Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) [Global Warming Edition] – DVD

Posted in1960s, 2007, Action, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Fantasy

**/**** Image B Sound A Extras B
starring Walter Pidgeon, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden, Peter Lorre
screenplay by Irwin Allen and Charles Bennett
directed by Irwin Allen

by Alex Jackson Take a gander at the sleeve for Fox’s “Global Warming Edition” of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The title is contained in a downward arrow in drippy, bright-red lettering. It’s guiding us towards the main action, a gleaming submarine and lime-green scuba divers fighting off a one-eyed, giant red squid. Dig the curvy brushstrokes, the action lines around the charging submarine, and the flecks of paint signifying bubbles. The cast, meanwhile, is in the top-left corner: there’s Walter Pidgeon with a Vincent Price moustache, Joan Fontaine with a face of granite, a gasping Barbara Eden, and behind them all, Peter Lorre pointing up at God knows what. Doesn’t it just get your juices flowin’? If I were browsing the video store and happened upon this, I’d be tempted to purchase it sight-unseen, and I’d like to think it’s rare that a DVD’s mere packaging could encourage me to do that.

Under the Cherry Moon (1986); Graffiti Bridge (1990); Purple Rain (1984) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVDs|Purple Rain – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2007, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

UNDER THE CHERRY MOON
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Prince, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jerome Benton, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Becky Johnston
directed by Prince

GRAFFITI BRIDGE
*/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Prince, Morris Day, Jerome Benton & The Time, Jill Jones
written and directed by Prince

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's something cinematic about the artist known as Prince, and it's not just his effeminate charisma (though there's that) or his flair for theatre (though there's that, too): The whole sensual package that is his deliciously weird sensibility–a blend of satin-laced fetishism and self-loving exhibitionism–all but cries out to be photographed. The question is, was The Artist himself filmmaker enough to bring that to the screen? Making for a split decision are the two films that bear his directorial stamp, both of which have finally hit DVD. In one corner stands Under the Cherry Moon, a savagely-underrated romance that suggests that with someone else's script, he's got the right stuff; in the other corner sits Graffiti Bridge, a grotesque white elephant that suggests Prince left to his own devices turns from funk idol into sadly inebriated schoolgirl.

Eastern Promises (2007)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2007, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Viggo Moretensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl
screenplay by Steve Knight
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw As executed by our pre-eminent insect anthropologist, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is more fairytale than thriller, one that finds new muse Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the rising star of an émigré Russian mob family taken root in the heart of London within the red velvet-lined walls of a restaurant innocuously-/romantically-named “Trans-Siberian.” Self-described as “wolfish,” this pack is led by grandfatherly Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who’s disappointed with his ineffectual son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and looking to replace him with a surrogate heir. The rot of that familial discord throws its roots back to ferocious opening minutes that see first a vicious throat-slashing, then a fourteen-year-old, pregnant prostitute haemorrhaging on the floor of a drugstore after she’s told that, for Methadone, the pharmacist will need a prescription. Cronenberg’s London is a cess seething beneath a veneer of “normalcy”; regarded as a toxic tabernacle in Spider, the city is transformed here into a garish, meticulously theatrical wonderland. The central problem of the picture has a lot to do with the idea that Cronenberg has again taken a pre-existing script and reordered it along distinctly Cronenbergian lines–that what must have read initially as a sociological text on another facet of the immigrant experience (much like screenwriter Steve Knight’s Dirty Pretty Things) now plays like one of Cronenberg’s investigations into the difficulty of parsing concepts like “normal” and “family” in the crushing crucible of bugs pretending to be human among humans.

