Mission: Impossible III (2006)

May 5, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Espionage, Germany, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

*/****
starring Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, Billy Crudup
screenplay by Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci & J.J. Abrams
directed by J.J. Abrams

Mi3by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. That classic combination of a film that doesn't make any sense with one that doesn't inspire anyone to invest an iota of emotion in giving a crap, J.J. Abrams's Mission: Impossible III (hereafter M:i:III) isn't convoluted like the first two instalments so much as it's just incoherent and loud. It's the camera-in-a blender-school of action filmmaking: There's so little understanding of spatial relationships that the whole thing plays like that Naked Gun gag where the gunfight is taking place between two people within arm's reach of one another. An extended heist sequence set in Vatican City, for instance, features the four members of IMF ("Impossible Mission Force") hotshot Ethan Hunt's (Tom Cruise) team (Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and the requisite hot Asian chick (Maggie Q)) running around in completely anonymous locations, sticking doodads to walls, and confirming to one another that they're "ready" and "in place." But without knowledge of their plan, their location (respective to one another and their goal, whatever that might be), their peril, or the stakes, you're left with four people doing something for some reason, necessitating our willingness to play along with the charade that we know who these people are, what their goal is, and why we should care. Consider a helicopter chase through a wind farm, too, and the many lovely visuals that such an enticing premise suggests–then look to the end-product, which is a lot of tight shots of helicopters in the middle of the night, parts of giant windmills, a bad soundtrack, and multiple decibel screaming about "incoming" and "they've got a lock on us." Who does? And where are they going on that wind farm? And why does the promise of an instrument-factory explosion induce yawns?

The Champ (1931) – DVD

May 1, 2006Posted in1930s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Sports

*/**** Image B Sound C Extras C
starring Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Irene Rich, Rosco Ates
screenplay by Francis Marion and Leonard Praskins
directed by King Vidor

by Walter Chaw So dated now as to seem nigh prehistoric, King Vidor's silent era-bound The Champ is broad melodrama of the underdog-uplift/precocious-kid variety, and though it's sorely tempting to condescend to it by placing it within its historical context, watching it now is like getting a screw drilled into your forehead. Doing road work with his lovable boy Dink (Jackie Cooper, more than a marionette, less than a creature of flesh and blood), The Champ (Wallace Beery) is a cartoon of a lush and a punch-drunk boxer who makes silly shadow-boxing gestures in long, unbroken takes, requiring Beery to ad-lib business that segues uneasily late in the film when the same Beery shtick must carry pathos. We can't think that a Vaudevillian's conception of a retarded drunk and a compulsive gambler is adorable and then reorient ourselves into thinking he's feeble without confronting the same conundrum the film itself presents a modern viewer. Either The Champ is fabulous–for a picture made in 1931, that is–or it's only accessible for a theoretical, contemporaneous audience, lacing any ascriptions of quality with that one major caveat and thus rendering them exactly as useless as that kind of equivocation always is.

United 93 (2006)

April 28, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Lewis Alsamari, JJ Johnson, Trish Gates, Polly Adams
written and directed by Paul Greengrass

United93by Walter Chaw I guess when you talk about a movie like Paul Greengrass's United 93, you have to talk about the propriety of the project: Whether death, fear, and suffering at its most obscene is something we should try to know or gratefully shield ourselves from. Should 9/11 already be an Oprah special and a national holiday? It's an essential question, a defining one–and on either side of the question's divide, you'll find one person who thinks we should see our soldiers' caskets draped in American flags and another who feels that seeing war casualties is somehow bad for morale or, if our fearless leaders are to be believed, somehow unpatriotic. Ignorance is as blissful now as it ever was–it's one aphorism the film honours. Another is that you reap what you sow: The belief that our civil liberties, for which we eagerly fight and die to protect on foreign soil, are the first things we seem to sacrifice in times of peril (including a vocal rabble wondering if we're "ready" for a 9/11 film), is far stickier when the proposition before us is that Islamic extremists don't like us because of that which defines us as Americans. ("They hate our freedom" is the party line.) So when our government begins to infringe on our personal freedom after a meticulously organized and coordinated terrorist attack took us completely unawares (I still recall with a shudder how then-Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice claimed that no one could have imagined it) more than four years ago, that means–more than over twenty-one hundred military dead (and counting) does–that we've already lost.

