Mr. Frears Presents: FFC Interviews Stephen Frears

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

January 29, 2006|My first glimpse of lanky British director Stephen Frears was in passing as he took shelter from a frigid early-December wind in a doorway in front of Denver’s historic Brown Palace Hotel. Iconoclastic at the least, Frears turned his back on a career in law and began his tutelage in the arts at the Royal Court Theatre under Karel Reisz and, eventually, Lindsay Anderson, on whose fantastic If… he worked before making his feature debut with Gumshoe in 1971. A two-film partnership with playwright Hanif Kureishi later yielded My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and they, along with the magnificent Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears, brought Frears to the attention of Hollywood, where he’s since had his share of ups (Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, and High Fidelity) and downs (Hero and Mary Reilly, high-profile flops made back-to-back for the same studio).

Sundance ’06: The Ground Truth

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance, War
The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends **/**** directed by Patricia Foulkrod by Alex Jackson Too often, I feel that critics and audiences place documentaries at the kids' table, refusing to critique them on the same level they do fiction films. Narration from the director, sit-down interviews with the subjects--in terms of filmmaking, we let documentaries get away with a lot of really primitive shit we probably wouldn't otherwise. Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth is a pretty good rant, but not much of a movie; Foulkrod made it because she had a burning desire to say something, not because she…

Sundance ’06: Jewboy

Posted in2000s, 2006, Australia, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
***½/**** starring Ewen Leslie, Naomi Wilson, Saskia Burmeister, Leah Vandenburg written and directed by Tony Krawitz by Alex Jackson Following his father's death, Orthodox Jew Yuri quits his rabbinical training and applies for a job as a taxi driver. He's mad at God, mad at his Jewish faith, and eager to experience a world that has been denied him all his life. Jewboy is perhaps the best Martin Scorsese film Martin Scorsese never made--and by that I mean, of course, the Scorsese of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and The Last Temptation of Christ rather than the more imitated (and imitable)…

Sundance ’06: The Proposition

Posted in2000s, 2006, Australia, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance, UK, Western

*/****
starring Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, John Hurt
screenplay by Nick Cave
directed by John Hillcoat

by Alex Jackson In his review of Rene Cardona’s exploitation quickie about the Jonestown Massacre Guyana: Cult of the Damned, Roger Ebert describes how Cardona ends the film with photos of the real-life victims while the audience is solemnly reminded that “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it,” prompting Ebert to crack, “So remember, don’t drink cyanide.” I only wish that John Hillcoat’s The Proposition were that lucid in delivering its Important Lesson. This is a movie at least as gory and brutal as Eli Roth’s Hostel, the highlights being an exploding head and an extended, Gibson-esque flogging of a prisoner. And Hillcoat loves flies: they’re always buzzing over the carrion, the human corpses, the gourmet meals, and the sweat of the film’s grotesquely hairy Australian men. I don’t have a problem with gore per se, but I do have a problem with the self-important joylessness with which it’s depicted here–and frankly, The Proposition hasn’t any justification for its austere tone.

Jerry Lewis: The “Legendary Jerry” Collection – DVD

Posted in1950s, 1960s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Music, Romance, Sci-Fi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover If you’re savvy enough to read film criticism, you probably know it’s supposed to be funny that the French love Jerry Lewis. We all have a big, self-satisfied laugh when we first hear that, as if anyone could take Jerry Lewis seriously. (We certainly didn’t.) But the thing is, there aren’t a lot of people who will admit to actually seeing one of his movies–the Lewis hate-on has become so intense that the only thing remaining of him is the joke; he’s the scapegoat of anti-French resentment and anti-intellectual hostility, as if only frogs and eggheads could possibly find anything redemptive in his work. Thus, a generation has shunned his films, never to know if there really is a centre to the onion, something more than mugging to the Lewis mystique.