Private Fears in Public Places (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Italy

Couers
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Sabine Azéma, Isabelle Carré, Laura Morante, Claude Rich
screenplay by Jean-Michel Ribes, based on the play by Alan Ayckbourn
directed by Alain Resnais

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Some time ago, there was a contretemps in the pages of another writing venue of mine, REVERSE SHOT. The estimable Nick Pinkerton had written a rather tepid assessment of Alain Resnais’s Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs): he claimed that its inclusion in the New York Film Festival was an “obligatory slot-filling by one of the ‘Old Masters of the Sixties’ art-house.” NYFF programmer Kent Jones shot back with a dryly hilarious note confirming such selection criteria, which enthused that the film “had exactly the lack of urgency, the unexceptionable hominess, and the scanty charm we were looking for.” The whole thing was pretty funny, but it illustrated the pitfalls of playing certain critical lines. While Pinkerton is mostly correct that Private Fears in Public Places is a disappointingly inconsequential film by someone who had previously defined styles and moved mountains, this is punishing Resnais unduly: just because you’re not making a masterpiece doesn’t mean you lack any point at all.

300 (2007) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

300 (2007) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2007, Action, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Bulgaria, Canada, Drama, DVD, War

*/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Dominic West
screenplay by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw There’s an idea in the ancient world about a “beautiful death,” achievable for the warrior only in mortal, one-on-one wartime combat–an idea that may have contributed to the length of the Trojan siege, and an idea vocalized by one of the captains serving under Spartan King Leonides (Gerard Butler) in Zack Snyder’s 300. Based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel of the same name, the film betrays a lot of the same macho aesthetic as Robert Rodriguez’s adaptation of Miller’s Sin City–but rather than content itself with the literally bestial terms of glory in the masculine psyche, it makes a play for allegory and equivocal morality (of all things) in the valorization of Sparta and the romanticization of a crushing military defeat. It’s not that Leonides is seen martyred in the end in a tableau explicitly meant to evoke the passion of St. Sebastian, but that he goes out pining for his wife like a lovesick hamster, thus completing 300‘s devolution from remorseless Spartan militarism into gushy democratic idealism and all manner of liberal maladies. There’s little profit in establishing the rules of this universe as uncompromising and brutal (it opens on a field of infant skulls–victims of a Spartan culling ritual of its own kind) if its intentions split time between justifying, in non-chest-beating terms, the decision to pit three-hundred against thousands while denying the Spartans their individual moments of “beautiful death” in favour of some collective date with pyrrhic immortality. History suggests that the Spartans, having exhausted their arms, died scratching and clawing with their bare hands; 300 suggests they died calling for their mothers and wives.

Eat My Dust (1976) [Roger Corman: Supercharged Edition] – DVD

Eat My Dust (1976) [Roger Corman: Supercharged Edition] – DVD

Posted in1970s, 2007, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Ron Howard, Christopher Norris, Brad David, Kathy O’Dare
written and directed by Charles B. Griffith

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In one sense, Eat My Dust fails completely at its stated goal–that is, to be a raucous car-chase comedy with squares goosed at every turn. Not that cops don’t crash their rides and girls don’t swoon at reckless drivers, but the movie isn’t really interested in setting up the very obvious payoffs required by the genre. Director Charles B. Griffith, a long-time writer for the Roger Corman factory, is more interested in the ambiance of a racetrack, the genial nature of teenagers, and an easygoing feeling of freedom quite opposed to the hyped-up version in which these things usually traffic. True, Griffith fumbles for his vision more often than he nails it, and he fluffs every joke and action scene from his own, hopelessly standard screenplay. But for a teen flick starring Ron Howard, Eat My Dust has plenty to keep you diverted and even mildly surprised–if not enough that it sticks to your bones.

