Film Freak Central does “The Art of Silent Film” series

April 19, 2005Posted in****/****, 1920s, 1930s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Charles Chaplin, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Soviet Union, Thriller

Silentfesttitleby Walter Chaw Denver Art Museum curator Tom Delapa is a one-man production. He books the prints, rents the space, does the research, and twice annually puts on a show consisting of possibly the most historically vital revivals in the Mile High City. Past years have seen screenings of pictures as varied as The Fountainhead and It Came From Outer Space in its original 3-D form–and now, over the course of seven consecutive Tuesdays at Denver's Starz Filmcenter beginning April 5, Mr. Delapa brings us "The Art of Silent Film." It's an ambitious program consisting of lesser-known pieces or rare prints from well-regarded artists of the silent era, giving cineastes the opportunity to see King Vidor's The Crowd (as yet unreleased on DVD) in 16mm with live accompaniment from pianist Hank Troy, as well as 35mm prints of both Buster Keaton's The Navigator and Charlie Chaplin's defiant Modern Times. These share the bill with 16mm presentations of Sergei Eisenstein's Strike, F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh, Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives, and G.W. Pabst's bleak, profound Diary of a Lost Girl. While the audience has grown for the Denver Art Museum film series, the truism remains that for as much lip service as is paid to the dearth of quality cinema in the heartland, if you don't get out and support essential institutions like this one, then they'll just go away.

The Lone Gunmen: The Complete Series (2001) – DVD

April 19, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
"Pilot," "Bond, Jimmy Bond," "Eine Kleine Frohike," "Like Water for Octane," "Three Men and a Smoking Diaper," "Madam, I'm Adam," "Planet of the Frohikes," "Maximum Byers," "Diagnosis: Jimmy," "Tango De Los Pistoleros," "The Lying Game," "The "Cap'n Toby" Show," "All About Yves"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover To paraphrase your high school guidance counsellor: respect for yourself is essential for respect from your audience. Let's say you have a show called "The Lone Gunmen". It's a spin-off from the successful (and successfully self-serious) "The X Files", which took somewhat far-fetched material and sold it, most of the time, with a straight face and a stern look. It deals with much the same subject matter but features nerdy misfits John Byers (Bruce Harwood), Melvin Frohike (Tom Braidwood), and Richard Langly (Dean Haglund), to whom you're somehow unwilling to commit total sympathy. So you make excuses by mocking them, as if apologizing for their unworthiness of the attention–which raises the question of why you're bothering in the first place. Complete self-deprecation usually results in discomfort, shunning, and, in this case, premature cancellation.

House of Flying Daggers (2004) – DVD

April 17, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Romance

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, Ziyi Zhang, Song Dandan
screenplay by Li Feng & Zhang Yimou & Wang Bin
directed by Zhang Yimou

Mustownby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the dozen or so eye-bleedingly beautiful sequences in Zhang Yimou's new wuxia pian, the encapsulating image is that of the incandescent Ziyi Zhang prostrate beneath a would-be paramour, her delicate, ivory hand pressed against his lips in an eloquently ineffective ward. It's a tableau introduced in a more overt attempted rape in a brothel and revisited in a stream where a quartet of thugs nearly succeed in literally/metaphorically piercing Ziyi with their long spears. House of Flying Daggers (its title in Chinese the loaded "Ambush from Ten Directions"–essentially an ambush from everywhere) is at its essence an allegory for rape and the Chinese tradition of concubinage that Zhang has already explored to varying degrees in Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Shanghai Triad, and, of course, Red Sorghum, in which a young woman played by Gong Li (Ziyi's predecessor as Zhang's muse) is saved from rape by a young man with whom she later runs a winery. But the conceit of a young woman teaming with her knight in shining armour is complicated in House of Flying Daggers by the fact that she is more than capable of taking care of herself, except, fascinatingly, when the attacks against her are sexualized.

