No Man’s Land (2001)

February 22, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Drama, France, Italy, Satire, Slovenia, Theatrical, Thriller, War

**½/****
starring Branko Djuric, Rene Bitorajac, Filip Sovagovic, Georges Siatidis
written and directed by Danis Tanovic

by Walter Chaw Chiki (Branko Djuric) is one of two surviving members of a front-line relief party that was decimated after their guide got them lost in a fog. (From the first, the visual metaphors fly as thick as pea soup.) His companion Cera (Filip Sovagovic), thought dead by the enemy, has been placed on a pressure-sensitive mine; his antagonist, Nino (Rene Bitorajac), has been disarmed and wounded. The three of them (four if you consider the mine a character) decry their causes while overlooking their similarities. No Man’s Land is at its best when it tantalizes with the possibility for resolution–and at its worst when it explodes the claustrophobia of its first hour to include the UN, the press, and a newsreel montage lending background to a conflict the movie’s only ostensibly about in the first place.

Kandahar (2001)

January 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Iran, Theatrical, War
Safar e Ghandehar
**/****
starring Niloufar Pazira, Hassan Tantai, Sadou Teymouri
written and directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

by Walter Chaw Kandahar is a science-fiction film about a terrifying and unknowable alien culture and the human anthropologist who must disguise herself to gain entry into its Byzantine infrastructure (thus often reminding me of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow), and it is the recipient of perhaps the most serendipitous release in film history. Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar is either a stunningly incompetent film or an amazingly evocative one. Perhaps best described as both, the piece alternates between sledgehammer images and awful didactic exposition. An argument can be made, and a good one, that the plight of Afghani women under the medieval rule of The Taliban deserves to be treated as a medieval passion play, with all the implied attendant allegorical characters (the pilgrim, the fallen child, the doctor, the thief) and mannered execution.

Little Women (1933) – DVD

November 25, 2001Posted in1930s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Romance, War

**/**** Image B Sound C-
starring Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Paul Lukas, Edna May Oliver
screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason & Victor Heerman, based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott
directed by George Cukor

by Walter Chaw A scant six years after The Jazz Singer introduced talking to the motion picture, George Cukor’s Little Women came to the screen with the awkwardness of a foundling art form (silent-picture burlesque and stage melodrama) in tow. It’s extremely difficult to view the film unjaundiced by a modern opinion of performance, script, and direction: Although the adapted screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman won an Oscar that year, Little Women is impossibly dated and difficult to swallow. Part of the problem is the casting of actresses (each one at least a decade too old for her role), whose performances are such sweeping caricatures that it takes some effort to remind oneself that they were once acceptable simulacrums of reality.

Guadalcanal Diary (1943) + Wing and a Prayer (1944) – DVDs

November 13, 2001Posted in1940s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War

GUADALCANAL DIARY
*/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Preston Foster, Lloyd Nolan, William Bendix, Richard Conte
screenplay by Jerry Cady, based on the book by Richard Tregaskis
directed by Lewis Seiler

Wing and a Prayer (The Story of Carrier X)
*½/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Don Ameche, Dana Andrews, William Eythe, Charles Bickford
screenplay by Jerome Cady
directed by Henry Hathaway

by Walter Chaw Filmed just months after the actual invasion of Guadalcanal late in 1942 and based on Richard Tregaskis’s wildly popular (but excessively jingoistic and poorly-written) memoir of the same, Guadalcanal Diary is interesting for a glimpse at the Hollywood propaganda machine of WWII, if not for any other reason. With predictable inflammatory dialogue and plotting and broad burlesque performances by a gaggle of recognizable character actors in familiar stereotypes, Guadalcanal Diary is a rush job notable today for an early appearance by Anthony Quinn, in a role as the token ethnic fellow meant to inspire volunteerism in the barrio.

Halls of Montezuma (1950) – DVD

November 13, 2001Posted in1950s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War

***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Reginald Gardiner, Neville Brand
screenplay by Michael Blankfort
directed by Lewis Milestone

by Walter Chaw Released in 1950, Lewis Milestone's Halls of Montezuma is gritty and fascinating, free of a good deal of the jingoism that flavoured earlier WWII studio productions and as influential as they come within the genre. A haunting sequence set during a nighttime rocket attack and lit only by occasional strobes while an unseen enemy screams out at frayed Marines recalls a similar one from Coppola's Apocalypse Now, while Richard Widmark's reluctant Lt. Anderson (a quiet former schoolteacher beset by doubt and anger) and Neville Brand's Sgt. Zelenko are clearly the prototypes for Tom Hanks's Capt. John Miller and Tom Sizemore's Sgt. Horvath, respectively, in Saving Private Ryan. The film's most impressive to the war-movie vocabulary is its ambiguous philosophy: Halls of Montezuma is alive with the creeping suspicion that war may not be all it's cracked up to be–that it might in fact be hell. While there's certainly nothing shocking about that sentiment in our post-Vietnam, post-Korea psyches, that kind of philosophical dissention was rare in the pre-Korea 1950s, and in regards to the unflagging "popularity" of WWII, uncommon even today.

