Norbit (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

June 4, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Eddie Murphy, Esoterica, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B-
starring Eddie Murphy, Eddie Murphy, Thandie Newton, Cuba Gooding, Jr.
screenplay by Eddie Murphy & Charles Murphy and Jay Scherick & David Ronn
directed by Brian Robbins

by Walter Chaw I looked up George Carlin’s seven dirty words that you can’t say on television and, sure enough, there was the outline for the gags, narrative, reason for being, you name it, of Eddie Murphy’s Norbit: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits. Marvin the Martian-talking geek pastiche Norbit (Murphy) is an orphan abandoned on the doorstep of Golden Wonton Restaurant and Orphanage by unkind kindly Asian caricature Mr. Wong (Murphy again), who, in a moment that doesn’t feel like a joke but definitely feels full of rage, confesses that he traded his two-year-old daughter for a yak (in another, he reveals his dream to be a whaler, making him more Japanese than Chinese, but hey, a slant’s a slant). Not connected to anything like atonement or social/racial satire, Mr. Wong hovers there in the background as occasional wise commentary while Norbit loses his childhood sweetheart Kate (Thandie Newton) and marries the monstrous Rasputia (yes, Murphy). Norbit loathes fat people, Asians, women (note the two girls who really, really want to get turned out by Eddie Griffin’s pimp archetype), and black people most of all. I guess this is meant to soften the misanthropy, except it doesn’t really matter that the perpetrators of the screenplay are Murphy and his out-of-work brother Charlie–catching this coattail now after Dave Chappelle rolled up his–if the director is a white guy.

The Bride and the Beast (1958)/The White Gorilla (1945) [Positively No Refunds Double Feature] – DVD

June 4, 2007Posted in1940s, 1950s, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror

THE BRIDE AND THE BEAST
***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Charlotte Austin, Lance Fuller, Johnny Roth, William Justine
screenplay by Edward D. Wood, Jr.
directed by Adrian Weiss

THE WHITE GORILLA
***/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Ray Corrigan, Lorraine Miller, George J. Lewis, Francis Ford
screenplay by Jo Pagano
directed by Harry Fraser

by Alex Jackson It would be easy to dismiss The Bride and the Beast and The White Gorilla, sight unseen, as dated trash encapsulating the lamentable racist attitudes of the era in which they were produced. Both films belong to a sub-genre of pulp fiction in which great white hunters penetrate the jungles of darkest Africa and quickly conquer the continent’s great beasts, much to the awe of the childlike natives. Told directly and on the level, it’s possible for this material to have a raw, primal power–this is the stuff of myth, right? The hero slaying the dragon and bringing peace to the land. I don’t find the “White Man’s Burden” position nearly as offensive as I find films like Jungle Goddess, where the white saviour passively conquers an African civilization and then just as passively leaves it behind. Certainly, you should be able to have a romantic fiction without marginalizing an entire race of people.

Shortbus (2006) [Unrated] – DVD

May 30, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Sook-Yin Lee, Paul Dawson, Lindsay Beamish, Justin Bond
written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I put John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus on my Top Ten for 2006. This was perhaps more for intent than for execution: ’06 was a pretty lousy year for cinema, and I was just happy to see something from this continent that wasn’t completely asleep at the switch. Still, I think it’s too easy to write the movie off (as many commentators have) as pie-in-the-sky warm-fuzzies. What impressed me most about Shortbus was that its famous nudity and hardcore sex had not been severed from the rest of human experience. Mitchell may not be an aesthetic master, but he’s onto something that few of the would-be indie rebels are: that there is no separating the person from the body, and that sex is as much a social and personal experience as it is a physical one. As the social/personal body is very likely to be a morass of guilt, doubt, confusion, and fatigue, the upbeat ending suggests a covering for a core of despair.

