Sundance ’09: Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire

February 1, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire***½/****starring Gabourey Sidibe, Paula Patton, Mo'Nique, Mariah Careyscreenplay by Damien Pauldirected by Lee Daniels by Alex Jackson The enormous hype surrounding Lee Daniels's Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire (hereafter Push) is both validating and a little confounding. Leaving Sundance with Grand Jury and Audience awards in the dramatic category, the film is an incredible mess. It takes a lot of risks, probably more than it needed to, and sometimes it falls flat on its face. The backlash has already begun to set in, natch--one commentator on the IMDb writes, "It's all…

Sundance ’09: Kimjongilia

January 28, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, South Korea, Sundance
The Flower of Kim Jong II**½/****directed by NC Heikin by Alex Jackson Kimjongilia takes its title from a hybrid red begonia created in honour of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's 46th birthday. It is said to symbolize wisdom, love, justice, and peace. Director NC Heikin juxtaposes propaganda footage romanticizing Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung's North Korea against interviews with former oppressed North Koreans who now reside in South Korea. As political filmmaking, it's pretty crude. There really aren't two sides to this issue: Kim Jong Il is a bad guy and there doesn't seem to…

Blue Streak (1999) – Blu-ray Disc

January 28, 2009Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Martin Lawrence, Luke Wilson, Dave Chappelle, William Forsythe
screenplay by Michael Berry & John Blumenthal and Steve Carpenter
directed by Les Mayfield

by Bryant Frazer Very early on in Blue Streak, as Miles Logan, the character portrayed by a fast-talking Martin Lawrence, co-opts Dr. Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech to describe his own civil rights movement upon getting released from the joint after serving time for his role in a botched jewel heist, it's clear the film is aiming for giddy irreverence. But slavish conformance to most conventions of the late-1990s PG-13 action farce keeps it from scaling the kind of heights that Lawrence's confident and wholly unpretentious comic presence occasionally suggests.

Sundance ’09: The Anarchist’s Wife

January 27, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Spain, Sundance, War
**/****starring María Valverde, Juan Diego Botto, Nina Hoss, Ivana Baqueroscreenplay by Marie Noëlledirected by Marie Noëlle & Peter Sehr by Alex Jackson Affirmation, if nothing else, that Paul Verhoeven's Blackbook has become the dominant model for World War II pictures, Marie Noëlle and Peter Sehr's Verhoeven-esque The Anarchist's Wife alienated me early on by folding in stock footage to depict both the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. On some level, I suspect this is a cheapoid strategy enabling the filmmakers to reserve more of their budget for costumes and sets. Whatever its intention, it dehumanizes the characters,…

Sundance ’09: Everything Strange and New

January 26, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
***½/****starring Jerry McDaniel, Beth Lisick, Luis Saguar, Rigo Chacon Jr.written and directed by Frazer Bradshaw by Alex Jackson The philosophical question at the centre of Frazer Bradshaw's incredible Everything Strange and New is as rudimentary and pragmatic as they come: how do you find happiness? And if you never find happiness but stumble upon contentment, is contentment going to be enough to sustain you for the rest of your days? The film begins with thirty-something carpenter Wayne (Jerry McDaniel) reflecting on the early years of his marriage to Reneé (Beth Lisick). She was in advertising and made more money than…

Zodiac (2007) [2-Disc Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards
screenplay by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith
directed by David Fincher 

by Walter Chaw The best film of its kind since All the President’s Men, David Fincher’s Zodiac is another very fine telephone procedural drawn from another landmark bit of investigative journalism–though more fascinatingly, it’s another time capsule of a very specific era, flash-frozen and suspended in Fincher’s trademark amber. Still, by the very nature of its subject matter, Zodiac deals in millennial anxieties: the un-‘catchable’ foe; the unknowable cipher; the futility of the best efforts of good and smart men; and the disintegration of the nuclear family smashed to pudding in a diving bell collapsed under the pressure of the sinking outside. The film is as remarkable as it is because it’s about something as simple and enchanted as the human animal–not just bedraggled San Francisco detective Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), but also Zodiac’s two female victims and, in a strange echo, two almost-invisible wives: Toschi’s (June Raphael) and that of newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). Easy to say that actresses Raphael and Chloë Sevigny are wasted by being given nary anything to work with outside a terrified moment and a single speech, respectively; better to say that they assume the only function they can in a picture revolving around male cooperation and survival in a world that has reduced itself to the barbarous niceties of macho religions and arcane rituals. No accident that the Zodiac Killer’s partiality to a medieval code is central to a key revelation.

