Invincible (2002) – DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A+
starring Tim Roth, Jouko Ahola, Anna Gourari, Jacob Wein
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw With casting, in true Herzog fashion, being the lion’s portion of performance, Finnish strongman Jouka Ahola starring as legendary Jewish strongman Zishe Breitbart in Herzog’s Invincible is a stroke of inspired madness. Herzog fashions Ahola’s total lack of experience and guile into something like an ecstatic holiness. He’s done this before, of course, with madmen Bruno S. in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek and the certifiable Klaus Kinski in some five astonishing pictures (astonishing not only for their quality, but also for the fact that there were five), so although extratextual complexity ever-threatens to become a distraction in Herzog’s films, it’s the sort of distraction that edifies Herzog’s preoccupation with blurring the distinction between performance and naturalism, fiction and documentary. No less so than in Invincible: The first time Herzog has returned to the pre-Bellum Nazi period in Germany since his directorial debut, Signs of Life, it pits one of Herzog’s classic social naïfs against a creature of pure manipulative malevolence, Hanussen (Tim Roth), who is, naturally, the kind of master showman/entertainer Herzog has always mistrusted.

The Machinist (2004) [Widescreen] + Enduring Love (2004) [Widescreen] – DVDs

THE MACHINIST
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, Michael Ironside
screenplay by Scott Kosar
directed by Brad Anderson

ENDURING LOVE
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Daniel Craig, Rhys Ifans, Samantha Morton, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Ian McEwan
directed by Roger Michell

Machinistcapby Walter Chaw Sickness sweats out of every pore of Brad Anderson's The Machinist. It's leprous green, corpse flesh lit by sulphur light, marking the end of a progression that took Anderson from the sunny Happy Accidents to the sepia-inflected Session 9 to the bleak and subterranean–Plutonian, really–The Machinist. But like all of Anderson's work, the current film seems best described as coitus interruptus–congress interrupted at the moment of climax by the director's peculiar fixation on mendacity in favour of the supernatural. It's all about the tease for Anderson's genre explorations: time travel in Happy Accidents, haunted asylums in Session 9, and now–what, possession? Murderous blackouts? By plumbing the depths of human failings in a literal-minded fashion, one after the other (obsession, then greed, and finally guilt), Anderson ignores the possibility that genre is sharpest when wielded as metaphor for the same. Even the profession of machining speaks to the idea of precision and craftsmanship over flights of fancy or suspicions of otherness. It's a shame that The Machinist isn't ultimately more than an elaborate Rubik's Cube: not that hard to solve, not high on replay value.

I, Robot (2004) [Widescreen + All-Access Collector’s Edition] – DVDs

*/****
DVD – Image A Sound A+ Extras C
DVD (CE) – Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, Bruce Greenwood, James Cromwell
screenplay by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman
directed by Alex Proyas

by Walter Chaw Alex Proyas makes movies about men who don’t know who they are. The Crow, Dark City, and, to an extent, his underachieving small-band-doesn’t-make-good dramedy Garage Days, feature main characters forced to come to terms with their identities before becoming empowered by them. It would appear, then, that Proyas is the perfect fit for the faux-philosophical science-fiction epic I, Robot, wherein a Luddite detective, played by Will Smith, struggles with his stupid past while an Aryan robot, played by Alan Tudyk, wonders if it’s a person. But instead of the existential grief of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, or even A.I., I, Robot is a mess of spare parts cannibalized from superior models and victimized by bad wiring. Poor Isaac Asimov is sparking in his grave–good thing the movie was only “suggested by a book by,” which at some point simply means “has the same title as.”

The Pacifier (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Vin Diesel, Lauren Graham, Faith Ford, Brittany Snow
screenplay by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant
directed by Adam Shankman

Pacifiercap

by Bill Chambers Three months after failing to return kidnapped professor Howard Plummer (Tate Donovan) to safety, Special Ops lieutenant Shane Wolfe (Vin Diesel) is assigned to stay with the late scientist's family while their mother (Faith Ford) visits Switzerland with Shane's superior (Chris Potter) to claim the contents of Howard's safety deposit box. Professor Plummer was killed over a piece of software named G.H.O.S.T. (though not in the pantry with a candlestick) now believed to have been stashed somewhere in his home; when the snot-nosed kids–vain Zoe (Brittany Snow), surly Seth (Max Thieriot), precocious Lulu (Morgan York, also one of the Cheaper by the Dozen brats), and reaction-shot fodder Peter (Keegan & Logan Hoover) and Baby Tyler (Bo & Luke Vink (and with "The Dukes of Hazzard"'s impending renaissance, boy are those two in for a rude awakening at the start of school))–grease the stairwell to take out Shane, they end up driving away their German nanny (a typically misused Carol Kane) instead, forcing Shane into a more maternal role and leaving him little time to search for the computer program.