The Twilight Samurai (2002) – DVD

May 28, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Japan, Martial Arts, Romance

****/**** Image D Sound D Extras B
starring Hiroyuki Sanada, Rie Miyazawa, Nenji Kobayashi, Ren Osugi
screenplay by Yôji Yamada, Yoshitaka Asama, based on the story of Shuuhei Fujisawa
directed by Yôji Yamada

by Walter Chaw Unforgiven for veteran director Yôji Yamada and the jidai-geki genre of samurai pictures, The Twilight Samurai is quiet, assured, a masterpiece of contemplative understatement. Its connection to Eastwood's film is more than just cosmetic, though, more than just another "Old West" film about an aging, widowed warrior called into action for something so quaint as the honour of a woman. No, The Twilight Samurai seems an apologia for the romanticization of violence and, moreover, for the elevation of the cult of masculinity out of the mud of bestial muck–where it at least in some measure belongs–and into realms of ritualistic divinity. There's a scene in The Twilight Samurai more powerful than its commensurate moment in Unforgiven that emphasizes this point as unassuming hero Seibei (Hiroyuki Sanada), without comment, steps over the flyblown corpse of a rival assassin in silent pursuit of his own quarry. The romance of end-of-era pictures like this (and literature as well; The Twilight Samurai and Unforgiven heavily remind of Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing) is that they can be pulled into a discussion of the passing away of youth as a man goes from early manhood's heady intoxication with the concept of chivalry to the more sober appreciation that true grit comes with providing constancy for your children in a world forever tilting towards alien territory. Though Seibei's nickname, "Tasogare" ("Twilight"), is a jab at his rushing home after clerk-work to tend to his demented mother and two young daughters, there's poetry in it as a description of a liminal magic hour where change looks not only more possible, but weighted with a lovely, gilded melancholy besides.

Comedy of Power (2006) – DVD

May 23, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Germany

L'Ivresse du pouvoir
**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Isabelle Huppert, François Berléand, Patrick Bruel, Robin Renucci
screenplay by Odile Barski and Claude Chabrol
directed by Claude Chabrol

Comedyofpowercapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Things were going great. Two Claude Chabrols (The Bridesmaid and Violette Nozière) had made their way into my FFC goodie bag, both of them entirely worthy entries in his oeuvre. Maybe they aren't masterpieces, but they're nonetheless solid pieces of filmmaking that don't disappoint. So when Comedy of Power (L'Ivresse du pouvoir) arrived on my doorstep, I clasped it to my chest just knowing that the third time's a charm. Alas, no. Turns out the movie is the most routine Chabrol I can remember: smug, lacking in ambiguity, and possessed of some of the feeblest writing in the director's career. It's an obvious movie by the master of misdirection, a blunt knee to the groin by someone you can usually count on to go for the throat. Even as satire, it's nothing you couldn't get any day from Jon Stewart (with twice the panache and funny to boot).

The Bridesmaid (2004) – DVD

May 22, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Romance, Thriller

La Demoiselle d'honneur
***/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras A-
starring Benoît Magimel, Laura Smet, Aurore Clément, Bernard Le Coq
screenplay by Pierre Leccia and Claude Chabrol, based on the novel by Ruth Rendell
directed by Claude Chabrol

Bridesmaidcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Comparisons of The Bridesmaid (La Demoiselle d'honneur) to Hitchcock are almost inevitable, not only because such assessments are the lazy default position of critics when referencing suspense yarns, but also because The Bridesmaid's director, Claude Chabrol, has carved out a career as the French heir apparent to the master's title. That said, the distinctions between the two filmmakers are probably more interesting than the similarities: Chabrol's overall style is considerably more relaxed than Hitchcock's, and his approach to character is finally less judgmental. Here, for instance, in lieu of assigning blame to the damaged femme fatale of the title, he notes the thrilling nature of her transgression and the unappetizing prospect of returning to normalcy after succumbing to her lethal charms. Chabrol has always put women in the driver's seat of perversity and sexual wilfulness–something Hitch never quite had either the guts or the sympathy to pull off.

Violette (1978) – DVD

May 21, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Thriller

Violette Nozière
***/**** Image C- Sound C+
starring Isabelle Huppert, Stephane Audran, Jean Carmet, Jean-François Garreaud
screenplay by Odile Barski, Herve Bromberger, Frederic Grendel, based on the novel Presses de la Cité by Jean-Marie Fitere
directed by Claude Chabrol

Violettecapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Violette Nozière (or Violette, as inexplicably shortened by some cretinous American distributor) isn't highly ranked in the canon of Claude Chabrol. Reviews range from the mildly indulgent to Leonard Maltin's assertion that "Chabrol lacks his usual directorial flair"–a strange thing to say about a man whose style is famously relaxed. While I wouldn't place it in the company of Les bonnes femmes or La femme infidèle, I would say that Violette Nozière returns Chabrol to his preoccupations with women and class with lethal accuracy. Its tale of an amoral 14-year-old who robs, sleeps around, and attempts to murder both of her parents is perceptively half-in, half-out of her desire to escape the confines of a small world and a smaller bankroll. The protagonist is completely horrible, and yet we're just as completely trapped in her point-of-view. The film's total commitment to her awful behaviour subsequently makes the audience both judge of and accomplice to Violette's terrible, terrible misdeeds.

