Deathwatch (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Germany, Horror, Thriller, UK, War

**½/**** Image B Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Bell, Ruaidhri Conroy, Laurence Fox, Torben Liebrecht
written and directed by Michael J. Bassett

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Reading the blurb on the keepcase for Deathwatch, I had to wonder: what kind of individual sets a horror film in World War I? The connection isn't obvious until you see the movie, whereupon you realize that this most pointless of military adventures provides an ideal location for the nihilism and futility that defines the genre. The conflict here serves as proof of the original sin that will result in the retributive deaths of the cast (whether they actually deserve it or not); simply put, it's a slasher movie, but with Kaiser Wilhelm instead of sex. The association is so suggestive that Deathwatch threatens to say things about the Great War that I've never really seen on film before–but alas, it doesn't fully grasp the potential of the link, forcing us instead to contend with fairly standard combat intrigue and officer-bashing as we wait for another flash of intelligence. Still, it's a cut above most straight-to-disc fare (it opened theatrically in the UK), and at its best it has a dank resonance setting it apart from the war and horror movie rabbles.

Head in the Clouds (2004); Bright Young Things (2003); Vera Drake (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, UK, War

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS
*/****
starring Charlize Theron, Penélope Cruz, Stuart Townsend, Thomas Kretschmann
written and directed by John Duigan

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS
**½/****
starring Emily Mortimer, Stephen Campbell Moore, James McAvoy, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Stephen Fry, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh
directed by Stephen Fry

VERA DRAKE
***½/****
starring Imelda Staunton, Richard Graham, Eddie Marsan, Anna Keaveney
written and directed by Mike Leigh

Headyoungveraby Walter Chaw There's a certain fascination embedded in our images of wartime England. When a film comes birthing across the pond this time of year, dripping with prestige and a whiff of stuffiness, what can it be but awards fodder laden with lovely sets, sepia-stained cinematography, handsome wool and silk costumes, and largely European casts that remind of how venal American mainstream casts tend to be by comparison? Something about the Blitz still intoxicates–perhaps England's steadfast refusal to surrender their island sanctuary to the barbarians at the gate tickles at our national self-delusion, trading on the belief, once ironclad, that our borders were as sacrosanct, or that our intentions in establishing a New World Order were ever that noble. Now, without the comfort of our own inviolate island sanctuary (what was Manhattan pre-9/11 than that–and what was it after but the biggest metaphor for the irony of capitalist arrogance since The Titanic?), there's just that much more reason for moth-balled middlebrow arthouse audiences to snuffle up great pinches of mid-twentieth century British pluck and remember from the cloistered perspective of a cloth chair a when that never existed–at least never for them.

The Alamo (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War, Western, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B- Sound A Extras C+
starring Dennis Quaid, Billy Bob Thornton, Jason Patric, Patrick Wilson
screenplay by Leslie Bohem and Stephen Gaghan and John Lee Hancock
directed by John Lee Hancock

by Walter Chaw There's an old joke from "Hee Haw" about crossing a potato with a sponge: "It didn't taste too good, but boy did it soak up the gravy!" In John Lee Hancock's appalling and sidesplitting The Alamo, Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett tells a gruesome variation on that punchline, only as an actor's moment (and with the "grease" off of slaughtered and incinerating Indians substituted for gravy). "Now, when someone passes me the potatoes, I just pass them right on." An interesting lesson taught about genocide and cannibalism: it's not the commission of atrocity to be mourned, it's the loss for a taste for French fries that's really the tragedy. The Alamo is essentially how "Hee Haw" saved the world–every time Davy pops his head above the titular fort's ramparts, visions of Roy Clark and Buck Owens popping out of a cornfield dance in your head. There are moments when, I kid you not, I looked to see if there was a price tag dangling, Minnie Pearl-style, from Jim Bowie's (Jason Patric) hat.

The Alamo (1960) – DVD

Posted in1960s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, War, Western

**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey, Frankie Avalon
screenplay by James Edward Grant
directed by John Wayne

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I freely admit that the prospect of a conservative historical epic directed by John Wayne initially sent a wave of panic rippling through my body. Having endured his offensive and tedious Vietnam opus The Green Berets, I was fearful of another impoverished mise-en-scène serving as the frame for Wayne's patented all-American bellicosity. (Unlike those crack commandoes, liberal critics can only stand so much.) So I was relieved to discover that The Alamo was at once more abstract and better-looking than The Green Berets and therefore more tolerable to sensitive lefty eyes–the film assumes that you're red-blooded enough to root for some American heroes, thus leaving the dubious reasons why unmentioned. Still, it lacks the articulateness to bring its jingoistic fervour to life, and it's sufficiently sluggish and monotonous to test the patience of all but the most uncritical super-patriots.

