Mute Witness: On “Synecdoche, New York”

September 14, 2008Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Charlie Kaufman, Film Festivals, TIFF

originally published September 14, 2008
As threatened, a few stream-of-consciousness thoughts on Charlie Kaufman's latest…

When Synecdoche, New York premiered at Cannes, I remember being annoyed by how feeble the critical coverage on it was. But I get it now. This is a film I'm hard-pressed to describe, let alone review in depth, after just a single viewing. I can say that I see why Kaufman kept this one for himself rather than entrusting it to Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry—it's so dense and cryptic that it would be nigh uninterpretable by anyone but the source. Kaufman is a pretty meat-and-potatoes director, all things considered, but there are so many idiosyncrasies built into the material that it's stylish by default.

TIFF ’08: Gigantic

September 13, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
**/****starring Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, Ed Asner, Jane Alexanderscreenplay by Adam Nagata & Matt Aseltondirected by Matt Aselton by Bill Chambers Gigantic is littered with dead and loose ends, which wouldn't be a big deal if this were the quasi-freeform jazz of a Cassavetes or even an Apatow wannabe, but is a considerable problem when taking into account the crispness of the film's aesthetics. The clean 'scope compositions and fat-free performances become increasingly incongruous; by the time the movie stops short with everything and nothing resolved, you're convinced the filmmakers snatched a script out of the oven half-cooked after a window…

TIFF ’08: The Wrestler

September 9, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Sports, TIFF
***½/****starring Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood, Todd Barryscreenplay by Robert Siegeldirected by Darren Aronofsky by Bill Chambers Mickey Rourke has spent the Aughties staging a series of mini-comebacks, but they've mostly sidestepped his iconography in favour of transforming him into a character actor. Not so Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which is poignant largely for how it reflects and refracts the Mickey Rourke mystique. Quite aware of his film's ghoulish appeal, Aronofsky, after spotlighting the visage of young, beautiful Mickey Rourke under the main titles, shields Rourke's face from view long enough that even though we know what he…

Kill Bill, Volume 2 (2004) – Blu-ray Disc

September 7, 2008Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, FFC Must-Own, Martial Arts, Revenge, Road Movie, Thriller, Western

Kill Bill, Vol. 2
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

Mustownby Walter Chaw Genre poetry from B-movies' poet laureate, Quentin Tarantino's conclusion to Kill Bill is marked by the filmmaker's carefully-calibrated celluloid insanity, as well as a deceptive maturity that allows a few powerfully-struck grace notes for the cult of femininity and the sanctity of motherhood. Its first portion overwhelming for its craft before lodging in the craw with its ever-present but tantalizingly difficult-to-nail moral code, Tarantino's epic whole clarifies a dedication to a sort of low, Samuel Fuller/Nicholas Ray tabloid cosmology, grounding itself eventually in the bold, lovely, curiously old-fashioned declaration that the last best reward is to be true to the primal clay of an idea of innate gender roles. The Bride (Uma Thurman) is so named not merely for camp grandeur's sake, but also to highlight the power of cultural archetypes and their roots in biology.

TIFF ’08: Rachel Getting Married

September 6, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Directors: Jonathan Demme, Drama, TIFF
**/****starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mather Zickel, Bill Irwinscreenplay by Jenny Lumetdirected by Jonathan Demme by Bill Chambers Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married has the cultural disadvantage of arriving soon after Margot at the Wedding and the personal one of following Claire Denis's 35 Shots in my screening log. Denis does so much more with so much less; perhaps sight-unseen, people have been calling this a return to form for Demme (as in, the form before The Silence of the Lambs created certain commercial expectations of/obligations in his work), but I don't remember him ever being this histrionic. And my…

The Counterfeiters (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

September 5, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Germany, Thriller

Die Fälscher
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow, Dolores Chaplin
 screenplay by Stefan Ruzowitzky, based on the book by Adolf Burger
directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky

by Bryant Frazer This year's winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) is defined in equal terms by what it is and what it isn't. It is a Holocaust survivor's yarn told with a certain playfulness and no lack of moral consideration, but it is not really a concentration-camp movie; mostly, it feels like a prison caper yarn that happens to take place in Sachsenhausen. The film's weight comes from the things we know about but cannot see within the frame: those haunting images of emaciated Jews, the walking-dead stares of the prisoners consigned to the gas chambers and crematoria, the tragedy of systematic genocide.