TIFF ’07: Lust, Caution

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, Taiwan, Thriller, TIFF, War
***/**** starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Wang Leehom screenplay by Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus, based on a short story by Eileen Chang directed by Ang Lee by Bill Chambers Blessed with an achingly beautiful score by Alexandre Desplat, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is a more tasteful Blackbook, which is odd considering how much more graphic it is in its depiction of not just sexuality but, thanks to a darkly-comic homage to Torn Curtain, violence as well. Where Blackbook director Paul Verhoeven is a vulgarian, though, Lee projects civility and cultivation. That's how he so…

TIFF ’07: The Tracey Fragments

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, TIFF
½*/**** starring Ellen Page, Ari Cohen, Max McCabe-Lokos, Max Turnbull screenplay by Maureen Medved, based on her novel directed by Bruce McDonald by Bill Chambers When I say that The Tracey Fragments applies the Tarnation method to fiction filmmaking, I say it exasperated with the whole Pied Piper mentality that follows any aesthetic innovation. I admire Tarnation, don't misunderstand, but a big part of that admiration rests in the picture's total invention and definitive application of a form that fits its function. Unfortunately, for every E.T., there's a Mac and Me--and for every original like Jonathan Caouette, there's a dilettante-in-waiting…

Going To Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film (2006) [Unrated] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, DVD, Horror

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
director uncredited

by Alex Jackson My cardinal rule about documentaries: they shouldn’t just coast on the gravitas of their subject matter. They have to have some kind of perspective and work on their own terms. With that said, documentaries about movies are a bit of a blind spot for me, as I have a particularly strong difficulty separating my affection for the film and my affection for what it’s about. I know that This Film Is Not Yet Rated isn’t very good–it’s childish and doesn’t mount a terribly convincing case against the MPAA. But come on, I could talk for hours about the MPAA if I could find somebody who would want to listen. Cinemania? Yeah, the filmmakers didn’t do much more than point and laugh at those guys. God help me, though, I had a little envy for them: I only wish I could theatre-hop in New York City, exclusively watching the films that interest me without worrying about money or having to review them. I could feel that my critical capacities were being tested in these cases, but I survived. However, when you have a documentary that isn’t about merely the movies, but about slasher movies specifically–well, shit, any pretense of objectivity on my part has officially gone out the window.

Dexter: The First Season (2006) – DVD

Dexter: The First Season (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
“Dexter,” “Crocodile,” “The Popping Cherry,” “Let’s Give the Boy a Hand,” “Love American Style,” “Return to Sender,” “Circle of Friends,” “Shrink Wrap,” “Father Knows Best,” “Seeing Red,” “Truth Be Told,” “Born Free”

by Walter Chaw “Dexter” sucks in that special Showtime way. It has nothing for the soul–not because it’s nihilistic, but because it isn’t. It’s “The Facts of Life” crossed with “Matlock”, starring a good-hearted serial killer; a superhero melodrama along the lines of “The Incredible Hulk”, whose self-contained mysteries are held together ever so loosely by a season-long thread involving a manhunt. What I’m trying to say is that it’s unbelievably patronizing. It’s not nuanced, not laden with depth–it’s a quirk machine, facile and shallow. See, a serial killer with heart isn’t “deep,” it’s a sketch. It’s the black guy who thinks he’s white, the horny old lady, the hooker with a heart of gold. What begins as a really fun-seeming premise is undone utterly by a succession of weak scripts and, with the exception of Michael C. Hall’s virtuoso turn as a sociopath working as a blood-spatter expert in Miami, slack performances. He’s a lot better than the material deserves, it goes without saying, but like Mary-Louise Parker in the similarly pandering, similarly terrible Showtime series “Weeds”, he’s just good enough to prolong the show’s already lamentable existence. Maybe the real argument pertains to the wisdom of creating a series about something so heinous in such a way that it trips no sensitivity meters. It’s a time bomb hidden in a teddy bear–and then the bomb doesn’t go off.