The Painted Veil (2006) – DVD; The Good Shepherd (2006); The Good German (2006) – DVD

May 21, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, China, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Romance, Thriller, War

THE PAINTED VEIL
***/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Diana Rigg
screenplay by Ron Nyswaner, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by John Curran

THE GOOD SHEPHERD
**/****
starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Eric Roth
directed by Robert De Niro

THE GOOD GERMAN
*½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Paul Attanasio, based on the novel by Joseph Kanon
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw PaintedgermanshepherdOne of seemingly dozens of pretentious, self-produced vanity pieces from the Edward Norton grist mill, The Painted Veil, John Curran's adaptation of Somerset Maugham's story of colonial malaise, is a pleasant surprise. Naomi Watts and Toby Jones are fabulous (and Norton is steady); it's not terribly paternalistically racist despite being another Western film in which white people exert their magical influence in foreign lands; and even though it's all about prestige and hedonism, it manages now and again to actually be about prestige and hedonism. But like the simultaneously-opening Soderbergh noir The Good German, it's mostly interesting in the meta. What keeps this updating of the old Greta Garbo weeper from being literally better is the lack of immediacy in its tale of emotionally distant scientists and their flapper wives, adrift in the boiler pot of 1920s Shanghai. Not timeless in its remove but instead ineffably dated by it, it's an Old Hollywood production in both epic scale and lack of subtext, making the picture a lovely trifle not unlike other well-done bits of instantly-forgotten prestige (see: Philip Noyce's The Quiet American).

Shrek the Third (2007)

May 17, 2007Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Eddie Murphy, Family, Fantasy, Japan, Romance, Theatrical

½*/****
screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman and Chris Miller & Aron Warner
directed by Chris Miller

Shrek3by Walter Chaw A bad franchise reaches its nadir as DreamWorks Animation's flat-awful Shrek the Third (hereafter Shrek 3) tackles the King Arthur mythos in eighty unwatchable minutes of thunderously boring and occasionally moralizing shit, puke, and hitting gags. The only thing mildly entertaining in the whole mess is a prolonged death scene for a frog followed by a chorus of the things singing a Wings song–entertaining, though not in any way inspired or satirical. As calling the movie dumb would constitute a recommendation for people actually interested in seeing it, better to call it the kind of life-suck where you can feel the irretrievable minutes siphoning out your eyes. To say that children would enjoy it is a smokescreen for the mentally-underdeveloped and emotionally immature to indulge in lowest-common-denominator slapstick and the type of hollow banter that passes for wit in great swaths of greater primate societies. All else fails and toss in a cover of Heart's "Barracuda" by that champion of women's rights and humps Fergie–paired in facile shorthand with a throwaway gag featuring one of the pantheon of fairy tale princesses burning her bra. (Describing it is already more funny and clever than the action itself is in the film.) Prescribing medieval Ever After revisionist feminism to something as essentially useless and inert as Shrek 3 is jarring to the point of total incoherence. If anything, this film is the prime example of what happens when the aim of crafting something for the express purpose of entertaining dullards, mental defectives, and toddlers results in something so middlebrow that it tends toward a vacuum. In its "defense," it's more likely to cause naps than to cause hyperactivity.

Tom Goes to the Mayor: The Complete Series (2004-2006) [Businessman’s Edition] + Anything But Love: Volume One (1989-1990) – DVDs

May 15, 2007Posted in1990s, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Romance, Television

TOM GOES TO THE MAYOR: THE COMPLETE SERIES
Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
"Bear Traps," "WW Laserz," "Pioneer Island," "Toodle Day," "Rats Off to Ya!," "Porcelain Birds," "Vehicular Manslaughter," "Boy Meets Mayor," "Calcucorn," "Gibbons," "Pipe Camp," "Re-Birth," "Vice Mayor," "My Big Cups," "Bass Fest," "Jeffy the Sea Serpent," "White Collarless," "Wrestling," "Saxman," "Spray a Carpet or Rug," "Surprise Party," "CNE," "Friendship Alliance," "Zoo Trouble," "The Layover," "Couples Therapy," "Glass Eyes," "Undercover," "Puddins," "Joy's Ex"

