Sword of the Valiant (1984) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, UK, ZERO STARS

Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
ZERO STARS/**** Image D+ Sound C-
starring Miles O'Keefe, Cyrielle Claire, Leigh Lawson, Sean Connery
screenplay by Stephen Weeks and Philip M. Breen and Howard C. Pen
directed by Stephen Weeks

by Walter Chaw A film that is actually exactly bad enough to be uproariously funny, Stephen Weeks's Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (hereafter Sword of the Valiant)–peculiarly, Weeks's second adaptation (after 1973's Gawain and the Green Knight) of The Rose Poet's fourteenth century Arthurian epic "Gawain and the Green Knight"–is one of those Golan-Globus productions that helped redefine the bottom of the barrel in the early Eighties. It gives Miles O'Keefe of Tarzan the Ape Man fame a short-lived and wholly unjust stay of career execution (decking him out in a Prince Valiant wig that makes him look suspiciously like Mary Worth with abs), and it furthers my contention that Sean Connery is pretty much just the Scottish Burt Reynolds. I'm not sure what Weeks and company had in mind when embarking on this project, but the result is something so deeply stupid as to inspire hopefulness and hopelessness in equal draughts: anyone can do it, apparently–but is it worth doing if it turns out to be Sword of the Valiant?

The Statement (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Thriller, UK

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Michael Caine, Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Northam, Alan Bates
screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Brian Moore
directed by Norman Jewison

by Walter Chaw A so-so director even at his best (thinking of The Cincinnati Kid) who vacillates aimlessly between soft romantic comedies and undisguised, under-informed diatribes against barn sides like big business (Rollerball, F.I.S.T., Other People's Money), American racism (In the Heat of the Night, A Soldier's Story, The Hurricane), and religious intolerance (Jesus Christ Superstar, Agnes of God, The Statement), Norman Jewison is full of activism–just not terribly ripe with ideas and perspective. His fists are of ham and his pulpit is splintered from the hammering, Jewison's political films distinctive mainly for the broadness of their focus and his romantic films distinctive for the extent to which the facile cultural stereotypes he seems so concerned about elsewhere are machined into the rom-com grist mill therein.

The Triplets of Belleville (2003) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Latvia, Music, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
written and directed by Sylvain Chomet

Mustownby Walter Chaw An extraordinary, melancholy ode to the endless, mercurial peculiarity of life, Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville (Les Triplettes de Belleville) finds as its existential constant the persistence of art, the familial ties that bind, and the echoing green of synchronicity. It is the finest film of its kind since Babe: Pig in the City, Gallic in the best implications of the term: self-conscious, intelligent, envelope-pushing. Its scope is immense both literally and philosophically, a series of dog dreams within providing a bit of core disquiet that work at you like the best poetry can. It's easy to forget the power of metaphor when it's bandied about like so much corrupt currency in sub-par product aching for subtext–in fact, The Triplets of Belleville is so close to poetry, something by William Carlos Williams, perhaps, that it touches something pure in art and archetype, reminding in the process of what symbolic language can do when wielded with a skilled, steady hand.

The Last Unicorn (1982) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, France, Japan, UK, West Germany

*/**** Image D Sound D
screenplay by Peter S. Beagle, based on his novel
directed by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass

by Walter Chaw Rankin & Bass’ typically sloppy adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s classic The Last Unicorn (adapted for the screen by Beagle himself) is terribly voiced and animated, even by the ’70s Bakshi/flash-frozen/Saturday-morning conveyor belt standard. The melancholy poetry of Beagle’s novel, rife with dread and the vertiginous feeling of falling into chaos, is notable for its similarity to the big eye, little mouth of traditional anime but falls short of that gold standard in terms of performance and detail. Mouths don’t move, backgrounds are static and recycled, and it doesn’t help that the colours on the print making it to the DVD format look as though they’d been left in the front window for too long.

