Dark Victory (1939) – DVD

February 21, 2006Posted in1930s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Bette Davis, George Brent, Humphrey Bogart, Geraldine Fitzgerald
screenplay by Casey Robinson
directed by Edmund Goulding

by Walter Chaw There’s been almost as much written about the life of Bette Davis as there has about her work, and I must confess that, with few exceptions, I consider her life to be far more interesting than her films. The best Davis picture from start to finish is probably The Letter–and the most honoured of her superfluity of clunkers is Edmund Goulding’s really quite dreadful Dark Victory, released in the annus mirabilis of 1939. Fanatics point to La Davis’s performance in this one as her most stirring, but all I see is a terminal ham pretending to have a brain tumor and cinematic blindness. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, I suppose, but then there’s the vomitous condescension of the hero doctor, the woeful miscasting of Humphrey Bogart as an Irish stable hand, and the wish unfulfilled that the great Geraldine Fitzgerald, in her screen debut, would take centre stage. The picture is also horribly dated, playing today like some weird, contrived burlesque of common sense as a terminally ill patient isn’t told of her condition, has to ask someone what “negative” means, and doesn’t inform her husband that she has about three hours to live. It’s not to say that there isn’t material of interest here, just that the material of interest doesn’t live organically with the narrative. Thus there exists on the one hand the possibility of appreciating the picture in an aloof way, and, on the other, a situation where respect and conventional enjoyment veers into something as ugly as camp appreciation.

Bambi II (2006) – DVD

February 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Romance

Bambi 2: The Great Prince of the Forest
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Alicia Kirk
directed by Brian Pimental

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It would be faintly disingenuous to cry bloody murder over a straight-to-video Bambi sequel: given Uncle Walt's own propensity for denaturing children's classics (and milking the new "classics" for cash), it's only fitting that the cream of his own canon would be whored out for what the market will bear. Still, Bambi is no ordinary Disney movie, but one whose awesome craft is matched only by its singular horror of the adult world. It's ludicrous, then, to pick up the story after the deer-kid has learned to talk and show him that being a grown-up isn't so bad. Not only does it generally contradict the original, but it also blows off the primal fear and sadness that make Bambi as potent as it is.

Walk the Line (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Germany, Music, Romance

**½/**** Image B Sound A- (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick
screenplay by Gill Dennis & James Mangold
directed by James Mangold

Walkthelinecap

by Walter Chaw I'm no longer certain what kind of currency there is in producing a biography of an iconoclast whose life is an exact simulacrum of every other iconoclast's life. Here's an entirely respectable film about Johnny Cash that begins in his childhood, proceeds into the Big Break, then segues from there into the euphoria of fame; the drug abuse and the groupies; the "Come to Jesus"; the rehabilitation; and the closing obituary. (It's like Denis Leary said about Oliver Stone's The Doors: "I'm drunk. I'm nobody. I'm drunk. I'm famous. I'm drunk. I'm fucking dead.") Though it claims not to be a hagiography, Walk the Line (like last year's Ray) featured the freshly-dead legends as advisors up until their untimely demises, a kind of personal involvement (and Cash's son John Carter is one of Walk the Line's executive producers, just as Ray Robinson Charles Jr. was for Ray) that precludes, methinks, most controversy in the telling. That's fine, I guess, this new vogue for these modern Gene Krupa Storys and Eddy Duchin Storys and Glenn Miller Storys–I mean, really, who does it hurt? But after praising the almost supernatural channelling of very public figures by talented actors, the only thing left is the drive home, a hot bath, dreamless sleep, and maybe the impulse purchase of the soundtrack at Starbucks in a couple of weeks.