Lucky You (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

Lucky You (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2007, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Sports

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore, Robert Duvall, Debra Messing
screenplay by Eric Roth & Curtis Hanson
directed by Curtis Hanson

by Walter Chaw Trapped in the doldrums between Robert Duvall doing his elderly, patting people on the hand while he’s talking bit and Drew Barrymore enunciating every word as though she’s trying not to let the marble fall out, Eric Bana struggles against stardom once again but states a case for it just the same. The vehicle this time is Curtis Hanson’s Lucky You, a mainstream poker picture that re-establishes Hanson as a less ambitious James L. Brooks (which isn’t altogether a bad thing). Bana is compulsive gambler Huck Cheever, named after an American writer and an antiquated term for a wheeler/dealer, thus neatly encapsulating his character as not only a con-man and a bit of an asshole but also moony and eloquent. There’s nothing at all surprising about the way the film moves towards its conclusion, and even its twist loses its lustre beneath the steady drone of its interiors. It’s an un-ironic love story featuring a problem gambler, a girl fresh off the bus, and a father/son subplot packing all the subtlety of a heart attack–which makes it, of course, suddenly Pollyannaish when it yearns so mightily for world-weary. Lucky You looks like a gambler, but it acts like a diagram instead of a train accident.

TIFF ’07: George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: George A. Romero, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF, Zombie

***/****
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Bill Chambers The problem with 2005’s Land of the Dead is that it could’ve been made by virtually anybody at virtually any time. While I imagine that George A. Romero, stalwart hippie that he is, has an anticapitalist streak a mile wide, that picture’s “eat the rich” trajectory ultimately felt like a rather flimsy pretext for Romero to resume chronicling social change through the prism of his precious undead. Given that the “Dead” films have typically had long incubation periods, it’s surprising to see Romero return to the well so soon, but then it was probably best to hit the reset button post-haste. George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead does just that in more ways than one: Here, Romero disentangles himself from the cul-de-sac of a zombie-human détente by starting from scratch in the present tense, making this the Casino Royale of the series.

TIFF ’07: Mother of Tears: The Third Mother

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Dario Argento, Film Festivals, Horror, Italy, TIFF

La terza madre
***/****
directed by Dario Argento

by Bill Chambers Sanity and fatigue are ineluctable corrupting influences on an aging filmmaker, but it brings me great pleasure and no small relief to be able to report that while Mother of Tears: The Third Mother–Dario Argento’s long-gestating conclusion to his “Three Sisters” trilogy–is neither as artful as Suspiria nor as dreamlike as Inferno, it nevertheless surpasses expectations fostered by Argento’s recent work to emerge as his best movie in decades. Fitting that Argento should choose to tell the Rome-set story of Mater Lacrimarum last, marking this as a homecoming in more ways than one.

Why I’m Not Formally Reviewing ‘Control’

Posted in2007, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blog, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Japan, Music, TIFF, UK

Control is an authentic-feeling biopic about the late Ian Curtis, the epileptic front man for Joy Division who committed suicide–though a revisionist theory absurdly contends that he “accidentally” hung himself from the clothesline in his Manchester flat–in 1979 at the age of 23. Spoiler. Directed by music-video auteur Anton Corbijn and lensed in black-and-white and ‘scope by Martin Ruhe, the film overcomes the central miscasting of Samantha Morton as Ian’s wife Deborah (though she would’ve nailed this role in her Morvern Callar days, she’s far too long in the tooth for it now) with the near-perfect casting of Sam Riley as Curtis, Craig Parkinson as Tony Wilson, and Alexandra Maria Lara as Annik Honoré, a.k.a. The Other Woman. (Morton’s incongruous star-power is easily explained by the basis for Control‘s screenplay: Deborah Curtis’s own memoir, Touching from a Distance.) The film is admirably not a hagiography while engendering empathy for a gifted asshole more successfully than, say, Man on the Moon, and the song recreations are surprisingly persuasive, although I was a bit disappointed with how literalmindedly the music is applied at times.

