2001 Maniacs (2006) – DVD

2001 Maniacs (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Horror

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Robert Englund, Lin Shaye, Giuseppe Andrews, Travis Tritt
screenplay by Chris Kobin and Tim Sullivan
directed by Tim Sullivan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Carol Clover has a lot to answer for. Prior to the advent of her Men, Women, and Chain Saws, slasher films were unambiguously misogynist, and hillbilly horror was unambiguously anti-South. Now the converse is stridently true, failing to take into account the infinitesimal cross-identifications that make both readings possible. 2001 Maniacs is interesting as a film that simultaneously mocks and sympathizes with ruthless killers from the destroyed South–it at once punishes and identifies with its Yankee victims, thwarting a straight-ahead reading. Its genre is rather like Daniel Auteuil in Caché: aware that there might be some crime in the past, but unable to deal with it once confronted with it. Alas, 2001 Maniacs is not interesting on any other level. The film is an 87-minute issue of FANGORIA, complete with bad puns and hard-R violence and distended by some smarmy shots at the characters who might be expected to want revenge.

Harry and Tonto (1974) – DVD

Harry and Tonto (1974) – DVD

Posted in1970s, 2006, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Commentary B+
starring Art Carney, Ellen Burstyn, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Larry Hagman
screenplay by Paul Mazursky and Josh Greenfeld
directed by Paul Mazursky

by Alex Jackson I complain a lot about film criticism being reduced to archaeology, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite as impenetrable along these lines as Paul Mazursky’s 1974 sleeper Harry and Tonto. It never coheres, it never makes its point, and it never justifies its existence. You know Mr. Bernstein’s anecdote about the girl in the white dress in Citizen Kane, or Marge Gunderson’s drink with her old high school chum in Fargo–those nice little throwaway moments that haven’t much to do with the actual movie? In Harry and Tonto, Mazursky gets rid of the “actual movie” and gives us nothing but throwaway moments. Yeah, it’s that kind of film.

Scary Movie 4 (2006) [Unrated & Uncensored] – DVD

Scary Movie 4 (2006) [Unrated & Uncensored] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Satire

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Craig Bierko, Bill Pullman
screenplay by Craig Mazin & Jim Abrahams & Pat Proft
directed by David Zucker

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The problem with Scary Movie 4 isn’t that the jokes are cheap–indeed, we’d be disappointed if they weren’t. No, the problem is that the film has no real point of view beyond a) black people are funny; b) gay people are funny; c) lascivious black women are hilarious; and d) recent horror movies fit together (however uneasily). The torrent of hit-or-miss gags is perhaps par for the course, but these bits aren’t held together by some overarching idea or sensibility–there’s no satire of current horror titles, just a parade titles and the lazy ethnic/sexual/bathroom humour that is this sort of movie’s bread and butter. Which probably won’t mean squat to the people who’ve made the series a cash cow, but anyone looking for genuine comedy (as opposed to listless shtick) is advised to look elsewhere.

Equinox [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

Equinox [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

Posted in1960s, 1970s, 2006, Action, Adventure, DVD, Esoterica, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, The Criterion Collection

THE EQUINOX …A JOURNEY INTO THE SUPERNATURAL (1967)
***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Skip Shimer, Barbara Hewitt, Frank Boers, Jr., Robin Snider
screenplay by Mark Thomas McGee
directed by Mark Thomas McGee & Dennis Muren