ANYTHING BUT LOVE: VOLUME ONE
Image C Sound B Extras D
"Fear of Flying," "Deadline," "Burning the Toad (The Jack Story)," "Love and Death," "Dorothy Dearest," "This is Not a Date," "Ch-Ch-Changes," "Those Lips, Those Thais," "It's My Party and I'll Schvitz If I Want To," "Scared Straight," "Mr. Mom," "Just the Facts, Ma'am," "Bang, You're Dead," "Truth or Consequences," "It's Better to Have Loved and Flossed," "Hearts and Bones," "Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," "Breast of Friends," "Hotel of the Damned," "All About Allison," "Proof It All Night," "Three Men on a Match," "Partying is Such Sweet Sorrow," "The Ice Woman Cometh," "Hooray for Hollywood," "Robin Q. Public," "The Days of Whine and Haroses," "Thirty… Something"

by Ian Pugh Equal parts hilarious and repellent, "Tom Goes to the Mayor" boasts an intentionally ugly aesthetic typified by characters who consist of static, colour-drained photographs of their performers sent through Photoshop's "photocopy" function, their "animation" being the occasional change in pictures to depict a new facial expression. Frequently interrupting are live-action interstitials, usually mock commercials for restaurants or gift shops from a local cable network full of blurry star-wipes and awkwardly-superimposed titles. The show's devotion to these stylistic grotesqueries is not burdened by complex plots, its basic formula boiling down to the title itself: naïve doormat Tom Peters (co-creator Tim Heidecker) comes up with an idea to improve the tiny community of Jefferton only to be blamed for the disasters that occur when he submits his plans to the indifferent, self-absorbed mayor (co-creator Eric Wareheim). Of course, Tom's ideas are routinely terrible on their own (as evidenced by the moronic T-shirt slogans (1.5, "Rats Off to Ya!") and non-functioning toy calculators (1.9, "Calcucorn")), a fact which completes a trinity of exploration into an arena right alongside Saturday morning cartoons (recalling cheapo anti-animation fare like "Clutch Cargo" and "The Marvel Superheroes") and public-access television, where quality control is impertinent. Between Jefferton's overload of obnoxious tchotchkes and its smorgasbord of disgusting food platters, "Tom Goes to the Mayor" is uniformly disturbing and sometimes nauseating. In other words, it succeeds spectacularly.

The Messengers (2007) – DVD

May 14, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Kristen Stewart, Dylan McDermott, Penelope Ann Miller, John Corbett
screenplay by Mark Wheaton
directed by Danny Pang & Oxide Pang

Messengerscapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Horror is not my area of expertise, but I'm fairly certain that The Messengers barely qualifies for the category. A two-bit riff on Ju-On and The Sixth Sense (themselves worth four bits at best), it's professionally shot and cleanly designed but fails completely to be at all scary or even marginally resonant. Those who recognize and revere the social relevance of genre entries from the '70s will be tearing their hair out at the film's hermetic sealing-away from anything beyond teen angst, with references to no less than the high foreclosure rate in farm country used purely as a plot convenience. (Inexcusable when you consider what sort of eldritch imagery might be wrung from a devastated agricultural wasteland.) What you get from The Messengers are some by-the-book jump-scares, "creepy" imagery that wouldn't damage the average eight-year-old, and a "surprise" ending that any thinking adult will see coming from miles away.

Major League (1989) [Wild Thing Edition] – DVD

May 9, 2007Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Sports

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Corbin Bernsen, Bob Uecker
written and directed by David S. Ward

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Major League doesn't have clichés, it is clichés. The film is a collection of sports- and slob-comedy riffs designed for maximum familiarity and a minimum of creative fat. What you see is what you get–and if you don't like what you see, there are legions of sports fans behind you who will, and have, to the extent of justifying a "Wild Thing Edition" DVD covered in Astroturf. Of course, sometimes we don't want anything beyond obvious underdogs obviously set up to obvious victory, and if you're in the mood for such faits accomplis then you could do a lot worse than to suckle at this comforting cinematic teat. But for the most part, lovers of cinema are warned to not get their hopes too high, while fans of crackling dialogue are advised to seek their kicks elsewhere.