September Tapes (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Pseudo-Documentary, Theatrical, Thriller, War, ZERO STARS

Septem8er Tapes
ZERO STARS/****
starring George Calil, Wali Razaqi
screenplay by Christian Johnston & Christian Van Gregg
directed by Christian Johnston

Septembertapesby Walter Chaw Exactly the kind of exploitative garbage that fellow post-9/11er The Guys was, September Tapes recasts The Blair Witch Project as a hunt for Osama Bin Laden in the wilderness of Afghanistan. It's this sort of film that takes collective tragedy and renders it something several degrees south of inconsequential, boiling horror down to soups and bones. The film is a vile, thick reduction, making a 9/11 victim's last cries the catalyst for a dimwitted first-person shooter with an unsympathetic protagonist and such stunning–and stunningly unsubstantiated–claims as, "America's not serious about tracking down Bin Laden." Maybe so, maybe not, but September Tapes isn't about politics, it's about bad filmmakers armed with a bad idea teaching an audience they imagine is less-informed than they are a lesson in seeking vengeance like a man. It's the "let's roll" school of Yankee machismo, the "bring it on" theory of diplomacy and warfare, and when the flick turns into the nightmare revisionist cartoon of Rambo, that susurration you hear isn't tension, it's resignation and maybe disgust. 9/11 has to be more than an excuse to make bad action/adventure flicks or (like The Guys) self-pitying chamber dramas.

Foreign Correspondent (1940) – DVD

Posted in1940s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Romance, Thriller, War

Foreigncorrespondent

***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George Sanders
screenplay by Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison; dialogue by James Hilton, Robert Benchley
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Largely dismissed as a jingoistic anomaly in the generally anti-establishment Hitchcock canon (and dwarfed by the meatier fort/da of the same year's Rebecca), Foreign Correspondent is arguably a superior representation of the screwball genre to which the later Mr. and Mrs. Smith aspired. That it has political undertones is undeniable (its spies and hunters plot a throwback to Hitch's Gaumont years), but most conspicuous is the kind of macabre visual wit that would define the bulk of Hitchcock's early American output. Consider a haunting sequence with titular journalist Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea) trying to find a missing getaway car in a Dutch field dotted with windmills that begins with a gust of wind blowing off his hat (a castration metaphor–the film is full of them) as his girl-Friday Carol Fisher (Laraine Day) laughs uncontrollably, proceeds to the inside of a false mill where Haverstock is nearly discovered when he gets his coat caught in gears, and ends with an exchange with non-English speaking Dutch police resolved by one of Hitch's precocious little-girl characters. With an intimidating self-possession, an already mature Hitchcock presents in fast fashion a dizzying series of technical gags (the suspicious windmill suspicious because it's turning in the wrong direction–compare to the tennis crowd of Strangers on a Train and this film's own chase beneath a canopy of umbrellas); a preoccupation with birds as representatives of the corruption of social order (introduced in Young and Innocent, it became a central throughline in Hitchcock's career); a serio-comic scene of near-discovery; and a slapstick vignette that makes asses of the police, Hitch's favourite target.

King Arthur (2004)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, UK, War

*/****
starring Clive Owen, Kiera Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by David Franzoni
directed by Antoine Fuqua

Kingarthurby Walter Chaw King Arthur wants to have it both ways. It wants to be smart and it wants to be stupid, too. It wants to appeal to eggheads, so it opens with a title card that promises what follows is based on "new" archaeological evidence; then, for the alleged delight of the peanut gallery, it trots out the same period epic dog-and-pony show to which we've been repeatedly subjected since Zulu Dawn. Strangely enough, this new archaeological evidence apparently dates feminism back to the fifth century (witness the dominatrix version of Guinevere, decked out at one point like Grace Jones), in addition to facilitating a clumsy political satire of twenty-first century America's religiosity, arrogance, and imperialism. Needless to say, when something tries to please everyone, everyone is seldom pleased; King Arthur is both stupid and boring, and the revelation that, stripped of tragedy, controversy, and resonance, Arthurian legend is as banal as and similar to Tears of the Sun (director Antoine Fuqua's previous film) displeases indeed.