EQUINOX (1970)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Edward Connell, Barbara Hewitt, Frank Boers jr., Robin Christopher
written and directed by Jack Woods

by Walter Chaw Four teens on a double-date venture into the hills around California in search of an old, dotty professor, only to learn that the crazy old bat’s unleashed the spawn of Hell with a book written by the devil. When producer Jack Harris bought The Equinox …A Journey Into the Supernatural (hereafter The Equinox) and hired B-hack Jack Woods to partially rewrite and reshoot it three years after its completion, he would insert a new character in evil, unibrowed park ranger Asmodeus (Woods), thus imposing a weird element of pervy grope cinema while handily washing away in a wave of lowbrow mediocrity most of what makes The Equinox so exceptional. Comparing the two versions (the revamp’s title streamlined to Equinox) is an example of the difference between gifted amateurs pursuing a passion and slick exploitation artists applying their own interpretations (this time the burgeoning drive-in market) of where they might grab the quickest buck. For The Equinox to endure as an underground classic despite its co-optation is something like The Magnificent Ambersons maintaining its masterpiece status despite the non-existence of Welles’s original cut. It’s quite a relief, in other words, that Dennis Muren’s The Equinox has survived for comparison’s sake.

Only Human (2004) + House of Sand (2005)

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, Comedy, Drama, Portugal, Romance, Spain, Theatrical, UK

Seres queridos
**/****
starring Guillermo Toledo, Marián Aguilera, María Botto, Fernando Ramallo
written and directed by Dominic Harari & Teresa Pelegri

Casa de Areia
***½/****
starring Fernanda Montenegro, Fernanda Torres, Ruy Guerra, Seu Jorge
screenplay by Elena Soárez
directed by Andrucha Waddington

by Walter Chaw Married hyphenates Dominic Harari and Teresi Pelegri craft a screwball comedy (which has the audacity to end with the final line of Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot) about what happens when good Jewish girl Leni (Marián Aguilera) brings Palestinian nebbish boyfriend Rafi (Guillermo Toledo) home to meet her My Big Fat Greek Wedding ethnic cartoon family. There’s the blind, rifle-toting old fossil fond of recounting his days of potting Arabs along the Gaza strip; the short, hysterical Jewish mother; the slutty older sister who only fucks anything with a dick because mama loved little sister more; the younger brother who’s newly fanatical about the Koran and the observance of the Jewish Sabbath; and the niece who’s a monster because, well, who wouldn’t be in that household? Discomfort turns into farce when Rafi drops a cube of frozen soup out a window, killing someone who might be Leni’s father (said father later mistaking a black prostitute for Leni’s mother)–this event also leading to the discovery that Leni’s mother has never had an orgasm and the tableaux homorte where grandpa is caught groping Rafi during a trip to the loo.

Keane (2005) – DVD

Keane (2005) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image B- Sound A Extras A
starring Damian Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Amy Ryan
written and directed by Lodge Kerrigan

by Walter Chaw Lodge Kerrigan’s astounding Keane deals not only with madness and the loss of a child but also with our preconceptions of the cold universe and, shaving it precisely, our expectations for the kinds of cold comfort we expect film to provide. It’s wrong to call it experimental, because the decision to shoot in four-minute takes doesn’t announce itself as a gimmick as much as it settles comfortably into a groove alternating small explosions and lulls laced with anticipation. A lot of movies pay lip service to carving space for their actors to find their way around difficult characters and emotionally taxing scenes–Keane actually does it. It’s about the belief that there are no certainties in life, and it understands that trusting–and loving–in a world so swiftly lurching is akin to a kind of insanity. When we meet William Keane (Damian Lewis), as he’s reeling around the Port Authority Bus Terminal looking for his daughter, it takes us a few minutes to realize that his daughter (if he’s ever even had a daughter) has been missing for a year and that his desperate attempts to find a witness to her abduction in the river of passers-by is spiced by a little too much stale urgency. Keane might be crazy. He also has good reason to be.

