A Man for All Seasons (1966) [Special Edition] – DVD

February 27, 2007Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Drama, DVD, UK

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Wendy Hiller, Leo McKern, Robert Shaw, Paul Scofield
screenplay by Robert Bolt, based on his play
directed by Fred Zinnemann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Assessing A Man for All Seasons is no easy task. In its favour is the fact that it’s quite sensitively directed: Fred Zinnemann lays on a level of melancholy largely unheard-of in the costume-movie sweepstakes, making the film plenty more affecting than the twilight-of-Old-Hollywood clunker it could very well have become. Alas, Robert Bolt’s screenplay (and presumably his stage play) is resolutely impervious to directorial manipulation–and also completely full of crap. Bolt’s hilariously over-the-top deification of Thomas More (Paul Scofield) and More’s opposition to the divorce of Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) is so emptied of contemporary meaning that you can project anything you like onto it. Such care has been taken to shift the discussion away from political matters and towards “personal ethics” that an atheist like me can groove to More’s rigid refusal to indulge Henry’s transgression over God’s law.

Crank (2007) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 27, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Esoterica

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Dwight Yoakam
written and directed by Neveldine/Taylor

by Walter Chaw Consider the moment where French-fu schlockmeister Jason Statham marches through downtown traffic clad in a hospital smock, black socks, and boots while sporting a giant erection and ask yourself what more you could want from a dumb action movie called Crank. Seriously. A crotch-first fusion of Rudolph Maté's D.O.A. and "Grand Theft Auto", it defines that genre of video game-inspired non-sequitur mayhem indicated by epileptic edits, CGI-aided wire-fu, and John Woo gunplay by offering a high concept (hero is dying of a rare Chinese toxin that can be held in abeyance only with a steady infusion of adrenaline) as its narrative/excuse to exist.

Requiem (2006) – DVD

February 26, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Germany, Horror

***½/**** Image B Sound A- (IFC) B+ (Mongrel)
starring Sandra Hüller, Burghart Klaussner, Imdgen Kogge, Anna Blomeier
screenplay by Bernd Lange
directed by Hans-Christian Schmid

Requiemcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like most pop epics, The Exorcism of Emily Rose was all about being sure. One had to throw down for the concept of the physical manifestation of Satan–any human considerations were swept aside in the affirmation of God's merciless will. And if certain college girls were crushed to pulp (a sentiment which extends to the general expendability of humankind), so be it. Thank goodness, then, that there's a movie like Requiem, based on the same case that inspired The Exorcism of Emily Rose but comparatively merciful in its mission. It wants to salvage the blighted life of an epileptic tossed around from doctor to doctor–one who, once presented with the beginnings of psychosis, had only religion and a mistrust of medicinal practice to fall back on. She's a victim of other people's indecision rather than of the Devil himself.

The Number 23 (2007)

February 23, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen, Logan Lerman, Danny Huston
screenplay by Fernley Phillips
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw The wilted potential part of it reminding a great deal of Ramsey Campbell's The Count of Eleven, the new Jim Carrey vehicle The Number 23 finds professional hack Joel Schumacher returning to his Flatliners camp/schlock phase: a sort of supernatural thriller (sort of) that goes the Secret Window route towards absolute stunning mediocrity. Hardest to watch isn't Schumacher's umpteenth treatise on how to shine any project to a frictionless, dimwit, burlesque sheen, but rather Carrey's betrayal of himself by following Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with a limp Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, a dreadful Fun with Dick and Jane, and now this. It suggests to me a lot of things, most of all the impression that Carrey, despite still wanting at least in part to be taken seriously as an actor, may have lost the critical facility first to avoid Schumacher projects and second to differentiate between high-concept dreck and Charlie Kaufman existential inspiration. Neither mysterious nor enthralling, The Number 23 is ridiculous, not for its complexity, but for its belief in its complexity–not for its Byzantine twists and turns, but for its utter self-delusion. It's READER'S DIGEST: the presumption that people who actually read would prefer to read this truncated, pandering, aggressively-neutered pap.

