdly contends that he “accidentally” hung himself from the clothesline in his Manchester flat–in 1979 at the age of 23. Spoiler. Directed by music-video auteur Anton Corbijn and lensed in black-and-white and ‘scope by Martin Ruhe, the film overcomes the central miscasting of Samantha Morton as Ian’s wife Deborah (though she would’ve nailed this role in her Morvern Callar days, she’s far too long in the tooth for it now) with the near-perfect casting of Sam Riley as Curtis, Craig Parkinson as Tony Wilson, and Alexandra Maria Lara as Annik Honoré, a.k.a. The Other Woman. (Morton’s incongruous star-power is easily explained by the basis for Control‘s screenplay: Deborah Curtis’s own memoir, Touching from a Distance.) The film is admirably not a hagiography while engendering empathy for a gifted asshole more successfully than, say, Man on the Moon, and the song recreations are surprisingly persuasive, although I was a bit disappointed with how literalmindedly the music is applied at times.

TIFF ’07: Angel

August 27, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Romance, TIFF, UK
**/****starring Romola Garai, Michael Fassbender, Sam Neill, Charlotte Ramplingscreenplay by François Ozon & Martin Crimp, based on the novel by Elizabeth Taylordirected by François Ozon by Bill Chambers François Ozon is what David Bordwell might call a "polystylist," though his eclecticism has mostly yielded diminishing returns. His latest finds him suiting up for yet another genre, and although it could be considered something of a throwback to his early features Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women (if by virtue of its roots in someone else's material), he's too tony now for the vaguely subversive pastiches with which he…

Stardust (2007) + Interview (2007)

August 14, 2007Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Netherlands, Robert De Niro, Romance, Theatrical, UK

STARDUST
***½/****
starring Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Sienna Miller, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman
directed by Matthew Vaughn

INTERVIEW
*/****
starring Sienna Miller, Steve Buscemi
screenplay by David Schecter and Steve Buscemi, based on the film by Theo Van Gogh
directed by Steve Buscemi

Stardustby Walter Chaw I do wonder about films that don't seem to be about anything, but I'll say this at the outset: Matthew Vaughn's Stardust, based on a book by Neil Gaiman, isn't about anything at all–and it's wonderful. Far from empty-headed, though, Stardust is a deeply meaningful series of sweet-nothings, wholly apolitical even in a macho supporting character revealed as a cross-dresser and hair stylist; and by its end, it wins not in spite of being so exuberant in its indulgence of flamboyant clichés, but because it is. It's so much better than the trailers and Gaiman's track record as a novelist (his métier is decidedly rooted in the comics) would lead you to believe, while the inevitable comparisons to The Princess Bride are misleading because The Princess Bride is a piece of shit. A beloved piece of shit, but a piece of shit just the same. On the contrary, Stardust is extremely well-made despite an opening half-hour that boasts of a few too many long establishing shots, directed with real snap by Guy Ritchie's former producer Matthew Vaughn (who did the same with Layer Cake) and executed by a stellar cast that includes a literally incandescent Claire Danes as a fallen star named Yvaine and Michelle Pfeiffer as a hideous bitch goddess, which, given that Stardust follows on the heels of Hairspray, appears to be the vehicle of her late-career comeback. More difficult to embrace is Robert De Niro as the film's Dread Pirate Roberts, a fencing mentor who happens, in this incarnation, to be a ballroom-dancing guru as well. The instinct is to recoil, but damned if it isn't the first De Niro performance in his self-parodic period that's both spot-on in its auto-satire and funny to boot.

The Guns of Navarone (1961) [2-Disc DVD Set] – DVD

August 10, 2007Posted in1960s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, UK, War

*½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn, James Darren
screenplay by Carl Foreman, based on the novel by Alistair MacLean
directed by J. Lee Thompson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover My brother Oliver is fond of citing movies where you actually root for the Nazis. Not because you like what they stand for, of course, but because the cinematic alternative suddenly seems much worse: fact of the matter is those fucking Von Trapps will simply not shut up in The Sound of Music, while anyone who would voluntarily off Jon Bon Jovi, as the Nazis do in U-571, can't possibly be ALL bad. To this very short list we may add the inexplicably popular guy-movie staple The Guns of Navarone. Supposedly trading on the selfless heroism of a commando unit behind enemy lines, the film has such a hair up its ass about the virtue of grim determination that it manages to bore you into an early grave within the first five minutes. Nearly three hours of watching Gregory Peck and his group of he-men bicker over ethics and strategy would make any thinking adult pray for some kind of violent deliverance. Nazis, Italian Fascists, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir–I'm not choosy about who shoots these jerks dead, just as long as somebody does it.