TIFF ’08: Lorna’s Silence

September 3, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Italy, TIFF
Le silence de Lorna***½/****starring Arta Dobroshi, Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Alban Ukajwritten and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne by Bill Chambers That figures: I'm finally ready to get on board the Dardenne Brothers bandwagon and everyone's bailing. What I like--maybe love--about their latest, Lorna's Silence (Le Silence de Lorna), is that it zigs when you expect it to zag, which may peg me as superficial (some reviews of the film have admonished it for having a plot) but which nevertheless strikes me as a refreshing change of pace from the neorealist wallowing of their earlier work. (To my…

Shotgun Stories (2008) – DVD

September 3, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B
starring Michael Shannon, Douglas Ligon, Barlow Jacobs, Natalie Canerday
written and directed by Jeff Nichols

by Walter Chaw I’m sick of the kind of exceptional that Shotgun Stories represents–sick enough that I wonder if it doesn’t actually reflect a certain faddism attending the creation of the picture. How many times is it seemly to invoke Faulkner before the prestige of it sours into eye-rolling familiarity? To call Shotgun Stories an American classic ignores that it’s a tonal clone of David Gordon Green’s idylls, which themselves owe their cadences to Terrence Malick’s true American classics (which themselves owe a tremendous debt to Charles Laughton’s singular Night of the Hunter). That’s just the cinematic legacy. At the end of all that impeccable menace, that twisted Grant Wood Americana and surreal, gravid Norman Rockwellian perversity, is this post-millennial, post-9/11 moral that revenge is strange and bitter fruit. As it goes, it’s not much; and as the novelty of it’s faded like the cheap denim spent in the telling of it, the only thing left is this faint after-image of better, more pioneering films in the genre. Like so much that begins as alternative fare, Shotgun Stories ends up the normative mean to which prestige indies inevitably tend. There’s a lot to admire about this film, I just feel like I’ve seen it about a dozen times by now.

Kill Bill, Volume 1 (2003) – Blu-ray Disc

September 1, 2008Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Revenge, Road Movie, Thriller

Kill Bill, Vol. 1
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, David Carradine
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

Mustownby Walter Chaw There is a palpable, undeniable perversity to Quentin Tarantino's fourth feature film, a taste for the extreme so gleeful and smart that its references are homage and its puerility virtue. I seem to find a reason between every Tarantino film to dislike him, to cast aspersions on my memories of his films, but I'm starting to think the source of my dislike is jealousy. Tarantino is the director Spielberg is too timid to be: a gifted visual craftsman unafraid of the contents of his psychic closet, and a film brat whose teachers happen to be blaxploitation, samurai epics, and Shaw Brothers chop-socky instead of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. And it isn't that I have aspirations of becoming a filmmaker, it's just that I want to be as good at something as Tarantino is at making movies.

TIFF ’08: The Girl from Monaco

September 1, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, TIFF
La fille de Monaco**/****starring Fabrice Luchini, Roschdy Zem, Louise Bourgoin, Stéphane Audranscreenplay by Anne Fontaine, Benoît Graffindirected by Anne Fontaine by Bill Chambers Her ringtone is a wolf whistle, her bedroom is decorated with Princess Di memorabilia, and she says things like "I feel orange." She's The Girl from Monaco. She's also a coarse variation on Sarah Jessica Parker's SanDeE* from L.A. Story (this time, it's she who does the weather), duking it out for the soul of lawyer Bertrand against his emotionally-involved bodyguard, Christophe. Bertrand (Fabrice Luchini) is in Monaco representing a suspected murderess (Stéphane Audran) in a case…

TIFF ’08: Derrière moi

August 31, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF
Behind Me**½/****starring Carina Caputo, Charlotte Legault, Patrice Duboiswritten and directed by Rafaël Ouellet by Bill Chambers The title translates as Behind Me, which is sort of where I want to put this Lukas Moodysson-esque downer. I hasten to add, though, that this is a work of fierce emotional intelligence, and I honestly can't decide whether its profoundly upsetting closing minutes (however bullshit they might be) are an example of the characters letting us down or the filmmakers letting the characters down, cynically betraying them and the scenario for shock value. What's interesting is that the logline sent out to the…