Freedomland (2006)

February 17, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore, Edie Falco, Ron Eldard
screenplay by Richard Price, based on his novel
directed by Joe Roth

Freedomlandby Walter Chaw Given that Joe Roth (America's Sweethearts, Christmas with the Kranks) directed it, Freedomland's first and biggest surprise is that it's not worse than it is. Maybe that has something to do with Samuel L. Jackson delivering his best performance since Changing Lanes, or a Richard Price screenplay (adapted from his own novel) that, while overwritten throughout and unforgivably histrionic by its end, manages to present its tensions with topicality and a passing familiarity, at least, with the complexities of race relations. It's deliberately set in 1999, just a few years after South Carolina mommy Susan Smith drowned her two children in a lake and blamed a non-descript "black man" in a knit cap for their carjacking/abduction, and the similarities to the Smith story continue through to incredulity in the black community and the involvement of activist parental groups. (Freedomland meanwhile takes place a decade after another case it seems to be based on: Bostonian Charles Stuart killing his pregnant wife and blaming a black guy, stirring nearby black suburb Roxbury to outrage.) Marc Klaas to the film's Susan Smith is child-safety advocate Karen Collucci (Edie Falco), while the New Jersey barrens–and, in its narrative fulcrum, a burned-out children's asylum called "Freedomland"–stand in for the wilds of the Deep South. The picture abounds with such similes and ironies, existing in a bizarre, terrifying version of the United States where iron-willed armies of the bereaved march through the blighted wastes of urban decay with sticks and resignation, looking for lost children they know, more likely than not, to be dead and, more, victims of their own parents.

Eight Below (2006)

February 17, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Antarctica, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, Family, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Paul Walker, Bruce Greenwood, Moon Bloodgood, Jason Biggs
screenplay by David DeGilio
directed by Frank Marshall

by Walter Chaw There are situations and statements, questions and propositions, that are so stupid by their nature that they actually approach Zen. And then there’s Frank Marshall’s arctic dogs-and-dude melodrama Eight Below, which plays for all the world like not only the world’s most unwelcome sequel (to Snow Dogs), but also a companion piece to March of the Penguins. It is, in simplest terms, a pandering blight–a straight line (nay, flatline) from unsurprising set-up to unsurprising resolution, every bit the equivalent of a line of footprints in the snow between two known points. Opening with one of film history’s most wooden leading men, Paul Walker, and “nice Jewish boy” comic relief Jason Biggs sitting in a hundred-degree steam room before running out into a 30-below autumn day in Antarctica, Eight Below immediately teaches us that human beings heated to a toasty 110 degrees do not steam when exposed to sub-zero temperatures and, more, that if you should ever visit the South Pole, your breath will never, ever show. It’s full of fun facts like that, but it saves its most fascinating revelations for the intricacies of canine interactions, including their complex gift-giving behaviours, advanced speech, abstract philosophical concepts, and eerie ability to go for at least fifteen days at a time without food or water. It even wrests an explanation from the universal loam as to what Walker was put on this earth for: to be upstaged by eight dogs, someone named Moon Bloodgood, Jason Biggs, and miles of white. It goes without saying that those scenes Walker plays against Bruce Greenwood have the queasy, guilty fascination of a baby seal getting mauled by a polar bear.

Red Eye (2005) [Widescreen] + Four Brothers (2005) [Special Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] – DVDs

February 15, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Revenge, Thriller, Wes Craven

RED EYE
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox, Jack Scalia
screenplay by Carl Ellsworth
directed by Wes Craven

FOUR BROTHERS
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese, André 3000, Garrett Hedlund
screenplay by David Elliot & Paul Lovett
directed by John Singleton