Thumbsucker (2005) + The Chumscrubber (2005) – DVDs

Thumbsucker (2005) + The Chumscrubber (2005) – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Satire, Teen

THUMBSUCKER
**/**** DVD – Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Lou Pucci, Tilda Swinton, Vincent D’Onofrio, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by Mike Mills, based on the novel by Walter Kirn
directed by Mike Mills

by Walter Chaw With the brief reprieve offered the Sundance imprint by Junebug now smelling a lot more like “fluke” than “trend,” find Mike Mills’s underwhelming Thumbsucker, another Sundance sensation so familiar in its affected suburban quirk that its peculiarities seem like formula and its attacks on middle-class perversity and malaise seem all too comfortable. There simply isn’t much heart left in this pursuit, this punching of holes into the façade of planned communities and their plastic citizenry–this central conceit of broken people leaning on psychic crutches as the apocalypse of the day-to-day cascades in on them in blue, stylized waves.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, France, Mexico, Mystery, Theatrical, Western

*½/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cesar Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam
screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga
directed by Tommy Lee Jones

by Walter Chaw Crash by way of Cormac McCarthy, Tommy Lee Jones’s “fuck you” of a mouthful The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is another fairytale salvo from the race divide, fired from that good place that results in cultural artifacts so unbearably cheesy and proselytizing that any potential heat is lost long before the second reel has finished unspooling. It’s about serendipity, this elegy for the American West, hence no transgression is left unredeemed in its long, rambling, “it’s good for you, so swallow it” narrative, with blame going in equal portion to Jones–whose smug, smarter-than-you are attitude has shoehorned him into prestigious position as the resident asshole of Man of the House, Men in Black II, and The Missing–and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams, Amores Perros), who paints every Mexican in the film in the same shade of saintly. (All the gringos, on the other hand, have a lot to learn about the grand mystery of being human.) It’s tedious, unsurprising stuff, this picture–the kind of thing that gets the Right in a bunch about how Hollywood is a tool of the subversive Lefties while making smart folks on both sides of the Culture War cringe before its condescension.

The Alan Clarke Collection – DVD

Posted in1970s, 1980s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Crime, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Prison, Television, UK

SCUM (BBC VERSION) (1977)
***½/****
starring Ray Winstone, Phil Daniels, David Threfall
screenplay by Roy Minton
directed by Alan Clarke

SCUM (THEATRICAL VERSION) (1979)
***½/****
starring Ray Winstone, Phil Daniels, Mick Ford
screenplay by Roy Minton
directed by Alan Clarke

MADE IN BRITAIN (1982)
***½/****
starring Tim Roth, Eric Richard, Terry Richards
screenplay by David Leland
directed by Alan Clarke

THE FIRM (1989)
***/****
starring Gary Oldman, Lesley Manville, Phillip Davis
screenplay by Al Hunter
directed by Alan Clarke

ELEPHANT (1989)
***½/****
screenplay by Bernard MacLaverty
directed by Alan Clarke

DIRECTOR: ALAN CLARKE (1991)
**/****
directed by Corin Campbell-Hill

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover What would Andre Bazin have made of Alan Clarke? Both the thinker and the maker were committed to capturing something real, the one stoked on Italian neo-realism and the verity of deep-focus long takes, the other brilliantly deploying montage and the Steadicam. But where Bazin was a passive sort of theorist, Clarke was all about rubbing your face in the action, his efforts to conceal his method of brutal madness to the contrary. He single-handedly redeemed the often stuffy and half-considered mode of British social realism, wiping clean the condescending memory of Richardson, Reisz, and early Lindsay Anderson and even eclipsing old reliable Ken Loach in his commitment to a version of reality. Clarke rescued the genre from high-mindedness and shoved it into your gut like something built from scratch in the borstal hell of his Scum.

Flightplan (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

Flightplan (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B+
starring Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Erika Christensen, Sean Bean
screenplay by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray
directed by Robert Schwentke

by Walter Chaw The bad guys have a plan, and to pull it off they need only total omniscience and omnipotence, putting Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan in the company of hysterical caper flicks like Arlington Road–though it’s also the kind of hysterical estrogen melodrama à la Mildred Pierce in which Jodie Foster specializes these days. Between this and Panic Room, it almost seems as if Foster is taking tough maternal roles to protect the over-exposed, maybe-exploited child actress she used to be, to the point where the quality of the project itself comes second.