Normal Life (1996) – DVD

April 17, 2005Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Ashley Judd, Luke Perry, Bruce Young, Jim True
screenplay by Peg Haller & Bob Schneider
directed by John McNaughton

by Bill Chambers I might be apocryphally attributing this to Pauline Kael, but I’m fairly confident that it was she who said there’s no such thing as bad acting, only bad casting. When people hear that John McNaughton’s Normal Life stars Luke Perry and Ashley Judd, they tend to lose interest, but to quote another of my favourite critics, Alex Jackson, “a great performance incorporates and molds a persona. It deals with it. Their body, voice, and persona are inescapable facts [and] the greatness of a performance lies in nothing more [than] the acknowledgment of these facts.” It’s interesting that the contemporary actors most likely to be credited with soul-searching to find the emotional truths of a character–Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, even Mark Ruffalo–are heirs apparent to Lon Chaney, gradually transforming themselves from without. In the same piece quoted above, a review of Midnight Express published just prior to last year’s Academy Awards, Jackson says he values Christina Ricci’s work in Monster over that of her co-star Charlize Theron: Where Ricci plumbs the depths of her established screen persona, Theron’s aesthetically-assisted turn is so anomalous in terms of her career as to register as standoffish. “I suspect that it takes more courage to be an icon than an actor,” Jackson brilliantly surmises.

Incident at Loch Ness (2004) – DVD

April 13, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Pseudo-Documentary, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
directed by Zak Penn

by Walter Chaw You could say that Werner Herzog has been hunting monsters for the whole of his career. (Chasing demons: even better.) Find in that the reason the satirical Incident at Loch Ness works to the extent that it does. The picture locates the mad German on the Scottish loch, where he's ostensibly shooting a documentary on Nessie under the auspices of Hollywood wunderkind Zak Penn while a film crew, led by veteran cinematographer John Bailey, shoots Herzog for a piece on the director's method called "Herzog in Wonderland." It's a fake documentary about the making of a fake documentary, in other words, commenting at several points about authenticity in a way that pings off the whimsical existentialism of Being John Malkovich at its best–and off the sudden shift into darkness of the same at its worst. Mocking the capricious ignorance of Hollywood moneymen is always sporting, I guess, and as Penn simultaneously acts the monster (he insists on the crew wearing matching jumpsuits) and surreptitiously slips a plastic monster-bot into the wake, the picture can be satisfying in a familiar way. But by this point in our progressive cynicism, anyone watching the film–and, more particularly, anyone at all familiar with Herzog–could say the same things regarding the venality of the blockbuster mentality with less effort. This doesn't mean that the film's closing shot of a sunglasses-wearing Herzog walking in front of his team in a Michael Bay heroic slow-motion is any less funny, but it does add up to a generally empty, if fitfully amusing, experience.

Hawaii (1966) – DVD

April 13, 2005Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Julie Andrews, Max Von Sydow, Richard Harris, Gene Hackman
screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Daniel Taradash, based on the novel by James A. Michener
directed by George Roy Hill

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover As a movie, Hawaii isn't very good, but in a way it's great. While it's hard not to grow weary with its 161 minutes of leaden historical pageantry, especially as there's not a single interesting shot in the whole thing, it's equally difficult to not be amazed by its acid take on colonial arrogance–or by its lead, one the most astoundingly unsympathetic in Hollywood history. You can't help but wonder what comes next, even as the filmmakers botch the execution and you grow impatient for what's-next to show its tardy face. They're not naturals, but they're not hypocrites, either, and if all fusty quality pictures were like this I'd have considerably less to complain about.

Lost Embrace (2004); Hard Goodbyes (2002); Walk on Water (2004)

April 12, 2005Posted in2000s, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Mystery, Spain, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller

El Abrazo partido
*/****
starring Daniel Hendler, Adriana Aizemberg, Jorge D’Elía, Sergio Boris
screenplay by Marcelo Birmajer, Daniel Burman
directed by Daniel Burman

Hard Goodbyes: My Father
Diskoli apocheretismi: O babas mou
***/****
starring Yorgos Karayannis, Stelios Mainas, Ioanna Tsirigouli, Christos Stergioglou
written and directed by Penny Panayotopoulou

WALK ON WATER
**/****
starring Lior Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, Caroline Peters, Gideon Shemer
screenplay by Gal Uchovsky
directed by Eytan Fox

