The Adventures of the American Rabbit (1986) – DVD

September 19, 2005Posted in1980s, Animation, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Family, Japan, Superhero

*½/**** Image B Sound B+
screenplay by Norm Lenzer
directed by Fred Wolf and Nobutaka Nishizawa

"And you come up with images in [Invincible] that are so remarkable, including these countless red crabs in this one, that are so frightening to me–because they are life, yet they are mindless and they just keep going on and on despite whatever we think or whatever we hope."
-Roger Ebert to Werner Herzog

"The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life."
-Item 10 of Herzog's "Minnesota Declaration"

by Alex Jackson There are a few basics tenets I have followed during my initiation into the world of film criticism: 1. That art is made up of subject matter and a perspective; 2. Frivolousness is not a substitute for offering a perspective–rather it is a perspective in and of itself; 3. Artist intentionality is less than meaningless, as perspective is often constantly being informed by greater cultural, social, and subconsciously psychological forces; 4. In light of tenets 1,2, and 3, one should be careful of dismissing the film you are reviewing, in particular because most of those you will be tempted to dismiss are frivolous, and dismissing them only advances their mission to secularize and marginalize the cinema.

TIFF ’05: The Myth

September 18, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, TIFF
½*/****starring Jackie Chan, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Kim Hee-seon, Mallika Sherawatscreenplay by Stanley Tong, Wang Hui-ling, Li Hai-shudirected by Stanley Tong by Bill Chambers The Myth, or: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Turdbath. Sabotaging a potential comeback by trying to catch a wave (not unlike the myriad has-beens in the music industry who jumped on the disco bandwagon), Jackie Chan dips a toe in the unfriendly, nay, hostile waters of the wu xia genre recently revitalized by the likes of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou. Although The Myth is cruddy-looking (HD's fine for George Lucas excretions and Robert Rodriguez fantasias, but it has…

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005)

September 16, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Tim Burton, Family, Theatrical

****/****
screenplay by John August and Pamela Pettler and Caroline Thompson
directed by Tim Burton & Mike Johnson

Corpsebrideby Walter Chaw A self-contained, melancholic, dulcet little ode to love and sacrifice, Tim Burton's stop-motion Corpse Bride is also a sly stab at class systems, a knowing tribute to both the Hammer horror run and the Universal monster tradition, and another of Burton's evocations of German Expressionism. As fairy tale, it rivals his Edward Scissorhands, as underworld fantasia, his Beetlejuice, and as classic studio-bound horror, his Sleepy Hollow–in many ways, in fact, Burton's return to the stop-motion of his breakthrough short Vincent (and his co-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas) feels like a figurative homecoming to the technique that suits him best. William Blake described an "infernal method" in his theory of creation wherein the artist touched every page of every print of his work to infuse it, ineffably, with the hand of its creator, and so stop-motion, with every movement manipulated painstakingly by the human hand, is infused with a Romanticist's idea of (possibly Satanic) vigor. It's animation that gives the term its "soul"–there's something vital about Corpse Bride that has nothing to do with its story, and watching it, you come to the realization that the reason so much of Burton's work feels airless or dated (or that his stars are so perverse) is that his way with puppets translates only uneasily to his way with actors.

TIFF ’05: Romance & Cigarettes

September 16, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, Romance, TIFF
*½/****starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemiwritten and directed by John Turturro by Bill Chambers Dennis Potter was a genre unto himself, and when he died, he took his recipe for what Heinz Antor called "humanist postmodernism" with him. It's painful to watch writer-director John Turturro, one of the great character actors of our time, invoke the writer in Romance & Cigarettes, as he reduces Potter's notion of pop music as existential catharsis to exactly what it wasn't: a gimmick--an alibi for air band. In the spellbinding film version of Potter's Pennies from Heaven, Christopher Walken comically menaces…

Into the Blue (2005)

September 16, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Paul Walker, Jessica Alba, Scott Caan, Ashley Scott
screenplay by Matt Johnson
directed by John Stockwell

Intotheblueby Walter Chaw Although it's impossible to discern the purpose of a movie like this, you find yourself ironically spending all of Into the Blue trying to do just that. Shot in a leering, dirty-old-man disgusting way by John Stockwell (a filmmaker I've liked in the past, though this one causes me to reassess what's going on in my head), the film places your subjective-camera eye upwards between the ankles of one bathing beauty after another, tracking slowly up and down their swimsuit-model bods and fixing, occasionally and briefly, on a perfunctory thriller plot that arises from nothing, goes nowhere, and makes no impact whatsoever on the parade of cakes. (Both beef and cheese.) It's an exploitation flick in the basest sense of the term, because the poor idiots onscreen most likely believe they've been hired for some sort of talent imperceptible to the rest of us (and with no evidence showing itself for the balance of their careers up to this point) as opposed to for how great they look holding their breath and having a camera positioned three feet from their stern. It's not that I'm complaining about having to stare at Jessica Alba's almost-unclad ass for two extraordinarily long hours–I'm complaining about Alba protesting that she's always cast in films for her acting prowess and not for how she looks almost-naked. I don't know if it's false modesty or willful ignorance, but either way: you gotta be kidding me.