TIFF ’08: A Christmas Tale

August 29, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, TIFF
Un Conte de Noël***/****starring Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Anne Cosignyscreenplay by Arnaud Desplechin, Emmanuel Bourdieudirected by Arnaud Desplechin by Bill Chambers A Gallic collision of The Family Stone (ugh) and The Royal Tenenbaums (woo) but far more palatable and novelistic than that might suggest, Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noël) unfurls over Christmas in bourgeois Roubaix, where the dysfunctional Vuillards have congregated to weigh their options now that matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve) has been diagnosed with cancer. She needs a bone-marrow transplant, and the only potential matches are black sheep Henri (Mathieu Amalric) and Henri's…

Shine a Light (2008) + Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (2008) – Blu-ray Discs

August 28, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Concert Doc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Disney, Documentary, Music

SHINE A LIGHT
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
directed by Martin Scorsese

HANNAH MONTANA/MILEY CYRUS: BEST OF BOTH WORLDS CONCERT TOUR
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
directed by Bruce Hendricks

by Bill Chambers Film critic and snarkmeister extraordinaire Glenn Kenny recently blogged, "When Martin Scorsese's Shine a Light hit theaters in April, it gave movie critics, myself included, a chance…to weigh in on just what they thought of [the Rolling Stones]. It sure was fun, kinda, but rather missed a point, which is that having an opinion on The Stones these days is like having an opinion about Mount Rushmore. No one really gives a shit." While I'm inclined to agree, does that not make a concert from "The Stones these days" tantamount to a sightseeing tour of Mt. Rushmore? What, then, does Shine a Light leave us to talk about? Sadly, not a lot.

P2 (2007) – DVD

August 27, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Wes Bentley, Rachel Nichols
screenplay by Franck Khalfoun, Alexandre Aja, Gregory Levasseur
directed by Franck Khalfoun

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Well, it starts off beautifully. The camera is floating around a parking lot while the Eartha Kitt version of "Santa Baby" plays on the soundtrack. The choice of this song is reminiscent of the semi-ironic use of "Mr. Sandman" at the end of Rick Rosenthal's pretty-damn-good Halloween II. It casts the madman who will chase our heroine in the role of a dream lover born of her subconscious death wish. Then the camera stops on a column with this level of the parking lot, P2, painted on it. The sign is flanked by the names of our leads, Rachel Nichols and Wes Bentley. Pretty cool way of presenting the film's title.

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

August 25, 2008Posted in1990s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Vincent Suarez, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Directors: Tim Burton, DVD, Musical

***/****
DVD – Image A Sound A
BD – Image A- Sound A+ Extras A-
screenplay by Caroline Thompson, based on a poem by Tim Burton (adaptation by Michael McDowell)
directed by Henry Selick

by Vincent Suarez You know the feeling: too many movies, too little time. You walk down the corridor of your local multiplex, relishing the titles on the marquees and posters, and you know that many will unfortunately have to be seen on home video. If you're lucky, you'll make wise choices, but, occasionally, your home viewing includes that film you regret not seeing theatrically. For me, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (hereafter Nightmare) is one of those films. Having grown weary of Burton's quirkiness after the disappointing Batman Returns, I passed up Nightmare in favour of movies I now cannot recall; what a shame. Fortunately, Touchstone's optical disc presentations of this magnificent film (the previous LaserDiscs and last year's DVD release) provide more than a glimpse of what was surely a wonderful theatrical experience.