by Walter Chaw If it barely registers at under ninety minutes, Wes Craven's high-concept thriller Red-Eye is carried along by a couple of excellent lead performances (from Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams) and a revenge subtext that lends surprising gravity to the lingering sensitivity of a sexual assault victim's scars. Red-Eye plays its 9/11 hand–and what else would you expect from a film about an assassination attempt on the Director of Homeland Security that takes place mostly on an airplane–as a metaphor for rape, because rape, after all, is as good a metaphor as any for a terrorist attack on native soil. Look to the glut of home invasion films (of which this is also one) in 2005 as further clarification of that connection–aliens of an inscrutable nature and purpose (and morality, it goes without saying) have come into the places we thought most sacred and taken what they wanted of our innocence: our once inviolate sense of security. Heady stuff for a film that is essentially Nick of Time on a plane, and indeed it may ultimately be too slight a framework to support the amount of topical sociology I'm tempted to ask it to bear, but there are moments now and again weighted with so much proverbial baggage that Red-Eye, with its melancholy regret, sucks the air right out of the theatre.

La scorta (1993) – DVD

February 14, 2006Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Italy, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Claudio Amendola, Enrico Lo Verso, Carlo Cecchi, Ricky Memphis
screenplay by Graziano Diana and Simona Izzo
directed by Ricky Tognazzi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's no way to put a fine point on this: La scorta is Backdraft with bodyguards. That is to say, it's one of those unsung-hero movies that: a) takes its subject very seriously; b) tries to give voice to a voiceless few; and c) fails to avoid every pitfall of the genre. The film is perhaps less heinous in its cinematic crimes than that Ron Howard schlockfest, but it's relentlessly mediocre, full of scenes that telegraph their significance and constantly reduce the characters to shorthand or macho clichés. Though La scorta does a good job of running down the outrageous risks faced by police bodyguards of judges, it doesn't bring their plight alive, choosing to make a gift of "white-knuckle tension" instead of dealing with the very real fear our heroes face. It's a smiley-faced version of pure, screaming terror–which, unfortunately, most people would probably prefer to something more free-form.

Separate Lies (2005) – DVD

February 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller, UK

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Emily Watson, Tom Wilkinson, Rupert Everett, John Neville
screenplay by Julian Fellowes, based on the novel A Way Through the Wood by Nigel Balchin
directed by Julian Fellowes

Separateliescap

by Walter Chaw You could call Separate Lies either a second pass at Asylum or just another drop in the English prestige bucket that finds the stuffy upper-crust married to silly women who bring down their country estates of cards. It hinges on performances when it can no longer surprise with its domestic meltdowns, and because its stable of English actors is stocked with more thoroughbreds than the Kentucky Derby, it gains a lot of currency in doing so. But Julian Fellowes's very British symphony of "sorry"s is extraordinarily familiar–an Adrian Lyne film without slickness or sex about what happens when a desperate housewife dabbles in the dangerous and the commensurate desperation with which her stiff-upper-lip husband scrambles to keep his dignity and status intact. It'd make a bigger impression if we learned more about the class struggle in Britain, I think, but without experience in the whys and wherefores of that caste system, what we're left with is a superbly-performed melodrama with a strained premise dissected in airless, suffocating situations.

The X Files: Black Oil; The X Files: Colonization; The X Files: Super Soldiers [Four-Disc Mythology Collection] – DVDs

February 13, 2006Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

THE X FILES: BLACK OIL – FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (1995-1997)
"Nisei," "731," "Piper Maru," "Apocrypha," "Talitha Cumi," "Herrenvolk," "Tunguska," "Terma," "Memento Mori," "Tempus Fugit," "Max," "Zero-Sum," "Gethsemane," "Redux," "Redux II"

THE X FILES: COLONIZATION – FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (1998-2000)
"Patient X," "The Red and the Black," "The End," "The Beginning," "S.R. 819," "Two Fathers, One Son," "Biogenesis," "The Sixth Extinction," "The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati," "Sein Und Zeit," "Closure," "En Ami," "Requiem," "Within," "Without"

THE X FILES: SUPER SOLDIERS – FOUR-DISC MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION (2001-2002)
"Par Manum," "This is Not Happening," "Deadalive," "Three Words," "Vienen," "Essence," "Existence," "Nothing Important Happened Today," "Trust No 1," "Provenance," "Providence," "William," "The Truth"