Sundance ’09: Boy Interrupted

January 25, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Biopic, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
***/****directed by Dana Perry by Alex Jackson In 2005, Dana and Hart Perry's 15-year-old son Evan fulfilled a life-long obsession with suicide by jumping out his bedroom window. Documentary filmmakers by profession, the Perrys worked through their grief by making this feature-length memorial to him. Exactly the sort of thing that seems immune to criticism, the film is nonetheless admirably free of sentimentality. When Perry includes footage of herself pregnant with Evan, she does so as a professional documentarian economically conveying the depth of a mother's attachment to her offspring. Given that one of Evan's dying wishes was to be…

Sundance ’09: The Killing Room

January 24, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sundance, Thriller
**/****starring Chloë Sevigny, Peter Stormare, Clea DuVall, Timothy Huttonscreenplay by Gus Krieger, Ann Peacockdirected by Jonathan Liebesman by Alex Jackson Jonathan Liebesman's The Killing Room would still have been pretty hokey five years ago, but in 2009, with the election and inauguration of Barack Obama, it's looking nothing short of obsolete. Genre filmmakers are going to have to face the fact that the Bush years are over. One of our new president's very first acts while in office was to shut down Guantanamo Bay; if torture porn wants to survive into the next decade, it's going to have to reinvent…

Dead & Buried (1981) [Limited Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc + I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 22, 2009Posted in1980s, 1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

DEAD & BURIED
***/****
DVD – Image B- Sound C+ (Remixes)/B (Mono) Extras A
BD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring James Farentino, Melody Anderson, Jack Albertson, Lisa Blount
screenplay by Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon
directed by Gary A. Sherman

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
**/****
DVD|BD – Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze, Jr.
screenplay by Kevin Williamson, based on the novel by Lois Duncan
directed by Jim Gillespie

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gary A. Sherman's Dead & Buried and Jim Gillespie's I Know What You Did Last Summer, released theatrically fourteen years apart, together demonstrate that the more the horror genre stays the same, the more it changes. Each of these B-movies resorts to similar cheap tricks (first and foremost a coastal setting (the atmospheric equivalent of a non-perishable in horror)) and traffics in pessimism, yet one is genuinely hopeless and the other is trendily nihilistic–karo syrup as late-Nineties fashion accessory. A great gulf stands between the sensibilities of the two pictures that's unearthed by drawing other such subtle distinctions: one is cruel, the other callous; one is about death, the other about killing; one is sexy, the other exploitive; and so on and so forth. Virtually indescribable to modern audiences despite its familiar elements, Dead & Buried is a Darwinian fossil of the horror cinema, whose DNA has been perverted by the progressive commercialization of the culture and weakening of the intellectual position. Simplified: Current scare flicks still sometimes enjoy provocative subtext (like the recent Freddy Vs. Jason); more often, they die on the vine from WB-itis.

Sundance ’09: Stay the Same Never Change

January 20, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Sundance, Teen
***½/****starring Tate Buck, Dirk Cowan, Matthew Faber, Mary Nicholswritten and directed by Laurel Nakadate by Alex Jackson In the first five to ten minutes of Laurel Nakadate's Stay the Same Never Change, a beautiful blonde teenage girl eats a bowl of Trix in a surreally white kitchen. Nakadate gives us a series of close-ups of lips moist with milk and cutaways to the Trix box art. We then see the girl lounging around in her pyjamas, sometimes watching TV but mostly doing pretty much nothing at all. While she doesn't do anything overtly sexual, there is something almost pornographic about…

Miracle at St. Anna (2008) – DVD

January 20, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, DVD, Italy, War

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonzo, Omar Benson Miller
screenplay by James McBride, based on his novel
directed by Spike Lee

by Ian Pugh Beginning with a moment of vocalized contempt for the John Wayne-ification of World War II in popular culture, Miracle at St. Anna thoroughly establishes its primary aim to give credit where credit is due to the unsung black heroes of the era. Director Spike Lee brings a broader sense of humanism to the table as well, though, orchestrating innumerable moments of fear and sympathy across several languages to impress upon viewers that there were, indeed, honest-to-gosh people on each side of a conflict not typically remembered for its moral ambiguity. If it's been done before, considering that Valkyrie subtly co-opted righteous, intelligent rebellion as an exclusively Anglo-American invention just a few short months after St. Anna's release, it's something of a necessary evil. Yet the picture is finally done a near-fatal disservice by Lee's often-painful (and, some might say, trademark) didacticism, with plenty of telegraphed prophecies on hand to reiterate that faith is more important than religion and that the common link of humanity overrides any national divisions. Messages well worth repeating, no doubt, but the film feels the need to drive them home with talking heads spouting heavy-handed philosophical ruminations that subtly give the mind license to wander. Sure, whether or not God exists, we should all act like He does–what else ya got?