The Descent (2005)

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder
written and directed by Neil Marshall

by Walter Chaw Beginning in the same way as countless other genre pictures (the city folks go to a cabin and have boring, perfunctory, character-defining chatter), Neil Marshall’s often-terrifying, often-brilliant The Descent subsequently manages to describe for long stretches a complicated, Jungian labyrinth of regret and shadow-projections and doubling through dank explorations of a vaginal, womb-like metaphor for the subconscious. There’s a moment where our avatar, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), emerges from a gore bath and stands reborn into the very avenging feminist totem of Carrie post-prom: it’s just one of three “births” Sarah endures (four if you count a dream sequence in a hospital early on), the last of which stands in tribute to the final sting of Carrie. It’s possible, in fact, to split the film into quarters according to its recurrent motifs of gestation-into-discharge following penetration.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006) + World Trade Center (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical, Thriller

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
**½/****
starring Greg Kinnear, Steve Carrell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano
screenplay by Michael Arndt
directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris

WORLD TRADE CENTER
**/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Peña, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello
screenplay by Andrea Berloff
directed by Oliver Stone

by Walter Chaw I laughed a little during Little Miss Sunshine, a piffle of a movie that boils down to that Blind Melon music video where the chubby girl in a bumblebee outfit finds joy at the end of three minutes of kicking ant piles by dancing in a field of misfits also wearing bumblebee outfits. It’s a smarter, less-angry version of Transamerica while featuring the same number of depressed gay people and Harold & Maude-esque teenage boys; it’s got the Wes Anderson stamp of approval for its coterie of sage oddballs, deadpan surrogates, and family decompositions; it has a stellar cast doing extremely predictable work at a stellar level; and it comes with the Sundance stamp of approval predestined for it because Little Miss Sunshine is a summary of every independent film since “dysfunction” became a hot-key button on critics’ keyboards.

30 Days (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD, Television

Image A- Sound A- Extras B
“Minimum Wage,” “Anti-Aging,” “Muslims and America,” Straight Man in a Gay World,” “Off the Grid,” “Binge Drinking Mom”

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The least interesting thing about Super Size Me was the gimmick for which we showed up. Morgan Spurlock’s month-long Mickey-D’s binge yielded nothing any reasonably well-informed person couldn’t have guessed about fast-food nutritional horrors. Rather, it was the supporting information on the extent and pervasiveness of those horrors that made the film worth the effort. Of course, there are large numbers of people who won’t invite facts into their home without entertainment as incentive, so maybe the Spurlock method is craftier than a first glance would suggest. In any event, we now have six more cases with which to test it: debuting on DVD in conjunction with its second-season premiere, his FX program “30 Days” puts the Month-Long Gimmick to work on a variety of unsuspecting innocents in the name of informing the public. And though there are limits to the success of each 44-minute episode, our man harmoniously blends information with rubbernecking.

The Wicker Man (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Mexico, Mystery, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Ellen Burstyn, Kate Beahan, Frances Conroy
screenplay by Neil LaBute, based on the screenplay by Anthony Shaffer
directed by Neil LaBute

by Walter Chaw You mark off certain literary flourishes in Neil LaBute’s remake of Robin Hardy’s classic The Wicker Man, and then you can’t help but note that beneath the pagan matriarchy that is its villain and the hangdog cop (Nicolas Cage) that is its dullard hero, the film is just the auteur’s latest unnecessarily reductive gender deconstruction. It’s another major disappointment from the man who put humanity on the spit in In the Company of Men and–to a lesser, if no less affecting, degree–Your Friends and Neighbors. This redux hates women and, more, it hates femininity–typical LaBute, you could fairly offer, especially after Possession and The Shape of Things; The Wicker Man demonstrates again that LaBute is one of the brightest, most well-read American directors working–and that he’s become incapable of focusing his smarts on a target other than the cruel and essentially alien nature of women. Hitchcock’s films are arguably as obsessed, but his “wrong men” were hardly free of complicity in the construction of their own downfalls. Fatal to the production, then, is the introduction of an unsullied male hero–a literal martyr this time instead of the figurative types of LaBute’s last couple of pictures: a man of action (no milquetoast intellectuals here) struggling against a rising tide of castrating, hippie harpies.