Clarifying the Image: FFC Interviews Sally Potter|Yes (2005)

SpotterinterviewtitleSally Potter reflects on her films

YES
*½/****

A loaded word, "pretentious," and one that I think is overused, but whatever its dictionary definition, to me the idea of "pretentious" has a lot to do with the ratio of intent to teach vs. what's actually taught. From The Tango Lesson to The Man Who Cried to Orlando, Sally Potter's films have generally been admirably high on ambition if lamentably low on insight: You can make a film about how cinema is protean and existentially thorny, but unless there's a greater purpose to that insight, it's just first-year film school mixed with a little first-year biology. Take Yes, a picture concerned with lenses and reflective surfaces–written in the high style, The Bard's own iambic, but not so much in play form as in couplets (call it "playful" playwriting)–featuring not only an agile (and game) cast, but also a boatload of pretensions that lead the viewer to the conclusion that what Potter believes is very interesting is only very interesting to her. Trapped in a loveless marriage with Anthony (Sam Neill), "She" (Joan Allen) is having a torrid affair with "He" (Simon Akbarian); she's people are from Belfast, He's are from Beirut, and throughout the tension of He/She is set against the three-R archetypes of polarity: race, religion, and region. Potter uses different film stocks to express disconnection, Antonioni's framing tactics to express the same, and a handful of soliloquies delivered on the so-called fourth-wall-breaking proscenium by a taciturn maid (Shirley Henderson) that explain the Brownian motion of the motes that open the piece, the microbes She examines in her day job, and the ultimate deconstructionalist rationalization that for all this talk of difference, it's just a matter of semantics. Yes is thus film about language and communication at mortal war with true emotion and protean thought, boasting a lot of arresting images and briefly interesting ideas that unfortunately deflate when it becomes clear that a pretty picture and a clever turn mask subterranean drafts of aimless, circular comings and goings and talk of Michelangelo.WC

July 3, 2005|A chat in the basement of Denver's Hotel Monaco with the loquacious, eloquent Sally Potter wrapped three interviews in three days, not counting the one with Gregg Araki conducted via e-mail, which was apparently pre-screened by someone (a first in my experience, as I've never interviewed Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie) at tiny distributor Tartan and has not, since a minor blow-up on my end, been completed as promised by the "maverick" director. Whether he was offended, put-off, or frightened by the questions, if they even got to him, I'm not sure (maybe he's just too busy with his alien-abduction comedy to honour his commitment), but I'll be honest, I'm finding it hard to give a shit. Less to transcribe. I ask them all and filmmakers, to a one, complain about how far the art of film criticism has fallen in the United States, about how it's consumer reportage nowadays instead of an invitation to a conversation and those tentative early steps towards immortality. But a mouth has two corners, and you talk out of one in righteousness and the other in insecurity; although I provide an outlet for the outrage of the artist jilted at the hands of one too many clever wordsmiths, I also get the sense that most of these film professionals would prefer getting the junket line to any actual serious inquiry into their work.

Credit Sally Potter, then, for having the guts to discuss what her work is actually about. They're pretentious, her films, they're always meaningful and they always strike me as trying too hard to impress an imaginary demographic. Ironically, Potter's pictures underline the truism that artist intentionality is a decent place to start an autopsy but a horrible place to end one. In her case, without the auteur theory, there's nothing to say, and so it is with her latest film, Yes, another of Potter's examinations of the meta-quality of film-within-film and the cinema as a medium of projection and inversion. Written in couplets of proto-Shakespearean iambic pentameter (done with more liquid realism–and fewer rhymes–on HBO's "Deadwood"), it's an intriguing experiment for a good half-hour before its usefulness as a glass held to language diminishes, leaving a soggy, vaguely orientalist romance to hold as its symbolic centre. Give her due for being courageous enough to make a picture so unapologetically rigorous in its intellectualism, particularly in an age when "nuance" is effete and the most minor critical analysis is seen as an unforgivable offense to God and country. Potter is articulate and gracious in explaining what she's getting at in an environment grown too comfortable with not getting at anything at all.