Love Actually (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Romance, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson
written and directed by Richard Curtis

Loveactuallycap

by Walter Chaw I actively, aggressively dislike this film. Richard Curtis's Love Actually says something of its intentions in a subplot involving an aged rocker (Bill Nighy) who knows he's creating a reprehensible piece of garbage in an attempt to cash in on the gaffed demographic that champions boy bands as the pinnacle of the art. The picture is a sex comedy in the worst senses of the genre: It's puerile, misogynistic, and breathtakingly stupid, with a keen focus on pratfalls and serendipity–all the while hoping that you won't notice the inappropriateness of its plays for heart-warming uplift. Curtis, after scoring a couple of times in the genre as screenwriter with Notting Hill and The Tall Guy, chooses Love Actually as his directorial debut, and its hatefulness speaks to the source of the comprehensive misanthropy of Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean (Atkinson makes a cameo; Curtis is a writer for "Mr. Bean"). A shame that Curtis's hyphenate turn begins to betray the man as ugly and self-indulgent.

Life on the Barge: FFC Interviews Tilda Swinton & David Mackenzie

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, UK

YoungadaminterviewtitleApril 25, 2004|It's in the mezzanine of what remains one of the more interesting places in Colorado to see a film, Denver's Mayan Theater, that I've come to meet Scottish director David Mackenzie and one of the stars of his sophomore film Young Adam, the strikingly, ethereally beautiful and staunchly uncompromising Tilda Swinton. Far more delicate-seeming in person than on the screen, Ms. Swinton is dressed in a loose brown shirt that she'll pull over her legs, knees folded against her chest, several times during the course of our conversation–a charming, almost alarmingly childlike pose from an actress I most readily associate with ferocious, audacious turns in Derek Jarman's free-verse celluloid poetry and best-of-bad-movie appearances in everything from Vanilla Sky to The Beach to The Statement. Her work marked by a driving curiosity about the riddle of (most often sexual) identity and the role of film as oral tradition, she proves to again be the strongest ingredient of a conflicted picture, playing the role of a disquiet wife of a bargeman in Young Adam with her trademark ferocity and intelligence. Mackenzie, by contrast or complement, is a little shy, almost sheepish. We traveled a little way from Young Adam to talk more generally about poetry and the cinema, as well as the damnable inadequacies of conventional communication.

Young Adam (2003); Millennium Mambo (2001); Secret Things (2002)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, France, Romance, Taiwan, Theatrical, UK

YOUNG ADAM
**½/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Peter Mullan, Emily Mortimer
screenplay by David Mackenzie, based on the novel by Alexander Trocchi
directed by David Mackenzie

Qian xi man po
****/****
starring Shu Qi, Jack Kao, Tuan Chun-hao, Chen Yi-Hsuan
screenplay by Chu T'ien-wen
directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Choses secrètes
***½/****
starring Coralie Revel, Sabrina Seyvecou, Roger Mirmont, Fabrice Deville
written and directed by Jean-Claude Brisseau

Youngadametcby Walter Chaw David Mackenzie's Young Adam opens with a shot from below of a duck paddling placidly along the surface of a lake that's replaced by a woman's corpse, then replaced by a filthy barge-worker and his mate fishing the cadaver out with a gaffing hook. Young Adam is a beautiful picture, really, its interiors sepia-tinged like a cameo photograph and its exteriors bleached and desperate, and as a film about surfaces, it marches to its own logic with the dyspeptic malaise, if not the consistent nihilistic poetry, of a Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Surfaces include skin, of course, and a scene where tattooed Les (Peter Mullan) washes his hired help Joe (Ewan McGregor) is as blandly erotic as a scene where Joe performs cunnilingus on Les's wife Ella (Tilda Swinton), an act that wins him the fried egg he was denied at breakfast. Consumption suggesting sustenance seeps into a scene where Joe covers his girlfriend, Cathie (Emily Mortimer), with custard, ketchup, and mustard before caning and raping her. Joe's furnace is unquenchable: as Biblical doppelganger, his carnal curiosity is constantly stoked by the invitation of moribund English housewives and widows–and his ire is only aroused when an appropriate mate choice threatens to free him from his fleshy fixations. Young Adam is about being trapped and listless, about the lost generation afflicted by a plague of ennui–paddling in a circle, floating between updrafts in the widening gyre.