Swing Vote (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

January 15, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Kevin Costner, Paula Patton, Kelsey Grammer, Madeline Carroll
screenplay by Jason Richman & Joshua Michael Stern
directed by Joshua Michael Stern

by Walter Chaw Another simple-minded liberal screed that does more harm to the liberal cause than the whole of Fox News could possibly dream, this salvo from the left positions itself as a wagging finger to the non-voters of the United States–so long as those non-voters are earnest (literally: the hero of the piece is named Ernest) and have precocious, politically-savvy preteen daughters. Yes, it's the Homer and Lisa Simpson dyad reproduced with Kevin Costner and Abigail Breslin 2.0 Madeline Carroll. This year's Man of the Year, Swing Vote is the kind of lefty pinko wet blanket that can't take a stand without providing narration for it, until finally it reveals itself as a public-service announcement for the sanctity of casting a vote that's properly counted. Hooray, Constitution! This doesn't preclude a few potshots at the press, natch–take that, stupid First Amendment! Every scene of the film is an exclamation point delivered from atop a worst-of-Capra soapbox; those bemoaning that they don't make 'em like they used to, take a big, heaving bite of Swing Vote, compared to which the Pollyannaism of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington reads like P.J. O'Rourke snark. Maybe it's better to see the picture as a scary-prescient prediction of what would happen if someone like Ernest were not only tasked with choosing the next President of the United States, but moreover tabbed as the vice-presidential nominee of a major candidate. Think of Swing Vote as the mother-loving Sarah Palin story and suddenly the movie's every bit the frightening satirical comedy it wasn't upon initial release.

Day of the Dead (2008) + Lost Boys: The Tribe (2008) [Uncut Version] – DVDs

January 14, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS, Zombie

DAY OF THE DEAD
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Mena Suvari, Nick Cannon, Michael Welch, Ving Rhames
screenplay by Jeffrey Reddick
directed by Steve Miner

LOST BOYS: THE TRIBE
*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Tad Hilgenbrinck, Angus Sutherland, Autumn Reeser, Corey Feldman
screenplay by Hans Rodionoff
directed by P.J. Pesce

by Walter Chaw As I'm an avowed fan of George Romero's severely underestimated Day of the Dead, imagine my unsurprised chagrin when über-hack Steve Miner's remake of Romero's third zombie outing falls far nearer in quality to Tom Savini's dishonourable remake of Night of the Living Dead than to Zach Snyder's better-than-the-original Dawn of the Dead. A mess from conception to execution, the picture's first misstep is to turn the splatter effects over to cheap-o CGI phantoms and allow the ridiculous cardboard stencils played by Mena Suvari and–horrors–Nick Cannon to run roughshod. The soul of Romero's flicks–of all good zombie flicks–lies in their social awareness and in the ultimate feeling that whatever chills and thrills enjoyed along the way, it was all a metaphor for something more interesting than an end-of-days high concept.

Touch of Evil (1958) [50th Anniversary Edition] – DVD

January 12, 2009Posted in****/****, 1950s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Directors: Orson Welles, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Thriller

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles, Joseph Calleia
screenplay by Orson Welles, based on the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson
directed by Orson Welles

mustown-9381168 by Alex Jackson Particularly in light of its 50th Anniversary DVD reissue, which gathers together all three extant versions of the film, I find myself grouping writer-director Orson Welles's Touch of Evil with multiple-incarnated masterworks like Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, and, to a lesser extent, Dawn of the Dead and Brazil. Moreover, I don't quite see it as a 1950s noir thriller from Universal, or even really as an Orson Welles picture–rather, I look at Touch of Evil as a canonical part of every young (male?) cinephile's indoctrination. It occurs to me that you should be able to buy one-sheets for it at your local record store. So I was mildly surprised to hear Jonathan Rosenbaum admit in his audio commentary that he disliked the picture when he saw it as a teenager. He explains that he tied it too closely into the film noir genre and found it an unpleasant specimen. David Edelstein, in his theatrical review of the 1998 restoration, writes that he initially regarded it as one of the worst movies ever made. The picture neatly conformed to his preconceptions of what bad movies are like.