The Illustrated Man (1969) – DVD

February 22, 2007Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi

Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, Robert Drivas, Don Dubbins
screenplay by Howard B. Kreitsek, based on the book by Ray Bradbury
directed by Jack Smight

Illustratedmancapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man (hereafter The Illustrated Man) lays its cards out on the table right from the start. There's not much going on, just a couple of drifters named Carl (Rod Steiger) and Willie (Robert Drivas) taking a dip in the river, unaware of each other's presence. It should have been fairly simple to communicate this, but director Jack Smight is no simpleton: he throws the cuts at you, struggling to achieve with sweeping helicopter shots and other ephemera an effect he ultimately can't articulate. This pretty much sums up the movie, a series of attempts to look like somebody's working when nobody has any idea why they bothered. Coupled with Steiger's obnoxious persona and Drivas' blankness, The Illustrated Man is largely a hole in the screen that turns Ray Bradbury's gripping anthology of the same name into something sluggish and unpleasant to behold.

Down in the Valley (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 21, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

*/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Edward Norton, Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse, Rory Culkin
written and directed by David Jacobson

Downinthevalleycap

by Walter Chaw Almost worth it for a scene on the set of a western where our deranged fabulist hero Harlan (Edward Norton) finally finds a home, David Jacobson's Down in the Valley is otherwise so much pretentious hoohah waving its indie banner like a parasol. Rather than serve to illustrate a point about form and function à la Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, what Jacobson's film does is strain its affection for (affectation of?) Taxi Driver, to the point of re-enacting the sacred "You talkin' to me?" sequence–to the point of actually perverting Scorsese's satire into your typical avenging-father/straying-daughter intrigue. It's possible of course to boil Travis Bickle's odyssey down to that, but to call Down in the Valley "reductive" is too kind: this is Taxi Driver recast as a protect-your-children-from-bad-dates picture, one that turns its back on the dreamlife of a crocodile in favour of the restoration of familial strata. It fails the courage test–going so far as to subtly pose an anti-Second Amendment suggestion–after failing, more damnably, to rationalize its pilfering of perhaps the definitive yawp in modern American cinema. Shake Down in the Valley hard enough and out falls another produced-by vanity piece for Norton to exercise his blank (as in Miyazaki-forest-sprite blank), squinty-eyed Method for the approval of his rapidly-shrinking circle of admirers. As far as the Norton mystique goes, Ryan Gosling is cheaper and prettier.

My Name is Earl: Season One (2005-2006) – DVD

February 20, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A- Extras B
"Pilot," "Quit Smoking," "Randy's Touchdown," "Faked My Own Death," "Teacher Earl," "Broke Joy's Fancy Figurine," "Stole Beer from a Golfer," "Joy's Wedding," "Cost Dad an Election," "White Lie Christmas," "Barn Burner," "O Karma, Where Art Thou?," "Stole P's HD Cart," "Monkeys in Space," "Something to Live For," "The Professor," "Didn't Pay Taxes," "Dad's Car," "Y2K," "Boogeyman," "Bounty Hunter," "Stole a Badge," "BB," "Number One"

by Ian Pugh I don't know a whole lot about the Buddhist concept of karma, but Earl Hickey knows even less, and I think that's the point. As "My Name is Earl" begins, the titular petty criminal and leech on society (Jason Lee) scratches a winning lotto ticket, whereupon he's immediately struck by a car. While a doped-up Earl convalesces, his cheating wife Joy (Jaime Pressly) seizes the opportunity to divorce him. Flipping through the TV channels from his hospital bed, Earl lands on Carson Daly, who attributes his own success to the most popular understanding of karma: "Do good things and good things happen to you. Do bad things and they come back to haunt you." In the show's first bit of hilarious commentary–one that guides the question of "doing the right thing" (which, in turn, dictates the series as a whole)–celebrity culture gives birth to self-serving pop religion. If Joe Sixpack is taking philosophical lessons from that guy whose primary function was to count down from the number ten…Lord, where did we go wrong?