Ripley’s Game (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Italy, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**** Image A Sound A
starring John Malkovich, Dougray Scott, Ray Winstone, Lena Headey
screenplay by Charles McKeown and Liliana Cavani, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Liliana Cavani

Mustownby Walter Chaw When I heard that The Night Porter auteur Liliana Cavani was adapting one of Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley novels, I knew to expect something more in line with René Clément's brilliant Purple Noon than Anthony Minghella's lavishly simpering The Talented Mr. Ripley. What I didn't anticipate was that this film, which never received any sort of domestic theatrical distribution before being summarily dropped, supplement-free, onto the home video market, would be one of the best of its year–indeed, of its kind. Ripley's Game is doomed to the "direct-to-video" label and an ignominious eternity buried in the Blockbuster shelves for the occasional stunned bemusement of the well traveled and the John Malkovich fetishist–it languishes there while over-masticated tripe like The Alamo finds its way to thousands of screens, its lingering impact to remind again that the slippery slope in Hollywood's distribution game just got steeper. Ripley's Game would have looked great on the big screen–and some genius robbed us of the opportunity to see it that way, thinking we'd prefer American Splendor or Along Came Polly.

The Office: The Complete Second Series (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Pseudo-Documentary, Television, UK

Image A Sound A- Extras C+

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Fans of "The Office" are in for a lopsided evening if they plan to do a marathon of both seasons. Much as I loved series one, there's no denying that it deals purely with the inertia of office life, of living with the petty nuisances of an obnoxious boss (Ricky Gervais as David Brent), a "weasel-faced ass" (Mackenzie Crook as Gareth Keenan) at the desk across from you, and a long stretch of boredom as the mindless work you do stretches on into infinity. Creators Gervais and Stephen Merchant could have easily riffed on this for years and run out of ideas along the way, but wanting to go out with a bang ("The Office" is, by all accounts, finished), they decided to play the series out by throwing the office environment into flux. Thus we have "The Office: The Complete Second Series", a brilliant and unlikely cross between Basil Fawlty and Arthur Miller that starts off subtly hilarious and ends as one of the most wrenching tragedies ever to crash through the small screen.

Ned Kelly (1970) – DVD

Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, UK, Western

*/**** | Image B- Sound C
starring Mick Jagger, Clarissa Kaye-Mason, Mark McManus, Ken Goodlet
screenplay by Tony Richardson and Ian Jones
directed by Tony Richardson

by Walter Chaw Somewhere between the islets of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, just off the coast of Performance and Mad Dog Morgan, floats Tony Richardson's less visited, incomprehensible, woefully miscalculated Ned Kelly. Edited with a cheese grater and scored with bizarre faux-Aussie folk by strange bedfellows Shel Silverstein and Waylon Jennings, all while giving lie to David Mamet-as-director's claims to originality in dispensing with exposition in favour of oblique, impenetrable dialogue and stilted performances, Ned Kelly is also home to one of the worst performances by a rock star in a world that knows Graffiti Bridge and Glitter. Really just the kissing cousin of such of its contemporary counter-cultural misfires as Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the panicked 1970 policy of giving the kids what they want, whatever that might be, is filtered here through the disturbing prism of a 42-year-old Englishman's perspective. (Admittedly, as angry young men go, Mick Jagger is a better choice than Breckinridge's Rex Reed.) Curiously though, as it so often does, the rare convergence of everything gone wrong makes for pretty compulsive viewing.

A Room with a View (1985) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, UK

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliot, Helena Bonham-Carter, Simon Callow
screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on the novel by E.M. Forster
directed by James Ivory

Roomwithaviewcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Somebody says to one of the more priggish characters in E.M. Forster's A Room with a View, "You were all right as long as you kept to things, but when it came to people…" It's a line that doubly applies to James Ivory's 1985 film version, which indeed has more to say about the things surrounding its characters than it does the characters themselves. Great care has been taken to tastefully capture the physical details of Italy and England circa 1908, and great care has been taken to provide the actors with the fashions to match. But when the lights come up, we don't really have a strong impression of the characters, who simply populate the period tableaux like mannequins.

Made-Up (2003) + The Reckoning (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, UK

MADE-UP
**½/****
starring Brooke Adams, Lynne Adams, Eva Amurri, Gary Sinise
screenplay by Lynne Adams
directed by Tony Shalhoub

THE RECKONING
*/****
starring Paul Bettany, Tom Hardy, Willem Dafoe, Gina McKee
screenplay by Mark Mills, based on the novel by Barry Unsworth
directed by Paul McGuigan

Madeupreckoningby Walter Chaw The problem with Tony Shalhoub’s directorial debut Made-Up is a certain forced artificiality in presentation and execution that, though in keeping with the mock-documentary-within-a-mock-documentary format, makes the consideration of it emotionally and aesthetically removed. It’s a slippery criticism to level at a picture that seems to be about emotional and aesthetic remove, of course, but there comes a point when the form imitates the message to an obfuscating degree–in other words, when it’s no longer about the distance, but is the distance. So for all the empty extra-textual readings the film culls for its subtext (Brooke Adams, an actress out of the scene for a decade or so, plays an actress out of the scene for at least a decade; sisters play sisters; the daughter is played by the daughter of Susan Sarandon; and so on), Made-Up is salvaged by a sense of decency, and one meta-read that carries some weight as Shalhoub, an Arab-American of Lebanese descent, directs a film about the ills of stereotyping based on appearance.

The Heart of Me (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, UK

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Helena Bonham Carter, Olivia Williams, Paul Bettany, Eleanor Bron
screenplay by Lucinda Coxon, based on the novel The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann
directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s nothing especially wrong with The Heart of Me, a professional, handsomely mounted, beautifully shot film featuring good performances from an attractive cast and a script that can at least be described as well-written. Unfortunately, that same screenplay doesn’t go far enough in pondering the ramifications of its narrative events: people fall in and out of love arbitrarily, make decisions because the plot requires it, and do horrible things just to get a rise out of the audience. There’s no real artistic purpose beyond the sound and fury of the story–it’s more designed and photographed than written and directed, with no real thematic exploration going on behind the devastatingly gorgeous goings-on. Thus The Heart of Me is craftsman-like enough to keep you watching, but it leaves you with nothing beyond a bunch of people being melodramatic while surrounded by sumptuous décor.

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) – DVD

Posted in1960s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Family, UK

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Stuart Whitman, Sarah Miles, James Fox, Alberto Sordi
screenplay by Jack Davies & Ken Annakin
directed by Ken Annakin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover As far as bloated Twilight of Hollywood fluff goes, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes doesn't do too badly for itself. The picture doesn't try to fill you with ersatz wonder at the magnitude of its expensive contraptions, nor does it try to bully you with offensive sentiment in the Sound of Music vein. It's mostly just a lark, and while it's clearly overpriced (as H'wood films of the period generally are), it manages as best as it can to be light and airy. Alas, as often as not the soufflé falls, the victim of obvious caricatures and a grotesquely overblown approach to slapstick. But while Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines doesn't really linger very long in the mind, it's not bad enough to be an affront, and should at least please children young enough to find the sight of a man with an enormous moustache funny.

The Pink Panther Film Collection [6-Disc DVD Collector’s Set – Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, UK

THE PINK PANTHER (1964)
*½/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring David Niven, Peter Sellers, Robert Wagner, Capucine
screenplay by Maurice Richlin and Blake Edwards
directed by Blake Edwards

A SHOT IN THE DARK (1964)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Peter Sellers, Elke Sommer, George Sanders, Herbert Lom
screenplay by William Peter Blatty and Blake Edwards, based on the play by Harry Kurnitz
directed by Blake Edwards

THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN (1976)
***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Lesley-Anne Down, Burt Kwouk
screenplay by Frank Waldman, Blake Edwards
directed by Blake Edwards

REVENGE OF THE PINK PANTHER (1978)
*½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Burt Kwouk, Dyan Cannon
screenplay by Ron Clark, Frank Waldman, Blake Edwards
directed by Blake Edwards

TRAIL OF THE PINK PANTHER (1982)
*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Peter Sellers, David Niven, Herbert Lom, Joanna Lumley
screenplay by Frank Waldman, Tom Waldman, Blake Edwards, Geoffrey Edwards
directed by Blake Edwards

by Bill Chambers If you've never seen the one that started it all, then it will probably surprise you to learn that The Pink Panther is all but a pre-emptive strike against a possible franchise–practically the only thing about it that became canonical and conventional was the animated title sequence. (This upheld tradition of a cartoon beneath the opening credits formalized a cottage industry for James Bond distributor United Artists.) Series lynchpin Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) isn't even the central figure; that would be Sir Charles Litton (David Niven), a playboy plotting to steal the coveted Pink Panther diamond by ingratiating himself with its owner, Dala (Once Upon a Time in the West's Claudia Cardinale), a pampered princess decompressing at a ski chalet in Cortina.