Paparazzi (2004) – DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Cole Hauser, Robin Tunney, Dennis Farina, Tom Sizemore
screenplay by Forrest Smith
directed by Paul Abascal

by Walter Chaw Loathsome doesn't begin to describe it. How about "toxic"? View Paparazzi and producer Mel Gibson's own The Passion of the Christ together for a better perspective on where Gibson's coming from these days. Better, view the two together for some insight into the way that martyr complexes sometimes metastasize into a belief that feelings of rage and vengeance are justifiable responses to the indignities of a world whose sole focus is to torture the privileged with wealth, adoration, and extraordinarily high levels of creature comfort. Paparazzi are no angels, what with the recent spate of highly-publicized incidents culminating in the accusation that one of the adorable little shutterbugs slammed his car into Lindsay Lohan's in order for his compatriots to snap a few shots of the starlet vehicle-free. But rather than deal in a serious fashion with the toll the paparazzi take on any individual's right to a certain measure of personal space and safety, Paparazzi chooses to offer an unironic manifesto that forgives the vigilante-style abuse of Gibson's very own personal Sanhedrin. The film is suspect from the trailers, and its horrific morality grows more noxious with prolonged exposure.

Best of “The Muppet Show”: Bob Hope, Dom DeLuise, George Burns (1977) – DVD

Image C+ Sound C Extras D

by Walter Chaw In a summer whose renewed interest in variety shows has brought us embarrassing spectacles ranging from a peculiar celebrity dance competition where ex-heavyweight champ Evander Holyfield does a Karloff in tuxedo pants to the hard-to-witness disinterring of moldy oldsters and one-hit-wonders croaking out their old hits and covering new ones, look back to the heyday of "The Muppet Show" and wonder how something like it ever made it to the air. The themes that Jim Henson's electric Kool-Aid acid trip tackles through its tacky sketches, instantly-dated guest stars, and cobwebbed musical interludes run the gamut from loneliness (a disturbing rendition of Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" in which a Muppet mutilates and pickles himself) to war (a version of Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" sung by forest animals being terrorized by mad redneck hunters) to exotic burlesques that predict the melancholia lacing The Dark Crystal and the eternally underestimated The Muppet Movie. Running concurrently with Jimmy Carter's presidency (1976-1981), it's the product, as it can only be, of the Carter administration in the United States: all goofy good intentions, bad fashion, rampant hickism, and confusion.

Bedtime for Bonzo (1951) + I’ll Take Sweden (1965) – DVDs

BEDTIME FOR BONZO
**½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Ronald Reagan, Diana Lynn, Walter Slezak, Jesse White
screenplay by Val Burton and Lou Breslow
directed by Frederick de Cordova

I'LL TAKE SWEDEN
*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Bob Hope, Tuesday Weld, Frankie Avalon, Dina Merrill
screenplay by Nat Perrin, Bob Fisher and Arthur Marx
directed by Frederick de Cordova

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover FILM FREAK CENTRAL now heads into uncharted waters with the first auteurist assessment of one Frederick de Cordova. Yes, the man who inadvertently wedged his foot in pop history by bringing Ronald Reagan and a monkey together in Bedtime for Bonzo indeed has themes that remain consistent–at least in the fifteen years that intervened between that film and his Bob Hope vehicle, I'll Take Sweden. Both find a rigid father figure finally lightening up after aggravating bad situations with some abstract and inflexible rules. But while Bedtime for Bonzo bristles with surprise implications and rear-view Reagan desecrations, I'll Take Sweden lies dead on the screen thanks to terrible lines and unpleasant "racy" humour. Which means that whatever de Cordova's thematic uniformity, I suspect the Cinémathèque française monograph is not forthcoming.

