Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)

October 30, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson, Jason Mewes
written and directed by Kevin Smith

by Walter Chaw There’s something wrong with Kevin Smith. Which is not to say that there isn’t something wrong with most artists, just that in the case of Smith, it’s become steadily apparent that whatever’s wrong with him is manifesting itself in genuinely sad ways. Zack and Miri Make a Porno (hereafter Zack and Miri) is dreadful in the unique style of that guy who traps you in a conversation and proceeds to drop lame Star Wars references and ancient race riffs laced with pathetic interludes about his syrupy, jejune concept of romantic love. Afraid to seem “uncool,” this guy will leaven his horny-dork shtick with dusty “blue” material–but every step along the way, all Smith does is demonstrate that he’s not funny anymore (if he ever was), and that if there was a time that he slipped in under the zeitgeist, that time is over.

The Polar Express (2004) [Two-Disc Widescreen Edition] – DVD|The Polar Express Presented in 3-D – Blu-ray Disc

October 29, 2008Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical

**/****
DVD – Image A Sound A- Extras C
BD – Image A Sound A Extras C
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis & William Broyles Jr., based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg
directed by Robert Zemeckis

Polarexpresscap

by Walter Chaw Robert Zemeckis's The Polar Express seems to be the culmination of a lot of his weird obsessions: his celebration of middle-class Aryan heroes; his tendency towards the tense and anxious; his love of casting an actor in multiple roles; Tom Hanks; Eddie Deezen; and that subtle quality of nightmare that infects even the most innocuous of his movies. (Zemeckis produces horror films in his spare time under the "Dark Castle" imprint; I wonder if he'll ever, What Lies Beneath notwithstanding, just cut the bushwah and make a straight shocker.) When Christopher Lloyd's Nazi-esque Judge Doom from Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit "dips" an adorable animated shoe into a corrosive sludge, Zemeckis foreshadows the engine that drives all of The Polar Express. It's infernal entertainment and comparisons to Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will are unavoidable (particularly in a disturbing rally scene), but it's hard to know how much of that intense martial creepiness is intended as satire, and how much of it is just what lies beneath.

W. (2008) + Trouble the Water (2008)

October 28, 2008Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Theatrical

W.
**½/****
starring Josh Brolin, James Cromwell, Elizabeth Banks, Ellen Burstyn
screenplay by Stanley Weiser
directed by Oliver Stone

TROUBLE THE WATER
**½/****
directed by Carl Deal & Tia Lessin

by Walter Chaw John Powers once called Nixon-era Oliver Stone our most Nixonian director: smart, driven, divisive, unlikeable. So the neatest trick of Stone's latest biopic, W., is to make George W. Bush–arguably the most reviled, detached, ideologically arrogant president since James Buchanan–a figure of genuine pathos. Never mind that this incurious, adolescent, fundamentalist fanatic is our proverbial Nero, fiddling while every foundational tenet of Lincoln's party is fed to anti-intellectualism and evangelical Christianity. George Orwell said something once about how the end of democracy is heralded by millionaires leading dishwashers; what's unexpected for me is the extent to which the Republican party in the new millennium has not only convinced the blue-collar to vote against its own self-interests by waging class warfare against liberals, but also begun to turn against the intellectuals in its own party. "Georgetown cocktail party" conservatives are now painted with the same broad brushstroke as "Latte-sipping" lefties–and this idea of abandoning the middle class takes on the onus of not just money and privilege, but education and eloquence as well. The logical end-point of wanting a President as ill-read, venal, and feckless as your alcoholic born-again Uncle Festus is a figure like Governor Sarah Palin, whose chief qualification appears to be her ability to blend into your local chapter of Oprah's Fan Club without a ripple. Hate, division, ugly innuendo, and racism: sowing fear and reaping the political benefits until the house falls down.

The Shining (1980) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

October 28, 2008Posted in****/****, 1980s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Jack Nicholson, Stephen King

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Shining has perhaps dated the most of Stanley Kubrick’s films. It’s not as stylized as Dr. Strangelove or Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick pictures set in the “present” that nonetheless feel as foreign as those set in the future and distant past. Particularly with the earthy orange-pinks and piss-yellows dominating the Overlook Hotel’s lobby in the opening sequence, not to mention the child star’s shaggy head of hair, the film has deep roots in the late-Seventies to early-Eighties. However, I’m beginning to think that the aging process itself has provided the necessarily alienating “timeless” quality.