Deadwood: The Complete Third Season (2006) + Rome: The Complete First Season (2005) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, 2007, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Television, Western

DEADWOOD: THE COMPLETE THIRD SEASON
Image A Sound A Extras A+
"Tell Your God to Ready for Blood," "I Am Not The Fine Man You Take Me For," "True Colors," "Full Faith And Credit," "A Two-Headed Beast," "A Rich Find," "Unauthorized Cinnamon," "Leviathan Smiles," "Amateur Night," "A Constant Throb," "The Catbird Seat," "Tell Him Something Pretty"

ROME: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image A Sound A Extras C
"The Stolen Eagle," "How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Republic," "An Owl in a Thornbush," "Stealing From Saturn," "The Ram Has Touched The Wall," "Egeria," "Pharsalus," "Caesarion," "Utica," "Triumph," "The Spoils," "Kalends of February"

by Walter Chaw HBO is the watermark for televised drama, no question. With "The Sopranos"–which began like high-concept and ended like avant-garde–as their flagship, they've progressed through the psychic devastation of "Six Feet Under" (was there ever a final episode of any series so steeped in existential terror?), the insouciance of "Entourage", the social nihilism of "Curb Your Enthusiasm", and the repugnant popular deviance of "Sex in the City", only to find as their bedrock circa 2007 something so slight (if so brilliant) as "Flight of the Conchords". Two contenders for that crown, "Rome" and "Deadwood", alas received their walking papers, victims of too high a budget, too heavy a burden of viewer investment (can I confess that I didn't like "Deadwood" until I started it from the first episode?), and too niche a viewership. I hesitate to compare even the extraordinarily-similar-feeling "Rome" to the channel's short-lived (equally short-lived, in fact: two seasons) "Carnivàle", but I do wonder whether "Deadwood" and "Rome" weren't nixed because they weren't interested in seducing new lovers and may have seemed, from the outside, like so much dry coming and going, talking of Michelangelo.

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

Posted in2000s, 2007, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Western

***/****
starring Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Peter Fonda, Gretchen Mol
screenplay by Halsted Welles and Michael Brandt & Derek Haas, based on the short story by Elmore Leonard
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw The distance–chronologically, ideologically–between the release of James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma and Andrew Dominick’s looming The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford strikes me as identical to the space that connects Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch with Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand. The exhaustion in our popular culture feels the same; the nihilism feels the same; the fatalism with which a lot of us look at our political prospects (the incumbents are bums, the insurgents are morons) feels the same. You compare Peckinpah’s criminal heroes, burnt by the sun into animated saddle bags, motivated by gold and orgies to go to their doom in blasted, godless places south of some metaphorical border, to Fonda’s retinue of burnt-out, disillusioned, disenfranchised yippies and graceless lugs, and you’re able to crystallize somehow a picture of how, even in the space of a single administration, the coarse diving bell of our basest natures is collapsed by too much terrible knowledge. (Compare Fonda in his own film to Fonda’s wonderful cameo in this one–the dream is dead, indeed.) You can only fall back on how natural it is to be a bastard for so long before philosophical reflection rears its ugly head. The internal progression of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde provides the template of this motion all by itself: The midpoint of that film, as Bonnie visits her mother on a soft-focus, sepia-smeared dirt farm, represents the generational gulf, sure, but also the turning point between the innocent bloodshed of that picture’s celebratory first half and the strive towards domestic “normalcy” of its doomed second. I wonder if what lingers (and what initially so offended) about Bonnie & Clyde wasn’t the gore and the sex but instead the suggestion that the way things are, just the act of growing old murders the spirit.

The Warriors (1979) [Ultimate Director’s Cut] + A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006) – DVDs

The Warriors (1979) [Ultimate Director’s Cut] + A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006) – DVDs

Posted in1970s, 2000s, 2006, 2007, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

THE WARRIORS
***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
starring Michael Beck, James Remar, David Patrick Kelly, Deborah Van Valkenburgh
screenplay by David Shaber and Walter Hill, based on the novel by Sol Yurick
directed by Walter Hill