Overnight (2004) – DVD

***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Mark Brian Smith & Tony Montana

by Walter Chaw Bordering on brilliant, Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana's dry, witty, scabrous Overnight chronicles the rise and fall of grade-A asshole Troy Duffy as he meets his match in Hollywood, a land where being a legendary dick is something so run-of-the-mill that Duffy finds himself among the rabble instead of the king prick that he was on the little Boston hill he called his stomping ground. Duffy's rags-to-riches story (roughneck bartender sells a script to Miramax for a cool $450K in a deal that includes the bar he works at as well as an agreement that he'll direct with no studio interference) is the stuff from which dreams are made–but Harvey Weinstein puts the project in turnaround after just a few months of trying to work with the guy, and Duffy is left holding his paranoia and sense of entitlement in a twenty-ton bag. (I never would have thought it possible to make Harvey Weinstein appear not only the genius but also the sainted hero in a documentary about the film industry, but Duffy and his boilerplate bullshit The Boondock Saints are just the jerk and flick to do it.) There haven't been many movie villains with less political charisma and grace than Duffy has. In that one sense, if in no other, all his delusions of grandeur are justified.

George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005)

*/****
starring Simon Baker, Dennis Hopper, Asia Argento, Robert Joy
written and directed by George A. Romero

Landofthedeadby Walter Chaw The weakest entry in George Romero's zombie quadrilogy by a long shot, the Toronto-lensed Land of the Dead loses the grit and familiarity of Romero's native Pittsburgh while managing to be every bit as awkward and allegorical as one of his trademark undead. The original concept for Day of the Dead was to have hundreds of trained zombies fighting one another in a post-apocalyptic landscape, a statement–and an eloquent one, as is, or was, Romero's practice–on war being an essential state of man that got scrapped due to budgetary concerns. With the success of films like Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later…, and the remake of Romero's own Dawn of the Dead, though, the primogenitor of the genre was given a respectable budget, the boon of CGI, and relatively free reign to continue a trio of films (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead) that besides spawning a legion of Italian knock-offs, were themselves gory, scary, and razor sharp.

Bewitched (2005)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Will Ferrell, Shirley MacLaine, Michael Caine
screenplay by Nora Ephron & Delia Ephron and Adam McKay
directed by Nora Ephron

Bewitchedby Walter Chaw Five minutes into Bewitched I was sick to death of its cutesy, smarmy self-satisfaction. This is Nicole Kidman talking something like Marilyn Monroe crossed with a feather duster, doing her best to work her mouth around Delia and Nora Ephron's vapid dialogue while wishing all the while that someone would solve the mystery of how she could be so accomplished at picking independent projects (Birth, Dogville) and so incompetent in picking mainstream ones (The Stepford Wives, Cold Mountain). It's a movie completely dependent on the belief that everyone has seen the Sol Saks sitcom upon which the flick is based (a belief supported at least in part by the warmth with which a multitude of clips from said sitcom were received), meaning it's the picture for which the term "meta" was created. Not the endlessly replicating screenplay, but the fabled film that is about nothing, is based on nothing, and features big stars struggling to overcome the freakish inconsequence of a project that should never have gotten beyond the what-if stage. (Who outside of coma would even consider starring in a film written by the Ephron sisters, directed by Nora, and produced by Penny freaking Marshall?) This is the film that cotton candy would imagine because it cheerfully has no mind to speak of, making Kidman's freaky, alien, doll-like performance (her Isabel eats buckets of Miracle Whip in one of the film's concessions to its powder-puff inconsequence) a minor stroke of genius, if only in hindsight.

The Women (1939) – DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Mary Boland
screenplay by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, based on the play by Clare Boothe
directed by George Cukor

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Few films fall on their swords so cheerfully and brilliantly as The Women. It's a masterpiece of rationalization that details the injustices men inflict on women until it suddenly shifts gears to explain why it's a woman's fault for giving up–an astounding about-face considering that it was written by women (Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, from Clare Boothe's play) and aims to completely banish men from the frame. But what sounds like a chance for actresses to shine turns into a world-famous bitch-a-thon in which men are a menacing, structuring absence rather than a lion tamed and women can be trusted to tear each other apart before doing any real damage to their master-tormentors. The film is compulsively watchable even as it does terrible things and holds its head high whilst simultaneously cutting it off.