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Posted in1960s, Algeria, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, Italy, Theatrical, War

La battaglia di Algeri
***/****
starring Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Yacef Saadi, Samia Kerbash
screenplay by Gillo Pontecorvo & Franco Solinas
directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Questions abound during a screening of The Battle of Algiers, first and foremost: what the hell is it? It’s not exactly agitprop, not quite a thriller, not really a historical epic–it’s a strange bird that combines each of these forms into a one-off genre all its own. The film has a reputation as high as the ceiling (as the multiple screenings in my film-school days can attest), and given its singularity, it’s not hard to see why: this is not some dowdy history lesson or humourless political screed, but a swift, shapely love letter to those who fought and died in the name of Algerian independence. As a love letter, it’s so typically wrapped up in its own feelings that it can’t relate the struggle to something outside of its own borders–but there’s no denying the writers’ commitment and depth of feeling, as well as the significant impact of The Battle of Algiers‘ bullet to the heart of empire.

Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) + Control Room (2004)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Palme d'Or Winner, Theatrical, War

FAHRENHEIT 9/11
*½/****
directed by Michael Moore

CONTROL ROOM
****/*****
directed by Jehane Noujaim

Fahrenheitcontrol
by Walter Chaw Shame on Michael Moore for the sloppy, sprawling Fahrenheit 9/11, and shame on President George W. Bush for being such a reprehensible dimwit target that the existence of such a film is possible. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a long, strident preach to the choir full of misleading juxtapositions and sarcastic asides that weaken what should be die-cast condemnations. A better film would have been two hours of just letting W. talk: drivelling his unique drivel that not only makes him sound stupid, for sure (and that's no crime), but is also dangerous and offensive to the 90% of the world (including 52% of the United States) who think he's a Gatsby with a great big sword. Bush describes going into the Middle East as a "crusade," he talks about leaving decisions to a higher power (something that Ron Reagan chose to address in the eulogy for his father), he rationalizes war by saying, "Hey, they tried to kill my daddy."

Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1973) – DVD

Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Italy, UK, War

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Graham Faulkner, Judi Bowker, Alec Guinness, Leigh Lawson
screenplay by Susio Cecchi D'Amico, Kenneth Ross, Lina Wertmüller, Franco Zeffirell
directed by Franco Zeffirelli

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover So: how do you get the young people back into church when they'd rather be out running wild and getting it on? If you're Mel Gibson, you break out the whips and chains and pour on the gore (an effective approach, to be sure), but if you're Franco Zeffirelli, you choose another path. You'll recall that Zeffirelli was the chap who brought kids back to Shakespeare by turning Romeo and Juliet into a make-out movie, scoring a few Oscar nominations in the bargain–but you can make certain sexy allowances for Shakespeare that you can't with the word of God. Against all odds, the man managed to make a religious tract in tune with the hormonal post-hippie youth of 1973 called Brother Sun, Sister Moon, which cleverly addresses the tender feelings of burgeoning bodies while glorifying a chaste life in the service of the Lord. Like Romeo and Juliet, though it's ludicrous in the extreme, its combination of low cunning and gawky earnestness makes it fascinating as a curio, if not as a fully functioning film on its own.

Saving Private Ryan (1998) [D-Day 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Spielberg, War

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore
screenplay by Robert Rodat
directed by Steven Spielberg

Savingprivateryancap

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One is tempted to speculate that, perhaps even more than his father's tour of duty, something that inspired the teenaged Steven Spielberg to shoot a succession of WWII docudramas on 8mm (since he had authentic props–Dad's medals–at his disposal), lingering guilt over his dismissal from the U.S. Army after a military shrink deemed him unfit for the battlefield accounts for Spielberg's frequent digressions into the war genre. As reductive, nay, Freudian as this may seem, for one thing, it has the potential to dilute the vitriol commonly reserved for the bookends of Saving Private Ryan by bringing them into autobiographical relief. Certainly ignoring the picture's prologue and epilogue altogether doesn't help: I once programmed my DVD player to do just that and the result felt surprisingly incomplete, as the context for a WWII narrative with a conspicuously anecdotal quality had all of a sudden disappeared.