Man of the Year (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 19, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Robin Williams, Christopher Walken, Laura Linney, Jeff Goldblum
written and directed by Barry Levinson

Manoftheyearcap

by Walter Chaw Notorious dullard Barry Levinson's second try at Wag the Dog, the Robin Williams vehicle Man of the Year is a limp wrist waved weakly at no more pathetic a target than new voting technology. The story, such as it is, involves a late-night political comedian/talk show pundit (in the Jon Stewart mold, I guess, if Jon Stewart were stupid, unfunny, and irritating) named Tom Dobbs (Williams) who carries his antiquated shtick all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue on the back of a faulty computerized voting system. Frail egghead techie Eleanor (Laura Linney, too good for this shit) discovers her company's HAL-like flaw (hardly godlike in her erudition, she puzzles out that the digital voting booths choose winners alphabetically), and then promptly goes on the lam after an inexplicable and out-of-tune assault hays her wires and inspires her to seek out the freshly-minted POTUS-elect to inform him of the error. Meanwhile, Dobbs keeps acting like that asshole Robin Williams, desperately in need of a strong hand at his reins lest he run roughshod over his co-stars, the script, sense, respectability, plausibility, and so on down the line.

The Last Kiss (2006) [Widescreen] + Trust the Man (2006) – DVDs

February 14, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

THE LAST KISS
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras D
starring Zach Braff, Jacinda Barrett, Casey Affleck, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on the screenplay for L'Ultimo Bacio by Gabriele Muccino
directed by Tony Goldwyn

TRUST THE MAN
½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras D
starring Billy Crudup, David Duchovny, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Julianne Moore
written and directed by Bart Freundlich

by Walter Chaw Zach Braff's auto-elevation into the rarefied air of Ed Burnsian self-satisfaction has required a fraction of the smarmcoms, if a meaningful assist from an obscenely-popular TV show that's running on fumes at this point. Garden State is dreadful, of course, swarming with awkward, overwritten, creepy alt-folk montages and pocket epiphanies (just like "Scrubs", albeit with half the rage and exploitation of frailty), but team up former "The Facts of Life" scribe (and Oscar-winning screenwriter) Paul Haggis with instant-brand Braff–he's like sea monkeys: just add grease–for The Last Kiss and discover in the alchemy a more pungent, twice-as-stale vintage of a type of picture that used to be done with grace and wit by people like Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley, cheapened by noxious voice-overs and skeezy dialogues obsessed with the female orgasm without having the honesty to actually show one. What we get instead is the idea that this shit sells to a privileged "indie"-craving hipster demographic oblivious to the fact that "indie" films are as homogenous a ghetto as any other now. (Independent of what? Alternative to what?) There's nothing genuine about these "relationshit" flicks (thanks to blogger John Landis for the term); they're a sloppily-baited hook dangling in a waitlisted stucco bistro.

The Devil’s Rain (1975) – DVD

February 13, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror, Zombie

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, Tom Skerritt, William Shatner
screenplay by James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, Gerald Hopman
directed by Robert Fuest

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Devil's Rain is like a bad song you can't get out of your head. It isn't a successful film, or even a particularly good one, but it's made with sincerity, verve, and an understanding of the horror genre's potential for kinetic filmmaking and potent allegory. Moreover, it isn't a cheat–this isn't just another cheap cash-in on the "Satan" craze of the 1970s. The last thing director Robert Fuest and screenwriters James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, and Gerald Hopman are looking to do is take your money and run. And though this is largely a trend of the mid-to-late-'80s onward, they aren't looking to vindicate their reputations by condescending to the material, either. I actually feel a little protective of The Devil's Rain; its failure is one more of incompetence than of cynicism, and that's really rather reinvigorating in an age where self-consciousness reigns supreme in horror films both good (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) and bad (See No Evil).