Stuck (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

October 26, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Crime, Drama, Germany, Horror, Thriller, UK

***/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Mena Suvari, Stephen Rea, Russell Hornsby, Rukiya Bernard
screenplay by John Strysik
directed by Stuart Gordon

by Walter Chaw Stuart Gordon, the man who gave us the Lovecraftian splatter film, has, lately, gone in for non-supernatural frights: first with the snake-infested well of man's self-interest in the irresistibly pulpy King of the Ants; then with his superb Mamet adaptation Edmund; and now with his inspired-by-a-true-story drive-in high-concept flick Stuck. The transition from Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos to the mendacity of mere humanity is less a leap in that Gordon to me has always been best when dealing with how the mundane is often just the thin candy shell over the boiling mess of our fetid Id–whether that Id manifests as the cellar of elder gods or, just as unspeakable, the lizard brain for which Lovecraft's bogeys are the metaphor, anyway. Stuck takes as its inspiration the story of 25-year-old nurse's aid Chante Mallard, who, one night flying high on alcohol and X, embedded one Gregory Biggs in her windshield and left him to die there over the course of two days. Gordon's film wonders what would've happened should Biggs have survived and, over the course of those same two days, gathered enough wits and strength to exact some measure of justice on his torturer. A delicious conceit, free of irony and post-modern self-awareness, it's funny without being snarky about it, delighting in the solipsistic desire of his Mallard, nursing home aide Brandi (Mena Suvari, dirtying up better here than in Spun), to not jeopardize a pending job promotion by reporting that guy stuck in her windshield. The guy, Tom (Stephen Rea), has fallen on hard times himself; if anything, Stuck is a diary of the modern malady of what happens when people can't make a living doing honest work and so find themselves stripped of dignity (sometimes literally) and exiled from civilization.

State of Mind: FFC Interviews “Synecdoche, New York” Writer-Director Charlie Kaufman

October 25, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Interviews

Ckaufmaninterviewtitle

Riding a mental rollercoaster with one of our heroes.

October 26, 2008 | I meet Charlie Kaufman in a dark little passage beneath Denver’s Hotel Monaco, both of us surveying a spread of cold cuts and a nice salad of greens and gorgonzola on the final day of a gruelling month-long junket in support of Kaufman’s new film and hyphenate debut, Synecdoche, New York. His first interview of the day following a late-night, (packed) post-screening Q&A at the University of Colorado, I confided in Kaufman that I’d been vying for a chance to speak with him for over four years now after being thwarted at a junket for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind–an experience I documented in an essay that developed a fun second life, probably got one of my local publicists fired, and doomed me to never getting offered another junket again. Mr. Kaufman asked me what it was like. I said it was like being a bug buoyed on the back of an ant colony and finally expelled not for smelling bad, but for smelling bad in the wrong way. We’d come back to this a few minutes later.

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

October 24, 2008Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener
written and directed by Charlie Kaufman

Synecdochenewyorkby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I don’t feel up to writing about Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (hereafter Synecdoche), because, as with something like Mulholland Drive, it’s in the writing about it that one is bound to discover one has said altogether too much about oneself and altogether not enough about the film. The picture is a lot like Nietzsche’s abyss, you know: the more it’s examined, the more it’s a dissection of the critic’s own fears and prejudices. There’s a scene early on where theatre director Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman–cast because he’s fabulous, and maybe because “Hoffman” incidentally rhymes with “Kaufman”) sits by himself on the floor next to a telephone and we notice more than he does that there are a couple of strange boils growing on his leg. It’s just something Caden lives with, and this visual comes sandwiched in the middle of an extended, uncomfortable sequence that begins with a gash to the forehead (and a glimpse into Caden’s vanity when he’s told it will scar), progresses through gum surgery and the revelation that Caden’s contracted a virus that’s made it difficult for him to salivate, and ends with his wife (Catherine Keener) and five-year-old daughter abandoning him, moving to Germany with monstrous nanny Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) + Persepolis (2007)|Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

October 23, 2008Posted in****/****, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Musical, Thriller, War

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen
screenplay by John Logan, based on the musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler
directed by Tim Burton

PERSEPOLIS
***½/****
screenplay by Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, based on the novel by Satrapi
directed by Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi

Mustown

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET

by Walter Chaw Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is easily Tim Burton's best film. It's uncompromised, deceptively uncomplicated, perverse in the most delightful way, and, maybe most importantly, it represents at last the full potency of Burton's German Expressionist vision. No surprise that it's closest allayed to Burton's previous career-pinnacle, his self-contained fairytale Edward Scissorhands–sporting, like that film, a black-clad protagonist festooned with blades who achieves his adolescence (and purpose) in a slanted attic chamber. This is another gothic romance, no explanation for snow but instead demonstration of the frugal repast of revenge's dish served cold. It's best described as a diary of the unrequited, a journal of terminal, irresolvable frustration. A violent, giallo-lurid succession of leering throat-slashings with a soupçon of cannibalism (I'm kind of shocked, truth be told, that the picture was completed in this form), this adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's genius 1979 musical is a timely film, boasting the sort of contemporary topicality of which only eternal works like Sondheim's are capable. Whatever the circumstances of its creation, watching it in this way speaks explicitly to the dismal tide of 2007, the desire to recover the illusory past (its hero speaks of his younger self as "naïve")–the recognition at the last that things are only ever as terrible as they've ever been; and that the only refuge from despair is embracing the tiny moments of human connection that make life liveable.

John Adams (2008) + Jimmy Carter Man from Plains (2007) – DVDs

October 21, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Biopic, Directors: Jonathan Demme, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Television

JOHN ADAMS
Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
“Join or Die,” “Independence,” “Don’t Tread on Me,” “Reunion,” “Unite or Die,” “Unnecessary War,” “Peacefield”

JIMMY CARTER MAN FROM PLAINS
***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Ian Pugh It’s hardly anything new to explore the professional brilliance and personal failings of those upon whom history has bestowed the title of Greatness, but Tom Hooper’s epic miniseries John Adams bucks genre expectations by refusing to keep us at arm’s length with a standardized character archetypally flawed, deigning to present us instead with an actual human being. Certainly, it forges an entry point in dismissing the sense of harmonious unity we usually attribute to those early American leaders: marvel as the opinion Adams (Paul Giamatti, a delightfully bitter pill) holds of stoic, wooden George Washington (David Morse) sours from respect to resentment; smirk as he barely hides his contempt for the hedonistic Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson) and his platitudinous adages; shock as he is too late in realizing the treachery orchestrated by that prick Alexander Hamilton (Rufus Sewell). But it’s not enough to tear down romantic icons by having General Washington–who looks as if he’s leapt out of a Stuart painting–crack one of his false teeth at breakfast. “Bed, both’a ya!” Adams shouts at his children shortly after witnessing the bloody aftermath of the Boston Massacre, and suddenly the shroud of tall tales collapses in a single powerful blast from a man who may represent the antithesis of any preconceived notions we have about the era of powdered wigs and stockings.

Zombie Strippers! (2008) [Unrated Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

October 20, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror

*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Robert Englund, Joey Medina, Shamron Moore, Jenna Jameson
written and directed by Jay Lee

by Bryant Frazer Imagine Richard Kelly's woefully ambitious Southland Tales without that film's confused grandeur and you'll get an idea of how dispiritingly terrible Zombie Strippers! really is. Not content to merely deliver generous servings of tits and ass and blood and guts, writer/director/editor/cinematographer Jay Lee tries to class up the joint with stumblebum nods towards political satire that make latter-day "Saturday Night Live" look like Robert Benchley. (Asking this film to spell "Cheney" correctly is, apparently, too tall an order.) The dialogue wouldn't pass muster on a sitcom and the direction would qualify as adequate only by community-theatre standards. Setting this stinking bag of turds aflame is an aesthetic that could charitably be described as indifferent: It has a cheap look, and some solid make-up FX work is compromised by quick-and-dirty CG gore effects that couldn't have been any more expensive than the pneumatic handiwork augmenting the quite visible chests of the film's serially zombefied softcore-sex workers. It's not as cheerfully bad as you'd expect a movie called Zombie Strippers! to be, just distressingly lousy.