Image A Sound A Extras B

by Walter Chaw Even if you're curious, you're probably not curious enough to wade through the sixteen DVDs that constitute "The X Files"' "mythology" (a.k.a. "Oh, no, not another one of these episodes"), compiled by creator Chris Carter in a quartet of four-disc collections that chronologically recap the ostensible "Truth" in the series' "The Truth is Out There" tagline. After the first set, "Abduction", comes "Black Oil", then "Colonization", then "Super Soldiers", the four of them parceling out the vital information that our government's struck a deal with aliens to turn us into human-alien hybrids; that most of the universe has been colonized by a virus that moves around in (or as) a black, oily substance; that some people are transformed by said alien entity into super-beings; and that there are other aliens out there hoping to prevent the spread of this contagion in the universe. That's it. Oh yeah, Scully and Mulder kiss–and it's dreamy. Happy?

Into Her Own: FFC Interviews Natasha Richardson

February 12, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, UK

NrichardsoninterviewtitleFebruary 12, 2006|If people know Natasha Richardson at all it seems it's as the titular gun-toting, Stockholm-struck heiress in Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst–a film that came closer to making her a star than the one that was supposed to two years later, The Handmaid's Tale. I myself was vaguely aware that she hailed from a long and storied English industry family, what with her father being director Tony Richardson and mother and aunt being acclaimed actresses Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, respectively; and I knew that she'd married Liam Neeson somewhere along the line, with whom she has two children. But it wasn't until very recently that I started becoming aware of Ms. Richardson more as an actress than as something like a faint suggestion of foreign royalty. The act of freeing herself from her past began with a move from the UK to Manhattan, a few celebrated turns on the Great White Way (most notably her Tony-winning stint as Sally Bowles in Sam Mendes's revival of Cabaret), and now a couple of films (Asylum and The White Countess) that find Richardson's screen work maturing along with her actualization. Yeah, I'm smitten.

Final Destination 3 (2006)

February 10, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, Kris Lemche, Crystal Lowe
screenplay by Glen Morgan & James Wong
directed by James Wong

Finaldestination3by Walter Chaw Jettisoning any attempt to perpetuate the ponderous lore of the first two films, Final Destination 3 docks at the arrivals gate with a full payload of wry sadism and satirical high school archetypes and nothing but grim exploitation nihilism on its mind. It's the perfect post-9/11 horror film in its way, and sure enough, 9/11 is invoked in an extraordinarily inappropriate photo of the WTC with the shadow of an airplane crossing its middle, which our dour, spoil-sport heroine presents in support of her thesis that photos taken of our soon-to-be-victims might provide clues as to their imminent demise. For the indoctrinated, the machinations of the picture are familiar: A small group of would-be teens avoids a Byzantine–and disgusting–fate, only to be hunted down by "death" (as a concept) and dismembered like flesh puppets ground in the gears of Rube Goldbergian contraptions. (Rube Goldberg with the unsavoury predilections of the Marquis de Sade, that is.) The calamity this time around is a hilariously sprung roller coaster, and the dour, virginal OCD headcase who has the premonition and survives is Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), doing her level best to warn her fellow survivors but succeeding mainly in being our front-row surrogate witness to the most gleeful assemblage of remorseless bloodletting since, well, Final Destination 2.

Wall (2004) – DVD

February 10, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD, France, Israel

Mur
***/**** Image A- Sound A-
directed by Simone Bitton

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Wall's greatest strength–its serene pictorialism–is also its greatest limitation. On the one hand, the film asks us to think long and hard about the sheer presence of the massive concrete edifice designed to keep terrorists out of Israel and whether that presence is necessary. To that end, it features some skilful photography of the towering edifice in all its intrusive glory. On the other hand, Wall pushes the surrounding populace onto an abstract plane, letting the Kafkaesque spectacle drive the movie when really it ought to be providing more, pardon the pun, concrete information. It's a tough call, as the film manages to gently grip instead of blind with the alienating rage the subject understandably attracts–it gets you to listen, but at the expense of a certain kind of perspective. Still, considering the passionate hysteria this topic usually incites, perhaps it's offering a necessary stretch of distance.