The Agronomist (2004) – DVD

***½/**** Image B- Sound B
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw Reminding a great deal of his remarkable Swimming to Cambodia, Jonathan Demme’s now-inspiring, now-shattering The Agronomist is another portrait of a doomed storyteller embellished with subtle audio cues and almost mnemonic camera movements–the stamps of a gifted filmmaker who may never be better than when he works with the stuff of real life. Demme is a superior anthropologist and only a so-so fabulist, his liquid cool visual acuity always second-fiddle, after all, to his gift for background flavour, i.e., the contextualizing power of the right music, the right settings, and the right personalities in supporting roles. Demme’s films are each documents of the underneath that find explication in hindsight in his apprenticeship underneath Roger Corman while simultaneously explaining how quickly his auteur identity and better judgment can be subsumed beneath too much legacy (The Truth About Charlie) or too devouring an ego (Oprah’s The Beloved)–making his upcoming remake of John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate an iffy proposition at best. Demme is himself forever just a step away from his vivid gallery of outcasts and iconoclasts.

Heights (2005); Mysterious Skin (2005); It’s All Gone Pete Tong (2005)

HEIGHTS
**½/****
starring Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, Jesse Bradford, James Marsden
screenplay by Amy Fox, based on her play
directed by Chris Terrio

MYSTERIOUS SKIN
*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Elisabeth Shue, Michelle Trachtenberg
screenplay by Gregg Araki, based on the novel by Scott Heim
directed by Gregg Araki

IT’S ALL GONE, PETE TONG
**½/****
starring Paul Kaye, Beatriz Batarda, Kate Magowan, Mike Wilmot
written and directed by Michael Dowse

by Walter Chaw Obsessed with doors and passages, façades and captured images, Chris Terrio’s Heights takes on the dour, dark, and twisted interpersonal machinations of The Scottish Play its diva Diana (Glenn Close) rehearses for some of the 24-hour period covered therein. Heights is a sexual film steeped in betrayals and unmaskings at its root, clothed in symbols for discovery and disguise that are almost literary in their uniform complexity. It’s therefore through a cloud of signs that its insular roundelay emerges. Wedding photographer Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), daughter of Diana and fiancée of Jonathan (James Marsden), is fired from her job on the day–on the hour, almost–that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cover a foreign war is offered her by an ex-boyfriend. Jonathan, meanwhile, has an ex-boyfriend of his own to suppress as pretty young actor Alec (Jesse Bradford) catches Diana’s eye in the hours before she discovers her husband is honouring their open marriage with her understudy. Questions of female sexual jealousy abound, hand in hand with the ruthless barbs of ambition (the price of success weighed against the cost of failure), tied into a messy bow by big ugly truths and the inescapability of our pasts.

Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Terrence Howard, Joy Bryant, Bill Duke
screenplay by Terence Winter
directed by Jim Sheridan

by Walter Chaw Another in the recent cycle of slick biopics overseen in whole or part by either the subjects themselves or relatives of the same, Jim Sheridan's Get Rich or Die Tryin', the peculiarly flaccid hagiography of two-bit rapper 50 Cent, is an overlong, overly-familiar, wholly sentimental look at a nobody who became a somebody primarily known for getting shot a few times. It's a companion piece of sorts to the also-white-guy-directed Hustle & Flow, a means through which the majority culture tries to reconfigure the minority culture into comfortable terms (minstrel/criminal) that are so entrenched they've been assimilated by the offended. Assimilated to the point, in fact, that it's hard to know if these images, words, and messages are even offensive anymore. Bill Cosby has taken a lot of heat over the past couple of years for his comments about African-American culture losing its mind, but, shocker, he's right. For that matter, arguably no one in popular culture has earned the right to speak out about blacks in the American mainstream more than Cosby.

Batman Begins (2005)

****/****
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes
screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw It's perhaps only right that in a year that has seen Robert Rodriguez present a scary-faithful adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City, Christopher Nolan should re-envision (and revitalize) the Batman film franchise with a picture, Batman Begins, that at last captures the pitch blackness of Miller's seminal graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns (itself a re-envisioning and revitalization of Batman for its time). Batman Begins is to Tim Burton's Batman films as Burton's films are to Adam West's camp-classic television series, so drastically have Nolan and co-scriptor David S. Goyer de-fabulized the mythology. Compare, for starters, a sequence in the 1989 film where Batman shines a little penlight in the eyes of an over-curious lady-fair while chauffeuring her in the Batmobile to the modern iteration in which Batman trashes the Gotham police force en route to getting a young lady an antidote to a concentrated militarized hallucinogen that, unchecked, could inspire her to rip her own face off.