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Woody Allen’s been on something like a two-decade slide, so if there’s a little voice in your head telling you that the last thing you need to see is an Argentine version of a Woody Allen “where’s daddy” neurosis opera: listen to it. Daniel Burman’s Lost Embrace (El Abrazo partido) is an interminable slog through the congested headspace of one Ariel Makaroff (Daniel Hendler), an insufferable, navel-gazing Pol expat living out his self-loathing strut and fret in the ridiculous family lingerie shop of a cut-rate shopping centre. (Yeah, it’s Scenes from a Mall in Spanish.) Burman likes breaking the fourth wall, likes humourless inter-titles that separate his film into a dozen awkward sketches, and really likes dense monologues about, essentially, why no one is ever happy. The extent to which you will cotton to Lost Embrace has a lot to do with how much you enjoy wallpaper narration and old Jewish-Polish grandmothers singing homey folk songs square to the camera–how much you delight in Jewish mothers nudzhing their schlemiel sons before divesting their aggressively middle-class closets of ancient infidelities set against intra-mall flings with an Internet café bimbo. Ennui, listlessness, and gab gab gab, Lost Embrace earns the occasional moment of interest or topicality in stuff like a semi-amusing interview Ariel endures before the Polish consulate (during which he expresses admiration for the recently-deceased Polish Pope), but the film spends most of its goodwill on masturbating with a furious, chafing intensity. Oh, and it’s mawkishly sentimental, too.

The Letter (1940) – DVD

April 11, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, Frieda Inescort
screenplay by Howard Koch, based on the play by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by William Wyler

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Andrew Sarris once defended American film by saying "it completely dominates in the middle ranges, particularly in the good-bad movies and genres." The Letter represents that glorious middle range in all its good-bad glory. Keeping it from the top is its refusal to be anything but surface: despite its origins as a sociopolitical W. Somerset Maugham play, it's played as a straight melodrama, and that reliable workhorse William Wyler ensures that you feel the "basic human drama" without noticing sticky details like issues of class and race. But the surface is smooth, sleek, and shapely and the craftsmanship shows loving care, if not obsession, for rendering the mood and evoking the characters. It's less than a masterpiece, more than a time-killer, and an excellent argument for excursions into the middle.

p.s. (2004) + Birth (2004)|Birth (2004) – DVD

April 10, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

p.s.
**½/****
starring Laura Linney, Topher Grace, Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden
screenplay by Helen Schulman and Dylan Kidd, based on the novel by Helen Schulman
directed by Dylan Kidd

BIRTH
****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Danny Huston, Lauren Bacall
screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière, Milo Addica, Jonathan Glazer
directed by Jonathan Glazer

Psbirthby Walter Chaw Second chances, erasing memories, manipulating perception–films this year like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Code 46, The Forgotten, The Manchurian Candidate, The Village, The Butterfly Effect, Before Sunset, 50 First Dates, The Final Cut, and so on suggest a collective desire to wash the slate clean, put on blinkers, and regain a little of that sweet, blithe ignorance of the day before yesterday. It's never as easy as all that, of course, since things have a tendency of coming back–and when an artifact of the past intrudes on the present it carries with it (along with all those memories of green) an aggressive payload of unexpected reactions. You can never go home again, nor can home ever return to you. Nevertheless, it tries to in a pair of films, two sophomore efforts, as it happens: Dylan Kidd's p.s. and Jonathan Glazer's Birth. Curiously, just the idea of the first film after a triumphant debut is tangled with the desire to recapture a little of the magic of the past.

Last of the Finest: FFC Interviews Stephen Chow

April 9, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Hong Kong, Interviews