Too Late the Hero (1970) – DVD

Posted in1970s, Action, Drama, DVD, War

***/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Michael Caine, Cliff Robertson, Ian Bannen, Harry Andrews
screenplay by Robert Aldrich and Lukas Heller
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Too Late the Hero is the consummate "solid flick"–sturdy, well-written, and just thoughtful enough to keep its machinations from working on autopilot. It's not a masterpiece by any stretch, but it is suffused with a dread and a tension that lift it out of the bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission ghetto and into something more sober and dignified. Whether or not it is the subterfuge Vietnam allegory of cult legend, it's a war film about people–not iron-jawed superheroes–whose selfless deeds have all the more impact when placed in context with the cowardice and stupidity of others. In the end, it does mouth certain pieties about that heroism that keep it from being too corrosive, but in this age of Black Hawk Down and Iraq prison scandals, it's refreshing for its refusal to knuckle under to the myth of the glorious warrior.

Eastern Condors (1987) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, War

Dung fong tuk ying
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ (DD)/A- (DTS)
starring Sammo Hung, Yuen Woo Ping, Mina Joyce Godenzi, Yuen Wah
screenplay by Barry Wong
directed by Sammo Hung

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover "It's The Dirty Dozen meets Rambo meets Apocalypse Now!" screams the back cover of the Sammo Hung vehicle Eastern Condors, and that's true–the film caters to all of your war/Vietnam film needs, managing to be completely parasitic of the abovementioned pictures while throwing in scenes from The Deer Hunter at no extra charge. Unfortunately, Eastern Condors doesn't also manage to be as good as any of its sources. An incongruous pairing of heavy combat violence and chirpy innocent characters, it's completely divided against itself: the wafer-thin plot renders the often impressive action scenes null while the scale of these set-pieces wipes the piddling stick-figure characters straight off the screen. And though the resulting tinny irritant is too penny-ante to be painful, the film's petty annoyances far outweigh its limited and meagre virtues.

Cold Mountain (2003)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Italy, Road Movie, Romance, Romania, Theatrical, UK, War

*½/****
starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Charles Frazier
directed by Anthony Minghella

Coldmountainby Walter Chaw Existing in an awards-season netherworld where the ugliest girl is Renée Zellweger (or Jena Malone), dad is Donald Sutherland, and Odysseus is Jude Law, Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain is a tarted-up march to the awards-night podium starring Nicole Kidman, possibly the most over-exposed actor of the last five years. Everything about the film is careful artifice, from its casting to its grandiloquent direction to its half-baked dialogue ("Small moments like a bag of diamonds," indeed), with only Law, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the magnificent Brendan Gleeson emerging unscathed from the golden wreckage. What Minghella seems best at is recasting edged, emotionally tumultuous novels into sun-kissed temples to the cinematographer's craft, the more dappled sunlight in the eye with which to bedazzle awards-season voters. The strength of Charles Frazier's National Book Award-winning source material lies in its socio-political details of America's Civil War period, but Minghella has focused his picture unerringly on the overrated novel's weaknesses instead: its dialogue, its clumsy Homeric riff (for better country-fried Odyssey, stick to O Brother Where Art Thou?), and its sweeping gothic romance, which finds its characters, at one point, reading the real deal in Wuthering Heights. The result is, like Minghella's previous literary adaptations (The Talented Mr. Ripley and The English Patient), lavish, lugubrious, and off-target.

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.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, War

***½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, James D’Arcy, Edward Woodall
screenplay by Peter Weir & John Collee, based on the novel by Patrick O’Brian
directed by Peter Weir

by Walter Chaw By turns brutal and majestic, Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (hereafter Master and Commander) reunites the antipodean director with Russell Boyd, the cinematographer with whom he shot The Last Wave, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously, and the two have produced a picture on par with those films: historically aware, but more notable for its epic beauty and scope. The effect of Master and Commander is rapture–it engulfs with its detail, finding time to flirt with the secrets of the Galapagos as parallel to the unfolding mystery of technology that finds the HMS Surprise outclassed by the French Acheron, stealthy and peerless enough to inspire speculations of supernatural origin. Issues of the old at war with the new (superstition vs. science, instinct vs. calculation) are nothing new for Weir, who is, after all, at his best when examining the dangers of individuals at odds with tradition, and the rewards for modern men able to assimilate the ancient into the new.