Apocalypse Now Redux (1979/2001)

August 16, 2001Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, Mystery, Palme d'Or Winner, Theatrical, War

Apocalypse Now
****/****
starring Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest
screenplay by John Milius and Francis Coppola, narration by Michael Herr
directed by Francis Coppola

by Walter Chaw Taking his cue from Orson Welles’s aborted screen translation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now sought to transplant Marlow’s journey down the Congo in pursuit of mad ivory trader Kurtz to Vietnam during the war. America’s involvement in Southeast Asia is, of course, a good fit with what Conrad calls “one of the dark places of the world,” and Apocalypse Now, easily one of the most literary big-budget blockbusters of the modern era, is utterly faithful to the intellectual and visceral impact of Conrad’s vision. Apocalypse Now is so overheated and pretentious, in fact, that the best way to explain its thematic core might be through an examination of the ways it uses three T.S. Eliot poems (The Wasteland, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Hollow Men) and nods obliquely towards a fourth (The Dry Salvages, which refers to the animalism of rivers as the “brown god”).

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) [Special Edition] – DVD

June 19, 2001Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Japan, War

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Martin Balsam, Joseph Cotten, E.G. Marshall, Tatsuya Mihashi
screenplay by Larry Forrester, Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni
directed by Richard Fleischer and Kinji Fukasuka & Toshio Masuda

by Walter Chaw A joint project between a Japanese film crew and veteran American director Richard Fleischer (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), Tora! Tora! Tora! had Akira Kurosawa assigned as the lead Japanese director, poised to make his American debut with a mammoth script weighing in at well over four-hundred pages–and that just for the Japanese side of the story. Accustomed to complete autonomy in his projects, Kurosawa bowed out after several weeks following a series of run-ins with Fox executives over not only the unwieldiness of his vision, but also disagreements concerning the shade of white used in the interiors of the Japanese carrier ward rooms! Unfortunately, Kurosawa’s initial involvement with the picture resulted in his regular cohort Toshiro Mifune turning down the role of Admiral Yamamoto (a role he would play in Jack Smight’s 1976 Midway and in 1968’s Yamamoto biopic Rengo kantai shirei chôkan: Yamamoto Isoroku), as the two titans of Japanese cinema had lingering bad feelings over their last collaboration, the underseen Akahige.

Paradise Road (1997) – DVD

May 13, 2001Posted in1990s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, War

**/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Glenn Close, Frances McDormand, Pauline Collins, Cate Blanchett
written and directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw In 1976, Polish composer Henryk Gorecki composed his stunning orchestral and choral piece Symphony No.3 Op.36 “Symfonia pie¶ni ¿a³osnych” (“Symphony for Sorrowful Souls”), a collection of smaller movements comprising, much like Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, varied texts both sacred and found. Among those sources used by Gorecki are a 15th-century lamentation of the Holy Cross Monastery; a folk song from the Opole region; and, most specifically, a young prisoner’s inscription on the wall of her cell in Zakopane’s Gestapo prison.

Mother Night (1996) + Waking the Dead (2000) – DVDs

November 16, 2000Posted in****/****, 1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

MOTHER NIGHT
***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A
starring Nick Nolte, Sheryl Lee, Alan Arkin, John Goodman
screenplay by Robert B. Weide, based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut
directed by Keith Gordon

WAKING THE DEAD
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Billy Crudup, Jennifer Connelly, Molly Parker, Janet McTeer
screenplay by Robert Dillon, based on the novel by Scott Spencer
directed by Keith Gordon

by Bill Chambers In Timequake, the most recent and arguably most flawed of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s novels (like many of his fans, I found it only intermittently readable), the author writes: “…I have never used semicolons. They don’t do anything, don’t support anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.” Perhaps Keith Gordon’s Mother Night is one of the few artistically successful cinematic adaptations of a Vonnegut work because Gordon avoids semicolons in his filmmaking–there is no straining to cohere, here.

Rules of Engagement (2000) – DVD

October 19, 2000Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller, UK, War

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, Guy Pearce, Bruce Greenwood
screenplay by Steven Gaghan
directed by William Friedkin

by Bill Chambers In an absurd bit of pop irony, director William Friedkin's biggest smash post-The Exorcist is…The Exorcist. His 1973 horror masterpiece just returned theatres as you've never seen it before–meaning it has been radically altered to fit the George Lucas model of re-release. Starting from scratch today, I doubt Friedkin could have made something half as trenchant as even this tailored-to-the-Nineties version of The Exorcist; for all its unnecessary underscore and pandering CGI, the film retains a purity of emotion he's rarely pursued–or hit upon–since. With Rules of Engagement, which bows on DVD this month, Friedkin seems jazzed by a good cast and implosive subject matter, but at the end of the day I'd be hard-pressed to call it anything but hollow.