Sundance ’06: Punching at the Sun

February 8, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
*½/****starring Misu Khan, Nina Edmonds, Hassan El-Gendi, Ferdusy Diawritten and directed by Tanuj Chopra by Alex Jackson Punching at the Sun follows the life of South Asian Queens teenager Mameet Nayak (Misu Khan). Mameet: (1) Lives in the shadow of his older brother, who was gunned down in his family's convenience store; (2) Falls in love with the neighbourhood sneaker salesgirl, Shawni (Nina Edmonds); (3) Identifies deeply with hip-hop culture; and (4) Feels that South Asians, due to their physical similarity to Arabs, are being unfairly mistreated in the aftermath of 9/11. The chief problem with Punching at the Sun…

Sundance ’06: Into Great Silence

February 7, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Sundance, Switzerland
Die Große Stille****/****directed by Philip Gröning by Alex Jackson I actually saw director Philip Gröning's previous film at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. It was called L'Amour, l'argent, l'amour, and it was kind of awful, I guess, very long and very pretentious. But it was kind of mesmerizing, too, and the mesmerizing and the awful become inextricable--it's the sort of "bad" movie that only a true genius could make. Gröning's Into Great Silence is in the same insane tradition. I offer no intellectual defense towards either of these two movies; I don't know if I'm complimenting the Emperor on his…

In America (2003) + Big Fish (2003)|Big Fish [“Fairy Tale for a Grown-Up” Edition] – DVD

February 7, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Theatrical

IN AMERICA
***½/****
starring Paddy Considine, Samantha Morton, Sarah Bolger, Emma Bolger
screenplay by Jim Sheridan & Naomi Sheridan
directed by Jim Sheridan

BIG FISH
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange
screenplay by John August, based on the novel by Daniel Wallace
directed by Tim Burton

Bigfishcap

by Walter Chaw Jim Sheridan's In America sees the nation's shores as the limits of a grand, dilapidated moviehouse, introduced at the border with The Lovin' Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic?" and sustained by the ideas that all deaths are dimpled with nobility, and that all life is instilled with the fever dream of an insomniac's carnival. Sheridan's all-night ice cream parlors are, of course, Edward Hopper paintings populated by pink-clad waitresses, while screaming men haunt his rundown tenement brownstones ("This house isn't haunted, it's a magic house"–referring to the domicile, then America), artists and mystics marooned on emotional floes by some seismic existential divorce. And his heroes are a family, aliens in America illegally who discover that their only ward against life's necessary evils is a faith in imagination and a fingernail declaration of hope.

Repo Man (1984) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD

February 6, 2006Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez, Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash
written and directed by Alex Cox

Repomanunicapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The question I ask after a screening of Repo Man is this: is it punk? And if it isn't punk, what is it? Those used to the anarcho-communitarian (i.e., "nice") ideals adopted by punk's intelligentsia would have no truck with the mentality of this film, whose hero, Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez), is in it for cheap thrills and hasn't got an ideal in his head. Indeed, once he gets sucked into the more "intense" world of car repossessor Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) and thus gainful employment, he distances himself from his punk friends–as represented by the three mohawk'd chumps whose idea of "doing crimes" is "let's order sushi and not pay!" But the repo gig leads to another dead end, as Bud turns out to be a blowhard full of idiot rules and his compatriots prove more unstable than Otto's old friends. There is no future to Otto's dreaming–just the cul-de-sac of punk's dark flipside: nihilism.