To Catch a Thief (1955) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

May 8, 2007Posted in1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

Tocatchathief

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C
starring Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Jessie Royce Landis, John Williams
screenplay by John Michael Hayes, based on the book by David Dodge
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw If Rear Window is Hitchcock's "testament" movie to that point in 1954 (post-North by Northwest, the term no longer has much meaning), then To Catch a Thief, appearing just a year later, recovers the only element missing from Hitchcock's black chest in Rear Window's exhausting exhumation: homosexuality. Note the way that Cary Grant's cat burglar John Robie is greeted by a former accomplice in scenic Nice: as Grant descends a staircase to an outdoor café run by all the reformed dregs of society once involved with Robie and now resentful that Robie appears to be back on the prowl, the head waiter pops a champagne cork in the first of several ejaculatory similes. I do wonder whether the entire film could in fact be read as a gay "reclamation"–its most famous sequence, the juxtaposition of the central seduction sequence with fireworks over Cannes, begins with Robie being teased for his asexuality, recalling an earlier flirtation with rival Danielle (Brigitte Auber) that ends with Robie asking her to cover her legs. More blatantly, Robie is approached by a muscle stud on the beach as Grace Kelly lounges in the background; and when offered on a picnic the choice between a "breast or a leg," Robie demurs, "You make the choice." Clever double entendres, no question, but what exactly is the second "understanding" that we come to in this series of innuendos? Moreover, what to make of the mother figure, reappearing at key erotic moments in body or direct reference (indeed, Kelly's Frances accuses Robie of thinking of her mother during their first kiss) and comprising the punchline of the picture as Frances threatens to make them a household of three (a literal "ménage a trios"–particularly given the film's setting). That kind of mother-love doesn't reach its apotheosis until Psycho five years hence, but there's something along the way to Hitch's complex Oedipal materphobia that suggests here a certain Freudian gay arrest.

Philadelphia Film Festival ’07: Waitress

May 4, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance
**½/****starring Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Jeremy Sisto, Adrienne Shellywritten and directed by Adrienne Shelly by Ian Pugh It takes place in a Mayberry-like Southern landscape and features Andy Griffith himself as a sweet old man with a grumpy façade, so it probably goes without saying that Waitress has the tendency to be a little too syrupy for its own good. But Adrienne Shelly's final film as writer, director, and actress collects its down-home '50s romantic comedy stylings and silly pie-recipe jokes into something that can be genuinely affecting when it tries--and if, through its mawkishness, it reveals Nathan Fillion as…

You Are Alone (2007) – DVD

May 4, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Jessica Bohl, Richard Brundage
written and directed by Gorman Bechard

Youarealonecapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Sometimes skill doesn't count for much. Coming in the next issue of iViews is a review of Mike Reilly's Road to Victory, which by most technical standards qualifies as inept but still manages to get by on a raw rage that can't possibly be faked. Its commitment to its subject matter is so complete that it (sort of) makes up for a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium. You Are Alone is an altogether different beast: it's reasonably well-shot (by DV indie standards), has a decent understanding of structure and foreshadowing, is consciously plugged into its subject matter–and through sheer force of prurience turns all of those plusses into a big minus. I have no idea what brought writer-director Gorman Bechard to the subject of a teenage prostitute and her next-door neighbour, but the end product is less compassionate than creepy and certainly less insightful than risible by the time of its wannabe-shock climax.

Pulp (1972) – DVD

May 3, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Michael Caine, Mickey Rooney, Lionel Stander, Lizabeth Scott
written and directed by Mike Hodges

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Pulp is so determined to not work on any level that you almost admire it in light of the effort. It's neither a parody of nor a tribute to the pulp genre, neither comedy-thriller nor thrilling comedy–it's just a freak that repeatedly falls flat on its face, leaving you with no choice but to grasp it close like an idiot child. The first time I saw this film, I was mostly annoyed by its determination to short-circuit the fun that might have come from genre trappings, not to mention its refusal to offer genuine alternatives. With a second viewing, it looks a little better, and though not a success, it earned my admiration for being so far out of its depth that a bit of pleasure at its expense was unavoidable. It may have earned an extra half-star were it not also sexist and homophobic in dated ways that have risen to the surface like yeast.