SchowinterviewtitleApril 10, 2005|Between the time that John Woo and Chow Yun Fat spawned a hipster fad on this island Hong Kong with 1986's A Better Tomorrow and the moment about a decade later when poor Jackie Chan starred with Chris Tucker in Rush Hour, a picture directed by solid gold jackass Brett Ratner (who still refers to Chan as "that Jap," possibly the worst thing you can call a Chinese man–worse than "that Chinaman," something Ratner also enjoys calling Chan), the HK film industry was the most vibrant and exciting in the world. It redefined action cinema by itself, pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in motion pictures, and valorized the "heroic bloodshed" genre by elevating old Chinese dictums of honour and brotherhood into ballets of romanticized violence. "One Cop, One Killer, 10,000 Bullets" became the byline for not only Woo's classic The Killer, but also an industry that made the Western world supple and accommodating to films like The Matrix, Reservoir Dogs, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Unfortunately, as Hollywood's siren call lulled away talents as diverse and incandescent as Ringo Lam, Jet Li, John Woo, Chow Yun Fat, Tsui Hark, and, finally, Jackie Chan, from Hong Kong (in Chan's case, for the second time), so, too, did the handover from British colony to Communist show pony take hold, rendering a film like Full Contact (where a bite-wound subbed for a wedding ring) impossible under the stringent censorship policies of Mainland China. The Hong Kong film industry has fallen, and hard. Almost as hard as its roster of superstars, finding themselves ethnic sidekicks and starfuckers in American dreck.

Oldboy (2003) + The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005)

April 7, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Revenge, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller

OLDBOY
****/****
starring Choi Min-sik, Yu Ji-tae, Kang Hye-jeong, Ji Dae-han
screenplay by Hwang Jo-yun, Lim Chun-hyeong, Park Chan-wook
directed by Park Chan-wook

THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE
**½/****
starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Catherine Keener, Camilla Belle, Paul Dano
written and directed by Rebecca Miller

by Walter Chaw

Oldboyballad"I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter, and with her I will found the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen." -Aguirre, Aguirre: The Wrath of God

A Greek tragedy, an opera, a showcase for South Korean cinema, and one exhilaratingly sick piece of cinema, Park Chan-wook's Oldboy is like the three plays of the "Oresteia" distilled into one pure, malevolent, volatile essence. It's vengeance served hot and perverse like a Medeaen stew, a story of settling scores old enough to be archetype married to sounds and images so invasively intimate that the process of working through the film is a little like getting physically violated. It's vital stuff, this Oldboy, its very title suggesting an ironic superhero alter ego–sketching anti-hero Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) as a fright-mask of arrested development, a child raging against its prematurely-aged body. We meet him one drunken night as he's bailed out of a night in the tank only to spend the next fifteen years in a solitary-confinement prison cell masquerading as a chintzy backwater motor inn room. He watches TV there, mostly cable news and its horrorshow of buildings and bridges falling, with periodic gassings allowing his anonymous captors to stitch up his wrists and gather biological mementos to leave at the scenes of crimes he didn't commit. When he's finally released, it's not clear if he's been falsely led to believe that he's free, if he's escaped by the graces of an ingenious plan involving a chopstick and a lot of time, or if he's died and this is his demented brain's oxygen-starved fantasy of what he woulda done to the lousy sons o'bitches if only he'd lived.

Melinda and Melinda (2005) + Head-On (2004)

April 7, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, Turkey

MELINDA AND MELINDA
**/****
starring Will Ferrell, Radha Mitchell, Chloë Sevigny, Chiwetel Ejiofor
written and directed by Woody Allen

Gegen die Wand
****/****
starring Birol Ünel, Sibel Kekilli, Catrin Striebeck, Güven Kiraç
written and directed by Fatih Akin

Melindaheadby Walter Chaw I was pretty sure that the stultified paralysis of Anything Else would eventually cause me to do myself serious injury and felt fortunate that when the lights came up, most of the intensity of my dislike for the Woody Allen of the last several years dissipated like the details of a bad dream. It's possible to leave the diminutive auteur in the dark, it seems, and such is the fate, too (and not a bad critique), of the more palatable but no less appallingly reductive and juvenile Melinda and Melinda. It's metaphysics by way of Strindberg, of course, and only as good as Allen ever is at capering around his familiar autumnal Manhattan fantasias in his "serious filmmaker" cap. His milieu, his Yoknapatawpha County, has always been the mating rituals of "blocked" artists–often filmmakers casting or directing films within films (What's Up, Tiger Lily?, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Stardust Memories, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hollywood Ending)–orbiting around one another in impotent, inevitably mortal, orbits. If he doesn't star in them himself, he hires someone to impersonate him–the Woodman is never far from his own lover/hand, and his casts of invariably grateful manqué dutifully take on his cadences and exhortations to debate Bartók and Bergman in airless dinner parties that would drive even Buñuel nuts.