Hairspray (2007)

July 19, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Nikki Blonsky, John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Queen Latifah
screenplay by Leslie Dixon
directed by Adam Shankman

Hairsprayby Walter Chaw It's pretty easy to take the neo-hipster stance of having been there when Divine ate dog shit and, because of status conferred by said endurance of John Waters at his most insouciantly "fuck you," to denounce the Broadway-ification of his already-mainstream-courting Hairspray–now turned into a movie based on a musical based on the original movie–as "Waters-lite." Except that Waters's satire at its best has always been a gloss on cults of pop (this is a guy who made an iconic cameo on "The Simpsons", for God's sake)–and after Polyester, all of his movies run like book for the plastic-fantastic of the Great White Way anyway. Artificiality is actually the point, affectedness another; like Italian, the only way to speak the language is to exaggerate past the point of embarrassment. Still, the key to Waters is the requirement that by assembling a collection of misfits to play his assembly of misfits, not a one of them takes to their duty ironically. Waters is the same kind of archivist as Quentin Tarantino in that way: the casting can be interpreted as a post-modern joke, but the performances need to be true to the essential nostalgia driving the casting. John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, in other words, needed very much to play it as straight as John Travolta is capable of playing it.

A Mighty Heart (2007)

June 27, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Irrfan Khan, Archie Panjabi
screenplay by John Orloff, based on the book by Mariane Pearl
directed by Michael Winterbottom

Mightyheartby Walter Chaw An avowed Michael Winterbottom fan, I think he's amazing even when he fails. I marvel at his Thomas Hardy adaptations–the devastating Jude and the redemptive The Claim (his take on The Mayor of Casterbridge)–and I hadn't thought, before I actually saw him do it, that anyone but Charlie Kaufman would have a shot at turning Tristram Shandy into a viable film. When the extremely prolific Winterbottom decided to explore how music and sex evolve sympathetically in culture, he turned out a little unofficial trilogy (24 Hour Party People, Code 46, 9 Songs) in the span of two years. And now that he's become politicized–something he would say he always was, with 1997's vérité Welcome to Sarajevo as evidence–he's turned out, in the same span, In This World, The Road to Guantanamo, and now A Mighty Heart. This is the story of Mariane Pearl, widow of WALL STREET JOURNAL reporter Daniel Pearl, who was infamously beheaded while covering Al-Qaeda in Pakistan in the early days leading up to our current boondoggle. As that fan of Winterbottom's, I'm inclined to give the picture a benefit of a doubt I nevertheless wonder if it deserves. First run through my head, A Mighty Heart strikes me as pointless and unsurprising; Winterbottom is of course a better anthropologist than he is a political philosopher: if he's trying to apply Donald Symons's models of cultural evolution to ethics instead of more immediately compatible pursuits (music, or literature), then what's emerged from the experiment is the revelation that ethics and morality appear to have nothing to do with the base nature of man–and, moreover, that Angelina Jolie will never be Nicole Kidman in her ability to be both herself and someone else.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) + Evan Almighty (2007)

June 22, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Germany, Sci-Fi, Superhero, UK

Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer
4: Rise of the Silver Surfer
½*/****
starring Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis
screenplay by Don Payne
directed by Tim Story

EVAN ALMIGHTY
½*/****
starring Steve Carell, Morgan Freeman, Lauren Graham, John Goodman
screenplay by Steve Oedekerk
directed by Tom Shadyac

Fantasticalmightyby Walter Chaw The question arises as to whether the choice for comic book adaptations has to be between "existentially tortured" and "dumb as a bag of hammers." It's a given on which extreme Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (hereafter FF2), already lauded for being blissfully free of gravitas and subtext, resides; what's troubling is the underlying inference of this philosophy: that people deserve and want entertainment that's beneath them. It's easier by far to condemn the audience as morons, forking over their cash like roughneck flyovers voting for Big Business, but I prefer to look at the situation as a tragedy–a by-product of a generation of fervent anti-intellectualism that's made smart people afraid to question their own judgment. Far from a malady unique to Hollywood, it's more a reflection of the culture that would elect someone most perceive to be, if not outright stupider, then certainly more thoughtless, than themselves to the highest office in the land. Discouraged to exercise the foundational, instinctively American inclination to criticize our leadership, we're left without enough of a nutsack to properly place a work of art in its social context. I'd offer that FF2 is a symptom of a potentially mortal illness, another being the ghettoizing of the idea of "nuance."

Overlord (1975) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

June 7, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, The Criterion Collection, UK, War

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Brian Stirner, Davyd Harries, Nicholas Ball, Julie Neesam
written and directed by Stuart Cooper

Overlordcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover If nothing else, Overlord has the distinction of inventing its own genre. A bold combination of fictional drama and found-footage assembly, it grimly blends the real and the imaginary to the point where you can't help but be a little affected by the actors' proximity to the real devastation of WWII. Long undistributed in North America and roundly-unseen on these shores except by those fortunate few who caught it on the late, lamented Z Channel, Overlord has acquired a cult mystique slightly disproportionate to its merit. Director Stuart Cooper and his co-scenarist Christopher Hudson only hint at the inner life of their hapless deer-in-the-headlights lead and don't quite sell the impending doom for which they so desperately reach. But make no mistake: this is a one-of-a-kind movie that should've opened new avenues for narrative filmmaking instead of dropping into the big black hole that it did.