Free Zone (2005) + The Secret Life of Words (2005) – DVDs

May 3, 2007Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Drama, France, Ireland, Israel, Road Movie, Romance, Spain

FREE ZONE
*/**** Image C- Sound B Extras F
starring Natalie Portman, Hanna Laslo, Hiam Abbass
written and directed by Amos Gitai

THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins, Javier Cámara, Julie Christie
written and directed by Isabel Coixet

Freezonecapby Walter Chaw The not-at-all-hamfisted allegory of an Israeli woman and a Palestinian woman trekking across the disputed land to find an American who will settle some non-specific debt, Amos Gitai's tediously strident Free Zone opens with ten minutes, uninterrupted, of Natalie Portman weeping over what we discover to be the end of a love affair. It's showy and about as subtle as a kidney-punch–ditto the conception of Portman's passive Rebecca (Portman), the American on the sidelines, a matinee-beautiful beacon who stands by as impassively as Milton's God. That said, the device of a long, car-bound road trip narrated by flashbacks of the protagonists' separate journeys to this journey is, at least for a while, intoxicating. The problem–and it's a doozy–is that Gitai's picture is so blatant an allegory that nothing any of the characters say comes free of dramatic distance or irony, making it impossible to take the film seriously as anything other than ventriloquism for Gitai's, let's face it, unsurprising politics. Nothing wrong with Wailing Wall lamentations about the state of the world, but watching someone shake a fist at a dead horse, long past the hope of resurrection, for upwards of two hours, is tiring and futile. Is there traction in proposing that the film merely mirrors the hopelessness of the Middle East conflict? I guess, but then how many people–specifically, how many people renting a film called Free Zone directed by Amos Gitai–are going to feel edified by that?

Manufactured Landscapes (2006) – DVD

May 3, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, DVD, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
directed by Jennifer Baichwal

Mustownby Walter Chaw There's something about Jennifer Baichwal's profiles of artists. After debuting with a nicely-modulated piece on writer Paul Bowles, Baichwal heard her muse with The True Meaning of Pictures, a profile of Appalachian portrait photog Shelby Lee Adams that, without overtly politicizing the subject, digs gratifyingly deep into the question of where representation becomes exploitation and, trickier still, how the audience might have as much to do with that difficult equation as the essayist himself. With Manufactured Landscapes, Baichwal looks at the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, an artist who shoots landscapes of industrial wastelands that reveal men to be astonishingly productive beasts–and destructive, too, in the same procreative stroke. It's hard to imagine the industry necessary to manufacture the scale of the freighters getting dismantled in the ship-breaking yards to which Baichwal travels with Burtynsky (I've heard a similar sense of awe attends a visit to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA)–hard to assimilate the amount of Nietzschian will-to-power necessary to even contemplate the construction of titans.

Frankenstein Unbound (1990) – DVD

May 3, 2007Posted in1990s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound
**/**** Image A- Sound A
starring John Hurt, Raul Julia, Bridget Fonda, Catherine Rabett
screenplay by Roger Corman and F.X. Feeney, based on the novel by Brian Aldiss
directed by Roger Corman

Frankensteinunboundcap

by Alex Jackson Dr. John Buchanan (John Hurt) is a brilliant scientist in New Los Angeles, circa 2031. One of his experiments fractures the space-time continuum, sucking him into nineteenth-century Geneva, where he meets Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Raul Julia), who's busy conducting a few experiments of his own. In the meantime, the Frankenstein maid is on trial for the murder of Victor's brother. Nobody knows how she did it, though they figure it's witchcraft. Because he read the book (Frankenstein, of course), Buchanan knows that Frankenstein's monster (Nick Brimble) is the true culprit. Frankenstein is refusing to admit to his failed experiment, however, and would rather allow this girl to die than confront his crimes against God. Exasperated, Buchanan goes to Mary Shelley (Bridget Fonda) for help. As for the monster, he's terrorizing Frankenstein and insisting that the scientist create him a female companion.

Inland Empire (2006)

April 27, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Lynch, Drama, Esoterica, France, Horror, Mystery, Poland, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Grace Zabriskie
written and directed by David Lynch

by Walter Chaw Nikki (Laura Dern) is an actress landing her dream role opposite Devon (Justin Theroux) in a film directed by the great Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons). Alas the project, “On High in Blue Tomorrows”, has a history in which a previous, doomed production ended as reality seeped into its fiction and the film’s onscreen/offscreen lovers were killed. For a moment, it seems as though David Lynch’s Inland Empire might be as straightforward as a haunted Hollywood genre exercise–but time slips, it’s suddenly the next day, and as one character says to another, you’re sitting over there. Displaced, distracted, the picture is a masterpiece that, for the patient, the active, and the curious, may be the most literal definition of “dread” captured on film. That feeling you get when Henry Spencer contemplates his feral baby in Eraserhead is the same species of disgusted, familiar fascination that infects this film like a murder of maggots.