Death Race (2008)

August 21, 2008Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Jason Statham, Tyrese Gibson, Ian McShane, Joan Allen
written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

Deathraceby Walter Chaw Paul W.S. Anderson makes one kind of movie: the kind with lots of explosions and girls and loud music and hyperkinetic editing. The shitty kind. Whether or not these pictures work has nothing to do with the head. Death Race, a "remake" of Roger Corman's Death Race 2000, is a middling Anderson joint: it's not so bad that you want to put a cigarette out on your eye, but it's also not so bad that it's good–though it is almost so bad that it's great. Jason Statham is Frankenstein, a guy framed for the murder of his wife who happens to be a former racecar driver–a past that, in the near future, is a premium in the privatized penal system. After being laid off from his blue-collar job in an entirely superfluous prologue that only really establishes the picture as one made in the second W. administration, Frank gets "recruited" to drive in the titular pay-per-view reality program involving hardened criminals participating in televised bloodsport. His arch-rival in the Big House is Machine Gun Joe (marble-mouthed Tyrese), his pit chief is gravel-voiced Coach (Ian McShane), and his zombie-voiced co-pilot is hot-looking Latin mannequin Case (Natalie Martinez). If you're surprised to see McShane in a piece of shit like this (sadly, McShane seems to only be in pieces of shit post-"Deadwood"), you should get a load of Joan Allen as evil bitch warden Hennessey, a creature one part genre prison bull, one part television executive. If she's also a lawyer and a film critic, start looking around for four horsemen.

Comedy Central’s TV Funhouse: Uncensored (2000-2001) + Dear Pam [2 DVD Set] – DVDs

August 20, 2008Posted in1970s, 2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Television

COMEDY CENTRAL'S TV FUNHOUSE: UNCENSORED
Image B Sound B Extras B-
"Western Day," "Hawaiian Day," "Christmas Day," "Mexicans Day," "Caveman Day," "Safari Day," "Astronaut Day," "Chinese New Year's Day"

DEAR PAM (1976)
*/**** Image C- Sound D+ Extras D+
starring Crystal Sync, Jennifer Jordan, John Holmes, Tony Perez
written and directed by Harold Hindgrind

by Ian Pugh Viewing it today, I realize that Robert Smigel's unfortunately short-lived Comedy Central series "TV Funhouse" probably represented a major turning point in my understanding of film and television as artforms. Its casual acquaintance with reality and fantasy was a vital link that germinated the meta seeds planted by "Freakazoid!" and Back to the Future Part II before I graduated to The Dead Pool and Tenebrae; and although the cartoons parodying celebrities are horribly dated now, they're most likely where I properly developed a sense of irony. ("Stedman," wherein Oprah's fiancé pretends to be a secret agent in order to spend her money and avoid sleeping with her, remains my most lucid memory of the show's broadcast run.) The revelation was somehow surprising yet completely logical all the same, considering how the show operates in a grey zone between two perspectives–that of a child vs. that of an adult–and questions whether the two are really that different from each other.

The Whoopee Boys (1986) – DVD

August 12, 2008Posted in1980s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy

**/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Michael O'Keefe, Paul Rodriguez, Denholm Elliott, Dan O'Herlihy
screenplay by Steve Zacharias and Jeff Buhai and David Obst
directed by John Byrum

by Alex Jackson John Byrum's 1986 comedy The Whoopee Boys is a strictly hit-and-miss affair. When it hits, it's good for a chuckle and a worthy distraction. When it misses, it is, to borrow one of the film's favourite visuals, like a swift kick to the groin. I'm being a lot easier on the picture than I imagine most people would be, in part because I simply admire its sheer hubris. The Whoopee Boys really puts it on the line, and there are many times where it seems like it's working without a safety net. What do you have to gain from making a movie like this? You might make people laugh. What do you have to lose? You could create such an unholy object of pure, unadulterated shittiness that audiences will commit hara-kiri in the aisles to preserve the very last shred of dignity they have left after buying a ticket.

Felon (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

August 11, 2008Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Prison, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Stephen Dorff, Harold Perrineau, Marisol Nichols, Val Kilmer
written and directed by Ric Roman Waugh

by Bryant Frazer If Jeffrey Lebowski had made a few wrong turns in life–if, let's say, he had brutally murdered some very bad men, as well as their families–he may have turned out not entirely unlike John Smith, the hulkingly mellow convict played by a moustachioed, goateed Val Kilmer in Felon. Judging from the wide berth the rest of the inmates give him, Smith is known as the silent-but-deadly type. Kilmer plays him from behind a whole bunch of prison tattoos with a steely glare, but also with a kind of openness that doesn't immediately compute. Although he's tagged as a sociopath, he's really just the opposite. He believes in justice, and he longs for the death sentence he feels his crimes deserve.