Fox Horror Classics, Vol. 2 – DVD

October 17, 2008Posted in1930s, 1940s, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

CHANDU THE MAGICIAN (1932)
***½/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A-
starring Edmund Lowe, Bela Lugosi, Irene Ware, Henry B. Walthall
directed by Marcel Varnel and William Cameron Menzies

DRAGONWYCK (1946)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Gene Tierney, Walter Huston, Vincent Price, Glenn Langan
screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on the novel by Anya Seton
directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

DR. RENAULT’S SECRET (1942)
*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring J. Carrol Naish, John Shepperd, Lynne Roberts, George Zucco
story by William Bruckner and Robert F. Metzler
directed by Harry Lachman

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I confess to feeling a little insecure while reading the entry for Chandu the Magician in Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide, wherein the learned film historian derides Chandu as “disappointing” and “not as good as most serials in this genre, and even sillier.” The suggestion is that he’s wholly sympathetic to the material and was actually hoping to see a good movie before being “disappointed.” Mr. Maltin may very well be in a better position than me to determine the relative merits of Chandu the Magician. Speaking as a layman, I found it to be sublime pulp fiction. Prototypical of George Lucas’s Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises, the film is remarkably shameless in its goofiness, never veering into self-deprecation or camp. It’s one of those rare pop entertainments that genuinely make you feel like a kid again.

The Big Bang Theory: The Complete First Season (2007-2008) – DVD

October 15, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Television

Image B Sound B Extras D
"Pilot," "The Big Bran Hypothesis," "The Fuzzyboots Corollary," "The Luminous Fish Effect," "The Hamburger Postulate," "The Middle Earth Paradigm," "The Dumpling Paradox," "The Grasshopper Experiment," "The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization," "The Loobenfeld Decay," "The Pancake Batter Anomaly," "The Jerusalem Duality," "The Bat Jar Conjecture," "The Nerdvana Annihilation," "The Pork Chop Indeterminacy," "The Peanut Reaction," "The Tangerine Factor"

by Ian Pugh I absolutely love the fact that "The Big Bang Theory"'s episode titles refer to throwaway gags buried in the show's worn-out sitcom scenarios. In "The Jerusalem Duality" (1.12), theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) is flummoxed by the presence of a North Korean wunderkind who threatens to steal his thunder; eager to upstage him, Sheldon proposes to end to the conflict in the Middle East by building an exact replica of Jerusalem in the Mexican desert. Within this seemingly arbitrary naming convention, find everything "The Big Bang Theory" is attempting to accomplish–a jovial elbow to the ribs directed at the smart guys who can't see the forest through the trees in their approach to life.

Constantine (2005) – Blu-ray Disc

October 13, 2008Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Germany, Horror, Mystery

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Shia LaBeouf, Tilda Swinton
screenplay by Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello, based on the DC comic
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw The problem with casting Keanu Reeves in the role of DC Comics anti-hero John Constantine, a chain-smoking, blue-collar bloke who happens to have a foot in a supernatural parallel world occupied by angels and demons, is that because of the actor's ethereal–some would say "stoned"–demeanour, he never for a moment convinces that his is the sympathetic point of view. Imagine Robert Redford as Snake Plisskin, or Pierce Brosnan playing Ash in the Evil Dead films: Constantine, if they were insisting on an American actor, should have been Denis Leary. By inserting Reeves as your avatar, suddenly the whole shooting match is about CGI effects and impossible things doing impossible things (witness the last two Matrix films). But even without Reeves as the central distraction, Constantine avoids much of what made the "Hellblazer" mythology so compelling (that Lucifer is beautiful, that Constantine is genuinely an asshole instead of a lovable loser), with its worst crime coming in making the film something of an anti-smoking tract. Displaying the Surgeon General's warning centre stage in one fiery moment and having the hero quit in the movie's worst, most toadying, most cowardly joke, Constantine amounts to a straw man.

Bright Lights, Big City (1988) [Special Edition] – DVD

October 8, 2008Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD

*/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras A
starring Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland, Phoebe Cates, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Jay McInerney, based on his novel
directed by James Bridges

by Walter Chaw Jay McInerney's nouveau second-person Bright Lights, Big City was my Catcher in the Rye (or, more precisely, his nameless protagonist was my Holden Caulfield), because I caught that bug in the same time of life that most people discover Salinger. I remember a 15-year-old me being disappointed when I saw James Bridges's Bright Lights, Big City on the big screen–not because Michael J. Fox wasn't poised for a dramatic breakthrough (he'd have one the following year in Casualties of War), but because Bridges is one of those old-timey directors without any discernible style who can be counted on for the same exhausted, completely lifeless movie no matter the era or the subject. No one else makes a nuclear meltdown (The China Syndrome) exactly as interesting as an aerobics class (Perfect) and Harvard Law (The Paper Chase). I mean, seriously, this is the guy who went out of his way to work with Debra Winger and John Travolta twice during the Eighties. Bridges's picture, surprise to no one, is a limp dick. The vibrancy–the exhilarated, doomed hedonism–of the McInerney novel gets subsumed under cotton-packed fathoms of complete incomprehension of what the source offered in spades: that note of melancholy in the lovelorn and the lost, that feeling of being swept up in something bigger than you. The Bridges picture is flyblown, devoid of pace and heat; it's such a mortician's slab that it's hard to even tell if the Fox performance is wasted on it, though I suspect it is. It's a bigger crime because someone else should have done this book.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) [2-Disc Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