RV (2006)

April 28, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Germany, Theatrical, UK

½*/****
starring Robin Williams, Jeff Daniels, Cheryl Hines, Kristin Chenowith
screenplay by Geoff Rodkey
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

Rvby Walter Chaw Shit, feral raccoons, hillbillies, tits, white-boy Ebonics, more shit, and oodles of forced sentimentality to propel the septic stew down our collective throat as we strain towards it, baby bird-like. Or so the theory goes. In the interest of complete disclosure, the reason Barry Sonnenfeld's excrescent RV dodged a zero-star rating from me is that I actually laughed at a perversely perfect sewage geyser. It's one thing when you're all about the slapstick gross-out gag; another when, National Lampoon's Vacation-style (the film that, structurally, RV, Johnson Family Vacation, Are We There Yet?, and so on most resemble), your trip across the middle of the United States yields insights into the caste and racial strata of our expansive country. Then you have a feckless relic like this that pulls its punches even in regards to the bigotry it directs at rednecks. There's nothing to hold onto in RV, and it tries so hard to please that there's not much joy in taking it down. It's like kicking a puppy, with the puppy trying to lick your boot as you do it.

Quintet (1979) [Robert Altman Collection] – DVD

April 27, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Robert Altman, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Paul Newman, Bibi Andersson, Fernando Rey, Vittorio Gassman
screenplay by Frank Barhydt & Robert Altman and Patricia Resnick
directed by Robert Altman

Robertaltmanquintetcapby Bill Chambers Set during another Ice Age (in a featurette on the DVD, co-writer/director Robert Altman makes the even loopier suggestion that the action takes place on another planet, perhaps to either demonstrate what little use he has for prologue or account for a total absence of people of colour), Quintet stars Paul Newman–never particularly well-matched with the iconoclasts–as Essex, a seal hunter trekking across the frozen tundra with pregnant wife Vivia (Brigitte Fossey) in search of his brother Francha (Tom Hill), who lives in candlelit ruins that now constitute a metropolis. Francha greets Essex by inviting him to play Quintet, a glyphic board game that has developed a religious following in these joyless times (some of Quintet's adjudicators have even adopted the names of patron saints, and they all wear makeshift Tudor caps), and when Essex goes off to fetch firewood, Altman pulls a Psycho and kills off every member of his party. It turns out that latter-day Louis XIV Grigor (Fernando Rey) has turned this dystopia into a human Quintet board by orchestrating the deaths of losing players. For largely nebulous reasons, Essex assumes the identity of Francha's assassin and joins a high-stakes tournie; Grigor sees through this ruse but decides to humour him, if only because to do otherwise would be unsportsmanlike.

Mae West: The Glamour Collection [The Franchise Collection] – DVD

April 27, 2006Posted in1930s, 1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Musical, Romance, Western

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT (1932)
*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring George Raft, Constance Cummings, Wynne Gibson, Mae West
screenplay by Vincent Lawrence and Kathryn Scola, based on the novel Single Night by Louis Bromfield
directed by Archie Mayo

I'M NO ANGEL (1933)
***½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Mae West, Cary Grant, Gregory Ratoff, Edward Arnold
screenplay by Mae West
directed by Wesley Ruggles

GOIN' TO TOWN (1935)
***/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Mae West, Paul Cavanagh, Gilbert Emery, Marjorie Gateson
screenplay by Mae West
directed by Alexander Hall

GO WEST YOUNG MAN (1936)
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Mae West, Warren William, Randolph Scott, Alice Brady
screenplay by Mae West, based on the play Personal Appearance by Lawrence Riley
directed by Henry Hathaway

MY LITTLE CHICKADEE (1940)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Mae West, W.C. Fields, Joseph Calleia, Dick Foran
screenplay by Mae West & W.C. Fields
directed by Edward F. Cline

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Flower Belle Lee reads some words off a school blackboard: "'I am a good boy. I am a good man. I am a good girl.' What is this, propaganda?" Thusly does My Little Chickadee sum up the appeal of its female star, Mae West, who invited all of us (but mostly women) to reject the nice behaviour we learned in school and chart a course based on glory and gratification. You can keep your Bette Davises and your Katharine Hepburns, so often punished for their lively behaviour or pushed into the arms of some man; rest assured that men found their way into West's arms and not the other way around. Certain proto-feminist elements are inescapable: long before Laura Mulvey was a gleam in her mother's eye, West would dare to return the male gaze and demand a sexual appetite equal to, if not exceeding, the men bound to use it against her in a double standard. There was only one standard in West's world, and she set it.

Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Sixth Season (2002-2003) – DVD

April 26, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Teen, Television

Image B Sound B+ Commentary A-
"The Kids Are Alright," "The Song Remains the Same," "The Importance of Not Being Too Earnest," Instant Karma!," "The Imposters," "Living Dead Girl," "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell," "Spiderwebs," "Everything Put Together Falls Apart," "Merry Mayhem," "Day Out of Days," "All the Right Moves," "Rock Bottom," "Clean and Sober," "Castaways," "That Was Then," "Sex and Violence," "Love Bites," "Lovelines," "Catch-22," "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road," "Joey Potter and the Capeside Redemption," "All Good Things… …Must Come to an End"

by Bill Chambers It's been three years since "Dawson's Creek" left the airwaves, and a side-effect of revisiting the final, wistful season of the show–in which the characters are constantly tabulating five years' worth of individual progress (or lack thereof)–is the urge to subject its core ensemble to a mental game of "Where Are They Now?". Newly-minted Oscar nominee Michelle Williams (a.k.a. Jen Lindley), whose revisionist contempt for the series manifested itself while she was doing press for Brokeback Mountain, has carved out a niche for herself as the muse of indie filmmakers, while Katie Holmes (Joey Potter) has spent the better part of the last nine months promoting the first blockbuster of her career (Batman Begins) and living out a real-life Rosemary's Baby. As for the dudes, James Van Der Beek (Dawson Leery) and Joshua Jackson (Pacey Witter), they've had a great deal more difficulty hitting their stride–which makes a certain amount of sense, given the program's gradual transformation into a distaff version of itself. Call it "Joey's Creek".

Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) – DVD

April 25, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan

*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki (American adaptation by Cindy Davis Hewitt & Donald H. Hewitt), based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones
directed by Hayao Miyazaki

Howlsmovingcastlecap

by Walter Chaw I've never liked it much when the Japanese are drawn to Victoriana, finding parallels as they sometimes seem to between that reserved, sexually-repressive culture and their own, because it most often results in garbage like Katsuhiro Ôtomo's exhausting Steamboy and now master Hayao Miyazaki's disappointing Howl's Moving Castle. Slow, not terribly interested in lore or internal logic, and fatally hamstrung by the choice of actors like Billy Crystal and a zombified Emily Mortimer to voice its American dub, it's a regression for Miyazaki from his last two films (Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away) in almost every sense, starting with his decision to have a lonely young woman as the central character in place of the prepubescent little girls front and centre in most of his masterpieces (the last two films, Kiki's Delivery Service, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and My Neighbor Totoro) and ending with a gross simplification of his usually complex themes of confidence and actualization into a colourless, flavourless drone about the hard-to-dispute badness of war.

Rescue Me: The Complete Second Season (2005) – DVD

April 24, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A Extras C
"Voicemail," "Harmony," "Balls," "Twat," "Sensitivity," "Reunion," "Shame," "Believe," "Rebirth," "Brains," "Bitch," "Happy," "Justice"

by Walter Chaw If we proceed from the premise that the first season of FX's firefighter series "Rescue Me" is an overt metaphor for the reconfiguration of society post-9/11 along tribal/machismo lines, the second season sees the rules established, leaving only the playing-out of über-civilization's system of justice. It's post-apocalyptic in the same manner as Walter Hill's The Warriors: a diary of urban demolition and the erosion of decorum; the crude, reductive barbarism of its survivors is worn as a badge of honour. They're martyrs in uniform flying the banner of the underpaid and overworked–credit the series for acknowledging their position on the cross a time or two through the firefighter's natural archenemy, the bulls. The world as we knew it ended one day, and from its ashes rose cowboys, cowboy crusades, and a "bring it on" attitude towards loss of life and the dealing of death. If the show gets progressively more unpleasant and hard to justify, it also charts the same arc in our culture and society. And it makes perfect sense in this way (if in no other) that Season Two's cliffhanger revolves around the senseless death of a child enlisted in a war not of his making and certainly beyond his comprehension.