Che (2008) + Milk (2008)

January 9, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, France, Mexico, Spain, Theatrical, War

CHE
***½/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Demián Bichir, Santiago Cabrera, Vladimir Cruz
screenplay by Peter Buchman, based on the memoir Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War by Ernesto "Che" Guevara
directed by Steven Soderbergh

MILK
*½/****
starring Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna
screenplay by Dustin Lance Black
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw Steven Soderbergh's Che is the curative to the Hollywood biopic formula that insists on reducing interesting/important historical figures to their workshop elements. It sees Ernesto "Che" Guevara as a charismatic figure but no T-shirt deity, as a guerrilla fighter with blood on his hands but also a revolutionary almost holy in his single-minded conviction that things weren't fair in the world and that one man–or one small group of heavily-armed men–could affect change that mattered. It's not a political film in the sense that it takes sides, rendering it a political film by the fact of it having no agenda except to make it difficult to condemn or celebrate first the events leading up to the success of the Cuban Revolution, then the failure of the Bolivian Revolution (which ended in Che's death). Soderbergh goes from close and medium shots in the first half–known as Che Part One in its marathon "roadshow" incarnation and as The Argentine in parts of the country where it and Che Part Two (a.k.a. The Guerrilla) are being treated as unique films–to an increasing distance for the second, a subtle, evocative move away from Che's idealism.

Hannah Montana: The Complete First Season (2006-2007) + Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007) [Special Edition] – DVD

January 7, 2009Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Music, Musical, Television

HANNAH MONTANA: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image C Sound C+ Extras D+
"Lilly, Do You Want to Know a Secret?," "Miley Get Your Gum," "She's a Super Sneak," "I Can't Make You Love Hannah If You Don't," "It's My Party and I'll Lie If I Want To," "Grandma Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Play Favorites," "It's a Mannequin's World," "Mascot Love," "Ooh, Ooh Itchy Woman," "O Say Can You… Remember These Words?," "Oops! I Meddled Again," "You're So Vain, You Probably Think This Zit is About You," "New Kid in School," "More Than a Zombie to Me," "Good Golly, Miss Dolly," "Torn Between Two Hannahs," "People Who Meet People," "Money for Nothing, Guilt for Free," "Debt it Be," "My Boyfriend's Jackson And There's Gonna Be Some Trouble," "We Are Family–Now Get Me a Water!," "Schooly Bully," "The Idol Side of Me," "Smells Like Teen Sellout," "Bad Moose Rising"

ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS
½*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras D+
starring Jason Lee, David Cross, Cameron Richardson, Jane Lynch
screenplay by Jon Vitti and Will McRobb & Chris Viscardi
directed by Tim Hill

by Ian Pugh Contemplating the factors that pushed Hannah Montana into the limelight is automatically more interesting than devoting the least amount of attention to the eponymous Disney sitcom that introduced her to her gullible constituency. The concept behind the show, a kind of rock star wish-fulfillment that teaches its tweener audience that if you tell enough people you're famous, you'll get there eventually, has proved the foundation on which to make a mint. But sit down to watch "Hannah Montana" itself and you won't see much more than the same episodic drivel from the Disney Channel–standardized junior-high antics cushioned by lame slapstick. Any significance you cull from a deeper reading invariably leads back to the construction of the carefully-groomed personality that serves as its centrepiece. Flanked by her best friends (Mitchel Musso and Emily Osment) and supported by her manager/father (Billy Ray Cyrus) and brother Jackson (Jason Earles), Miley Stewart (Miley Cyrus) divides her time between a typical teenage life and a tour through fame as bubblegum diva Hannah Montana. What she actually does with that time hardly matters.

Revolver (2005) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 6, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Thriller, UK

*/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
BD – Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Vincent Pastore, Andre Benjamin
written and directed by Guy Ritchie

Revolvercapby Walter Chaw Give Guy Ritchie a little credit for being ambitious and take a little away from him for being so relentlessly pussy-whipped that Revolver, his return to the neo-Mod gangster genre that made his name, is one part rumination on the mystical mumbo-jumbo of his then-wife's Kabbalah, one part exploration of the self-actualized ego, and every part pretentious, pseudo-intellectual garbage. It's so fascinated with itself that the yak-track on the film's DVD and Blu-ray releases finds Ritchie periodically consulting his assistant as an augur of whether or not Ritchie has gotten too complicated for the audience of nitwits not put off enough by the movie to avoid watching it again with the commentary activated. He believes he's created something of such vast, far-reaching, ungraspable, existential implication that this cheap, showy action pic is the ne plus ultra of modern experience, with Ritchie our schlock Zoroaster, guiding us through avatar Jake Green (Jason Statham) as he emerges from years of solitary confinement, during which he learned the parameters of the perfect con by intercepting the chess moves of the two prisoners on either side of him. Jake has claustrophobia, something Ritchie helpfully offers is a "metaphorical fear," by which I think he means that it's a metaphor for all fear; his clumsiness with the articulation of this single concept illustrates how it is that the rest of it is such a godawful mess. Consider Revolver's interesting only to the extent that Ritchie's self-absorption is ironic when applied to a picture about the internal struggle between Freud's personality strata–never mind that Jake's Super-Ego is André Benjamin and his Id appears to be motherfucking Big Pussy. Jesus, this is a stupid movie.