Just Like Heaven (2005) – DVD

February 6, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Reese Witherspoon, Mark Ruffalo, Donal Logue, Dina Waters
screenplay by Peter Tolan and Leslie Dixon, based on the novel If Only It Were True by Marc Levy
directed by Mark Waters

Justlikeheavencapby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I’m reminded of another magic-realist romantic comedy named after a song: Emile Ardolino’s sweet, all-but-forgotten Chances Are, starring Robert Downey Jr. as the reincarnate of a man killed en route to meeting his sweetie Cybill Shepherd. He falls in love with Shepherd’s daughter Mary Stuart Masterson, then falls back in love with Shepherd. This is a circuitous, distressingly disinteresting route towards expressing that Mark Waters’s Just Like Heaven is not only a movie I really hate, but also a movie that’s been done so many times before that instead of needing to follow along with the rigid requirements of the picture, you have time to comb the memory banks for obscure films that are better variations on this theme. (Stuff like Ghost, natch, but even relentlessly creepy garbage like Return to Me (also titled after a song) or Heart Condition or Always–or Truly, Madly, Deeply or The Bishop’s Wife. Or the pinnacles of the ghost-love genre, Laura and Rebecca.) Just the fact that it turns The Cure‘s titular tune into a big sloppy glob of Lilith Fair saliva is enough to turn this child of the ’80s right off, sure, but Just Like Heaven is also exactly the kind of piss that uses pop songs to narrate the action.

Sundance ’06: A Darkness Swallowed

February 3, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, Sundance
***/****directed by Betzy Bromberg by Alex Jackson A Darkness Swallowed is an experimental film consisting entirely of extreme close-ups of fossils, skins, rocks, and water droplets. There is a brief passage of voiceover in the beginning and a full-length soundtrack, but that's it as far as narrative cues are concerned. The film is supposed to be about the "nature of cellular memory" and "the physical traces that memories leave behind on and inside our bodies, and on and inside the earth." I had a considerably more banal philosophical question on my mind while watching it: I saw things in these…

Thunder and Lightning (1977) – DVD

February 3, 2006Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring David Carradine, Kate Jackson, Eddie Barth, Roger C. Carmel
screenplay by William Hjortsberg
directed by Corey Allen

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A long time ago…I saw Thunder and Lightning with my family on a drive-in double-bill with Star Wars. I remember the experience of the former being not only uncomfortable for my 6-year-old self, but in fact the polar opposite of the elaborate fantasy I was there to see (again). Yet aside from a couple of scenes that stuck, I later drew a complete blank on what it was all about. In one of those grail quests exclusive to sedentary movie nerds, the idea that I had to find out never stopped bothering me, though I now know there was a reason for my initial discomfort: it turns out that Thunder and Lightning takes entirely serviceable moonshine B-movie tropes and does as little as possible with them.

When a Stranger Calls (2006)

February 3, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Camilla Belle, Tommy Flanagan, Tessa Thompson, Brian Geraghty
screenplay by Jake Wade Wall, based on the screenplay by Steve Feke and Fred Walton
directed by Simon West

Whenastrangercalls06by Walter Chaw There's nothing patently, obviously offensive about Simon West's abominable remake of the already awful "thriller" When a Stranger Calls: It's neither misogynistic nor racist nor really anything more than exactly what you'd expect from a project like this, dumped as it has been in the wasteland of another early-February. It's so studiedly inoffensive, in fact, that you could take an elderly nun to it and there would be nary a flutter in her rigidly tender sensibilities. It tittles no ates, manufactures no suspense, and no one in a packed audience of four-hundred folks at the preview screening rustled an inch when the cat–not once, but twice–provided the false jump before the "real" one, though I confess the reason for that might be that by the time West and company get around to actually having something happen, most anyone with any kind of sense is asleep or halfway home. I've failed to mention that it's acted by heavy-browed lead Camilla Belle (as babysitter Johnson, Jill Johnson) like a toy robot with her key only half-wound. Were she to have run out of juice negotiating a wall and leaned there motionless, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash.