The Painted Veil (2006) – DVD; The Good Shepherd (2006); The Good German (2006) – DVD

May 21, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, China, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Romance, Thriller, War

THE PAINTED VEIL
***/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Diana Rigg
screenplay by Ron Nyswaner, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by John Curran

THE GOOD SHEPHERD
**/****
starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Eric Roth
directed by Robert De Niro

THE GOOD GERMAN
*½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Paul Attanasio, based on the novel by Joseph Kanon
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw PaintedgermanshepherdOne of seemingly dozens of pretentious, self-produced vanity pieces from the Edward Norton grist mill, The Painted Veil, John Curran's adaptation of Somerset Maugham's story of colonial malaise, is a pleasant surprise. Naomi Watts and Toby Jones are fabulous (and Norton is steady); it's not terribly paternalistically racist despite being another Western film in which white people exert their magical influence in foreign lands; and even though it's all about prestige and hedonism, it manages now and again to actually be about prestige and hedonism. But like the simultaneously-opening Soderbergh noir The Good German, it's mostly interesting in the meta. What keeps this updating of the old Greta Garbo weeper from being literally better is the lack of immediacy in its tale of emotionally distant scientists and their flapper wives, adrift in the boiler pot of 1920s Shanghai. Not timeless in its remove but instead ineffably dated by it, it's an Old Hollywood production in both epic scale and lack of subtext, making the picture a lovely trifle not unlike other well-done bits of instantly-forgotten prestige (see: Philip Noyce's The Quiet American).

The Rodgers & Hammerstein Collection (1934-1965) – DVD

March 12, 2007Posted in****/****, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, War, Western

THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Richard Haydn, Eleanor Parker
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Robert Wise

MustownTHE KING AND I (1956)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner, Rita Moreno, Martin Benson
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on Margaret Landon’s play “Anna and the King of Siam”
directed by Walter Lang

SOUTH PACIFIC (1958)
*½/**** Image A+ (Theatrical) A (Roadshow) Sound B Extras C+
starring Rossano Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor, John Kerr, Ray Walston
screenplay by Paul Osborn, based on Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
directed by Joshua Logan

CAROUSEL (1956)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Cameron Mitchell, Barbara Ruick
screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based on the Ferenc Molnár’s play “Liliom”
directed by Henry King

LILIOM (1934)
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Charles Boyer, Madeleine Ozeray, Robert Arnoux, Roland Toutain
screenplay by Robert Liebmann, dialogue by Bernard Zimmer, based on the play by Franz (a.k.a. Ferenc) Molnár
directed by Fritz Lang

STATE FAIR (1945)
½*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A
starring Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews, Dick Haymes, Vivian Blaine
screenplay by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the novel by Philip Strong
directed by Walter Lang

STATE FAIR (1962)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, Pamela Tiffin, Alice Faye
screenplay by Richard Breen; adaptation by Oscar Hammerstein II, Sonya Levien, Paul Green
directed by José Ferrer

OKLAHOMA! (1955)
***/**** Image A (CinemaScope) C (Todd-AO) Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Gordon MacRae, Gloria Grahame, Shirley Jones, Gene Nelson
screenplay by Sonya Levien and William Ludwig
directed by Fred Zinnemann

Rodgerssoundofmusiccapby Walter Chaw God, The Sound of Music is so freakin’ nice. Nazis are the bad guys, no controversy there; raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens–have you no heart, man? But when I like Rodgers & Hammerstein–and I like them quite a lot, truth be wrenched–I like their ambiguity, their irony, their goddamned fatalism in the face of eternal romantic verities. Consider the animal (jungle?) heat of “Shall We Dance,” cut off like a faucet by the fascistic abortion of The King and I‘s secondary love story; or the persistence of love despite abuse and abandonment in Carousel; or the slapdash kangaroo court that justifies love in Oklahoma!. This is all so much more than the slightly shady (and ultimately redeemed) shyster of The Music Man–this is reality in the midst of the un-, sur-, hyper-reality of the musical form. Yet what The Sound of Music offers up is a military man shtupping an ex-nun with no corresponding sense of fetishistic eroticism. How is it that the two most popular adult Halloween costumes engaged in naughty Alpine sexcapades could be totally free of va-va-va-voom? It’s so relentlessly wholesome that of course it’s the most beloved artifact of its kind in the short history of the movie musical: If you’re of a certain age, the plot of the thing is almost family mythology, resurrected every holiday like a dusty corpse at a decades-long Irish wake gone tragically awry. That ain’t a grin, baby, it’s a rictus.