Pulp (1972) – DVD

May 3, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Michael Caine, Mickey Rooney, Lionel Stander, Lizabeth Scott
written and directed by Mike Hodges

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Pulp is so determined to not work on any level that you almost admire it in light of the effort. It's neither a parody of nor a tribute to the pulp genre, neither comedy-thriller nor thrilling comedy–it's just a freak that repeatedly falls flat on its face, leaving you with no choice but to grasp it close like an idiot child. The first time I saw this film, I was mostly annoyed by its determination to short-circuit the fun that might have come from genre trappings, not to mention its refusal to offer genuine alternatives. With a second viewing, it looks a little better, and though not a success, it earned my admiration for being so far out of its depth that a bit of pleasure at its expense was unavoidable. It may have earned an extra half-star were it not also sexist and homophobic in dated ways that have risen to the surface like yeast.

Philadelphia Film Festival ’07: Severance

April 27, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Film Festivals, Germany, Horror, Hungary, UK
**½/****starring Tim McInnery, Toby Stephens, Claudie Blakley, Danny Dyerscreenplay by James Moran & Christopher Smithdirected by Christopher Smith by Ian Pugh Severance appears to have been crafted with the hope that someone out there with press credentials will use the poster-friendly quote "'The Office' meets [some horror film]," and, in order to guarantee that possibility, it mashes together about eight different subgenres of horror to simmer with the dry British humour. As we begin, David Brent manqué Richard (Tim McInnery) leads his merry band of office drones into the woods for a teamwork seminar in Bulgaria; they share a little…

Hot Fuzz (2007)

April 20, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, France, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg
directed by Edgar Wright

Hotfuzzby Walter Chaw Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost return after the triumph of Shaun of the Dead with the nominal success of Hot Fuzz: the one a dead-on skewering of/homage to the zombie genre, the latter an equally-dead-on skewering of/homage to the buddy-cop genre that leads one to conclude that the zombie genre is infinitely more fulsome a target than the buddy-cop genre. Though it's clearly the product of smart guys who care about the films they lampoon, there's obviously a difference between making a movie that can stand proudly alongside George Romero's body of work and making one that could keep good company with Michael Bay's. (There's a lot of meat to be mined in a clever dissection of the zombie genre, in other words, whereas most action flicks of this type are already self-parodying exercises in excessive hetero-affirmation amidst much piece-fondling and weeping.) What works best about Hot Fuzz isn't its admirable respect for and similarly keen understanding of films like Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man and Richard Rush's fondly-remembered Freebie and the Bean, but that it, like Shaun of the Dead, functions remarkably well as an example of the genre–something of which most parodies (i.e. arbitrary garbage like Shrek) are completely incapable.

Notes on a Scandal (2006) – DVD

April 15, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Bill Nighy, Andrew Simpson
screenplay by Patrick Marber, based on the novel by Zoë Heller
directed by Richard Eyre

by Walter Chaw When Judi Dench's brittle enunciation breathes life into the prologue of Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal, there's a hope, however fleeting, that the film will deserve the performance. Her tweedy, support-hosed teacher Barbara Covett is set up as a distaff Richard III, looking to subvert the beautifuls acting as the royals in her school's social strata–the newest member of which, Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), attracts the greatest amount of envy and desire. The characters' names are embarrassing (why not call them "Barbara Lust" and "Sheba Love"?), and it's not long before the picture follows suit, becoming as obvious and stillborn as its first half hour is scabrous and dangerous. Adapted from the Zoë Heller novel, it reminds of screenwriter Patrick Marber's Closer and how Mike Nichols's film adaptation similarly suffered from a gradual slackening of shock with the realization that its umbrella of misanthropy doesn't cast a dark shadow on all of us so much as it provides a vicarious thrill, like watching a cockfight, say, or a mantis eating its mate: though foul, its pungency is isolatable.

Philadelphia Film Festival ’07: Sisters

April 12, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Crime, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK
**/****starring Chloë Sevigny, Dallas Roberts, Lou Doillon, Stephen Reascreenplay by Douglas Buck & John Freitas, based on an earlier screenplay by Brian De Palma & Louisa Rosedirected by Douglas Buck by Ian Pugh Perhaps a little too earnest for its own good, Douglas Buck's Sisters takes one of Brian De Palma's most transparent tributes to Hitchcock and almost completely abandons its homage-laden aesthetic, convinced that saddling everyone with even more psychological baggage would somehow expand on the previous film's chilling ideas about identity panic. The basic structure remains the same: attempting to escape the grasp of her controlling psychiatrist ex-husband…