October 6, 2008Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Shia LaBeouf
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw There's a moment in the first thirty minutes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (hereafter Indy 4) that is so iconic, so breathtaking in its construction and implication within and without the text, that I was frankly glad to be alive at this point in our cinematic history. Well into its second century, the movies have become the wellspring of our past–enough that more than a few people, I'd wager, will debate whether or not mammoths had something to do with the construction of the pyramids and, more insidiously, whether, as U-571 asserts, the Americans had anything to do with the recovery of a working German Enigma machine. As early as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and before, films began to comment on how they'd become the opaque overlay to actual history–and perhaps, you know, history was the better for it: prettier, fancier, taller, with a better screenwriter and Edith Head at the threads. The question with currency, then, becomes what happens to our concept of history when the digital age renders any phantasm a compelling one. The image of which I speak (it's a minor, minor spoiler, so avert thy gaze if you're easily offended), of Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) silhouetted against a mushroom cloud, is something that people like Baudrillard would/should worry over for entire volumes of critical theory. As Indy is permanently, pregnantly implanted on the collective psyche of the blockbuster generation, I do wonder if I'll ever see a depiction of a nuclear blast again without looking at it through the prism of this avatar's eyes. It's like picturing Marty McFly jumping into the Holocaust, or Forrest Gump at Dealey Plaza–I won't be able to help myself.

Body of Lies (2008)

October 3, 2008Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

**/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani
screenplay by William Monahan, based on the novel by David Ignatius
directed by Ridley Scott

Bodyofliesby Walter Chaw Perfectly workmanlike, unimpeachably prestige-y, achingly contemporary, and a near-complete failure as revelation, Ridley Scott's Body of Lies tells the tale of modern spook-dom complete with spy satellites, cell-phone eavesdropping, torture, and terrorists. A compelling stew, one would think, yet something that a decade ago would be seen as science-fiction and as recently as a few years ago as satire today offers no surprises–no discernible sharp edges, smooth as a river stone worn down by a few fast years of crippling cynicism. So the United States is a fingernail factory skating on the razored edge of impossible technologies and still, because of two-minutes-ago wisdom and dusty bureaucrats, unable to exterminate subjects and achieve minimal objectives in our ideological war. The film advises that we trust no one, that the issues are complex, that our enemies aren't stupid, and that there will always be a super-suave Sharif-ian Arab in pictures like this lest we forget how much we're capable of getting behind the Disneyfied Aladdin portrait of the Near East when push comes to shove. It reminds that Russell Crowe can get fat with the best of them even if, after The Insider, no one was wondering–and it reminds that Leonardo DiCaprio is pretty good at this intense young man shtick (although no one was wondering that, either). The problem with Body of Lies isn't its craft (indeed, it's one of the most handsomely-mounted, professionally-executed pictures of the year)–the problem is that it's got nothing to say in a media-rich environment awash with pundits, alive with YouTube, and actually awake for all the sleepiness in our mid-section. The irony of Body of Lies is that it's about intelligence but its own is at least a few months behind the curve.

Appaloosa (2008)

October 3, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Romance, Western

*/****
starring Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris, Renée Zellweger, Jeremy Irons
screenplay by Robert Knott & Ed Harris, based on the novel by Robert Parker
directed by Ed Harris