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2006) + Why We Fight (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Denmark, Documentary, France, Satire, Theatrical, UK, War

LOOKING FOR COMEDY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
*/****
starring Albert Brooks, John Carroll Lynch, Sheetal Sheth, Fred Dalton Thompson
written and directed by Albert Brooks

WHY WE FIGHT
**/****
directed by Eugene Jarecki

by Walter Chaw The most frustrating thing about Albert Brooks's crushingly boring, infuriatingly unfunny Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (hereafter Comedy) is the possibility that such was the intention all along. 'Lost in Arabia' (well, India and Pakistan–let's not get crazy, here) finds Brooks doing a high-wire act with post-modernism–the same one he's been doing his whole career, as it happens. At some point, though, it's fair to wonder how long you can push self-awareness before it finally flies apart in a storm of narcissistic deconstruction. Mull over, if you will, a moment where Brooks (as Brooks) recreates one of his classic gags–involving the world's most ironically-tragic ventriloquist–in the middle of an interminable stand-up routine staged in a New Delhi auditorium, closing his act with the dummy (the wooden one) drinking a glass of water. It's Brooks, and Brooks's film, in microcosm: a man who returns the term "mortification" to ritual and religion while being incapable of subsuming the belief that he's still the smartest guy in the room. The trick of Comedy is that in making a movie that isn't very funny about a man who isn't very funny in the middle of a gulf of cultural misunderstanding that's especially not very funny, Brooks hopes to draw a corollary between how the troubles of the world boil down to everybody's inability to communicate. As revelations go, it's not earth-shattering. Guess it goes without saying that it's also not worth the effort to get there.

The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes (2006); Mutual Appreciation (2006); Unknown (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, France, Germany, Music, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE PIANOTUNER OF EARTHQUAKES
*½/****
starring Amira Casar, Gottfried John, Assumpta Serna, César Saracho
screenplay by Alan Passes and The Quay Brothers
directed by The Quay Brothers

MUTUAL APPRECIATION
***½/****
starring Justin Rice, Rachel Clift, Andrew Bujalski, Seung-Min Lee
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

UNKNOWN
½*/****
starring Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Bridget Moynahan, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Matthew Waynee
directed by Simon Brand

by Walter Chaw The Quay Brothers, Stephen and Timothy, are marvellous animators, having shepherded stop-motion and a disquieting biomechanical ethic into a series of notably discomfiting shorts, more than one of which pays tribute to their hero/mentor Jan Svankmajer. I met their 1995 transition to live-action features (Institute Benjamenta) with equal parts excitement, curiosity, and trepidation–I believed they'd be a little like either fellow animator-turned-director Tim Burton or those masters of a form who overreach by switching to a different medium, à la Michael Jordan. The truth is somewhere in-between, as the Quays have retained a bit of their glacial patience and a marked affection for created environments but have miscalculated the extent to which our fascination with animate clockworks translates into a commensurate fascination with people sitting around, staring at a wall. The former inspires existential thoughts on the nature of sentience; the latter generally inspires boredom. No question in my mind that something's lurking in the Quays' underneath, but it's important to mark that fine line distinguishing fascination from obtuseness for the sake of itself. Exploring the waking/dreamlife divide is interesting–but it's neither original nor terribly useful when the main tactic seems to be to conjure up pomposity-inspired sleepiness.

Two for the Money (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Al Pacino, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Sports

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Al Pacino, Matthew McConaughey, Rene Russo, Armand Assante
screenplay by Dan Gilroy
directed by D.J. Caruso

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Finally, a movie as loud and incoherent as Al Pacino himself. He's the resident corruptor of Two for the Money, and the film gives him massive monologues of dubious insight just so the Duke of Hambone can do his thing. Sadly, he's not the one running the show–that honour belongs to the perpetually-ripped Matthew McConaughey, whose role requires him to look mesmerized as Pacino talks of things that "pucker your asshole to the size of a decimal point." Two for the Money sure has that effect: the experience is assaultive in so many ways that you're likely to be riveted even as you wish it would all go away.