A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Robert Downey Jr., Shia LaBeouf, Chazz Palminteri, Rosario Dawson
written and directed by Dito Montiel

by Walter Chaw Walter Hill’s The Warriors adapts a Sol Yurick novel that was, in turn, inspired by Greek soldier Xenophon’s Anabasis, the account of a mercenary army stranded in the heart of Mesopotamia circa 400 B.C. that fought its way north to the coast of the Black Sea and then to safety. Accordingly, The Warriors is about the titular New York street gang–based in Coney Island, naturally–fighting its way through enemy territory from The Bronx back to the coast. That they’ve ventured so far from home has to do with a giant gathering of the city’s gangs to a rally/riot called by charismatic kingpin Cyrus (Roger Hill) in the hope of uniting the Big Apple’s diverse miscreants under a common flag. Shades of Abbie Hoffman’s Chicago Democratic Convention Yippie movement if you squint hard enough, but closer to the truth to locate the shard of revolution eternally sharpened against the promise that if all the minorities were to rise up collectively, they’d be the majority. Luckily for the majority, much of the minority is what it is because of its total inability to stand behind a common cause. Sure enough, once Cyrus is assassinated and the Warriors blamed, our heroes face a midnight odyssey through badlands patrolled by harlequin-painted baseball goons, Amazon/succubi, and overalls-wearing neo-hillbillies.

TIFF ’07: King of the Hill

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Spain, Thriller, TIFF
El Rey de la montaña ***½/**** starring Leonardo Sbaraglia, María Valverde, Pablo Menasanch, Francisco Olmo screenplay by Gonzalo López-Gallego, Javier Gullón directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego by Bill Chambers A political thriller in the sense that it's bound to polarize audiences, King of the Hill (El Rey de la montaña) is, if nothing else, gripping from beginning to end. The effective, switcheroo set-up finds lost souls Quim (Leonardo Sbaraglia) and Bea (María Valverde, who from certain angles suggests Monica Bellucci's little sister) hooking up anonymously in the bathroom of a gas station, after which Bea makes off with Quim's wallet. Giving chase, Quim…

TIFF ’07: Emotional Arithmetic

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF
**/**** starring Susan Sarandon, Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne, Max von Sydow screenplay by Jefferson Lewis, based on the novel by Matt Cohen directed by Paolo Barzman by Bill Chambers A "Never Forget" PSA done up as a Bergmanesque psychodrama, the destined-to-be-retitled Emotional Arithmetic at least has the good sense to co-opt Bergman veteran Max von Sydow, who turns in the kind of twilit performance that functions as both a compendium of and an exquisite gateway to a storied career. Asked point-blank how he managed to survive the Holocaust, a prison sentence, and shock therapy, Sydow, as the noble but senile…

Halloween (2007)

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Malcolm McDowell, Sherri Moon Zombie, Scout Taylor-Compton, William Forsythe
screenplay by Rob Zombie, based on the screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw If Rob Zombie ever decides to direct a horror movie, watch out. To date, up to and including his remake of John Carpenter’s legendary Halloween, he’s presented us a series of family melodramas peppered with modest genre references and exploitation flourishes. His best film, The Devil’s Rejects, is widely misread and underestimated, the most common complaint being that it isn’t scary. It’s a lot like complaining that Ordinary People isn’t scary. But I’d challenge anyone to come up with many more ebullient, honest moments of uplift than the conclusion of that film (set to “Free Bird” of all things), as Zombie’s miscreant clan makes a bid to let their freak flag fly in the middle of the American desert. His pictures are throwbacks to the Seventies in more ways than their relationship to drive-in and grindhouse fare: they’re lovely odes to a sense of frustrated possibilities in a United States suffering the first throes of post-Sixties culture shock. It goes hand-in-hand with the Nixonian westerns littering the popular culture in the new millennium; no surprise to me that this administration–and the attendant feeling of paranoia and cynicism befouling our air–encourages this kind of revisionism, and really, who better than Zombie to helm an update of Carpenter’s seminal slasher?