Appaloosaby Walter Chaw There's a great moment early on in Ed Harris's howler of a vanity piece Appaloosa where gunman-for-hire Virgil Cole (Harris) and his sidekick Everett (Viggo Mortensen) have a friendly conversation with evil Briton Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) about law and order in the Old West. The rest of it is garbage. Comparisons of this film to Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven have been floating around, but where that picture is about the complexities of the promises men make to women that they can't keep, Appaloosa is macho juvenilia that espouses the idea of "bros before hos" and, thus, renders all the men unflawed in their limited, brutal glory and all the women bimbos, sluts, or bimbo-sluts. Enter Renée Zellweger's repugnant turn as mattress-back Allison French, her predilection for spreading her legs for the highest-ranking stud viewed not so much as a moral failing as one of those things women do either with principle (see: saloon girl Katie (Ariadna Gil)), or without (Allison). From her bizarre appearance (she looks like a swollen Bill Mumy) to that pinched, kewpie-doll chipmunk chitter-chatter she uses in the mawkish belief that it's an endearing quality in someone past the age of six, Zellweger would appear to be an easy target of blame for the film's general inadequacy. (Likewise shitting in the flan is composer Jeff Beal, whose theme for Allison is one of the most invasive, repugnant bits of musical hate-crime not composed by James Horner; Beal only increases the picture's cartoon feel.) Closer to the mark, though, would be to identify that Appaloosa falls on its ass because its worldview is arrested and incurious, content to offer that women are mercurial trollops and men, good or evil, are the bedrock of civilization. When Appaloosa is described as "old-fashioned," hear spin on more accurate terms like "ossified" and "badly-dated" and "naïve."

The Sixth Sense (1999) [VISTA Series] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

October 2, 2008Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A-
BD – Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Bruce Willis, Toni Collette, Olivia Williams, Haley Joel Osment
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Bill Chambers There's a feeling of déjà vu at moviehouses this summer: in two different films, a particularly troubled character senses danger of the paranormal kind as the room plummets to freezing temperatures. The difference is that when it happens to Lili Taylor's Nell in The Haunting, it's schadenfreude. The hero of The Sixth Sense, a young boy named Cole, is a more sympathetic creation in a far less shrill enterprise, and we wish nothing more than for the ghosts that haunt him to take a hike.

Blindness (2008) + Eagle Eye (2008)

October 1, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, Canada, Drama, Germany, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller

BLINDNESS
*/****
starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga, Gael García Bernal
screenplay by Don McKellar, based on the novel by José Saramago
directed by Fernando Meirelles

EAGLE EYE
½*/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Billy Bob Thornton
screenplay by John Glenn & Travis Adam Wright and Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott
directed by D.J. Caruso

by Walter Chaw Brazilian wunderkind Fernando Meirelles has the one-trick pony and he's beaten its corpse for all the slickefied, electrified, vaguely exploitive prestige pieces he's made his calling card since City of God exploded into the loving arms of the arthouse. His latest, Blindness, feels like just another stroll down the same moralizing path as the residents of some generic city go blind, with only the bleary, red-rimmed eyes of Julianne Moore left as the moral barometer and literal/spiritual guide. And like his stable of reliable steeds, Blindness reveals itself at the end as having nothing much to say beyond the Lord of the Flies truism that men left to their own devices are no better than animals. Moore's an unnamed dingbat housewife fond of drinking a little too much wine and tittering around the limited orbit of her optometrist husband (Mark Ruffalo). When The Doctor (none of the characters have names, because the movie is profound) encounters a Patient (Yusuke Iseya) who has gone spontaneously blind, it's not long before the typical end-of-times plague starts the high-concept hullabaloo in earnest. Soon, The Doctor and The Wife find themselves in the Spooky Deserted Hospital that The City uses as The Quarantine Ward, though more literary-minded viewers will choose to refer to it as The Microcosm.

Californication: The First Season (2007) – DVD

September 28, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image B+ Sound B+
"Pilot (Californication)," "Hell-A Woman," "The Whore of Babylon," "Fear and Loathing at the Fundraiser," "LOL," "Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow Fonder," "Girls Interrupted," "Filthy Lucre," "The Devil's Threesome," "Turn the Page," "The Last Waltz"

by Ian Pugh "Californication" can only be described as an attempt to replicate Bukowskian swagger: a lot of drinking, fighting, and fucking, with a touch of melancholy as it silently laments that it doesn't know anything else. It's intriguing, but it proves to be a problem because, unlike its alcoholic inspiration, it really doesn't know anything else–especially how to properly express its perspective on all that drinking, fighting, and fucking. Indeed, it's a major problem, considering the show revolves around a novelist, Hank Moody (David Duchovny), who suffered an unwilling relocation from New York to L.A. after his alleged masterpiece of nihilism God Hates Us All was somehow transformed into a romantic comedy entitled A Crazy Little Thing Called Love, starring Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Much to the chagrin of his agent (Evan Handler), Hank hasn't written a word in almost five years–and in-between trying to win over his ex-lover Karen (Natascha McElhone) and their distant daughter Becca (Madeleine Martin), he spends his time patrolling the local bars and jumping into bed with every woman who crosses his path.