Don’t Come Knocking (2005) – DVD

Don’t Come Knocking (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Music, UK

**/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange, Tim Roth, Gabriel Mann
screenplay by Sam Shepard, based on his play
directed by Wim Wenders

by Walter Chaw Howard Spence (Sam Shepard) is a has-been western star knocked down a few pegs by alcohol, drugs, and groupies–and so like any good anti-hero, he takes off in the middle of shooting a film, on horseback, to reunite with his long-estranged mother (Eva Marie Saint) before heading off to Butte, Montana in search of a long-lost bastard son (Gabriel Mann). He has a few conversations with the barmaid (Jessica Lange) he knocked up once upon a time, while a sullen girl (Sarah Polley) carrying a blue urn stalks him around town, offering the occasional cryptic message before retreating again into the wallpaper. But what glorious wallpaper it is, with Wim Wenders and his cinematographer Franz Lustig finding in Butte a myth of the American West frozen in bright, primary, Edward Hopper amber. Twin painters of isolation and suspension, Wenders and Hopper–since long about The American Friend–have been on a mission to redraw the psychic divorce of one American from another in minor chords and long, drawn-out tremolos. Don’t Come Knocking, though, is only minor Wenders, and I do wonder if giving over too much faith in the flagging abilities of Shepard to write a script worth shooting has cost him his pitch this time around.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sports, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Sacha Baron Cohen, Gary Cole
screenplay by Will Ferrell & Adam McKay
directed by Adam McKay

by Walter Chaw I feel about Will Ferrell the way I feel about Jack Black: that they’re good second-fiddles on occasion, but put them in a lead role and my eyeballs roll into the back of my head. Imagine my surprise that Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (hereafter Talladega Nights) showcases Ferrell’s Faulknerian idiot man-child to great advantage in a vehicle that’s sharp, smart, topical, and funny. It’s an exuberant satire in every sense of the abused term–a twisting of familiar elements into grotesquerie that brings to light the essential absurdity of the familiar, sketching a portrait of the divide between the blue states and the red states with a feather bludgeon. It’s this year’s Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, doing for anti-intellectual animals and effete eggheads what that film did for the racism levelled in popular culture at “favoured” minorities. This is the finest document yet of the special brand of idiocy that compels our noble Congress to rename French Fries and French toast in their commissary or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, the air of noblesse oblige that taints the highbrow’s mincing, faux-outraged response. Credit Talladega Nights for this: no one’s necks have ever been redder than those sported by these self-described r*tards, and no brainy gay Frenchmen have ever been this gay and French.

Yours, Mine & Ours (2005) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

Yours, Mine & Ours (2005) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Romance

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Dennis Quaid, Rene Russo, Rip Torn, Linda Hunt
screenplay by Ron Burch & David Kidd, based on the screenplay by Melville Shavelson and Mort Lachman
directed by Raja Gosnell

by Walter Chaw Hand it to deal-with-the-devil Raja Gosnell’s Yours, Mine & Ours, a worthless update of the mostly worthless Henry Fonda/Lucille Ball original: at least it hurries up and cranks Admiral Frank (Dennis Quaid) and hippie-chick Helen (Rene Russo) into holy matrimony. But then, it’s not about the parents–it’s about getting covered in goop and obnoxious kid gags, so once we jettison the only two possible reasons to see this shipwreck (ignoring poor Rip Torn and Linda Hunt in perfunctory supporting roles), we’re offered eighteen adorable reasons to open our wrists and tie our tubes. You know the drill: disgusting food jokes, barf jokes, fart and poop and piss and pet jokes, sped-up moments, weird references to The Parent Trap, and then the obligatory soupy plot machinations that get the arch-enemy family camps to join forces to manufacture a feel-good throb of family against all odds. As Robert Altman himself couldn’t work a miracle with these twenty-two main characters (eighteen of them pre-adolescent), maybe it’s not fair to expect Gosnell to conjure something watchable from this infernal clips reel of children screaming–but one did have the reasonable expectation that he wouldn’t twice humiliate Quaid in silly-noise-augmented slapstick scenarios.