More Two-Second TIFF Reviews

September 15, 2005Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Film Festivals, TIFF
originally published September 15, 2005Wassup Rockers (d. Larry Clark) Somehow the most humanistic film of Clark's career is also his most nihilistic. Nice to see him acknowledge the "other," but they're still skater punks. *** (out of four)Romance & Cigarettes (d. John Turturro) A fugue. In the words of David Lynch, "Fugues make me crazy!" Actually eager to rant about this one. *½ (out of four)All the Invisible Children (ds. Various)As with any omnibus film, hit-or-miss. I think I liked Kátia Lund's segment best, but John Woo does his best work since heading West. Your mileage will vary. **½ (out of four)

TIFF ’05: Mary

September 14, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Esoterica, Thriller, TIFF
**/****starring Juliette Binoche, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Modine, Marion Cotillardscreenplay by Simone Lageoles, Abel Ferrara, Mario Isabelladirected by Abel Ferrara by Bill Chambers There are really three-tiers to Abel Ferrara's output, as indicated by his choice of avatar. Arguably the most commercial, at least until New Rose Hotel, his Christopher Walken movies have also been the director's most meticulously crafted, while his Harvey Keitel movies resonate as Ferrara's most personal, with Dangerous Game probably the closest he's ever come to a roman à clef. Then there is Matthew Modine, star of The Blackout and now Mary--relatively minor films seemingly motivated by…

TIFF ’05: Where the Truth Lies

September 13, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Crime, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF, UK
*½/****starring Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth, Alison Lohman, Rachel Blanchardscreenplay by Atom Egoyan, based on the novel by Rupert Holmesdirected by Atom Egoyan by Bill Chambers Canadian filmmakers tend to expose their limitations when they mimic American pop (see: the oeuvres of Jerry Ciccoritti and Mary Harron), and Atom Egoyan, who adapts his signature post-modernism to the Boogie Nights/Goodfellas paradigm in Where the Truth Lies, is no exception. Part of the problem is that it's almost impossible to empathize with journo Karen O'Connor's (Alison Lohman) attraction to the world of Lanny (Kevin Bacon, in what I'm tempted to call a career-best…

Pom Poko (1994) + My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) – DVDs

September 12, 2005Posted in1990s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan

POM POKO
*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras D+
written and directed by Isao Takahata

MY NEIGHBORS THE YAMADAS
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
screenplay by Isao Takahata, based on the comic strip by Hisaichi Ishii
directed by Isao Takahata

by Walter Chaw Two films by the other guy at Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata's Pom Poko and My Neighbors the Yamadas have the director deviating extravagantly from his masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies–one of the bona fide classics of the anime medium–by hopping from that film's heartbreaking war idyll to these films' anthropomorphic mysticism and broad slapstick. Anime gets a bad rap in the United States for being either pornographic or inscrutable (indeed, much anime pornography is inscrutable)–it's an easy way to dismiss an entire medium as foreign and/or amoral, but as a blanket condemnation it's as misguided at its essence as deriding black-and-white pictures, or talkies, or films altogether–and the truth of it is that for every memorable anime, there are probably fifty forgettable ones. As that ratio holds pretty steady for all films, though, the problem for fair-minded folks approaching the medium for the first time boils down to a picture with, crucially, a pedigree like Pom Poko.

Two-Second TIFF Reviews

September 12, 2005Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Film Festivals, TIFF
originally published September 12, 2005Mary (d. Abel Ferrara)Third-tier Ferrara, as evidenced by his choice of star (Matthew Modine). ** (out of four)Heading South (Vers le sud) (d. Laurent Cantet)Cantet works in dread the way some work in oils. A much-needed antidote to the twee likes of Ladies in Lavender. *** (out of four)Takeshis' (d. Takeshi Kitano)A kind of career summary for Beat by way of Buñuel; heard outside the screening: "Was that a comedy?" Short answer: yes. ***½ (out of four)

TIFF ’05: Capote

September 11, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Canada, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF
**/****starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins, Jr., Chris Cooperscreenplay by Dan Futterman, based on the novel by Gerald Clarkedirected by Bennett Miller Editor's note: I was so wrong about this film it's almost funny. It probably should've won Best Picture that year. by Bill Chambers Richard Brooks's masterful screen translation of Truman Capote's true-crime (Tru-crime?) novel In Cold Blood is full of indelible imagery that at first seems to seep into the fabric of Capote beyond director Bennett Miller's control. But as the homages--most notably, both pictures postpone the pivotal slaying of the ominously-named Clutter family until showing…