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005) – DVD

April 24, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, Laura Dern, Trevor Morgan
screenplay by Jane Anderson, based on the novel by Terry Ryan
directed by Jane Anderson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Writer-director Jane Anderson says of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio in her DVD commentary, “There are no villains in this film.” This is a bit of a feat considering that said film is about real-life Evelyn Ryan (Julianne Moore), whose husband Kelly (Woody Harrelson) was a chronic, self-piteous alcoholic; so disastrous was his handling of the family finances that Evelyn was forced to keep their ten-child brood together by entering jingle-writing contests. But instead of painting Kelly as a monster, the film shows him to be merely a broken and disappointed man as confused by his assigned role of patriarch and provider as he is about the accident that claimed his singing career. Of course, it’s just as pointed in its reclamation of the stifled talents of its titular prizewinner, detailing how she managed to become a breadwinner and a commercial poet when her assigned role was to keep her head down and go unnoticed. Everybody may lose in this scenario, but Anderson is certain that the heart’s desire bursts through ironclad roles.

The New World (2005) – DVD

April 23, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, Q'Orianka Kilcher
written and directed by Terrence Malick

Mustownby Walter Chaw Terrence Malick opens The New World with "come spirit, help us," invoking the muse before embarking on a spoken history part rapturous, part hallucinogenic, all speculative, reverent, and sanctified hearsay. Malick is the post-modern American epic poet of the division ploughed through the middle of America, telling our history with one voice, painting it in golden shades of romance and poesy. It's the only viable approach to the Captain John Smith/Pocahontas story in a minefield of debris strewn by not only our Western genre tradition, but also our newer guilt at how American Indians have been (and continue to be) portrayed in our culture: the most bestial, savage notions of the Natural have come around to their personification as an unsullied, Edenic embodiment of an impossibly harmonious nature. It's an organic progression from bigotry to paternalism, and Malick charts these dangerous waters with the audacity of an artist well and truly in the centre of his craft. He makes the doomed love between Smith and the much younger Pocahontas function as a metaphor for the decimation of the Native American population–and in so doing suggests the possibility that all human interaction can be analyzed along the lines of love and misunderstanding. Routinely described as inscrutable or remote, Malick's The New World presents history as something as simple as two people who come together, fall in love, and betray one another because their cultures are too different, too intolerant, to coexist with one another. It's history as a progression of human tragedy.

Whisper of the Heart (1995) – DVD

April 20, 2006Posted in1990s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Japan, Music, Romance

***/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki
directed by Yoshifumi Kondo

by Walter Chaw Three years after directing Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki-scripted Whisper of the Heart, and before he was able to complete a second picture for the venerable Japanese institution, ace animator and Miyazaki protégé Yoshifumi Kondo passed away of an aneurysm at the age of 47. Knowledge of Kondo's fate colours the already wistful Whisper of the Heart with another layer of blue (especially if you're a fan of Kondo's behind-the-scenes work on landmark anime like Grave of the Fireflies and Princess Mononoke), but it doesn't completely rescue its remarkable humanity from frequent descents into culturally-alien specificity. The obsession with reworking John Denver's hilljack schmaltz classic "Country Road" into an un-ironic ode to the "concrete roads" of the picture's Tokyo-bound little girl protagonist (Shizuku (Youko Honna)), for instance, almost by itself renders Whisper of the Heart a Hello Kitty! for that particular brand of Japanese, Yank-ophile, cross-eyed badger shit. It's a better film if you're Japanese–kind of an amazing thing to say, I know, but the moments that don't reconstitute American "popular" culture through a Nipponese filter manage a fair-to-amazing job of evoking the overwhelming rush of first love. Shame, then, that John Denver appears at regular intervals to remind us of how peculiar a beast cultural diffusion can be.

The Tenants (2006) – DVD

April 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Romance, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Dylan McDermott, Snoop Dogg, Rose Byrne, Seymour Cassel
screenplay by David Diamond, based on the novel by Bernard Malamud
directed by Danny Green

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Parts of The Tenants are very good indeed. Most of them involve the live-wire presence of Snoop Dogg, who, as an angry black writer named Willie Spearmint, acts as conscience/spur/romantic rival to Jewish novelist Harry Lesser (Dylan McDermott). While Snoop doesn't quite convince as a product of the film's '70s milieu, he's right on the money as a resentful, easily-provoked hard case seeking humiliating assistance from Lesser. Every time he has to flip-flop on some bit of respect or contempt for the cringing whitey, he shoots the movie straight through the ceiling–so much so that The Tenants often seems to have more to it than it actually does. As it stands, the film doesn't know what to do with source novelist Bernard Malamud's mash-up between a dithering Jew and a motor-mouthed black with nothing in common except their oblivious monomania for writing.

High Anxiety (1977) – DVD

April 17, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Mystery, Satire, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman
screenplay by Mel Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy DeLuca, Barry Levinson
directed by Mel Brooks

Melhighanxietycapby Bill Chambers There are three clever sight gags in Mel Brooks's disingenuous love letter to Alfred Hitchcock High Anxiety, all of which poke fun at Hitchcock's invasive camera. As far as I can tell, the remaining laughs have no real precedent in the Master's work, while riffs on signature moments from Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds elicit nary a titter. (It doesn't help that filmmakers straight-faced and tongue-in-cheek alike had plundered those pictures long before Brooks came along; the movie was destined to be impotent in a Brian DePalma world.) Choosing the misbegotten Spellbound, oddly, as its jumping-off point, High Anxiety stars Brooks as acrophobic Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke, the new Chief of Staff at "The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous." After stumbling upon some corrupt bookkeeping, Thorndyke is hustled off to a psychiatric convention by the scheming Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman, perhaps doing Rebecca's Mrs. Danvers) and her S&M-craving toady Dr. Charles Montague (Harvey Korman), where he meets the requisite blonde bombshell (Madeline Kahn) and becomes a murder suspect.

Wet Asphalt (1958) – DVD

April 12, 2006Posted in1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller, West Germany, ZERO STARS

Nasser Asphalt
ZERO STARS/**** Image D+ Sound C-
starring Horst Buccholz, Martin Held, Maria Perschv, Gert Frobe
screenplay by Will Tremper
directed by Frank Wisbar

by Walter Chaw Unbearably padded with stock footage and stilted segues around the alleged intrigue of newspaper ethics, Frank Wisbar's abominable Wet Asphalt might discover contemporary relevance for the conceit that a lie about war becomes the biggest story in the world–but probably only if you're so blinded by rage that the picture's shortcomings are secondary. Directed by the obscure Frank Wisbar and starring the recalcitrant punk (Horst Buchholz) from The Magnificent Seven and One, Two, Three, the film follows the trials of a ghost-written young reporter who gets his name attached to a bit of nonsense about Germans living underground after the war. Maybe it's an offshoot of the apocryphal tales of Japanese soldiers crawling out of the Pacific bush years after VJ-Day; more likely, it's the product of a belief that cheapo genre horseshit like this would earn its investment back before people got wise and stayed away in droves. Oh, and there's also some claptrap revolving around a perfunctory love story with wallpaper Bettina (Maria Perschy), to say nothing of the sitting room moralizations with smarmy boss Cesar (Martin Held).

Edward Scissorhands (1990) [Anniversary Edition] – DVD

April 11, 2006Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, Fantasy, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder, Dianne Wiest, Anthony Michael Hall
screenplay by Caroline Thompson
directed by Tim Burton

Edwardscissorhandscap

by Walter Chaw Edward (Johnny Depp), all of Edward Gorey blacks and angles, is the product of a variation on the Frankenstein myth, his mad scientist creator (Vincent Price) dying before he can replace Edward's scissor-hands with wax appendages. Marooned at a child's emotional development, he's thus unburdened by the sort of rage for usurpation of Mary Shelly's creation; when he kills his "father" by neither accident nor design, find in Edward an adolescent's existential angst in an Oedipal split interrupted at the moment he was to be given the instruments of his ascension into "humanity" by his creator. The irony of his condition is expressed by the Stan Winston-designed shears with which he's burdened, lost on the edges of civilization (Tim Burton's twisted view of suburbia), cutting out articles from scavenged magazines and junk mail flyers and arranging them in a collage that includes a story about a boy without eyes, an ad for the kind of prefab-furniture favoured by Burton's suburbanites, and a Madonna-and-child. Our introduction to Edward, facilitated by chirpy Avon sales lady and housewife Peg (Dianne Wiest), is the film's signature set-piece, allowing as it does this twisted, tragic figure to emerge as both effrontery and holy effigy. For Burton, Edward glows with the romance of an eternal child–Peter Pan in love with a memory of Wendy for eternity, adrift with the Lost Boys and working with ice.

C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) – DVD

April 10, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Morocco

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras N/A
starring Michel Côté, Marc-André Grondin, Danielle Proulx, Pierre-Luc Brillant
written and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The emotional epic that Canada deserves but never gets has finally arrived. There are no finger-wagging lessons here, no sluggish trudges through masochistic misery, no pointless abstractions hammered home a few too many times–only the sense that, despite the constant, agonizing gauntlet one runs in a lifetime, it's all worth it in the long, ecstatic view. C.R.A.Z.Y. isn't interested in wallowing in misery, though its narrative has plenty of that: instead, it's cheerleading the endless struggle to get what you need, and its refusal to acquiesce or admit defeat makes it a special movie. That it comes from Quebec is entirely predictable (although their last crossover success, The Barbarian Invasions, was about a suicide); what isn't predictable is how charged, how unpretentious, and how light on its feet it is even for Canada's provincial hotbed of film talent. C.R.A.Z.Y. suggests we might be good for something other than fictional defeat and documentaries on Paul Anka.

Friends with Money (2006)

April 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand
written and directed by Nicole Holofcener

Friendswithmoneyby Walter Chaw Nicole Holofcener follows her marginal success Lovely and Amazing with the equally marginal failure Friends with Money, presenting a series of interpersonal apocalypses as awkward dinner parties and scenes made unwisely at Old Navy by super-successful fashion designers. It's not subtle in its broad strokes, and once the layers of Angelino self-mortification and obfuscation are plumbed, it's not subtle in its character strokes, either. What it is is a caesura in the middle of those pictures that don't care about their characters that's only interested in its characters–a film that might be shorthanded as "European" in that nothing much happens as words and glances billow in carefully ventriloquited clouds. It's about how people talk to one another among friends and then lover/confidants on the drive home, and as such it provides a clearer look at conversation in any single exchange than does the whole of Crash. Friends with Money is a comparison of our intimate with our open lives; in the comparison, it suggests a third persona, an interiority–though not entirely successfully, making it only as good, really, as the conversation that it may itself inspire on the ride home.

Derailed (2005) [Widescreen Edition (Unrated)] – DVD

April 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Clive Owen, Jennifer Aniston, Vincent Cassel, Melissa George
screenplay by Stuart Beattie
directed by Mikael Håfström

Derailed2005capby Walter Chaw Okay, here's the deal: if I tell you that Derailed has a big plot twist, you're going to figure it out from the trailers; and if I don't, you're going to figure it out at around the ten-minute mark–it's just that stupid. So I'm simply going to say that Jennifer Aniston is like an old studio starlet trying on her ill-fitting acting shoes in a thriller that wants to turn her into a bad girl done wrong but quails at every moment of truth. The ultimate effect of her "metamorphosis" from America's sweetheart is the uncomfortable feeling that you just saw Donna Reed (or your best friend's mom) in an S&M outfit. It makes the already-spoiled rape scene (unless ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY is an underground publication nowadays) a non-event because as you're watching it, tickling at the back of your head is the knowledge that they'd never rape Rachel in a mainstream middlebrow thriller (even if professional creep Vincent Cassel is the rapist). More, because the whole thing unfolds from the point of view of a very groggy paramour Charles (Clive Owen), the rape becomes something that's only very inconvenient for our married white male adulterer. It's despicable is what it is–compounded by a lie later on and ultimately invalidated by our tired twist, which finds at the end our Charles the spitting image of Travis Bickle but without any trace of irony.

Adam & Steve (2006)

April 5, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, Music, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Craig Chester, Malcolm Gets, Parker Posey, Chris Kattan
written and directed by Craig Chester

Adamandsteveby Travis Mackenzie Hoover This site's editor Bill and I were on the phone one night, and we came up with a pleasant dream: What if a movie's stereotypical gay character–the one who gets all the bitchy repartee–actually wasn't funny? Be careful what you wish for: Adam & Steve is all stereotypes, all the time, and none of them are remotely funny. Only not by design, like in our fantasy–it's meant to be hilarious, meaning that you die of embarrassment on behalf of everyone involved. Although the film is supposed to be about a gay romance, its real theme is failure, and it's so terrified to seem like anything less than an outrageous good time that it tries too hard. (That the film's lone comedienne generally performs to crickets pretty much sums up the self-flagellant tone of the whole enterprise.) Hostile, ugly, and generally unpleasant to endure, it engenders fear intense enough to snuff out whatever lightness it might have had.