Sahara (2005)

April 7, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, France, Germany, Spain, Theatrical, UK, War
*½/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, Penélope Cruz, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and John C. Richards and James V. Hart, based on the novel by Clive Cussler
directed by Breck Eisner
 
by Walter Chaw For as difficult as it is to read a Clive Cussler novel, it's no more or less difficult to read something by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Robert James Waller, Dean Koontz, or Nicholas Sparks. A Cussler book is exactly what it is: a bestseller written specifically for people who base their reading decisions on how many other people have bought and ostensibly read a given book–bad grammar, bad sense, and ridiculous narratives be damned. So Sahara, Breck "Spawn of Michael" Eisner's feature debut (and what star Matthew McConaughey hopes is a franchise starter despite Cussler disowning the picture and threatening to sue), is an utterly faithful adaptation of the source material in that it's destined to become one of those movies people see or avoid depending on how low their expectations are going in or how irresistible the Friday night peer-pressure gets. It's a soulless picture, a wisp of a whimsy layered across what wishes it were an epic adventure, playing fast and loose with character and charisma while slathering on the boom-crash opera. The result isn't something awful so much as a spectacle without a hint of a human centre: a blockbuster played by action figures and written by children.

Venus in Furs (1969) – DVD

April 7, 2005Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, DVD, Esoterica, Italy, Thriller, UK, West Germany

Paroxismus
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring James Darren, Barbara McNair, Maria Rohm, Klaus Kinski
screenplay by Jess Franco & Malvin Wald
directed by Jess Franco

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Masterpiece is such a relative term. The keepcase for Venus in Furs (a.k.a. Paroxismus) anoints this rough jewel in Jess Franco's crown as "the one fans and critics alike call his masterpiece," but all this means is that next to some of the other films in Franco's dissipated oeuvre, Venus in Furs is comparatively competent, hangs together decently, and won't cause the intense eye-rolling of something like the same year's The Girl from Rio. But though it's slick and watchable, it's still a conceptual mess, combining a blithe pretentiousness with a total inability to suggest cause and effect–not to mention Franco's usual sophomoric sexuality. Or does being propositioned by Dean Martin while on acid count as a masterpiece?

Ocean’s Twelve (2004) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

April 5, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Catherine Zeta-Jones
screenplay by George Nolfi
directed by Steven Soderbergh

Oceanstwelvecap

by Walter Chaw It's all so very beautiful that it's easy to be seduced by it. The people, of course, are gorgeous. The locations in Amsterdam and Lake Como, Italy are gorgeous. The soundtrack? Gorgeous. Cinematography, direction: gorgeous, gorgeous. None too pretty, though, is that sniffy feeling of crashing a party where you stick out like a sore thumb–where everybody knows everybody else and you keep asking the wrong questions. In that, at least, Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Twelve is more faithful to the Rat Packer Ocean's Eleven than his own remake of the same–this picture's prequel–was. Ocean's Twelve amounts to a martini-and-lounge party at which everybody's having a really great time as you watch from your chair in the corner, daydreaming of looking like Julia Roberts, talking like brandy in a warm snifter, having more fame than The Beatles, and being richer than God.

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

April 4, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Ireland, Romance, UK

½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Andrew Davies and Helen Fielding and Richard Curtis and Adam Brooks, based on the novel by Fielding
directed by Beeban Kidron

Bridgetjonesedgecapby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The gusto with which a certain audience will guffaw at Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (henceforth Bridget Jones 2)–will buffet each other on the back in robust bonhomie at a joke well told and a prejudice indulged in appropriate company–says all there really is to say about the class schism that the film itself broaches but stops short of actually addressing. (If you squint, you can see them rendered satiric as swine in top hats, smoking cheap cigars and playing cards in their pearls and print dresses.) We reunite with our porcine heroine (Renée Zellweger) a little more than a month after the end of the first film, at which point she's shagged her new boyfriend Darcy (Colin Firth) a lot but remains saddled with her suspicions that he's a prick. He's a lawyer, see, and clearly too good for her, so Bridget, as is her wont, proceeds to embarrass herself in polite stuffed-shirt company, scoffing at the prig who suggests that giving to charity is bad and pretending to be able to ski whilst wrapped in a dreadful pink jumper. The resulting delightfully-patronizing humiliations are the sort of thing generally installed as the engine in romance novels, the main audience for which is one that looks like Bridget, is probably ten years older, and would be surprised to see that, were a film ever actually made of their fantasy projection of themselves onto the heroine role of their little pulp bodice-rippers, would look just as preposterous as Bridget Jones 2.