Smokin’ Aces (2007) + Seraphim Falls (2007)

January 26, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, France, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War, Western

SMOKIN' ACES
½*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Common, Andy Garcia
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

SERAPHIM FALLS
*/****
starring Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, Angie Harmon, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Abby Everett Jaques & David Von Ancken
directed by David Von Ancken

by Walter Chaw Director Joe Carnahan replicates a heart attack in the prologue of Narc, and David Von Ancken, in the action-packed opening to his feature debut Seraphim Falls, simulates a mildly hysterical bout of narcolepsy–but more on that later. Carnahan's third film, Smokin' Aces, is drawing a lot of unfavourable comparisons to Guy Ritchie's gangster sagas, but the real lineage can be traced to whatever strain of viral ADD infected Tony Scott. The film is so like Scott's Domino in its visual affectations and uniform incompetence that the two pictures could exchange scenes willy-nilly without losing a step. (Compare it to Wayne Kramer's similarly canted Running Scared for a mini-primer on when lawless misanthropy and the coked-up editor aesthetic can be wielded with delighted, visceral purpose as opposed to simply wielded.) Ultimately, Smokin' Aces is little more than a parade of sad "didn't you used to be…" stunt cameos installed for the missing "edge" that buckets of blood, rains of bullets, and a few power tools seem incapable of manifesting. With Narc, Carnahan showed real growth from his directorial debut (Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane, which is actually not unlike the new one at all). Now he's just showing off.

Children of Men (2006) + Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

January 5, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, War

CHILDREN OF MEN
****/****
starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Timothy J. Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby, based on the novel by P.D. James
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
***½/****
starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase
screenplay by Iris Yamashita, based on the book Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Tsuyoko Yoshido
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Stop on any single frame of Alfonso Cuarón's remarkable war idyll Children of Men–a film that's rarely in repose, sometimes seeming composed of one long, frantic shot–and I suspect the sharp-eyed, educated viewer would be able to cull a reference to modern art, most likely one about men reduced to their base animal nature. For me, the two visual landmarks come in the form of a cue to the cover design for Pink Floyd's 1977 "Animals" when hero Theo (Clive Owen) goes to see his industrialist cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) for help and a re-creation of Richard Misrach's remarkable series of 1987 photographs documenting, among other things, a dead-animal pit in Nevada purportedly used to dispose of victims of a plutonium "hot spot." Both share a space with surrealism in the positioning of animals (artificial or deceased) in industrial spaces (London's Battersea Power Station is the iconic backdrop of the "Animals" cover) as mute commentary, perhaps, on man's destructive relationship with his environment–a read that jibes comfortably with the thrust of Children of Men, in which we're told that one day in the not-too-distant future, humans suddenly stop reproducing. (Fertile ground for science-fiction, this obsession with progeny (see: everything from Frankenstein to I Am Legend).) The picture opens with a Fleet Street terrorist bombing, a little like Terry Gilliam's dystopic Brazil–though rather than take the easier route of satirizing our current state of instability and free-floating paranoia, Children of Men makes a serious attempt to allegorize it.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

December 29, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Mexico, Spain, Theatrical, War