Beyond Borders (2003) + Radio (2003)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Germany, Romance, Sports, Theatrical, War

BEYOND BORDERS
*/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Clive Owen, Linus Roache, Teri Polo
screenplay by Caspian Tredwell-Owen
directed by Martin Campbell

RADIO
*/****
starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Ed Harris, Riley Smith, Sarah Drew
screenplay by Mike Rich
directed by Michael Tollin

Beyondradioby Walter Chaw Some pharaohs spent their reign building mighty pyramid tributes to themselves, so in that respect we should feel lucky that Angelina Jolie and Cuba Gooding Jr. have only used up the latter part of their plummeting careers constructing towering monuments to their splendid ideological isolation. The real wonder of it all is that there's room enough in the universe for both of their dangerously inflated senses of self-satisfaction, simultaneously reaching their respective pinnacles in a pair of atrocious films that at least have the virtue of being really funny, albeit for all the wrong reasons. For Jolie, her desire to save the entire third world, one orphan at a time, manifests itself in a picture that poses the big-lipped beauty carefully as a fashion plate and a sainted martyr; a debutante with an amazing wardrobe and a UN worker with a streak of activism; and a figure in its way as ridiculous as Gooding Jr.'s caricature of a severely mentally-disabled man (James Robert Kennedy) that reminds, of all things, of that acorn-crazed, pre-verbal prehistoric squirrel from Ice Age.

Enigma (2001) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Germany, Mystery, Netherlands, Romance, Thriller, UK, War

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Saffron Burrows
screenplay by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Robert Harris
directed by Michael Apted

by Walter Chaw The easy thing to say is that the Mick Jagger-produced Enigma is enigmatic–it's more difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons why. Stars Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, and Jeremy Northam are fine, Tom Stoppard's screenplay would on the surface surely seem fine, and Michael Apted's polished, if unremarkable, direction is the very definition of just fine. So the onus must fall on the material adapted, Robert Harris's follow-up to his much-lauded Fatherland, which promised a Ken Follett romantic espionage page-burner while delivering a staid and occasionally incomprehensible period bodice-ripper crushed under the dual gorgons of the sophomore jinx and the Tom Clancy "guess I'm not very good at dialogue" bogey. Enigma's problems begin and end with its inability to overcome the essential faults of its inherited plot, its most interesting aspect–WWII cryptologists at London's Bletchley Park–subsumed by a run-of-the-mill mystery and a never-in-doubt love story. It appears the curse of many historical fictions that attempt to familiarize the "long ago" with a "universal" romantic story arc dooms Enigma's period and historical detail to function as mere decorative flourish.

TIFF ’03: Bon Voyage

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, TIFF, War
*½/****starring Isabelle Adjani, Gérard Depardieu, Virginie Ledoyen, Yvan Attalwritten and directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau by Bill Chambers "And I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll boorrre the hell out of you." Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Bon Voyage labours harder than any film in recent memory to entertain, but the result is so draining I don't remember grooving with it once. In the opening scene, the latest vehicle for champagne starlet Viviane Denverts (Isabelle Adjani, who at 48 should be too old to play an ingénue, but looks at least half her age--it's quite miraculous, really) leaves rapt the attendees of a French…

Four Faces West (1948) + Blood on the Sun (1945) – DVDs

Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller, War, Western

FOUR FACES WEST
*/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Joel McCrea, Frances Dee, Charles Bickford, Joseph Calleia
screenplay by C. Graham Baker, Teddi Sherman; adaptation: William Brent and Milarde Brent, based on the novel by Eugene Manlove Rhodes
directed by Alfred E. Green

BLOOD ON THE SUN
**½/**** Image F Sound B+
starring James Cagney, Sylvia Sidney, Porter Hall, John Emery
screenplay by Lester Cole, with additional scenes by Nathaniel Curtis
directed by Frank Lloyd

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Auteurism giveth, auteurism taketh away. It’s generally assumed that if we gravitate to the director with the greatest skill and the most obvious “personal” style, we will be doing ourselves a big cultural favour and putting ourselves on the side of the angels. And indeed, we generally strive for the power and aesthetic purity of those “originals,” as they give us the most pleasure. But if we declare–regardless of whether that personality has anything to say or says anything halfway coherent–that the only criterion of value in a film is a director’s personality, we will be shutting ourselves off from the other thing that artists do, which is interpreting the world for us. And sometimes lesser filmmakers take on subjects that great artists ignore–creating, if not brilliant analyses, something to stand for or against.