Mondovino (2004) – DVD

Mondovino (2004) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Argentina, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD, France, Italy

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
directed by Jonathan Nossiter

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

“I like order, but I also like disorder.”
-Hubert de Montille, Mondovino

Like a lot of people unconnected to the better households, I always viewed the obsessive discernment of wine lovers with a dash of incredulity. Cultivating taste in the arts, now that seemed to make sense: it was where the beliefs of a culture were stored, where competing values duked it out for the right to call themselves a representation of reality. But wine? The other grape juice? Something didn’t jibe–which made me nervous about approaching Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino. Yet the film’s subject isn’t really wine at all: this is a tract on how globalization is sucking local identity and individual quirk out of everything it touches. The subject could be art or food or, dare I say it, film. It’s a preview of what we’re going to be stuck with, and a message to those atomized in their fields that things are tough all over.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Disability, Drama, DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Johnny Depp, Juliette Lewis, Mary Steenburgen, Leonardo DiCaprio
screenplay by Peter Hedges, based on his novel
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s a cult following for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, but it’s peopled by folks without the stomach for a genuine cult outrage. Trafficking in low-level “unconventionality,” it’s fatally done in by Hollywood bet-hedging and the searing banality of director Lasse Hallström–a man who could turn William S. Burroughs into Norman Rockwell apple pie. Despite the potentially traumatic nature of the material (parental suicide, morbid obesity, self-abnegation), the film plays like every other mainstream weepie, with its straight edge only slightly dulled by trace elements of eccentricity. It’s one of those movies that works exactly as planned but bulldozes the implications that might make it less–or rather more–than stimulus/response emotional pornography.

Scoop (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical, UK

½*/****
starring Woody Allen, Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johansson, Ian McShane
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Walter Chaw Woody Allen’s stock had been falling when the surprising restraint and structure of the frankly-just-decent Match Point temporarily staunched a hemorrhage of appalling failures. Call Scoop a return to form, then, with Allen doing Allen again to rapidly diminishing returns, spicing things up this time around with a teeny dose of post-modern self-deprecation that seems not so much thoughtful as pathetic. The Woodman plays a fast-talking, stammering, Catskills comedian calling himself “The Great Splendini” (for the “square haircuts,” he Rickles) who, as Allen is wont to do nowadays, acts as the pandering mentor for a hot young couple. What’s most shocking is that a puff of dust and cobwebs don’t erupt from his mouth every time it creaks open to deliver another pun about Trollope/trollop and Ruebens/Rueben (the corned beef and sauerkraut variety). Otherwise, it’s The More the Merrier ad infinitum: the old fart helping a couple of good-looking kids get their groove on–with the twist of a Jack the Ripper subplot woven awkwardly into the narrative. It’s far easier to identify the Victorian rake as Allen himself, what with his vaguely pedophilic sleights-of-hand lurking in every frame. That’s not necessarily bad if the film’s about a Tom Ripley sociopath (à la Match Point), of course, but it’s pretty bad when it’s a piece of fluff starring his favourite new obsession.

Miami Vice (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Gong Li, Naomie Harris
written and directed by Michael Mann

by Walter Chaw Slot Michael Mann’s Miami Vice in there alongside other millennial films about the disintegration of society and its subsequent renewal along tribal, exclusively masculine lines. It’s a film from whose nihilism I would’ve recoiled just a few years ago, but now I see that as perhaps the definitive trend of the first six years of this brave new world (first five after 9/11, the inciting event of this love affair with apocalyptic cultural reset) and not entirely divorced from our reality besides. The best illustration of how we’ve gone from the voodoo of self-esteem of the Reagan ’80s (for which the Mann-produced “Miami Vice” television show has become something of a cultural roadmark) to the blasted, self-abnegating, divided wasteland of Bush 2’s America might be the difference between the white suits and socks-less loafers of the previous incarnation to the flak-jackets and high-velocity splatter head-shots of this one. WWI introduced irony into our lexicon with the advent of long-range, impersonal murder–and 9/11 deepened it in the popular culture in the United States with an existential fatalism borne of the idea that not only is sudden, arbitrary destruction from above a possibility, but most likely an unavoidable eventuality.