****/****
starring Ariadna Gil, Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú
written and directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw Brutal and ignoble, the antithesis of romantic, the violence in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth slaps metal against flesh like the flat of a hand against a steel table. It's the only element of the picture that isn't lush, that isn't laden with the burnished archetype of Catholic superstition as it exists in eternal suspension with the pagan mythologies it cannibalized. By itself, this seems a metaphor for the pain and the magic of how fable turns the inevitability of coming-of-age into ritual. An early scene where hero girl Ofelia (Ivana Baquero)–a storyteller equal parts experientially innocent and allegorically savvy, making her the manifestation of del Toro's ideal avatar–tells her prenatal brother a story about a rose that blooms nightly on a mountain of thorns touches in one ineffably graceful movement all the picture's themes of immortality, aspiration, isolation, and the promise of escape held, sadistically, just out of reach. There's something of the myth of Tantalus in Ofelia's tale, as much as there is of Lewis Carroll's Alice and the sagas of parental absence by the Brothers Grimm, which surface in the premise of a young girl traveling, as the film opens, with her pregnant mother into the war-torn Spanish countryside during Franco's rule to join her wicked stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi López) at his remote outpost. Ofelia will be reminded repeatedly throughout the film that there's no such thing as justice or innocence left in the world, and that the best intentions are crushed by cynicism and rage. The question left as the picture closes has to do with whether Ofelia's taken the lesson to heart, to say nothing of del Toro–or us.

Sergeant York (1941) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

December 19, 2006Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Romance, War

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Joan Leslie, George Tobias
screenplay by Abem Finkel & Harry Chandlee and Howard Koch & John Huston
directed by Howard Hawks

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Before it settles into the martial flag-waver it clearly wants to be, Sergeant York is a terrific movie. Its story of Tennessee-born WWI hero Alvin York, heavily supervised by the man himself, is one of not just a military coup, but an evolving conscience as well–and if that conscience eventually cons itself into supporting that most pointless of international conflicts, the film is nevertheless a moving story of personal growth. Though it barely betrays the hand of Howard Hawks (it lacks the team spirit that courses through his oeuvre), the director tells the tale with the kind of conviction and nuance a lesser director couldn’t provide. The movie feels York’s progress from alcoholic ne’er-do-well to industrious would-be farmer and prospective husband, and instead of taking his emotions for granted, it expresses them with a noted lack of condescension.

1900 (1976) [Two-Disc Collector’s Edition] + La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) – DVDs

December 18, 2006Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, France, Italy, Pseudo-Documentary, Robert De Niro, War, West Germany

1900
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Francesca Bertini
screenplay by Franco Arcalli, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Bernardo Bertolucci
directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871)
****/**** Image B- Sound C+ Extras C+
directed by Peter Watkins

1900capby Travis Mackenzie Hoover In this corner, Bernardo Bertolucci, weighing in with a massive budget courtesy of Alberto Grimaldi and a cast that includes De Niro, Depardieu, Sutherland, Lancaster, Hayden, and Sanda. Over here we have Peter Watkins, working for peanuts on a single soundstage with a cast of nobodies recruited from Paris and its environs. The fight, as it turns out, is more than one over who can make the longest movie (5hrs15mins for Bertolucci, 5hrs45mins for Watkins) or grab the most attention. The issue is: what are the conditions necessary for a revolutionary epic–moreover, what conditions get in the way? This is the real purpose of comparing 1900 and La Commune (Paris, 1871) (hereafter La Commune), for each film throws down for the Communist cause but only one is conscious of the nuances. Where Watkins and his troupe constantly reframe the idea of what it means to foment revolution, Bertolucci thinks he's got the idea–and proves, through mindless repetition, that he really doesn't.

Springfield Rifle (1952) [Gary Cooper: The Signature Collection] – DVD

November 28, 2006Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Thriller, War, Western

***/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Gary Cooper, Phyllis Thaxter, David Brian, Paul Kelly
screenplay by Charles Marquis Warren & Frank Davis
directed by André De Toth

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Springfield Rifle is a fat-free, plot-centric Gary Cooper western with a difference. While its counter-intelligence plot bears a passing resemblance to that of Henry Hathaway's docu-noir The House on 92nd Street, it's mostly about brisk movement through rough terrain as we wait for a climax in which the newly-minted Springfield rifle will prove its worth on the battlefield. There's absolutely no serious need to look for subtexts (director André De Toth keeps everything (moving quickly) on the surface), but it's a reasonably entertaining time-killer that's never exactly smart yet never exactly boring. Coming as it did on the heels of the star's High Noon, it could perhaps be considered counter-programming.