In Es-Crowe: On “Elizabethtown”

September 10, 2005Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Film Festivals, TIFF
originally published September 10, 2005Because Cameron Crowe considers it a work-in-progress, critics at last night's TIFF screening of the interminable Elizabethtown were asked, in not so many words, to handle the film with kid gloves. (Apparently the folks at Venice saw a completely different cut.) So to avoid a flap, I won't be posting a capsule review at the mother site, but let me just say that the version I saw--which looked polished but by no means finished--makes one long for the subtlety and finesse of Garden State. (And really, how much more warning do you need?) Its epiphanies are so processed and…

TIFF ’05: Shopgirl

September 9, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
**/****starring Steve Martin, Claire Danes, Jason Schwartzman, Bridgette Wilson-Samprasscreenplay by Steve Martin, based on his novelladirected by Anand Tucker by Bill Chambers Believe it or not, it takes more out of you to watch Anand Tucker's Shopgirl than to read the Steve Martin novella on which it's based. As in his Hilary and Jackie, Tucker seems to be striving for something lyrical but winds up with something purple, submerging as he does nearly every scene in Barrington Pheloung's syrupy score whilst failing to consolidate redundant emotional gestures. Consequently, Shopgirl is like Lost in Translation on steroids, bloated where the other…

Lady Chatterly’s Lover (1981) + Mata Hari (1985)

September 8, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD

LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER
**/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Sylvia Kristel, Nicholas Clay, Shane Briant
screenplay by Marc Behm, based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence
directed by Just Jaeckin

MATA HARI
½*/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Sylvia Kristel, Christopher Cazenove, Oliver Tobias, Gaye Brown
screenplay by Joel Ziskin
directed by Curtis Harrington

by Alex Jackson Cinematically at least, I view the 1980s as being an entirely pro-cultural period. Black became mainstream–everybody listened to music from black artists and watched films and television shows starring black actors. Gay became mainstream, blurring gender lines. Feminism likewise became mainstream, blurring gender roles. Blacks, gays, and women were not necessarily disenfranchised in the culture during the 1970s, but by the 1980s they defined the dominant culture, creating a new status quo. The '80s were not a carbon copy of the 1950s, rather they were the 1950s dragged through the '60s and '70s; it was essentially a period of multicultural homogenization. There was, then, never a proper counterculture or fringe element. Nobody was an outsider and nobody was "other." Similarly, there was no feeling of liberation, as there was nothing to be liberated from.

A Sound of Thunder (2005)

September 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Germany, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Edward Burns, Catherine McCormack, Ben Kingsley, Jemima Rooper
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and Gregory Poirier, based on the story by Ray Bradbury
directed by Peter Hyams

Soundofthunderby Walter Chaw Dr. Travis Ryer (Edward Burns) lives in 2055 Chicago, where he conducts hunting trips back to the same moment in the Cretaceous period to hunt the same dinosaur fated to die moments later in a tar pit. Cheap thrills for the future's bluebloods, the outfit is called "Time Safari," and it's owned by an evil capitalist, Hatton (Ben Kingsley), who, in trying to appease future-Chicago's strict time-travel regulatory agency, warns his clients to stay on the path and keep their hands to themselves lest the shockwaves of fucking with prehistory change the course of evolution. It's a term that A Sound of Thunder bandies about with some confidence, "evolution," but it does so without conveying the first idea of what evolution actually is or how it works. It's the kind of film that creationists and other retarded people will like because it mounts a pretty good case for the intelligent design-/flat earth-inspired "Heck, we don't know shit, anything could be true!" school of thought.

House M.D.: Season One (2004-2005) – DVD

September 6, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television

Image C+ Sound A- Extras C+
"Pilot," "Paternity," "Occam's Razor," "Maternity," "Damned if You Do," "The Socratic Method," "Fidelity," "Poison," "DNR," "Histories," "Detox," "Sports Medicine," "Cursed," "Control," "Mob Rules," "Heavy," "Role Model," "Babies & Bathwater," "Kids," "Love Hurts," "Three Stories," "Honeymoon"

by Bill Chambers The high-concept premise of "House M.D." is, like that of executive producer Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects, ultimately fraudulent. After all, for us plebes, there's no way of knowing whether the "Sherlock Holmes of Medicine" lives up to his billing, save his addiction to an opiate. (I'm reminded of that inside-baseball wannabe Brown Sugar, in which the characters cringe at the alleged awfulness of a hip-hop act that sounds to the untrained ear exactly like every other hip-hop act.) As the head of "diagnostics" at the fictitious Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, unorthodox Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) uses an informed process of elimination to cure anomalous illnesses (one per week, it's self-reflexively pointed out), but as the patients invariably go from bad to worse to healed, civilian audiences are denied the basic level of interactivity that is the raison d'être of the whodunit. "House M.D." is a "C.S.I." clone–right down to the impromptu Innerspace tours of the bloodstream–with science no longer the pretext but the text itself.