Ginger & Fred (1986) – DVD

February 12, 2007Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Italy, West Germany

Ginger and Fred
Ginger e Fred
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Giulietta Masina, Franco Fabrizi, Friedrich von Ledebur
screenplay by Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra and Tullio Pinelli
directed by Federico Fellini

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The idea of Fellini criticizing television for its vulgarity–as he does in Ginger and Fred–is indeed a bit rich: Federico Fellini complaining of vulgarity is rather like Roberto Rossellini complaining of neo-realism. But beneath the surface of this admittedly shallow lament lies the movie's real theme, which is the displacement of artists once their chosen form is rendered obsolete. It's not too hard to see Fellini himself, high-modernist art director that he was, in his music-hall dancer protagonists, who by 1985 have been completely snowed under by seismic shifts in technology and, by extension, entertainment. Slight as the film may be, you can't help feeling a twinge of regret for not only its leads, but also the increasingly-forgotten filmmaker who pulls their strings.

The Up Series [Five Disk Collector’s Edition] – DVD

February 11, 2007Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Documentary, DVD, FFC Must-Own, UK

Mustownby Ian Pugh "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."

So goes the Jesuit maxim, and, as it happens, so begins almost every review you'll find of Michael Apted's "Up" documentary series. Of course, you can't really fault someone for falling back on that warhorse (or this would be a very ironic paragraph indeed), because it's the concept that brought the original television production Seven Up! to life, intended as it was as "a glimpse into Britain's future." That is to say, into the lives of fourteen seven-year-olds, chosen from all walks of life (though mostly from polar opposites of the class divide) and asked about the world, their ambitions, and just generally how they're doing; they've been revisited for the same purpose every seven years hence.

Jesus Camp (2006) – DVD

February 9, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
directed by Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's hard to not be moved by the horrors of Jesus Camp. A record of one Pastor Becky Fischer's far-right Christian summer camp, it's loaded with stuff any compassionate person would decry–usually the cruelty and intimidation of adults, who are often seen scaring children shitless. But even as we may despise these guileless sadists as they reveal themselves to the camera, at some point it all begins to ring hollow. The film has nothing beyond the image of children being bullied while their parents natter on about hateful fundamentalism; perhaps most regrettably, there's no discussion as to why, in the 21st century, 80 million Americans willingly believe in such corrosive nonsense.

Cry-Baby (1990) [Director’s Cut] – DVD

February 7, 2007Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Musical

***½/**** Image A- Sound C+ Extras A+
starring Johnny Depp, Amy Locane, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop
written and directed by John Waters

by Walter Chaw Cry-Baby, John Waters's brilliant, ebullient satire of 1950s teensploitation, finds Johnny Depp and Amy Locane immaculately cast opposite one another as the ne plus ultra "He" and "She" of the Golden Age's doomed-youth pictures. One part Elvis musical calamity, one part queer camp exhibition, it's a cult classic for a reason: The second part of Waters's Hairspray nostalgia trip, Cry-Baby is a jubilant send-up of the lie of atomic-age perfection fixed broadly to the lie of modern sophistication that Waters would confront for the rest of his "legit" career. It's exactly what I imagine a David Lynch rockabilly rebel flick would be like–and indeed, when you get down to it, I don't know whether Lynch and Waters are really all that different.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) – DVD

February 6, 2007Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Fantasy, Romance

**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Robert Montgomery, Claude Rains, Evelyn Keyes, Rita Johnson
screenplay by Sidney Buchman and Seton I. Miller, from the play "Heaven Can Wait" by Harry Segall
directed by Alexander Hall

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Here Comes Mr. Jordan shakes your faith in the idea of Hollywood as Dream Factory. It's a film about a prizefighter (Robert Montgomery, playing Joe Pendleton) meeting an untimely end in a plane crash and having his consciousness transferred into the body of a murdered millionaire. (When his plane takes a nosedive via the magic of a camera off its axis, so, too, do the clouds in the sky.) There's a patrician, Mr. Roarke-ish afterlife overseer–the titular Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains)–and much switcheroo'ing involving bodies and identities and romance; it would take quite an effort for this to be less than light on its feet. But despite it all, the film hits the ground with a thud and sits there without a truly fanciful thought in its head. Not only is the script so impressed with itself that you can hear the writers crack up at every single feeble joke, but director Alexander Hall has also decided to shoot everything in cold, wide master shots that see everything and suggest nothing. It must be the least wondrous fantasy in Tinseltown history.

Sundance ’07: Low and Behold

February 6, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
½*/****starring Barlow Jacobs, Robert Longstreet, Eddie Rousescreenplay by Zack Godshall & Barlow Jacobsdirected by Zack Godshall by Alex Jackson I absolutely despise Zack Godshall's Low and Behold. If there is a just and loving God governing the cosmos it will be the worst movie I see all year; there should be a provision in the Patriot Act ensuring that these people never receive the funding to make another film. Turner Stull (co-writer Barlow Jacobs) has arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans to take a job as an insurance claims adjuster that his crude Uncle "Stully" has set up for him. Turner…

Sundance ’07: Year of the Fish

February 6, 2007Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Alex Jackson, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Romance, Sundance
**/****starring Tsai Chin, Randall Duk Kim, Ken Leung, An Nguyenwritten and directed by David Kaplan by Alex Jackson I'm not quite sure why David Kaplan's Year of the Fish doesn't work, but I think it might have something to do with a fundamentally tainted central concept: the Cinderella story retold with a Chinese girl being sold into slavery in New York's Chinatown district. Cinderella is Ye Xian (An Nguyen), which was Cinderella's real name in the original Chinese folktale published a good 800 years before the better-known Perrault version. Xian must reimburse her benefactor for the cost of her room,…

Sundance ’07: The Go-Getter

February 5, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

Sundancegetter**½/****
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Zooey Deschanel, Jena Malone, Judy Greer
written and directed by Martin Hynes

by Alex Jackson Two columns of note recently circulated in the blogosphere. The first was Richard Corliss's "The Trouble with Sundance," in which Corliss complains that Sundance movies have become formulaic and predictable, effectively snuffing out the fresh, original voices the festival was supposed to be cultivating. The second article was a partial rebuttal by David Bordwell that sheds light on the phenomenon of what he calls "Indie Guignol": independent filmmakers trying to outdo one another in sensationalistic brutality. Compared to entries in the "Sundance genre," i.e., films typically involving dysfunctional families that strive to reconnect, oftentimes through road trips (the Oscar-nominated Little Miss Sunshine would be considered prototypical), these pictures are not mainstream, but they're considered by critics to have more artistic merit. And yet, particularly because we can easily recognize the phenomenon, it's losing its legitimacy as art. "Very often the predictable nonconformist is just as orthodox as the conformist," Bordwell writes. I thought about this while watching Martin Hynes's The Go-Getter, a film that subtly breaks away from Indie Guignol by embracing the possibly more passé Sundance genre. After Fido, Teeth, We Are The Strange, Hounddog, Strange Culture, and Low and Behold, all decidedly non-commercial films that take lots of chances and fail miserably, I have to admit I was happy to see something that gave me a few simple guiltless pleasures. Yes, Sundance films have become their own genre, but what the fuck is wrong with genre, anyway? Are you really a movie lover if you can't enjoy a solid but generic horror film, war film, noir, romantic comedy, western, and/or musical?

Sundance ’07: Strange Culture

February 5, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
*/****starring Thomas Jay Ryan, Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyotewritten and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson by Alex Jackson On May 11, 2004, artist and college professor Steve Kurtz called 911 to report the death of his wife Hope by heart failure. When medics arrived, they saw his art supplies and called the FBI: in preparing an installation that would let patrons test whether food had been genetically modified, Kurtz had ordered biological materials over the Internet. The feds detained Kurtz as a suspected terrorist and confiscated his equipment. After a grand jury rejected the charges of terrorism, Uncle Sam tried to…

Sundance ’07: VHS – Kahloucha

February 5, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance, Tunisia
**/****directed by Nejib Belkadhi by Alex Jackson There may very well be a Pauline Kael review for every occasion. For VHS - Kahloucha, it's her dismissal of Francois Truffaut's Day for Night: "[It's] a movie for the movie-struck, the essentially naïve--those who would rather see a movie, any movie (a bad one, a stupid one, or an evanescent, sweet-but-dry little wafer of a movie like this one), than do anything else." Ayup, that about covers it. This documentary portrait of amateur Tunisian filmmaker Moncef Kahloucha never makes the mistake of condescending to its subject, but it never quite elucidates why…