Transamerica (2005) + Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005)

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Music, Road Movie, Theatrical, UK, War

TRANSAMERICA
**/****
starring Felicity Huffman, Kevin Zegers, Fionnula Flanagan, Graham Greene
written and directed by Duncan Tucker

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS
*½/****
starring Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins, Will Young, Christopher Guest
screenplay by Martin Sherman
directed by Stephen Frears

by Walter Chaw Duncan Tucker makes his hyphenate debut with Transamerica, one of the first pictures distributed by the Weinsteins under their new aegis. Predictably, all the earmarks of the earnest indie genre Miramax blazed are cemented into place: it's over-written when it's not overreliant on a soundtrack of ethnically-cued melodies (the wood flute marks the appearance of an Indian, for instance) and folksy ballads (I challenge you not to 'pit up when a tune about a rose blooming accompanies our hero swapping his "outie" for an "innie"); narratively creaky; and hangs its hopes on its star, Felicity Huffman, to impose nuance where there is none. Huffman's performance being the sort of stunt in a minor independent film that plays fast and loose with smug liberal paternalism should guarantee her an Oscar nomination–and it can't hurt that another Leonardo DiCaprio doppelgänger arrives post-Michael Pitt in the form of Kevin Zegers, trailing a little pathos and a little inappropriate titillation on his thin shoulders.

The Scalphunters (1968) – DVD

Posted in1960s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD, Western

**/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Burt Lancaster, Shelley Winters, Telly Savalas, Ossie Davis
screenplay by William Norton
directed by Sydney Pollack

by Alex Jackson In that glorious blow-job-thinly-disguised-as-a-documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, director Sydney Pollack claims to remember Pauline Kael's pan of 2001: A Space Odyssey "very well." A decade later, he says, the film was considered a classic–suggesting that Kael was seriously out of touch when she reviewed it, I guess. Pollack fails to mention the punch line, though: in the same piece, a notorious essay called "Trash, Art, and the Movies," Kael exalts Pollack's own The Scalphunters! 2001 is pretty lousy art, she decided, while The Scalphunters is pretty great trash. Between the two, she frankly prefers The Scalphunters.

A Dry White Season (1989) – DVD

Posted in1980s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Donald Sutherland, Janet Suzman, Jürgen Prochnow, Marlon Brando
screenplay by Colin Welland and Euzhan Palcy, based on the novel by Andre Brink
directed by Euzhan Palcy

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Belonging to the white-centred apartheid genre, '80s division, A Dry White Season is by far the best of a bad lot. At the time of its release, the film was widely–and rightly–criticized for being, like Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom, more concerned with its Caucasian lead than with the more central but less bankable blacks who suffer by his side. But unlike Cry Freedom (or last year's dismal In My Country), A Dry White Season isn't about a heroic fait accomplis so much as an evolving conscience shedding its skin. Donald Sutherland's Ben du Toit actually comes off like a naïve dingbat in early scenes, convinced that the caning of his gardener's son was justified and that the various disappearances subsequent to the incident must have some logical, moral justification. The film's project is to show him that to fight the power, he has to give up everything–a message sure to strike fear in the hearts of armchair liberals everywhere.

Match Point (2005)

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Luxembourg, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Walter Chaw Match Point is a quasi-Patricia Highsmith flick about a rudderless Ripley cruising like a shark amongst England’s polite society, and the extent to which it works has to do with the degree to which its philosophy of chance and living with ghosts attaches itself to the zeitgeist. The picture opens with a shot of a tennis ball lobbed low and in slow-motion into the top of a net, an image that has as its echo a key moment where a wedding ring tossed towards a river rebounds against a fence into the street. The voiceover talks about the common fear that our lives are governed by happenstance and entropy, transforming the ball going forward into a metaphor for winning–and back into one for losing. Using this as gospel, it’s interesting to wonder what it means that, when push comes to shove, our hero’s victory is defined by his defeat. Match Point is Woody Allen’s best film in some time, which is a left-handed compliment at best; better to say that it’s another decent millennial fable about class, the vicissitudes of fate, the reptilian hunger of infiltrating the social strata, and living with ghosts.

Glory Road (2006) + Last Holiday (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

GLORY ROAD
½*/****
starring Josh Lucas, Derek Luke, Emily Deschanel, Jon Voight
screenplay by Christopher Cleveland & Bettina Gilois and Gregory Allen Howard
directed by James Gartner