The Commitments (1991) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Ireland, Music, UK

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Robert Arkins, Michael Aherne, Angeline Ball, Maria Doyle Kennedy
screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais and Roddy Doyle
directed by Alan Parker

by Walter Chaw Alan Parker likes to use his platform as a film director to preach about all manner of society's more obvious ails, reserving the bulk of his ham-fisted proselytizing for the problems he himself identifies as endemic to the United States: hedonism and drug abuse (The Wall, Midnight Express); the price of a culture of fame (The Wall, Fame); the price of Vietnam and our broken social services system (Birdy); the rampant Yankee tragedy of divorce (Shoot the Moon); racism (Mississippi Burning, Come See the Paradise); our love/hate/fear relationship with food (The Road to Wellville); and, most recently (and egregiously), the death penalty (The Life of David Gale). When Parker manages to shut his hole long enough to pack his ponderous, moronic disdain back across the pond, the films he produces there (Angela's Ashes, The Commitments) are weepy prole sagas highlighting the determination of grubby Dickensian urchins toiling in the underbelly of failed capitalism–which, in Parker's mind, is probably America's fault, too. Poor baby. I'm not sure what's made Parker an expert on fixing the United States (something to do with his background as a commercial director, I suspect), but I for one am just so grateful for his insight.

The Girl from Rio (1969) + Sadomania (1981) – DVDs

Posted in1960s, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, DVD, Spain, Thriller, UK, West Germany, ZERO STARS

Die sieben Männer der Sumuru
*½/**** Image  A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Shirley Eaton, Richard Wyler, George Sanders, Maria Rohm
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

Sadomania – Hölle der Lust
Hellhole Women
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Ajita Wilson, Ursula Fellner, Robert Foster, Gina Jansen
screenplay by Jess Franco and Günter Ebert
directed by Jess Franco

by Walter Chaw Theoretically, I'm not opposed to the idea of the exploitation film. In the right hands, its disreputable ingredients of sex, violence, and "shocking" behaviour (the girl and the gun of Godardian legend) could be a thrilling camera subject and a springboard for lush stylistic excess. But for every Russ Meyer, Dario Argento, or Suzuki Seijun who knows his way around a camera, there are scores of Lucio Fulcis, Ruggero Deodatos, and Jess Francos who have no clue as to how to make a movie that hangs together. The latter of that unholy trio is a case in point: the current DVD release of two of his films is an occasion for seeing how far the exploitation formula can go wrong. Running the gamut from ridiculous (The Girl from Rio) to repellent (Sadomania), they lack any real stylistic brio to enliven their rote excesses and cheap perversions, succeeding only as possible subjects for Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style mockery.

The Republic of Love (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Bruce Greenwood, Emilia Fox, Edward Fox, Connor Price
screenplay by Deepa Mehta and Esta Spalding, based on the novel by Carol Shields
directed by Deepa Mehta

Republicofloveby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Not long ago in these pages, I gave Ginger Snaps II: Unleashed a thumbs-up for leading us out of Canadian master-shot hell with a bold use of montage. Little did I know that the master shots would deliver a riposte so soon afterwards, but lo and behold, here is The Republic of Love, a movie that finds a way to use Canada's compositional rhythm of choice to fairly spectacular effect. True, it has some narrative deficiencies, and it builds to a climax that never really arrives, but Deepa Mehta's slick and stately use of cinematography and colour redeems what could have been another leaden exercise in choice-free Canadian aesthetics.

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.

Emile (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Ian McKellen, Deborah Kara Unger, Tygh Runyan, Theo Crane
written and directed by Carl Bessai

Emileby Travis Mackenzie Hoover In Survival, Margaret Atwood's seminal 1972 study of Canadian literature, she identifies Canadian writers' use of the family as "the trap you're caught in" and identifies a number of inescapable families that shut tight like a prison. Faced with this preponderance of smothering clans, she notes: "What one misses [from these books] is joy. After a few of these books, you start wanting someone, sometime, to find something worth celebrating." Flash forward 32 years and you will have the same complaint about Emile, a film in which the family is a tangled web from which there is no escape–and those who try to escape are doomed to guilt and destructiveness. Teamed with a somnambulistic pace and a painful, childlike politeness, the film so reeks of disappointment that it can't even find the courage to allow its most wronged character any kind of catharsis.