Call Northside 777 (1948) – DVD

April 4, 2005Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring James Stewart, Richard Conte, Lee J. Cobb, Helen Walker
screenplay by Jerome Cady and Joy Dratler
directed by Henry Hathaway

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Call Northside 777 is far less virtuous than it wants to be, but we can overlook its delusions and enjoy it anyway. Its uneasy combination of working-man drama and noir cynicism does less for the former than it does for the latter, but that manages to give it its unique punch: into the crime-movie soup goes chunks of would-be reality, and if the film is less real than it advertises, it expands the self-contained genre universe to make it more vivid. Call Northside 777 is otherwise unremarkable as a piece of writing and only marginally exciting as picture-making, but its interesting clash of sensibilities makes it highly watchable as a curio–as well as a suggestion of what happens on the recombinant road less travelled.

Undertow (2004) – DVD

April 3, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras A-
starring Jamie Bell, Josh Lucas, Dermot Mulroney, Devon Alan
screenplay by Joe Conway and David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

Undertowdvdcapby Walter Chaw David Gordon Green's collaboration with cinematographer Tim Orr has borne George Washington and All the Real Girls–fruit from the tree of Americana, nourished at its roots by the twilit legacy of Terrence Malick. Taking its cue from another source, Malick's progenitor Charles Laughton and Laughton's only film as a director, Night of the Hunter, Green's latest, Undertow, just isn't as good as his previous work: it's too sunny at its end, too mannered in its middle, and it fails to live up to the standards both it sets for itself and the limited oeuvre of Green sets for it.

The Thinking Man’s Nimrod: FFC Interviews Nimrod Antal

April 3, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

NantalinterviewtitleApril 3, 2005|I caught a late-night screening of Nimród Antal's Kontroll during the 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival that was packed thanks to buzz that had been spreading ever since the film was honoured with the 23rd Prix de la Jeunesse in the Un certain regard category at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Alive with ideas and images, Kontroll combines western sensibilities and a peculiar Eastern Bloc social awareness–a little bit of surrealism and a little bit of Jungian archetype-building. It alone has the potential to rejuvenate a Hungarian film industry made moribund by the fall of the Iron Curtain, and it was written and directed by a California boy who moved to Hungary at the age of 17.

Up and Down (2004) + The Upside of Anger (2005)

March 30, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Czech Republic, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, UK

Horem pádem (a.k.a. Loop the Loop)
**½/****
starring Petr Forman, Emília Vásáryová, Jan Tríska, Ingrid Timková
 screenplay by Jan Hrebejk & Petr Jarchovský
directed by Jan Hrebejk

THE UPSIDE OF ANGER
**½/****
starring Joan Allen, Kevin Costner, Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood
written and directed by Mike Binder

Upanddownupsideby Walter Chaw Packed to the gills with what ails Czech life, Jan Hrebejk's Up and Down (Horem pádem) is a roundelay of social dysfunction, encompassing in 108 frantic minutes what feels like everything that's gone wrong with the Republic in the last twenty years. Illegal immigration and the racism attendant to it, social groups morphing into organized hate groups, the disintegration of traditional bonds, organized crime, white slavery–all of it is tossed into a loud, anxious bundle and presented as a confused overview of the hell of modern life. Begin with a Muslim child accidentally abandoned by one of a truckload of smuggled aliens and continue into the story of poor simpleton Franta (Jiri Machacek) and his baby-crazy wife, Mila (Natasa Burger), who together channel the conflict of Raising Arizona. Then there's an old professor (Jan Tríska) trying to win a divorce from his long-estranged wife (Emilia Vasaryova) so that he can marry his long-time girlfriend (Igrid Timkova), and the whole thing climaxes with something like a wagged finger, with the professor's expat son (Petr Forman) bucking the reactionary provincialism of his homeland by revealing an aboriginal wife and a mulatto son.