DIFF ’06: Rescue Dawn

November 22, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, Film Festivals, Luxembourg, Thriller, War
**½/****starring Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies, Marshall Bellwritten and directed by Werner Herzog by Walter Chaw Though a perfectly serviceable actioner, one that avoids almost every pitfall and cliché of the POW genre while supporting a singularly eccentric performance, Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, sadly, could have been directed by any one of a dozen directors. Gripping but not especially memorable, it lacks the mad Bavarian's insanity: his belief that nature is obscene, as well as his ability to make a trance from the mendacity of routine. (Because Herzog is a rare talent, his films butt up against greater expectations.) The…

Platoon (1986) [20th Anniversary Edition] – DVD

November 6, 2006Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, UK, War

***/**** Image A Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS) Extras B
starring Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen, Forest Whitaker
written and directed by Oliver Stone

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A watershed in American cultural history, Platoon parsed the Vietnam subject in ways that broke from the defensive trend, trading Sylvester Stallone's hard, unyielding Rambo physique for the infinitely penetrable bodies of various poor sods on their way to destruction. This was the moment when Americans let go of the past and resigned themselves to the war's negative impact–so much so that the quality of the movie proper now seems irrelevant. Let it be known that Platoon is far from perfect: it's often schmaltzy, sometimes schematic, and burdened by a director's innocence that would later curdle at the altar of a "dying king" in JFK. But its accumulation of details distinguishes it from the efforts of message-mongering artists like Coppola, Cimino, and Kubrick. It's not a statement so much as a list of indignities on the road to nothing at all–a life in Hell rather than a glorious campaign that as we know led to pointless ruin.

TIFF ’06: Black Book

September 25, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Drama, Espionage, Film Festivals, Germany, Netherlands, Thriller, TIFF, UK, War
Zwartboek**/****starring Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, Halina Reijnscreenplay by Gerard Soeteman & Paul Verhoevendirected by Paul Verhoeven by Bill Chambers The word on Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (Zwartboek) around the TIFF was that it's "Showgirls meets Schindler's List," which is a cute bit of shorthand but decidedly misleading, not that I can begin to imagine what that movie would be like. All it really means is that we're never going to let Verhoeven live Showgirls down, so who can blame him for going back to Holland, where he's still an object of veneration? Alas, you can take Verhoeven…

The TIFFing Point

September 14, 2006Posted inAction, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Blog, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Horror, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Thriller, TIFF, UK, War

Two more days until I turn back into a pumpkin (or something like that), probably for the good of not only my health, but also that of FILM FREAK CENTRAL. Anyway, some more stopgap coverage for you…

FAY GRIM (d. Hal Hartley)
As far as this unlikely sequel to the brilliant Henry Fool is concerned, those hoping for a Before Sunset should brace themselves for a Texasville. The movie feels like it came out of Hartley sideways (or, conversely, all too painlessly), and it never really catches fire until Thomas Jay Ryan makes his long-delayed cameo as Henry Fool. By then, it’s too little too late. **/****

MASH (1970) – DVD

July 25, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Robert Altman, Drama, DVD, Palme d'Or Winner, War

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman
screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr., based on the novel by Richard Hooker
directed by Robert Altman

Robertaltmanmashcapby Walter Chaw On the shortlist of Robert Altman masterpieces, MASH compares best with his The Long Goodbye in that both are unapologetically informed by the cult of masculinity: fucking and fucking people up. Tenderness in the film is someone breaking their hand on someone else's head when that someone else says something stupid to a kid. Better, it's giving a different kid a stroke magazine to counteract his de facto religious training at the hands of an obvious nutjob (who's nutty mainly because he's trying to impose enlightenment where enlightenment cannot by definition exist). Accordingly, matters of spirituality and men of the cloth are to be scoffed at while other rituals–like the rites observed in an operating theatre, or golf (a game played with clubs), or football, or the pursuit of women–are regarded with the obsessive gravity of a lower primate. It's about male bonding, all that cruelty towards women and disrespect of authority and open racism–the game of me-against-you in a film that, contrary to popular consensus, isn't a Hellerian satire about the absurdity of war, but what may be the saddest war film ever made in that it identifies conflict as something that, however contrary to civilization, is inextricably hardwired into our bestial nature. We're vile, stupid, ignoble apes and we aspire to ideals we're eternally incapable of honouring.