The Reivers (1969) + Tom Horn (1980) – DVDs

THE REIVERS
*½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Steve McQueen, Sharon Farrell, Will Geer, Michael Constantine
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the novel by William Faulkner
directed by Mark Rydell

TOM HORN
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steve McQueen, Linda Evans, Richard Farnsworth, Billy Green Bush
screenplay by Thomas McGuane and Bud Shrake
directed by William Wiard

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The oldest, most tired story to beguile the male artist is the Moment at Which Innocence is Irretrievably Lost. Most writers try their hand at it at some point, and I really wish they wouldn't: it suggests they'd rather be stupidly oblivious to not just the pains but also the rewards of adulthood. It's a boring default trauma, but at least when William Faulkner did it (in The Reivers), it was a boring default trauma with genius digressions that occasionally distracted from the emptiness of the narrative line. Not so Mark Rydell's big-screen adaptation of The Reivers, from which all of Faulkner's background about the landscape and the history and his characters' desperate lives has been excised, leaving the innocence-losing adventures to hog the spotlight and make you wish you were watching something that aspired to dissipation for a change.

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) – DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Robert Blake, Billy "Green" Bush, Jeannine Riley, Elisha Cook
screenplay by Robert Boris
directed by James William Guercio

Electraglideinbluecapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a priceless scene in Albert Brooks's Lost in America where our white-collar hero David Howard (played by Brooks himself) has to deal with a motorcycle cop. About to be ticketed for a minor infraction, David informs his tormentor that he's living out the dream of Easy Rider in his Winnebago–whereupon the cop, incredibly, professes the same with regards to being a bike cop, and tears up the ticket. The joke is that a lumpy bourgeois in a camper and a policeman in anything can bend the rebellious ways of that film to their own establishment end, cancelling out both sides in a puff of semiotics. But what was a throwaway in Lost in America is the whole movie in Electra Glide in Blue, a film centred around motorcycle cops that owes a serious debt to Easy Rider while blowing its us-vs.-them dichotomy out of the water from the other side of the line.

Shaun of the Dead (2004) + A Dirty Shame (2004)|A Dirty Shame – DVD

SHAUN OF THE DEAD
***½/****
starring Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, Lucy Davis
screenplay by Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright
directed by Edgar Wright

A DIRTY SHAME
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+
starring Tracey Ullman, Johnny Knoxville, Chris Isaak, Selma Blair
written and directed by John Waters

Dirtyshamecapby Walter Chaw Shaun of the Dead isn't a spoof, it's a traditional zombie film introduced as a romantic-comedy and infected with a sly British-cum-"The Simpsons" intelligence and sensibility. Director Edgar Wright, who co-wrote the film with star Simon Pegg, made his mark with a smart, hilarious Channel 4 comedy series called "Spaced", a show that bears comparison to "The Family Guy" in its pop-culture genius and frequent fantasy non sequiturs. The genesis of Shaun of the Dead appears to be an episode of "Spaced" in which Pegg, having an unfortunate trip, hallucinates himself shooting hordes of zombies. That the picture is born from a joke on a television show offers endless possibilities for interpretation, best among them the tidy read that television is still the best means towards auto-zombification.

Flavor of the Month: FFC Interviews Greg Harrison

GharrisoninterviewtitleJune 12, 2005|I met Greg Harrison on a sunny Colorado day. Lanky and stylish, if a little over-dressed for the temperature in black pinstripe-on-pinstripe, his appearance betrayed a man who's been living out of a suitcase and looking at the indistinguishable insides of hotels. In town to pimp November, his sophomore follow-up to Groove, Mr. Harrison has surprising heroes and an interesting story of how he got into the business; a shame that his film is an empty experiment in styles and homages that tend to titillate the festival audience–where November has found its momentum–but infuriate or bore the wider audience to which the picture now aspires. It looks great, but it's a gimmick stretched just barely long enough to fit the "feature" description. Mr. Harrison seems like a smart guy with a good, healthy respect for the history of alternative cinema. Here's hoping his next project is up to his speed.