The Narrow Margin (1952) – DVD

September 5, 2005Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
starring Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor, Jacqueline White, Don Beddoe
screenplay by Earl Felton
directed by Richard Fleischer

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Narrow Margin is the kind of minor classic that makes a few of the major ones look puny. Possessing a careful, Artful Dodger deviousness, the film pulls the rug out from under you before you even notice it was there–it refuses to waste time on speeches or showboating and simply gets down to the business of blowing your expectations right out of the water. It's also a strangely affirmative noir in its insistence on overturning surfaces to see the individual beneath the bluster, a testament to the cleverness and thoughtfulness of screenwriter Earl Felton. If Felton's efforts lean more towards chamber piece than grandiose masterwork, he's still clever enough to suck you in and unpretentious enough not to pat himself on the back for this triumph of art over budget.

Fever Pitch (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

September 5, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Romance, Sports

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Drew Barrymore, Jimmy Fallon, James B. Sikking, JoBeth Williams
screenplay by Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw Ben (Jimmy Fallon), a Red Sox fanatic and middle-school math teacher, falls in love with corporate minx Lindsey (Drew Barrymore), who, as is often the case in Farrelly Brothers films, is perfect. She's beautiful, bug-eyes and all, and when she simpers in her mealy-mouthed way that she loves Ben as much as Ben loves baseball, all the men folk are supposed to melt–but I have serious doubts as to whether Barrymore is romantic lead material. Though she's fine getting hit in the face with a hard foul (her best roles are as the benighted bimbos in Adam Sandler trainwrecks), much of Barrymore's sultriness has to do with the idea of her as a naughty schoolgirl (Poison Ivy), not as a savvy woman of the world. She's no Mary, in other words, and her lack as one-half of Fever Pitch's romantic pairing is distracting–if not actually crippling, since leading man Fallon is himself a stammering vanilla doormat.

Dillinger (1945) – DVD

September 5, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Biopic, Crime, DVD, Gangster

**/**** Image B Sound B- Commentary C+
starring Lawrence Tierney, Edmund Lowe, Anne Jeffreys, Eduardo Ciannelli
screenplay by Philip Yordan
directed by Max Nosseck

by Alex Jackson You have got to be shitting me. This is Lawrence Tierney? The guy who played Joe in Reservoir Dogs and Elaine’s dad on “Seinfeld”–that Lawrence Tierney? The Lawrence Tierney with whom modern audiences had come to be acquainted was a goat-munching ogre; in Reservoir Dogs Mr. Orange characterized him as the real-life Thing, and indeed the only way to describe late-period Tierney is as a superhuman being. Lawrence Tierney is to heavies as Marilyn Monroe is to bombshells and Casablanca is to the movies themselves–that is to say, a conglomerate of all that have ever existed. Like Marilyn Monroe and Casablanca, Tierney is essentially an impersonal and even rather cornball artificial construction, but along those same lines, he’s also a deeply iconic one. Caricature is, after all, a kissing cousin to archetype–and archetype is one of the essential ingredients of pure cinema.

The Baxter (2005) + Pretty Persuasion (2005)

September 2, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

THE BAXTER
*/****
starring Michael Showalter, Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Williams, Justin Theroux
written and directed by Michael Showalter

PRETTY PERSUASION
½/****
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Ron Livingston, James Woods, Jane Krakowski
screenplay by Skander Halim
directed by Marcos Siega

by Walter Chaw Writer-director Michael Showalter swings for the rafters with his anti-romcom The Baxter and ends up hitting into a double play: it's less a satire of romcom conventions than a meek kowtow before their awesome ubiquity. Showalter (also starring as CPA Elliot Sherman) plays the titular schlub, the "Baxter" being a creature of extreme nerdy social incompetence most often glimpsed in frown and tux in the retreating background of Dustin Hoffman rescuing Katharine Ross from the altar. Not a terrible idea (i.e., making the boring, button-down dork the centre of a satirical romance) for a movie as self-serving, self-pitying, neo-Woody Allen ideas go, but as The Baxter unfolds with a suspiciously-familiar series of contrived situations, gentle misunderstandings involving homosexuality and a strange woman in your bed, and a parade of women so far out of Elliot's league as to render his eventual abandonment as inevitable as his ultimate match (with Cecil (Michelle Williams), likewise far out of his league) is unlikely, it becomes clear that the flick is just as stupid as that which it purports to lampoon. The Baxter is actually harder to stomach than its traditional romcom brethren because in place of a leading man locked in its pre-destined narrative, there's barely a supporting character.