The Losers (1970) – DVD

March 23, 2006Posted in1970s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Thriller, War

Nam's Angels
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring William Smith, Bernie Hamilton, Adam Roarke, Houston Savage
screenplay by Alan Caillou
directed by Jack Starrett

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Figuring out the ideology of an exploitation movie is a tricky proposition. The libertarian leanings of a form generally concerned with sex, violence, and loose living lend themselves to right and left interpretations, often within the same movie. Consider The Losers: in one corner, it's a biker exploitation number given to sticking it to the man and getting it on in mass quantities, but in the other, it's one of the few pre-Rambo movies to be unambiguously positive about the Vietnam war. This cross-genre mélange basically charts the right-left mix of biker gangs themselves, which could ally themselves with the counterculture or claim themselves to be the real free Americans in the same breath. Pity, then, that they have to do their free living at the expense of "slopes" and "slants"–evidence that freedom is a one-way street.

Occupation: Dreamland (2005) – DVD

March 21, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD, War

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
directed by Garrett Scott & Ian Olds

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

"I guess someone smarter than me knows what's going on."
-Pfc. Thomas Turner, Occupation: Dreamland

Last year's thoroughly deplorable Gunner Palace had exactly one mode of thought: things are bad for our boys. Treating the citizens of Iraq as errant children and the soldiers like tin gods, it ironically had the effect of making the Iraqis look like victims and the troops look like callous, oblivious schmucks. Occupation: Dreamland is the necessary corrective to that film, at once granting the low-ranking occupiers a claim to feeling righteously confused and the occupied the right to answer back to people they never wanted there in the first place. Though many of the troops are as contemptuous as they were in Gunner Palace (some of them even more so), the overwhelming feeling is that nobody knows anything, with the inevitable end result being a mess of chaos and recrimination that neither side on the ground has a direct means of stopping. It's a reminder that the people who "know what's going on" are generally silent, largely remote, and completely unconcerned with the mess their ill-considered orders create.

Forbidden Games (1952) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

March 9, 2006Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, War

Jeux interdits
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Brigitte Fossey, Georges Poujouly, Amédée, Laurence Badie
screenplay by Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, François Boyer, René Clément
directed by René Clément

Forbiddengamescapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover René Clément's Forbidden Games is perhaps the best place to begin when comparing the Nouvelle Vague to its nemesis, the Tradition of Quality. As the director (and co-scenarists Pierre Bost and Georges Aurenche, regular CAHIERS DU CINEMA whipping boys) came in for abuse under Truffaut, there's no denying the film's connection to the ToQ and how that tradition represses so much of its more disturbing content. Indeed, one wonders how a movie that revolves around a WWII orphan named Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) who nicks grave markers can be this matter-of-fact and cute. Despite the astonishing morbidity of the subject matter, the film goes about it like Wally and the Beav setting barrel hoops for Lumpy Rutherford. Still, its total lack of shame is something that would be lost in the ensuing New Wave revolution, and though big claims for it are hard to make, it's remarkably fresh and open–if more than a little naïve.

Jarhead (2005) – DVD

March 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Germany, UK, War

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris Cooper, Jamie Foxx
screenplay by William Broyles, Jr., based on the novel by Anthony Swofford
directed by Sam Mendes

Jarheadcap

by Walter Chaw I went to high school with a guy who fought in the first Gulf War. I remember him as a delicate, sensitive, beautiful boy who in retrospect looked a lot like Cillian Murphy. I directed him in a play–and though I haven't spoken to him since, I heard that when he returned home, he was not quite the same. I remember chortling about the first Gulf War, too, thinking how funny it was that our military pounded fourth-generation Chinese armour with bombs left over from Vietnam in a withering blitz that left Saddam Hussein's vaunted "million man army" of non-volunteer soldiers buried in their trenches and surrendering to the press. I've never been able to completely reconcile the two impressions of that war through the haze of my own youth–this introduction to modern warfare as complex and confusing to my adolescent mind as love and looming responsibility. War was either something frightening and mysterious that left you ineffably changed, or it was hilarious and chuff to a chest-pounding nationalistic ego. Whatever the case, you surmise that it involves the slaughter of hordes of faceless huns.

Sundance ’06: The Ground Truth

January 28, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance, War
The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends**/****directed by Patricia Foulkrod by Alex Jackson Too often I feel that critics and audiences place documentaries at the kid's table, refusing to critique them on the same level they do fiction films. Narration from the director, sit-down interviews with the subjects--in terms of filmmaking, we let documentaries get away with a lot of really primitive shit we probably wouldn't otherwise. Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth is a pretty good rant, but not much of a movie; Foulkrod made it because she had a burning desire to say something, not because she had a…

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2006) + Why We Fight (2006)

January 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Denmark, Documentary, France, Satire, Theatrical, UK, War

LOOKING FOR COMEDY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
*/****
starring Albert Brooks, John Carroll Lynch, Sheetal Sheth, Fred Dalton Thompson
written and directed by Albert Brooks

WHY WE FIGHT
**/****
directed by Eugene Jarecki

by Walter Chaw The most frustrating thing about Albert Brooks's crushingly boring, infuriatingly unfunny Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (hereafter Comedy) is the possibility that such was the intention all along. 'Lost in Arabia' (well, India and Pakistan–let's not get crazy, here) finds Brooks doing a high-wire act with post-modernism–the same one he's been doing his whole career, as it happens. At some point, though, it's fair to wonder how long you can push self-awareness before it finally flies apart in a storm of narcissistic deconstruction. Mull over, if you will, a moment where Brooks (as Brooks) recreates one of his classic gags–involving the world's most ironically-tragic ventriloquist–in the middle of an interminable stand-up routine staged in a New Delhi auditorium, closing his act with the dummy (the wooden one) drinking a glass of water. It's Brooks, and Brooks's film, in microcosm: a man who returns the term "mortification" to ritual and religion while being incapable of subsuming the belief that he's still the smartest guy in the room. The trick of Comedy is that in making a movie that isn't very funny about a man who isn't very funny in the middle of a gulf of cultural misunderstanding that's especially not very funny, Brooks hopes to draw a corollary between how the troubles of the world boil down to everybody's inability to communicate. As revelations go, it's not earth-shattering. Guess it goes without saying that it's also not worth the effort to get there.

Transamerica (2005) + Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005)

January 18, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Music, Road Movie, Theatrical, UK, War

TRANSAMERICA
**/****
starring Felicity Huffman, Kevin Zegers, Fionnula Flanagan, Graham Greene
written and directed by Duncan Tucker

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS
*½/****
starring Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins, Will Young, Christopher Guest
screenplay by Martin Sherman
directed by Stephen Frears

by Walter Chaw Duncan Tucker makes his hyphenate debut with Transamerica, one of the first pictures distributed by the Weinsteins under their new aegis. Predictably, all the earmarks of the earnest indie genre Miramax blazed are cemented into place: it's over-written when it's not overreliant on a soundtrack of ethnically-cued melodies (the wood flute marks the appearance of an Indian, for instance) and folksy ballads (I challenge you not to 'pit up when a tune about a rose blooming accompanies our hero swapping his "outie" for an "innie"); narratively creaky; and hangs its hopes on its star, Felicity Huffman, to impose nuance where there is none. Huffman's performance being the sort of stunt in a minor independent film that plays fast and loose with smug liberal paternalism should guarantee her an Oscar nomination–and it can't hurt that another Leonardo DiCaprio doppelgänger arrives post-Michael Pitt in the form of Kevin Zegers, trailing a little pathos and a little inappropriate titillation on his thin shoulders.