LAST HOLIDAY
*/****
starring Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman, based on the screenplay by J.B. Priestley
directed by Wayne Wang

by Walter Chaw There are two big laughs in Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer’s African-American Hoosiers, Glory Road. The first comes when some white guy says derisively, “Can you imagine what basketball dominated by Negroes would look like?”, while the sight of defeated Kentucky coaching legend Adolph Rupp (Jon Voight), vilified by history perhaps unfairly (though there’s no question that he’s vilified unfairly by this film), mourning the loss of the National Championship Game to an upstart team prompts the second. Both moments speak to the biggest problems in a film riddled with little ones: the former because it makes the audience complicit in–and comfortable with–the picture’s callousness and casual blanket racism, and the latter because everything that happens in the film is already a foregone conclusion. The only appeal left is rooted in seeing the black players put on exactly the kind of degrading sideshow the picture suggests they’re too human for. Glory Road is smug, offensive, and ignorant in the way that films with no self-awareness are ignorant–wrapped in a story designed specifically to make people cheer and believe that this one game in 1966 changed peoples’ attitudes towards African-Americans in sports instead of simply bolstering the idea that the black athlete was advantageous and alien rather than just merely alien.

Tristan + Isolde (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, Germany, Ireland, Romance, Switzerland, Theatrical, UK, War

*/****
starring James Franco, Sophia Myles, Rufus Sewell, David O’Hara
screenplay by Dean Georgaris
directed by Kevin Reynolds

by Walter Chaw After bravely transforming the Robin Hood legend into a case of thirtysomething love jones with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner’s well-known ex-best friend Kevin Reynolds turns the Tristan + Isolde legend into a WB/TIGER BEAT-friendly, mouth-breathing bodice-ripper indicated by lots of backlighting, orgasmic slow-mo, and dialogue purple enough to blind a Brontë sister. It’s shot like a perfume commercial and written like a florid creative-writing exercise, one packed with such AM Gold, Luther Ingram treasures as: “Why does loving you feel so wrong?” Well, it might have something to do with said love being the basis for the Guinevere/Lancelot adultery story in which a woman comes between a king and his most trusted knight, leading to the ideological and literal collapse of a kingdom. Or it might have something to do with the fact that the actors playing the lovers in question never for a moment manage to spark the soggy tinder packed beneath the story. This allows a great deal of time for the sentient beings left in the audience after the ten-minute-mark exodus to suss out why this thing was delayed, then dumped in the middle of the January dead zone. It also, incidentally, caused me to fantasize about somehow harnessing the ability of films like this to make 125 minutes feel like six days for youth-giving effects and racing box scores.

Dark Water (2005) [Unrated Widescreen Edition] – DVD

Dark Water (2005) [Unrated Widescreen Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2005, 2006, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, Dougray Scott
screenplay by Rafael Yglesias, based on the novel by Koji Suzuki
directed by Walter Salles

by Walter Chaw Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) is having a nightmare. Dark water is flooding into the ramshackle apartment she’s been forced to rent with young daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade) now that husband Kyle (Dougray Scott) has left her for another woman, where she encounters the visage of her spiteful alcoholic mother. Connelly’s performance throughout, but especially within these few seconds, is so complex, so almost physically wrenching, that the knowledge that Dark Water was badly marketed, critically savaged, and largely ignored stings all the more. Specifically, the moment in question underscores how far from the usual supernatural thriller this picture aspires to be: a ghost story in which the hauntings are golems of the soul instead of ectoplasm, cold spots, and rattling chains. In many ways, Dark Water works as an update of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, another story of a single woman in a strange place, beset by children and other reptiles of the spirit. And in return, that image of corrupt water invading a woman’s place of sanctuary with her daughter, already laden with archetype, gets a bracing shot of genre smarts.

Lady Sings the Blues (1972) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in1970s, 2006, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams, Richard Pryor, James T. Callahan
screenplay by Terence McCloy and Chris Clark and Suzanne De Passe
directed by Sidney J. Furie

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Billie Holliday never really surfaces in her ostensible biopic, Lady Sings the Blues. There’s somebody using her name, of course, somebody who pouts and shrieks and cries copious tears–but no matter how much Diana Ross knocks herself out “emoting,” she doesn’t do justice to her predecessor. Nor, for that matter, does the movie she’s in. The supremely jaundiced Sidney J. Furie has seen fit to jettison any real mention of either Holliday’s music or her convictions, replacing them with a blackface Valley of the Dolls–the story of not one of jazz’s premier vocalists, but a sad little girl hooked on heroin. Ross is a solid junkie, all right, yet she and everybody else connected with the production are wrong to impose this on someone who should be remembered for a few things beyond sordid melodrama.