Pineapple Express (2008) [Unrated Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 5, 2009Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Seth Rogen, James Franco, Gary Cole, Danny McBride
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw I'm willing to concede that I don't completely get it, but I'm still game to think about it because Pineapple Express has a peculiar pedigree. It boasts David Gordon Green as its director and his regular DP Tim Orr is in charge of shooting the gross-out gags and stone-faced stoner riffs. The union makes the most sense if we read the film as a throwback/homage to the Seventies cycle of grindhouse exploitation flicks (doobies and dismemberment), thus explaining the old-school wipes and funkadelic soundtrack, the mote-flecked cinematography, the cruel violence, and, if it's even possible, the air of reality throughout. Otherwise, the picture feels like a cynical patchwork stitching together this new comedy genre with a sensibility specifically designed to mock it. When über-stoner Saul (James Franco, in his Spicoli/The Dude breakout) runs through the dark woods, the flash I get isn't to Cheech & Chong but to the convulsive opening of Green's Undertow. And during an ending in an abandoned government research facility-turned-subterranean pot greenhouse, I couldn't shake Green's odd relationship with Asian stereotyping (remember the Feng Shui character from All the Real Girls?) in a troupe of black-clad Asian assassins clearly established as objects of derision. In truth, however, I don't know if the derision is levied at Asians or at the criticism levied against Green's perceived derision of the same.

Defiance (2008)

January 2, 2009Posted inAction, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Thriller, War

½*/****
starring Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell, Alexa Davalos
screenplay by Edward Zwick & Clay Frohman
directed by Edward Zwick

by Walter Chaw It's finally happened: Red Dawn with Russian Jews. It's not so much unthinkable as inevitable after the fact. You could go your whole life without conjuring something so perverse; it's the kind of thing "South Park" might have done at a quarter the budget, with thrice the ingenuity, and without the star power of über-studs Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber making a pretty convincing play for inclusion in the bad accent hall of fame. When Craig, as heroic bandit Tuvia Bielski, delivers his St. Crispian's Day speech in half-pidgin/half-Queen's English ("Uff vee shut die? Tlyin to liff? At least we die like human beings!") as director Ed Zwick ladles on the Fiddler on the Roof score and we get reaction shots of a Dickensian urchin all dirt and eyes, what choice do we have but to harden our hearts and wonder how it is that every "true story" run through this prestige mill ends up exactly the same grain. The moment when Tuvia and his woodsman brother Zus (Schreiber) take on the responsibility of two fine young lasses at the behest of a set-upon farm family, however, is the moment that it clicks that this piece of macho bullroar is a direct blood descendant of John Milius's stupidest movie of 1984. There but for the grace of Swayze and Sheen goes Defiance–a film so bad that it's not only worse than Red Dawn, but worse because instead of positing an imaginary occupation of heartland America, it sets itself smack dab in the middle of the Nazi occupation of Belorussia circa 1941–suggesting in the process that while it's not true there was no Jewish resistance in WWII, it might be true that the reason so many were killed is because they weren't as macho as Tuvia and Zus. Kind of a sticky wicket, that.

Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2008

January 1, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

Top102008graphicsmall

I'm going to call 2008 a "down" year, but not because there were fewer masterpieces produced–only because the theme that resonated for me the most was this sense of a cycle completing. If it's true that every generation flatters itself as the last one, it's equally true that every decade of film nears its completion with its full measure of anticipation/regret (liebestraum as zeitgeist, no?) in its eighth, sometimes ninth, year. Even films that on the surface seem filled with the fruit of human ambition and desire–like James Marsh's ebullient Man on Wire, in which the World Trade Center appears as the phantom lover of highwire artist Philippe Petit–take place, after all, at the ground zero of this epoch. What's dying throughout 2006 and 2007, all this sussing through father issues and the cult of masculinity and love and the courage of children, is dead now. It's not nihilism anymore, it's pragmatism. The dream is over, the insect is awake.