Street Law (1974) + The Big Racket (1976) + The Heroin Busters (1977) – DVDs

Street Law (1974) + The Big Racket (1976) + The Heroin Busters (1977) – DVDs

Posted in1970s, 2006, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, DVD, Italy, Thriller

STREET LAW
Il cittadino si ribella
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Franco Nero, Giancarlo Prete, Barbara Bach, Renzo Palmer
screenplay by Massimo de Rita and Dino Maiuri
directed by Enzo G. Castellari

THE BIG RACKET
Il grande racket
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Fabio Testi, Vincent Gardenia, Renzo Palmer
screenplay by Arduino Maiuri, Massimo de Rita, Enzo G. Castellari
directed by Enzo G. Castellari

THE HEROIN BUSTERS
La via della droga
*½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Fabio Testi, David Hemmings, Sherry Buchanan
screenplay by Massimo de Rita and Enzo G. Castellari
directed by Enzo G. Castellari

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There comes a point in every man’s life when he finds himself pushed too far. By “too far,” I naturally mean the moment where a) criminal thugs are roaming the streets, and b) innocent bystanders are completely expendable in their apprehension and/or bloody death. And if Blue Underground is to be believed, Enzo G. Castellari long ago reached that point. The champagne of exploitation labels has lavished infinite care on three of the master’s most lurid exploits: the Death Wish precursor Street Law; the police-vigilante epic The Big Racket; and the relatively routine drug drama The Heroin Busters. Each of these films does away with such nuisances as due process and respect for public safety. Castellari’s oeuvre reveals the dark underbelly of ’70s permissiveness, which on one hand extended the hippie mandate to less shaggy extremes but on the other encouraged right-wingers to embrace police-brutality extravaganzas.

MASH (1970) – DVD

MASH (1970) – DVD

Posted in1970s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Robert Altman, Drama, DVD, Palme d'Or Winner, War

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman
screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr., based on the novel by Richard Hooker
directed by Robert Altman

by Walter Chaw On the shortlist of Robert Altman masterpieces, MASH compares best with his The Long Goodbye in that both are unapologetically informed by the cult of masculinity: fucking and fucking people up. Tenderness in the film is someone breaking their hand on someone else’s head when that someone else says something stupid to a kid. Better, it’s giving a different kid a stroke magazine to counteract his de facto religious training at the hands of an obvious nutjob (who’s nutty mainly because he’s trying to impose enlightenment where enlightenment cannot by definition exist). Accordingly, matters of spirituality and men of the cloth are to be scoffed at while other rituals–like the rites observed in an operating theatre, or golf (a game played with clubs), or football, or the pursuit of women–are regarded with the obsessive gravity of a lower primate. It’s about male bonding, all that cruelty towards women and disrespect of authority and open racism–the game of me-against-you in a film that, contrary to popular consensus, isn’t a Hellerian satire about the absurdity of war, but what may be the saddest war film ever made in that it identifies conflict as something that, however contrary to civilization, is inextricably hardwired into our bestial nature. We’re vile, stupid, ignoble apes, and we aspire to ideals we’re eternally incapable of honouring.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) [Cinema Classics Collection] – DVD

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) [Cinema Classics Collection] – DVD

Posted in1970s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Music

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers, Marcia McBroom, John La Zar
screenplay by Roger Ebert
directed by Russ Meyer

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s no point in whitewashing the career of Russ Meyer. Latter-day critics have tried to float the filmmaker/satirist/horndog as some kind of feminist despite much evidence to the contrary, and though against-the-grain readings are possible, really, who are we kidding? Similarly, his Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is loaded with all sorts of attitudes most thinking adults would rather like to forget, including a streak of homophobia that resonates as slightly nasty. But with Meyer, it’s impossible to separate an actual position from a sitting duck–and that confusion is what makes his films so uniquely mind-blowing. His fake morality tales blow up the very notion of morality, to the point where his less noble conceits are torpedoed with everything else.